Poems 1959-2009

by Frederick Seidel

  He married a writer just like—yes exactly.

  He shaved his beard off just like—et cetera.

  It is a problem in America.

  You never know who’s dreaming about you.

  They must do something to try to shift the weight

  They wear—painted and smiling like gold the lead!

  No wonder he walked staidly. They’ve time to dream.

  Oh hypocrites in hell dying to catch up!

  Oh in etterno faticoso manto!

  And if you hail one and stop—he’s coming—he’ll stutter,

  “Costui par vivo all’atto della gola,”

  “This man seems alive, by the working of his throat.”

  The dreaming envying third-rate writhe in America.

  He sucked his pipe. He skied he fished he published.

  He fucked his wife’s friends. Touching himself he murmured

  He was not fit to touch his wife’s hem.

  He dreamed of running away with his sister-in-law!

  Of doing a screenplay. Him the guest on a talk show—

  Wonderful—who has read and vilifies Freud!

  How he’d have liked to put Freud in his place,

  So really clever Freud was, but he was lies.

  It was autumn. It rained. His lies drooped down.

  It was a Year of the Pig in Vietnam,

  In Vietnam our year the nth, the Nixonth,

  Sometimes one wants to cut oneself in two

  At the neck. The smell. The gore. To kill! There was

  The child batting her head against the wall,

  Beating back and forth like a gaffed fish.

  There was the wife who suspected they were nothing.

  There’s the head face-up in the glabrous slop.

  You feel for him, the man was miserable.

  It’s mad t-tooh be so ad hominem!

  And avid, when the fellow was in Vermont,

  For Southeast Asia. Was he miserable?

  Another creative couple in Vermont,

  The wife toasts the husband’s trip to New York,

  The little evening he’s planning. In less than a day

  He will enter my poem. He picks at her daube.

  There’s the head face-up in the glabrous slop.

  Voilà donc quelqu’un de bien quelconque!

  Ah Vermont! The artists aggregate,

  A suburb of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop

  Except no blacks with no ability.

  I am looking down at you, at you and yours,

  Your stories and friends, your banal ludicrous dreams,

  Dear boy, the horror, mouth uncreating,

  Horror, horror, I hear it, head chopped off,

  The stuttering head face-up in a pile of slop.

  Just stay down there dear boy it is your home.

  The unsharpened knives stuck to the wall

  Magnet-bar dully. The rain let off the hush

  Of a kettle that doesn’t sing. Each leaf was touched,

  Each leaf drooped down, a dry palm and thin wrist.

  His beautifully battered sweet schoolboy satchel walked

  With him out the door into scrutiny,

  The ears for eyes of a bat on the wings of a dove.

  Art won’t forgive life, no more than life will.

  HOMAGE TO CICERO

  Anything and everyone is life when two

  Radios tune to the news on different stations while

  A bass recorder pulses familiar sequences of sound waves,

  An old sad sweet song, live. A computer

  On stage listens to it all and does a printout

  Of it in Fortran, after a microsecond lag, and adds its own

  Noise. The printout piles up in folds

  On the stage, in a not quite random way.

  “Plaisir d’Amour” was the song.

  Balls of cement shaped by a Vassar

  Person, “majored in art at Vassar,”

  Each must weigh a hundred pounds, fill a gallery.

  They are enough alike to be perhaps

  The look of what? The weight the person was

  When she first was no longer a child—

  Her planet lifeless after the Bomb—an anorexic image.

  The hideous and ridiculous are obsessed

  By the beautiful which they replace.

  It is an age we may not survive.

  The sciences know. We do believe in art

  But ask the computer to hear and preserve our cry.

  O computer, hear and preserve our cry.

  Mortem mihi cur consciscerem

  Causa non visa est, cur optarem multae causae.

  Vetus est enim, “ubi non sis qui fueris,

  Non esse cur velis vivere.” Or, in English:

  We are no longer what we were.

  DESCENT INTO THE UNDERWORLD

  A woman watches the sunrise in her martini,

  And drinks—and drinks darkness.

  She is in a dark room,

  Tubes in her nostrils and arms.

  She is in her childhood bed.

  Suddenly she is awake. Orpheus,

  A big person, is about to do

  Something to a little.

  Floating in darkness, connected

  To tubes like a diver … Eurydice.

  Her breath-bubbles rise. Backing out of her throat

  One by one, the Valiums rise.

  Sweets to the sweet, yellow pills for a princess—

  Orpheus holds out a bouquet

  Of yellow tulips like a torch,

  And shines it on her, and stares down at her.

  She drinks his syrup, drooling in her sleep.

  She lisps in a happy little girl’s voice:

  “The man is bad—I hate him.

  The little girl is bad. She loves him.”

  A BEAUTIFUL DAY OUTSIDE

  I still lived, and sat there in the sun,

  Too depressed to savor my melancholia.

  I wore a cardboard crown. I held

  A sceptre with a star on top.

  I was on a hill, looking over at a mountain.

  The sky was bald blue above.

  Pine needles made

  Something softer than a breast beneath the fits-all royal hose.

  I was like an inmate of Charenton

  Dully propped up on a throne outdoors, playing

  “Fatigue of the Brave”—fatigue such as of a fireman holding

  A still warm baby, waiting for the body bag.

  Professional depression,

  In an age of revolutionary fire

  And having to grow up. This king did not wish to—

  Still declined to be beheaded at forty-three.

  But that I was depressed,

  I had diagnosed the depression thus:

  Ambivalence at a standstill—

  Party-favor crown, real-life guillotine.

  I still lived. I sat there in the sun:

  Just water and salt conducting a weak current

  Between the scent of pine and the foot smell

  Of weeds reeking in the hot sun.

  The children’s party crown I wore

  Dazzled my thinning hair like a halo.

  The crown was crenellated like a castle wall.

  A leper begged outside the wall.

  In an upper gallery of the castle,

  A young woman curtsied to the king and said: “Sire,

  You are a beautiful day outside.”

  The king stuck his stick down her throat to shut her up.

  Children, of all things bad, the best is to kill a king.

  Next best: to kill yourself out of fear of death.

  Next best: to grovel and beg. I took for my own motto

  I rot before I ripen.

  YEARS HAVE PASSED

  Seeing you again.

  Your glide, your gaze.

  Your very quiet voice.

  Your terror. Your quiet eyes.

  THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR


  Oh never to be yourself,

  Never to let be

  And simply be there.

  The same

  Morning ink blot in the mirror

  Making a face up,

  Making up a face. You need

  All your strength

  Never to be yourself.

  Skirt, boots, and sweater

  Green as a stem.

  I’ll wear them.

  Take me down from the shelf.

  Oh never to be yourself

  And always to be the same.

  Like the air and the wind,

  The wind and the air.

  I hear a very quiet voice,

  Emphatic like a flower,

  Saying

  It is I.

  FEVER

  The soft street canyon was silent. In silence the new snow

  Layered a rolling swell. The greatest evening

  Tilted and rose against the tiny window:

  Like her juggled soaking fishbowl swinging

  A wave that burst into suds. A feeler of ice,

  See-through and frail, scaled the whitening lace

  Of the window guard, now more visible,

  As if a vine were growing its own trellis.

  The warm room watched it whiten, counting the minutes.

  Think fast! (Still dreaming?) The boy had caught his friend

  Flush with a lobbed cannonball of snow.

  But then they crossed the closed street hand in hand.

  Their dog sprinted in zigzags like a minnow,

  Or wallowing in too deep, leapt out like a deer,

  Folded forepaws leaping, then his rear.

  From two floors up, two floors below is deep.

  They don’t know it, but sometime someone will come

  And take her hand and feed her to the moon.

  ERATO

  Suddenly the pace

  Quickens, chill air dusts the air.

  The leaves shrink

  To a fawn color, held by their tails like mice,

  The color of twine.

  The fifty o’clock moon

  Laid its cheek against the window,

  Lay like snow on the carpet.

  Outside the window,

  Harlem in moonlight.

  You walked outside.

  Everyone knows

  About the would-be suicide: you walk—

  A step, a heartbeat—

  Heartbeats. Sobsob, in the noon park,

  The nannies were white,

  Seated like napkins on the benches,

  Starched and folded to sit up.

  The babies did not choose the carriages,

  Limousine coffers, blackly London;

  They did not choose the rayless Tartar sun,

  Sterile as the infected

  Industrial steppes of Calvin—of

  Bayonne. The reservoir banks were a purple socket

  Like a black tulip.

  Anything would do now

  That inspired you

  Below the Ninth Sphere, below the fixed stars

  With fall, the electric cattle prod,

  The cold juice that shocked you from your sleep

  Lovelorn: slight,

  Frizzy, sweating animal with feelings.

  For fall, dawn rises in combers

  Above the radiator shield’s metal caning,

  The sill flows like a pennant.

  You smell the back-to-school,

  Steam and rain on wool,

  The tears not learning

  And learning to write

  With the sharp new chalk

  Jacobean black and white,

  The fantastic wrong and right, now dissolving

  In Jamesian gray. You want to be a child—

  You want to find the way

  To either more or less than you are.

  If you could choose.

  Everywhere changes or fades.

  Her hair streams like a willow’s

  As it leans to the river

  When she leans toward you

  Her anodyne, her healing face,

  Eurasian, gypsy ease

  (You have your memories),

  Lovely lost love;

  Erato’s dark hair.

  DE SADE

  So now you’ve fettered that sweet bride,

  The boy you’ve toyed with awhile and gelded,

  And still not come, wretched sod.

  Suck yourself off, like in your dream.

  Innocents, white and fresh, bless ’em,

  They belonged down in your love grotto;

  They hiccup and honk on the slick flags

  Looped with turds and the squashed-flat intestine.

  Nothing helps, Marquis. Oh try

  The scaffold again, with your bald pregnant nun.

  The hired child caresses the ripped breasts;

  She fingers herself, and releases the pretend-drop—

  Nothing helps! At least, at least—

  Sade save our republican mistress, France.

  Kiss the Courrèges boot, de Sade,

  The stockingful up to the stocking top.

  Beyond you lies the shrine, between

  The slopes of Zion, past the alehouse.

  Refresh yourself, drink deep. The brine!

  The salt and gall, your honey and wine!

  THE NEW FRONTIER

  Never again to wake up in the blond

  Hush and gauze of that Hyannis sunrise.

  Bliss was it

  In that dawn to be alive

  With our Kool as breakfast,

  Make-do pioneers. Like politicians

  Headed for a back room,

  Each minute lived when it arrived,

  And was the future. To be our age

  Was very heaven. The fresh print

  On the leaves dabbed

  The windowscreen leaf-green;

  A nestling’s wing of a breeze that

  Could not have stirred a cobweb

  Eased through the air

  And swept the room clean.

  We could love politics for its mind!

  All seemed possible,

  Though it was barely a breeze.

  The spirey steel-wool tuft in the map

  Spreading apart, the city’s

  Wild wire and grease-rot,

  Must be redeemed. When we returned

  We would begin.

  The city was our faith—

  Ah we knew now the world need not end.

  The flagpole out on the common actually

  Seemed to tense,

  Attentive as a compass needle,

  Seemed caught in the open

  Sniffing the breeze,

  The little flag quivering like a sprig.

  Alas. We could almost see

  Cloth milk flying in place of blood and stars:

  A nationless white flag colorlessly

  Compounded of all colors, for peace.

  But the pitcher and turned-down tumbler

  On their doily summed up

  The trim smell of dill,

  We would begin.

  It was new Eden.

  And there was the young light,

  There the feathery sapling—our tree priest,

  Let us say, stuck with glued leaves.

  Eden’s one anthill bred

  A commune honey pallor on the lawn

  Uncurbed, yet innocent

  Of any metaphor.

  A pipe snaking around the baseboard rose

  And stood silent in the corner like a birch.

  Perhaps only innocence was keeping

  The common still asleep

  While we overreached, and touched so easily

  What we were. We were

  Awake while the world slept.

  We overweened. Yes, yes,

  We opened the patched screen

  And plucked a leaf and stem,

  And chewed the stem,

  And tasted its green.

  NOVEMBER 24, 1963r />
  The trees breathe in like show dogs, stiffening

  Under the silver leashes of light rain

  To spines. A Cyclone fence that guards the moire

  Embankment of the shrunken reservoir

  Bristles with rain barbs, each a milk tooth, sting

  Of stings, where fall began. The park’s a stain,

  The black paths shimmer under cellophane.

  It is so real. Shy ghosts of taxis sniff

  And worry in the empty park streets, lost

  And misted lights, and down Fifth Avenue:

  The flags soak at half-staff, bloodshed and blue;

  Bloodletting stripes repeating their mute riff;

  Gray stars, wet Union sky of stars, crisscrossed

  With petrifying folds and sparks of frost.

  The rain points prick the lake and touch the drought,

  The dusk blue of a sterile needletip.

  The brightness and the light has been struck down.

  FREEDOM BOMBS FOR VIETNAM (1967)

  The bald still head is filled with that grayish milk—

  It’s a dentist’s glass door. It turns heavily—

  There may be a weight in it. It weighs one ton.

  Very even light diffuses through the globe.

  But this surprise: life-squiggles, fishhooks,

  Minnowhooks, surround the mineral eyes.

  Someone like Muzak is burbling slant rhymes—

  -om and -am, -om and -am—and holds up a telltale map

  Of rice swimming in blood like white flies.

  Ears almost as large as the president’s

  And more eloquent than lips,

  That swallow toothlessly like polyps.

  A spit glob and naked flashbulbs pop in Rusk’s ear

  And go down with whole heads, whole fields of heads

  Of human hair, jagged necks attached.

  Tangled unwashed bangs lengthening and cut, lengthening and cut,

  The civilian population knows no more

  Than a cellar of pocked Georgia potatoes.

  This Press Talk is like a ham discussing pigs—

  They need our help. He’s a cracker showing the kids

  The funny human shapes his potatoes have.

  They must be scrubbed and eaten in their skins.

  That’s the nourishment. Rusk sets no other condition.

  Rusk’s private smile that looks like incest.

  ROBERT KENNEDY

  I turn from Yeats to sleep, and dream of Robert Kennedy,

  Assassinated ten years ago tomorrow.

  Ten years ago he was alive—

  Asleep and dreaming at this hour, dreaming