by John Updike
portrays him aging. Velvet furniture
selected by committee shows no wear.
The latches, black and flat, remind me of
my boyhood home. This stately farce of learning—
well, time to brush the teeth and face the students.
Perfection Wasted
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
Working Outdoors in Winter
It can be done. The seal of frost
imposed upon the windows can
be broken, and a depth of air revealed.
Trees follow one another, one by one—
birch, beech, white oak, a hickory or ash—
and make a space to move in, space
like that inside your clothes,
which can be warmed.
The poison ivy dormant,
mosquitoes dead, and leaves’ green suffocation
lifted, you wield the clipper, swing the ax
in an atmosphere of freedom earned, of nature
as calligraphy, transparent to the will.
You overheat, at last, and seem to wound
the virgin quiet as a glowing poker
wounds the water it is plunged into.
To build a fire in winter’s heart!
Now, there is self-assertion, gathering
the heap of brush, the castoff branches,
the kindling wood and match, and tools
to keep the orange pet in bounds, its roar
and snap and snarl and singing hiss all yours,
Der Feuermeister.
The blue smoke soils
blue sky, an ascent of sparks describes an S
baroque as the sound holes in a violin,
and a bed of frozen earth is fried,
with all its sleeping worms. The cold day sinks
to its ruddy ash of dusk while you recall
in bone and vein what tough machines
men are, their burning gristle built to push
against the zero waiting all around.
Indianapolis
A passion for Roman order seized the plains.
Desire to woo the American Legion raised
not one but two imperial monuments
to the oft-regretted dead. In World War One
Das Deutsche Haus became, to lick the Huns,
another Athenaeum. The spreading city hangs
between brick-striped solidity and dim
apology for being there at all.
Metropolis of writers—Tarkington,
James Whitcomb Riley, Vonnegut, and more
who fled and fed New York’s ungrateful maw.
Why flee? Come, stay beside the Hoosier Dome,
its alabaster bubble, citizen,
and dream your fill of plain civility—
of logical maps, and unimpeded streets,
and porch-swing sex like a window box in bloom.
Zoo Bats
In the Central Park Zoo, just past the ants
being televised by tiny cameras,
the bats flutter and swoop in a glassed-in gloom.
You don’t see bats this close up very often.
Yet they are hard to see, too quick, too faint,
and their shapes disagree with the eyes—
appall us, really, though we approach and peer
determined not to be appalled, to be liberal and just
toward this creature that is, after all,
remarkably successful, if quietly so.
One seventh of all mammalian species
are Chiroptera, and their mortality rate
is low, their predators no problem, and
their child-rearing habits more constant than ours.
Who begrudges them their diet of bugs?
Their digestions are rapid, to keep themselves light.
For all this Fourierism, this favorable press,
these bats in the flesh are worse than we dreamed;
if we dreamed of them often, we would swap
such sleep for death, its featureless white glare.
They are shapeless in flight and in repose—
small broken umbrellas that grab the air
like brown-gloved skeletal hands, and latch
their sticky feet to a roost with a vile
tenacity, and tremblingly hang; or else
they drop to a ledge like a sudden deposit
of excrement, shit out of nowhere, a
product of this intestinal gray gloom.
No doubt they have dear faces—with nose-flaps,
some of them, to aid echolocation,
and snouts, like the hog-nosed bat of Thailand,
small as a bumblebee. The common bat
that haunts our mauve suburban twilights with
its airborne evening meal—connect the dots—
weighs one third of an ounce, or less. How minor
a mass for so disquieting a shadow!
Perhaps to fly with webbed and lengthened fingers
sits worse, with nature, than to do it with
thoracic chitin-scales or feathered arms.
A bird is a new shape, a fish of the sky;
a bat, a squeaking face between a pair
of agitated hands, that’s all. I once
was at a party when a bat broke in.
It dipped from room to room as people screamed.
The host at last opened a door, and out
it went. To make his teary daughter laugh,
I said, “It looked like this,” and did a face—
a-squint, stretch-mouthed. She laughed and said, “It did!”
We see them better than we know, like the
subliminal bits on television.
They are subconscious, bats, and bubble up
like prejudices. Another time, one night,
I saw a bat sail like a flung black stone
behind my stepson’s head. He and my wife
reacted violently, and, slamming doors,
delegated me to be the bat
eliminator. Trapped, I crept upstairs,
through hall and bedroom (nothing there) into
the bathroom where, all fearful of its flying
Dracula-fanged and rabid at my face,
I found it hanging, folded, to a towel.
Resigned and upside down, the bat had sensibly
amid our panic put itself to sleep.
Stealthy as a parent, I wrapped it gently up;
it chirruped, exerting a questioning pressure
back through the towel like the throb of a watch.
Up, window. Up, screen. I gave the bat back
to the night like a cup of water to the sea.
Landing in the Rain at La Guardia
The death-grip of the chalky clouds lets slip,
within our oval view, a glimpse of ground:
six city autos snug in their snail’s pace
on rain-licked streets that we will never cruise.
The clouds return, a hurtling wisp or two
to measure our distressing speed; then space
opens a
gain beneath our belly-drone
like a wound, damp and lucidly detailed—
flat factory roofs and empty parking lots,
a cemetery’s ragged crowded rows.
What meaningless angel are we thus to loom
above the sleeping, crawling map of Queens?
The World’s Fair globe, a toy. Shea Stadium.
Upreaching stony water. Whumppf: we’re down.
Mouse Sex
In my cellar the poisoned mice, thirsty to death,
come out to die on the cement, in the center
of the floor. This particular corpse seemed fat,
so sideways-plump that pregnancy crossed my mind,
and, picking it up by the tail, I saw, sure enough,
at the base of the tail her tiny neat vagina,
a pumpkin-seed-shaped break in the dulcet fur.
I had murdered a matriarch, with d-Con.
Revelation of the vagina’s simplicity
had come to me before. Tossing the tiny body
into the woods, I remembered another
woods-surrounded house, where I and another
lay together upstairs, and had heard
a sound downstairs, her husband or the wind.
The phantom sound, like an alchemist’s pinch,
turned my erection inconvenient.
We listened, our love-flushed faces an inch apart.
The sound was not repeated. In the silence,
as the house resumed its enclosing, she said,
her voice thickened and soft and distinct,
“Put it in me.” In my wild mind’s eye I saw
the vagina as a simple wanting, framed in fur,
kept out of sight between the legs but always there,
a gentle nagging, a moist accommodacy.
A man and not a mouse, yet with a bed-squeak,
I fell to my duty, our ungainly huddle
and its tense outcome less memorable
than the urgent, imperilled invitation.
How dear she was—her husband, that creep,
creeping about for all we knew—to sock it to
herself and give me in words the carte blanche
boys dream of but seldom receive spelled out.
I loved her for it, and for afterwards
with a touch of a blush confessing,
“I don’t want to be coarse for you,” as if women
could be as bluntly brutes as men.
Until that moment I did not suspect
that sex had an equitable basis.
The cat creeps below, but lady mice
still put their dulcet selves at risk, and die.
Suppose that moment, frozen, were Heaven or Hell:
our hearts would thump until the death of stars,
the trees outside would stir their golden edges,
the bed would squeak, the frightened inch
between our skins would hold the headboard’s grain,
her brazen thighs would simply, frankly part,
our eyes and breath would forever entertain
our mutual inquisition. Put it in.
Suspended above the abyss of her desire,
I feel as far-flung as a constellation.
Colors: the golden-edged trees, the lilac sheets,
the mousy green of her self-startled eyes.
We are furtive, gigantic, our stolen hour
together a swollen eternity.
We enter into one another; the universe
rises about us like a hostile house.
Granite
New England doesn’t kid around;
it wears its bones outside.
Quartz-freckled, time-rumpled granite—
your tombstone everywhere.
At night I wake and warily gaze
at outcroppings on my lawn.
These moonlit humpbacks, do they sleep
or do their blanched surfaces sense my eyes?
By day, you can see how earth
engenders itself over aeons—
pine needles silt in, and tender weeds
take hold in the cracks, then wild roses
and hairy-stemmed sumacs find enough
for a footing, and oak rootlets,
and out of the mesh comes a mulch, a soil—
trapped particles breed trapped life.
There is no way not to die,
can it be? What do these stones
coldly know? Or is moonlight warm,
and the granite a pledge
to which consciousness clings?
Better rock than the mud
of a meaningless mercy, such as men
would devise. This outcrop
is a wide gray glow the night has grown.
I think with awe of the man
who will gaze down upon it, awake,
when I’m blinder than stone.
Relatives
Just the thought of them makes your jawbone ache:
those turkey dinners, those holidays with
the air around the woodstove baked to a stupor,
and Aunt Lil’s tablecloth stained by her girlhood’s gravy.
A doggy wordless wisdom whimpers from
your uncles’ collected eyes; their very jokes
creak with genetic sorrow, a strain
of common heritage that hurts the gut.
Sheer boredom and fascination! A spidering
of chromosomes webs even the infants in
and holds us fast around the spread
of rotting food, of too-sweet pie.
The cousins buzz, the nephews crawl;
to love one’s self is to love them all.
Thin Air
By holding one’s head stock-still and measuring
on a window edge the snail’s pace at which
the plane in its airy trudge eats up
the luminous noodles of roadway—wet boughs
with speckled leaves and globular fruit
(sports stadia? new-opened malls?)
one gauges, abstractly, a speed outracing
headlights and in seconds eclipsing cities
spun underneath us like irregular webs
bespangled with life’s bright dew—lives passing
from cradle to coffin in local ignorance.
But as we land, this speed turns non-abstract:
the flashing grope of water, the coded lights
that cry Come home!, the runway like a card
the magician slips from the bottom of the deck
murderously fast. We would die,
squashed snails, were the world one shade more solid.
November
The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace
in falling, sweeping clean the clouded sky.
This brightness shocks the window like a face.
Our eyes contract to hold the sudden space
of barrenness—bare branches, blue, up high.
The light the sun withdrew has been replaced.
The tiny muscles of the iris taste
past time—old falls, slant light—recalling why
this brightness shocks the window like a face.
To children, years are each a separate case,
enormous, full of presents and surprise:
the light the sun withdraws the leaves replace.
For grown-ups, reminiscence scores the days
with traces veteran nerve-ends recognize
when brightness shocks the window like a face.
November, we know you—the grudging grace
of clarity you grant the clouded eye.
The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace
with brightness at the window like a face.
Light Switches
Lord, but one wearies of flipping them,
or turning them, or punching or,
with certain rheostat
ted switches, sliding them.
Nipples on the walls’ flat chests,
they yield the milk of light—the creamy
incandescence of resistant tungsten,
and lo-fat fluorescence that comes
in brimming, humming tubes. A modern
miracle, O.K.; but miracles wear
over a man’s and/or a woman’s lifetime
to mere routines—to recurrent details
that acquire no-meaning’s muffled sense
of a gap between purpose and sign
like the gap inside a careful package
stuffed with newspapers wadded into nonsense,
the language they were printed in no matter.
Off. On. It goes without saying.
And the sockets get boring, too—their twin mouths
and little flat-sided eye for the grounding prong.
The walls are threaded with magic, so what?
It’s magic merely our own, cooked up
so we can watch inane commercials—
never a lightning arising from a sky
beyond our brains, where electric-blue Zeus
hurls laughing bolts that weld amino acids
to a fantastic random hunger.
Instead, these mechanisms we understand,
these diagrams whose starkness shocks the soul.
Off, on—there must be something else,
some middle way, third eye, or shakti current.
These tilted blond clitorises
of plastic, their pure thrill palls
with the morning shave and the midnight douche.
Miami
As in some car chase on Sunday-night TV,
Art Deco collides with postmodern glass
above pink-plaster, low-slung barrio;
nothing crumples like passé luxury.
Miami Beach is now a hustling strip
where college kids rub naked shoulders with
the Caribbean’s shadows, high on hopes