Poems 1959-2009

by Frederick Seidel

  Hunchbacks and addicts and sadists

  In braces in the cities,

  Roosting in their filth,

  Or plucking the trees,

  In New York for true love,

  In Boston for constancy.

  You can be needed by someone,

  Or needy, thinks Levy.

  They clutch their loves like addicts

  Embracing when they see

  Hot May put out her flowers.

  Or clutch themselves. They can’t shake free.

  He thinks of the time

  He lived by her calendar

  When she missed her time.

  She gave the child a name.

  When she bled, she laughed and gasped

  Tears warm as pablum

  On his wrists. But that is past.

  Levy feels his body

  Moving in front of his last

  Step. He sweats, and thinks

  Of the rubble massed

  On Creusa behind Aeneas’s

  White-hot shoulders and neck.

  Addresses

  And clothesline laundry swelled

  Like pseudocyesis—

  That’s what he has to pass through.

  His tie is her blue,

  And a new lotion gives him an air

  Of coolness. He combs his hair,

  And tries to smooth his hair.

  He’ll be there,

  The husband. She’ll have left him asleep—

  A nap, beyond the top stair,

  In darkness.

  Light, light is in the trees

  Pizzicato, and mica

  Sizzles up to his knees.

  A dozen traffic lights

  Swallow and freeze

  And one by one relay red red

  Like runners with a blank message.

  I hate her, I hate her, he said

  A minute ago. Curls cluster

  Levy’s dark head.

  TO MY FRIEND ANNE HUTCHINSON

  Now the green leaves of Irish Boston fly or wither

  Into bloodred Hebrew, Cotton Mather’s fall.

  When this morning the end-of-it-all

  Siren, out of its head,

  Turned inside out, hell-red,

  Anne, you touched my wrist, you touched your cross,

  The Fine Arts’ reproduction. It must have broken—

  On and on and on sang the siren,

  Like a hebephrenic

  Bleeding noise from each second’s pinprick.

  Our hearts stopped. The cars zombied on

  Through the synchronized lights;

  Monosyllabic shapes,

  Devoid of intonation as ghosts, deaf to melody,

  Like melodic dysprody.

  One more terrible redeemed day is risen!

  A siren wails that it is noon.

  You who are ill, Anne, soon

  Will withdraw to your therapy,

  Vainly again to seek succor:

  Passing the trees, the fall smells in their war paint

  And feathers—the statue of Mather,

  The marble head bent seeming to ponder

  The leaves on Moses’ tablets like a shroud;

  He wears his curls

  Like a lion in a sampler,

  And hungers to be president of Harvard—

  But his hand is gently raised to heaven

  Where his late wife is

  Whose soul was pleasant as a rose:

  Passing a nailless printed finger

  (It asks, Do you know about Christian Science?),

  Anne, passing a mother on a billboard

  (She asks, Have you called Mother

  This week long distance?).

  Your breath stops … glued to the black leather,

  Staring off into no hope, into space:

  The way a fiancée

  Stares past the left hand she holds up

  At a distance from her face,

  And the plastic groom figure

  On the cake, the way he stares

  When the bride begins to cut!

  Between the unreal and the next world, stretched taut,

  Anne, you are trying to talk, wide-eyed and hollow-eyed,

  Bright starving eyes! Like sections

  Of a tapeworm, the anacoluthons

  Break off—fed

  On your daily bread

  Dread.

  Yet you wear the cross,

  The red saltire x,

  And a Ban the Bomb button

  On your blouse.

  Said Endicott at the trial of your namesake:

  “She saith she now suffers and let us do what we will

  She shall be delivered by a miracle.

  I hope the court takes notice

  Of the vanity of it

  And heat of her spirit.”

  You hear the helicopter:

  The moth wings–against-a-window purr

  Of a cat squinting with pleasure.

  It hovers nearby,

  A winking red eye.

  Green helicopters patrol the mushroom-colored sky.

  The sunstruck State House dome is ringing

  The thin air with gold quoits. The end is winging

  Nearer. Your lips part;

  As if I, your one friend, might be late.

  You are drunk

  With being loved, the demands!

  Drunk that night, while your husband slept in a stupor,

  Your red-hot cigarette marked and marked and marked

  His palms and the backs of his hands!

  Over your bed is tacked the little print of Mather.

  His wig is white as a lamb,

  But evilly parted in the middle,

  His flesh shines like marble or cold tallow.

  He has anosognosia, he is incapable

  Of knowing he is ill.

  Aspiring to be less Magnalia and more direct,

  He sees the witches’ moist red and black parts

  Joined mutually to infect;

  Championing inoculation, he dreams of wet warm hearts,

  Their extinction! Their annihilation!

  You say he dreams of Mistress Hutchinson,

  When the Bomb had descended and was in her heart,

  That “peculiar indwelling of the Holy Ghost,”

  When the Voice was in her ear,

  When, all soul, without soul-space

  Left for sanctification,

  “At last she was so full she could not contain

  And vented her revelations …

  That she should come into New England

  And should here be persecuted,

  And that God would ruin us

  And our posterity and the whole state

  For the same.” Banished as one seditious,

  Indians stretched her apart piece by piece.

  Even her shade has disappeared.

  She is revered

  Only by you alone,

  Anne, no one even knows that she was here.

  Her sweet heart and sweet mind and sweet flesh and soul are one,

  Like the air with the wind, as if she had never been born!

  You walk through the burning Common,

  Past the low terror of the Ether Dome,

  You walk over the rooftops of Charlestown,

  You walk over the Mystic River, and think of the One!

  The Voice! It speaks of a wordless converse

  Between airy, sweetly singing

  Silent invisibles intermingling—

  In bliss! within a sunbeam!

  Within a single atom!

  The mind stops … mind and body

  Longing for order and mystery,

  To be as a cloud, pure as a Taj Mahal

  Of grief for a cherished soul,

  Floating over beautiful wine-colored October.

  AFTER THE PARTY

  A window sighs.

  The row of houses stipples and sways

  As if seen through a windshield after a downpour.


  A brownstone tries to say something:

  But the chimney is too small,

  Is intimidated by the dark,

  Its fireplaces never used.

  Under the street light,

  I take out the booklet

  Of shadowless photographs

  Drained soft beiges by reproduction:

  Slave-bangles, kohl eyes—the partner,

  With cracked patent-leather hair, in his socks and garters,

  All aloofness, good posture, chin in the air,

  Forty years ago. My glasses bite

  The bridge of my nose

  As I stare into the dustless room.

  Is he her lover? But cheats on her …

  And she’s had others.

  Her veil-gray fingertips brush my eyelids, my lips.

  And will have more.

  The cathedral clock has just struck three, or four;

  A car parks in the piles of leaves.

  I think of the flower-fresh wide-eyed gaze of Greece—

  Garlanding what it sees.

  Convinced life is meaningless,

  I lack the courage of my conviction.

  THE SICKNESS

  1.

  The way a child’s hands stare through glass

  Under the frost, pining so much

  They lag behind the child, they pass

  Their two hours, patients and their visitors, and touch

  Each other’s hands with all their love.

  The huge scarred Chinaman, a yellow boxing glove

  (His neck and head), spreads out his wife’s left hand

  Just so, and strokes her wedding band,

  A lion lapping at a thorn

  In his own paw. Alone, I stand

  By the wall scribbling with my finger Pound’s forlorn

  Hymn, “What thou lovest well remains …

  What thou lov’st well …” They don’t allow us pens. Bleak grains

  Of sunlight cross the floor, as the sun leans

  Inside the tall barred windowscreens,

  While the river escalates downtown

  On flattening steps of foam. “I cleans

  Yo hans, I cleans you fresh blue sunshine,” Chas, his brown

  And blue eyes tilting madly, sings.

  The gulls, their own white tracers, dip through spumy rings

  For rubbers, fish, and rubbish. Pudgy squabs

  Peck the yard’s pebbles. Each head bobs

  Like a cork floater. From these stones

  Give us our bread, Lord, each craw sobs.

  “Shall not be reft from thee”—rose lips and flinty crones’

  Lips peck their husbands’ lips, the priest

  Who came is going. Eyes and tongues and ears, like yeast,

  Swell through their sockets as the studded door

  Opens and buzzes closed for more

  Long hours. When washday’s down the drain,

  Comes Tuesday, two o’clock to four,

  Though some of them won’t come if there’s a washday rain.

  Priests, girls run down—the hours just run.

  No heliotrope, I watch that dead gray door. The sun,

  The flexed life-dealing sun’s too strong, the sun.

  2.

  Bottlegreen grass in Central Park,

  The early light streams. Lying like

  A lover near her boy, a girl,

  Pre-Raphaelite in profile, pearl-

  Smooth lips, nose and brow, and the passive

  Long eyelids and lashes of Melancholy pensive—

  And when she rises and walks away

  A borzoi and its soft sashay

  On slender white paws comes to mind.

  We lay there like a heart, our mind

  Off to our right the blue lagoon,

  Free still of sailboats, just free of the moon,

  Our south, the red and brown brick zoo.

  But that was then. This now is Bellevue,

  And God knows where the girl is, a ruined

  Wax mask, waist-down a shiftless hot wind.

  Dear heart, those times that were sweet milk

  For our pale bones, and in the clock spun silk

  For our chapped skin, like dice have scattered.

  I’m like that lady-killer Bluebeard,

  Dead, but to my last wife’s dust,

  All Bellevue-blue obsessive trust,

  Repeating like an old blind cock,

  “Dear heart, the light streams down on Central Park.”

  It’s not my mind. Shouldn’t that show

  Have gorgeous Desdemona snow

  Othello, ax him and then fly,

  Black circles under each blue eye,

  My dear? And our Miss Liberty,

  Lounging beside the door, our trusty p.t.,

  Will she be had, will she give in

  To the Red Bear and live in sin,

  And then Red China break the door?

  Divorce, adultery, and war

  Thrive. “Let live, sleep late, leave the lark

  To cry, The light streams down on Central Park,”

  You’d say—but some say, “Miss the slut

  A little while, poor soiled girl.” What

  Else is there but—to live—to care

  For something flashy made of air

  And lose it to the wind, and sue

  For breach of promise with faked death in Bellevue

  Or the sex pen? But I don’t know.

  The smile that builds the cretin’s brow,

  The tenderness one gives and gets,

  And lives off, with stale cigarettes,

  And what old people keep of fleece

  And breath, aren’t they some help? They give some peace.

  One man here said, “Don’t play dead—die!”

  But others try life, try dope, try

  The fairy bars, join the Reserves,

  Or take the wife their life deserves.

  He said we’re locked together like rhymes,

  Us and our loved-ones, in bad times,

  And the live whole halves of our heart

  Shall, wind or bomb, be smithereened apart.

  3.

  Like a gray cat tied to the tarred stump of a tree

  At night, the hall hides, tries its length, slinks back. It climbs

  Piles of back stairs down from the dark street. Finally

  The kitchen. Just to waste the steak here would take lifetimes!

  There’s that much, and all much too gamy to be good—

  Blue tons braised, baked, broiled, or basted violet. Pie-eyed

  Waiters dump it on castered slabs they wheel inside

  The banquet room. They breathe here. No one else could.

  The air’s close as wet wool. On the last door’s a hide,

  White once, now orange, lettered GRAEFIN SEIDE’S PRIDE.

  In the room, jet columns lace the floor and balcony

  From which low music flickers on the parquet wood

  Through massive fuming candelabra. Easily

  A dozen colored footmen hum along the walls,

  Among them grown men dressed like Philip Morris boys,

  Smooth moon-faced fairies, serving trays to him. He stalls

  Over each choice until—this the fat king enjoys—

  Their hands start shaking, picks some favorite saignant dish

  He’s had prepared, and motioning away the rest,

  Pokes it, and slurps his fingertip, and smiles—“Deeelish …

  Deeelicious!” Sweating, finished, he sheds his green vest

  And rolls his saffron blouse’s sleeves up to his armpits—

  Slowly, because of the stiff spangles—even so,

  They slip out of his fat gold fingers—and just sits,

  Just strokes his lapdog, slowly—no hour hand’s so slow.

  The candles huddle, soughing, in the brain-gray gloom,

  In their pale light. His gold knuckles gleam. Not a sound.

  Don’t make a sound,
here’s your last chance. Take it

  And run for it down the wrong hallway, the one

  That’s never used, and don’t look back. You’ve missed

  The worst of it just barely. You have to know!

  Is what you’re going to say. Well, things like a girl

  Exposing herself in various poses to

  A vast steel machine and its little red eye

  Which stares and stares and never goes off. Enough?

  Behind her, behind where she spreads herself out

  Nude in her stockings and black garter belt

  On the Persian carpet, its pile the silencer,

  Is another huge heavy machine, this one

  Entirely hooded in black leather except for

  Its appendages, mantis-like chrome arms

  Which operate on her face with silver knives,

  Finally leaving only her eyes. Enough?

  Well, like the room where priests walk on the ceiling,

  Nuns on the floor, looking for each other

  In pitch-darkness with great blind eyes on stalks,

  Like dandelions. With their charcoals they scrawl

  Messages they of course can’t know the others

  Can’t see, all being deaf-mutes, on the damp walls.

  Enough? One last thing, then, and the worst.

  In about an hour the Royal Servitors

  Of the Commode come in and fold a silk screen,

  Tall and lavender, with various seals

  And names sewn into it, like Eurydice, Gandhi,

  Nietzsche, Troilus, Dulles, Pola Negri,

  And others—they fold this screen around the fat king,

  Who is seated. Under it you can see

  The pairs of slippers, the Servitors at attention

  On triangle bases. Then they emerge, the screen

  Is folded back, and in the pot are gold bees,

  Honeybees, millions of them, which rise and join

  The millions and millions of them on the ceiling

  That you thought were highly overwrought

  Gold work. They made the low music that you heard.

  No one eats honey here—it drips down the walls

  And columns, it hangs in the air—so it happens

  Sometimes that a live man is selected

  For his weakness to come and gorge, to swell up

  Half dead on the sweetness that famishes,

  And all the while he dies the honeybees feed

  On him with their stingers, until in ecstasy

  He does die. You were lured here for this purpose.

  Get outside. It is morning on Eighty-sixth Street

  Where you live. The painted clock outside

  The jeweler’s window happens to have the right time,

  Six o’clock. A girl with crooked stockings

  Walks on the feet of a goddess to the bus stop.

  An opening window flashes light out over