My Lord of Essex knew.
Some quirk of baffled pride led to a death due,
old men fail to follow either the pain—
why did he leave her?—
or the fascinated blood that led to an end:
cold as a toad lay suddenly half their love
and rode he by no more.
Celtic Henry groaned with his shoulder to the door
which never will close again, nor open enough—
why did he leave her?
140
Henry is vanishing. In the first of dawn
he fails a little, which he figured on.
Henry broods & recedes.
Like the great Walt, come find him on his way
somewhere. I hear thunder in stillness. She was a good lay.
Terror on Henry feeds
beginning with his knees. I saw his point,
remains much, probably, but not enough.
When the going got rough
elsewhere in the world lay Helen asleep with her secrets,
the poor man is coming to pieces joint by joint.
Does it advantage him, weak
with violent effort, rickety, on the stairs
It’s a race with Time & that is all it is,
almost, given the conditions
& the faceless monsters of the Soviet Unions
The shadows, under the tower, in the most brilliant sun
will get us nowhere too.
141
One was down on the Mass. One on the masses.
Both grew Henry. What cause shall he cry
down the dead of Minnesota winter
without a singular follower nearby
among who seem to live entirely on passes
espouse for him or his printer?
Who gains his housing, heat, food, alcohol
himself & for his spouse & brood, barely.
Nude he danced in his snow
waking perspiring. He’d’ve run off to sea
(but for his studies careful of the Fall)
twenty-odd years ago.
Duly he does his needful little then
with a chest of ice, a head tipping with pain.
That perhaps is his programme,
cause: Henry for Henry in his main:
he’ll push it: down with anything Bostonian:
even god howled ‘I am’.
142
The animal moment, when he sorted out her tail
in a rump session with the vivid hostess
whose guests had finally gone,
was stronger, though so limited, though failed
all normal impulse before her interdiction, yes,
and Henry gave in.
I’d like to have your baby, but, she moaned,
I’m married. Henry muttered to himself
So am I and was glad
to keep chaste. If this lady he had had
scarcely could he have have ever forgiven himself
and how would he have atoned?
—Mr Bones, you strong on moral these days, hey?
It’s good to be faithful but it ain’t natural,
as you knows.
—I knew what I knew when I knew when I was astray,
all those bright painful years, forgiving all
but when Henry & his wives came to blows.
143
—That’s enough of that, Mr Bones. Some lady you make.
Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man,
I’ll sing you now a song
the like of which may bring your heart to break:
he’s gone! and we don’t know where. When he began
taking the pistol out & along,
you was just a little; but gross fears
accompanied us along the beaches, pal.
My mother was scared almost to death.
He was going to swim out, with me, forevers,
and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent Gulf,
but he decided on lead.
That mad drive wiped out my childhood. I put him down
while all the same on forty years I love him
stashed in Oklahoma
besides his brother Will. Bite the nerve of the town
for anyone so desperate. I repeat: I love him
until I fall into coma.
144
My orderly tender having too a gentle face
wants to be a Trappist but not to pray:
this convert lost his faith.
And douroucoulis out from their nesting place
peer with giant eyes, like lost souls, say:
but the whole fault ends with death.
as all we all are dying: death grew tall
up Henry as a child:
the truths that are revealed he is not buying:
he feels his death tugging within him, wild
to slide loose & to fall:
like the iron pear which rammed into his mouth
swells up to four times ordinary size
slowly cracking his skull open:
like the figure in a forest encountered, uncouth:
the oxygen tent: the consolation prize:
like the green pears which ripen.
Sorrow follows an evil thought, for the time being only.
145
Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong
for going on forty years—forgiveness time—
I touch now his despair,
he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower
but he did not swim out with me or my brother
as he threatened—
a powerful swimmer, to take one of us along
as company in the defeat sublime,
freezing my helpless mother:
he only, very early in the morning,
rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window
and did what was needed.
I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong
& so undone. I’ve always tried. I—I’m
trying to forgive
whose frantic passage, when he could not live
an instant longer, in the summer dawn
left Henry to live on.
VI
146
These lovely motions of the air, the breeze,
tell me I’m not in hell, though round me the dead
lie in their limp postures
dramatizing the dreadful word instead
for lively Henry, fit for debaucheries
and bird-of-paradise vestures
only his heart is elsewhere, down with them
& down with Delmore specially, the new ghost
haunting Henry most:
though fierce the claims of others, coimedela crime
came the Hebrew spectre, on a note of woe
and Join me O.
‘Down with them all!’ Henry suddenly cried.
Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own,
I dare say it won’t be long.
I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried,
but they are past it all, I have not done,
which brings me to the end of this song.
147
Henry’s mind grew blacker the more he thought.
He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore.
Delmore, Delmore.
He flung to pieces and they hit the floor.
Nothing was true but what Marcus Aurelius taught,
‘All that is foul smell & blood in a bag.’
He lookt on the world like the leavings of a hag.
Almost his love died from him, any more.
His mother & William
were vivid in the same mail Delmore died.
The world is lunatic. This is the last ride.
Delmore, Delmore.
High in the summer branches the poet sang.
Hís throat ached, and he could sing no more.
All ears closed
across the heights where Delmore & Gertrude sprang
so long ago, in the goodness of which it was composed.
Delmore, Delmore!
148
Glimmerings
His hours of thought grew longer, his study less,
the data (he decided) were abundantly his,
or if not, never.
He called on old codes or new apperceptions,
he fought off an anxiety attack as the Lord did nations,
with brutal commitments, not clever.
Almost he lost interest in the 14 books part-done
in favour of insights fresh, a laziness in the sun,
rapid sketchings,
a violent level on the drop of friendship,
‘I am pickt up & sorted to a pip,’
sleepless, watching.
Gravediggers all busy, Jelly, look what you done done
there died of late a great cat, a real boss cat
fallen from his prime
I’m sorry for those coming, I’m sorry for everyone
At least my friend is rid of that
for the present space-time.
149
This world is gradually becoming a place
where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die?
I don’t suppose
in all them years a day went ever by
without a loving thought for him. Welladay.
In the brightness of his promise,
unstained, I saw him thro’ the mist of the actual
blazing with insight, warm with gossip
thro’ all our Harvard years
when both of us were just becoming known
I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref
and grief too astray for tears.
I imagine you have heard the terrible news,
that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,
in New York: he sang me a song
‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz
Harms & the child I sing, two parents’ torts’
when he was young & gift-strong.
150
He had followers but they could not find him;
friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift
in the center of Manhattan,
without a girl, in cheap hotels,
so disturbed on the street friends avoided him
Where did he come by his lift
which all we must or we would rapidly die:
did he remember the more beautiful & fresh poems
of early manhood now?
or did his subtle & strict standards allow
them nothing, baffled? What then did self-love show
of the weaker later, somehow?
I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved
but it is not so. He painfully removed
himself from the ordinary contacts
and shook with resentment. What final thought
solaced his fall to the hotel carpet, if any,
& the New York Times’s facts?
151
Bitter & bleary over Delmore’s dying:
his death stopped clocks, let no activity
mar our hurrah of mourning,
let’s all be Jews bereft, for he was one
He died too soon, he liked ‘An Ancient to Ancients’
His death clouded the grove
I need to hurry this out before I forget
which I will never He fell on the floor
outside a cheap hotel-room
my tearducts are worn out, the ambulance came
and there on the way he died
He was ‘smart & kind,’
a child’s epitaph. He had no children,
nobody to stand by in the awful years
of the failure of his administration
He was tortured, beyond what man might be
Sick & heartbroken Henry sank to his knees
Delmore is dead. His good body lay unclaimed
three days.
152
I bid you then a raggeder farewell
than at any time my grief would have desired,
you take secrets with you,
sudden appearances, and worse to tell,
vanishings. You said ‘My head’s on fire’
meaning inspired O
meeting on the walk down to Warren House
so long ago we were almost anonymous
waiting for fame to descend
with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were.
Young poets are ridiculous, and rare
like a man death-wounded on the mend.
There’s a memorial today at N.Y.U.,
your last appearance, old heroic friend.
I hope the girls are pretty
and the remarks radish-crisp befitting you
to allay the horror of your lonely end,
appease, a little, sorrow & pity.
153
I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation.
First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.
In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.
That was a first rate haul. He left alive
fools I could number like a kitchen knife
but Lowell he did not touch.
Somewhere the enterprise continues, not—
yellow the sun lies on the baby’s blouse—
in Henry’s staggered thought.
I suppose the word would be, we must submit.
Later.
I hang, and I will not be part of it.
A friend of Henry’s contrasted God’s career
with Mozart’s, leaving Henry with nothing to say
but praise for a word so apt.
We suffer on, a day, a day, a day.
And never again can come, like a man slapped,
news like this
154
Flagrant his young male beauty, thick his mind
with lore and passionate, white his devotion
to Gertrude only,
but even that marriage fell on days were lonely
and ended, and the trouble with friends got into motion,
when Delmore undermined
his closest loves with merciless suspicion:
Dwight cheated him out of a house, Saul withheld money,
and then to cap it all,
Henry was not here in ’57
during his troubles (Henry was in Asia),
accusations to appall
the Loyal forever, but the demands increast:
as I said to my house in Providence
at 8 a.m. in a Cambridge taxi,
which he had wait, later he telephoned
at midnight from New York, to bring my family
to New York, leaving my job.
All your bills will be paid, he added, tense.
155
I can’t get him out of my mind, out of my mind,
Hé was out of his own mind for years,
in police stations & Bellevue.
He drove up to my house in Providence
ho ho at 8 a.m. in a Cambridge taxi
and told it to wait.
He walked my living-room, & did not want breakfast
or even coffee, or even even a drink.
He paced, I’d say Sit down,
it makes me nervous, for a moment he’d sit down,
then pace. After an hour or so I had a drink.
He took it back to Cambridge,
we never learnt why he came, or what he wanted.
His mission was obscure. His mission was real,
but obscure.
I remember his electrical insight as the young man,
his wit & passion, gift, the whole young man
alive with surplus love.
156
I give in. I must not leave the scene of this same death
as most of me
strains to.
There are all the problems to be sorted out,
the fate of the soul, what it was all about
during its being, and whether he was drunk
at 4 a.m. on the wrong floor too
fighting for air, tearing his sorry clothes
with his visions dying O and O I mourn
again this complex death
Almost my oldest friend should never have been born
to this terrible end, out of which what grows
but an unshaven, dissheveled corpse?
The spirit & the joy, in memory
live of him on, the young will read his young verse
for as long as such things go:
why then do I despair, miserable Henry
who knew him all so long, for better & worse
and nearly would follow him below.
157
Ten Songs, one solid block of agony,
I wrote for him, and then I wrote no more.
His sad ghost must aspire
free of my love to its own post, that ghost,
among its fellows, Mozart’s, Bach’s, Delmore’s
free of its careful body
high in the shades which line that avenue
where I will gladly walk, beloved of one,
and listen to the Buddha.
His work downhill, I don’t conceal from you,
ran and ran out. The brain shook as if stunned,
I hope he’s over that,
flame may his glory in that other place,
for he was fond of fame, devoted to it,
and every first-rate soul
has sacrifices which it puts in play,
I hope he’s sitting with his peers: sit, sit,
& recover & be whole.
158
Being almost ready now to say Goodbye,
my thought limps after you. I ring you up,
I know you are going tomorrow,
with gashed in me with you, I am I
gored with your leaving, for the 18th stop,
this stop is congratulation & sorrow,
you’ll pay high rent & whizz. Blessings on you
the almost only surviving Jewess & Jew
since Delmore’s dreadful death
who had no child in bitter early age
to turn him like a story, page on page,