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.
AFTER THE RAIN
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
Sought with a reckless thirst
A light so pure and just.
APPLES FOR PAUL SUTTMAN
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.
THE HUNT
for Zbigniew Herbert
I
A call, a call. Ringbolt clinks at dusk. Shadows wax. Sesame. Here are earthworms, and the dry needles of pine. I am hidden. Gems in their harness might be stars, picked out. Lovely to see, trust me. And the stone is protection, wouldn’t you say? This is my stone, gentle as snow, trust me. Darkness helps. Let us eat. The air, promise-crammed. And so the poor dog had none. I saw three in sunlight. One had a pearwood bow, like Cupid’s upper lip. I whisper my love to this rock. I have always loved it. Sesame. A caul, a caul. Where is Lady Luck in the forest? Well, there’s no moon. Once I had apples. Let us pray. They have great weight, the bronze fittings of Magyar kings. Their trumpets are muted. But the tall trees gather here, friendly. What is that fluttering, there? I can’t make out. All the dark sweet dens of the foxes are full of stink and safety. That was a tasty one. Just to go down, there with pale roots and hidden waters. O hidden. Is anyone hungry? He laughed, you know, and shook my hand. I must not say that. O the dear stone. Owls are out; mice, take warning. All those little squeaks must be death-cries. You’re welcome. Trust me, trust me. But didn’t he laugh? So help me.
II
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.
EXILE
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 w
ere 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.
THE FEAST OF STEPHEN
I
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.
II
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.
III
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.
IV
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.
THE ODDS
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.
APPREHENSIONS
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
I
n 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