Collected Poems, 1953-1993
Page 23
STROPHE
Ours is the most powerful nation in the world. It has had a decade of unparalleled prosperity.… Yet it is still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual.…
ANTISTROPHE
I’m going to write a novel, hey,
I’ll write it as per Life:
I’m going to say, “What a splendid day!”
And, “How I love my wife!”
Let heroines be once again
Pink, languid, soft, and tall,
For from my pen shall flow forth men
Heterosexual.
STROPHE
Atomic fear or not, the incredible accomplishments of our day are surely the raw stuff of saga.
ANTISTROPHE
Raw stuff shall be the stuff of which
My saga will be made:
Brown soil, black pitch, the lovely rich,
The noble poor, the raid
On Harpers Ferry, Bunker Hill,
Forefathers fairly met,
The home, the mill, the hearth, the Bill
Of Rights, et cet., et cet.
STROPHE
Nobody wants Pollyanna literature.
ANTISTROPHE
I shan’t play Pollyanna, no,
I’ll stare facts in the eye:
Folks come and go, experience woe,
And, when they’re tired, die.
Unflinchingly, I plan to write
A book to comprehend
Rape, fury, spite, and, burning bright,
A sunset at The End.
STROPHE
In every healthy man there is a wisdom deeper than his conscious mind, reaching beyond memory to the primeval rivers, a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life.
ANTISTROPHE
A wise and not unhealthy man,
I’m telling everyone
That deeper than the old brainpan
Primeval rivers run;
For Life is joy and Time is gay
And Fortune smiles on those
Good books that say, at some length, “Yea,”
And thereby spite the Noes.
The Newlyweds
After a one-day honeymoon, the Fishers rushed off to a soft drink bottlers’ convention, then on to a ball game, a TV rehearsal and a movie preview.
—Life
“We’re married,” said Eddie.
Said Debbie, “Incredi-
ble! When is our honey-
moon?” “Over and done,” he
replied. “Feeling logy?
Drink Coke.” “Look at Yogi
go!” Debbie cried. “Groovy!”
“Rehearsal?” “The movie.”
“Some weddie,” said Debbie.
Said Eddie, “Yeah, mebbe.”
The Story of My Life
Fernando Valenti, enthusiast, Yale graduate, and himself represented by numerous recordings of Scarlatti.
—The Saturday Review
Enthused I went to Yale, enthused
I graduated. Still infused
with this enthusiasm when
Scarlatti called, I answered en-
thusiastically, and thus
I made recordings numerous,
so numerous that I am classed,
quite simply, as “enthusiast.”
A Bitter Life
Dr. Ycas [of the Quartermaster Research and Development Center, in a report to the National Academy of Sciences] holds that the ocean itself was alive. There were no living creatures in it.
—The New York Times
O you Dr. Ycas you!
In one convulsive motion
Your brain has given birth unto
A viable young ocean.
All monsters pale beside the new:
The Hydra, Hap, Garuda, Ra,
Italapas, Seb, Hua-hu
Tiao, Gulltopr, Grendel’s ma,
Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan,
Onniont, Audhumbla, Ix,
Geryon, Leviathan,
666,
The ox Ahura Mazda made,
The Fomors, deevs, Graeae,
And others of this ilk all fade
Alongside Ycas’ sea.
The straits were sinews, channelways
Were veins, and islands eyes;
Rivers were tails, reefs bones, and bays,
Depending on their size,
Fists, shoulders, heads, ears, mouths, or feet.
The fjords, as fingers, froze
Sometimes, as did the arctic pate
And pale antarctic toes.
O horrid, horrid Ocean! The
Foul grandmother of Tyr,
Who had nine hundred crania,
Did not look half so queer.
It whistled with a mournful hiss
In darkness; scared and bored,
It lapped the land, yet every kiss
Was stonily ignored.
A spheric skin, or blue-green hide,
Alone the ocean kept
Our planet’s house, yet when it died
One aeon, no one wept.
A Wooden Darning Egg
The carpentered hen
unhinges her wings,
abandons her nest
of splinters, and sings.
· · ·
The egg she has laid
is maple and hard
as a tenpenny nail
and smooth as a board.
The grain of the wood
adorns the thick shell
as brown feathers do
a young cockerel.
The hen lifts her hackles;
her sandpapered throat
unwarps as she cackles
Cross-cut! ka-ross-cut!
Beginning to brood,
she tests with a level
the angle, sits down,
and coos Bevel bevel.
Publius Vergilius Maro, the Madison Avenue Hick
This was in Italy. The year was the thirty-seventh before the birth of Christ. The people were mighty hungry, for there was a famine in the land.
—the beginning of a Heritage Club advertisement, in The New Yorker, for The Georgics
It takes a heap o’ pluggin’ t’ make a classic sell,
Fer folks are mighty up-to-date, an’ jittery as hell;
They got no yen to set aroun’ with Vergil in their laps
When they kin read the latest news in twenty-four-point caps.
Ye’ve got t’ hit ’em clean an’ hard, with simple predicates,
An’ keep the clauses short becuz these days nobody waits
T’ foller out a sentence thet all-likely lacks a punch
When in the time o’ readin’ they could grab a bite o’ lunch.
Ye’ve got t’ hand ’em place an’ time, an’ then a pinch o’ slang
T’ make ’em feel right comfy in a Latinate shebang,
An’ ef your taste buds curdle an’ your tum turns queasy—well,
It takes a heap o’ pluggin’ t’ make a classic sell.
Tsokadze O Altitudo
Tsokadze has invented a new style—apparently without knowing it. He does not bend from the waist at all. His body is straight and relaxed and leaning far out over his skis until his face is only two feet above them, his arms at his side, his head up. His bindings and shoes are so loose that only his toes touch his skies. He gets enormous distances and his flight is so beautiful.
—Thorlief Schjelderup, quoted in The New York Times, of a young Russian ski-jumper
Tsokadze leans unknowingly
Above his skis, relaxed and tall.
�
� He bends not from the waist at all.
This is the way a man should ski.
He sinks; he rises, up and up,
His face two feet above the wood.
This way of jumping, it is good,
Says expert Thorlief Schjelderup.
· · ·
Beneath his nose, the ski-tips shake;
He plummets down the deepening wide
Bright pit of air, arms at his side,
His heart aloft for Russia’s sake.
Loose are the bindings, stiff the knees,
Relaxed the man—see, still he flies
And only his toes touch his skies!
Ah, c’est beau, when Tsokadze skis.
The One-Year-Old
(After Reading the Appropriate Chapter in Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, by Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg)
Wakes wet; is promptly toileted;
Jargons to himself; is fed;
Executively grips a cup;
Quadrupedal, will sit up
Unaided; laughs; applauds; enjoys
Baths and manipulative toys;
Socializes (parents: shun
Excess acculturation);
Demonstrates prehension; will
Masticate yet seldom spill;
Creeps (gross motor drives are strong);
And jargons, jargons all day long.
Room 28
National Portrait Gallery, London
Remembered as octagonal, dark-panelled,
And seldom frequented, except by me—
Indeed, a bower
Attained down avenues where, framed and annalled,
Great England’s great with truculence outlive
Their hour
And staringly put up with immortality—
The room gave rest as some libraries give.
The visitor, approaching, brushed a girlish
Bust of Lord Byron. Sir James George Frazer’s head,
An unarmed sentry,
Austere, tormented, brazen-browed, and churlish,
Guarded with sternness fit for Stygian gates
The entry
To harmless walls where men of letters lately dead
Were hung. The envied spot was held by Yeats.
His mask, alone a mask among the paintings,
Attracted to itself what little sun
The sky admitted.
Half-bronze, half-black, his Janus-face at matins
Amazed that dim arena of the less
Weird-witted
Survivors of a blurred time: presbyters upon
Whose faces grieved the ghost of earnestness.
The whites of Rider Haggard’s eyes were showing
When last I saw them. Conrad’s cheeks were green,
And Rudyard Kipling’s
Pink profile burned against his brown works, glowing
With royalties and loyalty to crown.
Fine stipplings
Limned the long locks that Ellen Terry, seventeen,
Pre-Raphaelite, and blonde, let shining down.
There Stevenson looked ill and ill-depicted;
Frail Patmore, plucked yet gamey; Henry James,
Our good grammarian,
More paunched and politic than I’d expected.
Among the lone-faced portraits loomed a trin-
Itarian
Composite: Baring, Chesterton, Belloc. The frame’s
Embellished foursquare dogma boxed them in.
Brave room! Where are they now? In college courses,
Perused in inferior light, then laid
On library tables.
White knights mismounted on empirical horses,
Flagbearers for a tattered heraldry
Of labels,
They lacked the universe their vows deserved, and fade
Here on the cusp, in neither century.
Philological
The British puss demurely mews;
His transatlantic kin meow.
The kine in Minnesota moo;
Not so the gentle Devon cows:
They low,
As every schoolchild ought to know.
Mr. High-Mind
Then went the Jury out, whose names were Mr. Blind-man, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Lyar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable.
—The Pilgrim’s Progress
Eleven rogues and he to judge a fool—
He files out with the jury, but distaste
Constricts his fluting nostrils, and his cool
Mind turns tepid with contempt. There is brought
A basin for him, in which to wash his hands.
Laving his palms and fingertips, he finds
An image of his white, proportioned thought
Plunged in the squalid suds of other minds.
Unmoved by Lust’s requests or Hate’s commands
Or Superstition’s half-embarrassed bribe,
His brain takes wing and flutters up the course
First plotted by the Greeks, up toward the sphere
Where issues and alternatives are placed
In that remorseless light that knows no source.
Here, in this saddle-shaped, expanding void,
The wise alone have cause for breathing; here
Lines parallel on Earth, extended, meet.
Here priests in tweeds gyrate around the feet
Of Fact, their bride, and hymn their gratitude
That each toe of her ten is understood.
From this great height, the notion of the Good
Is seen to be a vulgar one, and crude.
High-mind as Judge descends to Earth, annoyed,
Despairing Justice. Man, a massy tribe,
Cannot possess one wide and neutral eye.
He casts his well-weighed verdict with a sigh
And for a passing moment is distressed
To see it coinciding with the rest.
Tax-Free Encounter
We have $3,000 savings to invest and believe in the dignity of man. Box Y-920.
—Personal notice in The Saturday Review
I met a fellow in whose hand
Was hotly held a cool three grand.
“Inform me of,” he said, “the best
Technique of gaining interest.”
“Lend money at usurious rates,”
I said. “It soon accumulates.”
“Oh no!” he cried. “That is unsound
Artistically. Read Ezra Pound.”
“Invest,” I then suggested. “Deal
Yourself a hand in U.S. Steel.”
He snapped, “Big businessmen are sharks.
Peruse Das Kapital, by Marx.”
“Then buy some U.S. Savings Bonds,
For Our Defense, which corresponds
To Yours an
d Mine.” He told me, “Cease!
Defense degrades. Read War and Peace.”
He added, “Dignity of men
Is what we most believe in.” Then
He slyly smiled and slowly backed
Away, his principal intact.
Scenic
O when in San Francisco do
As natives do: they sit and stare
And smile and stare again. The view
Is visible from anywhere.
Here hills are white with houses whence,
Across a multitude of sills,
The owners, lucky residents,
See other houses, other hills.
The meanest San Franciscan knows,
No matter what his sins have been,
There are a thousand patios
Whose view he is included in.
The Golden Gate, the cable cars,
Twin Peaks, the Spreckels habitat,
The local ocean, sun, and stars—
When fog falls, one admires that.
Here homes are stacked in such a way
That every picture window has
An unmarred prospect of the Bay
And, in its center, Alcatraz.
Capacity
CAPACITY 26 PASSENGERS
—sign in a bus
Affable, bibulous,
corpulent, dull,
eager-to-find-a-seat,
formidable,
garrulous, humorous,
icy, jejune,
knockabout, laden-
with-luggage (maroon),
mild-mannered, narrow-necked,
oval-eyed, pert,
querulous, rakish,
seductive, tart, vert-
iginous, willowy,
xanthic (or yellow),