by John Updike
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,
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,