Brought from the tropic zone;
You know the very month and hour
To pluck the lust-inducing flower
That makes a woman groan.
There’s not, among the envenomed plants
On mountain or in valley haunts,
One that your eyes have missed
And has not yielded up its ground
To your bright sickle-blade, and crowned
Your formidable quest.
When, like a lunatic, all bare,
The moon lets down its mystic hair
Of cold, enraging light,
You wrap your features in the hide
Of animals, and smoothly glide
Abroad into the night.
Your least breath ravishes the blood
Of all dogs in the neighborhood
And sets them on to bark,
Makes rivers flow uphill, reversed,
And baying wolves observe your cursed
Hegira through the dark.
Chatelaine of deserted spots,
Of mouldered cemetery plots
Where you are most at home,
Muttering diabolic runes,
You disinter the troubled bones
From their sequestered tomb.
To grieve a mother more you don
The aspect of her only son
Who has just met his death,
And you assume the very shape
That makes an aged widow gape
And robs her of her breath.
You make the spell-bound moon appear
To march through the all-silvered air,
And cast through midnight’s hush
Such tincture on a pallid face
A thousand-cymbaled crashing brass
Could not restore its flush.
The terror of us all, we fear
Your hateful practice, and we bar
Your presence from our door,
Afraid you will inflict a pox
Upon our persons, herds and flocks,
With juice of hellebore.
Often I’ve watched as you espy
From far away with baleful eye
Some shepherd on his heights;
Soon after, victim of your arts,
The man is dead, his fleshly parts
A nest of parasites.
And yet like vile Medea, you
Could sometimes prove life-giving, too;
You know what secret thing
Gave Aeson back his sapling youth,
Yet by your spells you have in truth
Deprived me of my spring.
O Gods, if pity dwells on high,
May her requital be to die,
And may her last repose,
Unblessed by burial, serve as feast
To every gross and shameful beast,
To jackals and to crows.
(FROM PIERRE DE RONSARD)
AUSPICES
Cold, blustery cider weather, the flat fields
Bleached pale as straw, the leaves, such as remain,
Pumpkin or leather-brown. These are the wilds
Of loneliness, huge, vacant, sour and plain.
The sky is hourless dusk, portending rain.
Or perhaps snow. This narrow footpath edges
A small stand of scrub pine, warped as with pain,
And baneberry lofts its little poisoned pledges.
The footpath ends in a dried waterhole,
Plastered with black like old tar-paper siding.
The fearfullest desolations of the soul
Image themselves as local and abiding.
Even if I should get away from here
My trouser legs are stuck with burrs and seeds,
Grappled and spiked reminders of my fear,
Standing alone among the beggarweeds.
APPLICATION FOR A GRANT
Noble executors of the munificent testament
Of the late John Simon Guggenheim, distinguished bunch
Of benefactors, there are certain kinds of men
Who set their hearts on being bartenders,
For whom a life upon duck-boards, among fifths,
Tapped kegs and lemon twists, crowded with lushes
Who can master neither their bladders nor consonants,
Is the only life, greatly to be desired.
There’s the man who yearns for the White House, there to compose
Rhythmical lists of enemies, while someone else
Wants to be known to the Tour d’Argent’s head waiter.
As the Sibyl of Cumae said : It takes all kinds.
Nothing could bribe your Timon, your charter member
Of the Fraternal Order of Grizzly Bears to love
His fellow, whereas it’s just the opposite
With interior decorators; that’s what makes horse races.
One man may have a sharp nose for tax shelters,
Screwing the IRS with mirth and profit;
Another devote himself to his shell collection,
Deaf to his offspring, indifferent to the feast
With which his wife hopes to attract his notice.
Some at the Health Club sweating under bar bells
Labor away like grunting troglodytes,
Smelly and thick and inarticulate,
Their brains squeezed out through their pores by sheer exertion.
As for me, the prize for poets, the simple gift
For amphybrachs strewn by a kind Euterpe,
With perhaps a laurel crown of the evergreen
Imperishable of your fine endowment
Would supply my modest wants, who dream of nothing
But a pad on Eighth Street and your approbation.
(FREELY FROM HORACE)
AN OVERVIEW
Here, god-like, in a 707,
As on an air-conditioned cloud,
One knows the frailties of the proud
And comprehends the Fall from Heaven.
The world, its highways, trees and ports,
Looks much as if it were designed
With nifty model trains in mind
By salesmen at F. A. O. Schwarz.
Such the enchantment distance lends.
The bridges, matchstick and minute,
Seem faultless, intricate and cute,
Contrived for slight, aesthetic ends.
No wonder the camaraderie
Of mission-happy Air Force boys
Above so vast a spread of toys,
Cruising the skies, lighthearted, free,
Or the engaging roguishness
With which a youthful bombardier
Unloads his eggs on what appear
The perfect patchwork squares of chess;
Nor that the brass hat general staff,
Tailored and polished to a fault,
Favor an undeclared assault
On what an aerial photograph
Shows as an unstrung ball of twine,
Or that the President insist
A nation colored amethyst
Should bow to his supreme design.
But in the toy store, right up close,
Chipped paint and mucilage represent
The wounded, orphaned, indigent,
The dying and the comatose.
STILL LIFE
Sleep-walking vapor, like a visitant ghost,
Hovers above a lake
Of Tennysonian calm just before dawn.
Inverted trees and boulders waver and coast
In polished darkness. Glints of silver break
Among the liquid leafage, and then are gone.
Everything’s doused and diamonded with wet.
A cobweb, woven taut
On bending stanchion frames of tentpole grass,
Sags like a trampoline or firemen’s net
With all the glitter and riches it has caught,
Each drop a paperweight of Steuben glass.
No birdsong yet, no cricket, nor does the trout
Explode in wate
r-scrolls
For a skimming fly. All that is yet to come.
Things are as still and motionless throughout
The universe as ancient Chinese bowls,
And nature is magnificently dumb.
Why does this so much stir me, like a code
Or muffled intimation
Of purposes and preordained events?
It knows me, and I recognize its mode
Of cautionary, spring-tight hesitation,
This silence so impacted and intense.
As in a water-surface I behold
The first, soft, peach decree
Of light, its pale, inaudible commands.
I stand beneath a pine-tree in the cold,
Just before dawn, somewhere in Germany,
A cold, wet, Garand rifle in my hands.
PERSISTENCES
The leafless trees are feathery,
A foxed, Victorian lace,
Blank, washed-out, commonplace.
Between them and my window
Huge helices of snow
Perform their savage, churning rites
At seventeen below.
The obscurity resembles
A silken Chinese mist
Wherein through calligraphic daubs
Of artistry persist
Pocked and volcanic gorges,
Clenched and arthritic pines,
Faint, coral-tinted herons’ legs
Splashing among the tines
Of waving, tasselled marshgrass,
Deep pools aflash with sharp,
Shingled and burnished armor-plate
Of sacred, child-eyed carp.
This dimness is dynastic,
An ashen T’ang of age
Or blur that grudgingly reveals
A ghostly equipage,
Ancestral deputations
Wound in the whited air,
To whom some sentry flings a slight,
Prescriptive, “Who goes there?”
Are these the apparitions
Of enemies or friends?
Loved ones from whom I once withheld
Kindnesses or amends
On preterite occasions
Now lost beyond repeal?
Or the old childhood torturers
Of undiminished zeal,
Adults who ridiculed me,
Schoolmates who broke my nose,
Risen from black, unconscious depths
Of REM repose?
Who comes here seeking justice,
Or in its high despite,
Bent on some hopeless interview
On wrongs nothing can right?
Those throngs disdain to answer,
Though numberless as flakes;
Mine is the task to find out words
For their memorial sakes
Who press in dense approaches,
Blue numeral tattoos
Writ crosswise on their arteries,
The burning, voiceless Jews.
A CAST OF LIGHT
at a Father’s Day picnic
A maple bough of web-foot, golden greens,
Found by an angled shaft
Of late sunlight, disposed within that shed
Radiance, with brilliant, hoisted baldachins,
Pup tents and canopies by some underdraft
Flung up to scattered perches overhead,
These daubs of sourball lime, at floating rest,
Present to the loose wattage
Of heaven their limelit flukes, an artifice
Of archipelagian Islands of the Blessed,
And in all innocence pursue their cottage
Industry of photosynthesis.
Yet only for twenty minutes or so today,
On a summer afternoon,
Does the splendid lancet reach to them, or sink
To these dim bottoms, making its chancy way,
As through the barrier reef of some lagoon
In sea-green darkness, by a wavering chink,
Down, neatly probing like an accurate paw
Or a notched and beveled key,
Through the huge cave-roof of giant oak and pine.
And the heart goes numb in a tide of fear and awe
For those we cherish, their hopes, their frailty,
Their shadowy fate’s unfathomable design.
HOUSE SPARROWS
for Joe and U. T. Summers
Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class
Of travelers, nor that rarified tax bracket,
These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts
Under our eaves, nesting in withered grass,
Wormless but hopeful, and now their voice enacts
Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.
Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray
Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.
Salt of the earth, they are; the common clay;
Meek émigrés come over on the Ark
In steerage from the Old Country of the Drowned
To settle down along Long Island Sound,
Flatbush, Weehawken, our brownstone tenements,
Savers of string, meticulous and mild,
They are given to nervous flight, the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste of the exiled.
Like all the poor, their safety lies in numbers
And hardihood and anonymity
In a world of dripping browns and duns and umbers.
They have inherited the lower sky,
Their Lake of Constants, their blue modality
That they are borne upon and battered by.
Those little shin-bones, hollow at the core,
Emaciate finger-joints, those fleshless wrists,
Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,
As though the harvests of earth had never been,
Where have we seen such frailty before?
In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.
Yet here they are, these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful, full of the grace
Of cheerfulness, who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of “Summers, Summers, Summers.”
AN OLD MALEDICTION
What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex
Hairstylist and bathed in Russian Leather,
Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha,
In your expensive sublet? For whom do you
Slip into something simple by, say, Gucci?
The more fool he who has mapped out for himself
The saline latitudes of incontinent grief.
Dazzled though he be, poor dope, by the golden looks
Your locks fetched up out of a bottle of Clairol,
He will know that the wind changes, the smooth sailing
Is done for, when the breakers wallop him broadside,
When he’s rudderless, dismasted, thoroughly swamped
In that mindless rip-tide that got the best of me
Once, when I ventured on your deeps, Piranha.
(FREELY FROM HORACE)
II
THE VENETIAN VESPERS
for Harry and Kathleen Ford
. . where’s that palace whereinto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law days, and in session sit
With meditations lawful?
Othello: III, iii, 136–41
We cannot all have our gardens now, nor our
pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide.
RUSKIN : The Stones of Venice,
BK. I, CH. XXX
I
What’s merciful is not know
ing where you are,
What time it is, even your name or age,
But merely a clean coolness at the temple—
That, says the spirit softly, is enough
For the mind to adventure on its half-hidden path
Like starlight interrupted by dense trees
Journeying backwards on a winter trip
While you are going, as you fancy, forward,
And the stars are keeping pace with everything.
Where to begin? With the white, wrinkled membrane,
The disgusting skin that gathers on hot milk?
Or narrow slabs of jasper light at sundown
That fit themselves softly around the legs
Of chairs, and entertain a drift of motes,
A tide of sadness, a failing, a dying fall?
Or the glass jar, like a wet cell battery,
Full of electric coils and boiling resins,
Its tin Pinocchio nose with one small nostril,
And both of us under a tent of towels
Like child conspirators, the tin nose breathing
Health at me steadily, like the insufflation of God?
Yes, but also the sight, on a gray morning,
Beneath the crossbar of an iron railing
Painted a glossy black, of six waterdrops
Slung in suspension, sucking into themselves,
As if it were some morbid nourishment,
The sagging blackness of the rail itself,
But edged with brilliant fingernails of chrome
In which the world was wonderfully disfigured
Like faces seen in spoons, like mirrorings
In the fine spawn, the roe of air bubbles,
That tiny silver wampum along the stems,
Yellowed and magnified, of aging flowers
Caught in the lens of stale water and glass
In the upstairs room when somebody had died.
Just like the beads they sprinkled over cookies