Collected Poems, 1953-1993

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Collected Poems, 1953-1993 Page 17

by John Updike


  are split and shed by the jungle push of green

  and the swell of fresh bone

  echoes the engendering tumescence.

  Time’s line being a one-way street,

  we must walk the tight rope or fly.

  Growth is life’s lockstep;

  we shall never again sit next to Peggy Lutz

  in third grade, her breasts

  a mere glint on the curve of her tomboy vigor

  and our whiskery doom

  within us of less dimension than a freckle.

  To Fragmentation

  Motion, motion.

  Within the body cells

  each nucleus rotates widdershins

  and mitochondria hustle round and round.

  All things move, even the continents and Polaris,

  those epitomes of stability.

  Sun and gravity

  push and pull.

  Moisture seeps, and night-frost splits.

  Glaciers rub a sandpaper of boulders

  down U-shaped valleys,

  and tectonic uplift

  in slow motion shatters the friable shelves of shale.

  Carbon dioxide is washed from the air

  or the roots of plants:

  the resultant carbonic acid

  pries loose the glittering grip of flint upon flint.

  Dampness evaporates

  rapidly from the skin of stone but lingers within,

  transforming granite into clay,

  which swells,

  spalling loose thin flakes like bark from a rotting tree.

  At the cliff’s base builds a slope of scree.

  At the ocean’s edge

  the waves in a Shakespearean tumult pummel with pebbles

  gripped in the fingers of their froth

  the shore;

  their millennial frenzy carves

  the dizzying gills

  and the stacks of stratified sediment

  we marvelled at, visiting Caithness.

  Remember, Martha?

  The grass-bearing, cow-feeding turf

  worn by those cliffs like a wind-lifted cape?

  Breaking, breaking,

  eaten, eaten,

  the mother rock yields her sands and silts,

  each grain of sand a monolith,

  each Matterhorn a heap of potential till.

  “The eternal mountains were scattered,

  the everlasting hills sank low.”

  The pompous rivers conduct their symphonies of erosion,

  and the mites in the subterrene dark

  mince finer their mineral meal.

  No, nothing is “too, too solid.”

  All things mundane must slide and weather.

  Heat and cold saw back and forth,

  and wet and dry;

  wind and water and ice and life

  have powdered our planet’s obdurate skin.

  But

  had not Earth’s aboriginal rock

  submitted to fragmentation’s lash,

  no regolith would have seasoned into soil,

  and the imaginary

  would never have taken root.

  Ode to Entropy

  Some day—can it be believed?—

  in the year 1070 or so,

  single electrons and positrons will orbit

  one another to form atoms bonded

  across regions of space

  greater than the present observable universe.

  “Heat death” will prevail.

  The stars long since will have burnt their hydrogen

  and turned to iron.

  Even the black holes will have decayed.

  Entropy!

  thou seal on extinction,

  thou curse on Creation.

  All change distributes energy,

  spills what cannot be gathered again.

  Each meal, each smile,

  each foot-race to the well by Jack and Jill

  scatters treasure, lets fall

  gold straws once woven from the resurgent dust.

  The night sky blazes with Byzantine waste.

  The bird’s throbbling is expenditure,

  and the tide’s soughing,

  and the tungsten filament illumining my hand.

  A ramp has been built into probability

  the universe cannot reascend.

  For our small span,

  the sun has fuel, the moon lifts the lulling sea,

  the highway shudders with stolen hydrocarbons.

  How measure these inequalities

  so massive and luminous

  in which one’s self is secreted

  like a jewel mislaid in mountains of garbage?

  Or like that bright infant Prince William,

  with his whorled nostrils and blank blue eyes,

  to whom empire and all its estates are already assigned.

  Does its final diffusion

  deny a miracle?

  Those future voids are scrims of the mind,

  as academic as blackboards.

  Did you know

  that four-fifths of the body’s intake goes merely

  to maintain our temperature of 98.6°?

  Or that Karl Barth, addressing prisoners, said

  the prayer for stronger faith is the one prayer

  that has never been denied?

  Death exists nowhere in nature, not

  in the minds of birds or the consciousness of flowers,

  not even in the numb brain of the wildebeest calf

  gone under to the grinning crocodile, nowhere

  in the mesh of woods or the tons of sea, only

  in our forebodings, our formulae.

  There is still enough energy in one overlooked star

  to power all the heavens madmen have ever proposed.

  To Crystallization

  The atom is a crystal

  of a sort; the lattices

  its interlockings form

  lend a planarity most pleasing

  to the abysses and cliffs, much magnified,

  of (for example) salt and tourmaline.

  Arise, order,

  out of necessity!

  Mock, you crystals,

  with all appearance of chiselled design,

  our hope of a Grand Artificer.

  The graceful layered frost-ferns the midnight elves

  left on the Shillington windowpanes

  for my morning astonishment were misinformation,

  as is

  the glittering explosion of tinted quartz

  discovered in earth like a heart of thought,

  buried evidence

  crying out for release to the workman’s pick,

  tangled hexagonal hair of an angel interred

  where it fell, our earth still molten, in the Fall.

  When, on those anvils at the center of stars

  and those even more furious anvils

  of the exploding supernovae,

  the heavy elements were beaten together

  to the atomic number of 94

  and the crystalline metals with their easily lost

  valence electrons arose,

  their malleability and conductivity

  made Assyrian goldsmithing possible,

  and most of New York City.

  Stendhal thought that love

  should be likened to a bare branch crystallized

  by a winter in the depths of the salt mines of Hallein:

  “the tiniest twigs, no bigger

  than a tomtit’s claws, are spangled with an infinite

  number of shimmering, glistening crystals.”

  Our mathematics and hope of Heaven

  alike look to crystals;

  their arousal, the mounting

  of molecules one upon the other, suggests

  that inner freezing whereby inchoate

  innocence compresses a phrase of art.

  Music rises in its fixed lattices

  and its cries of aspira
tion chill our veins

  with snowflakes of blood;

  the mind grapples up an inflexible relation

  and the stiff spheres chime—

  themselves, the ancients thought, all crystal.

  In this seethe of hot muck there is something else:

  the ribs of an old dory emerge from the sand,

  the words set their bevelled bite on the page,

  the loved one’s pale iris flares in silent assent,

  the electrons leap, leaving positive ions

  as the fish-scales of moonlight show us water’s perfect dance.

  Steno’s Law, crystallography’s first:

  the form of crystal admits no angle but its own.

  Ode to Healing

  A scab

  is a beautiful thing—a coin

  the body has minted, with an invisible motto:

  In God We Trust.

  Our body loves us,

  and, even while the spirit drifts dreaming,

  works at mending the damage that we do.

  That heedless Ahab, the conscious mind,

  drives our thin-skinned hull onto the shoals;

  a million brilliant microscopic engineers below

  shore up the wound with platelets,

  lay down the hardening threads of fibrin,

  send in the lymphocytes, and supervise

  those cheery swabs, the macrophages, in their clean-up.

  Break a bone, and fibroblasts

  knit tight the blastema in days.

  Catch a cold, and the fervid armies

  swarm to blanket our discomfort in sleep.

  For all these centuries of fairy tales poor men

  butchered each other in the name of cure,

  not knowing an iota of what the mute brute body knew.

  Logically, benevolence surrounds us.

  In fire or ice, we would not be born.

  Soft tissue bespeaks a soft world.

  Yet, can it have been malevolence

  that taught the skinned knuckle to heal

  or set the white scar on my daughter’s glossy temple?

  Besieged, we are supplied,

  from caustic saliva down,

  with armaments against the hordes,

  “the slings and arrows,” “the thousand natural shocks.”

  Not quite benevolence.

  Not quite its opposite.

  A perfectionism, it would almost seem,

  stuck with matter’s recalcitrance,

  as, in the realm of our behavior, with

  the paradox of freedom.

  Well, can we add a cubit to our height

  or heal ourselves by taking conscious thought?

  The spirit sits as a bird singing

  high in a grove of hollow trees whose red sap rises

  saturated with advice.

  To the child as he scuffles up an existence

  out of pebbles and twigs

  and finds that even paper cuts, and games can hurt,

  the small assemblage of a scab

  is like the slow days’ blurring of a deep disgrace,

  the sinking of a scolding into time.

  Time heals: not so;

  time is the context of forgetting and of remedy

  as aseptic phlegms

  lave the scorched membranes,

  the capillaries and insulted nerves.

  Close your eyes, knowing

  that healing is a work of darkness,

  that darkness is a gown of healing,

  that the vessel of our tremulous venture is lifted

  by tides we do not control.

  Faith is health’s requisite:

  we have this fact in lieu

  of better proof of le bon Dieu.

  March-April 1984

  Switzerland

  The orderly hand of man, hollowing

  tunnels and culverts, and threading rails

  across the map, and edging lakes, and laying

  interlocking tiles, has busied itself

  beneath the baleful Alpine stare

  of giant limestone layers hurled

  kilometers high into a world of snow—

  spiked clouds like a negated, broken sun.

  The stationmaster weeds his window box

  while over his shoulder the Eiger leans,

  too out of scale to lend advice. Here time

  is tamed by many tiny, ticking hands,

  and into silence falls the avalanche

  when the desk clerk forgets what language he’s speaking.

  Munich

  Here Hitler had his first success, disguised

  as failure. No plaque commemorates the Putsch

  or marks the hall where Chamberlain begged peace.

  Broad avenues and gazing monuments

  devoted to the Wittelsbachs and feats

  of old Bavarian arms command perspectives

  askew with frolicsome façades that mask

  riots of silvered rococo within.

  The bombs fell lightly here; a burnt-out church

  alone eludes the grasp of restoration.

  The beer halls smile, the traffic purrs, the young

  look innocent as sleeping animals.

  The vegetables are stacked like giant jewels

  in markets far removed from earth and blood.

  A Pear like a Potato

  Was it worms, having once bitten

  and then wilted away, or some canker

  known only to nurserymen? Whatever the reason, the pear

  fresh-plucked from my tree where it leans and struggles

  in the garden’s dappled corner

  is a heavy dwarf-head whose faceless face

  puckers and frowns around a multitude of old problems,

  its furrowed brow and evil squint and pursy mouth

  and pinched-in reptilian ear rescrambling,

  feature for feature, as I rotate

  this weight in my hand, this

  friendly knot of fruit-flesh, this

  pear like a potato.

  It wanted to grow, and did. It

  had a shape in mind, and if that shape

  in transit was waylaid by scars, by cells that turned

  too obdurate to join in with the general swelling

  and stalled instead, leaving dents between bulges

  like quilt-buttons, well, it kept on going

  and rests here in my hand ripe and ready,

  sun-warmed, to be eaten.

  Not bad. The teeth must pick their spots,

  between the potato-eyes. Sun’s warmth

  mingles sweetly with mine. Our brains

  are like this, no doubt, having swelled

  in spite of traumas, of languages

  we never learned, of grudges never set aside but grown around,

  like parasites that died but forever snapped

  the rhythm whereby cell links up to cell

  to make up beauty’s smoothness. Plato’s

  was a manner of speaking, perfection’s

  an idea there at the start, that

  the body and soul make a run at

  and, falling short, fill the world instead

  with the lopsided jumble that is: the congregation

  of the failed yet not uncheerful,

  like this poor pear

  that never would do at the supermarket,

  bubble-wrapped with symmetrical brothers, but

  has given me a snack,

  a nibble here and there, on my own land,

  here in the sun of a somewhat cloudy morning.

  Airport

  Palace of unreality, where the place

  we have just been to fades from the mind—shrinking

  to some scribbled accounts, postcards unmailed,

  and faces held dear, let go, and now sinking

  like coins in clouded, forgetful water—

  and the place we are heading toward hangs forestalled

  in the stretched and colorless cor
ridors,

  on the travelling belts, and with the false-

  smiling announcements that melt in mid-air:

  to think, this may be our last reality.

  Dim alcoves hold bars well-patronized but where

  there is not that seethe of mating, each he and she

  focused instead on a single survival.

  To pass through, without panic: that is all.

  From Above

  These pink-white acres of overcast

  have rivers and cliffs, seen from above.

  A heavenly sight, such vapor grazed

  by sunset-red; interstices

  show baby-blue, a shadow of

  the hazed and hidden earth.

  Dead-level with our eyes, a horizon

  of buff, a salmon line, defines

  a smooth electric firmament—

  a second sky we fliers see.

  Leonardo, Bellini, and others arisen

  as Christendom evaporated

  first caught that tint, that cold blue-green

  just there, where illusion ends.

  Oxford, Thirty Years After

  The emperors’ heads around the Sheldonian

  have been replaced: grotesque great noggins

  Roman in style, modern in mocking manner,

  sculptured lips ajar, drill-holed eyes a-goggle.

  Well, it kept some Council artist busy

  for a year or two, and off the dole.

  The Fifties heads were rotten, eyeless, blackened,

  the limestone leprous yet imperial—

  the mind supplied what had been lost to time.

  Elsewhere, little change; the long-revered

  resists where the new succumbs. Our cafeteria

  is gone, but cast-iron gates and hallowed archways

  still say keep out, not yours, all mine beneath

  old England’s sky of hurrying gray stones.

  Somewhere

  Travelling alone through Europe,

  one can make beautiful moments—

  the pale bowl of fruit, the herringbone parquet,

  the bare feet up on a marquetry table

  in a slant of sun interlaced with sparrow

  twitter and a trolley’s distant squeal

  (always, this silence of travelling alone

  like a broad tinted mat that surrounds

  some precise old engraving, the absence

  of another voice a chance, once more,

 

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