Nothing by Design
Page 5
the sea-sprayed eagle too.
No kinsman can console
or protect a sorry soul.
In fact, a city dweller
who revels and swills wine
far from travel’s perils,
barely could believe
how often, wearily,
I weathered the sea paths.
The shadows of night deepened,
snow fell from the north,
and on the frost-bound earth
hail fell like the coldest grain.
For all that, my heart’s thoughts
pound now with the salt
wave’s surging; on high seas
my spirit urges me
forward, to seek far
from here a foreign land.
The truth is that no man—
however generous
in gifts, however bold
in youth, however brave,
however loyally
his own lord may attend him—
is ever wholly free
in his seafaring from worry
at what is the Lord’s will.
No, it is not for him,
the harp’s song, nor the rings
exchanged, nor pleasure in women,
nor any worldly glory,
nothing but welling waves;
the longing of seagoing
man is what he has.
Groves break into blossom,
the towns and fields grow fair
and the world once more is new:
all of this spurs on
the man whose mind and spirit
are eager for the journey,
who yearns to steer his course
far across the sea.
Mournfully the cuckoo’s
voice cries out in warning,
the harbinger of summer
bitterly foretells
in song the soul’s distress.
To the wealthy warrior
blessed with worldly fortune,
this is all unknown—
what we face who follow
the vast and alien way.
And now my thought roams far
beyond my heart; my mind
flows out to the water,
soars above the whale’s path
to the wide world’s corners
and returns with keen desire;
the lone bird, flying, shrieks
and leads the willing soul
to the whale road, and over
the tumbling of the waves.
The joys of the Lord can kindle
more in me than dead
and fleeting life on land.
I do not believe the riches
of this world will last forever.
Always, without fail,
of three things one will turn
uncertain for a man
before his fatal hour:
sickness, age, or the sword
will rip the life right out
of the doomed and done for.
So it is for every man:
the best praise will come after,
from people who outlive him;
today, then, he must toil
against enemies and the Devil;
undaunted he must dare
so that sons of men extol him,
that in time to come his fame
endures amid the angels,
and his glory goes on, ceaseless,
among the celestial hosts.
The days are dwindling now
of the kingdoms of this earth;
there are no kings or Caesars
as before, and no gold givers
as once, when men of valor
performed great deeds and lived
majestically among
themselves in high renown.
Their delights too are dead.
The weakest hold the world
in their hands, and wear it out
with labor, while all splendor,
like the earth, grows older;
its noble aspect withers
as man does everywhere.
Age creeps up on him,
his face grows pale; his head,
gray-haired, bewails old friends,
sons of princes, already
given to the earth.
As his body fails,
life leaks away, he tastes
sweetness in things no more,
nor feels pain, nor can move
his hand, nor use his mind.
When a kinsman dies, he wants
to strew the grave with gold,
or bury with the dead
treasures he amassed.
But no, it cannot be;
gold once hid and hoarded
in life is no good now
for the soul full of sin
before the force of God.
Terrible and great
is the Lord, and the very world
turns from Him in awe.
He made the firm foundations,
the earth’s face and the heavens.
Foolish is he who does not fear
his Lord; death comes to him
though he is unprepared.
Blessed is he who lives in all
humility; what comes to him
in Heaven is forgiveness.
God gave to him that spirit
to bow to all His power.
A man must steer his passions,
be strong in staying steady;
keep promises, be pure.
He must be wise and fair
with foes as much as friends,
well-tempered in himself.
He dreads to see a dear one
engulfed in flames, yet patience
tells him to trust the sway
of Fate, and that God’s might
is greater than we know.
Let us ponder where our true
home is, and how to reach it.
Let us labor to gain entry
into the eternal,
to find the blessedness
of belonging to the Lord
joyfully on high.
Thanks be to God who loved us,
the endless Father, the Prince
of Glory forever. Amen.
VII
LOST ORIGINALS
VOICE OF AMERICA
I sit at my desk
My life is grotesque.
—JOSEPH BRODSKY
1. Open to the Public
Hard labor? But you’d claim it wasn’t hard.
You sat in your log cabin, ably sketching
another cabin, and some chickens scratching
out their appointed living in the yard.
A farmhand reading poems by kerosene,
you plotted carefully the coup d’état
of yourself, and boiled another cup of tea;
a well-turned sentence made you feel serene.
I sit in Russia’s National Library,
rifling through folders of your private stuff.
They came easily—or not easily enough,
illiterate as I am in the very
language which to you was the first god.
Your faintly ruled, cheap spiral notebooks hatched
fresh images, new chickens came unlatched
from their coop, and from a corner, a man’s head—
a twenty-something profile. That was yours.
You doodled, and you knew your keepers well.
You studied English, though you couldn’t spell;
you daydreamed in unguarded metaphors.
Well, here’s one for you, touching and grotesque.
After you died, a citizen of the States,
they shipped some furniture of yours in crates
to Petersburg: your velvet couch, your desk—
actually two of them—from your South Hadley
room and a half. Or so your house had seemed,
those maple floors as slippery as in th
e dreamed
Leningrad apartment; brightly, sadly,
you’d write your parents, who had watched you jammed
into a taxi, snapped in a photograph,
and lost forever. Your desk sent here? I’d laugh,
if it were funny, studying a framed
Madonna and child, a cat, a Mandelstam,
an Auden; a pocket-sized address book, still
open to the last call; your manual
typewriter, outdated as a ham
radio no one again can operate.
The last icon is you. Incredible.
That’s you in tuxedo tails, with your Nobel,
in a video that loops as if your fate
had always been a hero’s. Applause and cheers
repeat on the TV screen within a house
that once was your old friend Akhmatova’s:
hero without a poem for years and years.
2. Tears at the Fountain House
Out in the garden, where for years her spies
chain-smoked while she sat indoors and nearly starved,
an art show. Wine and cheese are being served.
Today’s the opening, and a viewer’s eyes
are free to interpret anyhow, it appears.
Hung as if on cobwebs, or on memories
of traumas left unspoken, from the trees
giant water balloons droop like the tears
in your poetry that welled and wouldn’t land.
(Your mother told you weeping was for grave
occasions: obedient, you were brave.)
Don’t touch the tears. I brush one with my hand,
stroll about the grounds, and though I doubt
you’d love the installation, you’d round up
some artsy types—high-booted girls and hip
boyfriends in ripped jeans—and ask them out
to a smoky bar nearby, if you were here.
But you never will be. Never came back to grill
the next generation, shame them, crush their will—
or that’s how your taunts and teasing, your severe
quizzing came off, exiled to the warm
and fuzzy American classroom. Coeds cried.
You shrugged and tried again: identified
lines where native speakers missed the poem.
“Ms. Salter? Andrew Marvell. Tell the class.”
I heard my heart pound loudly in my head.
Tell them what? Declaim “An Horatian Ode
upon Cromwell’s Return …” perhaps? What an ass
I was—or maybe you were; I wasn’t sure.
Now it occurs to me: the poem of his
to recite into these flower beds would be less
“The Garden” than the twining “Eyes and Tears,”
where “all the jewels which we prize,” he wrote,
“melt in these pendants of the eyes”; and “happy they
whom grief doth bless, that weep the more, and see
the less.” Lovely; but the tears stayed in the throat,
or were meted out in rhyming drops of ink.
Lament was Russian, roughly; in the English
of Marvell, Hardy, Frost, you got your wish
for irony’s containments. You could think.
3. Border Crossing
You had them in your head—Pushkin, Gogol,
Dostoevsky. Best memory I ever met.
Nobody learns by rote now; quotes come out
from under the patchwork overcoat of Google—
a development you’d have found unnerving,
at least until you found some figure for it.
In Venice, you wrote, “a gigantic china teaset”
was heard vibrating when church bells were serving
“on a silver tray” their peals to the “pearl-gray sky.”
Your mind, a gondola on the lagoon
of time, skimmed the reflections in your own
outlandish, errant, metaphysical eye,
as if everything in the world could be amassed
on a single page in white with words in black,
although a tear might drop to it, a “throwback,
a tribute of the future to the past.”
Somebody boarded up, because they could,
the door from your parents’ room to yours. Or yours
to your parents’; but to me it hardly matters:
the living border crossing to the dead
is what I’m after. I stepped onto a plane
because I could, and joined your friend who’d taken
snapshots of your departure; though I’m shaken
to be standing in their one room—mute and plain,
erased of bed and table, of evidence
of birthday parties, songs at the piano,
piled‑up cups and saucers, the radio
from which state “drivel” flowed like water once—
I don’t need much, only to turn and walk
down warped linoleum in the communal hall
where the black phone still cowers on the wall,
to see you—overheard—pick up and talk.
4. Watermark
The Foundation’s conference room. Tea and coffee,
biscuits, sugar, brisk handshakes, respect,
and quick interpreters for the select
Americans invited to a country
some of us know little of. Academician
Likhachev, they tell us, would have liked
to meet us all. Your fellowships, in fact,
our conversations here, were his late mission,
he whose life would closely coincide
with the twentieth century; who bore the stamp
of public servant, scholar, and of camp
prisoner. A miracle he hadn’t died
at Solovki, where he heard three hundred gunned
down as he hid, three hundred on the dot—
he was to be among them, but was not,
which meant that someone else…The thought-of sound
reverberates on walls washed with the sun.
This was his radio. Mid-century relic,
midsized, ordinary, somehow orphic.
Likhachev marked it—see the painted line
dripping down the tuner? That’s the Voice
of America. Others marked the BBC.
This was a sign we wanted you to see…
The hardened teardrop holds its frequency.
ENGLISH COUNTRY DOLLHOUSE
Which scholar among the dolls
that stepped out from this room
(in volume, like one volume
of the O.E.D.)
needed spectacles?
A wire-rimmed, folded pair—
like a glossy insect
crushable in one swat—
lies lenses-up, not seeing
but wanting to be seen
as a letter, a giant B
for Book, upon a tiny,
leather-bound, gilt-edged tome
in which the words must be
unthinkably minute.
Are there really words in there?
The book, after all, is shut.
If I could step through the glass
of the museum case,
I’d shrink myself to fit
in that empty chair and put
those glasses on—whereby
I’d know whatever it was
I needed to magnify.
CRUSOE’S FOOTPRINT
At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me so long as he lived.
—DANIEL DEFOE, Robinson Crusoe
The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself.
—W. H. AUDEN
And Elizabeth Bishop did it, in her “Crusoe
in England”: though she needn’t have scanned a foot
in writing it, every step was itself alone
and demanded whatever served. Sometimes she cast
her thought in sestinas; found at her typewriter keys
to set free memories otherwise confined,
or labored within a villanelle to find
lost houses, continents, like the geometer Crusoe,
whose world to map had no scale and no keys;
who saw the surf wash in, efface his foot-
print like a sandpiper’s. The melted cast-
les of sand we’ve made are in the end all one:
what company we have when we feel alone!
A solitary stroll on the beach to find
ourselves rewards us, largely due to the cast
supporting us from the wings, the backstage crew so
handy, the believable props, and the foot-
lights revealing the beaming spectators: keys
to our happiness, in which the fashionable quais
Auden wrote of slosh with talk about us alone.
We’re not, in fact, entirely sorry for the foot-
note-in-mouth disease of the critics who find
what was never there in two-dimensional Crusoe.
Surely he would have liked to attend the cast-
away party that followed him—the downcast,
austere “Robinson” poems of Weldon Kees
the suicide, or Émile by that crank Rousseau,
who thought he’d bring up a boy on Defoe alone.
Swiss Family Robinson? There: we’ve defined
the branching tree-house of writing. Friday’s foot
is at his master’s head, and at the poet’s foot
the subject’s breathing: admittedly these are caste
systems, and guilty as charged, we the jury find.
No man is an island; we’re more like the Florida Keys—
a stanza of lines that each began alone.