by John Updike
Though faible Venus may be frantic
At this dismissal, mundane men
Have hearts of unmagnetic granite.
Released from her depleted spell,
Where shall we iron filings gather?
Stern Mars is cold, Uranus gassy,
And Saturn hopelessly déclassé;
Perhaps our lodestone lies in Hell.
I still am drawn to Venus, rather.
Farewell to the Shopping District of Antibes
Next week, alas, BOULANGERIE
Will bake baguettes, but not for me;
The windows will be filled, although
I’m gone, with brandy-laced gâteaux.
TABAC, impervious, will vend
Reynos to others who can spend
Trois francs (moins dix centimes) per pack—
Forget me not, très cher TABAC!
Grim BOIS & CHARBONS & MAZOUT
Will blacken someone else’s suit,
And FLEURS will romance with the air
As if I never had been there.
ALIMENTATION won’t grieve
As it continues, sans my leave,
To garland oignons, peddle pommes,
And stack endives till kingdom come.
La mer will wash up on the sand
Les poissons morts regardless, and
JOURNAUX will ask, though I’m away,
“UN AUTRE MARI POUR B.B.?”
Some Frenchmen
Monsieur Étienne de Silhouette*
Was slim and uniformly black;
His profile was superb, and yet
He vanished when he turned his back.
Humane and gaunt, precise and tall
Loomed Docteur J. I. Guillotin;†
He had one tooth, diagonal
And loose, which, when it fell, spelled fin.
André-Marie Ampère,‡ a spark,
Would visit other people’s homes
And gobble volts until the dark
Was lit by his resisting ohms.
Another type, Daguerre (Louis),§
In silver salts would soak his head,
Expose himself to light, and be
Developed just in time for bed.
Too brassy, tout Paris agreed
Of Adolph Sax,|| who, Belgian-born,
With cone-shaped bore and single reed,
Forever tooted his own horn.
* * *
*1709–1767.
†1738–1814.
‡1775–1836.
§1789–1851.
||1814–1894
Sea Knell
Pulsating Tones in Ocean
Laid to Whale Heartbeats
—The New York Times
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.…
—Byron
I wandered to the surfy marge
To eavesdrop on the surge;
The ocean’s pulse was slow and large
And solemn as a dirge.
“Aha,” mused I, “the beat of Time,
Eternally sonorous,
Entombed forever in the brine,
A fatal warning for us.”
“Not so!” bespoke a jolly whale
Who spouted into view.
“That pulsing merely proves I’m hale
And hearty, matey, too!
“Rejoice, my lad—my health is sound,
The very deeps attest!
It permeates the blue profound
And makes the wavelets crest!”
With that, he plunged, in sheer excess
Of spirits. On the shore,
I hearkened with an ear much less
Byronic than before.
Vow
(On Discovering Oneself Listed on the Back of a Concert Program as a “Museum Friend of Early Music”)
May I forever a Muse-
Um Friend of Early Music be;
May I be never loath to thrill
When three-stringed rebecs thinly trill,
Or fail to have a lumpish throat
When crumhorns bleat their fuzzy note.
I’ll often audit, with ma femme,
Duets of psaltery and shawm;
Cross-flutes of pre-Baroque design
Shall twit our eardrums as we dine,
And Slavic guslas will, forsooth,
In harsh conjunction with the crwth
(Which is a kind of Welsh vielle,
As all us Friends know very well),
Lull both of us to sleep. My love,
The keirnines (Irish harps) above
Tune diatonically, and lyres
Augment august celestial choirs
That plan to render, when we die,
“Lamento di Tristano” by
Anonymous. With holy din
Recorder angels will tune us in
When we have run our mortal race
From sopranino to contrabass.
The Amish
The Amish are a surly sect.
They paint their bulging barns with hex
Designs, pronounce a dialect
Of Deutsch, inbreed, and wink at sex.
They have no use for buttons, tea,
Life insurance, cigarettes,
Churches, liquor, Sea & Ski,
Public power, or regrets.
Believing motors undivine,
They bob behind a buggied horse
From Paradise to Brandywine,
From Bird-in-Hand to Intercourse.
They think the Devil drives a car
And wish Jehovah would revoke
The licensed fools who travel far
To gaze upon these simple folk.
The Naked Ape
(Following, Perhaps All Too Closely, Desmond Morris’s Anthropological Revelations)
The dinosaur died, and small
Insectivores (how gruesome!) crawled
From bush to tree, from bug to bud,
From spider-diet to forest fruit and nut,
Forming bioptic vision and
The grasping hand.
These perfect monkeys then were faced
With shrinking groves; the challenged race,
De-Edenized by glacial whim,
Sent forth from its arboreal cradle him
Who engineered himself to run
With deer and lion—
The “naked ape.” Why naked? Well,
Upon those meaty plains, that veldt
Of prey, as pell-mell they competed
With cheetahs, hairy primates overheated;
Selection pressure, just though cruel,
Favored the cool.
Unlikeliest of hunters, nude
And weak and tardy to mature,
This ill-cast carnivore attacked,
With weapons he invented, in a pack.
The tribe was born. To set men free,
The family
Evolved; monogamy occurred.
The female—sexually alert
Throughout the month, equipped to have
Pronounced orgasms—perpetrated love.
The married state decreed its lex
Privata: sex.
And Nature, pandering, bestowed
On virgin ears erotic lobes
And hung on women he
mispheres
That imitate their once-attractive rears:
A social animal disarms
With frontal charms.
All too erogenous, the ape
To give his lusts a decent shape
Conceived the cocktail party, where
Unmates refuse to touch each other’s hair
And make small “grooming” talk instead
Of going to bed.
He drowns his body scents in baths
And if, in some conflux of paths,
He bumps another, says, “Excuse
Me, please.” He suffers rashes and subdues
Aggressiveness by making fists
And laundry lists,
Suspension bridges, aeroplanes,
And charts that show biweekly gains
And losses. Noble animal!
To try to lead on this terrestrial ball,
With grasping hand and saucy wife,
The upright life.
The Origin of Laughter
(Again, after Desmond Morris)
Hunched in the dark beneath his mother’s heart,
The fetus sleeps and listens; dropped into light,
He seeks to lean his ear against the breast
Where the known rhythm holds its secret pace.
Slowly, slowly, through blizzards of dozing,
A face is gathered, starting with the eyes—
At first, quite any face; two painted dots
On cardboard stir a responsive smile. Soon
No face but one will serve: the mother’s,
A mist, a cloud that clearly understands.
She teases him, pretends to let him drop.
He wants to cry but knows that she is good.
Out of this sudden mix, this terror rimmed
With half-protective flesh, a laugh is born.
The Average Egyptian Faces Death
(Based upon an Article in Life)
Anubis, jackal-headed god
of mummification, will tenderly
eviscerate my corpse, oil it, salt it,
soothe it with unguent gods’ tears and honey.
My soul will be a ba-bird,
a shadow, free to move in and out
of my muralled house,
though it’s no pyramid.
In the court of Osiris the gods
will weigh my heart
for virtue; in the Field of Reeds
baboons worship Re,
and barley grows, and
beetle-headed Khepri, god of early morning,
infuses with gold the misted canals.
Atum the creator has set
a smoky partition in the midst of things,
but the Nile flows through;
death has no other name than ankh, life.
Painted Wives
Soot, house-dust, and tar didn’t go far
With implacably bathing Madame Bonnard;
Her yellowish skin has immortally been
Turned mauve by the tints she was seen floating in.
Prim, pensive, and wan, Madame Cézanne
Posed with her purple-ish clothes oddly on;
Tipped slightly askew, and outlined in blue,
She seems to be hearing, “Stop moving, damn you!”
All lilac and cream and pink self-esteem,
Young Madame Renoir made the sheer daylight dream;
In boas of air, without underwear,
She smiles through the brushstrokes at someone still there.
Skyey Developments
The clouds within the Milky Way
May well be diamonds, proudly say
Astronomers at U. of C.
The atmospheres of two or three
“Cool stars” could concentrate and freeze
More ice than winks at Tiffany’s.
The pulsars, lately found to beep
Six times or so a sec., still keep
Themselves invisible, but are,
Perhaps, a kind of neutron star
So dense a cubic inch would tip
The scales against a battleship.
The moon, the men who jumped it swear,
Is like a spheric sandbox where
A child has dabbled; gray and black
Were all the colors they brought back.
The mad things dreamt up in the sky
Discomfort our philosophy.
Courtesy Call
We again thank you for your esteemed order and now wish to advise you that the clothes are awaiting the pleasure of your visit.
—card from a London tailor
My clothes leaped up when I came in;
My trousers cried, “Oh is it
Our own, our prince?” and split their pleats
At the pleasure of my visit.
My jacket tried to dance with joy
But lacked the legs; it screamed,
“Though our confusion is deplored,
Your order is esteemed!”
“Dear clothes,” I cooed, “at ease. Down, please.
Adjust your warp and weft.”
Said they, “We love you.” I: “I know,
I was advised,” and left.
Business Acquaintances
They intimately know just how our fortune lies
And share the murmured code of mutual enterprise,
So when we meet at parties, like lovers out of bed,
We blush to know that nothing real is being said.
Seven New Ways of Looking at the Moon
July 21, 1969
I
Man, am I sick
of the moon.
We’ve turned it into one big
television screen,
one more littered campsite,
one more high-school yearbook
signed, “Lots of luck,
Richard Nixon.”
II
Still, seeing Armstrong’s strong leg
float down in creepy silhouette
that first stark second
was worth sitting up for.
Then it got too real, and seemed
a George Pal Puppettoon
called “Men on the Moon,”
mocked up on a Ping-Pong table.
III
Never again will I think of Houston
as full of rich men in cowboy hats:
it is full
of numbers that like to talk
and cajole.
They say, “Neil, start gathering rocks now,”
and, “Buzz, about time to get back into
your module.”
IV
And how about little Luna
snooping around
like a rusty private eye
casing the motel
where we’d set up the tryst?
V
There was a backyard something
that happened after
they put up the flag and laid out
the solar tinfoil and dug some holes.
I had been there before,
playing marbles under a line of wash,
skinning my knees on the lack of grass.
VI
Since St. Paul filed his bulletins
standing headlines have b
een claiming
SECOND COMING.
Now the type was broken up and used:
MOON SEDUCING,
one “c” turned sideways as a “u.”
Since no one came, we went.
VII
Well, I don’t know. The media
have swamped the message, but anyway
God bless the men.
I loved the way they ran,
like bear-foot ghosts let out of school to say
that Death is probably O.K.
if all it means is being in the sky.
Which answers why.
Upon Shaving Off One’s Beard
The scissors cut the long-grown hair;
The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz.
Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare
At the forgotten boy I was.
The Cars in Caracas
The cars in Caracas
create a ruckukus,
a four-wheeled fracacas,
taxaxis and truckes.
Cacaphono-comic,
the tracaffic is farcic;
its weave leads the stomach
to turn Caracarsick.
Insomnia the Gem of the Ocean
Now when I lay me down to sleep
My waterbed says, “Gurgle gleep,”
And when I readjustment crave
It answers with a tidal wave