Collected Earlier Poems (15 page)

The coltish horseplay of the locker room,

Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls,

With shameless blends of civet, musk and sweat,

Loud with the cap-gun snapping of wet towels

Under the steel-ribbed cages of bare bulbs,

In some such setting of thick basement pipes

And janitorial realities

Boys for the first time frankly eye each other,

Inspect each others’ bodies at close range,

And what they see is not so much another

As a strange, possible version of themselves,

And all the sparring dance, adrenal life,

Tense, jubilant nimbleness, is but a vague,

Busy, unfocused ballet of self-love.

If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body

Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit,

Felt in the tingling bruises of collision,

And known to captains as
esprit de corps
.

What is this brisk fraternity of timing,

Pivot and lobbing arc, or indirection,

Mens sana
in men’s sauna, in the flush

Of health and toilets, private and corporal glee,

These fleet caroms,
pliés
and genuflections

Before the salmon-leap, the leaping fountain

All sheathed in glistening light, flexed and alert?

From the vast echo-chamber of the gym,

Among the scumbled shouts and shrill of whistles,

The bounced basketball sound of a leather whip.

Think of those barren places where men gather

To act in the terrible name of rectitude,

Of acned shame, punk’s pride, muscle or turf,

The bully’s thin superiority.

Think of the
Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant

Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas,

Or the blond boys in jeans whose narrowed eyes

Are focussed by some hard and smothered lust,

Who lounge in a studied mimicry of ease,

Flick their live butts into the standing weeds,

And comb their hair in the mirror of cracked windows

Of an abandoned warehouse where they keep

In darkened readiness for their occasion

The rope, the chains, handcuffs and gasoline.

Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,

In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.

The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths

Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.

They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,

Having flung down their wet and salty garments

At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.

He watches sharply these superbly tanned

Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,

A miler’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,

And in between their sleek, converging bodies,

Brilliantly oiled and burnished by the sun,

He catches a brief glimpse of bloodied hair

And hears an unintelligible prayer.

for Evan

                         Three new and matching loaves,

    Each set upon a motionless swing seat,

               Straight from some elemental stoves

    And winter bakeries of unearthly wheat,

In diamonded, smooth pillowings of white

    Have risen out of nothing overnight.

                         And all the woods for miles,

    Stooped by these clean endowments of the north,

               Flaunt the same candle-dripping styles

    In poured combers of pumice and the froth

Of heady steins. Upon the railings lodge

    The fat shapes of a nineteen-thirties Dodge.

                         Such perilous, toppling tides;

    Such teeterings along uncertain perches.

               A fragile cantilever hides

    Even the chevrons of our veteran birches.

In this fierce hush there is a spell that heaves

    Those huge arrested oceans in the eaves.

                         A sort of stagy show

    Put on by a spoiled, eccentric millionaire.

               Lacking the craft and choice that go

    With weighed precision, meditated care,

Into a work of art, these are the spent,

    Loose, aimless squanderings of the discontent.

                         Like the blind, headlong cells,

    Crowding toward dreams of life, only to die

               In dark fallopian canals,

    Or that wild strew of bodies at My Lai.

Thick drifts, huddled embankments at our door

    Pile up in this eleventh year of war.

                         
Yet to these April snows,

    This rashness, those incalculable odds,

               The costly and cold-blooded shows

    Of blind perversity or spendthrift gods

My son is born, and in his mother’s eyes

    Turns the whole war and winter into lies.

                         But voices underground

    Demand, “Who died for him? Who gave him place?”

               I have no answer. Vaguely stunned,

    I turn away and look at my wife’s face.

Outside the simple miracle of this birth

    The snowflakes lift and swivel to the earth

                         As in those crystal balls

    With Christmas storms of manageable size,

               A chalk precipitate that shawls

    Antlers and roof and gifts beyond surmise,

A tiny settlement among those powers

    That shape our world, but that are never ours.

    A grave and secret malady of my brother’s,

The stock exchange, various grown-up shames,

The white emergency of hospitals,

Inquiries from the press, such
coups de théâtre

Upon a stage from which I was excluded

Under the rubric of “benign neglect”

Had left me pretty much to my own devices

(My own stage was about seven years old)

Except for a Teutonic governess

Replete with the curious thumb-print of her race,

That special relish for inflicted pain.

Some of this she could vaguely satisfy

In the pages of the
Journal-American

Which featured stories with lurid photographs—

A child chained tightly to a radiator

In an abandoned house; the instruments

With which some man tortured his fiancée,

A headless body recently unearthed

On the links of an exclusive country club—

That fleshed out terribly what loyal readers

Hankered for daily in the name of news.

(It in no way resembled the
New York Times
,

My parents’ paper, thin on photographs.)

Its world, some half-lit world, some demi-monde,

I knew of only through Fräulein’s addiction

To news that was largely terminal and obscene,

Winding its way between the ads for nightclubs

With girls wearing top hats, black tie, wing collar,

But without shirts, their naked breasts exposed;

And liquids that removed unsightly hair,

Treatments for corns, trusses and belts and braces.

She chain-smoked Camels as she scanned the pages,

Whereas my mother’s brand was Chesterfield.

    
My primary education was composed

Of daily lessons in placating her

With acts of shameless, mute docility.

At seven I knew that I was not her equal,

If I knew nothing else. And I knew little,

But suspected a great deal—domestic quarrels,

Not altogether muffled, must have meant something.

“The market” of our home was the stock market,

Without visible fruit, without produce,

Except perhaps for the strange vendors of apples

Who filled our city streets. And all those girls—

The ones with naked breasts—there was some secret,

Deep as my brother’s illness, behind their smiles.

They knew something I didn’t; they taunted me.

I moved in a cloudy world of inference

Where the most solid object was a toy

Rake that my governess had used to beat me.

    My own devices came to silence and cunning

In my unwilling exile, while attempting

To put two and two together, at which I failed.

The world seemed made of violent oppositions:

The Bull and Bear of Wall Street, Mother and Father,

Criminals and their victims, Venus and Mars,

The cold, portending graphics of the stars.

I spent my time in what these days my son

At three years old calls “grabbling around,”

For which Roget might possibly supply

“Purposeful idling, staying out of the way,”

Or, in the military phrase, “gold-bricking,”

A serious occupation, for which I was gifted

One Christmas with an all but magic treasure:

The Book of Knowledge, complete in twenty volumes.

I was its refugee, it was my Forest

Stocked with demure princesses, tameable dragons,

And sway-backed cottages, weighted with snow,

And waiting in an Arthur Rackham mist

For the high, secret advent of Santa Claus.

Dim populations of elfdom, and what’s more,

Pictures of laborers in derby hats

And shirtsleeves, Thomas Alva Edison,

Who seemed to resemble Harding, who, in turn,

Resembled a kindly courtier, tactfully whispering

In the ear of Isabella, Queen of Spain—

Probably bearing on financial matters,

Selling the family jewels for Columbus,

Or whether the world is round. Serious topics

To which I would give due consideration.

There were puzzles and, magnificently, their answers;

Lively depictions of the Trojan War;

And Mrs. Siddons as The Tragic Muse.

Methods of calculating the height of trees,

Maps of the earth and heavens, buccaneer

Ventures for buried gold, and poetry:

Whittier, Longfellow, and “Home, Sweet Home.”

Here was God’s plenty, as Dryden said of Chaucer.

    Inestimable, priceless as that gift was,

I was given yet another—more peculiar,

Rare, unexpected, harder to assess,

An experience that W. H. Auden

Designates as “The Vision of Dame Kind,”

Remarking that “the objects of this vision

May be inorganic—mountains, rivers, seas,—

Or organic—trees and beasts—but they’re non-human,

Though human artifacts may be included.”

    We were living at this time in New York City

On the sixth floor of an apartment house

On Lexington, which still had streetcar tracks.

It was an afternoon in the late summer;

The windows open; wrought-iron window guards

Meant to keep pets and children from falling out.

I, at the window, studiously watching

A marvelous transformation of the sky;

A storm was coming up by dark gradations.

But what was curious about this was

That as the sky seemed to be taking on

An ashy blankness, behind which there lay

Tonalities of lilac and dusty rose

Tarnishing now to something more than dusk,

Crepuscular and funerary greys,

The streets became more luminous, the world

Glinted and shone with an uncanny freshness.

The brickwork of the house across the street

(A grim, run-down Victorian chateau)

Became distinct and legible; the air,

Full of excited imminence, stood still.

The streetcar tracks gleamed like the path of snails.

And all of this made me superbly happy,

But most of all a yellow Checker Cab

Parked at the corner. Something in the light

Was making this the yellowest thing on earth.

It was as if Adam, having completed

Naming the animals, had started in

On colors, and had found his primary pigment

Here, in a taxi cab, on Eighty-ninth street.

It was the absolute, parental yellow.

Trash littered the gutter, the chipped paint

Of the lamppost still was chipped, but everything

Seemed meant to be as it was, seemed so designed,

As if the world had just then been created,

Not as a garden, but a rather soiled,

Loud, urban intersection, by God’s will.

And then a chart of the Mississippi River,

With all her tributaries, flashed in the sky.

Thunder, beginning softly and far away,

Rolled down our avenue towards an explosion

That started with the sound of ripping cloth

And ended with a crash that made all crashes

Feeble, inadequate preliminaries.

And it began to rain. Someone or other

Called me away from there, and closed the window.

    Reverberations (from the Latin,
verber
,

Meaning a whip or lash) rang down the alley

Of Lower Manhattan where George Washington

Stood in the cold, eying the ticker-tape,

Its latest bulletins getting worse and worse,

A ticking code of terminal messages.

The family jewels were gone. What had Columbus

(Who looked so noble in The Book of Knowledge)

Found for himself? Leg-irons. The Jersey flats.

More bodies than the
Journal-American

Could well keep count of, most of them Indians.

And then one day there was discovered missing

My brother’s bottle of phenobarbitol—

And, as it later turned out, a razor blade.

How late in coming were all the revelations.

How dark and Cabbalistic the mysteries.

Messages all in cipher, enthymemes

Grossly suggestive, keeping their own counsel,

Vivid and unintelligible dreams.

A heartless regimen of exercises

Performed upon a sort of doorway gym

Was meant to strengthen my brother’s hand and arm,

As hours with a stereopticon

His eyesight. But the doctor’s tactful whispers

Were sibilant, Sibylline, inaudible.

There were, at last, when he returned to us,

My father’s bandaged wrists. All the elisions

Cried loudly in a tongue I didn’t know.

Finally, in the flat, declarative sentence

Of the encephalograph, the news was in:

In shocking lines the instrument described

My brother’s malady as what the French,

Simply and full of awe, call “
le grand mal
,”

The Great Disease, Caesar’s and Dostoievski’s.

All of this seemed to prove, in a world where proof

Was often stinting, and the clues ominous,

That the
Journal-American
after all was right:

That sex was somehow wedded to disaster,

Pleasure and pain were necessary twins,

And that The Book of Knowledge and my vision

(Or whatever it was) were to be put away

With childish things, as, in the end, the world

As well as holy text insist upon.