by John Updike
burning in memory like leaky furnace doors,
minepits of honesty from which we escaped
with dilated suspicions. Love us, dead thrones:
sing us to sleep, awaken our eyes,
comfort with terror our mortal afternoons.
Bath After Sailing
From ten to five we whacked the waves,
the hostile, mobile black
that lurched beneath the leeward winch
as helplessly we heeled.
Now, after six, I lie at ease,
at ease in a saltless sea my size,
my fingertips shrivelled as if dead,
the sway of the sloop still haunting the tub.
I can’t stop seeing the heartless waves
the mirthless color of green tar
sliding on themselves like ball-bearings,
deep and opaque and not me,
not me: I was afraid,
afraid of heeling over in the wind
and inhaling bubbling lead
and sinking, opaque as stone.
Lord, how light my feet,
wed to their salt-soaked sneakers,
felt on the dock, amid the mysterious
steadiness of trees and air.
I did not want, I had not wanted
to die. I saw death’s face
in that mass absorbed
in shrugging off its timeless weight,
the same dull mass blond Vikings scanned,
impervious to all the sailor love
thrust onto it. My shredded hand
ached on the jib-sheet line.
The boat would clumsily, broken
wings flapping, come about,
and the slickered skipper search
the sea-face and find me gone,
his surprise not total,
and one wave much like the rest,
a toppling ton, a rib of time,
an urgent message from nothing to nothing.
I thank you, God of trees and air,
whose steeples testify
to something steady slipped by chance
upon Your tar-green sliding face,
for this my mock survival.
My children’s voices plumb my death.
My rippling legs are hydra limbs.
My penis, my representative,
my emissary to darkness, survivor
of many a plunge, flipflops
sideways, alive and small
and pallid in reprieve.
Black sea, deep sea, you dangle
beneath my bliss like a dreadful gamble.
Mute, white as a swimming-pool cork,
I float on the skin
of sleepiness, of my sleep,
of all sleep.…How much I prefer
this microcosmic version
of flirting with immersion.
Topsfield Fair
Animals seem so sad to be themselves—
the turkey a turkey even to his wattle,
the rabbit with his pink, distinctly, eyes,
the prize steer humble in his stall.
What are they thinking, the pouter pigeons,
shaped like opulent ladies’ hats,
jerking and staring in aisles of cages;
what does the mute meek monkey say?
Our hearts go out to them, then stop:
our fellows in mortality, like us
stiff-thrust into marvellous machines
tight-packed with chemical commands
to breathe, blink, feed, sniff, mate,
and, stuck like stamps in species, go out of date.
Pompeii
They lived, Pompeiians,
as installments of flesh in slots of stone;
they died in postures preserved,
by a ghoulish casting process, in the dank museum here.
Outside the gates, living Pompeiian men
peddle antique pornography.
One feels this place
was cursed before that noon in 79
when lunching gluttons found
their sturgeon mouths hot-stuffed with screaming ash.
There’s not much to admire but the fact
of preservation, and the plumbing.
The plumbing lingers
like a sour aftertaste—the loving conduits,
the phallic fountains, the three degrees,
so technically astute, of public bath. These Romans
enslaved their liquids well; pornography
became their monument.
Sand Dollar
This disc, stelliferous,
survived the tide
to tell us some small creature
lived and died;
its convex delicacy
defies the void
that crushed a vanished
echinoid.
Stoop down, delighted;
hoard in your hand
this sand-colored coin
redeemed from the sand
and know, my young sudden
archaeologist,
that other modes of being
do exist.
Behold the horizon.
Vastness acts
the wastrel with
its artifacts.
The sea holds lives
as a dream holds clues;
what one realm spends
another can use.
Washington
Diagonal white city dreamed by a Frenchman—
the nouveau republic’s Senecan pretension
populated by a grid of blacks—
after midnight your taxi-laced streets
entertain noncommittal streetlight shadows
and the scurry of leaves that fall still green.
Site, for me, of a secret parliament
of which both sides agreed to concede
and left the issue suspended in brandy,
I think of you longingly, as a Yankee
longs for Lee, sorry to have won,
or as Ho Chi Minh mourns for Johnson.
My capital, my alabaster Pandemonium,
I rode your stunned streets with a groin
as light and docile as a baby’s wrist,
guilt’s senators laughing in my skull’s cloakroom,
my hurried heart corrupt with peace,
with love of my country, of cunt, and of sleep.
Dream Objects
Strangest is their reality,
their three-dimensional workmanship:
veined pebbles that have an underside,
maps one could have studied for minutes longer,
books we seem to read page after page.
If these are symbols cheaply coined
to buy the mind a momentary pardon,
whence this extravagance? Fine
as dandelion polls, they surface and explode
in the wind of the speed of our dreaming,
so that we awake with the sense
of having missed everything, tourists
hustled by bus through a land whose history
is our rich history, whose artifacts
were filed to perfection by beggars we fear.
Midpoint
I. Introduction
ARGUMENT: The poet begins, and describes his beginnings. Early intimations of wonder and dread. His family on the Hill of Life in 1939, and his own present uncomfortable maturity. Refusing to take good advice, he insists on the endurance of the irreducible.
Of nothing but me, me
—all wrong, all wrong—
as I cringe in the face of glory
I sing, lacking
another song.
Proud mouths around me clack
that the livelong day is long
but the nip of night tugs back
my would-be celebrant brain
to the bricks of the moss-touched walk,
the sweet cold grass that had no name,
the arbor, and the wicker chair
turned cavernous beneath the tapping rain.
Plain wood and paint pressed back my stare.
Stiff cardboard apples crayoned to sell
(for nickels minted out of air)
from orange crates with still a citrus smell:
the thermometer: the broom:
this code of things contrived to tell
a timid God of a continuum
wherein he was delimited.
Vengeful, he applied his sense of doom
with tricycle tires to coppery-red
anthills and, dizzy in his Heaven, grieved
above his crushed Inferno of the dead.
A screen of color said, You are alive.
A skin of horror floated at my feet.
The corpses, comma-shaped, indicted, If
a wheel from far above (in summer heat,
loose thunders roamed the sky like untongued wagons)
would turn, you’d lie squashed on the street.
That bright side porch in Shillington:
under the sun, beneath grape leaves,
I feared myself an epiphenomenon.
The crucial question was, Why am I me?
In China boys were born as cherishing
of their small selves; in buried Greece
their swallowed spirits wink
like mica lost in marble.
Sickened by Space’s waste, I tried to cling
to the thought of the indissoluble:
a point infinitely hard
was luminous in me, and cried I will.
I sought in middling textures part-
icles of iridescence, scintillae
in dullish surfaces; and pictured art
as my descending, via pencil, into dry
exactitude. Behind the beaded curtain
of Matter lurked an understanding Eye.
Clint Shilling’s drawing lessons: in
the sun he posed an egg on paper, and said
a rainbow ran along the shadow’s rim—
the rainbow at the edge of the shadow of the egg.
My kindergarten eyes were sorely strained
to see it there. My still-soft head
began to ache, but docilely I feigned
the purple ghosts of green in clumsy wax:
thus was I early trained
and wonder, now, if Clint were orthodox.
He lived above a spikestone-studded wall
and honed his mustache like a tiny ax
and walked a brace of collies down our alley
in Pennsylvania dusk
beside his melodic wife, white-haired and tall.
O Philadelphia Avenue! My eyes lift up
from the furtive pencilled paper
and drown, are glad to drown, in a flood
of light, of trees and houses: our neighbors
live higher than we, in gaunt
two-family houses glaring toward our arbor.
Five-fingered leaves hold horse chestnuts.
The gutter runs with golden water
from Flickinger’s ice plant. Telephone wires hunt
through the tree crowns under orders
to find the wider world
the daily Eagle and the passing autos
keep hinting the existence of. And girls
stroll toward Lancaster Avenue and school
in the smoke of burning leaves, in the swirl
of snow, in the cruel
brilliance that follows, in the storm of buds that marries
earth to the iron sky and brings renewal
to the town so wide and fair from quarry
to trolley tracks, from Kenhorst to Mohnton,
from farmers’ market to cemetery,
that a boy might feel himself point N
in optics, where plane ABCD—
a visual phenomenon—
converges and passes through to be
(inverted on the other side,
where film or retina receives it)
a kind of afterlife,
knife-lifted out of flux
and developed out of time:
the night sky, with a little luck,
was a camera back, the constellations
faint silver salts, and I the crux
of radii, the tip of two huge cones,
called Empyrean and Earth,
that took their slant and spin from me alone.
I was that N, that white-hot nothing, yet
my hands, my penis, came also into view,
and as I grew I half unwilling learned
to seem a creature, to subdue
my giant solipsism to a common scale.
Reader, it is pure bliss to share with you
the plight of love, the fate
of death, the need for food,
the privileges of ignorance, the ways
of traffic, competition, and remorse.
I look upon my wife, and marvel that
a woman, competent and good,
has shared these years; my children, protein-fat,
echo my eyes and my laugh: I am disarmed
to think that my body has mattered,
has been enrolled like a red-faced farm-
boy in the beautiful country club
of mankind’s copulating swarm.
I did not expect it; humble
as a glow-worm, my boneless ego asked
only to witness, to serve as the hub
of a wheeling spectacle that would not pass.
My parents, my impression was,
had acted out all parts on my behalf;
their shouting and their silences
in the hissing bedroom dark
scorched the shadows; a ring of ashes
expanded with each smoldering remark
and left no underbrush of fuel
of passion for my intimidated spark.
My mother’s father squeezed his Bible
sighing, and smoked five-cent cigars
behind the chickenhouse, exiling the smell.
His wife, bespectacled Granma,
beheaded the chickens
in their gritty wire yard
and had a style of choking during dinner;
she’d run to the porch, where one of us
would pound her on the back until her inner
conflict had resolved. Like me, she was nervous;
I had sympathetic stomach cramps.
We were, perhaps, too close,
the five of us. Our lamps
were dim, our carpets worn, the furniture
hodgepodge and venerable and damp.
And yet I never felt that we were poor.
Our property included several stray
cats, one walnut tree, a hundred feet or more
of privet hedge, and fresh ice every other day.
The brothers pressing to be born
were kept, despite their screams, offstage.
The fifth point of a star, I warmed
to my onliness, threw tantrums,
and, for my elders’ benison, performed.
Seven I was when to amuse them
I drew the Hill of Life.
My grandfather, a lusty sixty-some,
is near the bottom, beside
the Tree to God, though twice twelve years
in fact would pass before he, ninety, died,
of eating an unwashed peach.
His wife, crippled but chipper, stepped
above him downward and, true, did not precede
him up that Tree, but snored and slept
six seasons more before her speechless spirit
into unresi
sted silence crept.
A gap, and then my father, Mr.
Downdike of high-school hilarity,
strides manful down the dry, unslippery
pencil line. My mother is at the peak—
eleven days short of thirty-five—
and starting up the lonely slope is me,
dear Chonny. Now on the downward side
behold me: my breath is short,
though my parents are still alive.
For conscientious climbing, God gave me these rewards:
fame with its bucket of unanswerable letters,
wealth with its worrisome market report,
rancid advice from my critical betters,
a drafty house, a voluptuous spouse,
and quatre enfants—none of them bed-wetters.
From Time’s grim cover, my fretful face peers out.
Ten thousand soggy mornings have warped my lids
and minced a crafty pulp of this my mouth;
and yet, incapable of being dimmed,
there harbors still inside me like the light
an anchored ketch displays, among my ribs,
a hopeful burning riding out the tide
that this strange universe employs
to strip itself of wreckage in the night.
“Take stock. Repent. The motion that destroys
creates elsewhere; the looping sun
sees no world twice.” False truths! I vouch for boys
impatient, inartistically, to get things done,
armored in speckled cardboard