Collected Earlier Poems (11 page)

Evening is clogged with gnats as the light fails,

And branches bloom with gold and copper screams

Of birds with figured and sought-after tails

To plume a lady’s gear; the motet wails

Through Africa upon dissimilar themes.

A little snuffbox whereon Daphnis sings

In pale enamels, touching love’s defeat,

Calls up the color of her underthings

And plays upon the taut memorial strings,

Trailing her laces down into this heat.

One day he found, topped with a smutty grin,

The small corpse of a monkey, partly eaten.

Force of the sun had split the bluish skin,

Which, by their questioning and entering in,

A swarm of bees had been concerned to sweeten.

He could distill no essence out of this.

That yellow majesty and molten light

Should bless this carcass with a sticky kiss

Argued a brute and filthy emphasis.

The half-moons of the fingernails were white,

And where the nostrils opened on the skies,

Issuing to the sinus, where the ant

Crawled swiftly down to undermine the eyes

Of cloudy aspic, nothing could disguise

How terribly the thing looked like Philinte.

Will-o’-the-wisp, on the scum-laden water,

Burns in the night, a gaseous deceiver,

In the pale shade of France’s foremost daughter.

Heat gives his thinking cavity no quarter,

For he is burning with the monkey’s fever.

Before the bees have diagrammed their comb

Within the skull, before summer has cracked

The back of Daphnis, naked, polychrome,

Versailles shall see the tempered exile home,

Peruked and stately for the final act.

                                        
of whom I have

                         
Receiv’d a second life
…

Why, let the stricken deer go weep
,
    
The hart ungallèd play
…

Think how some excellent, lean torso hugs

               The brink of weight and speed,

Coasting the margins of those rival tugs

               Down the thin path of friction,

The athlete’s dancing vectors, the spirit’s need,

               And muscle’s cleanly diction,

Clean as a Calder, whose interlacing ribs

               Depend on one another,

Or a keen heeling of tackle, fluttering jibs

               And slotted centerboards,

A fleet of breasting gulls riding the smother

               And puzzle of heaven’s wards.

Instinct with joy, a young Italian banks

               Smoothly around the base

Of Trajan’s column, feeling between his flanks

               That cool, efficient beast,

His Vespa, at one with him in a centaur’s race,

               Fresh from a Lapith feast,

And his Lapith girl behind him. Both of them lean

               With easy nonchalance

Over samphire-tufted cliffs which, though unseen,

               Are known, as the body knows

New risks and tilts, terrors and loves and wants,

               Deeply inside its clothes.

She grips the animal-shouldered naked skin

               Of his fitted leather jacket,

Letting a wake of hair float out the spin

               And dazzled rinse of air,

Yet for all their headlong lurch and flatulent racket

               They seem to loiter there,

Forever aslant in their moment and the mind’s eye.

               Meanwhile, around the column

There also turn, and turn eternally,

               Two thousand raw recruits

And scarred veterans coiling the stone in solemn

               Military pursuits,

The heft and grit of the emperors’ Dacian Wars

               That lasted fifteen years.

All of that youth and purpose is, of course,

               No more than so much dust.

And even Trajan, of his imperial peers

               Accounted “the most just,”

Honored by Dante, by Gregory the Great

               Saved from eternal Hell,

Swirls in the motes kicked up by the cough and spate

               Of the Vespa’s blue exhaust,

And a voice whispers inwardly, “My soul,

               It is the cost, the cost,”

Like some unhinged Othello, who’s just found out

               That justice is no more,

While Cassio, Desdemona, Iago shout

               Like true Venetians all,

“Go screw yourself; all’s fair in love and war!”

               And the bright standards fall.

Better they should not hear that whispered phrase,

               The young Italian couple;

Surely the mind in all its brave assays

               Must put much thinking by,

To be, as Yeats would have it, free and supple

               As a long-legged fly.

Look at their slender purchase, how they list

               Like a blown clipper, brought

To the lively edge of peril, to the kissed

               Lip, the victor’s crown,

The prize of life. Yet one unbodied thought

               Could topple them, bring down

The whole shebang. And why should they take thought

               Of all that ancient pain,

The Danube winters, the nameless young who fought,

               The blood’s uncertain lease?

Or remember that that fifteen-year campaign

               Won seven years of peace?

for Thomas Cornell

Peace, tawny slave, half me and half thy dam!
Did not thy hue bewray whose brat thou art
,
…
Villain, thou mightst have been an emperor
.

Summer. A hot, moth-populated night.

Yesterday’s maples in the village park

Are boxed away into the vaults of dark,

To be returned tomorrow, like our flag,

Which was brought down from its post office height

At sunset, folded, and dumped in a mailbag.

Wisdom, our Roman matron, perched on her throne

In front of the library, the Civil War

Memorial (History and Hope) no more

Are braced, trustworthy figures. Some witching skill

Softly dismantled them, stone by heavy stone,

And the small town, like Bethlehem, lies still.

And it is still at the all-night service station,

Where Andy Warhol’s primary colors shine

In simple commercial glory, the Esso sign

Revolving like a funland lighthouse, where

An eighteen-year-old black boy clocks the nation,

Reading a comic book in a busted chair.

Our solitary guardian of the law

Of diminishing returns? The President,

Addressing the first contingent of draftees sent

To Viet Nam, was brief: “Life is not fair,”

He said, and was right, of course. Everyone saw

What happened to him in Dallas. We were there,

We suffered, we were Whitman. And now the boy

Daydreams about the White House, the rising shares

Of Standard Oil, the whited sepulchres.

But what, after all, has he to complain about,

This expendable St. Michael we employ

To stay awake and keep the darkness out?

The lichens, like a gorgeous, soft disease

               In rust and gold rosette

Emboss the bouldered wall, and creepers seize

               In their cup-footed fret,

Ravelled and bare, such purchase as affords.

               The sap-tide slides to ebb,

And leafstems, like the drumsticks of small birds,

               Lie snagged in a spiderweb.

Down at the stonework base, among the stump-

               Fungus and feather moss,

Dead leaves are sunken in a shallow sump

               Of energy and loss,

Enriched now with the colors of old coins

               And brilliance of wet leather.

An earthen tea distills at the roots-groins

               Into the smoky weather

A deep, familiar essence of the year:

               A sweet fetor, a ghost

Of foison, gently welcoming us near

               To humus, mulch, compost.

The last mosquitoes lazily hum and play

               Above the yeasting earth

A feeble
Gloria
to this cool decay

               Or casual dirge of birth.

for Cyrus Hoy

The Discus Thrower’s marble heave,

    Captured in mid-career,

That polished poise, that Parian arm

    Sleeved only in the air,

Vesalian musculature, white

    As the mid-winter moon—

This, and the clumsy snapshot of

    An infantry platoon,

Those grubby and indifferent men,

    Lounging in bivouac,

Their rifles aimless in their laps,

    Stop history in its tracks.

We who are all aswim in time,

    We, “the inconstant ones,”

How can such fixture speak to us?

    The chisel and the lens

Deal in a taxidermy

    Of our arrested flights,

And by their brute translation we

    Turn into Benthamites.

Those soldiers, like some senior class,

    Were they prepared to dye

In silver nitrate images

    Behind the camera’s eye?

It needs a Faust to animate

    The wan homunculus,

Construe the stark, unchanging text,

    Winkle the likes of us

Out of a bleak geology

    That art has put to rest,

And by a sacred discipline

    
Give breath back to the past.

How, for example, shall I read

    The expression on my face

Among that company of men

    In that unlikely place?

Easy enough to claim, in the dawn of hindsight,

That Mozart’s music perfectly enacts

Pastries and powdered wigs, an architecture

Of white and gold rosettes, balanced parterres.

More difficult to know how the spirit learns

Its scales, or the exact dimensions of fear:

The nameless man dressed head-to-foot in black,

Come to commission a requiem in a hurry.

In the diatonic house there are many mansions:

A hunting lodge in the mountains, a peaceable cloister,

A first-class restaurant near the railroad yards,

But also a seedy alms-house, the granite prisons

And oubliettes of the soul. Just how such truth

Gets itself stated in pralltrillers and mordents

Not everyone can say. But the ’cellist,

Leaning over his labors, his eyes closed,

Is engaged in that study, blocking out, for the moment,

Audience, hall, and a great part of himself

In what, not wrongly, might be called research,

Or the most private kind of honesty.

We begin with the supreme donnée, the world,

Upon which every text is commentary,

And yet they play each other, the oak-leaf cured

In sodden ditches of autumn darkly confirms

Our words; and by the frailest trifles

(A doubt, a whisper, and a handkerchief)

Venetian pearl and onyx are cast away.

It is, in the end, the solitary scholar

Who returns us to the freshness of the text,

Which returns to us the freshness of the world

In which we find ourselves, like replicas,

Dazzled by glittering dawns, upon a stage.

Pentelic balconies give on the east;

The clouds are scrolled, bellied in apricot,

Adrift in pools of Scandinavian blue.

Light crisps the terraces of dolomite.

Enter The Prologue, who at once declares,

“We begin with the supreme donnée, the word.”

It is rather strange to be speaking, but I know you are there

Wanting to know, as if it were worth knowing.

Nor is it important that I died in combat

In a good cause or an indifferent one.

Such things, it may surprise you, are not regarded.

Something too much of this.

You are bound to be disappointed,

Wanting to know, are there any trees?

It is all different from what you suppose,

And the darkness is not darkness exactly,

But patience, silence, withdrawal, the sad knowledge

That it was almost impossible not to hurt anyone

Whether by action or inaction.

At the beginning of course there was a sense of loss,

Not of one’s own life, but of what seemed

The easy, desirable lives one might have led.

Fame or wealth are hard to achieve,

And goodness even harder;

But the cost of all of them is a familiar deformity

Such as everyone suffers from:

An allergy to certain foods, nausea at the sight of blood,

A slight impediment of speech, shame at one’s own body,

A fear of heights or claustrophobia.

What you learn has nothing whatever to do with joy,

Nor with sadness, either. You are mostly silent.

You come to a gentle indifference about being thought

Either a fool or someone with valuable secrets.

It may be that the ultimate wisdom

Lies in saying nothing.

I think I may already have said too much.