The Penguin Book of American Verse

  farted. it was grey and covered with hair

  and fat and it stank like old socks.

  it began to walk down the pier and we followed it.

  it ate a hot dog and bun right out of the hands of

  a little girl. then it leaped on the merry-go-round

  and rode a pinto, it fell off near the end and

  rolled in the sawdust.

  we picked it up.

  grop, it said, grop.

  then it walked back out on the pier.

  a large crowd followed us as we walked along.

  it’s a publicity stunt, said somebody,

  it’s a man in a rubber suit.

  then as it was walking along it began to breathe

  very heavily, it fell on its

  back and began to thrash.

  somebody poured a cup of beer over its head.

  grop, it went, grop.

  then it was dead.

  we rolled it to the edge of the pier and pushed it

  back into the water, we watched it sink and vanish.

  it was a Hollow-Back June Whale, I said.

  no, said the other guy, it was a Billow-Wind Sand-Groper.

  no, said the other expert, it was a Fandango Escadrille without stripes.

  then we all went our way on a mid-afternoon in August.

  Howard Nemerov 1920–91

  Make Love Not War

  Lovers everywhere are bringing babies into the world.

  Lovers with stars in their eyes are turning the stars

  Into babies, lovers reading the instructions in comic books

  Are turning out babies according to the instructions; this

  Progression is said by demographers to be geometric and

  Accelerating the rate of its acceleration. Lovers abed

  Read up the demographers’ reports, and accordingly produce

  Babies with contact lenses and babies diapered in the flags

  Of new and underdeveloped nations. Some experts contend

  That bayonets are being put into the hands of babies

  Not old enough to understand their use. And in the U.S.,

  Treasury officials have expressed their grave concern about

  The unauthorized entry of stateless babies without

  Passports and knowing no English: these ‘wetbacks’,

  As they are called from the circumstance of their swimming

  Into this country, are to be reported to the proper

  Authority wherever they occur and put through channels

  For deportation to Abysmo the equatorial paradise

  Believed to be their country of origin – ‘where’,

  According to one of our usually unformed sorcerers,

  ‘The bounteous foison of untilled Nature alone

  Will rain upon the heads of these homeless, unhappy

  And helpless beings apples, melons, honey, nuts, and gum

  Sufficient to preserve them in their prelapsarian state

  Under the benign stare of Our Lord Et Cetera forevermore.’

  Meanwhile I forgot to tell you, back at the ranch,

  The lovers are growing older, becoming more responsible.

  Beginning with the mortal courtship of the Emerald Goddess

  By Doctor Wasp – both of them twelve feet high

  And insatiable; he wins her love by scientific means

  And she has him immolated in a specially designed mole –

  They have now settled down in an L-shaped ranch-type home

  Where they are running a baby ranch and bringing up

  Powerful babies able to defend their Way of Life

  To the death if necessary. Of such breeding pairs

  The average he owns seven and a half pair of pants,

  While she generally has three girdles and a stove.

  They keep a small pump-action repeater in the closet,

  And it will not go off in the last act of this epic.

  To sum up, it was for all the world as if one had said

  Increase! Be fruitful! Multiply! Divide!

  Be as the sands of the sea, the stars in the firmament,

  The moral law within, the number of molecules

  In the unabridged dictionary. BVD. Amen. Ahem.

  AUM.

  (Or, roughly, the peace that passeth understanding.)

  Richard Wilbur 1921–

  Still, Citizen Sparrow

  Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call

  Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air

  Over the rotten office, let him bear

  The carrion ballast up, and at the tall

  Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you’lll see

  That no more beautiful bird is in heaven’s height,

  No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;

  He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,

  The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you

  Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he

  Devours death, mocks mutability,

  Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.

  Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget

  How for so many bedlam hours his saw

  Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,

  And the slam of his hammer all the day beset

  The people’s ears. Forget that he could bear

  To see the towns like coral under the keel,

  And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel

  How high and weary it was, on the waters where

  He rocked his only world, and everyone’s.

  Forgive the hero, you who would have died

  Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide

  To Ararat; all men are Noah’s sons.

  Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

  The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

  And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

  Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

  As false dawn.

  Outside the open window

  The morning air is all awash with angels.

  Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,

  Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

  Now they are rising together in calm swells

  Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

  With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

  Now they are flying in place, conveying

  The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

  And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

  They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

  That nobody seems to be there.

  The soul shrinks

  From all that it is about to remember,

  From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

  And cries,

  ‘Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

  Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

  And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.’

  Yet, as the sun acknowledges

  With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

  The soul descends once more in bitter love

  To accept the waking body, saying now

  In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

  ‘Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

  Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

  Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

  And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

  Of dark habits,

  keeping their difficult balance.’

  Pangloss’s Song: A Comic-Opera Lyric

  I

  Dear boy, you will not hear me speak

  With sorrow or with rancor

  Of what has paled my rosy cheek

  And blasted it with canker;

  ’Twas Love, great Love, that did the deed

  Through Nature’s gentle laws,

  And how should ill effects proceed

  Fro
m so divine a cause?

  Sweet honey conies from bees that sting,

  As you are well aware;

  To one adept in reasoning,

  Whatever pains disease may bring

  Are but the tangy seasoning

  To Love’s delicious fare.

  II

  Columbus and his men, they say,

  Conveyed the virus hither

  Whereby my features rot away

  And vital powers wither;

  Yet had they not traversed the seas

  And come infected back,

  Why, think of all the luxuries

  That modern life would lack!

  All bitter things conduce to sweet,

  As this example shows;

  Without the little spirochete

  We’d have no chocolate to eat,

  Nor would tobacco’s fragrance greet

  The European nose.

  III

  Each nation guards its native land

  With cannon and with sentry,

  Inspectors look for contraband

  At every port of entry,

  Yet nothing can prevent the spread

  Of Love’s divine disease;

  It rounds the world from bed to bed

  As pretty as you please.

  Men worship Venus everywhere,

  As plainly may be seen;

  The decorations which I bear

  Are nobler than the Croix de Guerre,

  And gained in service of our fair

  And universal Queen.

  On the Marginal Way

  FOR J.C.P

  Another cove of shale,

  But the beach here is rubbled with strange rock

  That is sleek, fluent, and taffy-pale.

  I stare, reminded with a little shock

  How, by a shore in Spain, George Borrow saw

  A hundred women basking in the raw.

  They must have looked like this,

  That catch of bodies on the sand, that strew

  Of rondure, crease, and orifice,

  Lap, flank, and knee – a too abundant view

  Which, though he’d had the lenses of a fly,

  Could not have waked desire in Borrow’s eye.

  Has the light altered now?

  The rocks flush rose and have the melting shape

  Of bodies fallen anyhow.

  It is a Géricault of blood and rape,

  Some desert town despoiled, some caravan

  Pillaged, its people murdered to a man,

  And those who murdered them

  Galloping off, a rumpling line of dust

  Like the wave’s white, withdrawing hem.

  But now the vision of a colder lust

  Clears, as the wind goes chill and all is greyed

  By a swift cloud that drags a carrion shade.

  If these are bodies still,

  Theirs is a death too dead to look asleep,

  Like that of Auschwitz’ final kill,

  Poor slaty flesh abandoned in a heap

  And then, like sea-rocks buried by a wave,

  Bulldozed at last into a common grave.

  It is not tricks of sense

  But the time’s fright within me which distracts

  Least fancies into violence

  And makes my thought take cover in the facts,

  As now it does, remembering how the bed

  Of layered rock two miles above my head

  Hove ages up and broke

  Soundless asunder, when the shrinking skin

  Of Earth, blacked out by steam and smoke,

  Gave passage to the muddled fire within,

  Its crannies flooding with a sweat of quartz,

  And lathered magmas out of deep retorts

  Welled up, as here, to fill

  With tumbled rockmeal, stone-fume, lithic spray,

  The dike’s brief chasm and the sill.

  Weathered until the sixth and human day

  By sanding winds and water, scuffed and brayed

  By the slow glacier’s heel, these forms were made

  That now recline and burn

  Comely as Eve and Adam, near a sea

  Transfigured by the sun’s return.

  And now three girls lie golden in the lee

  Of a great arm or thigh, and are as young

  As the bright boulders that they lie among.

  Though, high above the shore

  On someone’s porch, spread wings of newsprint flap

  The tidings of some dirty war,

  It is a perfect day: the waters clap

  Their hands and kindle, and the gull in flight

  Loses himself at moments, white in white,

  And like a breaking thought

  Joy for a moment floods into the mind,

  Blurting that all things shall be brought

  To the full state and stature of their kind,

  By what has found the manhood of this stone.

  May that vast motive wash and wash our own.

  Alan Dugan 1923–2003

  Love Song: I and Thou

  Nothing is plumb, level or square:

  the studs are bowed, the joists

  are shaky by nature, no piece fits

  any other piece without a gap

  or pinch, and bent nails

  dance all over the surfacing

  like maggots. By Christ

  I am no carpenter. I built

  the roof for myself, the walls

  for myself, the floors

  for myself, and got

  hung up in it myself. I

  danced with a purple thumb

  at this house-warming, drunk

  with my prime whiskey: rage.

  Oh I spat rage’s nails

  into the frame-up of my work:

  it held. It settled plumb,

  level, solid, square and true

  for that great moment. Then

  it screamed and went on through,

  skewing as wrong the other way.

  God damned it. This is hell,

  but I planned it, I sawed it,

  I nailed it, and I

  will live in it until it kills me.

  I can nail my left palm

  to the left-hand cross-piece but

  I can’t do everything myself.

  I need a hand to nail the right,

  a help, a love, a you, a wife.

  Fabrication of Ancestors

  FOR OLD BILLY DUGAN, SHOT IN THE ASS IN THE CIVIL WAR, MY FATHER SAID.

  The old wound in my ass has

  opened up again, but I

  am past the prodigies

  of youth’s campaigns, and weep

  where I used to laugh

  in war’s red humors, half

  in love with silly-assed pains

  and half not feeling them.

  I have to sit up with

  an indoor unsittable itch

  before I go down late

  and weeping to the storm-

  cellar on a dirty night

  and go to bed with the worms,

  So pull the dirt up over me

  and make a family joke

  for Old Billy Blue Balls,

  the oldest private in the world

  with two ass-holes and no

  place more to go to for a laugh

  except the last one. Say:

  The North won the Civil War

  without much help from me

  although I wear a proof

  of the war’s obscenity.

  Anthony Hecht 1923–2004

  Japan

  It was a miniature country once

  To my imagination; Home of the Short,

  And also the academy of stunts

  Where acrobats are taught

  The famous secrets of the trade:

  To cycle in the big parade

  While spinning plates upon their parasols,

  Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,

  Or tossing seven ba
lls

  In Most Celestial Order round and round.

  A child’s quick sense of the ingenious stamped

  All their invention: toys I used to get

  At Christmastime, or the peculiar, cramped

  Look of their alphabet.

  Fragile and easily destroyed,

  Those little boats of celluloid

  Driven by camphor round the bathroom sink,

  And delicate the folded paper prize

  Which, dropped into a drink

  Of water, grew up right before your eyes.

  Now when we reached them it was with a sense

  Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains

  Like mating weasels; our Intelligence

  Said: The Black Dragon reigns

  Secretly under yellow skin,

  Deeper than dyes of atabrine

  And deadlier. The War Department said:

  Remember you are Americans; forsake

  The wounded and the dead

  At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.

  And yet they bowed us in with ceremony,

  Told us what brands of Sake were the best,

  Explained their agriculture in a phony

  Dialect of the West,

  Meant vaguely to be understood

  As a shy sign of brotherhood

  In the old human bondage to the facts

  Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,

  Signalling tiny pacts

  With their antennae, they would wave their hands.

  At last we came to see them not as glib

  Walkers of tightropes, worshippers of carp,

  Nor yet a species out of Adam’s rib

  Meant to preserve its warp

  In Cain’s own image. They had learned

  That their tough eye-born goddess burned

  Adoring fingers. They were very poor.

  The holy mountain was not moved to speak.

  Wind at the paper door

  Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.

  Human endeavor clumsily betrays

  Humanity. Their excrement served in this;

  For, planting rice in water, they would raise

  Schistosomiasis

  Japonica, that enters through

  The pores into the avenue

  And orbit of the blood, where it may foil

  The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.

  This fruit of their nightsoil

  Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.

  Now the quaint early image of Japan

  That was so charming to me as a child

  Seems like a bright design upon a fan,

  Of water rushing wild

  On rocks that can be folded up,