The 50s

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The 50s Page 71

by The New Yorker Magazine


  heels together

  arms gracefully

  for the moment

  curled above his head!

  Then he whirled about

  bounded

  into the air

  and with an entrechat

  perfectly achieved

  completed the figure.

  My mother

  taken by surprise

  where she sat

  in her invalid’s chair

  was left speechless.

  “Bravo!” she cried at last

  and clapped her hands.

  The man’s wife

  came from the kitchen:

  “What goes on here?” she said.

  But the show was over.

  —William Carlos Williams

  November 28, 1953

  She had thought the studio would keep itself—

  No dust upon the furniture of love.

  Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

  The panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,

  A piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

  Stalking the picturesque, amusing mouse

  Had been her vision when he pleaded “Come.”

  Not that, at five, each separate stair would writhe

  Under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light

  So coldly would delineate the scraps

  Of last night’s cheese and blank, sepulchral bottles;

  That on the kitchen shelf among the saucers

  A pair of beetle eyes would fix her own—

  Envoy from some black village in the moldings.…

  Meanwhile her night’s companion, with a yawn,

  Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

  Declared it out of tune, inspected, whistling,

  A twelve hours’ beard, went out for cigarettes,

  While she, contending with a woman’s demons,

  Pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

  A fallen towel to dust the tabletop,

  And wondered how it was a man could wake

  From night to day and take the day for granted.

  By evening she was back in love again,

  Though not so wholly but throughout the night

  She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

  Like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

  —Adrienne Cecile Rich

  January 23, 1954

  There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams

  hurry too rapidly down to the sea,

  and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops

  makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,

  turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.

  —For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,

  aren’t waterfalls yet,

  in a quick age or so, as ages go here,

  they probably will be.

  But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,

  the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,

  slime-hung and barnacled.

  Think of the long trip home.

  Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

  Where should we be today?

  Is it right to be watching strangers in a play

  in this strangest of theatres?

  What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life

  in our bodies, we are determined to rush

  to see the sun the other way around?

  The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

  To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,

  inexplicable and impenetrable,

  at any view,

  instantly seen and always, always delightful?

  Oh, must we dream our dreams

  and have them, too?

  And have we room

  for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

  But surely it would have been a pity

  not to have seen the trees along this road,

  really exaggerated in their beauty,

  not to have seen them gesturing

  like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.

  —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard

  the sad, two-noted, wooden tune

  of disparate wooden clogs

  carelessly clacking over

  a grease-stained filling-station floor.

  (In another country the clogs would all be tested.

  Each pair there would have identical pitch.)

  —A pity not to have heard

  the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird

  who sings above the broken gasoline pump

  in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:

  three towers, five silver crosses.

  —Yes, a pity not to have pondered,

  blurr’dly and inconclusively,

  on what connection can exist for centuries

  between the crudest wooden footwear

  and, careful and finicky,

  the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.

  —Never to have studied history in

  the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.

  —And never to have had to listen to rain

  so much like politicians’ speeches:

  two hours of unrelenting oratory

  and then a sudden golden silence

  in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

  “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

  to imagined places, not just stay at home?

  Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

  about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

  Continent, city, country, society:

  the choice is never wide and never free.

  And here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,

  wherever that may be?”

  —Elizabeth Bishop

  January 21, 1956

  Spring comes and autumn goes

  But we still have the town of sparrows.

  Under the eaves and in the ivy

  These folk keep continually busy.

  If someone speaks, someone demurs;

  They are indomitable bickerers.

  One can easily imagine them

  Asquabble in the copses when brave William

  Led his band by; or even, once,

  In the dust near Hannibal’s elephants.

  Maybe in the primeval firs

  They went at it: What’s his, what’s hers?

  Apparently they do not welcome

  Finality in sparrowdom.

  Now, in the ivy, they are all upset;

  This argument isn’t settled yet.

  —Hayden Carruth

  December 8, 1956

  Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened

  To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark

  Till my ear, as it can when half asleep or half sober,

  Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,

  Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants

  Into a love speech indicative of a proper name.

  Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well

  As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise

  Kenning you a godchild of the Moon and the West Wind,

  With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,

  Likening your poise of being to an upland county,

  Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

  Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,

  It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence

  When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking

  On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless

  As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly

  So once, so valuable, so very new.

  This, moreover, at an hour when only too often

  A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,r />
  Predicting a world where every sacred location

  Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans “do,”

  Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,

  And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian bishops.

  Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say

  How much it believed of what I said the storm had said

  But quietly drew my attention to what had been done—

  So many cubic metres the more in my cistern

  Against a leonine summer—putting first things first:

  Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

  —W. H. Auden

  March 9, 1957

  Presently, at our touch, the teacup stirred,

  Then circled lazily about

  From A to Z. The first voice heard

  (If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)

  Was that of an engineer

  Originally from Cologne.

  Dead in his 22nd year

  Of cholera in Cairo, he had “known

  No happiness.” He once met Goethe, though.

  Goethe had told him: Persevere.

  Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde

  Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,

  Some childish and, you might say, blurred

  By sleep; one little boy

  Named Will, reluctant, possibly in a ruff

  Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled

  Back the arras for that next voice,

  Cold and portentous: “All is lost.

  Flee this house. Otto von Thurn und Taxis.

  Obey. You have no choice.”

  Frightened, we stopped; but tossed

  Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.

  Each night since then, the moon waxes,

  Small insects flit round a cold torch

  We light, that sends them pattering to the porch…

  But no real Sign. New voices come,

  Dictate addresses, begging us to write;

  Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom,

  In ways that so exhilarate

  We are sleeping sound of late.

  Last night, the teacup shattered in a rage.

  Indeed, we have grown nonchalant

  Toward the other world. In the gloom here,

  Our elbows on the cleared

  Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

  Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone

  Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,

  Than by those clamoring overhead,

  Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment

  We still have wit to postpone

  Because, once looked at, lit

  By the cold reflections of the dead

  Risen extinct but irresistible,

  Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,

  Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

  —James Merrill

  June 29, 1957

  I came before the water-

  colorists came to get the

  good of the Cape light that scours

  sand grit to sided crystal

  and buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls

  of the three fishing smacks beached

  on the bank of the river’s

  backtracking tail. I’d come for

  free fish bait: the blue mussels

  clumped like bulbs at the grass-root

  margin of the tidal pools.

  Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt

  mud stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;

  heard a queer crusty scrabble

  cease, and I neared the silenced

  edge of a cratered pool bed.

  The mussels hung dull blue and

  conspicuous, yet it seemed

  a sly world’s hinges had swung

  shut against me. All held still.

  Though I counted scant seconds,

  enough ages lapsed to win

  confidence of safe-conduct

  in the wary otherworld

  eying me. Grass put forth claws;

  small mud knobs, nudged from under,

  displaced their domes as tiny

  knights might doff their casques. The crabs

  inched from their pygmy burrows

  and from the trench-dug mud, all

  camouflaged in mottled mail

  of browns and greens. Each wore one

  claw swollen to a shield large

  as itself—no fiddler’s arm

  grown Gargantuan by trade,

  but grown grimly, and grimly

  borne, for a use beyond my

  guessing of it. Sibilant

  hordes, mass-motived, they sidled

  out in a converging stream

  toward the pool mouth, perhaps to

  meet the thin and sluggish thread

  of sea retracing its tide-

  way up the river basin.

  Or to avoid me. They moved

  obliquely with a dry-wet

  sound, with a glittery wisp

  and trickle. Could they feel mud

  pleasurable under claws

  as I could between bare toes?

  That question ended it—I

  stood shut out, for once, for all,

  puzzling the passage of their

  absolutely alien

  order as I might puzzle

  at the clear tail of Halley’s

  comet, coolly giving my

  orbit the go-by, made known

  by a family name it

  knew nothing of. So the crabs

  went about their business, which

  wasn’t fiddling, and I filled

  a big handkerchief with blue

  mussels. From what the crabs saw,

  if they could see, I was one

  two-legged mussel picker.

  High on the airy thatching

  of the dense grasses, I found

  the husk of a fiddler crab,

  intact, strangely strayed above

  his world of mud—green color

  and innards bleached and blown off

  somewhere by much sun and wind;

  there was no telling if he’d

  died recluse or suicide

  or headstrong Columbus crab.

  The crab face, etched and set there,

  grimaced as skulls grimace—it

  had an Oriental look,

  a samurai death mask done

  on a tiger tooth, less for

  art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea—

  where red-freckled crab backs, claws,

  and whole crabs, dead, their soggy

  bellies pallid and upturned,

  perform their shambling waltzes

  on the waves’ dissolving turn

  and return, losing themselves

  bit by bit to their friendly

  element—this relic saved

  face, to face the bald-faced sun.

  —Sylvia Plath

  August 9, 1958

  Take the intellectual prig;

  For his pretensions I do not care a whit or a fig.

  I am content that he should know what name Achilles

  assumed among the women, and do his crosswords

  in Esperanto,

  And ostentatiously comprehend the inner meaning of

  Pound’s obscurest canto.

  It does not disturb me that he can distinguish between

  “flaunt” and “flout,” and “costive” and “costate,”

  What does disturb me is his black-sheep brother, the

  intellectual prig apostate.

  Such a one is so erudite that he frequently thinks in Aramaic,

  But he expresses himself in slang long passé in Passaic.

  His signature is purple ink in an illegible curlicue,

  And he compares baseball to ballet, and laments the passing

  of burlesque, which he refers
to as burlicue.

  He has a folksy approach to the glory that was Greece,

  And professes to find more social and sociological

  significance in Li’l Abner than in War and Peace.

  For the most part, my feelings about him I silently conceal,

  But when he comments that The Power of Positive Thinking

  burns with a hard, gemlike flame, I can only cry that

  he is robbing Pater to paw Peale.

  —Ogden Nash

  August 30, 1958

  (Derived from “Golden Fleece of the Arctic,” an article in the Atlantic Monthly, by John J. Teal, Jr., who rears musk oxen on his farm in Vermont)

  To wear the arctic fox

  you have to kill it. Wear

  qiviut—the underwool of the arctic ox—

  pulled off it like a sweater;

  your coat is warm, your conscience better.

  I would like a suit of

  qiviut, so light I did not

  know I had it on, and in the

  course of time another,

  since I had not had to murder

  the “goat” that grew the fleece

  that grew the first. The musk ox

  has no musk and it is not an ox—

  illiterate epithet.

  Bury your nose in one when wet.

  It smells of water, nothing else,

  and browses goatlike on

  hind legs. Its great distinction

  is not egocentric scent

  but that it is intelligent.

  Chinchillas, otters, water rats,

  and beavers keep us warm.

  But think! A “musk ox” grows six pounds

  of qiviut; the cashmere ram,

  three ounces—that is all—of pashm.

  Lying in an exposed spot,

  basking in the blizzard,

  these ponderosos could dominate

 

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