The Power of Nothing at All

This is the poem that introduced me to Archibald MacLeish, a Librarian of Congress in the '40s who resigned to become assistant Secretary of State. I've got a volume of his collected poems, but so far none has affected me as lastingly as this one has.

As a teenager this seemed like a companion piece to modernist dystopian poetry like "The Waste Land" or "The Second Coming." But now it seems more like a strange, revelatory drug trip or a dream recovered just before the forgetting.

The End of the World

Archibald MacLeish 

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:


And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.




The first half almost appears to be a Beat extravaganza, with random names and professions, clauses unrelated and seemingly undefined. It's a little arch and a little twee all at the same time. Then the second half breaks loose, up, out, into something we can't quite seem to name. It's this kind of stuff that prose can't seem to crack, the magical realism that is deeper than magic and more solid than reality. 


Really, the closest I've found in other arts is in cinema: like in "Vertigo" when Stewart's character sees what he knows to be the ghost of the woman who died from his pursuit and the camera slowly swivels to reveal a black coach from the stables where they shared a quiet moment. It was astounding - somehow Hitchcock seemed to be speaking personally to me and only me, like I was the only person who had picked up on this small detail and realized the magnitude and portent of it all, and here he was bringing it back with the shock of revelation and the force of prophecy.


There's a nameless recognition and mutual confirmation exchanged that could never make literal connections, it's the random firing of synapses like fireflies on Independence Day, nearly burned out by the fireworks around you, but still you can recognize it for what these things are, even when what it is, is nothing.


It's these nothings that pull everything together.