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.
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.
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.
THE GHOST IN THE MARTINI
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.
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.
GOING THE ROUNDS: A SORT OF LOVE POEM
I
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.
II
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,
Nothi
ng, 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.
GOLIARDIC SONG
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.
“GLADNESS OF THE BEST”