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Collected Poems, 1953-1993

Page 1

by John Updike




  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1993 by John Updike

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Most of the poems in this work are from the following Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., collections: The Carpentered Hen, copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1982 by John Updike, copyright renewed 1982 by John Updike; Telephone Poles, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by John Updike; Midpoint, copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Updike; Tossing and Turning, copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977 by John Updike; Facing Nature, copyright © 1985 by John Updike.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Updike, John.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Collected poems, 1953–1993 / John Updike. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96197-6

  I. Title.

  PS3 571.P4A6 1993

  811’.54—dc20 92–28957

  v3.1

  Acknowledgments

  The following publications first printed certain of these poems: Agni, The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, American Way, Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, The Bennington Review, Boston Magazine, The Boston Review of the Arts, Boston University Journal, Boulevard, The Christian Century, Commonweal, The Connecticut Poetry Review, Horse, The Formalist, Grand Street, Harper’s, Harvard Advocate, The Harvard Bulletin, The Harvard Lampoon, Ladies’ Home Journal, Life, Look, Mānoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, Modern Poetry: East and West, The Nation, Negative Capability, New England Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Quarterly, The New York Times, The Ontario Review, The Oxford American, Parabola, The Paris Review, Plum, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poets and Writers Celebration Program, Polemic, Polymus, Première, Punch, Quest Magazine, River City, The Saturday Review, Scientific American, Shenandoah, South Beach, The Southern California Anthology, South Shore, Sycamore Review, Syracuse 10, The Transatlantic Review, What’s New.

  And the following presses and publishers issued broadsides and limited editions of various poems: The Adams and Lowell House Printers, Albondocani Press, Bits Press, Country Squires Books, Eurographica, Frank Hallman, Halty Ferguson, Lord John Press, Mummy Mountain Press, Palaemon Press, Press-22, Rook Broadsides, Santa Susana Press, Waves Press, and Wind River Press.

  for all of my families

  from John Franklin Hoyer, born in 1863,

  to Wesley Doudi Githiora Updike born in 1989

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Preface

  Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked

  Cloud Shadows

  Ex-Basketball Player

  A Modest Mound of Bones

  Sunflower

  March: A Birthday Poem

  Burning Trash

  English Train Compartment

  Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers

  How to Be Uncle Sam

  3 A.M.

  Mobile of Birds

  Shillington

  Suburban Madrigal

  Telephone Poles

  Mosquito

  Trees Eat Sunshine

  Winter Ocean

  Modigliani’s Death Mask

  Seagulls

  Seven Stanzas at Easter

  B.W.I.

  February 22

  Summer: West Side

  Wash

  Maples in a Spruce Forest

  Vermont

  The Solitary Pond

  Flirt

  Fever

  Earthworm

  Old-Fashioned Lightning Rod

  Sunshine on Sandstone

  The Stunt Flier

  Calendar

  The Short Days

  Boil

  Widener Library, Reading Room

  Movie House

  Vibration

  The Blessing

  My Children at the Dump

  The Great Scarf of Birds

  Azores

  Erotic Epigrams

  Hoeing

  Report of Health

  Fireworks

  Lamplight

  Nuda Natens

  Postcards from Soviet Cities

  Moscow

  Leningrad

  Kiev

  Tbilisi

  Yerevan

  Camera

  Roman Portrait Busts

  Fellatio

  Décor

  Poem for a Far Land

  Late January

  Dog’s Death

  Home Movies

  Antigua

  Amoeba

  Elm

  Daughter

  Eurydice

  Seal in Nature

  Air Show

  Omega

  The Angels

  Bath After Sailing

  Topsfield Fair

  Pompeii

  Sand Dollar

  Washington

  Dream Objects

  Midpoint

  I. Introduction

  II. The Photographs

  III. The Dance of the Solids

  IV. The Play of Memory

  V. Conclusion

  Chloë’s Poem

  Minority Report

  Living with a Wife

  At the Piano

  In the Tub

  Under the Sunlamp

  During Menstruation

  All the While

  À l’École Berlitz

  South of the Alps

  A Bicycle Chain

  Tossing and Turning

  On an Island

  Sunday Rain

  Marching Through a Novel

  Night Flight, over Ocean

  Phenomena

  Wind

  Sunday

  Touch of Spring

  The House Growing

  Cunts

  Apologies to Harvard

  Commencement, Pingree School

  Conversation

  Melting

  Query

  Heading for Nandi

  Sleepless in Scarsdale

  Note to the Previous Tenants

  Pale Bliss

  Mime

  Golfers

  Poisoned in Nassau

  You Who Swim

  Sunday in Boston

  Raining in Magens Bay

  Leaving Church Early

  Another Dog’s Death

  Dream and Reality

  Dutch Cleanser

  Rats

  The Melancholy of Storm Windows

  Calder’s Hands

  The Grief of Cafeterias

  Spanish Sonnets

  To Ed Sissman

  Ohio

  Iowa

  Waiting Rooms

  Boston Lying-In

  Mass. Mental Health

  On the Way to Delphi

  An Oddly Lovely Day Alone

  Taste

  Penumbrae

  Revelation

  The Shuttle

  Crab Crack

  Nature

  The Moons of Jupiter

  Upon the Last Day of His Forty-Ninth Year

  Planting Trees

  The Fleckings

  East Hampton-Boston by Air

  Small-City People

  L.A.

  Plow Cemetery

  Spring Song

  Accumulation

  Styles of Bloom
<
br />   Natural Question

  Two Hoppers

  Two Sonnets Whose Titles Came to Me Simultaneously

  The Dying Phobiac Takes His Fears with Him

  No More Access to Her Underpants

  Long Shadow

  Aerie

  The Code

  Island Sun

  Pain

  Sleeping with You

  Richmond

  Gradations of Black

  The Furniture

  Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes

  Ode to Rot

  To Evaporation

  Ode to Growth

  To Fragmentation

  Ode to Entropy

  To Crystallization

  Ode to Healing

  Switzerland

  Munich

  A Pear like a Potato

  Airport

  From Above

  Oxford, Thirty Years After

  Somewhere

  Sonnet to Man-Made Grandeur

  Klimt and Schiele Confront the Cunt

  Returning Native

  Snowdrops 1987

  Goodbye, Göteborg

  Hot Water

  Squirrels Mating

  Sails on All Saints’ Day

  Tulsa

  Washington: Tourist View

  Back Bay

  In Memoriam Felis Felis

  Enemies of a House

  Orthodontia

  Condo Moon

  Pillow

  Seattle Uplift

  The Beautiful Bowel Movement

  Charleston

  Frost

  To a Box Turtle

  Each Summer’s Swallows

  Fargo

  Fall

  The Millipede

  Generic College

  Perfection Wasted

  Working Outdoors in Winter

  Indianapolis

  Zoo Bats

  Landing in the Rain at La Guardia

  Mouse Sex

  Granite

  Relatives

  Thin Air

  November

  Light Switches

  Miami

  Fly

  Flurry

  Bindweed

  July

  To a Dead Flame

  Back from Vacation

  Literary Dublin

  Elderly Sex

  Celery

  São Paulo

  Rio de Janeiro

  Brazil

  Upon Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home

  At the End of the Rainbow

  Academy

  Light Verse

  Mountain Impasse

  Solitaire

  Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums

  Player Piano

  Snapshots

  An Imaginable Conference

  Dilemma in the Delta

  Shipbored

  Song of the Open Fireplace

  The Clan

  Youth’s Progress

  Humanities Course

  V. B. Nimble, V. B. Quick

  Lament, for Cocoa

  Pop Smash, Out of Echo Chamber

  Sunglasses

  Pooem

  To an Usherette

  Time’s Fool

  Superman

  An Ode

  The Newlyweds

  The Story of My Life

  A Bitter Life

  A Wooden Darning Egg

  Publius Vergilius Maro, the Madison Avenue Hick

  Tsokadze O Altitudo

  The One-Year-Old

  Room 28

  Philological

  Mr. High-Mind

  Tax-Free Encounter

  Scenic

  Capacity

  Little Poems

  Popular Revivals 1956

  Tune, in American Type

  Due Respect

  A Rack of Paperbacks

  Even Egrets Err

  Glasses

  The Sensualist

  In Memoriam

  Planting a Mailbox

  ZULUS LIVE IN LAND WITHOUT A SQUARE

  Caligula’s Dream

  Bendix

  The Menagerie at Versailles in 1775

  Reel

  Kenneths

  Upon Learning That a Bird Exists Called the Turnstone

  In Extremis

  Blked

  Toothache Man

  Party Knee

  The Moderate

  Deities and Beasts

  Within a Quad

  In Praise of (C10H9O5)x

  Milady Reflects

  The Fritillary

  Thoughts While Driving Home

  Sonic Boom

  Tome-Thoughts, from the Times

  A Song of Paternal Care

  Tropical Beetles

  Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter

  Young Matrons Dancing

  Comp. Religion

  Meditation on a News Item

  Cosmic Gall

  A Vision

  Les Saints Nouveaux

  The Descent of Mr. Aldez

  Upon Learning That a Town Exists in Virginia Called Upperville

  Recital

  I Missed His Book, but I Read His Name

  On the Inclusion of Miniature Dinosaurs in Breakfast Cereal Boxes

  The High-Hearts

  Marriage Counsel

  The Handkerchiefs of Khaibar Khan

  Dea ex Machina

  Die Neuen Heiligen

  Miss Moore at Assembly

  White Dwarf

  Exposure

  Exposé

  Farewell to the Shopping District of Antibes

  Some Frenchmen

  Sea Knell

  Vow

  The Amish

  The Naked Ape

  The Origin of Laughter

  The Average Egyptian Faces Death

  Painted Wives

  Skyey Developments

  Courtesy Call

  Business Acquaintances

  Seven New Ways of Looking at the Moon

  Upon Shaving Off One’s Beard

  The Cars in Caracas

  Insomnia the Gem of the Ocean

  To a Waterbed

  The Jolly Greene Giant

  News from the Underworld

  Authors’ Residences

  Sin City, D.C.

  Shaving Mirror

  Self-Service

  The Visions of Mackenzie King

  Energy: A Villanelle

  On the Recently Minted Hundred-Cent Piece

  Typical Optical

  The Rockettes

  Food

  The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring

  ZIP Code Ode

  Déjà, Indeed

  Two Limericks for the Elderly

  Mites

  An Open Letter to Voyager II

  Classical Optical

  Neoteny

  Notes

  Appendix A: Poems in Previous Collections Omitted

  Appendix B: Poems Published in The New Yorker Omitted

  Index of Titles

  A Note About the Author

  Books by John Updike

  Preface

  AS A BOY I wanted to be a cartoonist. Light verse (and the verse that came my way was generally light) seemed a kind of cartooning with words, and through light verse I first found my way into print. The older I have grown, the less of it I have written, but the idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise—the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control. In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux.

  In making this collection, I wanted to distinguish my poems from my light verse. My principle of segregation has been that a poem derives from the real (the given, the substantial) world and light verse from the man-made world of information—books, newspapers, words, signs. If a set of lines brought ba
ck to me something I actually saw or felt, it was not light verse. If it took its spark from language and stylized signifiers, it was. A number of entries wavered back and forth across the border; the distinction becomes a subjective one of tone. You will find in the light category a game of solitaire, a pair of glasses, and a shaving mirror that were all real to me. Artificial in essence, light verse usually employs the artifices of rhyme and strict form, but not always. Nor are rhyming poems always light; those reporting from specific places (“Azores,” “Antigua”) seemed to me earnest enough, in delivering up a piece of our planet, to be considered poems. The very first poem here, bearing a comically long title, yet conveyed, with a compression unprecedented in my brief writing career, the mythogenetic truth of telephone wires and poles marching across a stretch of Pennsylvania farmland. I still remember the shudder, the triumphant sense of capture, with which I got these lines down, not long after my twenty-first birthday.

  But every set of lines herein gave me the excited sensation of being a maker, a poiētēs. Almost all of the poems in my five previous volumes of verse have been included, along with some seventy more. I have sought out their dates of composition—given in the index of titles—and arranged them, within the two broad categories, in the order in which they were written. They form thus, with their sites and occasions, the thready backside of my life’s fading tapestry. Not included are verse translations, rhyming salutes for the birthdays and weddings of children and stepchildren, the lyrics of a children’s opera called The Fisherman and His Wife, a set of seasonal poems titled A Child’s Calendar, and a “cheerful alphabet” of “pleasant objects” composed with my infant first son in mind. An appendix lists the titles previously collected but dropped from this conclusive gathering. The stanza breaks, I trust, are all clear. Sic stat. My poems are my oeuvre’s beloved waifs, and I feared that if I did not perform the elementary bibliographical decencies for them no one would.

  J.U.

  Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked

  The old men say

  young men in gray

  hung this thread across our plains

  acres and acres ago.

  But we, the enlightened, know

  in point of fact it’s what remains

  of the flight of a marvellous crow

  no one saw:

  each pole, a caw.

  Cloud Shadows

  I

  That white coconut, the sun,

      is hidden by his blue leaves,

  piratical great galleons.

  Our sky their spanking sea,

      they thrust us to an ocean floor,

  withal with certain courtesy.

  II

  These courtly cotton-bellies rub

      around the jewel we live within

  and down to the muddled hub

  drop complements.

      Down shafts of violet fall

  counterweights of shadow, hence

 

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