Collected Poems, 1953-1993

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Collected Poems, 1953-1993 Page 8

by John Updike


                           in that room of old Newsweeks

                           cured

  sing                                                oh

      “adulterous offers made, acceptances,

                           rejections with convex lips”

  “Copulation is no more rank

                           to me than death is”

  “And mossy scabs of the worm fence,

                           and heap’d stones, elder,

                                          mullen and poke-weed”

  and Mother those three-way mirrors

                           in Croll & Keek’s you

                               buying me my year’s jacket

  my Joseph’s coat

                           I saw my appalling profile

  and the bulge at the back of my head

                           as if my brain were pregnant

  “apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am”

                 I felt you saw me as a fountain spouting

  gray pool unruffled as you listened to me

                 telling cleverly how I loved the mail

  how on Philadelphia Avenue I would lie

                 in the hall with the flecked mirror

  waiting for Mr. Miller

                 to plop the mail through the slot

  letter-slots are vaginas

                 and stamps are semen swimming in the dark

                           engraved with DNA

                           “vile jelly”

                 and mailboxes wait capaciously to be fucked

                 throughout the town as I insomniac

                           you pet

  “To touch my person to some one else’s

                           is about as much as I can stand”

  “And I know I am solid and sound”

                           “The well-taken photographs—

  but your wife or friend close and solid in your arms?”

  “I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips”

  the bed of two beds in the cabin

                           whose levels did not meet

  the pine needles myriad about us

  and the double-decker bunk

                           scintillations of grass

                           conversation of distant water

  “The play of shine and shade

                           on the trees as the supple boughs wag”

                 What is pressing through?

                           take me

  “For every atom belonging to me,

                           as good belongs to you”

  rien

  “And nothing, not God,

                           is greater to one than one’s self is”

  à trente et six ans

  “Behavior lawless as snow-flakes”

      having waited out numerous dead nights with listening and with prayer

      having brought myself back from the dead with extravagant motions of the mind

  the slide

                 the puddle

                           the clack of box hockey

                                          the pavilion

  many years later you

                           sat on my lap at a class reunion

                 your fanny was girdled and hard

  a mother of four and I the father of four

                           your body metallic with sex

                 and I was so happy I stuttered

  perhaps Creation is a stutter of the Void

                           (I could revise the universe if I just knew math)

                 I think it may all turn out to be an illusion

                             the red shift merely travel fatigue

                 and distance losing its value like inflated currency

                           (physicists are always so comfortably talking

                           about infinite flashlight beams

                           and men on frictionless roller skates)

                 and the atom a wrinkle that imagines itself

                           and mass a factor of our own feebleness

  “And to die is different from what any one supposed,

                           and luckier”

  and you above me in the bunk

                 coming and crying, “Fuck, John!”

                           all our broken veins displayed

  the honey of your coming a hummingbird’s tongue

                           an involuntary coo

                                          you pulled

  j’ai pensé que

  having inwardly revolved numerous Protestant elements—screen doors, worn Bibles, rubber condoms that snap and hurt, playground grass that feet have beaten into a dusty fuzz, certain Popsicle pleasures and hours of real reading, dental pain, the sociable rasp of Sunday drinks, the roses dozing, the children bored—

                           where you were always present

  whose shampooed groin

                           held all I wished to know—

      (dance, words!)

  I deduced

      a late bloomer but an early comer

      my works both green and overripe

  (Proust spurred me to imitation, />
                           the cars a-swish on Riverside Drive,

  and Kierkegaard held back the dark waters, but)

                                          you pulled me up

                           I did fly

  joy pulled a laugh from me

      your hands, voice fluttered

  “Is that funny? Is it?”

      your nerves, voice tumbling

  a two-body circus

  “In vain the mastodon retreats

                                          beneath its own powder’d bones”

  these dreadful nights of dust

      of discrete and cretin thoughts

                 the mind searching for a virtue

      whereon to pillow and be oblivious

  “The palpable is in its place,

                           and the impalpable is in its place”

  rummaging amid old ecstasies

                           “your poetry began to go to pot

  when you took up fucking housewives”

      a hitching post for the heart

                           the devil rides in circles

  wherever we turn we find a curved steel wall

                                          of previous speculation

  and the water leaking from the main conduits

  and the gauges rising

                           the needles shivering like whipped bitches

  “The nearest gnat is an explanation,

                                          and a drop or motion of waves a key”

  “I effuse my flesh in eddies,

                                          and drift in lacy jags”

                                          try again

  FATHER, as old as you when I was four,

  I feel the restlessness of nearing death

  But lack your manic passion to endure,

  Your Stoic fortitude and Christian faith.

  Remember, at the blackboard, factoring?

  My life at midpoint seems a string of terms

  In which an error clamps the hidden spring

  Of resolution cancelling confirms.

  Topheavy Dutchmen sundered from the sea,

  Bewitched by money, believing in riddles

  Syrian vagrants propagated, we

  Incline to live by what the world belittles.

      God screws the lukewarm, slays the heart that faints,

      And saves His deepest silence for His saints.

  I am a paper bag

                           I am trying to punch my way out of

  “Out of the dimness opposite equals advance—

                           always substance and increase,

                                          always sex”

                                          let’t go

  “Always a knit of identity—

                           always distinction—

                                          always a breed of life”

  you who breathe beside me

                           on Sparks Street spilled your cool nudity

  across my eyes

                           above the summer dust

                 body of ivory I have marred, silk I have stretched

  you came against me kneeling

  we, too, had our violence

  “The butcher-boy puts off his killing clothes”

                 beside me like a sacrifice

  mildly curious as to the knife

                 we did conceive

                           in that square mile of wooded loneliness

  a twinned point began to ravel

                 you took me in

                           “the fish-eggs are in their place”

  most gracious

                                          merci

  V. Conclusion

  ARGUMENT: The poet strives to conclude, but his aesthetic of dots prevents him. His heroes are catalogued. World politics: a long view. Intelligent hedonistic advice. Chilmark Pond in August. He appears to accept, reluctantly, the advice.

      An easy Humanism plagues the land;

  I choose to take an otherworldly stand.

  The Archimedean point, however small,

  Will serve to lift the whole terrestrial Ball.

      Reality transcends itself within;

  Atomically all pundits must begin.

  The Truth arrives as if by telegraph:

  One dot; two dots; a silence; then a laugh.

  The rules inhere, and will not be imposed

  Ab alto, as most Liberals have supposed.

      Praise Kierkegaard, who splintered Hegel’s creed

  Upon the rock of Existential need;

  Praise Barth, who told how saving Faith can flow

  From Terror’s oscillating Yes and No;

  Praise Henry Green, who showed how lifetimes sift

  Through gestures, glances, silly talk, and drift.

  Praise Disney, for dissolving Goofy’s stride

  Into successive stills our eyes elide,

  And Jan Vermeer, for salting humble bread

  With dabs of light, as well as bricks and thread.

  Praise IBM, which boiled the brain’s rich stores

  Down to a few electric either/ors;

  Praise Pointillism, Calculus, and all

  That turn the world infinitesimal:

  The midget of the alphabet is I;

  The Infinite is littleness heaped high.

      All wrong, all wrong—throughout phenomena

  There gleams the sword of Universal Law;

  Elegant formulations sever Chance

  From Cause, and clumsy Matter learns to dance.

  A magnet subdivides into Domains

  Till ratios are reached where Stasis reigns.

  An insect’s structure limits it: an Ant

  Can never swell to be an Elephant.

  The Demiurge expands up to a rim

  Where calculable cold collapses Him.

      In human matters, too, Inductions act,

  Cleave circumstance, and bare the general Fact.

  Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud together show

  Oppression alternates with Overthrow.

  The proletarian Id combines its mass

  With Superego’s castellated cla
ss

  To pinch the bourgeois Ego out of power.

  The flag of Anarchy besports a flower;

  The telescopic cock and winking cunt

  Emblazon Urban Youth’s united front.

      The world boils over; Ho and Mao and Che

  Blood-red inaugurate a brighter day.

  Apocalypse is in; mad Eros drives

  The continents upon a shoal of lives.

  Awash with wealth, the fair Republic creaks,

  While boilermen below enlarge the leaks;

  What child is this, who gathers up still more

  Confetti from the tilting ballroom floor?

      Well, times are always desperate; our strange

  Earth greets the old catastrophe of Change.

  In bins of textbooks, holocausts lie stacked:

  “No life was spared when Genghis Khan attacked.”

  It little counts in History’s jaded eye

  Just how we copulate, or how we die.

  Six million Jews will join the Congolese

  King Leopold of Belgium cleared like trees,

  And Hiroshima’s epoch-making flash

  Will fade as did the hosts of Gilgamesh.

  The Judgment Day seems nigh to every age;

  But History yawns, and turns another page.

  Our lovely green-clad mother spreads her legs—

  Corrosive, hairy, rank—and, shameless, begs

  For Pestilence to fuck her if he can,

  For War to come, and come again, again.

      The meanwhile, let us live as islanders

  Who pluck what fruit the lowered branch proffers.

  Each passing moment masks a tender face;

  Nothing has had to be, but is by Grace.

  Attend to every sunset; greet the dawn

  That combs with spears of shade the glistening lawn.

  Enjoy the risen morning, upright noon,

  Declining day, and swollen leprous moon.

  Observe the trees, those clouds of breathing leaf;

  Their mass transcends the insect’s strident grief.

  The forest holds a thousand deaths, yet lives;

  The lawn accepts its coat of bone and gives

  Next spring a sweeter, graver tone of green.

  Gladly the maple seed spins down, between

  Two roots extends a tendril, grips beneath

  The soil, and suffers the mower’s spinning teeth.

 

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