Collected Poems, 1953-1993 Read online

  brown, blue, and gray occur

      upon the chipmunk-colored

  earth’s fur.

  III

  Pine islands in a broken lake.

      Beyond Laconia the hills,

  islanded by shadows, take

  in cooling middle distance

      a motion from above, and lo!

  grave mountains belly dance.

  Ex–Basketball Player

  Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot

  Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

  Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

  At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

  Is on the corner facing west, and there,

  Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

  Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—

  Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,

  Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.

  One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes

  An E and O. And one is squat, without

  A head at all—more of a football type.

  Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

  He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46

  He bucketed three hundred ninety points

  A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

  I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

  In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

  He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,

  Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,

  As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,

  But most of us remember anyway.

  His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.

  It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

  Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.

  Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,

  Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.

  Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods

  Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers

  Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

  A Modest Mound of Bones

  That short-sleeved man, our

      uncle, owns

  the farm next our farm, south

      and west of us, and

  he butchers for a living, hand-to-mouth.

      Once, walking on his land,

  we found a hill, topped by a flower,

      a hill of bones.

  They were rain-scrubbed clean—

      lovely things.

  Depending how the white

      sun struck, chips of color

  (green, yellow, dove-blue, a light

      bay) flew off the sullen

  stilled turning there. To have seen

      those clickless rings,

  those prisonerles

      ribs, complex

  beyond the lathe’s loose jaws,

      convolute compounds

  of knobs, rods, hooks, moons, absurd paws,

      subtle flats and rounds:

  no man could conceive such finesse,

      concave or -vex.

  Some curve like umbrella

      handles, keys

  to mammoth locks. Some bend

      like equations hunting

  infinity, toward which to tend.

      How it sags!—what bunting

  is flesh to be hung from such ele-

      gant balconies?

  Sunflower

  Sunflower, of flowers

  the most lonely,

  yardstick of hours,

  long-term stander

  in empty spaces,

  shunner of bowers,

  indolent bender

  seldom, in only

  the sharpest of showers:

  tell us, why

  is it your face is

  a snarl of jet swirls

  and gold arrows, a burning

  old lion face high

  in a cornflower sky,

  yet by turning

  your head we find

  you wear a girl’s

  bonnet behind?

  March: A Birthday Poem

  My child as yet unborn, the doctors nod,

  Agreeing that your first month shall be March,

  A time of year I know by heart and like

  To talk about—I, too, was born in March.

  March, like November a month largely unloved,

  Parades before April, who steals all shows

  With his harlequinade of things renewed.

  Impatient for that pastel fool’s approach,

  Our fathers taunted March, called him Hlyd-monath,

  Though the month is mild, and a murmurer.

  Indeed, after the Titan’s fall and shatter

  Of February, March seems a silence.

  The Romans, finding February’s ruins

  At the feet of March, heard his wind as boasting

  And hailed his guilt with a war-god’s name.

  As above some street in a cobbled sea-town

  From opposing walls two huge boards thrust

  To advertise two inns, so do the signs

  Of Pisces the Fish and Aries the Ram

  Overhang March. Depending on the day,

  Your fortunate gem shall be the bloodstone

  Or the diamond, your lucky color crimson

  Or silver-gray. You shall prove affable,

  Impulsive, lucky in your friends, or not,

  According to the counterpoint of stars.

  So press your business ventures, wear cravats,

  And swear not by the moon. If planting wheat,

  Do it at dawn. At dusk for barley. Let

  The tide transplant kohlrabi, leeks, and beans.

  Toward the month’s end, sow hardy annuals.

  It was this month when Caesar fell, Stalin died,

  And Beethoven. In this month snowflakes melt—

  Those last dry crusts that huddle by the barn.

  Now kites and crocuses are hoisted up.

  Doors slap open. Dogs snuffle soggy leaves,

  Rehearsing rusty repertoires of smells.

  The color of March is the one that lies

  On the shadow side of young tree trunks.

  March is no land of extremes. Dull as life,

  It offers small flowers and minor holidays.

  Clouds stride sentry and hold our vision down,

  While underfoot the agony of roots

  Is hidden by earth. Much, much is opaque.

  The thunder bluffs, wind cannot be gripped,

  And kites and crocuses are what they are.

  Still, child, it is far from a bad month,

  For all its weight of compromise and hope.

  As modest as a monk, March shall be there

  When on that day without a yesterday

  You, red and blind and blank, gulp the air.

  Burning Trash

  At night—the light turned off, the filament

  Unburdened of its atom-eating charge,

  His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low

  To touch a swampy source—he thought of death.

  Her father’s hilltop home allowed him time

  To sense the nothing standing like a sheet

  Of speckless glass behind his human future.

  He had two comforts he could see, just two.

  One was the cheerful fullness of most things:

  Plump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil

  Offering up pressure to his knees and hands.

  The other was burning the trash each day.

  He liked the heat, the imitation danger,

  And the way, as he tossed in used-up news,

  String, napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,

  Hypnotic tongues
of order intervened.

  English Train Compartment

  These faces make a chapel where worship comes easy:

  Homo enim naturaliter est animal sociale.

  The flutter of a Guardian, the riveted image

  of Combe-in-Teignhead, faded by decades of eyes,

  the sting of smoke, the coughs, the whispering

  lend flavor to piety’s honest bone.

  Half-sick, we suck our teeth, consult our thumbs,

  through brown-stained glass confront the barbered hills

  and tailored trees of a tame and castrate land.

  Sheep elegant enough for any eclogue

  browse under Constable clouds. The unnatural

  darkness swells, and passengers stir

  at the sound of tapping fingernails. Rain,

  beginning, hyphenates our racing windows.

  And hands and smiles are freed by the benediction.

  The lights, always on, now tell. One man talks,

  and the water, sluicing sideways, teases our direction.

  Indeed, we are lively, smug, and brave

  as adventurers safe after some great hazard,

  while beside our shoulders the landscape streams

  as across the eye of a bathysphere surfacing.

  Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers

  Distance brings proportion. From here

  the populated tiers

  as much as players seem part of the show:

  a constructed stage beast, three folds of Dante’s rose,

  or a Chinese military hat

  cunningly chased with bodies.

  “Falling from his chariot, a drunk man is unhurt

  because his soul is intact. Not knowing his fall,

  he is unastonished, he is invulnerable.”

  So, too, the “pure man”—“pure”

  in the sense of undisturbed water.

  “It is not necessary to seek out

  a wasteland, swamp, or thicket.”

  The opposing pitcher’s pertinent hesitations,

  the sky, this meadow, Mantle’s thick baked neck,

  the old men who in the changing rosters see

  a personal mutability,

  green slats, wet stone are all to me

  as when an emperor commands

  a performance with a gesture of his eyes.

  “No king on his throne has the joy of the dead,”

  the skull told Chuang-tzu.

  The thought of death is peppermint to you

  when games begin with patriotic song

  and a democratic sun beats broadly down.

  The Inner Journey seems unjudgeably long

  when small boys purchase cups of ice

  and, distant as a paradise,

  experts, passionate and deft,

  hold motionless while Berra flies to left.

  How to Be Uncle Sam

  My father knew

      how to be

                 Uncle Sam.

  Six feet two,

      he led the

                 parade

  the year

      the boys came back

                 from war.

  Splendidly

      spatted, his legs

                 like canes,

  his dandy coat

      like a

                 bluebird’s back,

  he led the parade,

      and then

                 a man

  (I’ve never been sure

      he was honestly

                 canned—

  he might have been

      consciously

                 after a laugh)

  popped

      from the crowd,

                 swinging his hands,

  and screamed,

      “You’re the s.o.b.

                 who takes

  all my money!”

      and took

                 a poke at

  my own father!

      He missed

                 by half

  an inch; he felt

      the wind, my father

                 later said.

  When the cops

      grabbed that one,

                 another man

  shouted from the

      crowd in a

                 voice like brass:

  “I don’t care if

      you take a poke at

                 Updike,

  but keep your

      mitts off

                 Uncle Sam!”

  3 A.M.

  By the brilliant ramp

  of a ceaseless garage

  the eye like a piece of newspaper

  staring from a collage

  records on a yellowing

  gridwork of nerve

  “policemen move on feet of glue,

  sailors stick to the curb.”

  Mobile of Birds

  There is something

  in their planetary weave that is comforting.

  The polycentric orbits, elliptical

  with mutual motion,

  random as nature, and yet, above all,

  calculable, recall

  those old Ptolemaic heavens small

  enough for the Byzantine Trinity,

                 Plato’s Ideals,

                 formal devotion,

  seven levels of bliss, and numberless wheels

  of omen, balanced occultly.

                                          A small bird

  at an arc’s extremity

  adequately weights

  his larger mates’

  compounded mass: absurd

  but actual—there he floats!

  Persisting through a doorway, shadow-casting light

                 dissolves on the wall

                 the mobile’s threads

  and turns its spatial conversation

  dialectical. Silhouettes,

  projections of identities,

  merge and part and reunite

  in shapely syntheses—

                           an illusion,

  for the birds on their perches of fine wire avoid collusion

  and are twirled

  alone in their suspenseful world.

  Shillington

  The vacant lots are occupied, the woods

  Diminish, Slate Hill sinks beneath its crown

  Of solvent homes, and marketable goods

  On all sides crowd the good remembered town.

  Returning, we find our snapshots inexact.

  Perhaps a condition of being alive

  Is that the clothes which, setting out, we packed

  With love no longer fit when we arrive.

  Yet sights that limited our truth were strange

  To older eyes; the town that we have lost

  Is being found by hands that still arrange

  Horse-chestnut heaps and fingerpaint on frost.

  Time shades these alleys; every pavement crack

  Is mapped somewhere. A solemn concrete ball,r />
  On the gatepost of a sold house, brings back

  A waist leaning against a buckling wall.

  The gutter-fires smoke, their burning done

  Except for, fanned within, an orange feather;

  We have one home, the first, and leave that one.

  The having and leaving go on together.

  Suburban Madrigal

  Sitting here in my house,

  looking through my windows

  diagonally at my neighbor’s house,

  I see his sun-porch windows;

  they are filled with blue-green,

  the blue-green of my car,

  which I parked in front of my house,

  more or less, up the street,

  where I can’t directly see it.

  How promiscuous is

  the world of appearances!

  How frail are property laws!

  To him his window is filled with his

  things: his lamps, his plants, his radio.

  How annoyed he would be to know

  that my car, legally parked,

  yet violates his windows,

  paints them full

  (to me) of myself, my car,

  my well-insured ’55 Fordor Ford

  a gorgeous green sunset streaking his panes.

  Telephone Poles

  They have been with us a long time.

  They will outlast the elms.

  Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees

  In his search for game,

  Run through them. They blend along small-town streets

  Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.

  Our eyes, washed clean of belief,

  Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such

  Barnacles as compose

  These weathered encrustations of electrical debris—

  Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,