Of the pigeons out in the Square. Into those choirs
Of lacquered Thrones, enameled Archangels
And medaled Principalities rise up
A cool plantation of columns, marble shafts
Bearing their lifted pathways, viaducts
And catwalks through the middle realms of heaven.
Even as God descended into the mass
And thick of us, so is He borne aloft
As promise and precursor to us all,
Ascending in the central dome’s vast hive
Of honeyed luminosity. Behind
The altar He appears, two fingers raised
In benediction, in what seems two-thirds
Of the Boy Scout salute, wishing us well.
And we are gathered here below the saints,
Virtues and martyrs, sheltered in their glow,
Soothed by the punk and incense, to rejoice
In the warm light of Gabrieli’s horns,
And for a moment of unwonted grace
We are so blessed as to forget ourselves.
Perhaps. There is something selfish in the self,
The cell’s craving for perpetuity,
The sperm’s ignorant hope, the animal’s rule
Of haunch and sinew, testicle and groin,
That refers all things whatever, near and far,
To one’s own needs or fantasized desires.
Returning suddenly to the chalk-white sunlight
Of out-of-doors, one spots among the tourists
Those dissolute young with heavy-lidded gazes
Of cool, clear-eyed, stony depravity
That in the course of only a few years
Will fade into the terrifying boredom
In the faces of Carpaccio’s prostitutes.
From motives that are anything but kindly
I ignore their indiscreet solicitations
And far more obvious poverty. The mind
Can scarcely cope with the world’s sufferings,
Must blinker itself to much or else go mad.
And the bargain that we make for our sanity
Is the knowledge that when at length it comes our turn
To be numbered with the outcasts, the maimed, the poor,
The injured and insulted, they will turn away,
The fortunate and healthy, as I turn now
(Though touched as much with compassion as with lust,
Knowing the smallest gift would reverse our roles,
Expose me as weak and thus exploitable.
There is more stamina, twenty times more hope
In the least of them than there is left in me.)
I take my loneliness as a vocation,
A policied exile from the human race,
A cultivated, earned misanthropy
After the fashion of the Miller of Dee.
It wasn’t always so. I was an Aid Man,
A Medic with an infantry company,
Who because of my refusal to bear arms
Was constrained to bear the wounded and the dead
From under enemy fire, and to bear witness
To inconceivable pain, usually shot at
Though banded with Red Crosses and unarmed.
There was a corporal I knew in Heavy Weapons,
Someone who carried with him into combat
A book of etiquette by Emily Post.
Most brought with them some token of the past,
Some emblem of attachment or affection
Or coddled childhood—bibles and baby booties,
Harmonicas, love letters, photographs—
But this was different. I discovered later
That he had been brought up in an orphanage,
So the book was his fiction of kindliness,
A novel in which personages of wealth
Firmly secure domestic tranquility.
He’d cite me instances. It seems a boy
Will not put “Mr.” on his calling cards
Till he leaves school, and may omit the “Mr.”
Even while at college. Bread and butter plates
Are never placed on a formal dinner table.
At a simple dinner party one may serve
Claret instead of champagne with the meat.
The satin facings on a butler’s lapels
Are narrower than a gentleman’s, and he wears
Black waistcoat with white tie, whereas the gentleman’s
White waistcoat goes with both black tie and white.
When a lady lunches alone at her own home
In a formally kept house the table is set
For four. As if three Elijahs were expected.
This was to him a sort of Corpus Juris,
An ancient piety and governance
Worthy of constant dream and meditation.
He haunts me here, that seeker after law
In a lawless world, in rainsoaked combat boots,
Oil-stained fatigues and heavy bandoleers.
He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire.
His helmet had fallen off. They had sheared away
The top of his cranium like a soft-boiled egg,
And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon,
His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.
IV
Where to begin? In a heaven of golden serifs
Or smooth and rounded loaves of risen gold,
Formed into formal Caslon capitals
And graced with a pretzeled, sinuous ampersand
Against a sanded ground of fire-truck red,
Proclaiming to the world at large, “The Great
Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.”?
The period alone appeared to me
An eighteen-karat doorknob beyond price.
This was my uncle’s store where I was raised.
A shy asthmatic child, I was permitted
To improvise with used potato sacks
Of burlap a divan behind the counter
Where I could lie and read or dream my dreams.
These were infused with the smell of fruit and coffee,
Strong odors of American abundance.
Under the pressed-tin ceiling’s coffering
I’d listen to the hissing radiator,
Hung with its can, like a tapped maple tree,
To catch its wrathful spittings, and meditate
On the arcane meaning of the mystic word
(Fixed in white letters backwards on the window)
That referred inscrutably to nothing else
Except itself. An uncracked code : SALADA.
By childhood’s rules of inference it concerned
Saladin and the camphors of the East,
And through him, by some cognate lineage
Of sound and mystic pedigree, Aladdin,
A hushed and shadowy world of minarets,
Goldsmiths, persimmons and the ninety-nine
Unutterable Arabian names of God.
I had an eye for cyphers and riddling things.
Of all my schoolmates I was the only one
Who knew that on the bottle of Worcestershire
The conjured names of Lea and Perrins figure
Forty-eight times, weaving around the border
As well as the obvious places front and back.
I became in time a local spelling champion,
Encouraged and praised at home, where emphasis
Was placed on what was then called elocution
And upon “building” a vocabulary,
A project that seemed allied to architecture,
The unbuttressed balancing of wooden blocks
Into a Tower of Babel. Still, there were prizes
For papers in my English class : Carlyle
On The Dignity of Labor; John Stuart Mill
On Happiness. But the origin of things
Lies elsewhere. Back in some genetic swamp.
My uncle had worked hard to get his store.
Soon as he could he brought his younger brothers
From the Old Country. My father brought his bride
Of two months to the second-story room
Above the storage. Everybody shared
Labors and profits; they stayed open late
Seven days a week (but closed on Christmas Day)
And did all right. But cutting up the pie
Of measured earnings among five adults
(Four brothers and my mother—I didn’t count,
Being one year old at the time) seemed to my father
A burden upon everyone. He announced
That he was going west to make his fortune
And would send soon as he could for mother and me.
Everyone thought him brave and enterprising.
There was a little party, with songs and tears
And special wine, purchased for the occasion.
He left. We never heard from him again.
When I was six years old it rained and rained
And never seemed to stop. I had an oilskin,
A bright sou’wester, stiff and sunflower yellow,
And fireman boots. Rain stippled the windows
Of the school bus that brought us home at dusk
That was no longer dusk but massing dark
As that small world of kids drove into winter,
And always in that dark our grocery store
Looked like a theater or a puppet show,
Lit, warm, and peopled with the family cast,
Full of prop vegetables, a brighter sight
Than anyone else’s home. Therefore I knew
Something was clearly up when the bus door
Hinged open and all the lights were on upstairs
But only the bulb at the cash register lit
The store itself, half dark, and on the steps,
Still in his apron, standing in the rain,
My uncle. He was soaked through. He told me
He was taking me to a movie and then to supper
At a restaurant, though the next day was school
And I had homework. It was clear to me
That such a treat exacted on my part
The condition that I shouldn’t question it.
We went to see a bedroom comedy,
“Let Us Be Gay,” scarcely for six-year-olds,
Throughout the length of which my uncle wept.
And then we went to a Chinese restaurant
And sat next to the window where I could see,
Beyond the Chinese equivalent of SALADA
Encoded on the glass, the oil-slicked streets,
The gutters with their little Allagashes
Bent on some urgent mission to the sea.
Next day they told me that my mother was dead.
I didn’t go to school. I watched the rain
From the bedroom window or from my burlap nest
Behind the counter. My whole life was changed
Without my having done a single thing.
Perhaps because of those days of constant rain
I am always touched by it now, touched and assuaged.
Perhaps that early vigilance at windows
Explains why I have now come to regard
Life as a spectator sport. But I find peace
In the arcaded dark of the piazza
When a thunderstorm comes up. I watch the sky
Cloud into tarnished zinc, to Quaker gray
Drabness, its shrouded vaults, fog-bound crevasses
Blinking with huddled lightning, and await
The vast son et lumière. The city’s lamps
Faintly ignite in the gathered winter gloom.
The rumbled thunder starts—an avalanche
Rolling down polished corridors of sound,
Rickety tumbrels blundering across
A stone and empty cellarage. And then,
Like a whisper of dry leaves, the rain begins.
It stains the paving stones, forms a light mist
Of brilliant crystals dulled with tones of lead
Three inches off the ground. Blown shawls of rain
Quiver and luff, veil the cathedral front
In flailing laces while the street lamps hold
Fixed globes of sparkled haze high in the air
And the black pavement runs with wrinkled gold
In pools and wet dispersions, fiery spills
Of liquid copper, of squirming, molten brass.
To give one’s whole attention to such a sight
Is a sort of blessedness. No room is left
For antecedence, inference, nuance.
One escapes from all the anguish of this world
Into the refuge of the present tense.
The past is mercifully dissolved, and in
Easy obedience to the gospel’s word,
One takes no thought whatever of tomorrow,
The soul being drenched in fine particulars.
V
Seeing is misbelieving, as may be seen
By the angled stems, like fractured tibias,
Misplaced by water’s anamorphosis.
Think of the blonde with the exposed midriff
Who grins as the cross-cut saw slides through her navel,
Or, better, the wobbled clarity of streams,
Their graveled bottoms strewn with casual plunder
Of earthen golds, shark grays, palomino browns
Giddily swimming in and out of focus,
Where, in a passing moment of accession,
One thinks one sees in all that spangled bath,
That tarsial, cosmatesque bespattering,
The anchored floating of a giant trout.
All lenses—the corneal tunic of the eye,
Fine scopes and glazier’s filaments—mislead us
With insubstantial visions, like objects viewed
Through crizzled and quarrelled panes of Bull’s Eye Glass.
It turned out in the end that John Stuart Mill
Knew even less about happiness than I do,
Who know at last, alas, that it is composed
Of clouded, cataracted, darkened sight,
Merciful blindnesses and ignorance.
Only when paradisal bliss had ended
“And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew…”
I, for example, though I had lost my parents,
Thought I was happy almost throughout my youth.
Innocent, like Othello in his First Act.
“I saw ’t not, thought it not, it harmed not me.”
The story I have to tell is only my story
By courtesy of painful inference.
So far as I can tell it, it is true,
Though it has comprised the body of such dreams,
Such broken remnant furnishings of the mind
That my unwilling suspension of disbelief
No longer can distinguish between fact
As something outward, independent, given,
And the enfleshment of disembodied thought,
Some melanotic malevolence of my own.
I know this much for sure : When I was eighteen
My father returned home. In a boxcar, dead.
I learned, or else I dreamed, that heading west
He got no further than Toledo, Ohio,
Where late one night in a vacant parking lot
He was robbed, hit on the head with a quart bottle,
Left bleeding and unconscious and soaked with rum
By a couple of thugs who had robbed a liquor store
And found in my father, besides his modest savings,
A convenient means of diverting the police.
He came to in the hospital, walletless,
Paperless, without identity.
He had no more than a dozen words of English
Which, in hysterical anxiety
Or perhaps from the c
oncussion, evaded him.
The doctors seemed to be equally alarmed
By possible effects of the blow to his head
And by his wild excitability
In a tongue nobody there could understand.
He was therefore transferred for observation
To the State Mental Hospital where he stayed
Almost a year before, by merest chance,
A visitor of Lithuanian background
Heard and identified his Lettish speech,
And it could be determined that he was
In full possession of his faculties,
If of little else, and where he had come from
And all the rest of it. The Toledo police
Then wrote my uncle a letter. Without unduly
Stressing their own casualness in the matter,
They told my uncle where his brother was,
How he had come to be there, and that because
He had no funds or visible means of support
He would be held pending a money order
That should cover at least his transportation home.
They wrote three times. They didn’t get an answer.
The immigrants to Lawrence, Massachusetts,
Were moved as by the vision of Isaiah
To come to the New World, to become new
And enter into a peaceful Commonwealth.
This meant hard work, a scrupulous adoption
Of local ways, endeavoring to please
Clients and neighbors, to become at length,
Despite the ineradicable stigma
Of a thick accent, one like all the rest,
Homogenized and inconspicuous.
So much had the prophetic vision come to.
It would not do at all to have it known
That any member of the family
Had been in police custody, or, worse,
In an asylum. All the kind good will
And friendly custom of the neighborhood
Would be withdrawn at the mere breath of scandal.
Prudence is one of the New England virtues
My uncle was at special pains to learn.
And it paid off, as protestant virtue does,
In cold coin of the realm. Soon he could buy
His own store and take his customers with him
From the A. & P. By the time I was in high school
He and his brothers owned a modest chain
Of little grocery stores and butcher shops.
And he took on as well the unpaid task
Of raising me, making himself my parent,
Forbearing and encouraging and kind.
Or so it seemed. Often in my nightmares
Since then I appear craven and repulsive,
Always soliciting his good opinion
As he had sought that of the neighborhood.