What I think I feel now, by its own nature
Remains beyond my power to say outright,
Short of grasping the naked current where it
Flows through field and book, dog howling, the firelit
Glances, the caresses, whatever draws us
To, and insulates us from, the absolute—
The absolute which wonderfully, this slow
December noon of clear blue time zones flown through
Toward relatives and friends, more and more sounds like
The kind of pear-bellied early instrument
Skills all but lost are wanted, or the phoenix
Quill of passion, to pluck a minor scale from
And to let the silence after each note sing.
So Time has—but who needs that nom de plume? I’ve—
We’ve modulated. Keys ever remoter
Lock our friend among the golden things that go
Without saying, the loves no longer called up
Or named. We’ve grown autumnal, mild. We’ve reached a
Stage through him that he will never himself reach.
Back underground he sinks, a stream, the latest
Recurrent figure out of mythology
To lend his young beauty to a living grave
In order that Earth bloom another season.
Shall I come lighter-hearted to that Spring-tide
Knowing it must be fathomed without a guide?
With no one, nothing along those lines—or these
Whose writing, if not justifies, so mirrors,
So embodies up to now some guiding force,
It can’t simply be written off. In neither
The world’s poem nor the poem’s world have I
Learned to think for myself, much. The twinklings of
Insight hurt or elude the naked eye, no
Metrical lens to focus them, no kismet
Veiled as a stern rhyme sound, to obey whose wink
Floods with rapture its galaxy of sisters.
Muse and maker, each at a loss without the
—Oh but my foot has gone to sleep! Gingerly
I prod it: painful, slow, hilarious twinges
Of reawakening, recirculation;
Pulsars intuiting the universe once
More, this net of loose talk tightening to verse,
And verse once more revolving between poles—
Gassy expansion and succinct collapse—
Till Heaven is all peppered with black holes,
Vanishing points for the superfluous
Matter elided (just in time perhaps)
By the conclusion of a passage thus….
Years have gone by. How often in their course
I’ve “done” for people bits of this story.
Hoping for what response from each in turn—
Tom’s analytic cool? Alison’s shrewd
Silence? or Milton’s ghastly on the spot
Conversion complete with rival spirit
And breakdown, not long afterwards, in Truth
Or Consequences? None of these. Much less
Auden’s searingly gentle grimace of
Impatience with folderol—his dogma
Substantial, rooted like a social tooth
In some great Philistine-destroying jaw.
During one of our last conversations
(Wystan had just died) we got through to him.
He sounded pleased with his NEW PROLE BODY
And likened Heaven to A NEW MACHINE
But a gust of mortal anxiety
Blew, his speech guttered, there were papers YES
A BOX in Oxford that must QUICKLY BE
QUICKLY BURNED—breaking off: he’d overstepped,
Been told so. Then the same mechanical,
Kind, preoccupied GOODNIGHT that ended
One’s evenings with the dear man. Our turn now
To be preoccupied. Wystan had merged
Briefly with Tiberius, that first night,
Urging destruction of a manuscript—
Remember?—buried beneath a red stone
At the empire’s heart. And in the final
Analysis, who didn’t have at heart
Both a buried book and a voice that said
Destroy it? How sensible had we been
To dig up this material of ours?
What if BURN THE BOX had been demotic
For Children, while you can, let some last flame
Coat these walls, the lives you lived, relive them?
Here we had nothing if not room for that
(Fine connections, scratches on a mirror,
Illusion of coherence garlanding
Their answer, the old questioners back home)—
Candlelight shadowboxing in the dome
Brought like a cheerful if increasingly
Absent mind to bear upon the chatter
Below, the rosy dregs, the chicken bones.
Here was DJ, too. Home from the senior
Citizen desert ghetto his parents
Live on in. Oh, they’re living, the poor old
Helpless woman and the rich old skinflint
Who now, if no one’s there to stop him, beats
Intelligence back into her, or tries.
“Don’t mind her,” giggles Mary of herself,
“She’s crazy—just don’t hurt her,” nervously
Hiding yesterday’s bruise, wringing her hands
Like the fly in Issa’s famous haiku.
Outdoors, their “lawn” (gravel dyed green) and view:
Other pastel, gadget-run bungalows
Housing, you might expect, the personnel
Of some top-secret, top-priority
Project an artificial hill due West
Camouflages, deceiving nobody.
So far they’ve escaped the worst, or have they?—
These two old people at each other’s gnarled,
Loveless mercy. Yet David now evokes
Moments of broadest after-supper light
Before talk show or moon walk, when at length
The detergent and the atrocity
Fight it out in silence, and he half blind
And she half deaf, serenely holding hands
Bask in the tinted conscience of their kind.
And here was I, or what was left of me.
Feared and rejoiced in, chafed against, held cheap,
A strangeness that was us, and was not, had
All the same allowed for its description,
And so brought at least me these spells of odd,
Self-effacing balance. Better to stop
While we still can. Already I take up
Less emotional space than a snowdrop.
My father in his last illness complained
Of the effect of medication on
His real self—today Bluebeard, tomorrow
Babbitt. Young chameleon, I used to
Ask how on earth one got sufficiently
Imbued with otherness. And now I see.
Zero hour. Waiting yet again
For someone to fix the furnace. Zero week
Of the year’s end. Bed that keeps restlessly
Making itself anew from lamé drifts.
Mercury dropping. Cost of living high.
Night has fallen in the glass studio
Upstairs. The fire we huddle with our drinks by
Pops and snaps. Throughout t
he empty house
(Tenants away until the New Year) taps
Glumly trickling keep the pipes from freezing.
Summers ago this whole room was a garden—
Orange tree, plumbago, fuchsia, palm;
One of us at the piano playing his
Gymnopédie, the other entering
Stunned by hot news from the sundeck. Now
The plants, the sorry few that linger, scatter
Leaflets advocating euthanasia.
Windows and sliding doors are wadded shut.
A blind raised here and there, what walls us in
Trembles with dim slides, transparencies
Of our least motion foisted on a thereby
Realer—falser?—night. Whichever term
Adds its note of tension and relief.
Downstairs, doors are locked against the thief:
Night before last, returning from a dinner,
We found my bedroom ransacked, lights on, loud
Tick of alarm, the mirror off its hook
Looking daggers at the ceiling fixture.
A burglar here in the Enchanted Village—
Unheard of! Not that he took anything.
We had no television, he no taste
For Siamese bronze or Greek embroidery.
Except perhaps some loose change on the bureau
Nothing we can recollect is missing.
“Lucky boys,” declared the chief of police
Risking a wise look at our curios.
The threat remains, though, of there still being
A presence in our midst, unknown, unseen,
Unscrupulous to take what he can get.
Next morning in my study—stranger yet—
I found a dusty carton out of place.
Had it been rummaged through? What could he fancy
Lay buried here among these—oh my dear,
Letters scrawled by my own hand unable
To keep pace with the tempest in the cup—
These old love-letters from the other world.
We’ve set them down at last beside the fire.
Are they for burning, now that the affair
Has ended? (Has it ended?) Any day
It’s them or the piano, says DJ.
Who’ll ever read them over? Take this one.
Limp, chill, it shivers in the glow, as when
The tenor having braved orchestral fog
First sees Brünnhilde sleeping like a log.
Laid on the fire, it would hesitate,
Trying to think, to feel—then the elate
Burst of satori, plucking final sense
Boldly from inconclusive evidence.
And that (unless it floated, spangled ash,
Outward, upward, one lone carp aflash
Languorously through its habitat
For crumbs that once upon a…) would be that.
So, do we burn the— Wait the phone is ringing:
Bad connection; babble of distant talk;
No getting through. We must improve the line
In every sense, for life. Again at nine
Sharp above the village clock, ring-ring.
It’s Bob the furnace man. He’s on his way.
Will find, if not an easy-to-repair
Short circuit, then the failure long foreseen
As total, of our period machine.
Let’s be downstairs, leave all this, put the light out.
Fix a screen to the proscenium
Still flickering. Let that carton be. Too much
Already, here below, has met its match.
Yet nothing’s gone, or nothing we recall.
And look, the stars have wound in filigree
The ancient, ageless woman of the world.
She’s seen us. She is not particular—
Everyone gets her injured, musical
“Why do you no longer come to me?”
To which there’s no reply. For here we are.
II
MIRABELL’S BOOKS OF NUMBER
The three men decided they would prepare a letter to President Roosevelt, and that Einstein would sign it….Einstein’s eyes slowly moved along the two full, typewritten pages….
“For the first time in history men will use energy that does not come from the sun,” he commented and signed.
The scientists operated their pile for the first time on December 2, 1942. They were the first men to see matter yield its inner energy, steadily, at their will. My husband was their leader. LAURA FERMI
CONTENTS
0 Household decoration. The Jacksons meet new friends. A black dog in Athens. Poems of Science. Avebury visited.
1 Their Fall retold. A glimpse of the atom. Resisting Them. Akhnaton’s experiment. Auden joins the seminar.
2 Faust and the Five. The song Dante heard. A party in 1965. Densities and definitions. A look into the Research Lab.
3 Black holes. Maria and the plant world. Metamorphosis of 741. Athenianism. Plato patronized. Five elemental Voices.
4 Atlantis and after. Describing an elm. A peacock on trial. Cabel Stone. The Scribe supplants religion. Chester’s new life.
5 Losses to the Lab. The Bible endorsed. Mining of the Scribes. Are we an atom? The No Accident clause. Green fields ahead.
6 Days in Boston. Ephraim recollects. The dream in the ginger-pot. Maria’s fate. The red Visitor. Literary exchanges.
7 Numbers at work. Life and death in Thebes. Nature disparaged. Luca’s prank. The peacock named. Ten final lessons begin.
8 Apechild learns to talk. The hurricane. A Herald from the S/O/L. Robert Morse drops in. Compliments upon a silver field.
9 Mirabell’s picnic. Wystan on Poetry. Backward looks and bargains. Another black dog. Waiting for the Angel.
O
Oh very well, then. Let us broach the matter
Of the new wallpaper in Stonington.
Readers in small towns will know the world
Of interest rippling out from such a topic,
Largely a state of mind, a medium
Wherein suspended, microscopic figments
—Boredom, malice, curiosity—
Catch a steadily more revealing light.
However. Between our dining room and stairs
Leading to the future studio,
From long before our time, was this ill-lit
Shoebox of a parlor where we’d sit
Faute de mieux, when not asleep or eating.
It had been papered by the original people—
Blue-on-eggshell foliage touchingly
Mottled or torn in places—and would do
Throughout a first phase, till the Fisherman’s
Wife in one of us awoke requiring
That our arrangements undergo a partial
Turn of the screw toward grandeur. So began
What must in retrospect be called the Age
—Some fifteen years—of the Wrong Wallpaper.
Still blue and white, still floral, in the shop
Looking unexceptionably prim,
No sooner on our walls, the buds uncurl
In scorn. Compulsively repetitive
Neuroses full-blown and slack-lipped, then whole
Faces surely not intended, peer
Forth—once seen, no question of unseeing
That turbaned mongoloid, that toad with teeth…
Hiding as many as we can beneath
Pictures, in our heart of hearts we know
Either th
ey or we will have to go.
So we do. Into the next room—upstairs—
To Boston—Athens! It would seem all roads
Return us to the cell marked GO. Uncanny,
One’s tolerance for those quotidian toads.
.1
The buyer of the grandest house in town
Now makes up her mind to renovate.
Word goes round that she is giving—giving!—
To anyone who’ll haul it, an immense
Victorian mirror. David Jackson’s easy
Presence, winded by sundown, wringing wet,
Does all the rest. Here, to this day, it stands
Backed by shelves—not the detachable glass
Once drawn to table for the Ouija Board;
Under its gilded crown of palms and sphinxes,
Exactly six feet tall like Christ our Lord
Come to bring light, redeem from paper wastes
By doubling it—two minuses, one plus—
The book or figurine grown dubious.
Next comes an evening when the Fisherman’s Wife
Brings home from Boylston Street a 7 × 10
Chinese carpet, which just fits. A pale
Field. A ghostly maize in winter sun.
The border renders in two shades of tan
And three intensities of Prussian blue
Overlapping cloudlets that give way
To limber, leotarded, blue-eyed bats
—Symbols of eternity, said the dealer.
In short, although the walls remained a problem,
Something was at last reflecting in
Their midst, and something else was underfoot
That could be looked upon without dismay.
.2
Another decade wound itself in slow
Glinting coils about the status quo.
It’s 1975 before we fling
Them off, the carpet into our back seat,
Ourselves through melting drifts to Hubbell’s place.
This friend of many hands—one strums a bass
Accompaniment, another bastes a joint,
A third and fourth do expert needlepoint—
Has with an idle pair put out a line
Of his own wallpapers. Will he design
One for us, perhaps incorporating
Motifs from the carpet? Nothing simpler.
He makes a sketch, a cocktail, a soufflé;