A river which the wrist can stop
With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks
And silk of what had been a fan before,
And like such winning tricks,
It shall be buried in excelsior.
Denise Levertov 1923–1997
O Taste and See
The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
What Wild Dawns There Were
What wild dawns there were
in our first years here
when we would run outdoors naked
to pee in the long grass behind the house
and see over the hills such streamers,
such banners of fire and blue (the blue
that is Lilith to full day’s honest Eve) –
What feathers of gold under the morning star
we saw from dazed eyes before
stumbling back to bed chilled with dew
to sleep till the sun was high!
Now if we wake early
we don’t go outdoors – or I don’t –
and you if you do go
rarely call me to see the day break.
I watch the dawn through glass: this year
only cloudless flushes of light, paleness
slowly turning to rose,
and fading subdued.
We have not spoken of these tired
risings of the sun.
The Malice of Innocence
A glimpsed world, halfway through the film,
one slow shot of a ward at night
holds me when the rest is quickly
losing illusion. Strange hold,
as of romance, of glamor: not because
even when I lived in it I had
illusions about that world: simply because
I did live there and it was
a world. Greenshaded lamp glowing
on the charge desk, clipboards
stacked on the desk for the night,
sighs and waiting, waiting-for-morning stirrings
in the dim long room, warm, orderly,
and full of breathings as a cowbarn.
Death and pain dominate this world, for though
many are cured, they leave still weak,
still tremulous, still knowing mortality
has whispered to them; have seen in the folding
of white bedspreads according to rule
the starched pleats of a shroud.
It’s against that frozen
counterpane, and the knowledge too
how black an old mouth gaping at death can look
that the night routine has in itself –
without illusions – glamor, perhaps. It had
a rhythm, a choreographic decorum:
when all the evening chores had been done
and a multiple restless quiet listened
to the wall-clock’s pulse, and turn by turn
the two of us made our rounds
on tiptoe, bed to bed,
counting by flashlight how many pairs
of open eyes were turned to us,
noting all we were trained to note,
we were gravely dancing – starched
in our caps, our trained replies,
our whispering aprons – the well-rehearsed
pavanne of power. Yes, wasn’t it power,
and not compassion,
gave our young hearts
their hard fervor? I hated
to scrub out lockers, to hand out trays of
unappetizing food, and by day, or the tail-end of night
(daybreak dull on gray faces – ours and theirs)
the anxious hurry, the scolding old-maid bosses.
But I loved the power
of our ordered nights,
gleaming surfaces I’d helped to polish
making patterns in the shipshape
halfdark –
loved
the knowing what to do, and doing it,
list of tasks getting shorter
hour by hour. And knowing
all the while that Emergency
might ring with a case to admit, anytime,
if a bed were empty. Poised,
ready for that.
The camera
never returned to the hospital ward,
the story moved on into the streets,
into the rooms where people lived.
But I got lost in the death rooms a while,
remembering being (crudely, cruelly,
just as a soldier or one of the guards
from Dachau might be) in love with order,
an angel like the chercheuses de poux, floating
noiseless from bed to bed,
smoothing pillows, tipping
water to parched lips, writing
details of agony carefully into the Night Report.
Kenneth Koch 1925–2002
Mending Sump
‘Hiram, I think the sump is backing up.
The bathroom floor boards for above two weeks
Have seemed soaked through. A little bird, I think
Has wandered in the pipes, and all’s gone wrong.’
‘Something there is that doesn’t hump a sump,’
He said; and through his head she saw a cloud
That seemed to twinkle. ‘Hiram, well,’ she said,
‘Smith is come home! I saw his face just now
While looking through your head. He’s come to die
Or else to laugh, for hay is dried-up grass
When you’re alone.’ He rose, and sniffed the air.
‘We’d better leave him in the sump,’ he said.
You Were Wearing
You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.
In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.
Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, ‘Do most boys think that most girls are bad?’
I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s girls who think that boys are bad.’ Then we read Snowbound together
And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes.
Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair.
We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville
As well as with illustrations from his book Moby Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno.
Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: ‘How about a drink, everyone?’
I said, ‘Let’s go outside a while.’ Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.
You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.
In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into the likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.
Frank O’Hara 1926–66
To the Film Industry in Crisis
Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals
with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,
nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition
is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,
promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it’s you I love!
In time of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
And give credit where it’s due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me
how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed
herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church
which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,
not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,
glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,
stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all
your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To
Richard Barthelmess as the ‘tol’able’ boy barefoot and in pants,
Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck.
Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car
and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage
on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,
Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers’ gasping spouses,
the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer
Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,
her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,
its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,
Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea’s yacht
and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney
from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,
Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,
Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,
Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,
and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining
and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell
in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you
and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines, my love!
Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Why I am not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
‘Sit down and have a drink’ he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. ‘You have SARDINES in it.’
‘Yes, it needed something there.’
‘Oh.’ I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. ‘Where’s SARDINES?’
All that’s left is just
letters, ‘It was too much,’ Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
Ave Maria
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
they’ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn’t upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won’t know the difference
and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy
and they’ll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room hating you
prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it’s unforgivable the latter
so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young
A. R. Ammons 1926–2001
Coon Song
I got one good look
in the raccoon�
��s eyes
when he fell from the tree
came to his feet
and perfectly still
seized the baying hounds
in his dull fierce stare,
in that recognition all
decision lost,
choice irrelevant, before the
battle fell
and the unwinding
of his little knot of time began:
Dostoevsky would think
it important if the coon
could choose to
be back up the tree:
or if he could choose to be
wagging by a swamp pond,
dabbling at scuttling
crawdads: the coon may have
dreamed in fact of curling
into the holed-out gall
of a fallen oak some squirrel
had once brought
high into the air
clean leaves to: but
reality can go to hell
is what the coon’s eyes said to me:
and said how simple
the solution to my
problem is: it needs only
not to be: I thought the raccoon
felt no anger,
saw none; cared nothing for cowardice,
bravery; was in fact
bored at
knowing what would ensue:
the unwinding, the whirling growls,
exposed tenders,
the wet teeth – a problem to be
solved, the taut-coiled vigor
of the hunt
ready to snap loose:
you want to know what happened,
you want to hear me describe it,
to placate the hound’s-mouth
slobbering in your own heart:
I will not tell you: actually the coon
possessing secret knowledge
pawed dust on the dogs
and they disappeared, yapping into
nothingness, and the coon went
down to the pond
and washed his face and hands and beheld
the world: maybe he didn’t:
I am no slave that I
should entertain you, say what you want
to hear, let you wallow in
your silt: one two three four five:
one two three four five six seven eight nine ten:
(all this time I’ve been
counting spaces
while you were thinking of something else)
mess in your own sloppy silt:
the hounds disappeared
yelping (the way you would at extinction)
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 39