by John Updike
convulsively departing from the exhausting regimen—
the rising at 6 a.m. to sharpen twelve pencils
with which to cut, as he stands at his bookcase,
269 or 312 or 451 more words into the paper
that will compose one of those many rumored books
that somehow never appear—did he abruptly exclaim,
“I must have a fishing tourney!”
and have posters painted and posted
in cabañTas, cigar stores, and bordellos,
ERNEST HEMINGWAY FISHING COMPETITION,
just like that?
And did he receive, on one of those soft Havana mornings,
while the smoky-green Caribbean laps the wharf legs,
and the señToritas yawn behind grillwork,
and the black mailmen walk in khaki shorts,
an application blank stating CASTRO, Fidel?
Occupation: Dictator. Address:
Top Floor, Habana-Hilton Hotel (commandeered).
Hobbies: Ranting, U.S.-Baiting, Fishing (novice).
And was it honest? I mean, did Castro
wade down off the beach in hip boots
in a long cursing line of other contestants, Cubans,
cabdrivers, pimps, restaurant waiters, small landowners,
and make his cast, the bobbin singing,
and the great fish leap, with a splash
leap from the smoky-green waves,
and he, tugging, writhing, bring it in
and stand there, mopping the brow
of his somehow fragile, Apollonian profile
while the great man panted back and forth
plying his tape measure?
And at the award ceremony,
did their two so-different sorts of fame—
yet tangent on the point of beards and love of exploit—
create in the air one of those eccentric electronic disturbances
to which our younger physicists devote so much thought?
In the photograph, there is some sign of it:
they seem beatified, and resemble
two apostles by Dürer, possibly Peter and Paul.
My mind sinks down through the layers of strangeness:
I am as happy as if I had opened
a copy of “Alice in Wonderland”
in which the heroine does win the croquet contest
administered by the Queen of Hearts.
Cosmic Gall
Every second, hundreds of billions of these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during the day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth!
—from “An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle Physics,” by M. A. Ruderman and A. H. Rosenfeld, in American Scientist
Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed—you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.
A Vision
(After Being Heavily Drugged with Inhalations of Literary Criticism, circa 1960)
Said Harvey Swados to Herbert Gold,
“American Fiction has to be bold.”
Said Leslie Fiedler to Seymour Krim,
“American Fiction ought to have vim.”
Said Alfred Kazin to Lionel Trilling,
“American Fiction must become willing
To take the reader upon its knee
And criticize Society.”
So saying, all took pen in hand
And scratched away to beat the band
And wrote these splendid works themselves
And then arranged them on the shelves,
Proud row on row, immutable ranks.
American Fiction wept, and gave thanks.
Les Saints Nouveaux
Proust, doing penance
in a cork-lined room,
numbered the petals
in the orchards of doom
and sighed through the vortex
of his own strained breath
the wonderfully abundant
perfume called Death.
Brancusi, an anchorite
among rough shapes,
blessed each with his eyes
until like grapes
they popped, releasing
kernels of motion
as patiently worked
as if by the ocean.
Cézanne, grave man,
pondered the scene
and saw it with passion
as orange and green,
and weighted his strokes
with days of decision,
and founded on apples
theologies of vision.
The Descent of Mr. Aldez
Mr. Aldez, a cloud physicist, came down last year to study airborne ice crystals.
—dispatch from Antarctica in the Times
That cloud—ambiguous, not
a horse, or a whale, but what?—
comes down through the crystalline mist.
It is a physicist!
Like fog, on cat’s feet, tiptoeing
to where the bits of ice are blowing,
it drifts, and eddies, and spies
its prey through vaporous eyes
and pounces! With billowing paws
the vague thing smokily claws
the fluttering air, notes its traits,
smiles knowingly, and dissipates.
Upon Learning That a Town Exists in Virginia Called Upperville
In Upperville, the upper crust
Say “Bottoms up!” from dawn to dusk
And “Ups-a-daisy, dear!” at will—
I want to live in Upperville.
One-upmanship is there the rule,
And children learn about, at school,
The Rise of Silas Lapham and
Why gravitation has been banned.
High hamlet, ho!—my mind’s eye sees
Thy ruddy uplands, lofty trees,
Upsurging streams, and towering dogs;
There are no valleys, dumps, or bogs.
Depression never dares intrude
Upon thy sweet upswinging mood;
Downcast, long-fallen, let me go
To where the cattle never low.
I’ve always known there was a town
Just right for me; I’ll settle down
And be uplifted all day long—
Fair Upperville, accept my song.
Recital
ROGER BOBO GIVES
RECITAL ON TUBA
—headline in The New York Times
Eskimos in Manitoba,
Barracuda off Aruba,
Cock an ear when Roger Bobo
Starts to solo on the tuba.
Men of every station—Pooh-Bah,
Nabob, bozo, toff, and hobo—
Cry in unison, “Indubi-
Tably, there is simply nobo-
Dy who oompahs on the tubo,
Solo, quite like Roger Bubo!”
I Missed His Book, but I Read His Name
“The Silver Pilgrimage,” by M. Anantanarayanan … 160 pages. Criterion. $3
.95.
—The New York Times
Though authors are a dreadful clan
To be avoided if you can,
I’d like to meet the Indian,
M. Anantanarayanan.
I picture him as short and tan.
We’d meet, perhaps, in Hindustan.
I’d say, with admirable élan,
“Ah, Anantanarayanan—
I’ve heard of you. The Times once ran
A notice on your novel, an
Unusual tale of God and Man.”
And Anantanarayanan
Would seat me on a lush divan
And read his name—that sumptuous span
Of “a”s and “n”s more lovely than
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan”—
Aloud to me all day. I plan
Henceforth to be an ardent fan
Of Anantanarayanan—
M. Anantanarayanan.
On the Inclusion of Miniature Dinosaurs in Breakfast Cereal Boxes
A post-historic herbivore,
I come to breakfast looking for
A bite. Behind the box of Brex
I find Tyrannosaurus rex.
And lo! beyond the Sugar Pops,
An acetate Triceratops.
And here! across the Shredded Wheat,
The spoor of Brontosaurus feet.
Too unawake to dwell upon
A model of Iguanodon,
I hide within the Raisin Bran;
And thus begins the dawn of Man.
The High-Hearts
Assumption of erect posture in man lifts the heart higher above the ground than in any other animal now living except the giraffe and the elephant.
—from an article titled “Anatomy” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Proud elephant, by accident of bulk,
Upreared the mammoth cardiacal hulk
That plunged his storm of blood through canvas veins.
Enthroned beneath his tusks, unseen, it reigns
In dark state, stoutly ribbed, suffused with doubt,
Where lions have to leap to seek it out.
Herbivorous giraffe, in dappled love
With green and sunstruck edibles above,
Yearned with his bones; in an aeon or so,
His glad heart left his ankles far below,
And there, where forelegs turn to throat, it trem-
Bles like a blossom halfway up a stem.
Poor man, an ape anxious to use his paws,
Became erect and held the pose because
His brain, developing beyond his ken,
Kept whispering, “The universe wants men.”
So still he strains to keep his heart aloft,
Too high and low at once, too hard and soft.
Marriage Counsel
WHY MARRY OGRE
JUST TO GET HUBBY?
—headline in the Boston Herald
Why marry ogre
Just to get hubby?
Has he a brogue, or
Are his legs stubby?
Smokes he a stogie?
Is he not sober?
Is he too logy
And dull as a crowbar?
Tom, Dick, and Harry:
Garrulous, greedy,
And grouchy. They vary
From savage to seedy,
And, once wed, will parry
To be set asunder.
O harpy, why marry
Ogre? I wonder.
The Handkerchiefs of Khaibar Khan
Arriving for a Paris vacation with a wardrobe which included … 818 handkerchiefs … Iran’s Khaibar Khan explained with disarming candor: “I was fortunate to be born in the middle of an area where oil comes from.”
—Life
In Nishapur did Khaibar Khan
With stately ease exclaim “Kerchoo!”
And Standard Oil dispatched its man
With bales of linen to Iran
To minister unto his flu.
The prince allowed, “O lucky me,
To have been born above a sea
Where microörganisms died
By barrelfuls and so supplied
The engines of the fabled West
With fuel for which I take the fee
In handkerchiefs my valet crams
In chests and filing cabinets
In order of their monograms,
Which range from ‘K’ to ‘K,’ ” said he,
With candor, quite disarmingly.
Dea ex Machina
In brief, shapeliness and smoothness of the flesh are desirable because they are signs of biological efficiency.
—David Angus, The New York Times Book Review
My love is like Mies van der Rohe’s
“Machine for living”; she,
Divested of her underclothes,
Suggests efficiency.
Her supple shoulders call to mind
A set of bevelled gears;
Her lower jaw has been aligned
To hinge behind her ears.
Her hips, sweet ball-and-socket joints,
Are padded to perfection;
Each knee, with its patella, points
In just the right direction.
Her fingertips remind me of
A digital computer;
She couldn’t be, my shapely love,
A millimeter cuter.
Die Neuen Heiligen
Kierkegaard, a
cripple and a Dane,
disdained to marry;
the consequent strain
unsprang the whirling
gay knives of his wits,
which slashed the Ideal
and himself to bits.
Kafka, a lawyer
and citizen of Prague,
became consumptive
in the metaphysic fog
and, coughing with laughter,
lampooned the sad state
that judged its defendants
all guilty of Fate.
Karl Barth, more healthy,
and married, and Swiss,
lived longer, yet took
small comfort from this;
Nein! he cried, rooting
in utter despair
the Credo that Culture
left up in the air.
Miss Moore at Assembly
(Based Finically upon an Item in The New York Times Describing Marianne Moore’s Lecture Appearance before the Students of a Brooklyn High School)
A “chattering, gum-snapping audience”
held rapt by poetess, hat
tricorn, “gigantic white orchid
fluttering at her shoulder”—that
suffices, in mid-
century, to tax one’s fittingness’s sense.
But why?…Birds heard Francis. Who else could come
to Eastern District High School
(“slum,” “bubble-gum-snapping”) and stand—
tobacco-eschewer but Bol-
lingen Prize-winner—and
say, “I’ve always wanted to play a snare drum”?
White Dwarf
Discovery of the smallest known star in the universe was announced today.… The star is about one half the diameter of the moon.
—The New York Times
Welcome, welcome, little star!
I’m delighted that you are
Up in Heaven’s vast extent,
No bigger than a continent.
Relatively minuscule,
Spinning like a penny spool,
Glinting like a polished spoon,
A kind of kindled demi-moon,
You offer cheer to tiny Man
’Mid galaxies Gargantuan—
A little pill in endless night,
An antidote to cosmic fright.
Exposure
Please do not tell me there is no voodoo,
For, if so, how then do you
Explain that a photograph of a head
Always tells if the person is living or dead?
Always. I have never known it to fail.
There is something misted in the eyes, something pale,
If not in the lips, then in the hair—
It is hard to put your finger on, but there.
A kind of third dimension settles in:
A blur, a kiss of otherness, a milky film.
If, while you hold a snapshot of Aunt Flo,
Her real heart stops, you will know.
Exposé
LE CHAMP MAGNÉTIQUE DE VÉNUS EST EXTRÊMEMENT FAIBLE
—headline in Le Monde
Le Monde regrets it must report—
In simple duty to the nation,
And favoring no clique or faction—
That Venus’ powers of attraction,
When measured coolly, fall far short
Of their much-vaunted reputation.
“Extrěmement”—harsh word, but, then,
Le monde, it is a brutal planet,
Unsentimental, unromantic.