like friendly snakes embracing—cool not cold.…
Brotherly, stacked and mean, the great Convention
throws out Americana like dead flowers:
choices, at best, that hurt and cannot cure;
many are chosen, and too few were called.…
And yet again, I see the yellow bush rise,
the golds of the goldenrod eclipse their vase
(each summer the young breasts escape the ribcage)
a formation, I suppose, beyond the easel.
What can be is only what will be—
the sun warms the mortician, unpolluted.
After the Democratic Convention
Life, hope, they conquer death, generally, always;
and if the steamroller goes over the flower, the flower dies.
Some are more solid earth; they stood in lines,
blouse and helmet, a creamy de luxe sky-blue—
their music savage and ephemeral.
After five nights of Chicago: police and mob,
I am so tired and had, clichés are wisdom,
the clichés of paranoia.… Home in Maine,
the fall of the high tide waves is a straggling, joshing
mell of police … they’re on the march for me.…
How slender and graceful, the double line of trees,
slender, graceful, irregular and underweight,
the young in black folk-fire circles below the trees—
under their shadow, the green grass turns to hay.
The Nihilist as Hero
“All our French poets can turn an inspired line;
who has written six passable in sequence?”
said Valéry. That was a happy day for Satan.…
I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,
but a cold flame of tinfoil licks the metal log,
beautiful unchanging fire of childhood
betraying a monotony of vision.…
Life by definition breeds on change,
each season we scrap new cars and wars and women.
But sometimes when I am ill or delicate,
the pinched flame of my match turns unchanging green,
a cornstalk in green tails and seeded tassel.…
A nihilist wants to live in the world as is,
and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble.
For Elizabeth Bishop 4
The new painting must live on iron rations,
rushed brushstrokes, indestructible paint-mix,
fluorescent lofts instead of French plein air.
Albert Ryder let his crackled amber moonscapes
ripen in sunlight. His painting was repainting,
his tiniest work weighs heavy in the hand.
Who is killed if the horseman never cry halt?
Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf,
cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach to something? Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase—
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?
End of a Year
These conquered kings pass furiously away;
gods die in flesh and spirit and live in print,
each library a misquoted tyrant’s home.
A year runs out in the movies, must be written
in bad, straightforward, unscanning sentences—
stamped, trampled, branded on backs of carbons,
lines, words, letters nailed to letters, words, lines—
the typescript looks like a Rosetta Stone.…
One more annus mirabilis, its hero hero demens,
ill-starred of men and crossed by his fixed stars,
running his ship past sound-spar on the rocks.…
The slush-ice on the east bank of the Hudson
is rose-heather in the New Year sunset;
bright sky, bright sky, carbon scarred with ciphers.
from
For Lizzie and Harriet
(1973)
Summer
1.
HARRIET, BORN JANUARY 4, 1957
Half a year, then a year and a half, then
ten and a half—the pathos of a child’s fractions, turn-
ing up each summer. Her God a seaslug, God a queen
with forty servants, God—you gave up … things whirl
in the chainsaw bite of whatever squares
the universe by name and number. For
the hundredth time, we slice the fog, and round
the village with our headlights on the ground,
like the first philosopher Thales who thought all things water,
and fell in a well … trying to find a car
key.… It can’t be here, and so it must be there
behind the next crook in the road or growth
of fog—there blinded by our feeble beams,
a face, clock-white, still friendly to the earth.
2.
HARRIET
A repeating fly, blueblack, thumbthick—so gross,
it seems apocalyptic in our house—
whams back and forth across the nursery bed
manned by a madhouse of stuffed animals,
not one a fighter. It is like a plane
dusting apple orchards or Arabs on the screen—
one of the mighty … one of the helpless. It
bumbles and bumps its brow on this and that,
making a short, unhealthy life the shorter.
I kill it, and another instant’s added
to the horrifying mortmain of
ephemera: keys, drift, sea-urchin shells,
you packrat off with joy … a dead fly swept
under the carpet, wrinkling to fulfillment.
3.
ELIZABETH
An unaccustomed ripeness in the wood;
move but an inch and moldy splinters fall
in sawdust from the walls’ aluminum-paint,
once loud and fresh, now aged to weathered wood.
Squalls of the seagull’s exaggerated outcry
dim out in the fog.… Pace, pace. All day our words
were rusty fish-hooks—wormwood … Dear Heart’s-Ease,
we rest from all discussion, drinking, smoking,
pills for high blood, three pairs of glasses—soaking
in the sweat of our hard-earned supremacy,
offering a child our leathery love. We’re fifty,
and free! Young, tottering on the dizzying brink
of discretion once, you wanted nothing,
but to be old, do nothing, type and think.
4.
THESE WINDS (HARRIET)
I see these winds, these are the tops of trees,
these are no heavier than green alder bushes;
touched by a light wind, they begin to mingle
and race for instability—too high placed
to stoop to the strife of the brush, these are the winds.…
Downstairs, you correct notes at the upright piano,
twice upright this midday Sunday torn from the whole
green cloth of summer; your room was once the laundry,
the loose tap beats time, you hammer the formidable
chords of The Nocturne, your second composition.
Since you first began to bawl and crawl
from the unbreakable lawn to this sheltered room, how often
winds have crossed the wind of inspiration—
in these too, the unreliable touch of the all.
5.
HARRIET
Spring moved to summer—the rude cold rain
hurries the ambitious, flowers and youth;
our flash-tones crackle for an hour, and then
we too follow nature, imperceptibly
change our mouse-brown to white lion’s mane,
thin white f
ading to a freckled, knuckled skull,
bronzed by decay, by many, many suns.…
Child of ten, three-quarters animal,
three years from Juliet, half Juliet,
already ripened for the night on stage—
beautiful petals, what shall we hope for,
knowing one choice not two is all you’re given,
health beyond the measure, dangerous
to yourself, more dangerous to others?
from New York
3.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
By miracle, I left the party half
an hour behind you, reached home five hours drunker,
imagining I would live a million years,
a million quarts drunker than the gods of Jutland—
live through another life and two more wives.
Life is too short to silver over this tarnish.
The gods, employed to haunt and punish husbands,
have no hand for trigger-free distinctions,
their myopia makes all error mortal.…
My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the hearth,
chocolates, cherries, hairshirt, pinks and glass—
when we joined in the sublime blindness of courtship,
loving lost all its vice with half its virtue.
Cards will never be dealt to us fairly again.
4.
DEAR SORROW 1
If I can’t whistle in the dark, why whistle?
One doubts the wisdom of almighty God
casting weak husbands adrift in the hands of a wife.
We need the mighty diaphragm of Job
to jangle grandly. Pain lives in our free discussion,
like the Carlyles fighting meat from the mouth of their dog.
Luckily the Carlyles couldn’t bear children—
ours sees me, “Genius, unwise, unbrilliant, weird,”
sees you, “Brilliant, unwise, unweird, nerves.”
Barbaric cheek is needed to stay married.…
Lizzie, I wake to the hollow of loneliness,
I would cry out Love, Love, if I had words:
we are all here for such a short time,
we might as well be good to one another.
8.
HARRIET’S DREAM
“The broom trees twirped by our rosewood bungalow,
not wildlife, these were tropical and straw;
the Gulf fell like a shower on the fiber-sand;
it wasn’t the country like our coast of Maine—
on ice for summer. We met a couple, not people,
squared asking Father if he was his name—
none ever said that I was Harriet.…
They were laying beach-fires with scarlet sticks and hatchets,
our little bungalow was burning—it
had burned, I was in it. I couldn’t laugh,
I was afraid when the ceiling crashed in scarlet;
the shots were boom, the fire was fizz … While sleeping
I scrubbed away my scars and blisters, unable
to answer if I had ever hurt.”
from Circles
3.
OUR TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY 1 (ELIZABETH)
Leaves espaliered jade on our barn’s loft window,
sky stretched on a two-pane sash … it doesn’t open:
stab of roofdrip, this leaf, that leaf twings,
an assault the heartless leaf rejects.
The picture is too perfect for our lives:
in Chardin’s stills, the paint bleeds, juice is moving.
We have weathered the wet of twenty years.
Many cripples have won their place in the race;
Immanuel Kant remained unmarried and sane,
no one could Byronize his walk to class.
Often the player outdistances the game.…
This week is our first this summer to go unfretted;
we smell as green as the weeds that bruise the flower—
a house eats up the wood that made it.
5.
THE HUMAN CONDITION (HARRIET)
Should someone human, not just our machinery,
fire on sight, and end the world and us,
surely he’ll say he chose the lesser evil—
our wars were simpler than our marriages,
sea monster on sea monster drowning Saturday night—
the acid shellfish that cannot breathe fresh air.…
Home things can’t stand up to the strain of the earth.
I wake to your cookout and Charles Ives
lulling my terror, lifting my fell of hair,
as David calmed the dark nucleus of Saul.
I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty,
young when the century mislays my name—
no date I can name you can be long enough,
the impossible is allied to fact.
6.
THE HARD WAY (HARRIET)
Don’t hate your parents, or your children will hire
unknown men to bury you at your own cost.
Child, forty years younger, will we live to see
your destiny written by our hands rewritten,
your adolescence snap the feathered barb,
the phosphorescence of your wake?
Under the stars, one sleeps, is free from household,
tufts of grass and dust and tufts of grass—
night oriented to the star of youth.
I only learn from error; till lately I trusted
in the practice of my hand. In backward Maine,
ice goes in season to the tropical,
then the mash freezes back to ice, and then
the ice is broken by another wave.
8.
HEAT
For the first time in fifteen years, a furnace
Maine night that would have made summer anywhere,
in Brazil or Boston. The wooden rooms of our house
dry, redoubling their wooden farmhouse smell,
honest wooden ovens shaking with desire.
We feared the pressure was too curative.…
Outside, a young seal festers on the beach,
head snapped off, the color of a pig;
much lonelier, this formula for cures.
One nostril shut, my other attenuated—
it’s strange tonight I want to pencil myself
do-its on bits of paper. I must remember
to breathe through my mouth. Breathe only from my mouth …
as my mouth keeps shutting out the breath of morning.
from Late Summer
3.
BRINGING A TURTLE HOME
On the road to Bangor, we spotted a domed stone,
a painted turtle petrified by fear.
I picked it up. The turtle had come a long walk,
200 millennia understudy to dinosaurs,
then their survivor. A god for the out-of-power.…
Faster gods come to Castine, flush yachtsmen who see
hell as a city very much like New York,
these gods give a bad past and worse future to men
who never bother to set a spinnaker;
culture without cash isn’t worth their spit.
The laughter on Mount Olympus was always breezy.…
Goodnight, little Boy, little Soldier, live,
a toy to your friend, a stone of stumbling to God—
sandpaper Turtle, scratching your pail for water.
4.
RETURNING TURTLE
Weeks hitting the road, one fasting in the bathtub,
raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage,
the room drenched with musk like kerosene—
no one shaved, and only the turtle washed.
He was so beautiful when we flipped him over:
greens, reds, yellows, fringe of the faded savage,
the last Sioux, old and worn, saying with weariness,
“Why doesn’t the Great White Father put h
is red
children on wheels, and move us as he will?”
We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle
rush for water like rushing into marriage,
swimming in uncontaminated joy,
lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface,
a turtle looking back at us, and blinking.
6.
GROWTH (HARRIET)
“I’m talking the whole idea of life, and boys,
with Mother; and then the heartache, when we’re fifty.…
You’ve got to call your Notebook, Book of the Century,
but it will take you a century to write,
then I will have to revise it, when you die.”
Latin, Spanish, swimming half a mile,
writing a saga with a churl named Eric,
Spanish, Spanish, math and rollerskates;
a love of party dresses, but not boys;
composing something with the bells of Boris:
“UNTITLED, would have to be the name of it.…”
You grow apace, you grow too fast apace,
too soon adult; no, not adult, like us.…
On the telephone, they say, “We’re tired, aren’t you?”
12.
OUTLIVERS (HARRIET AND ELIZABETH)
“If we could reverse the world to what it changed
a hundred years ago, or even fifty,
scrupulous drudgery, sailpower, hand-made wars;
God might give us His right to live forever
despite the eroding miracle of science.…”
“Was everything that much grander than it is?”
“Nothing seems admirable until it fails;
but it’s only people we should miss.
The Goth, retarded epochs like crab and clam,
wept, as we do, for his dead child.” We talk
like roommates bleeding night to dawn. You say,
“I hope, of course, you both will outlive me,
but you and Harriet are perhaps like countries
not yet ripe for self-determination.”
Obit
Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel—
in the end it gets us, though a man know what he’d have:
old cars, old money, old undebased pre-Lyndon
silver, no copper rubbing through … old wives;
I could live such a too long time with mine.
In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.
Before the final coming to rest, comes the rest
of all transcendence in a mode of being, hushing
all becoming. I’m for and with myself in my otherness,
New Selected Poems Page 13