The Penguin Book of American Verse

  a replica of Louis XVI

  without the wig –

  redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,

  as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit

  and horses at chairs.

  These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

  In between the limits of day,

  hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts

  and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle

  of the Roman Catholic attendants.

  (There are no Mayflower

  screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

  After a hearty New England breakfast,

  I weigh two hundred pounds

  this morning. Cock of the walk,

  I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey

  before the metal shaving mirrors,

  and see the shaky future grow familiar

  in the pinched, indigenous faces

  of these thoroughbred mental cases,

  twice my age and half my weight.

  We are all old-timers,

  each of us holds a locked razor.

  Memories of West Street and Lepke

  Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

  in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,

  I hog a whole house on Boston’s

  ‘hardly passionate Marlborough Street’,

  where even the man

  scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,

  has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,

  and is ‘a young Republican’.

  I have a nine months’ daughter,

  young enough to be my granddaughter.

  Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.

  These are the tranquillized Fifties,

  and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?

  I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,

  and made my manic statement,

  telling off the state and president, and then

  sat waiting sentence in the bull pen

  beside a negro boy with curlicues

  of marijuana in his hair.

  Given a year,

  I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short

  enclosure like my school soccer court,

  and saw the Hudson River once a day

  through sooty clothesline entanglements

  and bleaching khaki tenements.

  Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,

  a jaundice-yellow (‘it’s really tan’)

  and fly-weight pacifist,

  so vegetarian,

  he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.

  He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,

  the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.

  Hairy, muscular, suburban,

  wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,

  they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

  I was so out of things, I’d never heard

  of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  ‘Are you a C.O.?’ I asked a fellow jailbird.

  ‘No,’ he answered, ‘I’m a J.W.’

  He taught me the hospital ‘tuck’,

  and pointed out the T-shirted back

  of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,

  there piling towels on a rack,

  or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full

  of things forbidden the common man:

  a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American

  flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.

  Flabby, bald, lobotomized,

  he drifted in a sheepish calm,

  where no agonizing reappraisal

  jarred his concentration on the electric chair –

  hanging like an oasis in his air

  of lost connections …

  Skunk Hour

  (FOR ELIZABETH BISHOP)

  Nautilus Island’s hermit

  heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

  her sheep still graze above the sea.

  Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

  is first selectman in our village,

  she’s in her dotage.

  Thirsting for

  the hierarchic privacy

  of Queen Victoria’s century,

  she buys up all

  the eyesores facing her shore,

  and lets them fall.

  The season’s ill –

  we’ve lost our summer millionaire,

  who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean

  catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

  was auctioned off to lobstermen.

  A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

  And now our fairy

  decorator brightens his shop for fall,

  his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

  orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl,

  there is no money in his work,

  he’d rather marry.

  One dark night,

  my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,

  I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

  they lay together, hull to hull,

  where the graveyard shelves on the town …

  My mind’s not right.

  A car radio bleats,

  ‘Love, O careless Love …’ I hear

  my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

  as if my hand were at its throat …

  I myself am hell,

  nobody’s here –

  only skunks, that search

  in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

  They march on their soles up Main Street:

  white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire

  under the chalk-dry and spar spire

  of the Trinitarian Church.

  I stand on top

  of our back steps and breathe the rich air –

  a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.

  She jabs her wedge head in a cup

  of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

  and will not scare.

  For the Union Dead

  Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.

  The old South Boston Aquarium stands

  in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.

  The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

  The airy tanks are dry.

  Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

  my hand tingled

  to burst the bubbles

  drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

  My hand draws back. I often sigh still

  for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

  of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,

  I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

  fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,

  yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting

  as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

  to gouge their underworld garage.

  Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

  sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

  A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

  braces the tingling Statehouse,

  shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

  and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

  on St Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,

  propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

  Two months after marching through Boston,

  half the regiment was dead;

  at the dedication,

  William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

  Their monument sticks like a fishbone

  in the city’s throat.

  Its Colonel is as lean

  as a compass-needle.

  He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

  a greyhound’s gentle tautness;

  he seems to wince at pleasure,

  and suffocate for privacy.


  He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,

  peculiar power to choose life and die –

  when he leads his black soldiers to death,

  he cannot bend his back.

  On a thousand small town New England greens,

  the old white churches hold their air

  of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

  quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

  The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

  grow slimmer and younger each year –

  wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

  and muse through their sideburns …

  Shaw’s father wanted no monument

  except the ditch,

  where his son’s body was thrown

  and lost with his ‘niggers’.

  The ditch is nearer.

  There are no statues for the last war here;

  on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

  shows Hiroshima boiling

  over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of Ages’

  that survived the blast. Space is nearer.

  When I crouch to my television set,

  the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

  Colonel Shaw

  is riding on his bubble,

  he waits

  for the blessèd break.

  The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

  giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

  a savage servility

  slides by on grease.

  T. S. Eliot

  Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom

  of Memorial Hall and Harvard’s war-dead … And he:

  ‘Don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?

  I do. I’ve just found two of mine reviewed by Poe.

  He wiped the floor with them … and I was delighted.’

  Then on with warden’s pace across the Yard,

  talking of Pound, ‘It’s balls to say he only

  pretends to be Ezra … He’s better though. This year,

  he no longer wants to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.

  Yes, he’s better, “You speak,” he said, when he’d talked two hours.

  By then I had absolutely nothing to say.’

  Ah Tom, one muse, one music, had one your luck –

  lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers,

  humor and honor from the everlasting dross!

  Ezra Pound

  Horizontal on a deckchair in the ward

  of the criminal mad … A man without shoestrings clawing

  the Social Credit broadside from your table, you saying,

  ‘ … here with a black suit and black briefcase; in the brief,

  an abomination, Possum’s hommage to Milton.’

  Then sprung; Rapallo, and the decade gone;

  and three years later, Eliot dead, you saying,

  ‘Who’s left alive to understand my jokes?

  My old Brother in the arts … besides, he was a smash of a poet.’

  You showed me your blotched, bent hands, saying, ‘Worms.

  When I talked that nonsense about Jews on the Rome

  wireless, Olga knew it was shit, and still loved me.’

  And I, ‘Who else has been in Purgatory?’

  You, ‘I began with a swelled head and end with swelled feet.’

  Gwendolyn Brooks 1917–2000

  The Lovers of the Poor

  arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment

  League

  Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting

  In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag

  Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting

  Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,

  The pink paint on the innocence of fear;

  Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.

  Cutting with knives served by their softest care,

  Served by their love, so barbarously fair.

  Whose mothers taught: You’d better not be cruel!

  You had better not throw stones upon the wrens!

  Herein they kiss and coddle and assault

  Anew and dearly in the innocence

  With which they baffle nature. Who are full,

  Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all

  Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit,

  Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt

  Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise.

  To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill.

  To be a random hitching-post or plush.

  To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem.

  Their guild is giving money to the poor.

  The worthy poor. The very very worthy

  And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy?

  Perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim

  Nor – passionate. In truth, what they could wish

  Is – something less than derelict or dull.

  Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze!

  God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold!

  The noxious needy ones whose battle’s bald

  Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down.

  But it’s all so bad! and entirely too much for them.

  The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans,

  Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains,

  The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they’re told,

  Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn

  Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs.

  The soil that looks the soil of centuries.

  And for that matter the general oldness. Old

  Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old.

  Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe.

  Nothing so sturdy, nothing is majestic,

  There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no

  Unkillable infirmity of such

  A tasteful turn as lately they have left,

  Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars

  Must presently restore them. When they’re done

  With dullards and distortions of this fistic

  Patience of the poor and put-upon.

  They’ve never seen such a make-do-ness as

  Newspaper rugs before! In this, this ‘flat’,

  Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich

  Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered …)

  Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon.

  Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look,

  In horror, behind a substantial citizeness

  Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart.

  Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door.

  All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor

  And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-

  Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.

  Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.

  But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put

  Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers

  Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems …

  They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,

  Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,

  Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin ‘hangings’,

  Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter

  In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June, attend,

  When suitable, the nice Art Institute;

  Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter

  On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.

  Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre

  With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings

  Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers

  So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?

  Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling


  And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage

  Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames

  And, again, the porridges of the underslung

  And children children children. Heavens! That

  Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long

  And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies’

  Betterment League agree it will be better

  To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,

  To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring

  Bells elsetime, better presently to cater

  To no more Possibilities, to get

  Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.

  Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!

  Some serious sooty half-unhappy home! –

  Where loathe-love likelier may be invested.

  Keeping their scented bodies in the center

  Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,

  They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,

  Are off at what they manage of a canter,

  And, resuming all the clues of what they were,

  Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.

  Robert Duncan 1919–88

  Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

  as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

  that is not mine, but is a made place,

  that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

  an eternal pasture folded in all thought

  so that there is a hall therein

  that is a made place, created by light

  wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

  Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

  I say are likenesses of the First Beloved

  whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

  She it is Queen Under The Hill

  whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words

  that is a field folded.

  It is only a dream of the grass blowing

  east against the source of the sun

  in an hour before the sun’s going down

  whose secret we see in a children’s game

  of ring a round of roses told.

  Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

  as if it were a given property of the mind

  that certain bounds hold against chaos,

  that is a place of first permission,

  everlasting omen of what is.

  Poetry, a Natural Thing

  Neither our vices nor our virtues

  further the poem. ‘They came up

  and died

  just like they do every year

  on the rocks.’

  The poem

  feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,