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Collected Earlier Poems

Page 11

by Anthony Hecht


  That yield and sway in soft Einsteinian tides.

  Who is she? Sylvia? Amelia Earhart?

  Some creature that appears and disappears

  From life, from reverie, a fugitive of dreams?

  There on the stage, with awkward grace, the actors,

  Beautifully costumed in Renaissance brocade,

  Perform their duties, even as I must mine,

  Though not, as I am, always free to smile.

  Something is happening. Some consternation.

  Are the knives out? Is someone’s life in danger?

  And can the magic cloak and book protect?

  One has, of course, real confidence in Shakespeare.

  And I relax in my plush seat, convinced

  That prompt as dawn and genuine as a toothache

  The dream will be accomplished, provisionally true

  As anything else one cares to think about.

  The players are aghast. Can it be the villain,

  The outrageous drunks, plotting the coup d’état,

  Are slyer than we thought? Or we more innocent?

  Can it be that poems lie? As in a dream,

  Leaving a stunned and gap-mouthed Ferdinand,

  Father and faery pageant, she, even she,

  Miraculous Miranda, steps from the stage,

  Moves up the aisle to my seat, where she stops,

  Smiles gently, seriously, and takes my hand

  And leads me out of the theatre, into a night

  As luminous as noon, more deeply real,

  Simply because of her hand, than any dream

  Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.

  AFTER THE RAIN

  for W. D. Snodgrass

  The barbed-wire fences rust

  As their cedar uprights blacken

  After a night of rain.

  Some early, innocent lust

  Gets me outdoors to smell

  The teasle, the pelted bracken,

  The cold, mossed-over well,

  Rank with its iron chain,

  And takes me off for a stroll.

  Wetness has taken over.

  From drain and creeper twine

  It’s runnelled and trenched and edged

  A pebbled serpentine

  Secretly, as though pledged

  To attain a difficult goal

  And join some important river.

  The air is a smear of ashes

  With a cool taste of coins.

  Stiff among misty washes,

  The trees are as black as wicks,

  Silent, detached and old.

  A pallor undermines

  Some damp and swollen sticks.

  The woods are rich with mould.

  How even and pure this light!

  All things stand on their own,

  Equal and shadowless,

  In a world gone pale and neuter,

  Yet riddled with fresh delight.

  The heart of every stone

  Conceals a toad, and the grass

  Shines with a douse of pewter.

  Somewhere a branch rustles

  With the life of squirrels or birds,

  Some life that is quick and right.

  This queer, delicious bareness,

  This plain, uniform light,

  In which both elms and thistles,

  Grass, boulders, even words,

  Speak for a Spartan fairness,

  Might, as I think it over,

  Speak in a form of signs,

  If only one could know

  All of its hidden tricks,

  Saying that I must go

  With a cool taste of coins

  To join some important river,

  Some damp and swollen Styx.

  Yet what puzzles me the most

  Is my unwavering taste

  For these dim, weathery ghosts,

  And how, from the very first,

  An early, innocent lust

  Delighted in such wastes,

  Sought with a reckless thirst

  A light so pure and just.

  APPLES FOR PAUL SUTTMAN

  Chardin, Cézanne, they had their apples,

  As did Paris and Eve—

  Sleek, buxom pippins with inverted nipples;

  And surely we believe

  That Pluto has his own unsweet earth apples

  Blooming among the dead,

  There in the thick of Radamanthine opals,

  Blake’s hand, Bernini’s head.

  Ours are not golden overtures to trouble

  Or molds of fatal choice,

  But like some fleshed epitome, the apple

  Entreats us to rejoice

  In more than flavor, nourishment, or color,

  Or jack or calvados;

  Nor are we rendered, through ingested dolor,

  Sinful or comatose.

  It speaks to us quite otherwise, in supple

  Convexity and ply,

  Smooth, modeled slopes, familiar rills. Crab apple,

  Winesap and Northern Spy

  Tell us Hogarth’s “Analysis of Beauty”

  Or architect’s French Curve

  Cannot proclaim what Aphrodite’s putti

  Both celebrate and serve:

  Those known hyperbolas, those rounds and gradients,

  Dingle and shadowed dip,

  The commonwealth of joy, imagined radiance,

  Thoughts of that faultless lip.

  The dearest curves in nature—the merest ripple,

  The cresting wave—release

  All of our love, and find it in an apple,

  My Helen, your Elisse.

  THE HUNT

  for Zbigniew Herbert

  I

  A call, a call. Ringbolt clinks at dusk. Shadows wax. Sesame. Here are earthworms, and the dry needles of pine. I am hidden. Gems in their harness might be stars, picked out. Lovely to see, trust me. And the stone is protection, wouldn’t you say? This is my stone, gentle as snow, trust me. Darkness helps. Let us eat. The air, promise-crammed. And so the poor dog had none. I saw three in sunlight. One had a pearwood bow, like Cupid’s upper lip. I whisper my love to this rock. I have always loved it. Sesame. A caul, a caul. Where is Lady Luck in the forest? Well, there’s no moon. Once I had apples. Let us pray. They have great weight, the bronze fittings of Magyar kings. Their trumpets are muted. But the tall trees gather here, friendly. What is that fluttering, there? I can’t make out. All the dark sweet dens of the foxes are full of stink and safety. That was a tasty one. Just to go down, there with pale roots and hidden waters. O hidden. Is anyone hungry? He laughed, you know, and shook my hand. I must not say that. O the dear stone. Owls are out; mice, take warning. All those little squeaks must be death-cries. You’re welcome. Trust me, trust me. But didn’t he laugh? So help me.

  II

  I am much too tired now to do anything

  But look at the molding along the top of the wall.

  Those orchid shadows and pearl highlights bring

  My childhood back so oddly. They recall

  Two weeks of scarlet fever, when I lay

  Gazing at grooves and bevels, oyster whites

  Clouding to ringdove feathers, gathering lights

  Like snow on railings towards the middle of day.

  Just to lie there and watch, astonished when

  That subtle show gave way to electric light,

  That’s what I think of, lying here tonight.

  Tonight the interrogations begin again.

  EXILE

  for Joseph Brodsky

  Vacant parade grounds swept by the winter wind,

  A pile of worn-out tires crowning a knoll,

  The purplish clinkers near the cinder blocks

  That support the steps of an abandoned church

  Still moored to a telephone pole, this sullen place

  Is terra deserta, Joseph, this is Egypt.

  You have been here before, but long ago.

  The first time you w
ere sold by your own brothers

  But had a gift for dreams that somehow saved you.

  The second time was familiar but still harder.

  You came with wife and child, the child not yours,

  The wife, whom you adored, in a way not yours,

  And all that you can recall, even in dreams,

  Is the birth itself, and after that the journey,

  Mixed with an obscure and confusing music,

  Confused with a smell of hay and steaming dung.

  Nothing is clear from then on, and what became

  Of the woman and child eludes you altogether.

  Look, though, at the blank, expressionless faces

  Here in this photograph by Walker Evans.

  These are the faces that everywhere surround you;

  They have all the emptiness of gravel pits.

  And look, here, at this heavy growth of weeds

  Where the dishwater is poured from the kitchen window

  And has been ever since the house was built.

  And the chimney whispers its weak diphtheria,

  The hydrangeas display their gritty pollen of soot.

  This is Egypt, Joseph, the old school of the soul.

  You will recognize the rank smell of a stable

  And the soft patience in a donkey’s eyes,

  Telling you you are welcome and at home.

  THE FEAST OF STEPHEN

  I

  The coltish horseplay of the locker room,

  Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,

  With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,

  Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels

  Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs,

  In some such setting of thick basement pipes

  And janitorial realities

  Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,

  Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,

  And what they see is not so much another

  As a strange, possible version of themselves,

  And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,

  Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,

  Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.

  II

  If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body

  Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,

  Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,

  And known to captains as esprit de corps.

  What is this brisk fraternity of timing,

  Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,

  Mens sana in men’s sauna, in the flush

  Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,

  These fleet caroms, pliés and genuflections

  Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain

  All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?

  From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,

  Among the scumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,

  The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.

  III

  Think of those barren places where men gather

  To act in the terrible name of rectitude,

  Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,

  The bully’s thin superiority.

  Think of the Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant

  Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,

  Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes

  Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,

  Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,

  Flick their live butts into the standing weeds,

  And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows

  Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep

  In darkened readiness for their occasion

  The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.

  IV

  Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,

  In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.

  The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths

  Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.

  They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,

  Having flung down their wet and salty garments

  At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.

  He watches sharply these superbly tanned

  Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,

  A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,

  And in between their sleek, converging bodies,

  Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,

  He catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair

  And hears an unintelligible prayer.

  THE ODDS

  for Evan

  Three new and matching loaves,

  Each set upon a motionless swing seat,

  Straight from some elemental stoves

  And winter bakeries of unearthly wheat,

  In diamonded, smooth pillowings of white

  Have risen out of nothing overnight.

  And all the woods for miles,

  Stooped by these clean endowments of the north,

  Flaunt the same candle-dripping styles

  In poured combers of pumice and the froth

  Of heady steins. Upon the railings lodge

  The fat shapes of a nineteen-thirties Dodge.

  Such perilous, toppling tides;

  Such teeterings along uncertain perches.

  A fragile cantilever hides

  Even the chevrons of our veteran birches.

  In this fierce hush there is a spell that heaves

  Those huge arrested oceans in the eaves.

  A sort of stagy show

  Put on by a spoiled, eccentric millionaire.

  Lacking the craft and choice that go

  With weighed precision, meditated care,

  Into a work of art, these are the spent,

  Loose, aimless squanderings of the discontent.

  Like the blind, headlong cells,

  Crowding toward dreams of life, only to die

  In dark fallopian canals,

  Or that wild strew of bodies at My Lai.

  Thick drifts, huddled embankments at our door

  Pile up in this eleventh year of war.

  Yet to these April snows,

  This rashness, those incalculable odds,

  The costly and cold-blooded shows

  Of blind perversity or spendthrift gods

  My son is born, and in his mother’s eyes

  Turns the whole war and winter into lies.

  But voices underground

  Demand, “Who died for him? Who gave him place?”

  I have no answer. Vaguely stunned,

  I turn away and look at my wife’s face.

  Outside the simple miracle of this birth

  The snowflakes lift and swivel to the earth

  As in those crystal balls

  With Christmas storms of manageable size,

  A chalk precipitate that shawls

  Antlers and roof and gifts beyond surmise,

  A tiny settlement among those powers

  That shape our world, but that are never ours.

  APPREHENSIONS

  A grave and secret malady of my brother’s,

  The stock exchange, various grown-up shames,

  The white emergency of hospitals,

  Inquiries from the press, such coups de théâtre

  Upon a stage from which I was excluded

  Under the rubric of “benign neglect”

  Had left me pretty much to my own devices

  (My own stage was about seven years old)

  Except for a Teutonic governess

  Replete with the curious thumb-print of her race,

  That special relish for inflicted pain.

  Some of this she could vaguely satisfy

  In the pages of the Journal-American

  Which featured stories with lurid photographs—

  A child chained tightly to a radiator

  I
n an abandoned house; the instruments

  With which some man tortured his fiancée,

  A headless body recently unearthed

  On the links of an exclusive country club—

  That fleshed out terribly what loyal readers

  Hankered for daily in the name of news.

  (It in no way resembled the New York Times,

  My parents’ paper, thin on photographs.)

  Its world, some half-lit world, some demi-monde,

  I knew of only through Fräulein’s addiction

  To news that was largely terminal and obscene,

  Winding its way between the ads for nightclubs

  With girls wearing top hats, black tie, wing collar,

  But without shirts, their naked breasts exposed;

  And liquids that removed unsightly hair,

  Treatments for corns, trusses and belts and braces.

  She chain-smoked Camels as she scanned the pages,

  Whereas my mother’s brand was Chesterfield.

  My primary education was composed

  Of daily lessons in placating her

  With acts of shameless, mute docility.

  At seven I knew that I was not her equal,

  If I knew nothing else. And I knew little,

  But suspected a great deal—domestic quarrels,

  Not altogether muffled, must have meant something.

  “The market” of our home was the stock market,

  Without visible fruit, without produce,

  Except perhaps for the strange vendors of apples

  Who filled our city streets. And all those girls—

  The ones with naked breasts—there was some secret,

  Deep as my brother’s illness, behind their smiles.

  They knew something I didn’t; they taunted me.

  I moved in a cloudy world of inference

  Where the most solid object was a toy

  Rake that my governess had used to beat me.

  My own devices came to silence and cunning

  In my unwilling exile, while attempting

 

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