Route - George Oppen

'the void eternally generative'

the Wen Fu of Lu Chi

1

Tell the beads of the chromosomes like a rosary,

Love in the genes, if it fails

We will produce no sane man again

I have seen too many young people become adults, young

           friends become old people, all that is not ours,

The sources

And the crude bone

                     —we say

Took place

Like the mass of the hills.

'The sun is a molten mass'. Therefore

Fall into oneself—?

Reality, blind eye

Which has taught us to stare—

Your elbow on a car-edge

Incognito as summer,

I wrote. Not you but a girl

At least 

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful 

           thing in the world,

A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry

But to achieve clarity 

2

Troubled that you are not, as they say,

Working—

I think we try rather to understand,

We try also to remain together 

There is a force of clarity, it is

Of what is not autonomous in us,

We suffer a certain fear

Things alter, surrounded by a depth 

And width

The unreality of our house in moonlight

Is that if the moonlight strikes 

It is truly there tho it is ours

3

Not to reduce the thing to nothing—

I might at the top of my ability stand at a window

and say, look out; out there is the world.

Not the desire for approval nor even for love—O,

that trap! From which escaped, barely—if it fails

We will produce no sane man again

4

Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the 

           'heartlessness' of words.

Neither friends nor lovers are coeval...

as for a long time we have abandoned those in 

           extremity and we find it unbearable that we should

           do so...

The sea anemone dreamed of something, filtering the sea

           water thru its body,

Nothing more real than boredom—dreamlessness, the

           experience of time, never felt by the new arrival,

           never at the doors, the thresholds, it is the native 

Native in native time...

The purity of the materials, not theology, but to present 

           the circumstances

5

         In Alsace, during the war, we found ourselves on the

edge of the Battle of the Bulge. The front was inactive, but

we were spread so thin that the situation was eerily precar-

ous. We hardly knew where the next squad was, and it was

not in sight—a quiet and deserted hill in front of us. We dug

in near a farmhouse. Pierre Adam, tho he was a journeyman

mason, lived with his wife and his children in tha farmhouse.

         During the occupation the Germans had declared Alsace

a part of Greater Germany. Therefore they had drafted

Alsatian men into the German army. Many men, learning in

their own way that they were to be called, dug a hole. The

word became a part of the langauge: faire une trou. Some

men were in those holes as long as two and three years. It

was necessary that someone should know where those holes

were; in winter it was impossible for a man to come out of

his hole without leaving footprints in the snow. While snow

was actually falling, however, a friend could come to the hole

with food and other help. Pierre, whom many people trusted,

knew where some two dozen of those holes were.

         The Germans became aware that men were going into

hiding, and they began to make reprisals. If the man was

young and unmarried, they killed his parents. If the man was

married, they took his wife into Germany to the army broth-

els, it was said. They took children into Germany, and it

was not certain whether those children would remember 

where they came from. Pierre told me this stroy:

         Men would come to Pierre and they would say: I am

thinking of making a hole. Pierre would say: yes. They would

say then: but if I do they will kill my parents; or; they will 

take my wife and my children. Then Peirre would say, he

told me: if you dig a hole,    I will help you.

         He knew, of course, what he was telling me. You must

try to put yourself into those times. If one thought he knew 

anything, it was that a man should not join the Nazi army.

Pierre himself learned, shortly before the Americans arrived,

that he was about to be drafted. He and his wife discusses

the children. They thought of tattoing the children's names

and addresses on their chests so that perhaps they could be

found after the war. But they thought that perhaps the tattoo-

ing would be cut out of the children...They did not, finally,

have to make that decision, as it turned out. But what a con-

versation between a man and his wife—

          There was an escape from that dilemma, as, in a way,

there always is. Pierre told me of a man who, receiving the

notification that he was to report to the German army, called

a celebration and farewell at his home. Nothing was said at

that party that was not jovial. They drank and sang. At the

proper time, the host got his bicycle and waved goodbye. The

house stood at the top of a hill and, still waving and calling

farewells, he rode with great energy and as fast as he could

down the hill, and, at the bottom, drove into a tree.

It must be hard to do. Probably easier in an automobile.

There is, in an automobile, a considerable time during which 

you cannot change your mind. Riding a bicycle, since in those

woods it is impossible that the tree should be a redwood, it 

must be necessary to continue aiming at the tree right up to 

the moment of impact. Undoubtely difficult to do. And, of

course, the children had no father. Thereafter.

6

Wars that are just? A simpler question: In the event,

will you or will you not want to kill a German. Because

in the event, if you do not want to, you won't.

...and my wife was reading letters she knew were two weeks

late and did not prove I was not dead while she read. Why

did I play all that, what was I doing there?

We are brother, we are brothers?—these things are

composed of a moral subtance only if they are untrue. If

these things are true they are perfectly simple, perfectly 

impenetrable, those primary elements which can only be

named.

A man will give his life for his friend provided he wants

to.

In all probability a man will give his life for his child

provided his child is an infant.

...One man could not understand me because I was saying

simple things; it seemed to him that nothing was being

said. I was saying: there is a mountain, there is a lake

A picture seen from within. The picture is unstable, a 

moving picture, unlimited drift. Still, the picture

exists.

The circumstance:

7

And if at 80

He says what has been commonly said

It is for the sake of old times, a cozy game

He wishes to join again, an unreasonable speech 

Out of context

8 

Cars on the highway filled with speech,

People talk, they talk to each other;

Imagine a man in the ditch,

The wheels of the overturned wreck

Still spinning—

I don't mean he despairs, I mean if he does not

He sees in the manner of poetry 

9

The cars run in a void of utensils

—the powerful tires—beyond

Happiness

Tough rubbery gear of invaders, of the descendents

Of invaders, I begin to be aware of a countryside

And the exposed weeds of a ditch

The context is history

Moving toward the light of the conscious

And beyond, culvert, blind curb, there are also names 

For these things, language in the appalling fields 

I remember my father as a younger man than I am now,

My mother was a tragic girl

Long ago, the autonomous figures are gone,

The context is the thousands of days 

10

Not the symbol bu the scene this pavement leads

To roadsides—the finite

Losing its purposes

Its estranged

All this is reportage.

If having come so far we shall have 

Song

Let it be small enough.

Virgin 

what was there to be thought

comes by the road

11

Tell the life of the mind, the mind creates the finite.

All punishes him. I stumble over these stories—

Progeny, the possibility of progeny, continuity

Or love that tempted him

He is punished by place, by scene, by all that holds

all he has found, this pavement, the silent symbols

Of it, the word it, never more powerful than in this 

moment. Well, hardly an epiphany, but there the thing

is all the same

All this is reportage

12

To insist that what is true is good, no matter, no matter,

           a definition—?

That tree

           whose fruit...

The weight of air

Measured by the barometer in the parlor,

Time remains what it was

Oddly, oddly insistent

haunting the people in the automobiles,

shining on the sheetmetal,

open and present, unmarred by indifference,

wheeled traffic, indifference,

the hard edge of concrete continually crumbling 

into gravel in the gravel of the shoulders,

Ditches of our own country

Whom shall I speak to

13

Department of Plants and Structures—obsolete, the old name 

In this city, of the public works

Tho we meant to entangel ourselves in the roots of the world

An unexpected and forgotten spoor, all but indestructible

           shards

To owe nothing to fortune, to chance, nor by the power of 

            his heart

Or her heart to have made these things sing

But the benevolence of the real

Tho there is no longer shelter in the earth, round helpless belly 

Or hope amoung the pipes and broken works

'Substance itself which is the subject of all our planning'

And by this we are carried into the incalculable 

14

There was no other guarantee

Ours aren't the only madmen tho they have burned thousands

of men and women alive, perhaps no madder than most

Strange to be here, strange for them also, insane and criminal,

who hasn't noticed that, strange to be man, we have come

rather far

We are at the beginning of a radical depopulation of the earth

Cataclysm...cataclysm of the plains, jungles, the cities

Something in the soil exposed between two oceans 

As Cabeza de Vaca found a continent of spiritual despair

in campsites

His miracles among the Indians heralding cataclysm

Even Cortés greeted as revelation...No I'd not emigrate,

I'd not live in a ship's bar wherever we may be healed

These things at the limits of reason, nothing at the limits

of dream, the dream merely ends, by this we know it is the

real

That we confront

[From:
Oppen, G. (1975) Collected Poems. New York: New Directions. p184 - 196]