Collected Poems, 1953-1993

by John Updike

  and an untoward faith in the eye/I pun.

  II. The Photographs

  ARGUMENT: The pictures speak for themselves. A cycle of growth, mating, and birth. The coarse dots, calligraphic and abstract, become faces, with troubled expressions. Distance improves vision. Lost time sifts through these immutable old screens.

  III. The Dance of the Solids

  ARGUMENT: In stanzas associated with allegory the actual atomic structure of solids unfolds. Metals, Ceramics, and Polymers. The conduction of heat, electricity, and light; nonsymmetry and magnetism. Solidity emerges as intricate and giddy.

  All things are Atoms: Earth and Water, Air

      And Fire, all, Democritus foretold.

      Swiss Paracelsus, in’s alchemic lair,

      Saw Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury unfold

      Amid Millennial hopes of faking Gold.

      Lavoisier dethroned Phlogiston; then

      Molecular Analysis made bold

      Forays into the gases: Hydrogen

  Stood naked in the dazzled sight of Learned Men.

  The Solid State, however, kept its grains

      Of Microstructure coarsely veiled until

      X-ray diffraction pierced the Crystal Planes

      That roofed the giddy Dance, the taut Quadrille

      Where Silicon and Carbon Atoms will

      Link Valencies, four-figured, hand in hand

      With common Ions and Rare Earths to fill

      The lattices of Matter, Salt or Sand,

  With tiny Excitations, quantitively grand.

  The Metals, lustrous Monarchs of the Cave,

      Are ductile and conductive and opaque

      Because each Atom generously gave

      Its own Electrons to a mutual Stake,

      A Pool that acts as Bond. The Ions take

      The stacking shape of Spheres, and slip and flow

      When pressed or dented; thusly Metals make

      A better Paper Clip than a Window,

  Are vulnerable to Shear, and, heated, brightly glow.

  Ceramic, muddy Queen of Human Arts,

      First served as simple Stone. Feldspar supplied

      Crude Clay; and Rubies, Porcelain, and Quartz

      Came each to light. Aluminum Oxide

      Is typical—a Metal close-allied

      With Oxygen ionically; no free

      Electrons form a lubricating tide,

      Hence, Empresslike, Ceramics tend to be

  Resistant, porous, brittle, and refractory.

  Prince Glass, Ceramic’s son, though crystal-clear,

      Is no wise crystalline. The fond Voyeur

      And Narcissist alike devoutly peer

      Into Disorder, the Disorderer

      Being Covalent Bondings that prefer

      Prolonged Viscosity and spread loose nets

      Photons slip through. The average Polymer

      Enjoys a Glassy state, but cools, forgets

  To slump, and clouds in closely patterned Minuets.

  The Polymers, those giant Molecules,

      Like Starch and Polyoxymethylene,

      Flesh out, as protein Serfs and plastic Fools,

      This Kingdom with Life’s Stuff. Our time has seen

      The synthesis of Polyisoprene

      And many cross-linked Helixes unknown

      To Robert Hooke; but each primordial Bean

      Knew Cellulose by heart. Nature alone

  Of Collagen and Apatite compounded Bone.

  What happens in these Lattices when Heat

      Transports Vibrations through a solid mass?

      T = 3Nk is much too neat;

      A rigid Crystal’s not a fluid Gas.

      Debye in 1912 proposed Elas-

      Tic Waves called phonons that obey Max Planck’s

      E = hv. Though amorphous Glass,

      Umklapp Switchbacks, and Isotopes play Pranks

  Upon his Formulae, Debye deserves warm Thanks.

  Electroconductivity depends

      On Free Electrons: in Germanium

      A touch of Arsenic liberates; in blends

      Like Nickel Oxide, Ohms thwart Current. From

      Pure Copper threads to wads of Chewing Gum

      Resistance varies hugely. Cold and Light

      As well as “doping” modify the sum

      Of Fermi levels, Ion scatter, site

  Proximity, and other Factors recondite.

  Textbooks and Heaven only are Ideal;

      Solidity is an imperfect state.

      Within the cracked and dislocated Real

      Nonstoichiometric Crystals dominate.

      Stray Atoms sully and precipitate;

      Strange holes, excitons, wander loose; because

      Of Dangling Bonds, a chemical Substrate

      Corrodes and catalyzes—surface Flaws

  Help Epitaxial Growth to fix adsorptive claws.

  White Sunlight, Newton saw, is not so pure;

      A Spectrum bared the Rainbow to his view.

      Each Element absorbs its signature:

      Go add a negative Electron to

      Potassium Chloride; it turns deep blue,

      As Chromium incarnadines Sapphire.

      Wavelengths, absorbed, are reëmitted through

      Fluorescence, Phosphorescence, and the higher

  Intensities that deadly Laser Beams require.

  Magnetic Atoms, such as Iron, keep

      Unpaired Electrons in their middle shell,

      Each one a spinning Magnet that would leap

      The Bloch Walls whereat antiparallel

      Domains converge. Diffuse Material

      Becomes Magnetic when another Field

      Aligns domains, like Seaweed in a swell.

      How nicely Microscopic Forces yield,

  In Units growing visible, the World we wield!

  IV. The Play of Memory

  ARGUMENT: The poet remembers and addresses those he has loved. Certain equations emerge from the welter, in which Walt Whitman swims. Arrows urge us on. Imagery from Canto II returns, enlarged. Sonnet to his father. Conception as climax of pointillism theme.

  memory of girl—worker for McCarthy—came to our door—zaftig—lent her my wife’s bathing suit—she pinned it—she was smaller than my wife—pinned it to fit—the house upstairs hushed—velvety sense of summer dust—she came down—we went to beach—talked politics lying on pebbles—her skin so pale—bra too big so the curve of her breast was revealed nearly to the nipple—“If he ever got any real power it’d ruin him for me”—pebbles hurt her young skin—we came home—she took shower—should have offered to wash her back—passing me on the way to the bathroom—skin—dawn-colored skin—eyes avoided—eye/I—I should have offered to wash her back—dressed in her own cool clothes, she handed me back the bathing suit, unpinned again—lovely skin of her arms untanned from a summer of campaigning by telephone—strange cool nerve taking a shower in married man’s wifeless home—the velvety summer dust waiting to be stirred, to be loved, by the fan—left her by South Green—“You’ll be all right”—“Oh sure”—girls hitch-hike now—a silk-skinned harem drifting through this conscience-stricken nation

  You who used to swing on the pavilion rafters

    �
�            showing me your underpants

  you with whom I came six times in one night

                           back from St. Thomas sunburned

  in my haste to return

      my skin peeling from my chest like steamed wallpaper

  my prick toward morning a battered miracle

                           of response

  and your good mouth wetter than any warm washrag

      and the walk afterwards toward the Park

                 past Doubleday’s packed with my books

  your fucked-out insides airy in your smile

                 and my manner a proud boy’s

                                          after some stunt

  did you know you were showing me your underpants?

                 did you know they said you laid

                           beneath the pines by the poorhouse dam?

  and in the Algonquin you

      in the persimmon nightie just down to your pussy

  and your air of distraction

      your profile harassed against the anonymous wall

                           that sudden stooping kiss

  a butterfly on my glans

  your head beat like a wing on the pillow

                           your whimper in the car

  you wiped blood from me with a Kleenex

                 by the big abandoned barn I never drive past

                                          without suffering

  you who outran me at fox-in-the-morning

                 whom I caught on the steps of the Fogg

                           the late games of Botticelli

  you in your bed Ann in hers

                 and the way we would walk to the window

                           overlooking the bird sanctuary

  our hands cool on each other’s genitals

                 have you forgotten?

  we always exuded better sex than we had

                 should I have offered to wash your back?

  you whose breast I soaped

                           and you my cock, and your cunt

  indivisible from the lather and huge as a purse and the mirror

                 giving us back ourselves

                           I said look because we were so beautiful and

  you said “we’re very ordinary”

                 and in the Caribbean the night you knelt

  to be taken from behind and we were entangled

                           with the mosquito netting

  and in the woods you let me hold your breasts

                           your lipstick all flecked

  the twigs dissolved in the sky above and I jerked off

                 driving home alone one-handed

  singing of you

                           you

      who demurely clenched

  your thighs and came and might have snapped my neck

  you who nursed me

  and fed me dreams of Manhattan in the cloudy living room

  and rubbed my sore chest with VapoRub

                 and betrayed me with my father

                           and laughed it off

  and betrayed me with your husband

                           and laughed it off

  and betrayed me beneath the pines

                           and never knew I thought I knew

  your underpants were ghostly gray and now

                 you wear them beneath your nightie

                                          and shy from my hug

                           pubescent

                           my daughter

  who when I twirled you and would not stop bit my leg

                 on West Thirteenth Street

  you who lowered your bathing suit in the dunes

                 your profile distracted against the sand

                           your hips a table

                 holding a single treat

  your breasts hors d’oeuvres

  you fed me tomatoes until I vomited

                 because you wanted me to grow and you

  said my writing was “a waste” about “terrible people”

                 and tried to call me down from the tree

                           for fear I’d fall

  and sat outside nodding while I did toidy

                 because I was afraid of ghosts

  and said to me “the great thing about us is

                 you’re sure of the things I’m unsure about and

                 I’m sure of the things you’re unsure about”

                           and you blamed yourself for my colds

                 and my skin and my gnawing panic to excel, you

                   walked with me on Penn Street

  I think of you and mirrors:

                 the one that hung in the front hall

                           murky and flyspecked and sideways

                 and the little round one with which you

                           conducted arcane examinations by the bedside

                             I lying on the bed and not daring

  look over the edge

                           I was a child and as an infant

  I had cracked this mirror in a tantrum

                           it had a crack

                           it was a crack

  “O I am wonderful!

                           I cannot tell how my ankles bend”

  “The smallest spro
ut shows

                           there is really no death”

  “And the pismire is equally perfect,

                           and a grain of sand,

                                          and the egg of the wren”

  “What is commonest, cheapest,

                           nearest, easiest, is Me”

  “his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it”

  Q.E.D.

  and you who sat

                           and so beautifully listened

  your gray hair limpid and tense like a forest pool

  “nor whence the cause of my faintest wish”

                           listened as I too effortlessly talked

                               after putting on my glasses

                           (you called them my “magic eyes”)

  shielding my genitals (remember

                           the Cocteau movie where he slashes an egg?

  not to mention poor Gloucester’s

                           “vile jelly”)

  talked but never explicit anent sex

                           “shy all the same”

  trying to wheedle your love

                           and after months and years

  you pronounced at last:

  I said, “how sad if true”

                 staggering out past the next patient