Collected Poems, 1953-1993
Page 17
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,