Collected Earlier Poems (12 page)

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks
,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet
,
What saint strained so much
,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

THEODORE ROETHKE

    I write at last of the one forbidden topic

We, by a truce, have never touched upon:

Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought

With moral inhibitions, so at odds with

The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness,

And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,

That almost all of us were taken in,

Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,

Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory

Of Good and Evil, clearly identified

By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,

The virginal meekness of the ingénue,

Seduced us straight into that perfect world

Of Justice under God. Art for the sake

Of money, glamour, ego, self-deceit.

When we emerged into the assaulting sunlight,

We had a yen, like bad philosophers,

To go back to stay forever, there in the dark

With the trumpets, horses, and ancient Certitudes

On which, as we know, this great nation was founded,

Washington crossed the Delaware, and so forth.

And all of us, for an hour or so after,

Were Humphrey Bogart dating Ingrid Bergman,

Walking together but incommunicado

Till subway and homework knocked us out of it.

Yet even then, whatever we returned to

Was not, although we thought it was, the world.

    I write at last on this topic because I am safe

Here in this grubby little border town

With its one cheap hotel. No one has my address.

The food is bad, the wine is too expensive,

And the local cathedral marred by restorations.

But from my balcony I view the east

For miles and, if I lean, the local sunsets

That bathe a marble duke with what must be

Surely the saddest light I have ever seen.

The air is thin and cool at this elevation,

And my desk wobbles unless propped with matchbooks.

    It began, I suppose, as a color, yellow-green,

The tincture of spring willows, not so much color

As the sensation of color, haze that took shape

As a light scum, a doily of minutiae

On the smooth pool and surface of your mind.

A founding colony, Pilgrim amoebas

Descended from the gaseous flux when Zeus

Tossed down his great original thunderbolt

That flashed in darkness like an electric tree

Or the lit-up veins in an old arthritic hand.

    Here is the microscope one had as a child,

The Christmas gift of some forgotten uncle.

Here is the slide with a drop of cider vinegar

As clear as gin, clear as your early mind.

Look down, being most careful not to see

Your own eye in the mirror underneath,

Which will appear, unless your view is right,

As a darkness on the face of the first waters.

When all is silvery and brilliant, look:

The long, thin, darting shapes, the flagellates,

Rat-tailed, ambitious, lash themselves along—

Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells

Content to be borne on whatever tide,

Trustful, the very image of consent—

These are the frail, unlikely origins,

Scarcely perceived, of all you shall become.

Scarcely perceived? But at this early age

(What are you, one or two?) you have no knowledge,

Nor do your folks, nor could the gravest doctors

Suspect that anything was really wrong.

Nor see the pale beginnings, lace endeavors

That with advancing ages shall mature

Into sea lettuce, beard the rocky shore

With a light green of soft and tidal hair.

    Whole eras, seemingly without event,

Now scud the glassy pool processionally

Until one day, misty, uncalendared,

As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,

Vascular tissue, conduit filaments

Learn how to feed the outposts of that small

Emerald principate. Now there are roots,

The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,

Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last

Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.

How soundlessly, shyly this came about,

One thinks today. But that is not the truth.

It was, from the first, an everlasting war

Conducted, as always, at gigantic cost.

Think of the droughts, the shifts of wind and weather,

The many seeds washed to some salt conclusion

Or brought to rest at last on barren ground.

Think of some inching tendrils worming down

In hope of water, blind and white as death.

Think of the strange mutations life requires.

Only the toughest endured, themselves much altered,

Trained in the cripple’s careful sciences

Of mute accommodation. The survivors

Were all, one way or another, amputees

Who learned to live with their stumps, like Brueghel’s beggars.

    
Yet, for all that, it clearly was a triumph,

Considering, as one must, what was to come.

And, even by themselves, those fields of clover,

Cattails, marsh bracken, water-lily pads

Stirred by the lightest airs, pliant, submissive—

Who could have called their slow creation
rage
?

    Consider, as one must, what was to come.

Great towering conifers, deciduous,

Rib-vaulted elms, the banyan, oak, and palm,

Sequoia forests of vindictiveness

That also would go down on the death list

And, buried deep beneath alluvial shifts,

Would slowly darken into lakes of coal

And then under exquisite pressure turn

Into the tiny diamonds of pure hate.

The delicate fingers of the clematis

Feeling their way along a face of shale

With all the ingenuity of spite.

The indigestible thistle of revenge.

And your most late accomplishment, the rose.

Until at last, what we might designate

As your Third Day, behold a world of green:

Color of hope, of the Church’s springtide vestments,

The primal wash, heraldic hue of envy.

But in what pre-lapsarian disguise!

Strangers and those who do not know you well

(Yourself not least) are quickly taken in

By a summery prospect, shades of innocence.

Like that young girl, a sort of chance acquaintance,

Seven or eight she was, on the New York Central,

Who, with a blue-eyed, beatific smile,

Shouted with joy, “Look, Mommy, quick. Look. Daisies!”

    
These days, with most of us at a safe distance,

You scarcely know yourself. Whole weeks go by

Without your remembering that enormous effort,

Ages of disappointment, the long ache

Of motives twisted out of recognition,

The doubt and hesitation all submerged

In those first clear waters, that untroubled pool.

Who could have hoped for this eventual peace?

Moreover, there are moments almost of bliss,

A sort of recompense, in which your mood

Sorts with the peach endowments of late sunlight

On a snowfield or on the breaker’s froth

Or the white steeple of the local church.

Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain

A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun

In lively, fluctuant geometries,

You sometimes contemplate a single image,

Utterly silent, utterly at rest.

It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,

Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,

Gravely intent at a table propped with match-books,

Writing this very poem—about me.

Cliff-high, sunlit, in the tawny warmth of youth,

He gazed down at the breakneck rocks below,

Entranced by the water’s loose attacks of jade,

The sousing waves, the interminable, blind

Fury of scattered opals, flung tiaras,

Full, hoisted, momentary chandeliers.

He spent most of the morning there alone.

He smoked, recalled some lines of poetry,

Felt himself claimed by such rash opulence:

These were the lofty figures of his soul.

What was it moved him in all that swash and polish?

Against an imperial sky of lupine blue,

Suspended, as it seemed to him, forever,

Blazed a sun-flooded gem of the first water.

Blazed, as it seemed, forever. Was this the secret

Gaudery of self-love, or a blood-bidden,

Involuntary homage to the world?

As it happens, he was doomed never to know.

At times in darkened rooms he thought he heard

The soft ruckus of patiently torn paper,

The sea’s own noise, the elderly slop and suck

Of hopeless glottals. Once, in a bad dream,

He saw himself stranded on the wet flats,

As limp as kelp, among putrescent crabs.

But to the very finish he remembered

The flash and force, the crests, the heraldry,

Those casual epergnes towering up

Like Easter trinkets of the tzarevitch.

               Even a Pyrrhonist

Who knows only that he can never know

               (But adores a paradox)

Would admit it’s getting dark. Pale as a wrist-

               Watch numeral glow,

Fireflies build a sky among the phlox,

               Imparting their faint light

Conservatively only to themselves.

               Earthmurk and flowerscent

Sweeten the homes of ants. Comes on the night

               When the mind rockets and delves

In blind hyperbolas of its own bent.

               Above, the moon at large,

Muse-goddess, slightly polluted by the runs

               Of American astronauts,

(Poor, poxed Diana, laid open to the charge

               Of social Actaeons)

Mildly solicits our petty cash and thoughts.

               At once with their votive mites,

Out of the woods and woodwork poets come,

               Hauling their truths and booty,

Each one a Phosphor, writing by his own lights,

               And with a diesel hum

Of mosquitoes or priests, proffer their wordy duty.

               They speak in tongues, no doubt;

High glossolalia, runic gibberish.

               Some are like desert saints,

Wheat-germ ascetics, draped in pelt and clout.

               Some come in schools, like fish.

These make their litany of dark complaints;

               
Those laugh and rejoice

At liberation from the bonds of gender,

               Race, morals and mind,

As well as meter, rhyme and the human voice.

               Still others strive to render

The cross-word world in perfectly declined

               Pronouns, starting with ME.

Yet there are honest voices to be heard:

               The crickets keep their vigil

Among the grass; in some invisible tree

               Anonymously a bird

Whistles a fioritura, a light, vestigial

               Reminder of a time,

An Aesopic Age when all the beasts were moral

               And taught their ways to men;

Some herbal dream, some chlorophyll sublime

               In which Apollo’s laurel

Blooms in a world made innocent again.

June 22, 1976

Like a small cloud, like a little hovering ghost

                         Without substance or edges,

Like a crowd of numbered dots in a sick child’s puzzle,

               A loose community of midges

Sways in the carven shafts of noon that coast

Down through the summer trees in a golden dazzle.

Intent upon such tiny copter flights,

                         The eye adjusts its focus

To those billowings about ten feet away,

               That hazy, woven hocus-pocus

Or shell game of the air, whose casual sleights

Leave us unable certainly to say

What lies behind it, or what sets it off

                         With fine diminishings,

Like the pale towns Mantegna chose to place

               Beyond the thieves and King of Kings:

Those domes, theatres and temples, clear enough

On that mid-afternoon of our disgrace.

And we know at once it would take an act of will

                         Plus a firm, inquiring squint

To ignore those drunken motes and concentrate

               On the blurred, unfathomed background tint

Of deep sea-green Holbein employed to fill

The space behind his ministers of state,

As if one range slyly obscured the other.

                         As, in the main, it does.

All of our Flemish distances disclose

               A clarity that never was:

Dwarf pilgrims in the green faubourgs of Mother

And Son, stunted cathedrals, shrunken cows.

It’s the same with Time. Looked at
sub specie

                         
Aeternitatis
, from

The snow-line of some Ararat of years,

               Scholars remark those kingdoms come

To nothing, to grief, without the least display

Of anything so underbred as tears,