Collected Poems, 1953-1993
Page 18
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