by John Updike
The sea’s pale green seems evil.
The shells seem pellets, the meals
forced doses, Bahamian cooking
as bitterly obsequious as
the resentful wraiths that serve it.
Vertigo is reading at the beach
words a thousand miles away,
is tasting Coppertone again,
is closing one’s eyes once more against
the mismatch of poverty and beauty.
The beautiful sea is pale, it is
sick, its fish sting like regrets.
Perhaps it was the conch salad, or is
the something too rich in Creation.
You Who Swim
You who in water move as one
long rounded to this use, a stone
that gently fails to sink, you tint
as wind tints air this element.
Androgynous, your round face shorn
by bathing cap, you feign to drown.
“The dead man’s float,” you say and smile,
your lashes wet and animal.
Soft teacher, otter, other, moth
to the sunk sun, you play at death;
the surface glitter slips, and air
slices your throat with shards of glare.
At night you rise beside me, face
wet with the dark, your dim lips spaced
to hold the bubble love. Your eyes
are shut. We swim our dead men’s lives.
Sunday in Boston
The fags and their gay dogs are patrolling
the Garden; on Boylston the blacks,
hollow-backed, demonstrate styles of meander
in this hearttown theirs by default.
The winos on Commonwealth, wiser than wisdom,
blink eyes pale as bottle bottoms;
sun-pickled and lined fine as maps, their faces
beam from within this particular nowhere.
Pistachio George sits high. July beds bloom.
The Ritz’s doorman sports his worn maroon.
Above us like a nearer sky great Pei’s
glass sheet, cerulean, clasps clouds to its chest.
And, unapologetic in their pallor, girls
in jigging halters and sordid shorts parade
festive colorless flesh regathered from
its Saturday spill, the bearded lover split.
Brick Boston, city of students and drunks!
In Godless, doggy righteousness we bask.
The suburbs send us their stifling cars, and we
in turn give back the hollow sound of bells.
Raining in Magens Bay
The sky, paid to be blue,
yields at most patches of silver
and then, salted with sun, rain
(we can’t quite believe it)
so heavy the branches of sea-grape
afford no shelter. Run!
The towel, the book, the sunglasses:
save them, and save our fair skins
from the pelting,
bitter and chill, that dyes the arms
of the bay the color of smoke
and erases Outer Brass Island.
Wait, there is a way,
a way not to panic. The picnic
by the cabañTa has not stopped cackling;
its voices ricochet louder,
wind-whipped, from lips
an inch above the skin of water.
They have gone swimming,
and the lovers up the beach
persist in embracing submerged.
Come, the calm green is alive
with drops, and soft; one’s shadow
no longer lurks below like a shark.
The way to get out of the rain
is to get into the water.
The way for rain to fall
is mixed with sun, like salt.
The way for man to be is mixed
with sun and salt and sea and shadow.
Leaving Church Early
What, I wonder, were we hurrying to,
my grandfather, father, mother, myself,
as the last anthem was commencing? Were
we avoiding the minister’s hand at the door?
My mother shied, in summer, from being touched.
Or was it my father, who thought life was grim
and music superfluous, dodging the final hymn?
Or could, I wonder now, the impetus
that moved the small procession of us up
and out, apologizing, from the pew
have come from the ancient man, mysterious
to me as an ancestor turned to ash,
who held some thunders though, a tavern bully
in his time and still a steadfast disliker
of other people’s voices? Whatever the cause,
we moved, bump and whisper, down
the side aisle, while the organ mulled Stanza One,
a quadruped herd, branded as kin, I
the last of the line, adolescent, a-blush,
out through the odor of piety and the scents
(some purchased at Kresge’s, some given by God)
my buxom country cousins harbored in
their cotton dresses, to the sighing exit
which opened on the upbeat as the choir
in love of the Lord and imperfect unison
flung its best self over the balcony.
The lifted voices drifted behind us, spurned.
Loose pebbles acknowledged our shoes.
Our Buick, black and ’36, was parked
in a hickory picnic grove where a quoit stake,
invisible as Satan in the grass
of Eden, might spear a tire “of the unwary,”
as my grandfather put it. The interior
of the auto hit us with an hour’s heat.
We got in gear, our good clothes mussed,
and, exonerated for the week, bounced home.
Home: the fields, red, with acid rows of corn
and sandstone corner-markers. The undertone
of insect-hum, the birds too full to sing.
A Sunday haze in Pennsylvania.
My unchurched grandma stoops in the foursquare house,
as we prattle in the door, like a burglar
trapped in mid-theft, half-paralyzed, her frame
hung in my memory between two tasks,
about to do something, but what? A cream
jug droops in her hand, empty or it would spill—
or is it a potato-masher, or
a wooden spoon? White-haired, stricken, she stares
and to welcome us back searches for a word.
What had we hurried back to? There could be
no work: a mock-Genesiac rest reigned
in the bewitched farmland. Our strawberries
rotted in their rows unrummaged-for;
no snorting, distant tractor underlined
the rasp of my father’s pencil as he marked,
with his disappointed grimace, math exams.
The dogs smelled boredom, and collapsed their bones.
The colors of the Sunday comics jangled,
printed off-key, and my grandfather’s feet,
settling in for a soliloquy, kicked up fuzz.
My father stood to promenade his wounds.
I lay down, feeling weak, and pulled a book
across my eyes the way a Bedouin
in waiting out a sandstorm drapes his sheet.
The women clucked and quarrelled with the pots
over who was cook. A foody fog
arose. The dogs rose with it, and the day
looked as if it might survive to noon.
What is wrong with this picture? What is strange?
Each figure tends its own direction, keeps
the axis of its own theatric chore,
scattered, anarchic, kept home by poverty,
with nowhere else to go. A modern tribe
would be aligned
around “the television,”
the family show-off, the sparkling prodigy
that needs a constant watching lest it sulk and cease
to lift into celebrity the arc
of interlocked anonymous: we were not such.
We spurned all entertainment but our misery.
“Jesus,” my father cried, “I hate the world!”
“Mother,” my mother called, “you’re in the way!”
“Be grateful for your blessings,” Grandpa advised,
shifting his feet and showing a hairless shin.
“Ach,” Grandma brought out in self-defense,
the syllable a gem of German indignation,
its guttural edge unchipped, while I,
still in the sabbath shirt and necktie, bent
my hopes into the latest Nero Wolfe, imagining
myself orchidaceous in Manhattan and
mentally constructing, not Whodunit,
but How to Get Out of Here: my dastardly plot.
The rug, my closest friend, ignored
my jabbing elbows. Geraniums raged on the sills.
The furniture formed a living dismal history
of heritage, abandonment, and purchase,
pretension, compromise, and wear: the books
tried to believe in a better world but failed.
An incongruous painting told of dunes
and a dab of unattainable sea.
Outside, a lone car passed; the mailbox held
no hope of visitation—no peacock magazine,
wrapped in brown paper, rife with ads, would come
to unremind us of what we were, poor souls
who had left church early to be about
the business of soaking ourselves in Time,
dunking doughnuts let fall into the cup.
Hot Pennsylvania, hazy, hugged the walls
of sandstone two feet thick as other cells
enfold the carcinomic hyperactive one; we were
diseased, unneighborly, five times alone, and quick.
What was our hurry? Sunday afternoon
beckoned with radioed ball games, soft ice cream,
furtive trips in the creaking auto, naps
for the elderly, daydreams for the young,
while blind growth steamed to the horizon of hills,
the Lord ignoring His own injunction to rest.
My book grew faint. My grandfather lifted his head,
attentive to what he alone divined;
his glasses caught the light, his nose
reclaimed an ancient handsomeness.
His wife, wordless, came and sat beside.
My father swished his hips within his bath of humor
and called his latest recognition to the other
co-captain of dissatisfaction; my mother
came to the living-room doorway, and told us off.
She is the captive, we are the clumsy princes
who jammed the casket with our bitter kisses.
She is our prison, the rampart of her forehead
a fiery red. We shake our chains, amused.
Her myths and our enactment tickle better
the underside of facts than Bible fables;
here to this house, this mythy then, we hurried,
dodging the benediction to bestow,
ourselves upon ourselves, the final word.
Envoi
My mother, only you remember with me—
you alone still populate that room.
You write me cheerful letters mentioning Cher
and Barbara Walters as if they were there with you,
realer than the dead. We left church early
why? To talk? To love? To eat? To be free
of the world’s crass consensus? Now you read,
you write me, Aristotle and Tolstoy
and claim to be amazed, how much they knew.
I send you this poem as my piece of the puzzle.
We know the truth of it, the past, how strange,
how many corners wouldn’t bear describing,
the angles of it, how busy we were forgiving—
we had no time, of course, we have no time
to do all the forgiving that we must do.
Another Dog’s Death
For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave
in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,
such expeditions were rare, and the dog,
spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.
· · ·
She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.
We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the field.
The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;
I carved her a safe place while she protected me.
I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;
she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up earth.
Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,
but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.
They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he
injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;
we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.
In the wheelbarrow up to the hole, her fur took the sun.
Dream and Reality
I am in a room.
Everything is white, the walls
are white, there are no windows.
There is a door.
I open it, and neatly
as a shadow a coating of snow
falls door-shaped into the room.
I think, Snow, not surprised
it is inside and outside both,
as with an igloo.
I move through the open door
into the next room; this, too, is
white and windowless and perfect.
I think, There must be more than this.
This is a dream.
· · ·
My daughter finds bones
on the marshes. I examine them:
deer heads with sockets round as
cartoon eyes, slender jaws broken.
There are tiny things, too,
no bigger than a pulled tooth,
and just that white—burrs of bone,
intricate, with pricking flanges
where miniature muscles attached.
She says, Those are mouse jaws.
Indeed: I see teeth like rows
of the letter “i” in diamond type.
She tells me, I find them
in the cough balls of owls.
And this is reality.
Dutch Cleanser
My grandmother used it, Dutch Cleanser,
in the dark Shillington house,
in the kitchen darkened by the grape arbor,
and I was frightened of the lady on the can.
Why was she carrying a stick?
Why couldn’t we see her face?
Now I, an aging modern man,
estranged, alone, and medium gray,
I tip Dutch Cleanser onto a sponge,
here in this narrow bathroom,
where the ventilator fan has to rumble
when all I want to switch on is light.
· · ·
The years have spilled since Shillington,
the daily Eagles stacked in the closet
have burst the roof! Look up,
Deutsche Grossmutter—I am here!
You have changed, I have changed,
Dutch Cleanser has changed not at all.
The lady is still upholding the stick
chasing dirt, and her face
is so an
gry we dare not see it.
The dirt she is chasing is ahead of her,
around the can, like a minute hand
the hour hand pushes around.
Rats
A house has rotten places: cellar walls
where mud replaces mortar every rain,
the loosening board that begged for nails in vain,
the sawed-off stairs, and smelly nether halls
the rare repairman never looks behind
and if he did would, disconcerted, find
long spaces, lathed, where dead air grows a scum
of fuzz, and rubble deepens crumb by crumb.
Here they live. Hear them on their boulevards
beneath the attic flooring tread the shards
of panes from long ago, and Fiberglas
fallen to dust, and droppings, and dry clues
to crimes no longer news. The villains pass
with scrabbly traffic-noise; their avenues
run parallel to chambers of our own
where we pretend we’re clean and all alone.
The Melancholy of Storm Windows
We touch them at the raw turns
of the year—November,
with its whipped trees and cellar sky,
and April, whose air
promises more than the earth
seems willing to yield.
They are unwieldy, of wood, and their panes
monotonously ask the same question—Am I clean?
No, the answer is.
They fit less well, we feel, each year.
But the weather lowers,
watery and wider than a tide,
and if a seam or leak of light shows, well,
nothing’s perfect under Heaven.
Our mortal shell,
they used to call the body.
In need of paint, they heave
up from the cellar and back down again
like a species of cloud,
shedding a snow of flakes and grime.
They rotate heavy in our hands; the screwdriver
stiffly twirls; the Windex swipes evaporate
in air ominous of coming worse
or, at winter’s end, of Easter entombment,