Rock insults us, hard and so boldly browed
Its scorn needs not to focus, and with fists Which still unstirring strike: Collected it resists Until its buried glare begets a like Anger in us, and finds our hardness. Proud, Then, and armed, and with a patient rage We carve cliff, shear stone to blocks, And down to the the image of man Batter and shape the rock's Fierce composure, closing its veins within That outside man, itself its captive cage. So we can baffle rock, and in our will Can clothe and keep it. But if our will, though locked In stone it clutches, change, Then are we much worse mocked Than cliffs can do: then we ourselves are strange To what we were, which lowers on us still. High in the air those habitants of stone Look heavenward, lean to a thought, or stride Toward some concluded war, While we on every side, Random as shells the sea drops down ashore, Are walking, walking, many and alone. What stony shape could hold us now, what hard Bent can we bulk in air, where shall our feet Come to a common stand? Follow along this street (Where rock recovers carven eye and hand), Open the gate, and cross the narrow yard And look where Giacometti in a room Dim as a cave of the sea, has built the man We are, and made him walk: Towering like a thin Coral, out of a reef of plaster chalk, This is the single form we can assume. We are this man unspeakably alone Yet stripped of the singular utterly, shaved and scraped Of all but being there, Whose fullness is escaped Like a burst balloon's: no nakedness so bare As flesh gone in inquiring of the bone. He is pruned of every gesture, saving only The habit of coming and going. Every pace Shuffles a million feet. The faces in this face Are all forgotten faces of the street Gathered to one anonymous and lonely. No prince and no Leviathan, he is made Of infinite farewells. O never more Diminished, nonetheless Embodied here, we are This starless walker, one who cannot guess His will, his keel his nose's bony blade. And volumes hover round like future shades This least of man, in whom we join and take A pilgrim's step behind, And in whose guise we make Our grim departures now, walking to find What railleries of rock, what palisades? by Richard Wilbur, 1950
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The Ekphrastic Review
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February 2025
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