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.