New Selected Poems

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New Selected Poems Page 12

by Robert Lowell


  the daddy was out at sea; that helped, I could bask

  in the rest and stimulation of my dreams,

  but the courtship was too swift, the disembarkment

  dangerously abrupt. I was animal,

  healthy, easily tired; I adored luxury,

  and should have been an extrovert; I usually

  managed to make myself pretty comfortable.…

  Well,” she laughed, “we both were glad to dazzle.

  A genius temperament should be handled with care.”

  5. ONION SKIN

  It’s the fancy functional things love us best;

  not mutely useful, or austerely useless,

  they touch our bodies to assume a body.

  My half-pound silver ticker had two bopped lids,

  a silver lever to be thumbnailed out

  at six, and six, when all hands stopped, and time.

  My watch ran to the clockmaker once too often.

  Where’s Grandfather’s gold chain with the snake-head?

  They go a-begging; without us, they are gone.

  This typing paper pulped in Bucksport, Maine,

  onion skin, only merchandised in Maine,

  creased when I pulled the last sheet, and seemed to scream,

  as if Fortuna bled in the white wood,

  first felt the bloody gash that brought my life.

  Close the Book

  The book is finished and the air is lighter,

  I can recognize people in the room;

  I touch your pictures, find you in the round.

  The cat sits pointing the window from the bedspread,

  hooked on the nightlife flashing through the curtain;

  he is a dove and thinks the lights are pigeons—

  flames from the open hearth of Thor and Saul,

  arms frescoed on the vaults of the creeping cavern,

  missiles no dialectician’s hand will turn,

  fleshspots for the slung chunks of awk and man.

  Children have called the anthropoid, father;

  he’d stay home Sunday, and they walked on eggs.…

  The passage from lower to upper middle age

  is quicker than the sigh of a match in the water—

  we too were students, and betrayed our hand.

  from

  Notebook

  (1970)

  Pastime

  1

  Unorthodox sleep in the active hour:

  young afternoon, the room, half-darkened, is day,

  the raw draft brushing sock and soul.

  Like cells of a charging battery, I charge up sleep—

  if such sleep lasts, I touch eternity.

  This, its pulse-stop, must have been before.

  What is true is not real: I here, this bed here, this hour here,

  mid-day inscrutable behind these blinds.

  When truth says goodmorning, it means goodbye.

  Voices drop from forms of distant apartments,

  voices of schoolboys … they are always ours,

  early prep-school; just as this hour is always

  optional recess—this has been before:

  the sting of touching past time by dropping off.

  2

  Labor to pull the raw breath through my closed nostrils

  brings back breathing another, rawer air,

  drawn freely enough from ice-crust football,

  sunlight gilding the golden polo coats

  of boys with country seats on the Dutch Hudson.

  But why does that light stay? First Form football,

  first time being sent on errands by a schoolmate—

  Bobby Delano, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

  escorted drunk off the Presidential yacht,

  winner of the football and hockey letters at fifteen;

  at fifteen, expelled. He dug my ass with a compass,

  and forced me to say my mother was a whore.

  My freshman year, he shot himself in Rio,

  odius, unknowable, inspired as Ajax.

  from

  History

  (1973)

  History

  History has to live with what was here,

  clutching and close to fumbling all we had—

  it is so dull and gruesome how we die,

  unlike writing, life never finishes.

  Abel was finished; death is not remote,

  a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,

  his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,

  his baby crying all night like a new machine.

  As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,

  the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends—

  a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,

  my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose—

  O there’s a terrifying innocence in my face

  drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

  Napoleon

  Boston’s used bookshops, anachronisms from London,

  are gone; it’s hard to guess now why I spent

  my vacations lugging home his third-hand Lives—

  shaking the dust from that stationary stock:

  cheap deluxe lithographs and gilt-edged pulp

  on a man … not bloodthirsty, not sparing of blood,

  with an eye and sang-froid to manage everything;

  his iron hand no mere appendage of his mind

  for improbable contingencies …

  for uprooting races, lineages, Jacobins—

  the price was paltry … three million soldiers dead,

  grand opera fixed like morphine in their veins.

  Dare we say, he had no moral center?

  All gone like the smoke of his own artillery?

  Beethoven

  Our cookbook is bound like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—

  gold title on green. I have escaped its death,

  take two eggs with butter, drink and smoke;

  I live past prudence, not possibility—

  who can banquet on the shifting cloud,

  lie to friends and tell the truth in print,

  be Othello offstage, or Lincoln retired from office?

  The vogue of the vague, what can it teach an artist?

  Beethoven was a Romantic, but too good;

  did kings, republics or Napoleon teach him?

  He was his own Napoleon. Did even deafness?

  Does the painted soldier in the painting bleed?

  Is the captive chorus of Fidelio bound?

  For a good voice hearing is a torture.

  Coleridge

  Coleridge stands, he flamed for the one friend.…

  This shower is warm, I almost breathe-in the rain

  horseclopping from fire escape to skylight

  down to a dungeon courtyard. In April, New York

  has a smell and taste of life. For whom … what?

  A newer younger generation faces

  the firing squad, then their blood is wiped from the pavement.…

  Coleridge’s laudanum and brandy,

  his alderman’s stroll to positive negation—

  his passive courage is paralysis,

  standing him upright like tenpins for the strike,

  only kept standing by a hundred scared habits …

  a large soft-textured plant with pith within,

  power without strength, an involuntary imposter.

  Abraham Lincoln

  All day I bang and bang at you in thought,

  as if I had the license of your wife.…

  If War is the continuation of politics—

  is politics the discontinuation of murder?

  You may have loved underdogs and even mankind,

  this one thing made you different from your equals …

  you, our one genius in politics … who followed

  the bull to the altar … to death in unity.

  J’accuse, j’accuse, j’accuse, j�
�accuse, j’accuse!

  Say it in American. Who shot the deserters?

  Winter blows sparks in the face of the new God,

  who breathes-in fire and dies with cooling faith,

  as the firebrand turns black in the black hand,

  and the squealing pig darts sidewise from his foot.

  Bobby Delano

  The labor to breathe that younger, rawer air:

  St. Mark’s last football game with Groton lost on the ice-crust,

  the sunlight gilding the golden polo coats

  of boys with country seats on the Upper Hudson.

  Why does that stale light stay? First Form hazing,

  first day being sent on errands by an oldboy,

  Bobby Delano, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—

  deported soused off the Presidential yacht

  baritoning You’re the cream in my coffee …

  his football, hockey, baseball letter at 15;

  at 15, expelled. He dug my ass with a compass,

  forced me to say “My mother is a whore.”

  My freshman year, he shot himself in Rio,

  odious, unknowable, inspired as Ajax.

  Will Not Come Back

  (Volverán)

  Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing

  the injudicious nightflies with a clack of the beak;

  but these that stopped full flight to see your beauty

  and my good fortune … as if they knew our names—

  they’ll not come back. The thick lemony honeysuckle,

  climbing from the earthroot to your window,

  will open more beautiful blossoms to the evening;

  but these … like dewdrops, trembling, shining, falling,

  the tears of day—they’ll not come back.…

  Some other love will sound his fireword for you

  and wake your heart, perhaps, from its cool sleep;

  but silent, absorbed, and on his knees,

  as men adore God at the altar, as I love you—

  don’t blind yourself, you’ll not be loved like that.

  Sylvia Plath

  A miniature mad talent? Sylvia Plath,

  who’ll wipe off the spit of your integrity,

  rising in the saddle to lash at Auschwitz,

  life tearing this or that, I am a woman?

  Who’ll lay the graduate girl in marriage,

  queen bee, naked, unqueenly, shaming her shame?

  Each English major saying, “I am Sylvia,

  I hate marriage, I must hate babies.”

  Even men have a horror of giving birth,

  mother-sized babies splitting us in half,

  sixty thousand American infants a year,

  U.I.D., Unexplained Infant Deaths,

  born physically whole and hearty, refuse to live,

  Sylvia … the expanding torrent of your attack.

  Randall Jarrell

  The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo,

  slats of dust distracted by a downdraw;

  I woke and knew I held a cigarette;

  I looked, there was none, could have been none;

  I slept off years before I woke again,

  palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I saw

  nothing was burning. I awoke, I saw

  I was holding two lighted cigarettes.…

  They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death.

  Tonight it’s Randall, his spark still fire though humble,

  his gnawed wrist cradled like Kitten. “What kept you so long,

  racing the cooling grindstone of your ambition?

  You didn’t write, you rewrote.… But tell me,

  Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?”

  Our Dead Poets

  Their lines string out from nowhere, stretch to sorrow.

  I think of the others who once had the top billing,

  ironclads in our literary havoc,

  now even forgotten by malice. “He exists,”

  as an old Stalinist luminary said of a friend

  sent to Siberia. “Cold helps him to compose.”

  As a child Jean Stafford stood on a chair to dress;

  “It’s so much easier.” It’s easier not to dress,

  not brush our teeth, flick off unopened mail.

  Sometimes for days I only hear your voices,

  the sun of summer will not adorn you again

  with her garment of new leaves and flowers …

  her nostalgie de la boue that shelters ape

  and protozoa from the rights of man.

  T. S. Eliot

  Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom

  of Memorial Hall and Harvard’s war-dead.… And he:

  “Don’t you loathe to be compared with your relatives?

  I do. I’ve just found two of mine reviewed by Poe.

  He wiped the floor with them … and I was delighted.”

  Then on with warden’s pace across the Yard,

  talking of Pound, “It’s balls to say he only

  pretends to be Ezra.… He’s better though. This year,

  he no longer wants to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem.

  Yes, he’s better. ‘You speak,’ he said, when he’d talked two hours.

  By then I had absolutely nothing to say.”

  Ah Tom, one muse, one music, had one your luck—

  lost in the dark night of the brilliant talkers,

  humor and honor from the everlasting dross!

  Ezra Pound

  Horizontal on a deckchair in the ward

  of the criminal mad.… A man without shoestrings clawing

  the Social Credit broadside from your table, you saying,

  “… here with a black suit and black briefcase; in the brief,

  an abomination, Possum’s hommage to Milton.”

  Then sprung; Rapallo, and the decade gone;

  and three years later, Eliot dead, you saying,

  “Who’s left alive to understand my jokes?

  My old Brother in the arts … besides, he was a smash of a poet.”

  You showed me your blotched, bent hands, saying, “Worms.

  When I talked that nonsense about Jews on the Rome

  wireless, Olga knew it was shit, and still loved me.”

  And I, “Who else has been in Purgatory?”

  You, “I began with a swelled head and end with swelled feet.”

  William Carlos Williams

  Who loved more? William Carlos Williams,

  in collegiate black slacks, gabardine coat,

  and loafers polished like rosewood on yachts,

  straying stonefoot through his town-end garden,

  man and flower seedy with three autumn strokes,

  his brown, horned eyes enlarged, an ant’s, through glasses;

  his Mother, stonedeaf, her face a wizened talon,

  her hair the burnt-out ash of lush Puerto Rican grass;

  her black, blind, bituminous eye inquisitorial.

  “Mama,” he says, “which would you rather see here,

  me or two blondes?” Then later, “The old bitch

  is over a hundred, I’ll kick off tomorrow.”

  He said, “I am sixty-seven, and more

  attractive to girls than when I was seventeen.”

  Robert Frost

  Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone

  to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs,

  his voice is musical and raw—he writes in the flyleaf:

  For Robert from Robert, his friend in the art.

  “Sometimes I feel too full of myself,” I say.

  And he, misunderstanding, “When I am low,

  I stray away. My son wasn’t your kind. The night

  we told him Merrill Moore would come to treat him,

  he said, ‘I’ll kill him first.’ One of my daughters thought things,

  thought every male she met was out to make her;

  the
way she dressed, she couldn’t make a whorehouse.”

  And I, “Sometimes I’m so happy I can’t stand myself.”

  And he, “When I am too full of joy, I think

  how little good my health did anyone near me.”

  Blizzard in Cambridge

  Risen from the blindness of teaching to bright snow,

  everything mechanical stopped dead,

  taxis no-fares … the wheels grow hot from driving—

  ice-eyelashes, in my spring coat; the subway

  too jammed and late to stop for passengers;

  snow-trekking the mile from subway end to airport …

  to all-flights-canceled, fighting queues congealed

  to telephones out of order, stamping buses,

  rich, stranded New Yorkers staring with the wild, mild eyes

  of steers at the foreign subway—then the train home,

  jolting with stately grumbling: an hour in Providence,

  in New Haven … the Bible. In darkness seeing

  white arsenic numbers on the tail of a downed plane,

  the smokestacks of abandoned fieldguns burning skyward.

  For Robert Kennedy 1925–68

  Here in my workroom, in its listlessness

  of Vacancy, like the old townhouse we shut for summer,

  airtight and sheeted from the sun and smog,

  far from the hornet yatter of his gang—

  is loneliness, a thin smoke thread of vital

  air. But what will anyone teach you now?

  Doom was woven in your nerves, your shirt,

  woven in the great clan; they too were loyal,

  and you too were loyal to them, to death.

  For them like a prince, you daily left your tower

  to walk through dirt in your best cloth. Untouched,

  alone in my Plutarchan bubble, I miss

  you, you out of Plutarch, made by hand—

  forever approaching your maturity.

  Dream, the Republican Convention

  That night the mustard bush and goldenrod

  and more unlikely yellows trod a spiral,

  clasped in eviscerating blue china vases

 

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