On The Decline Of Oracles

My father kept a vaulted conch

By two bronze bookends of ships in sail,

And I listened its cold teeth seethed

With voices of that ambiguous sea

Old Böcklin missed, who held a shell

To hear the sea he could not hear.

What the seashell spoke to his inner ear

He knew, but no peasants know.

My father died, and when he died

He willed his books and shell away.

The books burned up, sea took the shell,

But I, I kept the voices he

Set in my ear, and in my eye

The sight of those blue, unseen waves

For which the ghost Böcklin grieves.

The peasants feast and multiply

Eclipsing the spitted ox I see

Neither brazen swan nor burning star,

Heraldry of a starker age,

But three men entering the yard,

And those men coming up the stair.

Profitless, their gossiping images

Invade the cloistral eye like pages

From a gross comic strip, and toward

The happening of this happening

The earth turns now. In half an hour

I shall go down the shabby stair and meet,

Coming up, those three. Worth

Less than present, past—this future.

Worthless such vision to eyes gone dull

That once descried Troy's towers fall,

Saw evil break out of the north.