by John Updike
to both of our problems, but until he awoke
our gazes interlocked like the strengths of sumo wrestlers too caught up
in the effort of contention even to grunt.
And the sky swooped at the blue harbor, and the great green steel bridge
trembled with its traffic, and the machines
keeping alive the terrified and comatose beneath us hummed,
and the icons of old haircuts grinned in fading color,
and all was as the earth is, poised in space between contending wishes,
until a sharper rap from the intelligent gull, or else
a more pointed clearing of my throat, awoke
the Demiurge, who, with not
a further wink, sized us both up
and nimbly reached for his bag of old bread and his scissors.
The Code
Were there no rain there would be little noise,
no rustle on the roof that we confuse
with our own bloodbeat on the inner ear,
no braided gurgle in the gutter, no breathing
within the tree whose shelved and supple bulk
sifts the rain to a mist of small descents.
A visitor come from a cloudless planet
would stand amazed by the tumults of our water
and feel bereaved. Without the rain
the taxi wheels would pass like wind on sand
and all the splashing that excites our lovers
fresh from drinks would be a chastening calm;
the sky would be devoid of those enormous
witnesses who hang invisible
until our wish to see brings forth in focus
their sliding incandescent shapes.
Without the rain the very links of life
would drift still uncemented, a dream of dust.
Were there no rain the windowpanes
would never tick as if a spy outside,
who once conspired with us to ferret out
the secret code, the terms of full concord
with all that is and will be, were signalling
with a fingernail, I’m back, I’ve got the goods.
Island Sun
When the albums of this century’s intermingling
are assembled, I hope a page will show
two sunburned young honeymooners from Woonsocket,
Rhode Island, or an aged duo from Short Hills,
New Jersey (he in green pants, she in pink pleats),
gazing into the teeth of a black steel band
beating away and pealing in full flight
while the tropical moon leans lopsided overhead—
lopsided because its face is tilted differently
at these holiday latitudes, just as the air
yields different constellations, and summer
is not a season to be earned but always there:
outside the louvered door, the vertical sunlight
like a face of childhood, too good to be true.
The steel band wears mismatching tank tops
and speaks an English too liquid to understand.
Ghosts, we flit through a phantasmal summer
we have earned with dollar-shaped months of living
under clouds, in cold cities that are clouds.
We burn. Our noses have been painted red!
For the white translucent fish that flutter
away from our glass masks, the turquoise water
is paradise; but what of the mahogany man
entranced in his shack by the sea-grape tree?
His irises are like licked Lifesavers, so thin.
He smiles to see us rob him of the sun,
the golden pain he has anesthetized with rum.
Let’s play that he’s invisible. Six days
of sand like sugar, salt baths, and soft nights,
and you have learned to love your body again:
as brown as a stranger beheld in a mirror
whose back is gilded each time the planet turns.
Pain
Pain flattens the world—its bubbles
of bliss, its epiphanies, its upright
sticks of day-to-day business—
and shows us what seriousness is.
And shows us, too, how those around us
cannot get in; they cannot share
our being. Though men talk big
and challenge silence with laughter
and women bring their engendering smiles
and eyes of famous mercy,
these kind things slide away
like rain beating on a filthy window
when pain interposes.
What children’s pageant in gauze
filled the skull’s ballroom before
the caped dark stranger commanded, Freeze?
Life is worse than mere folly. We live
within a cage wherefrom escape
annihilates the captive; this, too,
pain leads us to consider anew.
Sleeping with You
One creature, not the mollusk
clamped around an orgasm, but
more loosely biune, we are linked
by tugs of the blanket and dreams whose disquiet
unsettles night’s oily depths, creating
those eddies of semi-wakefulness wherein
we acknowledge the other is there
as an arm is there, or an ancestor,
or any fact admitted yet not known.
What body is warm beside mine,
what corpse has been slain
on this soft battlefield where we wounded
lift our heads to cry for water
and to ask what forces prevailed?
It is you, not dead, but entrusted
at my side to the flight the chemical mind
must take or be crazed, leaving the body
behind like matériel in a trench.
The moon throws back sunlight into the woods,
but whiter, cleansed by its bounce
amid the cold stars, and the owls
fly their unthinkable paths to pluck
the velvet mole from her tunnel of leaves.
Dreaming rotates us, but fear
leads us to cling each to each as a spar
is clung to by the shipwrecked
till dawn brings sky-fire and rescue.
Your breathing, relaxed to its center,
scrapes like a stone on rough fiber,
over and over. Your skin, steeped
in its forgetting, sweats,
and flurries of footwork bring you near
the surface; but then your rapt lungs slip
with a sigh back into the healing,
that unpoliced swirling of spirit
whose sharing is a synonym for love.
Richmond
The shadows in his eye sockets like shades
upon a bearded hippie, Stonewall Jackson
stares down Monument Avenue toward where Lee
sits on an even higher horse. The cause
was lost but lingers in the faintly defiant
dignity of the pale-gray, Doric dollhouse
from whence Jeff Davis, conscientious Satan,
directed our second rebellion: a damn good try.
Brick graciousness prevails; across the James
wood houses hold black pensioners, and Poe’s
ghost haunts a set of scattered tombs, musei
exposing to Northern visitors his quills,
a model of his muddy city, and
an etching of, wry-necked in death, Virginia.
Gradations of Black
(Third Floor, Whitney Museum)
Ad Reinhardt’s black, in Abstract Painting 33,
seems atmosphere, leading the eye into
that darkness where, self-awakened, we
grope for the bathroom switch; no light comes on,
but slowly we perceive the corners of his square
black canvas to be squares just barely brown.
Frank Stella, in Die Fahne Hoch, aligns
right-angled stripes, dark gray, upon black ground
granular and lustrous, like the magnified
skin of a tattooed noble from Niger.
The black of Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red
holds grief; small lakes of sheen ebb away,
and the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed
by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag
that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.
While Clyfford Still, in his tall Untitled,
has laid on black in flakes of hardening tar,
a dragon’s scales so slick the viewer’s head
is mirrored, a murky helmet, as he stands
waiting for the flame-shaped passion to clear.
With broad housepainter’s brush and sweeping hands
Franz Kline, in Mahoning, barred radiance; now each
black gobby girder has yielded cracks to time
and lets leak through the dead white underneath.
The Furniture
To things we are ghosts, soft shapes
in their blindness that push and pull,
a warm touch tugging on a stuck drawer,
a face glancing by in a mirror
like a pebble skipped across a passive pond.
They hear rumors of us, things, in their own rumble,
and notice they are not where they were in the last century,
and feel, perhaps, themselves lifted by tides
of desire, of coveting; a certain moisture
mildews their surfaces, and they guess that we have passed.
They decay, of course, but so slowly; a vase
or mug survives a thousand uses. Our successive
ownerships slip from them, our fury
flickers at their reverie’s dimmest edge.
Their numb solidity sleeps through our screams.
Those photographs Victorian travellers
produced of tombs and temples still intact
contain, sometimes, a camel driver, or beggar; a brown
man in a gallabiya who moved his head, his life
a blur, a mere smear on the unflinching stone.
Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes
Ode to Rot
Der gute Herr Gott
said, “Let there be rot,”
and hence bacteria and fungi sprang
into existence to dissolve the knot
of carbohydrates photosynthesis
achieves in plants, in living plants.
Forget the parasitic smuts,
the rusts, the scabs, the blights, the wilts, the spots,
the mildews and aspergillosis—
the fungi gone amok,
attacking living tissue,
another instance, did Nature need another,
of predatory heartlessness.
Pure rot
is not
but benign; without it, how
would the forest digest its fallen timber,
the woodchuck corpse
vanish to leave behind a poem?
Dead matter else would hold the elements in thrall—
nitrogen, phosphorus, gallium
forever locked into the slot
where once they chemically triggered
the lion’s eye, the lily’s relaxing leaf.
All sparks dispersed
to that bad memory wherein the dream of life
fails of recall, let rot
proclaim its revolution:
the microscopic hyphae sink
their fangs of enzyme into the rosy peach
and turn its blush a yielding brown,
a mud of melting glucose:
once-staunch committees of chemicals now vote
to join the invading union,
the former monarch and constitution routed
by the riot of rhizoids,
the thalloid consensus.
The world, reshuffled, rolls to renewed fullness;
the oranges forgot
in the refrigerator “produce” drawer
turn green and oblate
and altogether other than edible,
yet loom as planets of bliss to the ants at the dump.
The banana peel tossed from the Volvo
blackens and rises as roadside chicory.
Bodies loathsome with their maggotry of ghosts resolve
to earth and air,
their fire spent and water there
as a minister must be, to pronounce the words.
All process is reprocessing;
give thanks for gradual ceaseless rot
gnawing gross Creation fine,
the lightning-forged organic conspiracy’s
merciful counterplot.
To Evaporation
What lifts the ocean into clouds
and dries our ink upon the page?
What gives the porous pavement, an hour after rain,
its sycamore-bark-splotchy steaminess
as molecules of H2O leap from the fading film
to find lodging in air’s loose lattices?
Evaporation,
that random breach of surface tension
by molecules “which happen to acquire exceptionally high
velocities.” Brave “happening”!—they fly
the minute distance across
and join another state of matter,
sacrificing, as they depart, heat
to the attraction of the molecules still water,
like a wedlocked beauty leaving behind
her jewels as she flees to a better lover.
Fidelity of process!
The housewife trusts
the sheets left out upon the line to dry,
and on Anguilla, where I spent a winter once,
the natives trusted
the great salt pond behind our home to yield
its annual harvest of sublimated salt.
All around us, water is rising
on invisible wings
to fall as dew, as rain, as sleet, as snow,
while overhead the nested giant domes
of atmospheric layers roll
and in their revolutions lift
humidity north and south
from the equator toward the frigid, arid poles,
where latitudes become mere circles.
Molecular to global, the kinetic order rules
unseen and omnipresent,
merciful and laughingly subtle like the breathing of naiads.
The ladies of Anguilla, lilting in their kerchiefs,
with pale-nailed black hands would spread
their festive damp wash
on the bushes around their shacks to dry,
the scents of skin and soap and oleander confounded
in this process as elemental
as the rain showers that would fall so quickly that
sun, caught shining,
made of each hurtling drop a spear of fire.
As a child I—
I,
the tiniest of nominatives, the atom that “happens”—
watched the blood dry on my wounds
and observed how a cup of spilled water
would certainly vanish
with no more cause than time,
leaving behind as stain
only the dust its tumble of molecules had gathered
or, if the cup had been sweet, the sugar
left faintly behind as precipitate.
Trivial matters!
But I exulted
in the sensation of delivery,
of vapor carrying skyward, just as gravity
hurled water, twisting, down the sink and scummed gutter;
these processes
transpiring without my guilt or willing
were pure pleasure:
all blame and duty and self-exertion,
evaporation
as delicate as mist,
more mighty than a waterfall.
Ode to Growth
Like an awl-tip breaking ice
the green shoot cleaves the gray spring air.
The young boy finds his school-pants cuffs
too high above his shoes when fall returns.
The pencilled marks on the bathroom doorframe climb.
The cells rereplicate,
somatotropin
comes bubbling down the bloodstream, a busybody
with instructions for the fingernails,
another set for the epiderm,
a third for the budding mammae,
all hot from the hypothalamus
and admitting of no editing,
lest dwarves result, or cretins, or neoplasms.
In spineless crustaceans
the machinery of molting is controlled
by phasing signals from nervous ganglia
located, often, in the eyestalks, where these exist.
In plants
a family of auxins,
shuttling up and down,
inhibit or encourage cell elongation
as eventual shapeliness demands,
and veto lateral budding while apical growth proceeds,
and even determine abscission—
the falling of leaves.
For death and surrender
are part of growth’s package.
“It’s just the eye’s way of growing,”
my ophthalmologist euphemizes
of the lens’s slow stiffening
and irreversible presbyopia.
Skin goes keratinous,
the epiphyses of the long bones unite with the shaft,
and “linear growth comes to an end.”
Comes to an end!
Our aging’s a mystery, as is our sleep:
the protein codes, transactions more elaborate
than the accounts of a thousand dummy trusts,
have their smuggling secrets still.
The meanwhile, let us die
rejoicing,
as around us uncountable husks