And proves a mountain in me, white earth
Beloved of aspen trees twinned at birth.
Deluge
I’d like for poetry to die with me:
Not only mine, but all of it. Where’s
A good word now for Louis Quinze?
Can symmetries survive themselves?
Can the shadows of trees so razor-edged
At the fingertips of untouched women
Possibly survive a single winter,
Much less the oblivion humanity
Justly mistakes for simple change? The nearest heat
Is far. Horses refuse Phaeton.
Awake before anyone, untouched women
Slowly cleanse the body of a day
Never to dawn. In the east, horizon
Unwrites itself in momentary raiment:
Reddish-gold that blackens into mountains.
IV
…this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
—The Winter’s Tale
The Watteau Poem
Life in heaven not alto, but the freight
Train’s higher register a shriek of couplings
In the February night air bedside
Table bedside telephone 1982
Resembles her, resembles the two of us.
We are an old married couple in Corinth,
Tennessee. How is any child’s
Eyesight a heaven? Any soprano
Stepping down out of the cars onto?
The color of periwinkles not yet
Came very soon afterwards, palette.
Be easy in your mind. Read yourself to sleep.
Into a train yard cauldron one man,
Watteau until later on, looks again.
Corinth, Tennessee is a township northeast of the city of Knoxville.
Symphony No. 4 of Gustav Mahler includes the song “Das himmlische Leben” for solo soprano.
Periwinkles, in French “pervenches, blue flowers of the dogbane family, Apocynaceae.”
Jean-Antoine Watteau, October 10, 1684–July 18, 1721. Rococo?
A sudden river to the clown of roses,
S-curved presidency, the letters too
Are letters, and I mean to say Pierrot
Run among the roses suddenly red.
What’s to be said for understanding? Too
Late, too late. Those saints won’t hunt. These flowers
Understand nothing of the waking sleep
Makes poetry. How many red letters
In a country mile? We cross the river
Simply to rest in the shade of things, curved
In a flash and onrush I can feel,
Sleeping with you. Almost sleeping. I see
A garden scripted beneath our breath and noise.
See here, Johanna, Joachim, and Watteau!
Another will entice me on, and on
Through almond blossoms and rich cinnamon;
Till in the bosom of a leafy world
We rest in silence, like two gems upcurl’d
In the recesses of a pearly shell. (John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry”)
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees. (Last words of Stonewall Jackson, May 10, 1863)
Yes, I can hear it. Inside
The tiger lily bent double,
What I’d taken for a soft breeze:
Bee mouth, behemoth, sips. It is
For you to decide. The beauty
Bent to the breaking point, is she
Sad? Is she Cythera? Turn, turn
To me, and I shall honestly.
What Watteau? If ever I once
Breathed the fine air, Dumbarton Oaks,
The world premiere of another
Country, June 1984,
The waitress is in love with us.
Are we the exact pilgrims? Yes.
The Embarkation for Cythera, painted by Watteau, 1717. The beautiful pilgrims, have they only now departed? Have they only now arrived?
Another Country, a British film written by Julian Mitchell and adapted from his play of the same title. Part romance, part historical drama, it is based upon events in the early life of Guy Burgess, spy and double-agent. Betrayal is a sacrament of the last man, of the priest unto himself alone.
Dumbarton Oaks. Bliss family estate in Washington, DC. The house is now a museum and research library. The extensive gardens, designed by Beatrix Farrand, are open to the public.
If the horse any longer…it was you.
Ride it. Restore the original word
Inside an only. And here it comes clattering,
The matter once only and, afterwards,
God.
I’d arranged a shelf of animals.
At the center was a clear space,
An ark for snow, dust, and adagios.
Comes a time you must understand, you two,
I did it for you. I left my lover
On the far side of the swimming horses.
Chincoteague, Cythera, the summer house
I never saw builded, although I am
The spook of the builders, Antoine Watteau.
Chincoteague Island is a coastal island in Accomack County, Virginia. The horses known as “Chincoteague Ponies” actually live and graze on the salt marshes of nearby Assateague Island, and are descended from animals released into the wild by 17th-century British colonists. On the last Wednesday of every July, riders herd some of the ponies and swim them across the narrow channel to Chincoteague, where they are auctioned off in aid of the local Fire Department. Once, in Colorado, a cowboy poet asked me if I’d ever seen horses eating fish out of the ocean. I think of the Chincoteague Ponies as of angels, as of tireless commuters, as recovering alcoholics in a story by John Cheever. I would like to walk beside one across the Tappan Zee Bridge some early morning, whistling the adagio from Brahms’ violin sonata in G major. In 1861, the residents of Chincoteague Island voted not to secede from the Union.
A place of quiet nor of such consent
Never any of it turning to say
The perfect life is ourselves this evening
Once the weight the desperation of it
Intoxicated as the mountain lights
Nearest buildings some distance away mark
Events of such glamor loves our waitress
Wanting to care to bring us the mountain
Alphabet of which your green eyes show
There is no cutting corners in color
The heaven-sent harries our evidence
Each sign each second of extremity
All rescued by the Lord gives freely
Unhappy we cannot say He
In celebration of the 300th anniversary of Watteau’s birth, a major retrospective of his works was assembled. It travelled to several of the world’s great museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC where it was on display from 17 June through 23 September 1984. I saw it there. Betrayal hung upon the face of Watteau’s Pierrot (sometimes known as Gilles) like a cloudy veil upon a weathered mask. Earlier that summer, in New York, at the Whitney Museum, I’d seen a retrospective of the paintings of Fairfield Porter. The clouds in Maine, the houses beneath them, the lawns running down to the ocean, shone separately, each from the other, in distinctive, pious illumination. The parts of a world are alone with God, crowded together. I can never separate the Watteau exhibition, in memory, from the Fairfield Porters I’d seen a few days earlier, some distance to the north. Columbine might have been a dog asleep in Maine. Harlequin remained hidden somewhere in an upstairs bedroom.
Blaze of fir along the ground, I mean
Needles in a finger-splay showing
God’s direction to the wind, why now?
Could it not have saved the boy sooner?
Colin to Cuddie: blow the fire.
Love to liking: lullay my dear one.
Rummage the odes for a fir tree more,
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A black finger mark on pitch-black sky.
I will lug my son into the light
Soon. Blaze me then. If the ground envies
The wind, despair’s a fine thing. Mine eyes
Etcetera will lug my son soon.
Pagans were underfoot always, Watteau,
Heavy to me and not a boy for you.
Colin Cloute, a shepheardes boy enamor’d of Rosalind. Colin is Edmund Spenser’s own avowed persona in The Shepheardes Calender. A rural musician and lay-prophet, Colin is the conscience of English pastoral poetry, forever and ever.
Cuddie, an unhappy Heardsmans boye. Cuddie is the main character of Spenser’s “Februarie” eclogue.
Lullay, myn lykyng, my dere sone, myn swetyng,/Lullay, my dere herte, myn owyn dere derlyng. Fifteenth-century English Christmas carol.
Then you, the burlesque of our lust—and faith,/Lug us back lifeward—bone by infant bone. Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden.”
Of smoke in Bethel, no solitude can say,
Or archangel. Said Christ to me a wisp
Tilted into the trees to meet mountains,
Palm trees. Company of losels and pricks.
Say it again, Lord. We are not lonely.
Asking girls at two o’clock in the morning
Stabbed through the heart, joy’s absolute only
Saying, will you be married all these years?
Bejeweled, yes, where the dog was sick.
Heaven’s gate, yes, made of pearl and jasper.
Also I had in my mind the fountain
Wept a crazy glass into my birthday.
A new car is another Christmas morning
Farther on. Further, Antoine, my roundelay.
Bethel, literally “House of God.” In Genesis, Bethel is the site of Jacob’s dream, the dream of a ladder thronged with angels ascending and descending. In my Sunday School, we read very little of the Old Testament, and so it was not until I came across Denise Levertov’s beautiful 1961 collection that I knew anything of that dream. I never met Denise, but we did have a good correspondence over the course of several years, from 1986 until her death. Her letters seemed always to arrive when I most needed them. They were like the windows of houses in paintings by Vuillard.
Losels, scoundrels, good-for-nothings, rogues.
Jasper, Revelation 21:18, “And the building of the wall of it (Jerusalem) was of jasper…” Among the secrets of why and why now, I ask you to number the death of our dog Jasper, a giant schnauzer.
A space between clockwork and the rainbow
Wrapped in wads of hay, happens a child.
Whose? Mary would say Cupid’s. Venus would
Paint rainbows across my Christ, the soar
Falcon I should learn. And so it is
Star’s lief to wander, murdering as far
As the next animal—hind, bee—nightgowned
For the fayre election, calling itself
Queenie. Children hurt one another
And themselves. Between the clockmaker God,
Combing the beaches, and His joy fell a truth
Like thousands of wounds. Watteau, it’s Christmas!
The elementary school playgrounds
Behave the night sky as if they owned it.
Covenant below my eye, self-made
Something, dread awhile to frighten rabbits
Out of the snow, but no, nothing like that,
I went to the window today nearly blind.
Christ promised me American catastrophe
All my own. My erst friends, beloved,
Would hurry away down the white, white snow,
And I would pound into the window panes
White names, their names. Below the eye, self-made
Imagination of a colored spree
Plays hangman. Wretched man. Wretched tree.
Ermine of the coldest kind, says Watteau.
Into my heart to write a Christ did, once,
The whole way go, on the off chance.
Window panes facing onto a little square of garden, Saturday, October 13, 1984, a letter on my desk from a dear friend thanking me for happy days in Washington—Dumbarton Oaks, the Watteau exhibition, a screening of “Another Country.”
Wretched tree—I am thinking of the elder tree. Adultery is the good health of human helplessness every time, every time, and also of its hair and Harlequin.
A fold field chose The rightest boy
Something to wings Well-accustomed
So that so that A long woman
Finding him nude Would love and know
The carrying Beneath her heart
Was his was he A fold field chose
In the Grecian Epigraphy
Muddle is made Of a plain truth
As if two girls Climbing a hill
To some ruins Were not two girls
And the long boy Trailing after
Were not the Christ But one Greek more
Christ’s epigone Clownish Watteau
Painted for them A hilltop home
Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions, and particularly of ancient inscriptions.
Epigone: an undistinguished imitator or follower; also Epigon, one born after; in the plural, Epigoni, as in the sons of The Seven against Thebes.
…Time is the steward of décor.
In auctioned fittings that no longer are,
Persists the image that forever is:
Ease, class on class, and in the distance, war. (“Epigoni Go French Line” by Turner Cassity)
I met Turner Cassity only once, at the home (27 Chestnut Street, Binghamton NY) of Patricia Wilcox, sometime in the spring of 1974. His patter was devilish and keen and kind: “Why do the wicked prosper, Patty? Because they are wicked!” Patricia Wilcox was the first friend my writing ever had, and certainly the best. She perfectly loved this world of which she perfectly despaired. God’s truth was an oxalis growing in her kitchen window. I last visited her and her family in June 1984, right around the time of my 30th birthday.
Very light snow of smalls. The last one,
Time at last to praise intervals when
Nightclothes, speaking of angels, begin
In cold beloved bed one flannel,
Falls. Afterwards there must be skating.
Lately, Watteau, I’ve found you often
Painting flannel and periwinkle
In the 23rd psalm. Is it me?
It is small enough to pray, and cold
In bed. Cupped in blue flowers, needle-
Sharp as winter starlight, the breasts of
Skating you know. The musics will stray.
Periwinkle and dots of fire
Praise Christ Cupid on snowy rapier.
This morning of the small snow/I count the blessings…(Charles Olson, “The Songs of Maximus”)
The Bishop’s Wife, a film (1947) directed by Henry Koster and adapted from Robert Nathan’s novel of the same name. In the scene I’m remembering, the angel Dudley (played by Cary Grant) is seated on the floor beside a child, the Bishop’s little daughter. He tells her a story of a shepherd boy’s fight with a lion, and the story becomes Psalm 23. The scene is so deeply focused, so clear and clean-edged, it could only have been photographed by Gregg Toland, as indeed it was. Cinematographer of Wuthering Heights, The Grapes of Wrath, and Citizen Kane, Toland died in 1948 at the age of forty-four.
Tan-ta-ra cries Mars on bloody rapier,
Fa-la, fa-la, fa-la, cries Venus in her chamber.
Toodle loodle loo, cries Pan that cuckoo,
With bells at his shoe, and a fiddle too. (Thomas Weelkes, 1608)
How near would you dare to row? Revisit
Your island now after so many such
Mornings, mornings the rabbits set to burst
Cornflower blue, is it smoke, is it frost
So makes the color, and you would surely
Never leave. Her. You once together set
The lintel askew from a ship’s l
ast timber.
Her. And the animals came to your hand.
The color of foam is sound, not color.
Swale, gunnel, swamp Andromeda, choose, man,
You must choose your parcel of imagined
Land and live in it, dry, berry-brown dry.
Dressed as a clown Antony, Antony
Rows for home. Christmas, they said. Come Christmas.
…I put the idea to the Steward, who sent for rabbits from Neuchatel, both bucks and does, and we proceeded in great ceremony, his wife, one of his sisters, Therese and I, to install them on the little island, where they were beginning to breed before my departure and where they will doubtless have flourished if they have been able to withstand the rigours of winter. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France)
Entirely forgotten they the license, hame and sky.
To manage a fine staircase, turning one’s eyes
To his angels of no help, needing any, they
Have forgotten. Take this engine now from me.
Beloved rib cage and poverty hame.
Bell. Bell. Steeple that buried my parents
Under the hill was a staircase too.
Psyche had two sisters. Of women, a man
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