Collected Poems, 1953-1993

by John Updike

  wall-broad in this instance,

      house-high:

  splendiferous surface, the stucco

      worn bare

  here and there, stones nicked, cracked,

      flecked, marked,

  scored warmly, worn considerably, having

      wept rust,

  borne whitewash, mortar, known weather,

      these spots

  seem meditating irregularities:

      Lord’s thoughts.

  The Stunt Flier

  I come into my dim bedroom

  innocently and my baby

  is lying in her crib face-down;

  just a hemisphere of the half-bald head

  shows, and the bare feet, uncovered,

  the small feet crossed at the ankles

  like a dancer doing easily

  a difficult step—or,

  more exactly, like a cherub

  planing through Heaven,

  cruising at a middle altitude

  through the cumulus of the tumbled covers,

  which disclose the feet crossed

  at the ankles à la small boys who,

  exulting in their mastery of bicycles,

  lift their hands from the handlebars

  to demonstrate how easy gliding is.

  Calendar

  Toward August’s end,

  a hard night rain;

  and the lawn is littered

  with leaves again.

  How the seasons blend!

  So seeming still,

  summer is fettered

  to a solar will

  which never rests.

  The slanting ray

  ignites migration

  within the jay

  and plans for nests

  are hatching when

  the northern nation

  looks white to men.

  The Short Days

  I like the way, in winter, cars

  Ignite beneath the lingering stars

  And, with a cough or two, unpark,

  And roar to work still in the dark.

  Like some great father, slugabed,

  Whose children crack the dawn with play,

  The sun retains a heavy head

  Behind the hill, and stalls the day.

  Then red rims gild the gutter-spouts;

  The streetlamp pales; the milk-truck fades;

  And housewives—husbands gone—wash doubts

  Down sinks and raise the glowing shades.

  The cars are gone, they will return

  When headlights in a new night burn;

  Between long drinks of Acheron

  The thirst of broad day has begun.

  Boil

  In the night the white skin

  cries aloud to be broken,

  but finds itself a cruel prison;

  so it is with reason,

  which holds the terror in,

  undoubted though the infection.

  Widener Library, Reading Room

  Eight years removed from them, I sit among

  The weary faces of the hopeful young.

  All self-reflectively, my gaze is bent

  To where the mirror proves recalcitrant.

  The frosted glass of vanished time before

  My eyes suggests the firm-locked office door

  Of some august professor who has sent

  For me and then forgot our appointment.

  Mater, behold your son, not prodigal

  But having, eager pen in hand, done all

  Your discipline implied; the feat feels meant

  Ill, here in the vault of its vague intent.

  Movie House

  View it, by day, from the back,

  from the parking lot in the rear,

  for from this angle only

  the beautiful brick blankness can be grasped.

  Monumentality

  wears one face in all ages.

  No windows intrude real light

  into this temple of shades,

  and the size of it,

  the size of the great rear wall measures

  the breadth of the dreams we have had here.

  It dwarfs the village bank,

  outlooms the town hall,

  and even in its decline

  makes the bright-ceilinged supermarket seem mean.

  Stark closet of stealthy rapture,

  vast introspective camera

  wherein our most daring self-projections

  were given familiar names:

  stand, stand by your macadam lake

  and tell the aeons of our extinction

  that we, too, could house our gods,

  could secrete a pyramid

  to sight the stars by.

  Vibration

  The world vibrates, my sleepless nights

  discovered. The air conditioner hummed;

  I turned it off. The plumbing

  in the next apartment sang;

  I moved away, and found a town

  whose factories shuddered as they worked

  all night. The wires on the poles

  outside my windows quivered in an ecstasy

  stretched thin between horizons.

  I went to where no wires were; and there,

  as I lay still, a dragon tremor

  seized my darkened body, gnawed

  my heart, and murmured, I am you.

  The Blessing

  The room darkened, darkened until

  our nakedness became a form of gray;

  then the rain came bursting,

  and we were sheltered, blessed,

  upheld in a world of elements

  that held us justified.

  In all the love I had felt for you before,

  in all that love,

  there was no love

  like that I felt when the rain began:

  dim room, enveloping rush,

  the slenderness of your throat,

  the blessèd slenderness.

  My Children at the Dump

  The day before divorce, I take my children

  on this excursion;

  they are enchanted by

  a wonderland of discard where

  each complicated star cries out

  to be a momentary toy.

  · · ·

  To me, too, the waste seems wonderful.

  Sheer hills of television tubes, pale lakes

  of excelsior, landslides

  of perfectly carved carpentry-scraps,

  sparkplugs like nuggets, cans iridescent

  as peacock plumes, an entire lawnmower

  all pluck at my instinct to conserve.

  I cannot. These things

  were considered, and dismissed

  for a reason. But my children

  wander wondering among tummocks of junk

  like stunted starvelings cruelly set free

  at a heaped banquet of food too rich to eat.

  I shout, “Don’t touch the broken glass!”

  The distant metal delicately rusts.

  The net effect is floral: a seaward wind

  makes flags of cellophane and upright weeds.

  The seagulls weep; my boys bring back

  bent tractors, hoping what some other child

  once played to death can be revived by them.

  No. I say, “No.” I came to add

  my fragments to this universe of loss,

  purging my house, ridding a life

  no longer shared of remnants.

  My daughter brings a naked armless doll,

  still hopeful in its dirty weathered eyes,

  and I can only tell her, “Love it now.

  Love it now, but we can’t take it home.”

  The Great Scarf of Birds

  Playing golf on Cape Ann in October,

  I saw something to remember.

  Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets

  of their branc
hes. The maples

  were colored like apples,

  part orange and red, part green.

  The elms, already transparent trees,

  seemed swaying vases full of sky. The sky

  was dramatic with great straggling V’s

  of geese streaming south, mare’s-tails above them;

  their trumpeting made us look up and around.

  The course sloped into salt marshes,

  and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.

  As if out of the Bible

  or science fiction,

  a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots

  like iron filings which a magnet

  underneath the paper undulates.

  It dartingly darkened in spots,

  paled, pulsed, compressed, distended, yet

  held an identity firm: a flock

  of starlings, as much one thing as a rock.

  One will moved above the trees

  the liquid and hesitant drift.

  Come nearer, it became less marvellous,

  more legible, and merely huge.

  “I never saw so many birds!” my partner claimed;

  we returned our eyes to the game.

  Later, as Lot’s wife must have done,

  in a pause of walking, not thinking

  of calling down a consequence,

  I shifted my bag and looked back.

  The rise of the fairway behind us was tinted,

  so evenly tinted I might not have noticed

  but that at the rim of the delicate shadow

  the starlings were thicker and outlined the flock

  as an inkstain in drying pronounces its edges.

  The gradual rise of green was vastly covered;

  I had thought nothing in nature could be so broad but grass.

  And as

  I watched, one bird,

  prompted by accident or will to lead,

  ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,

  the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,

  transparent, of gray, might be twitched

  by one corner, drawn upward, and then,

  decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:

  the southward cloud withdrew into the air.

  Long had it been since my heart

  had been lifted as it was by the lifting of that great scarf.

  Azores

  Great green ships

      themselves, they ride

  at anchor forever;

      beneath the tide

  huge roots of lava

      hold them fast

  in mid-Atlantic

      to the past.

  The tourists, thrilling

      from the deck,

  hail shrilly pretty

      hillsides flecked

  with cottages

      (confetti) and

  sweet lozenges

      of chocolate (land).

  They marvel at

      the dainty fields

  and terraces

      hand-tilled to yield

  the modest fruits

      of vines and trees

  imported by

      the Portuguese:

  a rural landscape

      set adrift

  from centuries ago.

      The rift

  enlarges.

      The ship proceeds.

  Again the constant

      music feeds

  an emptiness astern,

      Azores gone.

  The void behind, the void

      ahead are one.

  Erotic Epigrams

  I

  The landscape of love

  can only be seen

  through a slim windowpane

  one’s own breath fogs.

  II

  Iseult, to Tristan

  (condemned to die),

  is like a letter of reprieve

  which is never delivered

  but he knows has been dispatched.

  III

  Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover

  doth polish the face of his beloved

  until he produces a skull.

  Hoeing

  I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived

      of the pleasures of hoeing;

      there is no knowing

  how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.

  The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing

      moist-dark loam—

      the pea-root’s home,

  a fertile wound perpetually healing.

  How neatly the green weeds go under!

      The blade chops the earth new.

      Ignorant the wise boy who

  has never rendered thus the world fecunder.

  Report of Health

  I

  I am alone tonight.

  The wrong I have done you

  sits like a sore beneath my thumb,

  burns like a boil on my heart’s left side.

  I am unwell.

  My viscera, long clenched in love of you,

  have undergone a detested relaxation.

  There is, within, a ghostly maze

  of phantom tubes and nodules where

  those citizens, our passions, flit; and here,

  like sunlight passing from a pattern of streets,

  I feel your bright love leaving.

  II

  Another night. Today I am told,

  dear friend, by another,

  you seem happy and well.

  Nothing could hurt me more.

  How dare you be happy, you,

  shaped so precisely for me,

  my cup and my mirror—

  how dare you disdain to betray,

  by some disarray of your hair,

  my being torn from you?

  I would rather believe

  that you knew your friend would come to me,

  and so seemed well—

  “not a hair / out of place”—

  like an actress blindly hurling a pose

  into the fascinated darkness.

  As for me, you are still the eyes of the air.

  I travel from point to point in your presence.

  Each unattended gesture hopes to catch your eye.

  III

  I may not write again. My voice

  goes nowhere. Dear friend,

  don’t let me heal. Don’t

  worry, I am well.

  I am happy

  to dwell in a world whose Hell I will:

  the doorway hints at your ghost

  and a tiger pounces on my heart;

  the lilac bush is a devil

  inviting me into your hair.

  Fireworks

  These spasms and chrysanthemums of light

  are like emotions

  exploding under a curved night that corresponds

  to the dark firmament within.

  See, now, the libidinous flare,

  spinning on its stick in vain resistance

  to the upright ego and mortality’s gravity;

  behold, above, the sudden bloom,

  turquoise, each tip a comet,

  of pride—followed, after an empty bang,

  by an ebbing amber galaxy, despair.

  We feel our secrets bodied forth like flags

  as wide as half the sky. Now

  passions, polychrome and coruscating, crowd

  one upon the other in a final fit,

  a terminal display

  that tilts the children’s faces back in bleached dismay

  and sparks an infant’s crying in the grass.

  They do not understand, the younger ones,

  what thunderheads and nebulae,

  what waterfalls and momentary roses fill

/>   the world’s one aging skull,

  and are relieved when in a falling veil

  the last awed outburst crumbles to reveal

  the pattern on the playroom wall

  of tame and stable stars.

  Lamplight

  Sent straight from suns

  on slender stems

  whose fangèd tendrils

  leech the walls,

  it sadly falls

  on tabletops

  and barren floors

  where rugs lie flat

  as sunburnt crops.

  Yet by this glow,

  while daylight leans

  outside the door

  like an idle ax,

  green voices wax,

  red tongues thrust seeds

  deep in the soil

  of our harrowed needs,

  and conversations grow.

  Nuda Natens

  Anthea, your shy flanks in starlight

  sank into the surf like thumbs into my heart.

  Your untanned skin,

  shaped like a bathing suit,

  lifted me thick from my thighs,

  old Adam in air

  above the cool ribs of sand.

  My lust was a phosphor in a wide black wash,

  and your quick neck the stem of a vase,

  and your shoulders a crescent perilously balanced

  where darkness was sliding on darkness.

  You led me up, frightened with love,

  up from the wet to where warm wind

  bathed us in dust, and your embarrassed beauty

  bent silver about your pudenda.

  Postcards from Soviet Cities

  Moscow

  Gold onions rooted in the sky

  Grow downward into sullen, damp

  Museums where, with leaden eye,