Collected Poems, 1953-1993 Read online

  Could stun us to stone.

  · · ·

  Yet they are ours. We made them.

  See here, where the cleats of linemen

  Have roughened a second bark

  Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes

  Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.

  The Nature of our construction is in every way

  A better fit than the Nature it displaces.

  What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,

  Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,

  But then again there is not that tragic autumnal

  Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.

  These giants are more constant than evergreens

  By being never green.

  Mosquito

  On the fine wire of his whine he walked,

  Unseen in the ominous bedroom dark.

  A traitor to his camouflage, he talked

  A thirsty blue streak distinct as a spark.

  I was to him a fragrant lake of blood

  From which he had to sip a drop or die.

  A reservoir, a lavish field of food,

  I lay awake, unconscious of my size.

  We seemed fair-matched opponents. Soft he dropped

  Down like an anchor on his thread of song.

  His nose sank thankfully in; then I slapped

  At the sting on my arm, cunning and strong.

  A cunning, strong Gargantua, I struck

  This lover pinned in the feast of my flesh,

  Lulled by my blood, relaxed, half-sated, stuck,

  Engrossed in the gross rivers of myself.

  Success! Without a cry the creature died,

  Became a fleck of fluff upon the sheet.

  The small welt of remorse subsides as side

  By side we, murderer and murdered, sleep

  Trees Eat Sunshine

  It’s the fact:

  their broad leaves lap it up like milk

  and turn it into twigs.

  Fish eat fish.

  Lamps eat light

  and when their feast has starved their filament

  go out.

  So do we,

  and all sweet creatures—

  cats eating horses, horses grass, grass earth, earth water—

  except for the distant Man

  who inhales the savor of souls—

  let us all strive to resemble this giant!

  Winter Ocean

  Many-maned scud-thumper, tub

  of male whales, maker of worn wood, shrub-

  ruster, sky-mocker, rave!

  portly pusher of waves, wind-slave.

  Modigliani’s Death Mask

  Fogg Museum, Cambridge

  The shell of a doll’s head,

  It stares askew, lopsided in death,

  With nervous lips, a dirty tan,

  And no bigger than my hand.

  Could the man have been that small?

  Or is life, like rapid motion,

  An enlarging illusion?

  Ringed, Italianly, with ivy,

  The mask makes an effect of litter,

  Preserved inside its glass case like

  An oddly favored grapefruit rind.

  Seagulls

  A gull, up close,

  looks surprisingly stuffed.

  His fluffy chest seems filled

  with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material

  rather lumpily inserted. The legs,

  unbent, are childish crayon strokes—

  too simple to be workable.

  And even the feather-markings,

  whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,

  are in the gull slovenly,

  as if God makes too many

  to make them very well.

  Are they intelligent?

  We imagine so, because they are ugly.

  The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,

  the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,

  the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump

  all suggest deskwork: shipping rates

  by day, Schopenhauer

  by night, and endless coffee.

  At that hour on the beach

  when the flies begin biting in the renewed coolness

  and the backsliding skin of the after-surf

  reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,

  the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand

  like those melancholy European crowds

  that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake

  of assassinations and invasions,

  heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.

  It is also this hour when plump young couples

  walk down to the water, bumping together,

  and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.

  Then they walk back toward the car,

  tugging as if at a secret between them,

  but which neither quite knows—

  walk capricious paths through the scattering gulls,

  as in some mythologies

  beautiful gods stroll unconcerned

  among our mortal apprehensions.

  Seven Stanzas at Easter

  Make no mistake: if He rose at all

  it was as His body;

  if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,

                 the amino acids rekindle,

  the Church will fall.

  It was not as the flowers,

  each soft spring recurrent;

  it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

                 eleven apostles;

  it was as His flesh: ours.

  The same hinged thumbs and toes,

  the same valved heart

  that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered

                 out of enduring Might

  new strength to enclose.

  Let us not mock God with metaphor,

  analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,

  making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

                 credulity of earlier ages:

  let us walk through the door.

  The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,

  not a stone in a story,

  but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of

                 time will eclipse for each of us

  the wide light of day.

  And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

  make it a real angel,

  weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in

                 the dawn light, robed in real linen

  spun on a definite loom.

  Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

  for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

  lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed

                 by the miracle,

  and crushed by remonstrance.

  B.W.I.

  Under a priceless sun,

      Shanties and guava.

  Beside an emerald sea,

      Coral and lava.

  On the white dirt road,

      A blind man tapping.

  On dark Edwardian sofas,

      White men napping.

  In half-caste twilight, heartfelt

      Songs to Jesus.

  Across the arid land,

      Ocean breezes.

  The sibilance of sadness

      Never ceases.

  The empty cistern.

      The broken Victrola.

  The rusted praise of

      Coca-Cola.


  Old yellow tablecloths,

      And tea, and hairy

  Goats, and airmail

      Stationery.

  Copies of Punch and Ebony.

      Few flowers.

  Just the many-petalled sun above

      The endless hours.

  February 22

  Three boys, American, in dungarees,

  walk at a slant across the street

  against the mild slant of the winter sun,

  moseying out this small, still holiday.

  The back of the cold is broken; later snows

  will follow, mixed with rain, but today

  the macadam is bare, the sun loops high,

  and the trees are bathed in sweet grayness.

  He was a perfect hero: a man of stone,

  as colorless as a monument,

  anonymous as Shakespeare. We know him

  only as the author of his deeds.

  There may have been a man: a surveyor,

  a wencher, a temper, a stubborn farmer’s mind;

  but our legends seem impertinent

  graffiti scratched upon his polished granite.

  He gazes at us from our dollar bills

  reproachfully, a strange green lady,

  heavy-lidded, niggle-lipped, and wigged,

  who served us better than we have deserved.

  More than great successes, we love great failures.

  Lincoln is Messiah; he, merely Caesar.

  He suffered greatness like a curse.

  He fathered our country, we feel, without great joy.

  But let us love him now, for he crossed the famous ice,

  brought us out of winter, stood, and surveyed

  the breadth of our land exulting in the sun:

  looked forward to the summer that is past.

  Summer: West Side

  When on the coral-red steps of old brownstones

  Puerto Rican boys, their white shirts luminous,

  gather, and their laughter

  conveys menace as far as Central Park West,

  When the cheesecake shops on Broadway

  keep open long into the dark,

  and the Chinaman down in his hole of seven steps

  leaves the door of his laundry ajar,

  releasing a blue smell of starch,

  When the curbside lines of parked cars

  appear embedded in the tar,

  and the swish of the cars on the Drive

  seems urgently loud—

  Then even the lapping of wavelets

  on the boards of a barge on the Hudson

  is audible,

  and Downtown’s foggy glow

  fills your windows right up to the top.

  And you walk in the mornings with your cool suit

  sheathing the fresh tingle of your shower,

  and the gratings idly steam,

  and the damp path of the street-sweeper evaporates,

  And—an oddly joyful sight—

  the dentists’ and chiropractors’ white signs low

  in the windows of the great ochre buildings on Eighty-sixth Street

  seem slightly darkened

  by one more night’s deposit of vigil.

  Wash

  For seven days it rained that June;

  A storm half out to sea kept turning around like a dog trying to settle himself on a rug;

  We were the fleas that complained in his hair.

  On the eighth day, before I had risen,

  My neighbors’ clothes had rushed into all the back yards

  And lifted up their arms in praise.

  From an upstairs window it seemed prehistorical:

  Amongst the sheds and fences and vegetable gardens,

  Workshirts and nightgowns, long-soaked in the cellar,

  Underpants, striped towels, diapers, child’s overalls,

  Bibs and black bras were thronging the sunshine

  With hosannas of cotton and halleluiahs of wool.

  Maples in a Spruce Forest

      They live by attenuation,

      Straining, vine-thin,

  Up to gaps their gold leaves crowd

      Like drowning faces surfacing.

      Wherever dappled sun persists,

      Shy leaves work photosynthesis;

  Until I saw these slender doomed,

      I did not know what a maple is.

      The life that plumps the oval

      In the open meadow full

  Is beggared here, distended toward

      The dying light available.

      Maturity of sullen spruce

      Will murder these deciduous;

  A little while, the fretted gloom

      Is dappled with chartreuse.

  Vermont

  Here green is king again,

  Usurping honest men.

  Like Brazilian cathedrals gone under to creepers,

  Gray silos mourn their keepers.

  Here ski tows

  And shy cows

  Alone pin the ragged slopes to the earth

  Of profitable worth.

  Hawks, professors,

  And summering ministers

  Roost on the mountainsides of poverty

  And sniff the poetry,

  And every year

  The big black bear,

  Slavering through the woods with scrolling mouth,

  Comes further south.

  The Solitary Pond

  The fall we moved to the farm, I was thirteen;

  the half-wild grapes on the dilapidated arbor

  could not be eaten, and the forests and brown fields

  also seemed to have no purpose. I grew accustomed,

  that winter before the first spring, to hike alone,

  ducking first under our barbed wire, then our neighbor’s,

  through thorny and hurricane-hit woods to a store

  selling candy and soft drinks and gas by Route 11.

  Returning one afternoon along an old wall,

  I came to a shallow, solitary pond, frozen,

  not more than fifteen feet across, and lined with stalks

  and briar-strands that left the center scarcely open.

  Recalling the rink in the town we had moved from,

  I fetched my dull skates from the attic chest and blundered

  back through sharp thickets while the cold grew and a frown

  from the sky deepened the ominous area under

  the black branches. My fingers were numb at the laces,

  and the ice was riddled with twigs, and my intent

  to glide back to childhood absurd. I fell, unstable

  on the clutter of wood and water bubbled and bent

  like earth itself, and thrashed home through the trees hating

  the very scratches left by my experiment.

  Flirt

  The flirt is an antelope of flame,

  igniting the plain

  wherever she hesitates.

  She kisses my wrist, waits,

  and watches the flush of pride

  absurdly kindle my eyes.

  She talks in riddles,

  exposes her middle,

  is hard and strange in my arms:

  I love her. Her charms

  are those of a fine old book with half-cut pages,

  bound in warm plush at her white neck’s nape.

  Fever

  I have brought back a good message from the land of 102°:

  God exists.

  I had seriously doubted it before;

  but the bedposts spoke of it with utmost confidence,

  the threads in my blanket took it for granted,

  the tree outside the window dismissed all complaints,

  and I have not slept so justly for years.

  It is hard, now, to convey

  how emblematically appearances satr />
  upon the membranes of my consciousness;

  but it is a truth long known,

  that some secrets are hidden from health.

  Earthworm

  We pattern our Heaven

  on bright butterflies,

  but it must be that even

  in earth Heaven lies.

  The worm we uproot

  in turning a spade

  returns, careful brute,

  to the peace he has made.

  God blesses him; he

  gives praise with his toil,

  lends comfort to me,

  and aerates the soil.

  Immersed in the facts,

  one must worship there;

  claustrophobia attacks

  us even in air.

  Old-Fashioned Lightning Rod

  Green upright rope

  of copper, sprouting

  (from my perspective) from

  an amber ball—jaundiced amber,

  the belly-bulb

  of an old grasshopper—

  braced between three

  sturdy curlicues of wrought

  iron (like elegancies

  of logical thought)

  and culminating—the rod,

  the slender wand of spiral

  copper weathered pistachio-pale—

  in a crown, a star

  of five radiating thorns

  honed fine on the fine-grained

  grinding blue wheel of sky:

  flared fingers, a torch,

  a gesture, crying,

  “I dare you!”

  Sunshine on Sandstone

  Golden photon white on granulated red

      makes brown,