by John Updike
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh’s sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross
your ankles. Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.
On an Island
Islanded, my wife turned on the radio for news of home.
Instead she heard that near us a plane had crashed into the sea.
She told me after dinner she couldn’t face the flight home:
“What would I tell the children as we go down?”
I pooh-poohed her of course, said the odds were against it;
we made love with a desperate undercurrent, and fell asleep.
Then I awoke in the dark, and her fears appeared real.
The blinds were tilted black, my sunburn hurt, I was thirsty.
The tranquil ocean was yet enormous in its noise;
its hissing pursued me into each of the rooms.
My children were asleep, each small mouth darkly open;
“The radio said that a couple with a ten-year-old child
was found in the water, their bodies still clutching him.”
Moonlight, pale as a moth, chasmed the front room with shadow
and lay white on the water, white on the sliding,
the huge-shushing sliding from island to island—
sleepless, inanimate, bottomless, prayer-denying,
the soughing of matter cast off by the sun, blind sun
among suns, massed liquid of atoms that conceives
and consumes, that communes with itself only,
soulless and mighty; our planes, our islands sink:
a still moon plates the sealed spot where they were.
Sunday Rain
The window screen
is trying to do
its crossword puzzle
but appears to know
only vertical words.
Marching Through a Novel
Each morning my characters
greet me with misty faces
willing, though chilled, to muster
for another day’s progress
through the dazzling quicksand,
the marsh of blank paper.
With instant obedience
they change clothes and mannerisms,
drop a speech impediment,
develop a motive backwards
to suit the deed that’s done.
They extend skeletal arms
for the handcuffs of contrivance,
slog through docilely
maneuvers of coincidence,
look toward me hopefully,
their general and quartermaster,
for a clearer face, a bigger heart.
I do what I can for them,
but it is not enough.
Forward is my order,
though their bandages unravel
and some have no backbones
and some turn traitor
like heads with two faces
and some fall forgotten
in the trenchwork of loose threads,
poor puffs of cartoon flak.
Forward. Believe me, I love them
though I march them to finish them off.
Night Flight, over Ocean
Sweet fish tinned in the innocence of sleep,
we passengers together navigate
the firmament’s subconscious-colored deep,
streaming aligned toward a landlocked gate.
Schooled (in customs, in foreign coin), from zone
to zone we slip, each clutching at the prize
(a camera, a seduction) torn from some lone
shore lost in our brains like the backs of our eyes.
Nationless, nowhere, we dream the ocean
we motionless plummet above, fuel roaring,
and stewardesses padding, and stray yen
or shillings jingling in the sky of our snoring.
Incipient, we stir; we burgeon, blank
dim swimmers borne toward the touchdown spank.
Phenomena
The tide goes up and down in the creek.
I wake each morning to witness
the black-clay banks bared like senile gums
or the marsh eclipsed by a second sky.
My furnace went out.
The man who fixed it let me look
at the rejuvenated flame;
it was astonishing.
In a cave of asbestos a vivid elf
went dancy, dancy, dancy;
his fingers and feet were uncountable;
he was all hot eye
and merry, so merry he roared.
I handle stones.
They like, perhaps, being handled.
In the earth, at the shovel’s first strike,
they are mysterious—one might be
the tip of a China-sized cathedral.
But grubbing and cunning and cursing
bring them one by one to light,
disappointing when dried in the sun,
yet there, waterproof, fireproof,
dull veins disclosing a logic of form
and formation, but endurance the foremost quality.
I pile them; I alter their position in the universe.
By a tissue’s-width difference, it matters.
Their surfaces say something to my hands.
At night, lying down, I cannot breathe.
A tree inside me clenches and I sweat.
There are reasons, there is medicine;
the frost of death
has found a chink in me, is all.
I breathe easier and, breathing, sleep.
The tide sighs and rises in my sleep.
The flame is furious in its cell below.
Under the moon the cold stones wait.
Wind
If God has any voice it is the wind.
How women hate
this seeking of a vacuum;
it gets their edges up,
they cannot sleep, they think
of Boreas impregnating primeval Night,
of skirts rudely lifted in funhouses.
It is death made loud:
nowhereness bellowing,
now reedy along the copper eaves,
now ballooned to a manifold softness by a tree,
now scraping like flint on the surface of water,
making arrowhead wrinkles,
seeking somewhere to stop and be.
I lie here listening.
God is crying, for-
giiiive, demanding, for-
go-ooo, proclaiming, no-
wheerrre, and begging,
let go-oo-ohhh.
In His mouth my body tastes like stale milk.
Sunday
This day that would tell us what we are
if we would but listen
this day that is all gray sea
with no bell buoys to ring the changes
�
�� or turn us toward an appointed shore
into our boredom break
(a wedding: flecks of rice) flecks
on windowpanes where
a branchlet taps (a witch’s claw)
rust-red in rain now
O lovely failing of the light
that opens our pupils as sunlight never does
admitting
pale sun brown lawn blurred hills dull sky
this the necessary palette
bare bones of our time here
where all days are Sundays
disguised as work days
Touch of Spring
Thin wind winds off the water,
earth lies locked in dead snow,
but sun slants in under the yew hedge,
and the ground there is bare,
with some green blades there,
and my cat knows,
sharpening her claws on the flesh-pink wood.
The House Growing
April 1972
The old house grows, adding rooms of silence.
My grandfather coughing as if to uproot
burdock from his lungs,
my grandmother tapping a ragged path
from duty to duty, and now
my father, prancing and whinnying
to dramatize his battle for the dollar,
pricking himself with pens to start each day—
all silent. The house grows vast.
Its windows take bites of the sky
to feed its flight toward emptiness. The mantel
restates its curve of molding undismayed;
the hearthstones fatten on the vanished.
Cunts
(Upon Receiving a Solicitation for Membership in The Swingers Life Club)
The Venus de Milo didn’t have one, at least no pussy
that left its shadow in the marble, but Botticelli’s Venus,
though we cannot see it for her sea-anemone hand,
did, no doubt—an amber-furred dear mouth we would kiss
could we enter the Arcadian plane of the painting.
We must assimilate cunts to our creed of beauty.
September Morn held her thighs tight shut, and the dolls
we grew up undressing had nothing much there, not even MADE IN USA,
but the beauties we must learn to worship now all
have spread legs, splayed in bedspreaded motel beds,
and the snowflakes that burst forth are no two alike:
convolute snapdragons, portals and tears
and T-bones of hair, lips lurid as slices of salmon,
whirlpooly wisps more ticklish than skin, black brooms
a witch could ride cackling through the spatter of stars,
assholes a-stare like monocles tiny as dimes.
“I adore french culture and can really blow your mind”
“half of an ultra-sophisticated couple who prefers”
“love modelling with guys or gals and groovy parties”
“affectionate young housewife would like to meet”
“attractive broadminded funloving exotic tastes”
glory Gloria fellatio Felicia Connie your cunt
is Platonism upside down and really opens innocence
the last inch wider: I bite and I believe.
“Who put this mouse between my legs if not the Lord?
Who knocks to enter? Pigs of many stripes.
My cunt is me, it lathers and it loves
because its emptiness knows nothing else to do.
Here comes the stalwart cock, numb-headed hater,
assassin dragging behind him in a wrinkled sack
reproduction’s two stooges; refrigerated in blood,
the salt sperm thrashes to mix with my lipstick.
Nibble my nipples, you fish. My eyelashes tickle your glans
while my cunt like a shark gone senile yawns for its meal.
In my prison your head will lean against the wet red wall
and beg for a pardon and my blood will beat back No.
Here is my being, my jewel, simpler than a diamond,
finer-spun than Assyrian gold and the Book of Kells,
nobler than a theorem by Euler, more darling than a dimple
in a Steuben-glass Shirley Temple—flesh-flower, riddle
of more levels than a Pyramid passageway greased with balm.
Adore!”
A woman once upon a bed with me
to kiss my soul went down but in addition thrust
her ass up to my face and trembled all her length
so I knew something rare was being served; of course
the lapping was an ecstasy, but such an ecstasy
I prayed her distant face grow still so I could drink
the deeper of this widening self that only lacked
the prick of stars to be a firmament.
“Adore
this hole that bleeds with the moon so you can be born!”
Stretched like a howl between the feet pushing the stirrups
the poor slit yields up the bubble of a skull.
Glad tunnel of life, foretaste of resurrection,
slick applicant of appropriate friction
springing loose the critical honey from the delirious bee.
“You can meet these swinging gals” “you
can be in direct contact with these free-thinking modern people”
“if you are a polaroid photography enthusiast”
“you can rest assured your membership”
“you will discover the most exquisite, intimate”
“you” and the clitoris
like a little hurt girl turns its face to the corner.
Well, how were we to know that all you fat sweethearts
were as much the vagina’s victim as the poor satyr who sells
his mother’s IBM preferred to procure three whores
to have three ways at once—by land, by sea, by air?
“It was all a sacred mush of little pips to me.”
Now you tell us, tell us and tell us, of a magical doorbell
crocheted of swollen nerves beneath the fur
and all the pallid moon from scalp to toes decuple
not quite this molehill of a mountain is
the Mare of Disenchantment, the Plain of No Response.
Who could have known, when you are edible all over?
So edible we gobble even your political views
as they untwist in lamplight, like lemon peel from a knife.
Tell us O tell us why is it why
the hairs on the nape of your neck say cunt
and the swirl in your laugh says cunt
and your fingernails flanking your cigarette
and the red of the roof of your mouth and your mischief
and your passion for sleeping dogs and the way
you shape hamburgers naked-handed and the way
you squat to a crying child so the labia stain
your underpants cry cunt CUNT there is almost
CUNT too much of a CUNT good thing CUNT
“And howzabout
that split banana second when
(a clouded tear in its single eye,
stiff angel stuffed with ichor)
the semen in good faith leaps
(no shadows live on marble
like these that coat my helpless hands)
and your [unmentionable]
enhouses the cosmic stranger with a pinch?”
It is true, something vital ebbs from the process
&nb
sp; once the female is considered not a monstrous emissary
from the natural darkness but as possessing personhood
with its attendant rights, and wit.
I pulled a Tampax with my teeth and found it, darling,
not so bloody. I loved the death between your toes.
I gazed my sallow fill in motel light until
your cunt became my own, and I a girl. I lost
my hard-on quite; my consciousness stayed raised.
Your mouth became a fumble at my groin.
You would not let me buck away. I came,
and sobbed, triumphantly repentant. You said
with a smile of surprise it was warm,
warm on the back of your throat, hitting,
and not salty, but sweet.
We want to fill your cunt but are unmanned.
My sobbing felt like coming. Fond monster,
you swallowed my tears. We were plighted.
I was afraid. I adore your cunt. But why
is there only one? Is one enough? You cunt.
“I’m available … and so are hundreds of other
eager young girls who are ready to pose FOR YOU!”
Corinna, even your shit has something to be said for it
“avant garde of a new era of freedom” (Coronet)
“dawn of a cultural phenomenon” (Playboy)
“Dr. Gilbert Bartell, the renowned cultural anthropologist”
“page after page of totally rewarding sexual knowledge
that will be an invaluable asset in your search for greater
sexual understanding Only through complete understanding
can man hope” “Discretion is our middle name!”
Daphne, your fortune moistens. Stand. Bend down. Smile.
Apologies to Harvard
The Phi Beta Kappa Poem, 1973
Fair, square Harvard, crib of the pilgrim mind;
Home of the hermit scholar, who pursues
His variorums undistracted by