New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick

  of his ghost-written rhetoric!

  No weekends for the gods now. Wars

  flicker, earth licks its open sores,

  fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance

  assassinations, no advance.

  Only man thinning out his kind

  sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind

  swipe of the pruner and his knife

  busy about the tree of life …

  Pity the planet, all joy gone

  from this sweet volcanic cone;

  peace to our children when they fall

  in small war on the heels of small

  war—until the end of time

  to police the earth, a ghost

  orbiting forever lost

  in our monotonous sublime.

  from Brunetto Latini

  (Canto XV of Dante’s “Inferno”)

  (FOR LILLIAN HELLMAN)

  … “Oh, Oh,”

  I answered groaning, as I stretched my hand

  to touch his arm, “are you here Ser Brunetto?”

  He answered, “Do not be displeased, my Son,

  if Brunetto Latini turn and walk a little

  downward with you, and lets this herd pass on.”

  Then I, “I’ll go with you, or we can sit

  here talking as we used to in the past,

  if you desire it, and my guide permit.”

  “O Son,” he answered, “anyone who stands

  still a moment will lie here a hundred years,

  helpless to brush the sparks off with his hands.

  Move on, I’ll follow. Soon enough I must

  rejoin my little group of friends who walk

  with me lamenting their eternal lust.”

  Then since I dared not leave my bank and move

  over the flames of his low path, I bent

  my head to walk with reverence and love.

  Then he, “What brings you here before your day?

  Is it by accident, or Providence?

  Who is this man who guides you on your way?”

  I answered, “In the world that lies serene

  and shining over us, I lost my path,

  even before the first young leaves turned green.

  Yesterday morning when my steps had come

  full circle, this man appeared. He turned me round,

  and now he guides me on my journey home.”

  “O Son,” said he, “if you pursue your star,

  you cannot fail to reach the glorious harbor.

  And if the beautiful world, less sinister,

  had let me live a little longer, I too

  might have sustained your work and brought you comfort,

  seeing how heaven has befriended you.

  But that perverted and ungrateful flock

  that held the hills with Catiline, and then

  descended, hard and sterile as their rock,

  to govern Florence, hate you for the good

  you do; and rightly! Could they wish to see

  the sweet fig ripen on their rotten wood?

  Surely, they’ve earned their reputation: blind,

  fratricidal, avaricious, proud.

  O root their filthy habits from your mind!

  Fortune will load such honors on your back

  that Guelph and Ghibelline will hunger for you.

  But beat them back from the pasture. Let the pack

  run loose, and sicken on the carcasses

  that heap the streets, but spare the tender flower,

  if one should rise above the swamp and mess—

  some flower in which the fragile, sacred seed

  of ancient Roman virtue still survives

  in Florence, that vulture’s nest of lies and greed.”

  “Master,” I said, “you would not walk here now

  cut off from human nature, if my prayers

  had had an answer. I remember how

  I loved you, sitting at your knees—all thought

  fixed on your fatherly and gentle face,

  when in the world, from hour to hour, you taught

  me how a man becomes eternal. O

  Master, as long as I draw breath and live,

  men shall remember you and what I owe.…”

  from

  Notebook 1967–68

  (1969)

  Long Summer

  1.

  At dawn, the crisp goodbye of friends; at night,

  enemies reunited, who tread, unmoving,

  like circus poodles dancing on a ball—

  something inhuman always rising on us,

  punching you with embraces, holding out

  a hesitant hand, unbending as a broom;

  heaping the bright logs brighter, till we sweat

  and shine as if anointed with hot oil:

  straight alcohol, bright drops, dime-size and silver.…

  Each day more poignantly resolved to stay,

  each day more brutal, oracular and rooted,

  dehydrated, and smiling in the fire,

  unbandaging his tender, blood-baked foot,

  hurt when he kicked aside the last dead bottle.

  2.

  Humble in victory, chivalrous in defeat,

  almost, almost.… I bow and watch the ashes

  blush, crash, reflect: an age less privileged,

  though burdened with its nobles, serfs and Faith.

  The possessors. The fires men build live after them,

  this night, this night, I elfin, I stonefoot,

  walking the wildfire wildrose of those lawns,

  filling this cottage window with the same

  alluring emptiness, hearing the simmer

  of the moon’s mildew on the same pile of shells,

  fruits of the banquet … boiled a brittle lobster-

  shell-red, the hollow foreclaw, cracked, sucked dry,

  flung on the ash-heap of a soggy carton—

  two burnt-out, pinhead, black and popping eyes.

  3.

  Months of it, and the inarticulate mist so thick

  we turned invisible to one another

  across the room; the floor, aslant, shot hulling

  through thunderheads, gun-cotton dipped in pitch,

  salmon, when lighted, as the early moon,

  snuffed by the malodorous and frosted murk—

  not now! Earth’s solid and the sky is light,

  yet even on the steadiest day, dead noon,

  the sun stockstill like Joshua’s in midfield,

  I have to brace my hand against a wall

  to keep myself from swaying—swaying wall,

  straitjacket, hypodermic, helmeted

  doctors, one crowd, white-smocked, in panic, hit,

  stop, bury the runner on the cleated field.

  4.

  The vaporish closeness of this two-month fog;

  thirty-five summers back, the brightest summer:

  the Dealer’s Choice, the housebound girls, the fog;

  fog lifting. Then, as now, the after curfew

  boom of an unknown nightbird, local hemlock

  gone black as Roman cypress, the barn-garage

  below the tilted Dipper lighthouse-white,

  a single misanthropic frog complaining

  from the water hazard on the shortest hole;

  till morning! Short dreams, short shrift—one second, bright

  as burning shavings, scattered bait and ptomaine

  caught by the gulls with groans like straining rope;

  windjammer pilgrims cowled in rubber hoods,

  making for harbor in their yellow bus.

  5.

  Going the limit on some slip of crabgrass,

  vibrating to the everlasting motor,

  a hundred yards, two hundred, above the ocean—

  or once in New Orleans, when the ceiling fan

  wrestled the moisture, and one pajama leg

  hung out o
f reach, caught on a leather blade—

  the generation bred to drink the ocean

  in that all-possible after Repeal;

  all girls then under twenty, and the boys

  unearthly with the white blond hair of girls,

  crawling the swimming pool’s robin’s-egg sky;

  safe, out of reach. The fall warms vine and wire,

  the ant’s cool, amber, hyperthyroid eye,

  grapes tanning on these tried entanglements.

  6.

  Shake of the electric fan above our village;

  oil truck, refrigerator, or just man,

  nightly reloading of the village flesh—

  there are worse things than marriage. Men find dates

  wherever summer is out, the nights of the swallow

  clashing in heat, storm-signal to stay home.

  On Court Street, Dyer’s Lane, School, Green and Main,

  the moon-blanched blacktop fusses like a bosom,

  dropping through shade-trees to the shadeless haven—

  woman as white as ever. One only knows

  her mother, sweatshirt gorged with tennis balls,

  still air expiring from the lavish arc—

  we too wore armor, strode riveted in cloth,

  stiff as the broken clamshell labeled man.

  7.

  They come, each year more gallant, playing chicken,

  then braking to a standstill for a girl;

  soft bullets hitting bottles, spars and gulls,

  echo and ricochet across the bay—

  hardy perennials. Kneedeep in the cowpond,

  far from this cockfight, cattle stop and watch us,

  then, having had their fill, go back to lapping

  soiled water indistinguishable from heaven.

  The cattle get through living, but to live:

  Kokoschka at eighty, saying, “If you last,

  you’ll see your reputation die three times,

  and even three cultures; young girls are always here.”

  Satyr and chick … two fray-winged dragonflies,

  clinging to a thistle, too clean to mate.

  8.

  The shore is pebbled with eroding brick,

  seaweed in grizzled furrows—a surf-cast away,

  a converted brickyard dormitory; higher,

  the blacktop; higher yet, a fish-hawk’s nest,

  a bungalow, view-hung and staring, with wash

  and picture-window—here, like offshoots that

  have taken root. Grass shooting overnight,

  sticks of dead rotten wood in drifts, the fish

  with missing eyes, or heel-print on the belly,

  or a gash in the back from a stray hook;

  the lawns, the paths, the harbor—stitched with motors,

  yawl-engine, outboard, power mower, plowing

  the mangle and mash of the monotonous frontier,

  bottles of dirt and lighted gasoline.

  9.

  Two in the afternoon. The restlessness.

  Greek Islands. Maine. I have counted the catalogue

  of ships down half its length: the blistered canvas,

  the metal bowsprits, once pricking up above

  the Asian outworks like a wedge of geese,

  the migrant yachtsmen, and the fleet in irons.…

  The iron bell is rocking like a baby,

  the high tide’s turning on its back exhausted,

  the colored, dreaming, silken spinnakers

  shove through the patches in the island pine,

  as if vegetating millennia of lizards fed

  on fern and cropped the treetops … or nation of gazelles,

  straw-chewers in the African siesta.…

  I never thought scorn of things; struck fear in no man.

  10.

  Up north here, in my own country, and free—

  look on it with a jaundiced eye, you’ll see

  the manhood of the sallowing south, noblesse

  oblige turned redneck, and the fellaheen;

  yet sometimes the Nile is wet; life’s lived as painted:

  those couples, one in love and profit, swaying

  their children and their slaves the height of children,

  supple and gentle as giraffes or newts;

  the waist still willowy, and the paint still fresh;

  decorum without hardness; no harness on

  the woman, and no armor on the husband,

  the red clay Master with his feet of clay,

  catwalking lightly through his conquests, leaving

  one model, dynasties of faithless copies.

  11.

  Both my legs hinged on the foreshortened bathtub,

  small enough to have been a traveler’s …

  sun baking a bright fluff of balsam needles,

  loose yellow swaths; and yet the scene confines;

  sun falls on so many, many other things:

  someone, Custer, leaping with his wind-gold scalplock,

  a furlong or less from the old-style battle,

  Sitting Bull’s, who sent our hundreds under

  in the Indian Summer—Oh that sunlit balsam,

  this wizened window, the sea-haze of gauze blue

  distance plighting the tree-lip of land to islands—

  wives split between a playboy and a drudge.

  Who can help us from our nothing to the all,

  we aging downstream faster than a scepter can check?

  12.

  Everyone now is crowing everyone

  to put off leaving till the Indian Summer;

  and why? Because the others will be gone—

  we too, dull drops in the decamping mass,

  one in a million buying solitude.…

  We asked to linger on past fall in Eden;

  there must be good in man. Life fears us. Death

  keeps our respect by keeping at a distance—

  death we’ve never outdistanced as the Apostle boasted …

  stream of heady, terrified poured stone,

  suburban highway, rural superhighway,

  foot of skunkweed, masts of scrub … the rich poor.…

  We are loved by being distant; love-longing

  mists the windshield, soothes the eye with milk.

  13.

  Mischievous fish-shapes without scale or eye

  swimming your leaf-green teagown, maternal, autumnal,

  swirling six inches past the three-inch heel,

  collapsing on us like a parachute,

  in a spate of controversial spatter … then

  exhaustion. We hunger for the ancient fruit,

  marriage with its naked artifice;

  two practiced animals, close to widower

  and widow, greedily bending forward

  for the first handgrasp of vermilion leaves,

  clinging like bloodclots to the smitten branch—

  summer afield and whirling to the tropics,

  to the dogdays and dustbowl—men, like ears of corn,

  fibrous growths … green, sweet, golden, black.

  14.

  Iced over soon; it’s nothing; we’re used to sickness;

  too little perspiration in the bucket—

  in the beginning, polio once a summer. Not that;

  each day now the cork more sweetly leaves the bottle,

  except a sudden falseness in the breath,

  passive participation, dogged sloth,

  angrily skirting greener ice, the naught

  no longer asset or advantage. Sooner

  or later, and the chalk wears out the smile,

  this life too long for comfort and too brief

  for perfection—Cro-Magnon, dinosaur—

  the neverness of meeting nightly like surgeons’

  apprentices studying their own skeletons,

  old friends and mammoth flesh preserved in ice.

  Five Dreams

  1. THE OLD ORDER

  Eyes shut,
I hunt the vision through my eyelids:

  first a bull’s-head, Cretan black-bronze, high cheekbone

  still brave with gilt—too military; I see

  a girl’s Bacchanalia with a wicker cow’s-head;

  she died of sleeping pills, but there’s a tongue

  of silverfoil still sticks in the wicker mouth;

  now it’s a horse’s-head; this is better, it’s nervous,

  its eyes are string-shot like the bull’s; but now,

  my bestiary is interrupted: the man,

  the beauty in checker trousers, strides the schoolroom;

  he is eloquently angry, confiscates the ink-pots;

  I wouldn’t try this, but perhaps he did right—

  a groom tends the black gate to the freestone graveyard—

  old law and order that locked at the tap of a glove.

  2. AGAMEMNON: A DREAM

  As I sleep, their saga comes out clarified:

  why for three weeks mother toured the countryside,

  buying up earthenware, big pots and urns,

  Goliath’s potsherds, such as the savage first

  archaeologist broke on the first dig—our own art:

  common the clay, kingly the workmanship.

  As I sleep, streams of butane leak from my lighter;

  for three weeks mother’s foreign in-law kept carving

  his chess-sets, leaf green, leaf red, as tall as urns,

  modern Viking design for tribal Argos.

  The King tripped on his pawns.… Suddenly, I see

  father’s eyes cross and bubble—a whiff of butane,

  the muscle of a spitted ox bubbling by the urn.…

  Can I call the police against my own family?

  3. THE HOUSE IN ARGOS

  O Christmas tree, how green thy branches—the features

  could only be the most conventional,

  the hardwood smiles, the Trojan rug’s abstraction,

  the firelight dancing to the Christmas candles,

  the unusual offspring with his usual scowl,

  naming all fifty states of Paradise,

  with a red, blue, yellow pencil, while his mother,

  seasick with marital unhappiness—

  she has become the eye of heaven, she hates

  her husband swimming like vagueness, like a porpoise,

  on the imperial scarlet of the rug.…

  His corpse in the candles is the fool’s-gold lion,

  his head is like the rich collection-plate,

  singing, “O Christmas tree, how green thy branches…”

  4. THE NEXT DREAM

  “After my marriage, I found myself in constant

  companionship with this almost stranger I found

  neither agreeable, interesting, nor admirable,

  though he was always kind and irresponsible.

  The first years after our first child was born,