Collected Earlier Poems (24 page)

It’s stifling. And the thick leaves’ rasping sound

Is enough all by itself to make you sweat.

What seems to be a small dot in the dark

Could only be one thing—a star. On the deserted ground

Of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set

Its fragile egg in the steel hoop’s ravelled net.

There’s a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.

Like a despotic Sheik, who can be untrue

To his vast seraglio and multiple desires

Only with a harem altogether new,

Varied and numerous, I have switched Empires.

A step dictated by the acrid, live

Odor of burning carried on the air

From all four quarters (a time for silent prayer!)

And, from the crow’s high vantage point, from five.

Like a snake charmer, like the Pied Piper of old,

Playing my flute I passed the green janissaries,

My testes sensing their pole axe’s sinister cold,

As when one wades into water. And then with the brine

Of sea-water sharpness filling, flooding the mouth,

I crossed the line

And sailed into muttony clouds. Below me curled

Serpentine rivers, roads bloomed with dust, ricks yellowed,

And everywhere in that diminished world,

In formal opposition, near and far,

Lined up like print in a book about to close,

Armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows

And cities all went dark as caviar.

And then the darkness thickened. All lights fled,

A turbine droned, a head ached rhythmically,

And space backed up like a crab, time surged ahead

Into first place, and streaming westwardly,

Seemed to be heading home, void of all light,

Soiling its garments with the tar of night.

I fell asleep. When I awoke to the day,

Magnetic north had strengthened its deadly pull.

I beheld new heavens, I beheld the earth made new.

It lay

Turning to dust, as flat things always do.

Being itself the essence of all things,

Solitude teaches essentials. How gratefully the skin

Receives the leathery coolness of its chair.

Meanwhile my arm, off in the dark somewhere,

Goes wooden in sympathetic brotherhood

With the chair’s listless arm of oaken wood.

A glowing oaken grain

Covers the tiny bones of the joints. And the brain

Knocks like the glass’s ice-cube tinkling.

It’s stifling. On a pool hall’s steps, in a dim glow,

Somebody striking a match rescues his face

Of an old black man from the enfolding dark

For a flaring moment. The white-toothed portico

Of the District Courthouse sinks in the thickened lace

Of foliage, and awaits the random search

Of passing headlights. High up on its perch,

Like the fiery warning at Belshazzar’s Feast,

The inscription,
Coca-Cola
, hums in red.

In the Country Club’s unweeded flowerbed

A fountain whispers its secrets. Unable to rouse

A simple
tirra lirra
in these dull boughs,

A strengthless breeze rustles the tattered, creased

News of the world, its obsolete events,

Against an improvised, unlikely fence

Of iron bedsteads. It’s stifling. Leaning on his rifle,

The Unknown Soldier grows even more unknown.

Against a concrete jetty, in dull repose

A trawler scrapes the rusty bridge of its nose.

A weary, buzzing ventilator mills

The U.S.A.’s hot air with metal gills.

Like a carried-over number in addition,

The sea comes up in the dark

And on the beach it leaves its delible mark,

And the unvarying, diastolic motion,

The repetitious, drugged sway of the ocean

Cradles a splinter adrift for a million years.

If you step sideways off the pier’s

Edge, you’ll continue to fall toward those tides

For a long, long time, your hands stiff at your sides,

But you will make no splash.

The change of Empires is intimately tied

To the hum of words, the soft, fricative spray

Of spittle in the act of speech, the whole

Sum of Lobachevsky’s angles, the strange way

That parallels may unwittingly collide

By casual chance some day

As longitudes contrive to meet at the pole.

And the change is linked as well to the chopping of wood,

To the tattered lining of life turned inside out

And thereby changed to a garment dry and good

(To tweed in winter, linen in a heat spell)

And the brain’s kernel hardening in its shell.

In general, of all our organs the eye

Alone retains its elasticity,

Pliant, adaptive as a dream or wish.

For the change of Empires is linked with far-flung sight,

With the long gaze cast across the ocean’s tide

(Somewhere within us lives a dormant fish)

And the mirror’s revelation that the part in your hair

That you meticulously placed on the left side

Mysteriously shows up on the right,

Linked to weak gums, to heartburn brought about

By a diet unfamiliar and alien,

To the intense blankness, to the pristine white

Of the mind, which corresponds to the plain, small

Blank page of letterpaper on which you write.

But now the giddy pen

Points out resemblances, for after all,

The device in your hand is the same old pen and ink

As before, the woodland plants exhibit no change

Of leafage, and the same old bombers range

The clouds toward who knows what

Precisely chosen, carefully targeted spot.

And what you really need now is a drink.

New England towns seem much as if they were cast

Ashore along its coastline, beached by a flood-

Tide, and shining in darkness mile after mile

With imbricate, speckled scales of shingle and tile,

Like schools of sleeping fish hauled in by the vast

Nets of a continent that was first discovered

By herring and by cod. But neither cod

Nor herring have had any noble statues raised

In their honor, even though the memorial date

Could be comfortably omitted. As for the great

Flag of the place, it bears no blazon or mark

Of the first fish-founder among its parallel bars,

And as Louis Sullivan might perhaps have said,

Seen in the dark,

It looks like a sketch of towers thrust among stars.

Stifling. A man on his porch has wound a towel

Around his throat. A pitiful, small moth

Batters the window screen and bounces off

Like a bullet that Nature has zeroed in on itself

From an invisible ambush,

Aiming for some improbable bullseye

Right smack in the middle of July.

Because watches keep ticking, pain washes away

With the years. If time picks up the knack

Of panacea, it’s because time can’t abide

Being rushed, or finally turns insomniac.

And walking or swimming, the dreams of one hemisphere (heads)

Swarm with the nightmares, the dark, sinister play

Of its opposite (tails), its double, its underside.

Stifling. Great motionless plants. A distant bark.

A nodding head now jerks itself upright

To keep faces and phone numbers from sliding into the dark

And off the precarious edge of memory.

In genuine tragedy

It’s not the fine hero that finally dies, it seems,

But, from constant wear and tear, night after night,

The old stage set itself, giving way at the seams.

Since it’s too late by now to say “goodbye”

And expect from time and space any reply

Except an echo that sounds like “here’s your tip,”

Pseudo-majestic, cubing every chance

Word that escapes the lip,

I write in a sort of trance,

I write these words out blindly, the scrivening hand

Attempting to outstrip

By a second the “how come?”

That at any moment might escape the lip,

The same lip of the writer,

And sail away into night, there to expand

By geometrical progress,
und so weiter
.

I write from an Empire whose enormous flanks

Extend beneath the sea. Having sampled two

Oceans as well as continents, I feel that I know

What the globe itself must feel : there’s nowhere to go.

Elsewhere is nothing more than a far-flung strew

Of stars, burning away.

Better to use a telescope to see

A snail self-sealed to the underside of a leaf.

I always used to regard “infinity”

As the art of splitting a liter into three

Equal components with a couple of friends

Without a drop left over. Not, through a lens,

An aggregate of miles without relief.

Night. A cuckoo wheezes in the Waldorf-

Inglorious. The legions close their ranks

And, leaning against cohorts, sleep upright.

Circuses pile against fora. High in the night

Above the bare blue-print of an empty court,

Like a lost tennis-ball, the moon regards its court,

A chess queen’s dream, spare, parqueted, formal and bright.

There’s no life without furniture.

Only a corner cordoned off and laced

By dusty cobwebs may properly be called

Right-angled; only after the musketry of applause

And “bravos” does the actor rise from the dead;

Only when the fulcrum is solidly placed

Can a person lift, by Archimedian laws,

The weight of this world. And only that body whose weight

Is balanced at right angles to the floor

Can manage to walk about and navigate.

Stifling. There’s a cockroach mob in the stadium

Of the zinc washbasin, crowding around the old

Corpse of a dried-up sponge. Turning its crown,

A bronze faucet, like Caesar’s laureled head,

Deposes upon the living and the dead

A merciless column of water in which they drown.

The little bubble-beads inside my glass

Look like the holes in cheese.

No doubt that gravity holds sway,

Just as upon a solid mass,

Over such small transparencies as these.

And its accelerating waterfall

(Thirty-two feet per sec. per sec.) refracts

As does a ray of light in human clay.

Only the stacked, white china on the stove

Could look so much like a squashed, collapsed pagoda.

Space lends itself just to repeatable things,

Roses, for instance. If you see one alone,

You instantly see two. The bright corona,

The crimson petals abuzz, acrawl with wings

Of dragonflies, of wasps and bees with stings.

Stifling. Even the shadow on the wall,

Servile and weak as it is, still mimics the rise

Of the hand that wipes the forehead’s sweat. The smell

Of old body is even clearer now

Than body’s outline. Thought loses its defined

Edges, and the frazzled mind

Goes soft in its soup-bone skull. No one is here

To set the proper focus of your eyes.

Preserve these words against a time of cold,

A day of fear : Man survives like a fish,

Stranded, beached, but intent

On adapting itself to some deep, cellular wish,

Wriggling toward bushes, forming hinged leg-struts, then

To depart (leaving a track like the scrawl of a pen)

For the interior, the heart of the continent.

Full-breasted sphinxes there are, and lions winged

Like fanged and mythic birds.

Angels in white, as well, and nymphs of the sea.

To one who shoulders the vast obscurity

Of darkness and heavy heat (may one add, grief?)

They are more cherished than the concentric, ringed

Zeroes that ripple outwards from dropped words.

Even space itself, where there’s nowhere to sit down,

Declines, like a star in its ether, its cold sky.

Yet just because shoes exist and the foot is shod

Some surface will always be there, some place to stand,

A portion of dry land.

And its brinks and beaches will be enchanted by

The soft song of the cod:

“Time is far greater than space. Space is a thing.

Whereas time is, in essence, the thought, the conscious dream

Of a thing. And life itself is a variety

Of time. The carp and bream

Are its clots and distillates. As are even more stark

And elemental things, including the sea-

Wave and the firmament of the dry land.

Including death, that punctuation mark.

At times, in that chaos, that piling up of days,

The sound of a single word rings in the ear,

Some brief, syllabic cry,

Like ‘love,’ perhaps, or possibly merely ‘hi!’

But before I can make it out, static or haze

Trouble the scanning lines that undulate

And wave like the loosened ripples of your hair.”

Man broods over his life like night above a lamp.

At certain moments a thought takes leave of one

Of the brain’s hemispheres, and slips, as a bedsheet might,

From under the restless sleeper’s body-clamp,

Revealing who-knows-what-under-the-sun.

Unquestionably, night

Is a bulky thing, but not so infinite

As to engross both lobes. By slow degrees

The africa of the brain, its europe, the asian mass of it,

As well as other prominences in its crowded seas,

Creaking on their axis, turn a wrinkled cheek

Toward the electric heron with its lightbulb of a beak.