Collected Earlier Poems

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Collected Earlier Poems Page 8

by Anthony Hecht

For the sun-speckled shade of the fig tree,

  And shelter in its gloom, and raise his hand

  For tribute and for nourishment (for he

  Was once entirely at the god’s command)

  But that his nature, being all undone,

  Cannot abide the clarity of the sun.

  Morning deceived him those six years ago.

  Morning swam in the pasture, being all green

  And yellow, and the swallow coiled in slow

  Passage of dials and spires above the scene

  Cluttered with dandelions, near the fence

  Where the hens strutted redheaded and wreathed

  With dark, imponderable chicken sense,

  Hardly two hundred yards from where he breathed,

  And where, from their declamatory roosts,

  The cocks cried brazenly against all ghosts.

  Warmth in the milling air, the warmth of blood;

  The dampness of the earth; the forest floor

  Of fallen needles, the dried and creviced mud,

  Lay matted and caked with sunlight, and the war

  Seemed elsewhere; light impeccable, unmixed,

  Made accurate the swallow’s traveling print

  Over the pasture, till he saw it fixed

  Perfectly on a little patch of mint.

  And he could feel in his body, driven home,

  The wild tooth of the wolf that suckled Rome.

  What if he came and stood beside my tree,

  A poor, transparent thing with nothing to do,

  His chest showing a jagged vacancy

  Through which I might admire the distant view?

  My house is solid, and the windows house

  In their fine membranes the gelatinous light,

  But darkness follows, and the dark allows

  Obscure hints of a tapping sound at night.

  And yet it may be merely that I dream

  A woodpecker attacks the attic beam.

  It is as well the light keeps him away;

  We should have little to say in days like these,

  Although once friends. We should have little to say,

  But that there will be much planting of fig trees,

  And Venus shall be clad in the prim leaf,

  And turn a solitary. And her god, forgot,

  Cast by that emblem out, shall spend his grief

  Upon us. In that day the fruit shall rot

  Unharvested. Then shall the sullen god

  Perform his mindless fury in our blood.

  A ROMAN HOLIDAY

  I write from Rome. Last year, the Holy Year,

  The flock was belled, and pilgrims came to see

  How milkweed mocked the buried engineer,

  Wedging between his marble works, where free

  And famished went the lions forth to tear

  A living meal from the offending knee,

  And where, on pagan ground, turned to our good,

  Santa Maria sopra Minerva stood.

  And came to see where Caesar Augustus turned

  Brick into marble, thus to celebrate

  Apollo’s Peace, that lately had been learned,

  And where the Rock that bears the Church’s weight,

  Crucified Peter, raised his eyes and yearned

  For final sight of heavenly estate,

  But saw ungainly huge above his head

  Our stony base to which the flesh is wed.

  And see the wealthy, terraced Palatine,

  Where once the unknown god or goddess ruled

  In mystery and silence, whose divine

  Name has been lost or hidden from the fooled,

  Daydreaming employee who guards the shrine

  And has forgotten how men have been schooled

  To hide the Hebrew Vowels, that craft or sin

  Might not pronounce their sacred origin.

  And has forgot that on the temple floor

  Once was a Vestal Virgin overcome Even by muscle of the god of war,

  And ran full of unearthly passion home,

  Being made divinity’s elected whore

  And fertile with the twins that founded Rome.

  Columns are down. Unknown the ruined face

  Of travertine, found in a swampy place.

  Yet there was wisdom even then that said,

  Nothing endures at last but only One;

  Sands shift in the wind, petals are shed,

  Eternal cities also are undone;

  Informed the living and the pious dead

  That there is no new thing under the sun,

  Nor can the best ambition come to good

  When it is founded on a brother’s blood.

  I write from Rome. It is late afternoon

  Nearing the Christmas season. Blooded light

  Floods through the Colosseum, where platoon

  And phalanx of the Lord slaved for the might

  Of Titus’ pleasure. Blood repeats its tune

  Loudly against my eardrums as I write,

  And recollects what they were made to pay

  Who out of worship put their swords away.

  The bells declare it. “Crime is at the base,”

  Rings in the belfry where the blood is choired.

  Crime stares from the unknown, ruined face,

  And the cold wind, endless and wrath-inspired,

  Cries out for judgment in a swampy place

  As darkness claims the trees. “Blood is required,

  And it shall fall,” below the Seven Hills

  The blood of Remus whispers out of wells.

  ALCESTE IN THE WILDERNESS

  Non, je ne puis souffrir cette lâche méthode

  Qu’affectent la plupart de vos gens à la mode…

  MOLIERE: Le Misanthrope

  Evening is clogged with gnats as the light fails,

  And branches bloom with gold and copper screams

  Of birds with figured and sought-after tails

  To plume a lady’s gear; the motet wails

  Through Africa upon dissimilar themes.

  A little snuffbox whereon Daphnis sings

  In pale enamels, touching love’s defeat,

  Calls up the color of her underthings

  And plays upon the taut memorial strings,

  Trailing her laces down into this heat.

  One day he found, topped with a smutty grin,

  The small corpse of a monkey, partly eaten.

  Force of the sun had split the bluish skin,

  Which, by their questioning and entering in,

  A swarm of bees had been concerned to sweeten.

  He could distill no essence out of this.

  That yellow majesty and molten light

  Should bless this carcass with a sticky kiss

  Argued a brute and filthy emphasis.

  The half-moons of the fingernails were white,

  And where the nostrils opened on the skies,

  Issuing to the sinus, where the ant

  Crawled swiftly down to undermine the eyes

  Of cloudy aspic, nothing could disguise

  How terribly the thing looked like Philinte.

  Will-o’-the-wisp, on the scum-laden water,

  Burns in the night, a gaseous deceiver,

  In the pale shade of France’s foremost daughter.

  Heat gives his thinking cavity no quarter,

  For he is burning with the monkey’s fever.

  Before the bees have diagrammed their comb

  Within the skull, before summer has cracked

  The back of Daphnis, naked, polychrome,

  Versailles shall see the tempered exile home,

  Peruked and stately for the final act.

  MILLIONS OF STRANGE SHADOWS

  For HELEN

  of whom I have

  Receiv’d a second life…

  THE COST

  Why, let the stricken deer go weep,

  The hart ungallèd play…

  Think how some
excellent, lean torso hugs

  The brink of weight and speed,

  Coasting the margins of those rival tugs

  Down the thin path of friction,

  The athlete’s dancing vectors, the spirit’s need,

  And muscle’s cleanly diction,

  Clean as a Calder, whose interlacing ribs

  Depend on one another,

  Or a keen heeling of tackle, fluttering jibs

  And slotted centerboards,

  A fleet of breasting gulls riding the smother

  And puzzle of heaven’s wards.

  Instinct with joy, a young Italian banks

  Smoothly around the base

  Of Trajan’s column, feeling between his flanks

  That cool, efficient beast,

  His Vespa, at one with him in a centaur’s race,

  Fresh from a Lapith feast,

  And his Lapith girl behind him. Both of them lean

  With easy nonchalance

  Over samphire-tufted cliffs which, though unseen,

  Are known, as the body knows

  New risks and tilts, terrors and loves and wants,

  Deeply inside its clothes.

  She grips the animal-shouldered naked skin

  Of his fitted leather jacket,

  Letting a wake of hair float out the spin

  And dazzled rinse of air,

  Yet for all their headlong lurch and flatulent racket

  They seem to loiter there,

  Forever aslant in their moment and the mind’s eye.

  Meanwhile, around the column

  There also turn, and turn eternally,

  Two thousand raw recruits

  And scarred veterans coiling the stone in solemn

  Military pursuits,

  The heft and grit of the emperors’ Dacian Wars

  That lasted fifteen years.

  All of that youth and purpose is, of course,

  No more than so much dust.

  And even Trajan, of his imperial peers

  Accounted “the most just,”

  Honored by Dante, by Gregory the Great

  Saved from eternal Hell,

  Swirls in the motes kicked up by the cough and spate

  Of the Vespa’s blue exhaust,

  And a voice whispers inwardly, “My soul,

  It is the cost, the cost,”

  Like some unhinged Othello, who’s just found out

  That justice is no more,

  While Cassio, Desdemona, Iago shout

  Like true Venetians all,

  “Go screw yourself; all’s fair in love and war!”

  And the bright standards fall.

  Better they should not hear that whispered phrase,

  The young Italian couple;

  Surely the mind in all its brave assays

  Must put much thinking by,

  To be, as Yeats would have it, free and supple

  As a long-legged fly.

  Look at their slender purchase, how they list

  Like a blown clipper, brought

  To the lively edge of peril, to the kissed

  Lip, the victor’s crown,

  The prize of life. Yet one unbodied thought

  Could topple them, bring down

  The whole shebang. And why should they take thought

  Of all that ancient pain,

  The Danube winters, the nameless young who fought,

  The blood’s uncertain lease?

  Or remember that that fifteen-year campaign

  Won seven years of peace?

  BLACK BOY IN THE DARK

  for Thomas Cornell

  Peace, tawny slave, half me and half thy dam!

  Did not thy hue bewray whose brat thou art,

  …

  Villain, thou mightst have been an emperor.

  Summer. A hot, moth-populated night.

  Yesterday’s maples in the village park

  Are boxed away into the vaults of dark,

  To be returned tomorrow, like our flag,

  Which was brought down from its post office height

  At sunset, folded, and dumped in a mailbag.

  Wisdom, our Roman matron, perched on her throne

  In front of the library, the Civil War

  Memorial (History and Hope) no more

  Are braced, trustworthy figures. Some witching skill

  Softly dismantled them, stone by heavy stone,

  And the small town, like Bethlehem, lies still.

  And it is still at the all-night service station,

  Where Andy Warhol’s primary colors shine

  In simple commercial glory, the Esso sign

  Revolving like a funland lighthouse, where

  An eighteen-year-old black boy clocks the nation,

  Reading a comic book in a busted chair.

  Our solitary guardian of the law

  Of diminishing returns? The President,

  Addressing the first contingent of draftees sent

  To Viet Nam, was brief: “Life is not fair,”

  He said, and was right, of course. Everyone saw

  What happened to him in Dallas. We were there,

  We suffered, we were Whitman. And now the boy

  Daydreams about the White House, the rising shares

  Of Standard Oil, the whited sepulchres.

  But what, after all, has he to complain about,

  This expendable St. Michael we employ

  To stay awake and keep the darkness out?

  AN AUTUMNAL

  The lichens, like a gorgeous, soft disease

  In rust and gold rosette

  Emboss the bouldered wall, and creepers seize

  In their cup-footed fret,

  Ravelled and bare, such purchase as affords.

  The sap-tide slides to ebb,

  And leafstems, like the drumsticks of small birds,

  Lie snagged in a spiderweb.

  Down at the stonework base, among the stump-

  Fungus and feather moss,

  Dead leaves are sunken in a shallow sump

  Of energy and loss,

  Enriched now with the colors of old coins

  And brilliance of wet leather.

  An earthen tea distills at the roots-groins

  Into the smoky weather

  A deep, familiar essence of the year:

  A sweet fetor, a ghost

  Of foison, gently welcoming us near

  To humus, mulch, compost.

  The last mosquitoes lazily hum and play

  Above the yeasting earth

  A feeble Gloria to this cool decay

  Or casual dirge of birth.

  “DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT”

  for Cyrus Hoy

  I

  The Discus Thrower’s marble heave,

  Captured in mid-career,

  That polished poise, that Parian arm

  Sleeved only in the air,

  Vesalian musculature, white

  As the mid-winter moon—

  This, and the clumsy snapshot of

  An infantry platoon,

  Those grubby and indifferent men,

  Lounging in bivouac,

  Their rifles aimless in their laps,

  Stop history in its tracks.

  We who are all aswim in time,

  We, “the inconstant ones,”

  How can such fixture speak to us?

  The chisel and the lens

  Deal in a taxidermy

  Of our arrested flights,

  And by their brute translation we

  Turn into Benthamites.

  Those soldiers, like some senior class,

  Were they prepared to dye

  In silver nitrate images

  Behind the camera’s eye?

  It needs a Faust to animate

  The wan homunculus,

  Construe the stark, unchanging text,

  Winkle the likes of us

  Out of a bleak geology

  That art has put to rest,

&nbs
p; And by a sacred discipline

  Give breath back to the past.

  How, for example, shall I read

  The expression on my face

  Among that company of men

  In that unlikely place?

  II

  Easy enough to claim, in the dawn of hindsight,

  That Mozart’s music perfectly enacts

  Pastries and powdered wigs, an architecture

  Of white and gold rosettes, balanced parterres.

  More difficult to know how the spirit learns

  Its scales, or the exact dimensions of fear:

  The nameless man dressed head-to-foot in black,

  Come to commission a requiem in a hurry.

  In the diatonic house there are many mansions:

  A hunting lodge in the mountains, a peaceable cloister,

  A first-class restaurant near the railroad yards,

  But also a seedy alms-house, the granite prisons

  And oubliettes of the soul. Just how such truth

  Gets itself stated in pralltrillers and mordents

  Not everyone can say. But the ’cellist,

  Leaning over his labors, his eyes closed,

  Is engaged in that study, blocking out, for the moment,

  Audience, hall, and a great part of himself

  In what, not wrongly, might be called research,

  Or the most private kind of honesty.

  We begin with the supreme donnée, the world,

  Upon which every text is commentary,

  And yet they play each other, the oak-leaf cured

  In sodden ditches of autumn darkly confirms

  Our words; and by the frailest trifles

  (A doubt, a whisper, and a handkerchief)

  Venetian pearl and onyx are cast away.

  It is, in the end, the solitary scholar

  Who returns us to the freshness of the text,

  Which returns to us the freshness of the world

  In which we find ourselves, like replicas,

  Dazzled by glittering dawns, upon a stage.

 

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