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,
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 38