Collected Poems, 1953-1993

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Collected Poems, 1953-1993 Page 18

by John Updike


  to face one’s life and to live solemnly,

  with an eloquence, like a bow being drawn

  across a cello the color of God’s cigar—

  to make, of this scuttle and heartbeat, art).

  Sonnet to Man-Made Grandeur

  The Pyramids rooted in a rubble of beggars and bored camels

  the Parthenon eroding in the chemical nibble of Athenian exhaust

  the Pantheon with its far square star of a leaking skylight

  Chartres and its tilted old floor and darkening sad glass

  St. Peter’s that monstrous consumer of indulgences

  swallowing angels upward in its cavernous blue vaults

  St. Paul’s the fog-gray of mothering London

  its domed gallery whispering while the void below screams

  Versailles paved to the horizon with its gardens and mirrors

  Napoleon’s tomb that orgy of marble tout à gloire

  Neuschwanstein mad Ludwig’s bankrupting fairy tale

  and the Washington obelisk like a mote in God’s eye:

  Majesty! we have lifted you up on the backs of slaves

  whose lives you still hold as the curved Earth holds worms

  Klimt and Schiele Confront the Cunt

  That women in their marble glory still

  had pubic hair so startled Ruskin he

  turned impotent, and had to be divorced.

  The nineteenth century, for all its love

  of facts, preferred its female hair to stream,

  like emanations of divinity,

  a ghostly river, solely from the head.

  Vienna, though, was looking lower. Freud

  sat giving ear above that mystic couch

  where golden heads, and brown, materialized

  to spill their minds’ secretions; meanwhile, Klimt

  and Schiele pencilled pussies blackly on

  their nudes and even limned the labia

  that frame the blameless hole men seek and dread.

  For stylish Gustav Klimt, whose early work

  shows much of Edvard Munch’s hysteria—

  such staring, snake-haired, toxic femmes fatales!—

  the pubic patch (once lightly called,

  by young Adele Astaire, the “Ace of Spades”)

  plays hide-and-seek beyond a bent-down head

  or tucked between the buttocks, just a curl.

  For Egon Schiele, born much closer to

  la fin de siècle (fin is feminine,

  men will observe), the pencil gouges deeper,

  and something close to famine dulls the eyes

  while fingers seek the masturbator’s groove.

  The flesh is gaunt and splotchy but alive,

  and appetite torments its toothless mouth.

  Returning Native

  What can you say about Pennsylvania

  in regard to New England except that

  it is slightly less cold, and less rocky,

  or rather that the rocks are different?

  Redder, and gritty, and piled up here and there,

  whether as glacial moraine or collapsed springhouse

  is not easy to tell, so quickly

  are human efforts bundled back into nature.

  In fall, the trees turn yellower—

  hard maple, hickory, and oak

  give way to tulip poplar, black walnut,

  and locust. The woods are overgrown

  with wild-grape vines, and with greenbrier

  spreading its low net of anxious small claws.

  In warm November, the mulching forest floor

  smells like a rotting animal.

  A genial pulpiness, in short: the sky

  is soft with haze and paper-gray

  even as the sun shines, and the rain

  falls soft on the shoulders of farmers

  while the children keep on playing,

  their heads of hair beaded like spider webs.

  A deep-dyed blur softens the bleak cities

  whose people palaver in prolonged vowels.

  There is a secret here, some death-defying joke

  the eyes, the knuckles, the bellies imply—

  a suet of consolation fetched straight

  from the slaughterhouse and hung out

  for chickadees to peck in the lee of the spruce,

  where the husks of sunflower seeds

  and the peace-signs of bird feet crowd

  the snow that barely masks the still-green grass.

  I knew that secret once, and have forgotten.

  The death-defying secret—it rises

  toward me like a dog’s gaze, loving

  but bewildered. When winter sits cold and black

  on Boston’s granite hills, in Philly,

  slumped between its two polluted rivers,

  warmth’s shadow leans close to the wall

  and gets the cement to deliver a kiss.

  Snowdrops 1987

  Isn’t it nice (Diane Keaton

  singing in Radio Days: “Sssso nice”),

  the way that snowdrops survive,

  with many a nocturnal freeze-frame,

  the cold days that follow their first thrusting

  up through the dead-seeming dirt,

  our dusty and stiff winter earth,

  as the frost, rebounding, seals the ice

  of the stars in their crazed inflexible pattern

  and the rabbit curls tighter

  in his burrow and the thought of a flower

  seems quite as fantastic

  as that of a warm-blooded God?

  Through spring’s intermissions

  the snowdrops with their ovoid

  hung heads on the delicate stems

  don’t lose faith, but advance

  as little or much into bloom as the mood

  of that day permits, till the bright days

  in the cards come to bake their cool splash

  against the stone foundation wall

  and make life seem obvious: its tentative

  yet implacable announcement as white

  as her gown, a snow queen’s, as she sings

  “Sssso nice” (paradise) and lets her face come home to

  her shy and grateful, pearl-pale smile.

  Goodbye, Göteborg

  The countries we depart will manage without us.

      The Swedes will rise tomorrow, brush their teeth,

      and go about their businesses. Beneath

  the hiss of the street-sweeper’s rotary brush

  the footstep-peppered cobbles will resume

      their ancient shine; the citizens will seethe

      at dinging crosswalks and ruthlessly will keep

  appointments made before our small hiatus.

  We meant nothing. We were less to Sweden

      than a scratch on crystal. Their lovely English

      was a pose, a veneer applied by television;

  like the thin ice of their eyes, it will be broken.

  Behind our backs, all over Europe, men

      are picking up and carrying their languages,

      barbaric fossils, in their mouths; it is

  as if they relish our absence from this Eden.

  Hot Water

  Imagine an empty house—a mansion, vast

  and moon-caressed, apparently abandoned.

  We tiptoe to a spidery bathroom

  and turn on the tap. Out comes, first, rust,

  with a belch that shakes pipes behind plaster,

  then cold, then tepid water, and, lastly, hot.

  Hot water! The house is alive, lived in

  at least by the unswitched-off tall heater,

  secreting its blue flame in the cellar.

  And we ourselves, if you’d prick us, would gush

  not scaldingly, but with a detectable

  caloric investment. We are enough in our flesh

&nb
sp; to warm the hands of another by; we are

  hot water, here among the icy stars.

  Squirrels Mating

  In fits and starts around

  and around the hickory’s

  adhesive trunk, they

  chase one another—or

  so it seems, though the male

  must be doing the chasing

  and the female the fleeing,

  without ever seeming

  to flee very far, or to be

  quite out of it. Back in it,

  rather. Around and

  around the trunk in a

  furry flurry, they stop

  and start, up and down,

  a double helix halted when,

  deadpan, he mounts her, and

  she, expressionless

  in kind but palpably

  alert and sensitive and strong,

  supports their two linked weights

  by clinging with her two

  front feet, as frail as burrs,

  to bark. The male, his tail

  erect and quivering with faith,

  hangs on to only her,

  their four bright beady eyes

  turned outward to the world.

  Sun shines. Leaves shake. The slow

  world turns. The moment passes,

  the primal freeze-frame. Then,

  as skittery as ever, they—

  our innocent, unsatisfied

  Sciuridae—resume

  their chase in fits and starts.

  Sails on All Saints’ Day

  One does not expect to see them, out there,

  so late, on a sea so blue, beneath this sky

  whose faint clouds seem to be remembering

  yesterday’s skywriting. True, the sails are few,

  and the wind they are tilting in is a mystery.

  A freighter stands out in Massachusetts Bay

  like a small gray tab on a giant folder marked

  FILE IN MEMORY. This calm at winter’s edge.

  More toward the foreground, trees, their blushing done,

  look burnt, and the frost-defying roses

  incongruous. The summer’s last flies find

  my warm white corner, where a leaning mop,

  set out to dry, plays the hypotenuse

  to its own slim shadow, mast-straight and blue.

  Tulsa

  Not Oral Roberts’ city of heavenly glitz

  (as are most dreams come true, in dreadful taste)

  nor the Gilcrease Museum’s thirty thousand

  arrowheads and countless canvases

  of melting cowboys in pathetic-prairie pink,

  but vacant lots impressed me most: downtown

  a wilderness of parking space and brave

  renewal schemes—the least false note, pawn shops.

  Oil money like a flash flood came and went;

  one skyscraper was snapped off like a stick

  when the big ebb hit. Now the Arkansas

  pokes muddily along, and a rusty train

  fills all that hollow downtown with a blast

  the Cherokee street people blink away.

  Washington: Tourist View

  The protesters in their houses built of placards

  and brandishing signs lettered with a paranoid fullness—

  as crabbed as religious texts, in rainbows of emphasis—

  would be hard for a Martian statesman to distinguish

  from the drab desperadoes who flourish on the sidewalks

  around the White House fence with their life-size cutouts

  saying POSE WITH RON $5 USE YOUR OWN CAMERA or

  (a cutout wrapped in plastic, a fad whose day is over)

  POSE WITH OLLIE NORTH.

                                          He who is not with me is

  against me; but who, amid all these façades,

  is “me”? The marble show of power shows no center,

  and on the Mall a mob of happy unempowered

  toss Frisbees, tote balloons, and hug their souvenirs.

  Behold the gleaming monuments, the stone celebrities

  of Capitol and obelisk and sunken V

  and Lincoln’s stately outhouse, where he sits. Pure fame

  ennobles the gilded air and bestows a gladness on

  the long reflecting pool where freedom tosses trash.

  So much! And yet, not quite enough, these radiant streets,

  these gray museums where our loot and feats accrue:

  always, for the buses of high-schoolers, and for

  the troops of retirees in childish matching hats,

  a sense that freedom has no center, and pulls at the legs,

  and fails, among the Homers and dinosaur bones,

  to yield its sweetest essence, the final word.

                                          Bums stained

  or deep-dyed black like shadows sleep beneath cardboard

  whose only message names some goods consumed, and cops

  bulked out by guns and radios go rolling by

  with the careful geared gait of robots: perhaps they,

  or the Popsicle men, know where America

  has tucked the goody half the planet craves, beneath

  the cotton candy, the postermongers, the museum shops.

  A spectral Ferris wheel lifts our egos to the height

  of the obelisk tip and back down to the grass

  worn bare by Sunday patriots and games of catch.

  Back Bay

  My adult unemployed son and I

  (he composes electronic music)

  for his birthday traversed the Back Bay

  region of Boston, looking for suitable clothes

  as a present. A leather jacket, he thought,

  might be nice, but we had no idea where,

  at this outset of summer, such an item

  might be found. The Banana Republic,

  on Newbury Street near Gloucester, offered

  stone-washed denims and safari outfits in

  a crinkly fabric that might be called pre-rumpled.

  On Boylston beyond Berkeley, Eddie Bauer

  was little better—committed to skimpy summer

  and backpacking’s sturdy orange canvas.

  In Brooks Brothers, where Berkeley and Newbury meet,

  my shy son, mirrored, posed in seersucker

  but concluded it wasn’t leather. I

  was desperate to buy him something, he seemed

  so shabby, shy and tall and broad; his shirt

  baggy, his hairy belly peeping through,

  his khaki trousers torn and smudged, his shoes

  especially pitiful, scuffed gray dress shoes

  he had found in a bin behind the building where

  he lives with his equipment and his tapes.

  These shoes brought back to me my father, who

  dramatized his fear of poverty

  by dressing himself in castoffs: dead man’s shoes.

  Also, as we traversed the area—saved

  from the sea by landfill a century ago,

  granite scraped from the top of Beacon Hill

  and hauled by railroad to the fragrant flats

  and dumped into the marsh, which at high tide

  glittered just like the sea—I was haunted

  by a woman I had once known, who had lived

  in Back Bay and who loved to shop. Her wide hips.

  Her slight hunch. Her big smile, eager to acquire.

  Cancer had come and all her precious clothes,

  the closetsful, the silken underwear,

  had failed to shield her body cells. The day

  was dazzling with white June sun for which

  New England’s wintry spring had not prepared us.

  We were pale, and our pupils still open.

  His shi
rt, my son’s, sagged and flapped like a kite,

  and I scanned the glittering crowds as if she

  might pop into sight, by accident, grinning

  in that way she had, displaying her gums.

  An eeriness of the land-filled region

  shimmered above the artificial flatness,

  the alphabetical order of the cross-streets—

  Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon … Hereford.

  It had been years since I had lived here, but

  I remembered. Finally, at Bally’s,

  one of the swell small shops in Copley Plaza,

  which we reached with a long walk along Boylston,

  through clouds of construction dust as the city

  piles ever more stones on the vanished marsh,

  we found a jacket of black leather, for

  eight hundred ninety dollars! But my son,

  posing before the mirror with many head-cocks,

  decided it made him look like an Italian

  movie director. He settled for some slacks

  and a new shirt back at Eddie Bauer’s.

  I didn’t dare suggest new shoes, his own

  as dead as my father and scuffed like a child’s.

  The bright streets struck us again, and I looked

  for her, unable to grasp how gone she was

  from this panorama, how she had existed,

  as the living still did, less as a thing

  than as a pattern or shimmer in what was seen

  for a season or two, a ripple in water

  that catches light, then spills it like a pod.

  In Memoriam Felis Felis

  The Pussycat on Causeway Street is closed.

  Vacant the poster cases that proclaimed

  RED HOT, ADULT, and UNINHIBITED.

  Dusty and chained the glass doors opening

  into the small slant lobby where a black

  bored woman took your fiver and a turn-

  stile yielded as if a subway lay beyond.

  Dark, dark at noon the theatre had been,

  its inky seats as silent as the tomb.

  Your fear was sitting on a sleeping bum.

  The screen would be ablaze with private parts,

  and hollow breathless voices spelled a plot

 

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