Selected Poems
Page 6
the leaves
bright
green
of wrist-thick
tree
and old
stiff broken
branch
ferncool
swaying
loosely strung—
come May
again
white blossom
clusters
hide
to spill
their sweets
almost
unnoticed
down
and quickly
fall
The Locust Tree in Flower
(Second version)
Among
of
green
stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again
View of a Lake
from a
highway below a face
of rock
too recently blasted
to be overgrown
with grass or fern:
Where a
waste of cinders
slopes down to
the railroad and
the lake
stand three children
beside the weed-grown
chassis
of a wrecked car
immobile in a line
facing the water
To the left a boy
in falling off
blue overalls
Next to him a girl
in a grimy frock
And another boy
They are intent
watching something
below—?
A section sign: 50
on an iron post
planted
by a narrow concrete
service hut
(to which runs
a sheaf of wires)
in the universal
cinders beaten
into crossing paths
to form the front yard
of a frame house
at the right
that looks
to have been flayed
Opposite
remains a sycamore
in leaf
Intently fixed
the three
with straight backs
ignore
the stalled traffic
all eyes
toward the water
To a Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
Proletarian Portrait
A big young bareheaded woman
in an apron
Her hair slicked back standing
on the street
One stockinged foot toeing
the sidewalk
Her shoe in her hand. Looking
intently into it
She pulls out the paper insole
to find the nail
That has been hurting her
The Raper from Passenack
was very kind. When she regained
her wits, he said, It’s all right, kid,
I took care of you.
What a mess she was in. Then he added,
You’ll never forget me now.
And drove her home.
Only a man who is sick, she said
would do a thing like that.
It must be so.
No one who is not diseased could be
so insanely cruel. He wants to give it
to someone else—
to justify himself. But if I get a
venereal infection out of this
I won’t be treated.
I refuse. You’ll find me dead in bed
first. Why not? That’s
the way she spoke,
I wish I could shoot him. How would
you like to know a murderer?
I may do it.
I’ll know by the end of this week.
I wouldn’t scream. I bit him
several times
but he was too strong for me.
I can’t yet understand it. I don’t
faint so easily.
When I came to myself and realized
what had happened all I could do
was to curse
and call him every vile name I could
think of. I was so glad
to be taken home.
I suppose it’s my mind—the fear of
infection. I’d rather a million times
have been got pregnant.
But it’s the foulness of it can’t
be cured. And hatred, hatred of all men
—and disgust.
The Yachts
contend in a sea which the land partly encloses
shielding them from the too-heavy blows
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses
tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute
brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails
they glide to the wind tossing green water
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls
ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing,
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.
In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare
as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace
of all that in the mind is fleckless, free and
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them
is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts
move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas.
Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows.
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair
until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind,
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,
beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.
The Catholic Bells
Tho’ I’m no Catholic
I listen hard when the bells
in the yellow-brick tower
of their new church
ring down the leaves
ring in the frost upon them
and the death of the flowers
ring out the grackle
toward the south, the sky
darkened by them, ring in
the new baby of Mr. and Mrs.
Krantz which cannot
for the fat of its cheeks
open well its eyes, ring out
the parrot under its hood
jealous of the child
ring in Sun
day morning
and old age which adds as it
takes away. Let them ring
only ring! over the oil
painting of a young priest
on the church wall advertising
last week’s Novena to St.
Anthony, ring for the lame
young man in black with
gaunt cheeks and wearing a
Derby hat, who is hurrying
to 11 o’clock Mass (the
grapes still hanging to
the vine along the nearby
Concordia Halle like broken
teeth in the head of an
old man) Let them ring
for the eyes and ring for
the hands and ring for
the children of my friend
who no longer hears
them ring but with a smile
and in a low voice speaks
of the decisions of her
daughter and the proposals
and betrayals of her
husband’s friends. O bells
ring for the ringing!
the beginning and the end
of the ringing! Ring ring
ring ring ring ring ring!
Catholic bells—!
Adam and Eve and the City
(1936)
Fine Work with Pitch and Copper
Now they are resting
in the fleckless light
separately in unison
like the sacks
of sifted stone stacked
regularly by twos
about the flat roof
ready after lunch
to be opened and strewn
The copper in eight
foot strips has been
beaten lengthwise
down the center at right
angles and lies ready
to edge the coping
One still chewing
picks up a copper strip
and runs his eye along it
Adam
He grew up by the sea
on a hot island
inhabited by negroes—mostly.
There he built himself
a boat and a separate room
close to the water
for a piano on which he practiced—
by sheer doggedness
and strength of purpose
striving
like an Englishman
to emulate his Spanish friend
and idol—the weather!
And there he learned
to play the flute—not very well—
Thence he was driven
out of Paradise—to taste
the death that duty brings
so daintily, so mincingly,
with such a noble air—
that enslaved him all his life
thereafter—
And he left behind
all the curious memories that come
with shells and hurricanes—
the smells
and sounds and glancing looks
that Latins know belong
to boredom and long torrid hours
and Englishmen
will never understand—whom
duty has marked
for special mention—with
a tropic of its own
and its own heavy-winged fowl
and flowers that vomit beauty
at midnight—
But the Latin has turned romance
to a purpose cold as ice.
He never sees
or seldom
what melted Adam’s knees
to jelly and despair—and
held them up pontifically—
Underneath the whisperings
of tropic nights
there is a darker whispering
that death invents especially
for northern men
whom the tropics
have come to hold.
It would have been enough
to know that never,
never, never, never would
peace come as the sun comes
in the hot islands.
But there was
a special hell besides
where black women lie waiting
for a boy—
Naked on a raft
he could see the barracudas
waiting to castrate him
so the saying went—
Circumstances take longer—
But being an Englishman
though he had not lived in England
desde que avia cinco años
he never turned back
but kept a cold eye always
on the inevitable end
never wincing—never to unbend—
God’s handyman
going quietly into hell’s mouth
for a paper of reference—
fetching water to posterity
a British passport
always in his pocket—
muleback over Costa Rica
eating pâtés of black ants
And the Latin ladies admired him
and under their smiles
dartled the dagger of despair—
in spite of
a most thorough trial—
found his English heart safe
in the roseate steel. Duty
the angel
which with whip in hand …
—along the low wall of paradise
where they sat and smiled
and flipped their fans
at him—
He never had but the one home
Staring Him in the eye
coldly
and with patience—
without a murmur, silently
a desperate, unvarying silence
to the unhurried last.
The Crimson Cyclamen
(To the Memory of Charles Demuth)
White suffused with red
more rose than crimson
—all acolor
the petals flare back
from the stooping craters
of those flowers
as from a wind rising—
And though the light
that enfolds and pierces
them discovers blues
and yellows there also—
and crimson’s a dull word
beside such play—
yet the effect against
this winter where
they stand—is crimson—
It is miraculous
that flower should rise
by flower
alike in loveliness—
as though mirrors
of some perfection
could never be
too often shown—
silence holds them—
in that space. And
color has been construed
from emptiness
to waken there—
But the form came gradually.
The plant was there
before the flowers
as always—the leaves,
day by day changing. In
September when the first
pink pointed bud still
bowed below, all the leaves
heart-shaped
were already spread—
quirked and green
and stenciled with a paler
green
irregularly
across and round the edge—
Upon each leaf it is
a pattern more
of logic than a purpose
links each part to the rest,
an abstraction
playfully following
centripetal
devices, as of pure thought—
the edge tying by
convergent, crazy rays
with the center—
where that dips
cupping down to the
upright stem—the source
that has spl
ayed out
fanwise and returns
upon itself in the design
thus decoratively—
Such are the leaves
freakish, of the air
as thought is, of roots
dark, complex from
subterranean revolutions
and rank odors
waiting for the moon—
The young leaves
coming among the rest
are more crisp
and deeply cupped
the edges rising first
impatient of the slower
stem—the older
level, the oldest
with the edge already
fallen a little backward—
the stem alone
holding the form
stiffly a while longer—
Under the leaf, the same
though the smooth green
is gone. Now the ribbed
design—if not
the purpose, is explained.
The stem’s pink flanges,
strongly marked,
stand to the frail edge,
dividing, thinning
through the pink and downy
mesh—as the round stem
is pink also—cranking
to penciled lines
angularly deft
through all, to link together
the unnicked argument
to the last crinkled edge—
where the under and the over
meet and disappear
and the air alone begins
to go from them—
the conclusion left still
blunt, floating
if warped and quaintly flecked
whitened and streaked
resting
upon the tie of the stem—
But half hidden under them
such as they are
it begins that must
put thought to rest—
wakes in tinted beaks
still raising the head
and passion
is loosed—
its small lusts
addressed still to
the knees and to sleep—
abandoning argument
lifts
through the leaves
day by day
and one day opens!
The petals!
the petals undone
loosen all five and
swing up
The flower
flows to release—
Fast within a ring
where the compact
agencies
of conception
lie mathematically
ranged
round the
hair-like sting—
From such a pit
the color flows
over
a purple rim
upward to
the light! the light!
all around—
Five petals
as one
to flare, inverted
a full flower
each petal tortured
eccentrically
the while, warped edge