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Collected Earlier Poems

Page 3

by Anthony Hecht


  Because I’m old and plain

  And never had a lover,

  The authoress of this.

  CLOTHO: OR, THE PRESENT

  Well, there he stands, surrounded

  By all his kith and kin,

  Townspeople and friends,

  As the evidence rolls in,

  And don’t go telling me

  The spectacle isn’t silly.

  A prince in low disguise,

  Moving among the humble

  With kingly purposes

  Is an old, romantic posture,

  And always popular.

  He started on this career

  By overthrowing Fate

  (A splendid accomplishment,

  And all done in an hour)

  That crucial day at the temple

  When the birds crossed over the pasture

  As was said by my sister, here.

  Which goes to show that an omen

  Is a mere tissue of lies

  To please the superstitious

  And keep the masses content.

  From this initial success

  He moved on without pause

  To outwit and subdue a vicious

  Beast with lion’s paws,

  The wings of a great bird,

  And the breasts and face of a woman.

  This meant knowing no less

  Than the universal state

  Of man. Which is quite a lot.

  (Construe this as you please.)

  Now today an old abuse

  Raises its head and festers

  To the scandal and disease

  Of all. He will weed it out

  And cleanse the earth of it.

  Clearly, if anyone could,

  He can redeem these lands;

  To doubt this would be absurd.

  The finest faculties,

  Courage and will and wit

  He has patiently put to use

  For Truth and the Common Good,

  And lordly above the taunts

  Of his enemies, there he stands,

  The father of his sisters,

  His daughters their own aunts.

  Some sentimental fool

  Invented the Tragic Muse.

  She doesn’t exist at all.

  For human life is composed

  In reasonably equal parts

  Of triumph and chagrin,

  And the parts are so hotly fused

  As to seem a single thing.

  This is true as well

  Of wisdom and ignorance

  And of happiness and pain:

  Nothing is purely itself

  But is linked with its antidote

  In cold self-mockery—

  A fact with which only those

  Born with a Comic sense

  Can learn to content themselves.

  While heroes die to maintain

  Some part of existence clean

  And incontaminate.

  Now take this fellow here

  Who is about to find

  The summit of his life

  Founded upon disaster.

  Lovers can learn as much

  Every night in bed,

  For whatever flesh can touch

  Is never quite enough.

  They know it is tempting fate

  To hold out for perfect bliss.

  And yet the whole world over

  Blind men will choose as master

  To lead them the most blind.

  And some day men may call me,

  Because I’m old and tough,

  And never had a lover,

  The instrument of this.

  LACHESIS: OR, THE PAST

  Well, now. You might suppose

  There’s nothing left to be said.

  Outcast, corrupt and blind,

  He knows it’s night when an owl

  Wakes up to hoot at the wise,

  And the owl inside his head

  Looks out of sightless eyes,

  Answers, and sinks its toes

  Into the soft and bloody

  Center of his mind.

  But miles and miles away

  Suffers another man.

  He was young, open-hearted,

  Strong in mind and body

  When all these things began.

  Every blessed night

  He attends the moonstruck owl,

  Familiar of the witless,

  And remembers a dark day,

  A new-born baby’s howl,

  And an autumnal wetness.

  The smallest sign of love

  Is always an easy target

  For the jealous and cynical.

  Perhaps, indeed, they are right.

  I leave it for you to say.

  But to leave a little child,

  Roped around the feet,

  To the charities of a wolf

  Was more than he could stomach.

  He weighed this for an hour,

  Then rose to his full height,

  The master of himself.

  And the last, clinching witness.

  The great life he spared

  He would return to punish

  And punish himself as well.

  But recently his woes

  Are muted by the moon.

  He no longer goes alone.

  Thorns have befriended him,

  And once he found his mother

  Hiding under a stone.

  She was fat, wet, and lame.

  She said it was clever of him

  To find her in the dark

  But he always had been a wise one,

  And warned him against snails.

  And now his every word

  Is free of all human hates

  And human kindliness.

  To be mad, as the world goes,

  Is not the worst of fates.

  (And please do not forget

  There are those who find this comic.)

  But what, you ask, of the hero?

  (Ah well, I am very old

  And they say I have a rambling

  Or a devious sort of mind.)

  At midnight and in rain

  He advances without trembling

  From sorrow unto sorrow

  Toward a kind of light

  The sun makes upon metal

  Which perhaps even the blind

  May secretly behold.

  What the intelligence

  Works out in pure delight

  The body must learn in pain.

  He has solved the Sphinx’s riddle

  In his own ligaments.

  And now in a green place,

  Holy and unknown,

  He has taken off his clothes.

  Dust in the sliding light

  Swims and is gone. Fruit

  Thickens. The listless cello

  Of flies tuning in shadows

  Wet bark and the silver click

  Of water over stones

  Are close about him where

  He stands, an only witness

  With no eyes in his face.

  In spite of which he knows

  Clear as he once had known,

  Though bound both hand and foot,

  The smell of mountain air

  And an autumnal wetness.

  And he sees, moreover,

  Unfolding into the light

  Three pairs of wings in flight,

  Moving as water moves.

  The strength, wisdom and bliss

  Of their inhuman loves

  They scatter near the temple.

  And some day men may call me,

  Because I’m old and simple

  And never had a lover,

  Responsible for this.

  LIZARDS AND SNAKES

  On the summer road that ran by our front porch

  Lizards and snakes came out to sun.

  It was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch

  A buzzard’s foot. Still, it was fun

  To lie
in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,

  They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile

  In the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat

  Working away like Jack Doyle’s after he’d run the mile.

  Aunt Martha had an unfair prejudice

  Against them (as well as being cold

  Toward bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,

  Being a spinster and all, and old.

  So we used to slip them into her knitting box.

  In the evening she’d bring in things to mend

  And a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.

  It broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend.

  But we never did it again after the day

  Of the big wind when you could hear the trees

  Creak like rockingchairs. She was looking away

  Off, and kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, please

  Don’t let him near me. He’s as like as twins.

  He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.

  I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins

  And swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.”

  ADAM

  Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?

  “Adam, my child, my son,

  These very words you hear

  Compose the fish and starlight

  Of your untroubled dream.

  When you awake, my child,

  It shall all come true.

  Know that it was for you

  That all things were begun.”

  Adam, my child, my son,

  Thus spoke Our Father in heaven

  To his first, fabled child,

  The father of us all.

  And I, your father, tell

  The words over again

  As innumerable men

  From ancient times have done.

  Tell them again in pain,

  And to the empty air.

  Where you are men speak

  A different mother tongue.

  Will you forget our games,

  Our hide-and-seek and song?

  Child, it will be long

  Before I see you again.

  Adam, there will be

  Many hard hours,

  As an old poem says,

  Hours of loneliness.

  I cannot ease them for you;

  They are our common lot.

  During them, like as not,

  You will dream of me.

  When you are crouched away

  In a strange clothes closet

  Hiding from one who’s “It”

  And the dark crowds in,

  Do not be afraid—

  O, if you can, believe

  In a father’s love

  That you shall know some day.

  Think of the summer rain

  Or seedpearls of the mist;

  Seeing the beaded leaf,

  Try to remember me.

  From far away

  I send my blessing out

  To circle the great globe.

  It shall reach you yet.

  THE ORIGIN OF CENTAURS

  for Dimitri Hadzi

  But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

  Beneath is all the fiend’s. KING LEAR

  This mild September mist recalls the soul

  To its own lust;

  On the enchanted lawn

  It sees the iron top of the flagpole

  Sublimed away and gone

  Into Parnassian regions beyond rust;

  And would undo the body to less than dust.

  Sundial and juniper have been dispelled

  Into thin air.

  The pale ghost of a leaf

  Haunts those uncanny softnesses that felled

  And whitely brought to grief

  The trees that only yesterday were there.

  The soul recoils into its old despair,

  Knowing that though the horizon is at hand,

  Twelve paltry feet

  Refuse to be traversed,

  And form themselves before wherever you stand

  As if you were accursed;

  While stones drift from the field, and the arbor-seat

  Floats toward some millefleurs world of summer heat.

  Yet from the void where the azalea bush

  Departed hence,

  Sadly the soul must hear

  Twitter and cricket where should be all hush,

  And from the belvedere

  A muffled grunt survives in evidence

  That love must sweat under the weight of sense.

  Or so once thought a man in a Greek mist—

  Who set aside

  The wine-cup and the wine,

  And that deep fissure he alone had kissed,

  All circumscribing line,

  Moved to the very edge in one swift stride

  And took those shawls of nothing for his bride.

  Was it the Goddess herself? Some dense embrace

  Closed like a bath

  Of love about his head;

  Perfectly silent and without a face.

  Blindfolded on her bed,

  He could see nothing but the aftermath:

  Those powerful, clear hoofprints on the path.

  THE VOW

  In the third month, a sudden flow of blood.

  The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, and the joy

  Also of the harp. The frail image of God

  Lay spilled and formless. Neither girl nor boy,

  But yet blood of my blood, nearly my child.

  All that long day

  Her pale face turned to the window’s mild

  Featureless grey.

  And for some nights she whimpered as she dreamed

  The dead thing spoke, saying: “Do not recall

  Pleasure at my conception. I am redeemed

  From pain and sorrow. Mourn rather for all

  Who breathlessly issue from the bone gates,

  The gates of horn,

  For truly it is best of all the fates

  Not to be born.

  “Mother, a child lay gasping for bare breath

  On Christmas Eve when Santa Claus had set

  Death in the stocking, and the lights of death

  Flamed in the tree. O, if you can, forget

  You were the child, turn to my father’s lips

  Against the time

  When his cold hand puts forth its fingertips

  Of jointed lime.”

  Doctors of Science, what is man that he

  Should hope to come to a good end? The best

  Is not to have been born. And could it be

  That Jewish diligence and Irish jest

  The consent of flesh and a midwinter storm

  Had reconciled,

  Was yet too bold a mixture to inform

  A simple child?

  Even as gold is tried, Gentile and Jew.

  If that ghost was a girl’s, I swear to it:

  Your mother shall be far more blessed than you.

  And if a boy’s, I swear: The flames are lit

  That shall refine us; they shall not destroy

  A living hair.

  Your younger brothers shall confirm in joy

  This that I swear.

  HEUREUX QUI, COMME ULYSSE, A FAIT UN BEAU VOYAGE…

  for Claire White

  Great joy be to the sailor if he chart

  The Odyssey or bear away the Fleece

  Yet unto wisdom’s laurel and the peace

  Of his own kind come lastly to his start.

  And when shall I, being migrant, bring my heart

  Home to its plots of parsley, its proper earth,

  Pot hooks, cow dung, black chimney bricks whose worth

  I have not skill to honor in my art.

  My home, my father’s and grandfather’s home.

  Not the imperial porphyry of Rome

  But slate is my true stone, slate is my blue.
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  And bluer the Loire is to my reckoning

  Than Caesar’s Tiber, and more nourishing

  Than salt spray is the breathing of Anjou.

  (AFTER DU BELLAY)

  RITES AND CEREMONIES

  I THE ROOM

  Father, adonoi, author of all things,

  of the three states,

  the soft light on the barn at dawn,

  a wind that sings

  in the bracken, fire in iron grates,

  the ram’s horn,

  Furnisher, hinger of heaven, who bound

  the lovely Pleaides,

  entered the perfect treasuries of the snow,

  established the round

  course of the world, birth, death and disease

  and caused to grow

  veins, brain, bones in me, to breathe and sing

  fashioned me air,

  Lord, who, governing cloud and waterspout,

  o my King,

  held me alive till this my forty-third year—

  in whom we doubt—

  Who was that child of whom they tell

  in lauds and threnes?

  whose holy name all shall pronounce

  Emmanuel,

  which being interpreted means,

  “Gott mit uns”?

  I saw it on their belts. A young one, dead,

  Left there on purpose to get us used to the sight

  When we first moved in. Helmet spilled off, head

  Blond and boyish and bloody. I was scared that night.

  And the sign was there,

  The sign of the child, the grave, worship and loss,

  Gunpowder heavy as pollen in winter air,

  An Iron Cross.

  It is twenty years now, Father. I have come home.

  But in the camps, one can look through a huge square

  Window, like an aquarium, upon a room

  The size of my livingroom filled with human hair.

  Others have shoes, or valises

  Made mostly of cardboard, which once contained

  Pills, fresh diapers. This is one of the places

  Never explained.

  Out of one trainload, about five hundred in all,

  Twenty the next morning were hopelessly insane.

  And some there be that have no memorial,

  That are perished as though they had never been.

  Made into soap.

  Who now remembers “The Singing Horses of Buchenwald”?

 

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