Collected Poems

  The little tailors busily sitting

  Flashing their shears in rival haste

  Won’t spare time for a prior fitting—

  In with the stitches, too late to baste.

  They say the season for doubt has passed:

  The changes coming are due to last.

  UNSOUNDED

  Mariner unpracticed,

  In this chartless zone

  Every navigator

  Fares unwarned, alone.

  Each his own Magellan

  In tropics of sensation:

  Not a fire-scorched stone

  From prior habitation,

  Not an archaic hull

  Splintered on the beach.

  These are latitudes revealed

  Separate to each.

  DESIGN IN LIVING COLORS

  Embroidered in a tapestry of green

  Among the textures of a threaded garden,

  The gesturing lady and her paladin

  Walk in a path where shade and sunlight harden

  Upon the formal attitudes of trees

  By no wind bent, and birds without a tune,

  Against the background of a figured frieze

  In an eternal summer afternoon.

  So you and I in our accepted frame

  Believe a casual world of bricks and flowers

  And scarcely guess what symbols wander tame

  Among the panels of familiar hours.

  Yet should the parting boughs of green reveal

  A slender unicorn with jeweled feet,

  Could I persuade him at my touch to kneel

  And from my fingers take what unicorns eat?

  If you should pick me at my whim a rose,

  Setting the birds upon the bush in flight,

  How should I know what crimson meaning grows

  Deep in this garden, where such birds alight?

  And how should I believe, the meaning clear,

  That we are children of disordered days?

  That fragmentary world is mended here,

  And in this air a clearer sunlight plays.

  The fleeing hare, the wings that brush the tree,

  All images once separate and alone,

  Become the creatures of a tapestry

  Miraculously stirred and made our own.

  We are the denizens of a living wood

  Where insight blooms anew on every bough,

  And every flower emerges understood

  Out of a pattern unperceived till now.

  WALDEN 1950

  Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord,

  Finds the town like all towns, much the same—

  A little less remote, less independent.

  The cars hurl through from dawn to dawn toward Boston

  Paying out speed like a lifeline between towns.

  Some of them pause to look at Alcott’s house.

  No farmer studies Latin now; the language

  Of soil and market would confound a scholar;

  And any Yankee son with lonesome notions

  Would find life harder in the town today.

  Under the trees by Walden Pond, the stalls

  Where summer pilgrims pause beside the road,

  Drown resinous night in busy rivalry

  While the young make boisterous love along the shores.

  He used to hear the locomotive whistle

  Sound through the woods like a hawk’s restless cry.

  Now the trains run through Concord night and day,

  And nobody stops to listen. The ghost might smile—

  The way a man in solitude would smile—

  Remembering all the sounds that passed for sound

  A century ago.

  He would remain

  Away from houses other ghosts might visit,

  Not having come to tell a thing or two

  Or lay a curse (what curse could frighten now?)

  No tapping on the windowpane for him

  Or twilight conversation in the streets

  With some bewildered townsman going home.

  If he had any errand, it would be

  More likely curiosity of his own

  About the human race, at least in Concord.

  He would not come so far from distant woods

  Merely to set them wondering again.

  SUNDAY EVENING

  We are two acquaintances on a train,

  Rattling back through darkening twilight suburbs

  From a weekend in the country, into town.

  The station lights flare past us, and we glance

  Furtively at our watches, sit upright

  On leather benches in the smoke-dim car

  And try to make appropriate conversation.

  We come from similar streets in the same city

  And have spent this same hiatus of three days

  Escaping streets and lives that we have chosen.

  Escape by deck chairs sprawled on evening lawns,

  By citronella and by visitant moths;

  Escape by sand and water in the eyes,

  And sea-noise drowned in weekend conversation.

  Uneasy, almost, that we meet again,

  Impatient for this rattling ride to end,

  We still are stricken with a dread of passing

  Time, the coming loneliness of travelers

  Parting in hollow stations, going home

  To silent rooms in too-familiar streets

  With unknown footsteps pacing overhead.

  For there are things we might have talked about,

  And there are signs we might have shared in common.

  We look out vainly at the passing stations

  As if some lamplit shed or gleaming roof

  Might reawake the sign in both of us.

  But this is only Rye or Darien,

  And whoever we both knew there has moved away.

  And I suppose there never will be time

  To speak of more than this—the change in weather,

  The lateness of the train on Sunday evenings—

  Never enough or always too much time.

  Life lurches past us like a windowed twilight

  Seen from a train that halts at little junctions

  Where weekend half-acquaintances say good-by.

  THE INNOCENTS

  They said to us, or tried to say, and failed:

  With dust implicit in the uncurled green

  First leaf, and all the early garden knowing

  That after rose-red petals comes the bleak

  Impoverished stalk, the black dejected leaf

  Crumpled and dank, we should at Maytime be

  Less childlike in delight, a little reserved,

  A little cognizant of rooted death.

  And yet beneath the flecked leaf-gilded boughs

  Along the paths fern-fringed and delicate,

  We supple children played at golden age,

  And knelt upon the curving steps to snare

  The whisking emerald lizards, or to coax

  The ancestral tortoise from his onyx shell

  In lemon sunlight on the balcony.

  And only pedagogues and the brittle old

  Existed to declare mortality,

  And they were beings removed in walk and speech.

  For apprehension feeds on intellect:

  Uneasy ghosts in libraries are bred—

  While innocent sensuality abides

  In charmed perception of an hour, a day,

  Ingenuous and unafraid of time.

  So in the garden we were free of fear,

  And what the saffron roses or the green

  Imperial dragonflies above the lake

  Knew about altered seasons, boughs despoiled,

  They never murmured; and to us no matter

  How in the drawing room the elders sat

  Balancing teacups behind curtained glass,

  While rare miraculous clocks in crystal domes

  Impaled the
air with splintered chips of time

  Forever sounding through the tea-thin talk,

  An organpoint to desperate animation.

  They knew, and tried to say to us, but failed;

  They knew what we would never have believed.

  “HE REMEMBERETH THAT WE ARE DUST”

  And when was dust a thing so rash?

  Or when could dust support the lash

  And stand as arrogant as stone?

  And where has revelation shown

  Conceit and rage so interfused

  In dust, that suns have stood bemused

  To watch the reckless consequence?

  And when did dust break reticence

  To sing aloud with all its might

  In egotistical delight?

  Yet when the tale is told of wind

  That lifted dust and drove behind

  To scoop the valleys from their sleep

  And bury landscapes inches deep

  Till there must follow years of rain

  Before the earth could breathe again—

  Or when the appetite of fire

  Blazes beyond control and higher,

  Then sinks into the sullen waste

  Of what, devouring, it effaced,

  And thinly in my palm I hold

  The dust of ash grown wan and cold,

  I know what element I chose

  To build such anger, mould such woes.

  LIFE AND LETTERS

  An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city

  Where here and there against the febrile sky

  The shaft of an unbroken column rises,

  And in the sands indifferent lizards keep

  The shattered traces of old monuments.

  Here where the death of the imagination

  Trances the mind with shadow, here the shapes

  Of tumbled arch and pediment stand out

  In their last violence of illumination.

  By day his valet rules him, forcing him

  With milk and medicines, a deference

  Cloaking the bully. “Signora X was here

  During your nap; I told her doctor’s orders,

  You must stay quiet and rest, keep up your strength.”

  He leaves the pasteboard rectangle, engraved,

  Scrawled in regretful haste, and goes his way

  To join a lounging crony belowstairs.

  (“The old man’s not so wide awake today.”)

  The ivory body in the dressing gown

  (Not the silk robe the Countess sent; he spills

  His milk sometimes, and that would be a pity)

  Stirs in the sinking warmth that bathes his chair

  And looks on summer sunlight in the square.

  Below, the fat concierge points out his window

  With half-drawn blinds, to tourists who inquire.

  There are a few who make the pilgrimage;

  They stand and gaze and go away again.

  Something to say that one has stood beneath

  His window, though they never see himself.

  The post brings letters stamped in foreign countries.

  He holds them in his fingers, turns them over.

  “He always says he means to read them later,

  But I should say his reading days are finished.

  All he does now is watch the square below.

  He seems content enough; and I’ve no trouble.

  An easy life, to watch him to his grave.”

  The letters still arrive from universities,

  Occasionally a charitable cause,

  A favor-seeker, or an aged friend.

  But now it seems no answers are expected

  From one whose correspondence is collected

  In two large volumes, edited with notes.

  What should that timid hand beneath its sleeve

  Warmed by the rich Italian sun, indite

  To vindicate its final quarter-decade?

  No; he has written all that can be known.

  If anything, too much; his greedy art

  Left no domain unpillaged, grew its breadth

  From fastening on every life he touched.

  (Some went to law, some smiled, some never guessed.)

  But now the art has left the man to rest.

  The failing searchlight of his mind remains

  To throw its wavering cone of recognition

  Backward upon those teeming images.

  New York invades the memory again:

  A million jewels crowd the boyish brain

  With apprehension of an unmastered world.

  The red-haired girl waves from the Brooklyn ferry,

  The bridges leap like fountains into noon.

  Again the train goes rocking across-country

  Past midnight platforms where the reddish light

  Plays on a game of checkers through the window,

  Till dawn spells snow on emptiness of plains.

  Once more in San Francisco Margaret wakes

  Beside him in the heat of August dark,

  Still weeping from a nightmare.

  So by day

  He looks on summer sunlight in the square.

  The grinning Bacchus trickles from his gourd

  A thin bright spume of water in the basin,

  While the hot tiles grow cool as evening drops

  Deep cobalt from white buildings. Far in air

  Buonarroti’s dome delays the gold.

  The old man who has come to Rome to die

  Ignores the death of still another day.

  So many days have died and come to life

  That time and place seem ordered by his valet;

  He puts them on and off as he is told.

  Now he is standing bareheaded in dusk

  While fireworks rain into the sea at Biarritz,

  And at his shoulder Louis Scarapin

  Quotes La Fontaine. The giddy winds of fortune

  Make love to him that night; and he recalls

  Toasts drunk by rocketlight, and Louis’ voice

  With its perpetual drawl: “Mon bon monsieur …”

  Louis, who could have made the world more sane,

  But killed himself instead, a Pierrot-gesture,

  His face a whiteness in the dark apartment.

  The bitter coffee drunk on early mornings

  With Sandra’s straw hat hanging from the bedpost,

  Red roses, like a bonnet by Renoir.

  And the incessant tapping of her heels

  Late evenings on the cobbles as they stroll:

  Splinters to tingle in an old man’s brain.

  Again the consumptive neighbor through the wall

  Begins his evening agony of coughing

  Till one is ready to scream him into silence.

  And the accordion on the river steamer

  Plays something from last season, foolish, gay;

  Deaf ears preserve the music of a day.

  Life has the final word; he cannot rule

  Those floating pictures as he ruled them once,

  Forcing them into form; the violent gardener,

  The two-edged heart that cuts into every wound,

  Reciprocates experience with art.

  No more of that for now; the boughs grow wild,

  The willful stems put forth undisciplined blooms,

  And winds sweep through and shatter. Here at last

  Anarchy of a thousand roses tangles

  The fallen architecture of the mind.

  FOR THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO PLANETS

  We smile at astrological hopes

  And leave the sky to expert men

  Who do not reckon horoscopes

  But painfully extend their ken

  In mathematical debate

  With slide and photographic plate.

  And yet, protest it if we will,

  Some corner of the mind retains

  The medieval man, who still

  Keeps watch upon those starry sk
eins

  And drives us out of doors at night

  To gaze at anagrams of light.

  Whatever register or law

  Is drawn in digits for these two,

  Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,

  Wardens of brilliance, as they do

  Their dual circuit of the west—

  The brightest planet and her guest.

  Is any light so proudly thrust

  From darkness on our lifted faces

  A sign of something we can trust,

  Or is it that in starry places

  We see the things we long to see

  In fiery iconography?

  POEMS

  (1950–1951)

  THE PRISONERS

  Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood,

  Wounded alike by thorns of the same tree,

  We seek in hopeless war each other’s blood

  Though suffering in one identity.

  Each to the other prey and huntsman known,

  Still driven together, lonelier that alone.

  Strange mating of the loser and the lost!

  With faces stiff as mourners’, we intrude

  Forever on the one each turns from most,

  Each wandering in a double solitude.

  The unpurged ghosts of passion bound by pride

  Who wake in isolation, side by side.

  1950

  NIGHT

  The motes that still disturbed her lidded calm

  Were these: the tick and whisper of a shade

  Against the sill; a cobweb-film that hung

  Aslant a corner moulding, too elusive

  For any but the gaze of straitened eyes;

  The nimbus of the night-lamp, where a moth

  Uneasily explored the edge of light

  Through hours of fractured darkness. She alone

  Knew that the room contained these things; she lay

  Hearing the almost imperceptible sound

  (As if a live thing shivered behind the curtains)

  Watching the thread that frayed in gusts of air

  More delicate than her breathing, or by night

  Sharing a moth’s perplexity at light

  Too frail to drive out dark: minutiae