Collected Earlier Poems

by Anthony Hecht

Brought from the tropic zone;

  You know the very month and hour

  To pluck the lust-inducing flower

  That makes a woman groan.

  There’s not, among the envenomed plants

  On mountain or in valley haunts,

  One that your eyes have missed

  And has not yielded up its ground

  To your bright sickle-blade, and crowned

  Your formidable quest.

  When, like a lunatic, all bare,

  The moon lets down its mystic hair

  Of cold, enraging light,

  You wrap your features in the hide

  Of animals, and smoothly glide

  Abroad into the night.

  Your least breath ravishes the blood

  Of all dogs in the neighborhood

  And sets them on to bark,

  Makes rivers flow uphill, reversed,

  And baying wolves observe your cursed

  Hegira through the dark.

  Chatelaine of deserted spots,

  Of mouldered cemetery plots

  Where you are most at home,

  Muttering diabolic runes,

  You disinter the troubled bones

  From their sequestered tomb.

  To grieve a mother more you don

  The aspect of her only son

  Who has just met his death,

  And you assume the very shape

  That makes an aged widow gape

  And robs her of her breath.

  You make the spell-bound moon appear

  To march through the all-silvered air,

  And cast through midnight’s hush

  Such tincture on a pallid face

  A thousand-cymbaled crashing brass

  Could not restore its flush.

  The terror of us all, we fear

  Your hateful practice, and we bar

  Your presence from our door,

  Afraid you will inflict a pox

  Upon our persons, herds and flocks,

  With juice of hellebore.

  Often I’ve watched as you espy

  From far away with baleful eye

  Some shepherd on his heights;

  Soon after, victim of your arts,

  The man is dead, his fleshly parts

  A nest of parasites.

  And yet like vile Medea, you

  Could sometimes prove life-giving, too;

  You know what secret thing

  Gave Aeson back his sapling youth,

  Yet by your spells you have in truth

  Deprived me of my spring.

  O Gods, if pity dwells on high,

  May her requital be to die,

  And may her last repose,

  Unblessed by burial, serve as feast

  To every gross and shameful beast,

  To jackals and to crows.

  (FROM PIERRE DE RONSARD)

  AUSPICES

  Cold, blustery cider weather, the flat fields

  Bleached pale as straw, the leaves, such as remain,

  Pumpkin or leather-brown. These are the wilds

  Of loneliness, huge, vacant, sour and plain.

  The sky is hourless dusk, portending rain.

  Or perhaps snow. This narrow footpath edges

  A small stand of scrub pine, warped as with pain,

  And baneberry lofts its little poisoned pledges.

  The footpath ends in a dried waterhole,

  Plastered with black like old tar-paper siding.

  The fearfullest desolations of the soul

  Image themselves as local and abiding.

  Even if I should get away from here

  My trouser legs are stuck with burrs and seeds,

  Grappled and spiked reminders of my fear,

  Standing alone among the beggarweeds.

  APPLICATION FOR A GRANT

  Noble executors of the munificent testament

  Of the late John Simon Guggenheim, distinguished bunch

  Of benefactors, there are certain kinds of men

  Who set their hearts on being bartenders,

  For whom a life upon duck-boards, among fifths,

  Tapped kegs and lemon twists, crowded with lushes

  Who can master neither their bladders nor consonants,

  Is the only life, greatly to be desired.

  There’s the man who yearns for the White House, there to compose

  Rhythmical lists of enemies, while someone else

  Wants to be known to the Tour d’Argent’s head waiter.

  As the Sibyl of Cumae said : It takes all kinds.

  Nothing could bribe your Timon, your charter member

  Of the Fraternal Order of Grizzly Bears to love

  His fellow, whereas it’s just the opposite

  With interior decorators; that’s what makes horse races.

  One man may have a sharp nose for tax shelters,

  Screwing the IRS with mirth and profit;

  Another devote himself to his shell collection,

  Deaf to his offspring, indifferent to the feast

  With which his wife hopes to attract his notice.

  Some at the Health Club sweating under bar bells

  Labor away like grunting troglodytes,

  Smelly and thick and inarticulate,

  Their brains squeezed out through their pores by sheer exertion.

  As for me, the prize for poets, the simple gift

  For amphybrachs strewn by a kind Euterpe,

  With perhaps a laurel crown of the evergreen

  Imperishable of your fine endowment

  Would supply my modest wants, who dream of nothing

  But a pad on Eighth Street and your approbation.

  (FREELY FROM HORACE)

  AN OVERVIEW

  Here, god-like, in a 707,

  As on an air-conditioned cloud,

  One knows the frailties of the proud

  And comprehends the Fall from Heaven.

  The world, its highways, trees and ports,

  Looks much as if it were designed

  With nifty model trains in mind

  By salesmen at F. A. O. Schwarz.

  Such the enchantment distance lends.

  The bridges, matchstick and minute,

  Seem faultless, intricate and cute,

  Contrived for slight, aesthetic ends.

  No wonder the camaraderie

  Of mission-happy Air Force boys

  Above so vast a spread of toys,

  Cruising the skies, lighthearted, free,

  Or the engaging roguishness

  With which a youthful bombardier

  Unloads his eggs on what appear

  The perfect patchwork squares of chess;

  Nor that the brass hat general staff,

  Tailored and polished to a fault,

  Favor an undeclared assault

  On what an aerial photograph

  Shows as an unstrung ball of twine,

  Or that the President insist

  A nation colored amethyst

  Should bow to his supreme design.

  But in the toy store, right up close,

  Chipped paint and mucilage represent

  The wounded, orphaned, indigent,

  The dying and the comatose.

  STILL LIFE

  Sleep-walking vapor, like a visitant ghost,

  Hovers above a lake

  Of Tennysonian calm just before dawn.

  Inverted trees and boulders waver and coast

  In polished darkness. Glints of silver break

  Among the liquid leafage, and then are gone.

  Everything’s doused and diamonded with wet.

  A cobweb, woven taut

  On bending stanchion frames of tentpole grass,

  Sags like a trampoline or firemen’s net

  With all the glitter and riches it has caught,

  Each drop a paperweight of Steuben glass.

  No birdsong yet, no cricket, nor does the trout

  Explode in wate
r-scrolls

  For a skimming fly. All that is yet to come.

  Things are as still and motionless throughout

  The universe as ancient Chinese bowls,

  And nature is magnificently dumb.

  Why does this so much stir me, like a code

  Or muffled intimation

  Of purposes and preordained events?

  It knows me, and I recognize its mode

  Of cautionary, spring-tight hesitation,

  This silence so impacted and intense.

  As in a water-surface I behold

  The first, soft, peach decree

  Of light, its pale, inaudible commands.

  I stand beneath a pine-tree in the cold,

  Just before dawn, somewhere in Germany,

  A cold, wet, Garand rifle in my hands.

  PERSISTENCES

  The leafless trees are feathery,

  A foxed, Victorian lace,

  Against a sky of milk-glass blue,

  Blank, washed-out, commonplace.

  Between them and my window

  Huge helices of snow

  Perform their savage, churning rites

  At seventeen below.

  The obscurity resembles

  A silken Chinese mist

  Wherein through calligraphic daubs

  Of artistry persist

  Pocked and volcanic gorges,

  Clenched and arthritic pines,

  Faint, coral-tinted herons’ legs

  Splashing among the tines

  Of waving, tasselled marshgrass,

  Deep pools aflash with sharp,

  Shingled and burnished armor-plate

  Of sacred, child-eyed carp.

  This dimness is dynastic,

  An ashen T’ang of age

  Or blur that grudgingly reveals

  A ghostly equipage,

  Ancestral deputations

  Wound in the whited air,

  To whom some sentry flings a slight,

  Prescriptive, “Who goes there?”

  Are these the apparitions

  Of enemies or friends?

  Loved ones from whom I once withheld

  Kindnesses or amends

  On preterite occasions

  Now lost beyond repeal?

  Or the old childhood torturers

  Of undiminished zeal,

  Adults who ridiculed me,

  Schoolmates who broke my nose,

  Risen from black, unconscious depths

  Of REM repose?

  Who comes here seeking justice,

  Or in its high despite,

  Bent on some hopeless interview

  On wrongs nothing can right?

  Those throngs disdain to answer,

  Though numberless as flakes;

  Mine is the task to find out words

  For their memorial sakes

  Who press in dense approaches,

  Blue numeral tattoos

  Writ crosswise on their arteries,

  The burning, voiceless Jews.

  A CAST OF LIGHT

  at a Father’s Day picnic

  A maple bough of web-foot, golden greens,

  Found by an angled shaft

  Of late sunlight, disposed within that shed

  Radiance, with brilliant, hoisted baldachins,

  Pup tents and canopies by some underdraft

  Flung up to scattered perches overhead,

  These daubs of sourball lime, at floating rest,

  Present to the loose wattage

  Of heaven their limelit flukes, an artifice

  Of archipelagian Islands of the Blessed,

  And in all innocence pursue their cottage

  Industry of photosynthesis.

  Yet only for twenty minutes or so today,

  On a summer afternoon,

  Does the splendid lancet reach to them, or sink

  To these dim bottoms, making its chancy way,

  As through the barrier reef of some lagoon

  In sea-green darkness, by a wavering chink,

  Down, neatly probing like an accurate paw

  Or a notched and beveled key,

  Through the huge cave-roof of giant oak and pine.

  And the heart goes numb in a tide of fear and awe

  For those we cherish, their hopes, their frailty,

  Their shadowy fate’s unfathomable design.

  HOUSE SPARROWS

  for Joe and U. T. Summers

  Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class

  Of travelers, nor that rarified tax bracket,

  These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts

  Under our eaves, nesting in withered grass,

  Wormless but hopeful, and now their voice enacts

  Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.

  Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray

  Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.

  Salt of the earth, they are; the common clay;

  Meek émigrés come over on the Ark

  In steerage from the Old Country of the Drowned

  To settle down along Long Island Sound,

  Flatbush, Weehawken, our brownstone tenements,

  Wherever the local idiom is Cheep.

  Savers of string, meticulous and mild,

  They are given to nervous flight, the troubled sleep

  Of those who remember terrible events,

  The wide-eyed, anxious haste of the exiled.

  Like all the poor, their safety lies in numbers

  And hardihood and anonymity

  In a world of dripping browns and duns and umbers.

  They have inherited the lower sky,

  Their Lake of Constants, their blue modality

  That they are borne upon and battered by.

  Those little shin-bones, hollow at the core,

  Emaciate finger-joints, those fleshless wrists,

  Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,

  As though the harvests of earth had never been,

  Where have we seen such frailty before?

  In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.

  Yet here they are, these chipper stratoliners,

  Unsullen, unresentful, full of the grace

  Of cheerfulness, who seem to greet all comers

  With the wild confidence of Forty-Niners,

  And, to the lively honor of their race,

  Rude canticles of “Summers, Summers, Summers.”

  AN OLD MALEDICTION

  What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex

  Hairstylist and bathed in Russian Leather,

  Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha,

  In your expensive sublet? For whom do you

  Slip into something simple by, say, Gucci?

  The more fool he who has mapped out for himself

  The saline latitudes of incontinent grief.

  Dazzled though he be, poor dope, by the golden looks

  Your locks fetched up out of a bottle of Clairol,

  He will know that the wind changes, the smooth sailing

  Is done for, when the breakers wallop him broadside,

  When he’s rudderless, dismasted, thoroughly swamped

  In that mindless rip-tide that got the best of me

  Once, when I ventured on your deeps, Piranha.

  (FREELY FROM HORACE)

  II

  THE VENETIAN VESPERS

  for Harry and Kathleen Ford

  . . where’s that palace whereinto foul things

  Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure

  But some uncleanly apprehensions

  Keep leets and law days, and in session sit

  With meditations lawful?

  Othello: III, iii, 136–41

  We cannot all have our gardens now, nor our

  pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide.

  RUSKIN : The Stones of Venice,

  BK. I, CH. XXX

  I

  What’s merciful is not know
ing where you are,

  What time it is, even your name or age,

  But merely a clean coolness at the temple—

  That, says the spirit softly, is enough

  For the mind to adventure on its half-hidden path

  Like starlight interrupted by dense trees

  Journeying backwards on a winter trip

  While you are going, as you fancy, forward,

  And the stars are keeping pace with everything.

  Where to begin? With the white, wrinkled membrane,

  The disgusting skin that gathers on hot milk?

  Or narrow slabs of jasper light at sundown

  That fit themselves softly around the legs

  Of chairs, and entertain a drift of motes,

  A tide of sadness, a failing, a dying fall?

  Or the glass jar, like a wet cell battery,

  Full of electric coils and boiling resins,

  Its tin Pinocchio nose with one small nostril,

  And both of us under a tent of towels

  Like child conspirators, the tin nose breathing

  Health at me steadily, like the insufflation of God?

  Yes, but also the sight, on a gray morning,

  Beneath the crossbar of an iron railing

  Painted a glossy black, of six waterdrops

  Slung in suspension, sucking into themselves,

  As if it were some morbid nourishment,

  The sagging blackness of the rail itself,

  But edged with brilliant fingernails of chrome

  In which the world was wonderfully disfigured

  Like faces seen in spoons, like mirrorings

  In the fine spawn, the roe of air bubbles,

  That tiny silver wampum along the stems,

  Yellowed and magnified, of aging flowers

  Caught in the lens of stale water and glass

  In the upstairs room when somebody had died.

  Just like the beads they sprinkled over cookies