Collected Poems, 1953-1993
Page 15
We crowd in, crouching
in our summer denims and shades;
we settle, buckle, inhale. Oh
no, we are aloft! like that,
with just a buzz, and Shelter Island
flattens beneath us, between
the forks of Long Island—the twisty
legs of a dancing man, foreshortened,
his head lost in a tan mist.
The plane is too little!
It rides the waves of air
like a rowboat, of aluminum,
sluing, dropping into the troughs;
it gives out a shuddering Frug motion
of its shoulders—one, two!
I sit facing
the women I am flying to Boston with,
only one of them my wife
but all of them grimacing,
shutting their eyes with a sigh, resting
forehead on fingertips as in sick prayer.
Eyeballs roll, breasts bounce,
nostril-wings turn pale, and hair
comes sweatily undone;
my wife signals
with mirthless terrified lips that only
I can read, “I hate this.”
We tip! tip as a body,
skid above some transmitting antennae,
in Rhode Island it must be,
stuck in the Earth like knitting needles
into a ball of yarn: webbed
by wire stays, their eerie points rise.
We are high, but not so high
as not to feel high;
the Earth is too clear beneath us,
under glass that must not be touched,
each highway and house and the sites
of our graves but not yet,
not yet, no! Bright wind
toys with us,
tosses us,
our eyes all meet together
in one gel gaze of fear;
we are closer than in coitus;
the girl beside me,
young and Jewish, murmurs
she was only trying to get to Maine.
And now Boston
is its own blue street-map beneath us;
we can feel in the lurching the pilot
trying to pull in the city
like a great fish
by the throat of the runway.
What invisible castles
of turbulence rise
from the rooted, safe towers!
What ripples of ecstasy
leap
from the wind-whitened water!
The sea-wall, the side-streaming asphalt:
we are down, shouting out
defiance to our own momentum,
and trundle unbroken
back through the static gates
of life, and halt.
Had that been us, aloft?
Unbuckling, we trade
simpers and caresses of wry glance
in farewell, our terror
still moist on our clothes.
One by one
we crouch toward the open and drop,
dishevelled seatbelts left behind
us like an afterbirth.
Small-City People
They look shabby and crazy but not
in the campy big-city way of those
who really would kill you or really do
have a million dollars in the safe at home—
dudes of the absolute, swells of the dark.
Small-city people hardly expect to get
looked at, in their parkas
and their hunting caps and babushkas
and Dacron suits and outmoded
bouffants. No tourists come
to town to stare, no Japanese
or roving photographers.
The great empty mills, the wide main drag
with its boarded-up display windows,
the clouded skies that never quite rain
form a rock there is no out from under.
The girls look tough, the men look tired,
the old people dress up for a circus called off
because of soot, and snarl
with halfhearted fury, their hats
on backwards. The genetic pool
confluxes to cast up a rare beauty,
or a boy full of brains:
these can languish as in a desert
or eventually flourish, for not being
exploited too soon.
Small cities are kind, for
failure is everywhere, ungrudging;
not to mention free parking
and bowls of little pretzels in the ethnic bars.
Small-city people know what they know,
and what they know is what you learn
only living in a place
no one would choose but that chose you,
flatteringly.
L.A.
Lo, at its center one can find oneself
atop a paved and windy hill, with weeds
taller than men on one side and on the other
a freeway thundering a canyon’s depth below.
New buildings in all mirror-styles of blankness
are being assembled by darkish people while
the old-time business blocks that Harold Lloyd
teetered upon crouch low, in shade, turned slum.
The lone pedestrian stares, scooped at by space.
The palms are isolate, like psychopaths.
Conquistadorial fevers reminisce
in the adobe band of smog across the sky,
its bell of blue a promise that lured too many
to this waste of angels, of ever-widening gaps.
Plow Cemetery
The Plow: one of the three-mile inns that nicked
the roads that led to Reading and eased the way.
From this, Plow Hill, Plowville—a little herd
of sandstone, barn and house like cow and calf,
brown-sided—and, atop the hill, Plow Church,
a lumpy Lutheran pride whose bellied stones
Grandfather Hoyer as a young buck wheeled
in a clumsy barrow up the bending planks
that scaffolded around the rising spire.
He never did forget how those planks bent
beneath his weight conjoined with that of rock,
on high; he would tell of it in the tone
with which he recounted, to childish me,
dental pain he had endured. The drill,
the dentist warned him, would approach the nerve.
“And indeed it did approach it, very close!”
he said, with satisfaction, savoring
the epic taste his past had in his mouth.
What a view he must have commanded then,
the hickory handles tugging in his palms!—
the blue-brown hills, Reading a red-brick smudge
eleven winding miles away. The northward view
is spacious even from the cemetery,
Plow Cemetery, downhill from the church.
Here rest my maternal forebears underneath
erect or slightly tipping slender stones,
the earliest inscribed Hier ruhe, then
with arcs of sentimental English set
afloat above the still-Germanic names
in round relief the regional soft rock
releases to the air slow grain by grain
until the dates that framed a brisk existence
spent stamping amid animals and weather
are weathered into timelessness. Still sharp,
however, V-cut in imported granite,
stand shadowed forth John Hoyer’s name, his wife’s,
his daughter’s, and his son-in-law’s. All four
mar one slab as in life they filled one house,
my mother’s final year left blank. Alert
and busy aboveground, she’s bought a plot
for me—for me—in Plow Cemetery.
Our earth here is red
, like blood mixed with flour,
and slices easy; my cousin could dig
a grave in a morning with pick and shovel.
Now his son, also my cousin, mounts
a backhoe, and the shuddering machine
quick-piles what undertakers, for the service,
cloak in artificial turf as tinny
as Christmas. New mounds weep pink in the rain.
Live moles hump up the porous, grassy ground.
Traffic along Route 10 is quieter now
the Interstate exists in parallel,
forming a four-lane S in the middle view
that wasn’t there before, this side the smudge
red Reading makes between its blue-brown hills.
Except for this and ever-fresher graves,
all changes are organic here. At first,
I did resent my mother’s heavy gift,
her plot to bring me home; but slowly I
have come to think, Why not? Where else? I will
have been away for fifty years, perhaps,
but have forever to make my absence up.
My life in time will seal shut like a scar.
Spring Song
The fiddlehead ferns down by our pond
stand like the stems of violins
the worms are playing beneath the moss.
Last autumn’s leaves are pierced by shoots
that turn from sickly-pale to green.
All growth’s a slave, and rot is boss.
Accumulation
Busbound out of New York
through New Jersey,
one sees a mountain of trash,
a hill of inhuman dimension, with trucks
filing up its slopes like ants
and filing down empty, back to the city
for more.
Green plastic flutters from the mountain’s sides,
and flattened tin glints through the fill
that bulldozer treads have tamped
in swatches like enormous cloth.
One wonders, does it have a name,
this hill,
and has any top been set
to its garbagy growing?
Miles pass.
A cut by the side of the eight-
lane concrete highway
(where spun rubber and dripped oil
accumulate)
has exposed a great gesture of shale—
sediment hardened, coarse page by page,
then broken and swirled like running water,
then tipped and infolded by time,
and now cut open like a pattern of wood
when grain is splayed to make a butterfly.
Gray aeons stand exposed in this gesture,
this half-unfurling
on the way to a fuller unfurling
wherein our lives will have been of less moment
than grains of sand tumbled back and forth
by the solidifying tides.
Our past
lies at the end of this journey.
The days bringing each their detritus,
the years minute by minute have lifted
us free of our home,
that muck whose every particle—
the sidewalk cracks, the gravel alleys—
we hugged to our minds as matrix,
a cozy ooze.
What mountains we are,
all impalpable, and
perishable as tissue
crumpled into a ball and tossed upon the flames!
Lives, piled upon lives.
The faces outside the stopped bus window
have the doughy, stoic look of those
who grew up where I did,
ages ago.
Styles of Bloom
One sudden week (the roads still salty,
and only garlic green) forsythia
shouts out in butter-yellow monotone
from hedge to hedge and yard to yard,
a shout the ochre that precedes
maple leaves echoes overhead.
The dogwood’s blossoms float sideways
like stars in the dark that teatime brings
to the side of the tall brick house,
but almost vanish, melting flakes,
in morning’s bald spring sun.
Lilac: an explosion of ego
odorous creamily, each raceme
dewy till noon, then overnight
turned papery and faded—a souvenir.
In arches weighed by fragile suds,
the bridal wreath looks drenched.
White as virtue is white, plain
as truth is plain, the bushes can’t wait
to shed their fat bundles of sequins;
burdensome summer has come.
Natural Question
What rich joke does
the comically spherical peony bud—
like the big button on a gong striker—
hold, that black ants
crawl all over its tie-dyed tightness,
as if to tickle it forth?
Two Hoppers
Displayed in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
The smaller, older Girl at a Sewing Machine
shows her, pale profile obscured by her hair,
at work beneath an orange wall while sky
in pure blue pillars stands in a window bay.
She is alone and silent. The heroine
of Hotel Room, down to her slip, gazes
at a letter unfolded upon her naked knees.
Her eyes and face are in shadow. The day
rumbles with invisible traffic outside
this room where a wall is yellow, where
a bureau blocks our way with brown and luggage
stands in wait of its unpacking near
a green armchair: sun-wearied, Thirties plush.
We have been here before. The slanting light,
the woman alone and held amid the planes
of paint by some mysterious witness we’re
invited to breathe beside. The sewing girl,
the letter. Hopper is saying, I am Vermeer.
Two Sonnets Whose Titles Came to Me Simultaneously
The Dying Phobiac Takes His Fears with Him
Visions of flame fanned out from cigarette
or insecure connection to engulf
all carpets, floors, and sleepers in their beds
torment no longer the shadow in his tent
of sterile plastic, his oblivious lungs
laboring to burn last oxygen,
his fear of heights dissolving as he hangs
high above hissing nothingness.
The dread of narrow places fails to visit
his claustral tent, and hydrophobia,
amid the confluence of apparatus,
runs swirling down a drain. His nerves and veins
release their fibrous demons; earth and air
annul their old contract and set him free.
No More Access to Her Underpants
Her red dress stretched across the remembered small
of her dear bare back, bare for me no more,
that once so nicely bent itself in bed
to take my thrusts and then my stunned caress,
disclosing to my sated gaze a film
of down, of sheen, upon the dulcet skin—
her red dress stretched, I say, as carapace
upon her tasty flesh, she shows a face
of stone and turns to others at the party.
Her ass, its solemn cleft; her breasts, their tips
as tender in color as the milk-white bit
above the pubic curls; her eyes like pits
of warmth in the tousled light: all forfeit,
and locked in antarctic ice by this bitch.
Long Shadow
Crossing from a chore as the day
was packing it in, I saw my long shadow
walking before me, bearing in the tilt
of its thin head autumnal news,
news broadcast red from the woods to the west,
the goldleaf woods of shedding branch and days
drawing in like a purse being cinched,
the wintry houses sealed and welcoming.
Why do we love them, these last days of something
like summer, of freedom to move in few clothes,
though frost has flattened the morning grass?
They tell us we shall live forever. Stretched
like a rainbow across day’s end, my shadow
makes a path from my feet; I am my path.
Aerie
By following many a color-coded corridor
and taking an elevator up through the heart of the hospital
amid patients with the indignant stare of parrots
from within their cages of drugs,
one can arrive at the barbershop
which the great institution keeps as a sop to the less-than-mortal needs
of its captive populace, its serried ranks of pain.
Here, a marvel: a tiny room, high above Boston,
lined with Polaroid photographs of happy, shorn customers,
and the barber himself asleep in two chairs,
snoring with the tranquillity of a mustached machine.
Nor is that all: opposite me,
not ten feet away from where I stood wondering what happened next,
a seagull on the ledge outside the windows with so dazzling a view
worried at the same problem. With his beak
he rapped at the glass. Once. Twice. Hard.
We two framed the problem, two sentient bookends
with slumber’s fat volume between us.
The gull was accustomed to being fed stale breadcrusts, and the back
of my neck tickled unendurably, and the tops of my ears.
One man with an oblivious mustache between us held the answer