Collected Poems, 1953-1993
Page 25
When I was small, I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in my mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart.
Now, gnarled and pale, each said, j’accuse!—
I hid them quickly in my shoes.
Blked
Labor—gas tove $28.00
4 ¾ female ells 2.60
1 ¾ blk union .80
4 ¾ × 2″ cplings 1.14
2 ¾ male tees .72
—from a plumbing bill
At first, the euphemistic “blk”
Appeared to me to rhyme with “milk.”
The labor done upon my tove
Had not, it seemed, been one of love.
And yet love’s language ripples through
The reckoning; cplings, two by two,
Perhaps aroused some Puritan
To balk a union. Nasty man!
Or does the “union” mean The States,
Which Cold-War cost debilitates?
To boost the Free World’s bulk, give $.80,
And be a bulwark of defense.
Toothache Man
The earth has been unkind to him.
He lies in middle strata.
The time capsules about him brim
With advertising matter.
His addled fossils tell a tale
That lacks barbaric splendor;
His vertebrae are small and pale,
His femora are slender.
It is his teeth—strange, cratered things—
That name him. Some are hollow,
Like bowls, and hold gold offerings.
The god may be Apollo.
Silver and gold. We think he thought
His god, who was immortal,
Dwelt in his skull; hence, the devout
Adorned the temple’s portal.
Heraldic fists and spears and bells
In all metallic colors
Invade the bone; their volume swells
On backward through the molars.
This culture’s meagre sediments
Have come to light just lately.
We handle them with reverence.
He must have suffered greatly.
Party Knee
To drink in moderation, and to smoke
A minimal amount, and joke
Reservedly does not insure
Awaking from a party whole and pure.
Be we as temperate as the turtledove,
A soirée is an orgy of
This strange excess, unknown in France,
And Rome, and Nineveh: the upright stance.
When more than four forgather in our land,
We stand and stand, and stand and stand.
Thighs ache; a drowsy numbness locks
The bones between our pockets and our socks.
We rue the night next morning; up from bed
With addled knees and lucid head
We crawl at dawn, and sob, and beg
A buffered aspirin for a splitting leg.
The Moderate
Frost’s space is deeper than Poliakoff’s and not as deep as that of Soulages.
—Patrick Heron in Arts
“Soulages’s space is deep and wide—
Beware!” they said. “Beware,” they cried,
“The yawning gap, the black abyss
That closes with a dreadful hiss!
“That shallow space by Poliakoff,”
They added, “is a wretched trough.
It wrinkles, splinters, shreds, and fades;
It wouldn’t hold the Jack of Spades.”
“But where?” I asked, bewildered, lost.
“Go seek,” they said, “the space of Frost;
It’s not too bonny, not too braw—
The nicest space you ever saw.”
I harked, and heard, and here I live,
Delighted to be relative.
Deities and Beasts
Tall Atlas, Jupiter, Hercules, Thor,
Just like the antic pagan gods of yore,
Make up a too-erratic pantheon
For mortal men to be dependent on.
I much prefer, myself, the humble RAT,
The tiny Terrier, the short Hawk that
Makes secret flight, and the Sparrow, whose fall
Is never mentioned in the press at all.
Within a Quad
Within a quad of aging brick,
Behind the warty warden oak,
The Radcliffe sophomores exchange,
In fencing costume, stroke for stroke;
Their bare knees bent, the darlings duel
Like daughters of Dumas and Scott.
Their sneakered feet torment the lawn,
Their skirted derrières stick out.
Beneath the branches, needles glint
Unevenly in dappled sun
As shadowplay and swordplay are
In no time knitted into one;
The metal twitters, girl hacks girl,
Their educated faces caged.
The fake felt hearts and pointless foils
Contain an oddly actual rage.
In Praise of (C10H9O5)x
I have now worn the same terylene tie every day for eighteen months.
—From Chemistry, a Penguin book by Kenneth Hutton
My tie is made of terylene;
Eternally I wear it,
For time can never wither, stale,
Shred, shrink, fray, fade, or tear it.
The storms of January fail
To loosen it with bluster;
The rains of April fail to stain
Its polyester lustre;
July’s hot sun beats down in vain;
October’s frosts fall futilely;
December’s snow can blow and blow—
My tie remains acutely
Immutable! When I’m below,
Dissolving in that halcyon
Retort, my carbohydrates shed
From off my frame of calcium—
When I am, in lay language, dead,
Across my crumbling sternum
Shall lie a spanking fresh cravat
Unsullied ad æternum,
A grave and solemn prospect that
Makes light of our allotted
Three score and ten, for terylene
Shall never be unknotted.
Milady Reflects
RADIO SIGNALS BOUNCED OFF VENUS
—headline in The New York Times
When I was known as Aphrodite, men
Were wont to bounce their prayers off my side.
I shrugged, and granted some, and some denied,
And even slept with mortals now and then.
But then Jehovah stormed in on a star
And put a rapid end to such requests.
Well, cultures change; the gods are transient guests
On Earth. I made the sky my sole boudoir.
Just yesterday, I felt an odd caress,
A tickle or a whisper or a hum
That smacked of Man—his opposable thumb,
His monkey face, his myths, his humanness.
Oh, dear. I’m not the girl he left alone.
I have my books, my chocolates, and my maid—
I know Mars thinks I’ve gotten rather staid.
I think I’ll have them disconnect the phone.
The fritillary,
Fickle, wary,
Flits from plant to plant with nary
A forethought as to where he
Alights, a butterfly.
And, what’s extraordinary,
Is also an herb—
The same word serves.
Nothing disturbs
Its thick green nerves.
When one lights on the other it is very
Nice:
The spotted wings and the spotted petals, both spelled from the Latin fritillus [dice],
Nod together
Toward a center
Where a mirror
Might be imagined.
They are tangent,
Self to self, the same
Within a single name.
A miracle has occurred.
· · ·
Alas! The wingèd word
With a blind flap leaves the leaved,
Unbereaved,
And bobbles down the breeze,
Careless of etymologies.
Thoughts While Driving Home
Was I clever enough? Was I charming?
Did I make at least one good pun?
Was I disconcerting? Disarming?
Was I wise? Was I wan? Was I fun?
Did I answer that girl with white shoulders
Correctly, or should I have said
(Engagingly), “Kierkegaard smolders,
But Eliot’s ashes are dead”?
And did I, while being a smarty,
Yet some wry reserve slyly keep,
So they murmured, when I’d left the party,
“He’s deep. He’s deep. He’s deep”?
Sonic Boom
I’m sitting in the living room,
When, up above, the Thump of Doom
Resounds. Relax. It’s sonic boom.
The ceiling shudders at the clap,
The mirrors tilt, the rafters snap,
And Baby wakens from his nap.
· · ·
“Hush, babe. Some pilot we equip,
Giving the speed of sound the slip,
Has cracked the air like a penny whip.”
Our world is far from frightening; I
No longer strain to read the sky
Where moving fingers (jet planes) fly.
Our world seems much too tame to die.
And if it does, with one more pop,
I shan’t look up to see it drop.
Tome-Thoughts, from the Times
The special merit of the two first novels up for discussion today is that they are neither overly ambitious nor overly long. Both are deftly written, amusing and intensely feminine. Both are the work of brightly talented young women.
—Orville Prescott, in The New York Times
Oh, to be Orville Prescott
Now that summer’s here,
And the books on tinted paper
Blow lightly down the air,
And the merciful brevity of every page
Becalms the winter’s voluminous rage,
And unambition like lilac lies
On Prescott’s eyes.
When heroines with small frustrations,
Dressed in transparent motivations,
Glimmer and gambol, trip and trot;
Then may the sensitive critic spy,
Beneath the weave of a gossamer plot,
The subtle pink of an author’s thigh.
Oh bliss! oh brightly talented! oh neither
Overly this nor that—a breather!
Along the sands of the summer lists
The feminine first novelists
Go dancing, deft, and blessed twice over
By Prescott, deep in short-stemmed clover.
A Song of Paternal Care
A Lithuanian lithographer
Who lived on lithia water
Was blessed, by lithogenesis,
With a lithe and lithic daughter.
Said he beneath a lithy tree
When she’d reached litholysis,
“It’s time you thought of lithomarge,
And even … lithophthisis.”
She blushed, the lovely lithoglyph,
And said, “I love a lithsman.*
I feel so litholyte when I’m,”
She smiled, eliding, “wi’ th’s man.”
“Go fetch the lithofellic fellow!”
Her father boomed, with laughter.
She did. They lived in Lithgow, Austl.,
Litherly† ever after.
* * *
*An unfortunately obsolete word meaning a sailor in the navy under the Danish kings of England.
†Another, meaning mischievous, wicked, or lazy.
Tropical Beetles
Composed of horny, jagged blacks
Yet quite unformidable,
They flip themselves upon their backs
And die beneath the table.
The Temperate wasp, with pointed moan,
Flies straightway to the apple;
But bugs inside the Tropic Zone
With idle fancies grapple.
They hurl themselves past window sills
And labor through a hundred
Ecstatic, crackling, whirring spills—
For what, I’ve often wondered.
They seek the light—it stirs their stark,
Ill-lit imaginations—
And win, when stepped on in the dark,
Disgusted exclamations.
Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter
Many-volumed authoresses
In capacious country dresses,
Full of cheerful art and nearly
Perfect craft, we love you dearly.
You know the hedgerow, stile, and barrow,
Have sniffed the cabbage, leek, and marrow,
Have heard the prim postmistress snicker,
And spied out murder in the vicar.
You’ve drawn the berry-beaded brambles
Where Mrs. Tiggy-winkle rambles,
And mapped the attics in the village
Where mice plot alibis and pillage.
Lord love you both, for in these places
You give us cozy scares and chases
That end with innocence acquitted—
Except for Cotton-tail, who did it.
Young Matrons Dancing
Corinna foots it in bare feet;
Her toes are dusty but discreet
In sliding backwards from the shoes
Of Arthur Johnson Betelgeuse.
Anthea, married twice with three
Small children, softly smiles to see
Her jealous present husband frown
While talking stocks with Elmore Brown.
These pelves childbirth spread still twitch
In time to that too-narrow itch
That led their innocence down ways
Composed of endless working days;
Corinna and Anthea still
Can bend to Lester Lanin’s will,
And mime with scarce-diminished grace
Perpetuation of the race.
Comp. Religion
It all begins with fear of mana.
Next there comes the love of tribe.
Native dances, totems, ani-
Mism and magicians thrive.
Culture grows more complicated.
Spirits, chiefs in funny hats,
And suchlike spooks are sublimated
Into gods and ziggurats.
Polyarmed and polyheaded,
Gods proliferate until
Puristic-minded sages edit
Their welter into one sweet Will.
This worshipped One grows so
enlightened,
Vast, and high He, in a blur,
Explodes; and men are left as frightened
Of mana as they ever were.
Meditation on a News Item
Fidel Castro, who considers himself first in war and first in peace, was first in the Hemingway fishing tourney at Havana, Cuba. “I am a novice at fishing,” said Fidel. “You are a lucky novice,” replied Ernest.
—Life, in June 1960
Yes, yes, and there is even a photograph,
of the two in profile, both bearded, both sharp-nosed,
both (though the one is not wearing a cap
and the other is not carrying a cat)
magnificently recognizable (do
you think that much-photographed faces grow
larger, more deeply themselves, like flowers
in sunlight?). A great cup sits between their chests.
Life does not seem to think it very strange.
It runs the shot cropped to four inches,
and the explanation is given in full above.
But to me it seems immeasurably strange: as strange
to me as if there were found,
in a Jacobean archive, an unquestionably authentic
woodcut showing Shakespeare
presenting the blue ribbon for Best Cake Baked
to Queen Elizabeth.
And even the dialogue: so perfect—
“You are a lucky novice.” Succinct,
wry, ominous, innocent: Nick Adams talking.
How did it happen? Did he,