The idiot greens the meadow with his eyes, <br />The meadow creeps implacable and still; <br />A dog barks, the hammock swings, he lies. <br />One two three the cows bulge on the hill. <br /> <br />Motion that is not time erects snowdrifts <br />While sister's hand sieves waterfalls of lace. <br />With a palm fan closer than death he lifts <br />The Ozarks and tilted seas across his face. <br /> <br />In the long sunset where impatient sound <br />Strips niggers to a multiple of backs <br />Flies yield their heat, magnolias drench the ground <br />With Appomattox! The shadows lie in stacks. <br /> <br />The julep glass weaves echoes in Jim's kinks <br />While ashy Jim puts murmurs in the day; <br />Now in the idiot's heart a chamber stinks <br />Of dead asters, as the potter's field of May. <br /> <br />All evening the marsh is a slick pool <br />Where dream wild hares, witch hazel, pretty girls. <br />'Up from the important picnic of a fool <br />Those rotted asters!' Eddy on eddy swirls <br /> <br />The innocent mansion of a panthers heart! <br />It crumbles, tick-tick time drags it in <br />Till now his arteries lag and now they start <br />Reverence with the frigid gusts of sin. <br /> <br />The stillness pelts the eye, assaults the hair; <br />A beech sticks out a branch to warn the stars, <br />A lightening-bug jerks angles in the air, <br />Diving. 'I am the captain of new wars!' <br /> <br />The dusk runs down the lane driven like hail; <br />Far off a precise whistle is escheat <br />To the dark; and then the towering weak and pale <br />Covers his eyes with memory like a sheet.<br /><br />Allen Tate<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/idiot-3/
