the peopled terraces,
slaves winding in & out, paying no income tax,
mostly brutal one to another,
I saw it all.
Baseball, & the utter bloody fucking news,
converged on miserable Henry, eh?
Brother, they did.
Then how did Henry make itself of use?
apart, I mean, from these nuclear devices H & A.
Henry hid.
198
—I held all solid, then I let some jangle,
offended Henry whistled to itself.
How few followed
the One or both. Only some captains swallowed,
wondering. Many sprang in to untangle
the riddles of my little wit.
How tiresome Spenser’s knights, their grave wounds overnight
annealed, whilst Henry with one broken arm
deep in hospital lay
with real pain between shots from light to light
ten lights, two specialists, where nurses swarm
day after achieveless day.
After all, it was solely the left arm
reminding me the whole body can come to harm;
will.
My wife puts off my sling: I cannot think:
I do my exercises. I wish all well,
including Mrs Randall Jarrell.
199
I dangle on the rungs, an open target.
The world grows more disgusting dawn by dawn.
There is a ‘white backlash.’
When everything else fails on the auto, park it
& move away slowly. Obsolescent, on
the rungs, out of the car, ‘ashes’.
Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
I will meet you then in the middle of the maidan
jump at monsoon dawn.
The bearer weeps, I’m going out so early.
How to account for me? I want her dearly
but being ill & so on
I stumble at the lift. Henry is dying.
Erect-squat in the corner, sweating, the bearer is crying.
I don’t seem to make it down
Shall I finish on the landing? They have all waited
the foes fierce, others whom Henry baited,
a forest of bottles.—Mr Bones, you a clown.
200
I am interested & amazed: on the building across the way
from where I vaguely live there are no bars!
Best-looking place in town.
Only them lawyers big with great cigars
and lesser with briefcases, instead of minds,
move calmly in & out
and now or then an official limousine
with a live Supreme Court justice & chauffeur
mounts the ramp toward me.
We live behind, you see. It’s Christmas, and brrr
in Washington. My wife’s candle is out
for John F. Kennedy
and the law rushes like mud but the park is white
with a heavy fall for ofays & for dark,
let’s exchange blue-black kisses
for the fate of the Man who was not born today,
clashing our tinsel, by the terrible tree
whereon he really hung, for you & me.
201
Hung by a thread more moments instant Henry’s mind
super-subtle, which he knew blunt & empty & incurious
but when he compared it with his fellows’
finding it keen & full, he didn’t know what to think
apart from typewriters & print & ink.
On the philosophical side
plus religious, he lay at a loss.
Mostly he knew the ones he would not follow
into their burning systems
or polar systems, Wittgenstein being boss,
Augustine general manager. A universal hollow
most of the other seems;
so Henry in twilight is on his own:
marrying, childing, slogging, shelling taxes,
pondering, making.
It’s rained all day. His wife has been away
with genuine difficulty he fought madness
whose breast came close to breaking.
202
With shining strides hear his redeemer come,
in a hospital gown, bringing to bear on some
more than they well can bear.
Huge & dark stairwells see the one draw down
with a strange expression, neither smile nor frown,
What can be piled on Henry Henry can take,
peine forte et dure, and never will his silence break.
Ex-nuns line
the circle of the room of recognition
transfixed in Schadenfreude like a mission.
The orderlies serve wine
while slow the ex-priest hauls a frantic breath
and the gong clangs, meaning this way is death.
We still have some to go
when a blessed sweating waking heaves between
this body lunging and the horrid scene
alive back there below.
203
Nothing! —These young men come to interview me
armed with taperecorders, cameras,
the best ways of getting at you
so far invented save the telephone
and it costs money now to be alone:
to shut it off you need two
I have two & they ring from dawn to eve,
with extras in the night—can’t shut them down:
awaiting a long distance call.
I read the ’paper gingerly lest I grieve,
ignore the radio & TV, don’t go downtown:
truly isolated, pal.
However, I shudder & the world shrugs in,
hilarious loves walking the streets like trees
minus an ear,
men from far tribes armed in the dark, women
cantering in from the plains just as they please
with the water up to here.
204
Henry, weak at keyboard music, leanèd on
the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A
& the mysterious final soundings
of Beethoven’s 109–10–11 & the Diabelli Variations
You go by the rules but there the rules don’t matter
is what I’ve been trying to say.
Huddled, from their recesses, the goblins spring
(I’m playing it as softly as I can)
while the sound goes roaring.
If I scream, who would hear me? Rilke, come on strong
& forget our rôles, we’ll play the Housman man
unless, of course, all this is boring.
Tides bring the bodies back sometimes, & not.
The bodies of the self-drowned out there wait,
wait, & the widows wait,
my gramophone is the most powerful in the country,
I am trying, trying, to solve the andante
but the ghost is off before me.
205
Come & dance, Housman’s hopeless heroine
bereft of all: I take you in me arms
burnt-cork:
your creator is studying his celestial sphere,
he never loved you, he never loved a woman
or a man, save one: he was a fork
saved by his double genius & certain emendations
All his long life, hopeless lads grew cold
He drew their death-masks
To listen to him, you’d think that growing old
at twenty-two was horrible, and the ordinary tasks
of people didn’t exist.
He did his almost perfect best with what he had
Shades are sorrowing, as not called up
by in his genius him
Others are for his life-long omission glad
& published their works as soon as he c
ame to a stop
& could not review them.
206
Come again closer, Dr Swift & Professor Housman,
you have in common—I repeat, in common—
a certain failure in youth:
which you ruined, with your hard-earn’d learning:
seven years it took you, ancient Dean,
& Housman came to truth
only after ledgering, endless ledgering
& then he squandered his brains on the youths at Cambridge—
my own university!—
he would accept no honours, he proud as Swift,
merely refused them. Swift, infinitely greater
but far more imperfect
I hear as chiding that distinguisht man
but the Dean must be careful: Housman lost his degree
because he would not take
the Platonic argument beyond what was necessary
to establish the text. Therefore he failed
& became the first scholar in Europe.
207
—How are you? —Fine, fine. (I have tears unshed.
There is here near the bottom of my chest
a loop of cold, on the right.
A thing hurts somewhere up left in my head.
I have a gang of old sins unconfessed.
I shovel out of sight
a-many ills else, I might mention too,
such as her leaving and my hopeless book.
No more of that, my friend.
It’s good of you to ask and) How are you?
(Music comes painful as a happy look
to a system nearing an end
or an empty question slides to a standstill
while the drums increase inside an empty skull
and the whole matter breaks down
or would it would, had Henry left his will
but that went sideways sprawling, collapsed & dull.)
How are you, I say with a frown.
208
His mother wrote good news: somebody was still living.
His wife gave him a hard time, unforgiving.
He romped on the floor with his daughter.
A special number of the London TLS came
and he studied the Asiatic & European
brains of late, across the water,
and some of the articles were spectacularly stupid
but most were par—though there appeared no Cupid—
Vozhnezsensky was good on watermelons
and Nevada’s Miss Breadlove outstripped the felons
to be crowned the Narrative Poet Laureate of North America.
Groovy, pal.
So many thinking & feeling, in so many languages
as it has probably, women barred, down the ages,
but seldom so frisky as now.
Risky & slavish looks the big big scene.
Henry his horns waved at the future of poetry, where he had been,
and hid back in his shell-ow.
209
Henry lay cold & golden in the snow
toward whom the universe once more howled ‘No’—
once more & again.
‘What pricks have you agin’ me, —liquor laws,
the appearance in my house of owls & saws,—
decanted unto the world of men?’
‘Divulge we further: somewhat is because
you loner, you storm off away without pause
across the sad ice
overlain with the tricky new of all the snow
whereat my Sisters up in Him sang ‘So:
he’s coming: ’twill be nice?’
Darker, of the beginning of their hopes,
the huddled end, toward which the lost cork gropes.
I seize the neck of the bottle
& smash it on my sink, when from both ends
it spurts, it rides, as if to blow amends
for the earlier part of the bottle.
210
—Mr Blackmur, what are the holy cities of America?
Sir Herbert’s son, who lives near Canterbury,
precocious, asked my friend.
A brain can stammer: Henry’s friend’s did: ‘Er … er…’
Pilgrimages to Palm Springs smother me,
I’m retreating to Atlantic City.
Atlantic City in the winter is worth having: holy it’s not,
empty it is, and who knows anybody in Atlantic City?
His doctors drove him there
for privacy: at the biggest bar in the world,
down his hotel, shared now with a man a football field away,
he had one drink.
The Boardwalk, keen winds, & the timeless surf
& the medieval torture-instruments from Nuremberg
& shrunken heads for dollars
and home he fled, abroad he streamed, to Autun
& places else where holiness held forth
& then slunk back to his north.
211
Forgoing the Andes, the sea-bottom, Angkor,
he led with his typewriter. He made it fly
& walk to them sites for him.
He led with his tongue & taught & taught & taught,
forgoing Truro, to mollify one creditor
or another.
The heat made headlines, while he lectured on,
drencht.
Ouzo was peaceful in the fearful nights,
a gift from a Spartan lady
whose life has been so far so much worse even than his
that he stifled an American scream.
Of the stately sights he had his modicum,
it’s true: the Campidoglio, e.g.
But mostly, though, the grindstone & the nose
had it, & him, like Fragor
When nostalgia for things unknown grips him he growls
he’s saving it for the next time around.
212
With relief to public action, briefly stopt
the lonely stalking of phrasing & concept:
I’ll begin like a cannon
or canon: I think the elder statesman stance will do.
I will wear my bearded difference with rue
before the damned young things
flashy for knowledge of they dream not what
until I drop the Bacchae in its slot:
take that! and that!
Also his brains accumulates its fat
until their priest, squat on the altar, Skat,
reluctant as my tot.
The women scream adown the mountain side
& the frisky god screams, as full well he may,
worst is the armed mother:
night with her knives reigns. I will stay the night
and I have nothing more much now to say
in the brilliance of their smother.
213
Wan shone my sun on Easter Monday,—ay,
on Monday wan, and yet the snow has ceast.
Filthy, my grass appears.
Pavements appear. It’s spring in Minnesota.
My summerhouse limps. My friends in the East
stalk robins, & dot their fears.
One of my steps is broken, free from ice,
I notice. Henry’s steps sag in the blue
lost of Louisiana.
He was always in love with the wrong woman
we can’t go on here, which would not be nice
nor true.
Horror absolved his movement’s strange. He hangs on
Azured the star over the tower at the top of the hill,
the Mayor’s wife sank into grateful sleep
by his good side
blonde, touseled, back from Washington.
In which pale sun we abide.
Jews being better than us others, still …
214
Which brandished goddess wide-eyed Henry’s nights—
the temperature was even, the sky was still—
tell me, which one
?
Was it the one with the curve to her left knee—
hidden her face with swung hair, masked her delights—
or was it another one?
Tribunals converged in vain. Honours swung to him
doing him less good. He had a court case
he was bound to lose.
Photographers & reporters swarmed, as of an honour
which all thought it was, whereupon he had
a Chinese nightmare, whose?
Back to the knee. We must not the divine knee
swiftly forget. Her family don’t talk,
nobody lately talks.
My friends are ill or dead, who goes for walks?
In the atlas of Henry’s women
your happy map would be a folding map.
215
Took Henry tea down at the Athenaeum with Yeats
and offered the master a fag, the which he took,
accepting too a light
to Henry’s lasting honour. Time abates.
Humourless, grand, by the great fire for a look
he set out his death in twilight.
The goddamned scones came hot.
He coughed with his sphincter, when it hurt
Henry, who now that fierceness imitates.
Empires fall, arise semi-states,
Kleenex improves, clings to its own our dirt
the foul same. The last of the girls had gone
half in despair on.
He starved & flung him on ’em. Fat then, free,
he make a lukewarm wooer. All this hell of flesh—
not so bulk’, after all—
keeps him from edge, as forever he will be—
how rottenly the prize collapse from fresh—
a taller man than, we thought, tall.
216
‘Scads a good eats’, dere own t’ree cars, the ’teens
(until of them shall be asked one thing, they romp or doze)
have got it made;
no prob. was ever set them, their poor ol’ jerks
of parents loved them, with deep-freeze, & snacks
would keep a Hindu family-group alive.
Well, so they’re liars & gluttons & cowards: so what?
… It’s the Land of Plenty, maybe about to sigh.
Why shouldn’t they terrify
with hegemony Dad (stupido Dad) and teach’?