there is the profile of a man with long hair
and a couple of feathers in the hair; we know
somehow that he is an American Indian, and
he wears the number nineteen-thirty-six.
Right in front of his eyes the word LIBERTY, bent
to conform with the curve of the rim, appears
to be falling out of the sky Y first; the Indian
keeps his eyes downcast and does not notice this;
to notice it, indeed, would be shortsighted of him.
So much for the iconography of one of our nickels,
which is now becoming a rarity and something of
a collectors’ item: for as a matter of fact
there is almost nothing you can buy with a nickel,
the representative American Indian was destroyed
a hundred years or so ago, and his descendants’
relations with liberty are maintained with reservations,
or primitive concentration camps; while the bison,
except for a few examples kept in cages,
is now extinct. Something like that, I think,
is what Keats must have meant in his celebrated
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Notice, in conclusion,
a number of circumstances sometimes overlooked
even by experts:(a) Indian and bison,
confined to obverse and reverse of the coin,
can never see each other;(b) they are looking
to opposite directions, the bison past
the Indian’s feathers, the Indian past
the bison’s tail; (c) they are upside down
to one another; (d) the bison has a human face
somewhat resembling that of Jupiter Ammon.
I hope that our studies today will have shown you
something of the import of symbolism
with respect to understanding of what is symbolized.
Snowflakes1
Not slowly wrought, nor treasured for their form
in heaven, but by the blind self of the storm
spun off, each driven individual
perfected in the moment of its fall.
Hayden Carruth (b. 1921)
Little Citizen, Little Survivor2
A brown rat has taken up residence with me.
A little brown rat with pinkish ears and lovely
almond-shaped eyes. He and his wife live
in the woodpile by my back door, and they are
so equal I cannot tell which is which when they
poke their noses out of the crevices among
the sticks of firewood and then venture farther
in search of sunflower seeds spilled from the feeder.
I can’t tell you, my friend, how glad I am to see them.
I haven’t seen a fox for years, or a mink, or
a fisher cat, or an eagle, or a porcupine, I haven’t
seen any of my old company of the woods
and the fields, we who used to live in such
close affection and admiration. Well, I remember
when the coons would tap on my window, when
the ravens would speak to me from the edge of their
little precipice. Where are they now? Everyone knows.
Gone. Scattered in this terrible dispersal. But at least
the brown rat that most people so revile and fear
and castigate has brought his wife to live with me
again. Welcome, little citizen, little survivor.
Lend me your presence, and I will lend you mine.
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
A Summer Morning1
Her young employers having got in late
from seeing friends in town
and scraped the right front fender on the gate,
will not, the cook expects, be coming down.
She makes a Quiet breakfast for herself.
The coffee-pot is bright,
the jelly where it should be on the shelf.
She breaks an egg into the morning light,
then, with the bread knife lifted, stands and hears
the sweet efficient sounds
of thrush and catbird and the snip of shears
where, in the terraced backward of the grounds,
a gardener works before the heat of day.
He straightens for a view
of the big house ascending stony-gray
out of his bed’s mosaic with the dew.
His young employers having got in late,
he and the cook alone
receive the morning on their old estate,
possessing what the owners can but own.
Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)
An Arundel Tomb1
Side by side, their faces blurred,
the earl and countess lie in stone,
their proper habits vaguely shown
as jointed armor, stiffened pleat,
and that faint hint of the absurd—
the little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
hardly involves the eye, until
it meets the left-hand gauntlet, still
clasped empty in the other; and
one sees, with a sharp tender shock,
his hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
was just a detail friends would see:
a sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
thrown off in helping to prolong
the Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
their supine stationary voyage
the air would change to soundless damage,
turn the old tenantry away;
how soon succeeding eyes begin
to look, not read. Rigidly they
persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
each summer thronged the glass. A bright
litter of birdcalls strewed the same
bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
the endless altered people came,
washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
an unarmorial age, a trough
of smoke in slow suspended skeins
above the scrap of history,
only an attitude remains:
time has transfigured them into
untruth. The stone fidelity
they hardly meant has come to be
their final blazon, and to prove
our almost-instinct almost true:
what will survive of us is love.
Talking In Bed1
Talking in bed ought to be easiest
lying together there goes back so far
an emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind’s incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
at this unique distance from isolation
it becomes still more difficult to find
words at once true and kind
or not untrue and not unkind.
This Be the Verse1
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
and add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
by fools in old-style hats and coats,
who half the time were soppy-stern
and half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
and don’t have any kids yourself.
; James Dickey (1923 – 1997)
The Heaven of Animals1
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
it is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
it is grass rolling
under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
and they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
outdoing, desperately
outdoing what is required:
the richest wood,
the deepest field.
For some of these,
it could not be the place
it is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
but with claws and teeth grown perfect,
more deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
and crouch on the limbs of trees,
and their descent
upon the bright backs of their prey
may take years
in a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
know this as their life,
their reward: to walk
under such trees in full knowledge
of what is in glory above them,
and to feel no fear,
but acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain
at the cycle’s center,
they tremble, they walk
under the tree,
they fall, they are torn,
they rise, they walk again.
The Sheep Child1
Farm boys wild to couple
with anything with soft-wooded trees
with mounds of earth mounds
of pine straw will keep themselves off
animals by legends of their own:
in the hay-tunnel dark
and dung of barns, they will
say I have heard tell
that in a museum in Atlanta
way back in a corner somewhere
there’s this thing that’s only half
sheep like a woolly baby
pickled in alcohol because
those things can’t live his eyes
are open but you can’t stand to look
I heard from somebody who …
But this is now almost all
gone. The boys have taken
their own true wives in the city,
the sheep are safe in the west hill
pasture but we who were born there
still are not sure. Are we,
because we remember, remembered
in the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
be saying
I am here, in my father’s house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
to my mother in the long grass
of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
listening for foxes. It was something like love
from another world that seized her
from behind, and she gave, not Lifting her head
out of dew, without ever looking, her best
self to that great need.
Turned loose, she dipped her face
farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
of sobbing of something stumbling
away, began, as she must do,
to carry me. I woke, dying,
in the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
the great grassy world from both sides,
man and beast in the round of their need,
and the hill wind stirred in my wool,
my hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
of milk, and died
staring. From dark grass I came straight
to my father’s house, whose dust
whirls up in the halls for no reason
when no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
and, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun’s grains eye
to eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
in the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
and from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields they go
deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
they groan they wait they suffer
themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.
Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003)
How We Heard the Name1
The river brought down
dead horses, dead men
and military debris,
indicative of war
or official acts upstream,
but it went by, it all
goes by, that is the thing
about the river. Then
a soldier on a log
went by. He seemed drunk
and we asked him Why
had he and this junk
come down to us so
from the past upstream.
“Friends,” he said, “the great
Battle of Granicus
has just been won
by all of the Greeks except
the Lacedaemonians and
myself: this is a joke
between me and a man
named Alexander, whom
all of you ba-bas
will hear of as a god.”
Love Song: I and Thou1
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 one 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.
Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997)
Consulting the Oracle1
I asked a blind man the way east,
because I’d not seen him,
not looked before asking.
He smiled, and walked on,
sure of his felt way,
silent.
From a Plane2
Green water of lagoons,
brown water of a great river
sunning its muscles along intelligent
rectangular swathes of
other brown, other green,
alluvial silvers.
Always air
looked down through, gives
a reclamation of order, re-
visioning solace: the great body
not torn apart, though raked and raked
by our claws—
Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
I
maginary Paintings1
l.HOW I WOULD PAINT THE FUTURE
A strip of horizon and a figure,
seen from the back, forever approaching.
2.HOW I WOULD PAINT HAPPINESS
Something sudden, a windfall,
a meteor shower. No—
a flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom,
transformed into a stranger
too beautiful to touch.
3.HOW I WOULD PAINT DEATH
White on white or black on black.
No ground, no figure. An immense canvas,
which I will never finish.
4.HOW I WOULD PAINT LOVE
I would not paint love.
5.HOW I WOULD PAINT THE LEAP OF FAITH
A black cat jumping up three feet
to reach a three-inch shelf.
6.HOW I WOULD PAINT THE BIG LIE
Smooth, and deceptively small
so that it can be swallowed
like something we take for a cold.
An elongated capsule,
an elegant cylinder,
sweet and glossy,
that pleases the tongue
and goes down easy,
never mind
the poison inside.
7.HOW I WOULD PAINT NOSTALGIA
An old-fashioned painting, a genre piece.
People in bright and dark clothing.
A radiant bride in white
standing above a waterfall,
watching the water rush
away, away, away.
Reader1
For Mary Elsie Robertson, author of Family Life
A husband. A wife. Three children. Last year they did not exist; today the parents are middle-aged, one of the daughters grown. I live with them in their summer house by the sea. I live with them, but they can’t see me sharing their walks on the beach, their dinner preparations in the kitchen. I am in pain because I know what they don’t, that one of them has snipped the interlocking threads of their lives and now there is no end to the slow unraveling. If I am a ghost they look through, I am also a Greek chorus, hand clapped to mouth in fear, knowing their best intentions will go wrong. “Don’t,” I want to shout, but I am inaudible to them; beach towels over their shoulders, wooden spoon in hand, they keep pulling at the threads. When nothing is left they disappear. Closing the book I feel abandoned. I have lost them, my dear friends. I want to write them, wish them well, assure each one of my affection. If only they would have let me say good-bye.
The Giant Book of Poetry (2006) Page 36