A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.
How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I’m afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.
… Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.
Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time’s child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.
Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water –
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,
When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.
A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide-open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper – cream, medallioned
With pink and brown – brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds, and Emma, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.
The real house became a boarding-school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.
W. D. Snodgrass 1926–2009
From Heart’s Needle
8
I thumped on you the best I could
which was no use;
you would not tolerate your food
until the sweet, fresh milk was soured
with lemon juice.
That puffed you up like a fine yeast.
The first June in your yard
like some squat Nero at a feast
you sat and chewed on white, sweet clover.
That is over.
When you were old enough to walk
we went to feed
the rabbits in the park milkweed;
saw the paired monkeys, under lock,
consume each other’s salt.
Going home we watched the slow
stars follow us down Heaven’s vault.
You said, let’s catch one that comes low,
pull off its skin
and cook it for our dinner.
As absentee bread-winner,
I seldom got you such cuisine;
we ate in local restaurants
or bought what lunches we could pack
in a brown sack
with stale, dry bread to toss for ducks
on the green-scummed lagoons,
crackers for porcupine and fox,
life-savers for the footpad coons
to scour and rinse,
snatch after in their muddy pail
and stare into their paws.
When I moved next door to the jail
I learned to fry
omelettes and griddlecakes so I
could set you supper at my table.
As I built back from helplessness,
when I grew able,
the only possible answer was
you had to come here less.
This Hallowe’en you come one week.
You masquerade
as a vermilion, sleek,
fat, crosseyed fox in the parade
or, where grim jackolanterns leer,
go with your bag from door to door
foraging for treats. How queer:
when you take off your mask
my neighbors must forget and ask
whose child you are.
Of course you lose your appetite,
whine and won’t touch your plate;
as local law
I set your place on an orange crate
in your own room for days. At night
you lie asleep there on the bed
and grate your jaw.
Assuredly your father’s crimes
are visited
on you. You visit me sometimes.
The time’s up. Now our pumpkin sees
me bringing your suitcase.
He holds his grin;
the forehead shrivels, sinking in.
You break this year’s first crust of snow
off the runningboard to eat.
We manage, though for days
I crave sweets when you leave and know
they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet
foods leave us cavities.
John Ashbery 1927–
‘How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher …’
How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher
Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge bottomward
To find the light? Or is it rock
That is searched? Unrelentingly? Huh. And if some day
Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock
Which encases me, what about the light that comes in then?
What about the smell of the light?
What about the moss?
In pilgrim times he wounded me
Since then I only lie
My bed of light is a furnace choking me
With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).
I mean it – because I’m one of the few
To have held my breath under the house. I’ll trade
One red sucker for two blue ones. I’m
Named Tom. The
Light bounces off mossy rocks down to me
In this glen (the neat villa! Which
When he’d had he would not had he of
And jests under the smarting of privet
Which on hot spring nights perfumes the empty rooms
With the smell of sperm flushed down toilets
On hot summer afternoons within sight of the sea.
If you knew why then professor) reads
To his friends: Drink to me only with
And the reader is carried away
By a great shadow under the sea.
Behind the steering wheel
The boy took out his own forehead.
His girlfriend’s head was a green bag
Of narcissus stems. ‘OK you win
But meet me anyway at Cohen’s Drug Store
In 22 minutes.’ What a marvel is ancient man!
Under the tulip roots he has figured out a way to be a religious animal
And would be a mathematician. But where in unsuitable heaven
Can he get the heat that will make him grow?
For he needs something or will forever remain a dwarf,
Though a perfect one, and possessing a normal-sized brain
But he has got to be released by giants from things.
And as the plant grows older it realizes it will never be a tree,
Will probably always be haunted by a bee
And cultivates stupid impressions
So as not to become part of the dirt. The dirt
Is mounting like a sea. And we say goodbye
Shaking hands in front of the crashing of the waves
That give our words lonesomeness, and make these flabby hands seem ours –
Hands that are always writing things
On mirrors for people to see later –
Do you want them to water
/> Plant, tear listlessly among the exchangeable ivy –
Carrying food to mouth, touching genitals –
But no doubt you have understood
It all now and I am a fool. It remains
For me to get better, and to understand you so
like a chair-sized man. Boots
Were heard on the floor above. In the garden the sunlight was still purple
But what buzzed in it had changed slightly
But not forever … but casting its shadow
On sticks, and looking around for an opening in the air, was quite as if it had never refused to exist differently. Guys
In the yard handled the belt he had made
Stars
Painted the garage roof crimson and black
He is not a man
Who can read these signs … his bones were stays …
And even refused to live
In a world and refunded the hiss
Of all that exists terribly near us
Like you, my love, and light.
For what is obedience but the air around us
To the house? For which the federal men came
In a minute after the sidewalk
Had taken you home? (‘Latin … blossom …’)
After which you led me to water
And bade me drink, which I did, owing to your kindness.
You would not let me out for two days and three nights,
Bringing me books bound in wild thyme and scented wild grasses
As if reading had any interest for me, you …
Now you are laughing.
Darkness interrupts my story.
Turn on the light.
Meanwhile what am I going to do?
I am growing up again, in school, the crisis will be very soon.
And you twist the darkness in your fingers, you
Who are slightly older …
Who are you, anyway?
And it is the color of sand,
The darkness, as it sifts through your hand
Because what does anything mean,
The ivy and the sand? That boat
Pulled up on the shore? Am I wonder,
Strategically, and in the light
Of the long sepulcher that hid death and hides me?
Bird’s-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.
For a long time I used to get up early.
20–30 vision, hemorrhoids intact, he checks into the
Enclosure of time familiarizing dreams
For better or worse. The edges rub off,
The slant gets lost. Whatever the villagers
Are celebrating with less conviction is
The less you. Index of own organ-music playing,
Machinations over the architecture (too
Light to make much of a dent) against meditated
Gang-wars, ice cream, loss, palm terrain.
Under and around the quick background
Surface is improvisation. The force of
Living hopelessly backward into a past of striped
Conversations. As long as none of them ends this side
Of the mirrored desert in terrorist chorales.
The finest car is as the simplest home off the coast
Of all small cliffs too short to be haze. You turn
To speak to someone beside the dock and the lighthouse
Shines like garnets. It has become a stricture.
Here Everything is Still Floating
But, it’s because the liquor of summer nights
Accumulates in the bottom of the bottle.
Suspenders brought it to its, this, level, not
The tempest in a teapot of a private asylum, laughter on the back steps,
Not mine, in fine; I must concentrate on how disappointing
It all has to be while rejoicing in my singular
Un-wholeness that keeps it an event to me. These, these young guys
Taking a shower with the truth, living off the interest of their
Sublime receptivity to anything, can disentangle the whole
Lining of fabricating living from the instantaneous
Pocket it explodes in, enters the limelight of history from,
To be gilded and regilded, waning as its legend waxes,
Disproportionate and triumphant. Still I enjoy
The long sweetness of the simultaneity, yours and mine, ours and mine,
The mosquitoey summer night light. Now about your poem
Called this poem: it stays and must outshine its welcome.
Joe Leviathan
Just because I wear a voluminous cap
With a wool-covered wooden button at its peak, the cries of children
Are upon me, passing through me. The season at this time
Offers no other spectacle for the curious part-time executioner.
In his house they speak of rope. They skate past the window.
I have seen and know
Bad endings lumped with the good. They are in the future
And therefore cannot be far off.
The bank here is quite steep
And casts its shadow over the river floor.
An exploration, a field trip, might be worth making.
We could have made some nice excursions together.
Then he took a bat and the clams and
Where hope is the door it is stained with the strong stench of brine.
Inside too. The window frames have been removed. I mean
He can pass with me in the meaning and we still not see ourselves.
W. S. Merwin 1927–
The Child
Sometimes it is inconceivable that I should be the age I am
Almost always it is at a dry point in the afternoon
I cannot remember what
I am waiting for and in my astonishment I
Can hear the blood crawling over the plains
Hurrying on to arrive before dark
I try to remember my faults to make sure
One after the other but it is never
Satisfactory the list is never complete
At times night occurs to me so that I think I have been
Struck from behind I remain perfectly
Still feigning death listening for the
Assailant perhaps at last
I even sleep a little for later I have moved
I open my eyes the lanternfish have gone home in darkness
On all sides the silence is unharmed
I remember but I feel no bruise
Then there are the stories and after a while I think something
Else must connect them besides just this me
I regard myself starting the search turning
Corners in remembered metropoli
I pass skins withering in gardens that I see now
Are not familiar
And I have lost even the thread I thought I had
If I could be consistent even in destitution
The world would be revealed
While I can try to repeat what I believe
Creatures spirits not this posture
I do not believe in knowledge as we know it
But I forget
This silence coming at intervals out of the shell of names
It must be all one person really coming at
Different hours for the same thing
If I could learn the word for yes it could teach me questions
I would see that it was itself every time and I would
Remember to say take it up like a hand
And go with it this is at last
Yourself
The child that will lead you
James Wright 1927–80
A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Anne Sexton 1928–74
Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love. At first hunger is not wrong.
The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded
down starch halls with the other unnested throng
in wheeling baskets. You tip like a cup; your head
moving to my touch. You sense the way we belong
But this is an institution bed.
You will not know me very long.
The doctors are enamel. They want to know
the facts. They guess about the man who left me,
some pendulum soul, going the way men go
and leave you full of child. But our case history
stays blank. All I did was let you grow.
Now we are here for all the ward to see.
They thought I was strange, although
I never spoke a word. I burst empty
of you, letting you learn how the air is so.
The doctors chart the riddle they ask of me
and I turn my head away. I do not know.
Yours is the only face I recognize.
Bone at my bone, you drink my answers in.
Six times a day I prize
your need, the animals of your lips, your skin
growing warm and plump. I see your eyes
lifting their tents. They are blue stones, they begin
to outgrow their moss. You blink in surprise
and I wonder what you can see, my funny kin,
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 43