Collected Earlier Poems (14 page)

Of rising carbuncles of air; he sees

Light spill across the undulant mercury film

Beyond which lies his breath. And now with a flutter

Of fountaining arms and into a final calm

He surfaces, clutching at the tiled gutter,

Where he rides limp and smilingly at ease.

But hoisting himself out, his weight returns

To normal, like sudden aging or weariness.

Tonight, full-length on a rumpled bed, alone,

He will redream it all: bathed in success

And sweat, he will achieve the chiselled stone

Of catatonia, for which his body yearns.

A small, unsmiling child,

Held upon her shoulder,

Stares from a photograph

Slightly out of kilter.

It slipped from a loaded folder

Where the income tax was filed.

The light seems cut in half

By a glum, October filter.

Of course, the child is right.

The unleafed branches knot

Into hopeless riddles behind him

And the air is clearly cold.

Given the stinted light

To which fate and film consigned him,

Who’d smile at his own lot

Even at one year old?

And yet his mother smiles.

Is it grown-up make-believe,

As when anyone takes your picture

Or some nobler, Roman virtue?

Vanity? Folly? The wiles

That some have up their sleeve?

A proud and flinty stricture

Against showing that things can hurt you,

Or a dark, Medean smile?

I’d be the last to know.

A speechless child of one

Could better construe the omens,

Unriddle our gifts for guile.

There’s no sign from my son.

But it needs no Greeks or Romans

To foresee the ice and snow.

Of course, the familiar rustling of programs,

My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture

Of mink. A little craning about to see

If anyone I know is in the audience,

And, as the house fills up,

A mild relief that no one there knows me.

A certain amount of getting up and down

From my aisle seat to let the others in.

Then my eyes wander briefly over the cast,

Management, stand-ins, make-up men, designers,

Perfume and liquor ads, and rise prayerlike

To the false heaven of rosetted lights,

The stucco lyres and emblems of high art

That promise, with crude Broadway honesty,

Something less than perfection:

Two bulbs are missing and Apollo’s bored.

And then the cool, drawn-out anticipation,

Not of the play itself, but the false dusk

And equally false night when the houselights

Obey some planetary rheostat

And bring a stillness on. It is that stillness

I wait for.

                         Before it comes,

Whether we like it or not, we are a crowd,

Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, fat with arrogance,

Passion, opinion, and appetite for blood.

But in that instant, which the mind protracts,

From dim to dark before the curtain rises,

Each of us is miraculously alone

In calm, invulnerable isolation,

Neither a neighbor nor a fellow but,

As at the beginning and end, a single soul,

With all the sweet and sour of loneliness.

I, as a connoisseur of loneliness,

Savor it richly, and set it down

In an endless umber landscape, a stubble field

Under a lilac, electric, storm-flushed sky,

Where, in companionship with worthless stones,

Mica-flecked, or at best some rusty quartz,

I stood in childhood, waiting for things to mend.

A useful discipline, perhaps. One that might lead

To solitary, self-denying work

That issues in something harmless, like a poem,

Governed by laws that stand for other laws,

Both of which aim, through kindred disciplines,

At the soul’s knowledge and habiliment.

In any case, in a self-granted freedom,

The mind, lone regent of itself, prolongs

The dark and silence; mirrors itself, delights

In consciousness of consciousness, alone,

Sufficient, nimble, touched with a small grace.

Then, as it must at last, the curtain rises,

The play begins. Something by Shakespeare.

Framed in the arched proscenium, it seems

A dream, neither better nor worse

Than whatever I shall dream after I rise

With hat and coat, go home to bed, and dream.

If anything, more limited, more strict—

No one will fly or turn into a moose.

But acceptable, like a dream, because remote,

And there is, after all, a pretty girl.

Perhaps tonight she’ll figure in the cast

I summon to my slumber and control

In vast arenas, limitless space, and time

That yield and sway in soft Einsteinian tides.

Who is she? Sylvia? Amelia Earhart?

Some creature that appears and disappears

From life, from reverie, a fugitive of dreams?

There on the stage, with awkward grace, the actors,

Beautifully costumed in Renaissance brocade,

Perform their duties, even as I must mine,

Though not, as I am, always free to smile.

Something is happening. Some consternation.

Are the knives out? Is someone’s life in danger?

And can the magic cloak and book protect?

One has, of course, real confidence in Shakespeare.

And I relax in my plush seat, convinced

That prompt as dawn and genuine as a toothache

The dream will be accomplished, provisionally true

As anything else one cares to think about.

The players are aghast. Can it be the villain,

The outrageous drunks, plotting the coup d’état,

Are slyer than we thought? Or we more innocent?

Can it be that poems lie? As in a dream,

Leaving a stunned and gap-mouthed Ferdinand,

Father and faery pageant, she, even she,

Miraculous Miranda, steps from the stage,

Moves up the aisle to my seat, where she stops,

Smiles gently, seriously, and takes my hand

And leads me out of the theatre, into a night

As luminous as noon, more deeply real,

Simply because of her hand, than any dream

Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.

for W. D. Snodgrass

The barbed-wire fences rust

As their cedar uprights blacken

After a night of rain.

Some early, innocent lust

Gets me outdoors to smell

The teasle, the pelted bracken,

The cold, mossed-over well,

Rank with its iron chain,

And takes me off for a stroll.

Wetness has taken over.

From drain and creeper twine

It’s runnelled and trenched and edged

A pebbled serpentine

Secretly, as though pledged

To attain a difficult goal

And join some important river.

The air is a smear of ashes

With a cool taste of coins.

Stiff among misty washes,

The trees are as black as wicks,

Silent, detached and old.

A pallor undermines

Some damp and swollen sticks.

The woods are rich with mould.

How even and pure this light!

All things stand on their own,

Equal and shadowless,

In a world gone pale and neuter,

Yet riddled with fresh delight.

The heart of every stone

Conceals a toad, and the grass

Shines with a douse of pewter.

Somewhere a branch rustles

With the life of squirrels or birds,

Some life that is quick and right.

This queer, delicious bareness,

This plain, uniform light,

In which both elms and thistles,

Grass, boulders, even words,

Speak for a Spartan fairness,

Might, as I think it over,

Speak in a form of signs,

If only one could know

All of its hidden tricks,

Saying that I must go

With a cool taste of coins

To join some important river,

Some damp and swollen Styx.

Yet what puzzles me the most

Is my unwavering taste

For these dim, weathery ghosts,

And how, from the very first,

An early, innocent lust

Delighted in such wastes,

Sought with a reckless thirst

A light so pure and just.

Chardin, Cézanne, they had their apples,

    As did Paris and Eve—

Sleek, buxom pippins with inverted nipples;

    And surely we believe

That Pluto has his own unsweet earth apples

    Blooming among the dead,

There in the thick of Radamanthine opals,

    Blake’s hand, Bernini’s head.

Ours are not golden overtures to trouble

    Or molds of fatal choice,

But like some fleshed epitome, the apple

    Entreats us to rejoice

In more than flavor, nourishment, or color,

    Or jack or calvados;

Nor are we rendered, through ingested dolor,

    Sinful or comatose.

It speaks to us quite otherwise, in supple

    Convexity and ply,

Smooth, modeled slopes, familiar rills. Crab apple,

    Winesap and Northern Spy

Tell us Hogarth’s “Analysis of Beauty”

    Or architect’s French Curve

Cannot proclaim what Aphrodite’s putti

    Both celebrate and serve:

Those known hyperbolas, those rounds and gradients,

    Dingle and shadowed dip,

The commonwealth of joy, imagined radiance,

    Thoughts of that faultless lip.

The dearest curves in nature—the merest ripple,

    The cresting wave—release

All of our love, and find it in an apple,

    My Helen, your Elisse.

for Zbigniew Herbert

I am much too tired now to do anything

But look at the molding along the top of the wall.

Those orchid shadows and pearl highlights bring

My childhood back so oddly. They recall

Two weeks of scarlet fever, when I lay

Gazing at grooves and bevels, oyster whites

Clouding to ringdove feathers, gathering lights

Like snow on railings towards the middle of day.

Just to lie there and watch, astonished when

That subtle show gave way to electric light,

That’s what I think of, lying here tonight.

Tonight the interrogations begin again.

for Joseph Brodsky

Vacant parade grounds swept by the winter wind,

A pile of worn-out tires crowning a knoll,

The purplish clinkers near the cinder blocks

That support the steps of an abandoned church

Still moored to a telephone pole, this sullen place

Is
terra deserta
, Joseph, this is Egypt.

You have been here before, but long ago.

The first time you were sold by your own brothers

But had a gift for dreams that somehow saved you.

The second time was familiar but still harder.

You came with wife and child, the child not yours,

The wife, whom you adored, in a way not yours,

And all that you can recall, even in dreams,

Is the birth itself, and after that the journey,

Mixed with an obscure and confusing music,

Confused with a smell of hay and steaming dung.

Nothing is clear from then on, and what became

Of the woman and child eludes you altogether.

Look, though, at the blank, expressionless faces

Here in this photograph by Walker Evans.

These are the faces that everywhere surround you;

They have all the emptiness of gravel pits.

And look, here, at this heavy growth of weeds

Where the dishwater is poured from the kitchen window

And has been ever since the house was built.

And the chimney whispers its weak diphtheria,

The hydrangeas display their gritty pollen of soot.

This is Egypt, Joseph, the old school of the soul.

You will recognize the rank smell of a stable

And the soft patience in a donkey’s eyes,

Telling you you are welcome and at home.