Collected Earlier Poems (16 page)

    Just when it was that Fräulein disappeared

I don’t recall. We continued to meet each other

By secret assignations in my dreams

In which, by stages, our relationship

Grew into international proportions

As the ghettos of Europe emptied, the box cars

Rolled toward enclosures terminal and obscene,

The ovens blazed away like Pittsburgh steel mills,

Chain-smoking through the night, and no one spoke.

We two would meet in a darkened living room

Between the lines of advancing allied troops

In the Wagnerian twilight of the
Reich
.

She would be seated by a table, reading

Under a lamp-shade of the finest parchment.

She would look up and say, “I always knew

That you would come to me, that you’d come home.”

I would read over her shoulder, “
In der Heimat
,

Im Heimatland, da gibts ein Wiedersehen
.”

An old song of comparative innocence,

Until one learns to read between the lines.

               Over the rim of the glass

Containing a good martini with a twist

I eye her bosom and consider a pass,

               Certain we’d not be missed

               In the general hubbub.

Her lips, which I forgot to say, are superb,

Never stop babbling once (Aye, there’s the rub)

               But who would want to curb

               Such delicious, artful flattery?

It seems she adores my work, the distinguished grey

Of my hair. I muse on the salt and battery

               Of the sexual clinch, and say

               Something terse and gruff

About the marked disparity in our ages.

She looks like twenty-three, though eager enough.

               As for the famous wages

               Of sin, she can’t have attained

Even to union scale, though you never can tell.

Her waist is slender and suggestively chained,

               And things are going well.

               The martini does its job,

God bless it, seeping down to the dark old id.

(“Is there no cradle, Sir, you would not rob?”

               Says ego, but the lid

               Is off. The word is Strike

While the iron’s hot.) And now, ingenuous and gay,

She is asking me about what I was like

               At twenty. (Twenty, eh?)

               
You wouldn’t have liked me then,

I answer, looking carefully into her eyes.

I was shy, withdrawn, awkward, one of those men

               That girls seemed to despise,

               Moody and self-obsessed,

Unhappy, defiant, with guilty dreams galore,

Full of ill-natured pride, an unconfessed

               Snob and a thorough bore.

               Her smile is meant to convey

How changed or modest I am, I can’t tell which,

When I suddenly hear someone close to me say,

               “You lousy son-of-a-bitch!”

               A young man’s voice, by the sound,

Coming, it seems, from the twist in the martini.

“You arrogant, elderly letch, you broken-down

               Brother of Apeneck Sweeney!

               Thought I was buried for good

Under six thick feet of mindless self-regard?

Dance on my grave, would you, you galliard stud,

               Silenus in leotard?

               Well, summon me you did,

And I come unwillingly, like Samuel’s ghost.

‘
All things shall be revealed that have been hid
.’

               
There’s
something for you to toast!

               You only got where you are

By standing upon my ectoplasmic shoulders,

And wherever that is may not be so high or far

               In the eyes of some beholders.

               
Take, for example, me.

I have sat alone in the dark, accomplishing little,

And worth no more to myself, in pride and fee,

               Than a cup of luke-warm spittle.

               But honest about it, withal …”

(“Withal,” forsooth!) “Please not to interrupt.

And the lovelies went by, ‘the long and the short and the tall,’

               Hankered for, but untupped.

               Bloody monastic it was.

A neurotic mixture of self-denial and fear;

The verse halting, the cataleptic pause,

               No sensible pain, no tear,

               But an interior drip

As from an ulcer, where, in the humid deep

Center of myself, I would scratch and grip

               The wet walls of the keep,

               Or lie on my back and smell

From the corners the sharp, ammoniac, urine stink.

‘
No light, but rather darkness visible
.’

               And plenty of time to think.

               In that thick, fetid air

I talked to myself in giddy recitative:

’
I have been studying how I may compare

               
This prison where I live

               
Unto the world
…’ I learned

Little, and was awarded no degrees.

Yet all that sunken hideousness earned

               Your negligence and ease.

               
Nor was it wholly sick,

Having procured you a certain modest fame;

A devotion, rather, a grim device to stick

               To something I could not name.”

               Meanwhile, she babbles on

About men, or whatever, and the juniper juice

Shuts up at last, having sung, I trust, like a swan.

               Still given to self-abuse!

               Better get out of here;

If he opens his trap again it could get much worse.

I touch her elbow, and, leaning toward her ear,

               Tell her to find her purse.

               Some people cannot endure

Looking down from the parapet atop the Empire State

Or the Statue of Liberty—they go limp, insecure,

The vertiginous height hums to their numbered bones

               Some homily on Fate;

Neither virtue past nor vow to be good atones

               To the queasy stomach, the quick,

Involuntary softening of the bowels.

“What goes up must come down,” it hums: the ultimate, sick

Joke of Fortuna. The spine, the world vibrates

               With terse, ruthless avowals

From “The Life of More,” “A Mirror For Magistrates.”

               And there are heights of spirit.

And one of these is love. From way up here,

I observe the puny view, without much merit,

Of all my days. High on the house are nailed

               Banners of pride and fear.

And that small wood to the west, the girls I have failed.

               It is, on the whole, rather glum:

The cyclone fence, the tar-stained railroad ties,

With, now and again, surprising the viewer, some

Garden of selflessness or effort. And, as I must,

               I acknowledge on this high rise

The ancient metaphysical distrust.

               
But candor is not enough,

Nor is it enough to say that I don’t deserve

Your gentle, dazzling love, or to be in love.

That goddess is remorseless, watching us rise

               In all our ignorant nerve,

And when we have reached the top, putting us wise.

               My dear, in spite of this,

And the moralized landscape down there below,

Neither of which might seem the ground for bliss,

Know that I love you, know that you are most dear

               To one who seeks to know

How, for your sake, to confront his pride and fear.

No sooner have the words got past my lips—

               (I exaggerate for effect)

But two months later you have packed your grips

And left. And left eye-shadow, Kotex, bra,

A blue silk slip-dress that I helped select,

               And Fortuna shouts, “Hurrah!

Who does that crazy bastard think he is?

               I’ll fix his wagon!”

As indeed she has. Or, as Shakespeare puts it, “ ‘’Tis

Brief, my lord.’ ‘As woman’s love.’ ” He knew,

Though our arch-scholiast of the spirit’s agon,

               Nothing, of course, of you.

And what am I to say? “Well, at least it will do

               For a poem.”? From way down here,

The Guy in the Lake, I gaze at the distant blue

Beyond the surface, and twice as far away.

Deep in the mirror, I am reversed but clear.

               And what am I to say?

Sackville would smile. Well, let him smile. To say

               Nothing about those girls

I turned into wood, like Daphne. And every day

Cavendish mutters about his Cardinal, scorned

Son-of-a-butcher. More God damn moral pearls.

               Well, I had been warned.

Yet when I dream, it’s more than of your hair,

               Your privates, voice, or face;

These deeps remind me we are still not square.

A fog thickens into cold smoke. Perhaps

You too will remember the terror of that place,

               The breakers’ dead collapse,

The cry of the boy, pulled out by the undertow,

               Growing dimmer and more wild,

And how, the dark currents sucking from below,

When I was not your lover or you my wife,

Yourself exhausted and six months big with child,

               You saved my son’s life.

In classical environs

    Deity misbehaves;

There nereids and sirens

    Bucket the whomping waves.

As tritons sound their conches

    With fat, distended cheeks,

Welded are buxom haunches

    To muscular physiques.

Out of that frothy pageant

    Venus Pandemos rose,

Great genetrix and regent

    Of human unrepose.

Not age nor custom cripples

    Her strenuous commands,

Imperative of nipples

    And tyrannous of glands.

We who have been her students,

    Matriculated clerks

In scholia of imprudence

    And vast, venereal Works,

Taken and passed our orals,

    Salute her classic poise:

Ur-Satirist of Morals

    And Mother of our Joys.

for Hays Rockwell

Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us
see if the vine flourish, whether the tender
grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth:
there will I give thee my loves
.

See, see upon a field of royal blue,

Scaling the steep escarpments of the sky

               With gold-leafed curlicue,

Sepals and plumula and filigree,

               This vast, untrellised vine

Of scroll- and fretwork, a Jesse’s family tree

Or ivy whose thick clamberings entwine

Heaven and earth and the viewer’s raddling eye.

This mealed and sprinkled glittering, this park

Of ‘flowres delice’ and Gobelin
millefleurs

               Coiling upon the dark

In wild tourbillions, gerbs and golden falls

               Is a mere lace or grille

Before which Jesus works his miracles

Of love, feeding the poor, curing the ill,

Here in the Duc de Berry’s
Très Riches Heures
;

And is itself the visible counterpart

Of fugal consort, branched polyphony,

               That dense, embroidered art

Of interleaved and deftly braided song

               In which each separate voice

Seems to discover where it should belong

Among its kind, and, fated by its choice,

Pursues a purpose at once fixed and free;

And every
cantus
, firm in its own pursuits,

Fluent and yet cast, as it were, in bronze,

               Exchanges brief salutes

And bows of courtesy at every turn

               With every neighboring friend,

Bends to oblige each one with quick concern

And join them at a predetermined end

Of cordial and confirming antiphons.

Such music in its turn becomes the trope

Or figure of that holy amity

               Which is our only hope,

Enjoined upon us from two mountain heights:

               On Tables of The Law

Given at Sinai, and the Nazarite’s

Luminous sermon that reduced to awe

And silence a vast crowd near Galilee.

Who could have known this better than St. George,

The Poet, in whose work these things are woven

               Or wrought as at a forge

Of disappointed hopes, of triumphs won

               Through strains of sound and soul

In that small country church at Bemerton?

This was the man who styled his ghostly role,

“Domestic servant to the King of Heaven.”