and the water, sluicing sideways, teases our direction.
Indeed, we are lively, smug, and brave
as adventurers safe after some great hazard,
while beside our shoulders the landscape streams
as across the eye of a bathysphere surfacing.
TIME’S FOOL
Frederick Alexander Pott
Arrives at parties on the dot.
The drinks have not been mixed, the wife
Is still applying, with a knife,
Extract of shrimp and chicken spread
To parallelograms of bread
When Pott appears, remarking, “I’m
Afraid I’m barging in on time.”
Frederick Pott is never late
For any rendezvous or date.
Arrange to meet at some hotel;
You’ll find he’s been there since the bell
Tolled the appointed hour. Not
Intending to embarrass, Pott
Says shyly, “Punctuality
Is psychological with me.”
Pott takes the most preposterous pains
To suit the scheduled times of trains.
He goes to concerts, races, plays,
Allowing nicely for delays, And at the age three score and ten
Pott plans to perish; doubtless then
He’ll ask, as he has often done,
“This was the time agreed upon?”
PHILOLOGICAL
The British puss demurely mews;
His transatlantic kin meow.
The kine in Minnesota moo;
Not so the gentle Devon cows:
They low,
As every school child ought to know.
CLOUD SHADOWS
(New Hampshire)
I
That white coconut, the sun,
is hidden by his blue leaves,
piratical great galleons.
Our sky their spanking sea,
they thrust us to an ocean floor,
withal with certain courtesy.
II
These courtly cotton-bellies rub
around the jewel we live within
and down to the muddled hub
drop complements.
Down shafts of violet fall
counterweights of shadow, hence
brown, blue, and gray occur
upon the chipmunk-colored
earth’s fur.
III
Pine islands in a broken lake.
Beyond Laconia the hills,
islanded by shadows, take
in cooling middle distance
a motion from above, and lo!
grave mountains belly dance.
A MODEST MOUND OF BONES
(Pennsylvania)
That short-sleeved man, our
uncle, owns
the farm next our farm, south
and west of us, and
he butchers for a living, hand-to-mouth.
Once walking on his land
we found a hill, topped by a flower,
a hill of bones.
They were rain-scrubbed clean—
lovely things.
Depending how the white
sun struck, chips of col-
or (green, yellow, dove-blue, a light
bay) flew off the sul-
len stilled turning there. To have seen
those clickless rings,
those prisonerless
ribs, complex
beyond the lathe’s loose jaws,
convolute compounds
of knobs, rods, hooks, moons, absurd paws,
subtle flats and rounds:
no man could conceive such finesse,
concave or -vex.
Some curve like umbrella
to mammoth locks. Some bend
like equations hunting
infinity, toward which to tend.
How it sags!—what bunting
is flesh to be hung from such ele-
gant balconies?
TO AN USHERETTE
Ah, come with me,
Petite chérie,
And we shall rather happy be.
I know a modest luncheonette
Where, for a little, one can get
A choplet, baby Lima beans,
And, segmented, two tangerines.
Le coup de grâce,
My petty lass,
Will be a demi-demitasse
Within a serviette conveyed
By weazened waiters, underpaid,
Who mincingly might grant us spoons
While a combo tinkles trivial tunes.
Ah, with me come,
Ma faible femme,
And I shall say I love you some.
SUNGLASSES
On an olive beach, beneath a turquoise sky
And a limeade sun, by a lurid sea,
While the beryl clouds went blithely by,
We ensconced ourselves, my love and me.
O her verdant hair! and her aqua smile!
O my soul, afloat in an emerald bliss
That retained its tint all the watery while—
And her copper skin, all verdigris!
YOUTH’S PROGRESS
Dick Schneider of Wisconsin … was elected “Greek God” for an interfraternity ball.
—Life
When I was born, my mother taped my ears
So they lay flat. When I had aged ten years,
My teeth were firmly braced and much improved.
Two years went by; my tonsils were removed.
At fourteen, I began to comb my hair
A fancy way. Though nothing much was there,
I shaved my upper lip—next year, my chin.
At seventeen, the freckles left my skin.
Just turned nineteen, a nicely molded lad,
I said goodbye to Sis and Mother; Dad
Drove me to Wisconsin and set me loose.
At twenty-one, I was elected Zeus.
DILEMMA IN THE DELTA
An extra quarter-inch on Cleopatra’s nose would have changed the entire course of history.
—Pascal, misquoted in a newspaper
Osiris pales; the palace walls
Blush east; through slatted arches falls
The sun, who stripes the cushions where
Empires have been tucked away.
Light fills her jewels and rims her hair
And Cleopatra ripens into day.
Awake, she flings her parakeets
Some chips of cinnamon, and beats
Her scented slave, a charming thing
Who chokes back almond tears. The queen,
Her wrist fatigued, then bids them bring
Her mirror, a mammoth aquamarine.
She rests the gem upon her thighs
And checks her features. First, the eyes:
Weight them with ink. The lips need rose
Tint: crush a rose. And something’s wrong
Between her mouth and brow—her nose,
Her nose seems odd, too long. It is too long!
These stupid jokes of Ra! She sees,
Through veils of fury, centuries
Shifting like stirred-up camels. Men
Who wrought great deeds remain unborn,
Unthought-of heroes fight like ten,
And her own name is lost to praise or scorn.
As she lies limp, seduced by grief,
There enters, tall beyond belief,
Marc Antony, bronze-braceleted,
Conceived where Rome on Tiber sits.
Six sprigs of laurel gird his head.
His mouth expels two avocado pits.
“Now dies,” she cries, “your love, my fame!
My face shall never seem the same!”
But Marc responds, “Deorum artis
Laudemus! Bonum hoc est omen.
Egyptian though your wicked heart is,
I can’t resist a nose so nobly Roman.”
The carpentered hen
unhinges her wings,
abandons her nest
of splinters, and sings.
The egg she has laid
is maple and hard
as a tenpenny nail
and smooth as a board.
The grain of the wood
embraces the shape
as brown feathers do
the rooster’s round nape.
Under pressure of pride,
her sandpapered throat
unwarps when she cries
Cross-cut! ka-ross-cut!
Beginning to brood,
she tests with a level
the angle, sits down,
and coos Bevel bevel.
MR. HIGH-MIND
Then went the Jury out, whose names were Mr. Blind-man, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Lyar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable.
—The Pilgrim’s Progress
Eleven rogues and he to judge a fool—
He files out with the jury, but distaste
Constricts his fluting nostrils, and his cool
Mind turns tepid with contempt. There is brought
A basin for him, in which to wash his hands.
Laving his palms and fingertips, he finds
An image of his white, proportioned thought
Plunged in the squalid suds of other minds.
Unmoved by Lust’s requests or Hate’s commands
Or Superstition’s half-embarrassed bribe,
His brain takes wing and flutters up the course
First plotted by the Greeks, up toward the sphere
Where issues and alternatives are placed
In that remorseless light that knows no source.
Here, in this saddle-shaped, vanilla void,
The wise alone have cause for breathing; here
Lines parallel on Earth, extended, meet.
Here priests in tweeds gyrate around the feet
Of Fact, their bride, and hymn their gratitude
That each toe of her ten is understood.
From this great height, the notion of the Good
Is seen to be a vulgar one, and crude.
High-mind as Judge descends to Earth, annoyed,
Despairing Justice. Man, a massy tribe,
Cannot possess one wide and neutral eye.
He casts his well-weighed verdict with a sigh
And for a passing moment is distressed
To see it coinciding with the rest.
THE ONE-YEAR-OLD
(After Reading the Appropriate Chapter in Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, by Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg)
Wakes wet; is promptly toileted;
Jargons to himself; is fed;
Executively grips a cup;
Quadrupedal, will sit up
Unaided; laughs; applauds; enjoys
Baths and manipulative toys;
Socializes (parents: shun
Excess acculturation);
Demonstrates prehension; will
Masticate yet seldom spill;
Creeps (gross motor drives are strong);
And jargons, jargons all day long.
SUPERMAN
I drive my car to supermarket,
The way I take is superhigh,
A superlot is where I park it,
And Super Suds are what I buy.
Supersalesmen sell me tonic—
Super-Tone-O, for Relief.
The planes I ride are supersonic.
In trains, I like the Super Chief.
Supercilious men and women
Call me superficial—me,
Who so superbly learned to swim in
Supercolossality.
Superphosphate-fed foods feed me;
Superservice keeps me new.
Who would dare to supersede me,
Super-super-superwho?
PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, THE MADISON AVENUE HICK
This was in Italy. The year was the thirty-seventh before the birth of Christ. The people were mighty hungry, for there was a famine in the land.
—the beginning of a Heritage Club advertisement, in The New Yorker, for The Georgics
It takes a heap o’ pluggin’ t’ make a classic sell,
Fer folks are mighty up-to-date, an’ jittery as hell;
They got no yen to set aroun’ with Vergil in their laps
When they kin read the latest news in twenty-four-point caps.
Ye’ve got t’ hit ’em clean an’ hard, with simple predicates,
An’ keep the clauses short becuz these days nobody waits
T’ foller out a sentence thet all-likely lacks a punch
When in the time o’ readin’ they could grab a bite o’ lunch.
Ye’ve got t’ hand ’em place an’ time, an’ then a pinch o’ slang
T’ make ’em feel right comfy in a Latinate shebang,
An’ ef your taste buds curdle an’ your tum turns queasy—well,
It takes a heap o’ pluggin’ t’ make a classic sell.
IN MEMORIAM
In the novel he marries Victoria but in the movie he dies.
—caption in Life
Fate lifts us up so she can hurl
Us down from heights of pride,
Viz.: in the book he got the girl
But in the movie, died.
The author, seeing he was brave
And good, rewarded him,
Then, greedy, sold him as a slave
To mean old M-G-M.
He perished on the screen, but thrives
In print, where serifs keep
Watch o’er the happier of his lives:
Say, Does he wake, or sleep?
LITTLE POEMS
OVERCOME, Kim flees in bitter frustration to her TV studio dressing room where she angrily flings a vase of flowers to the floor and sobs in abandon to a rose she destroys: “I’m tearing this flower apart like I’m destroying my life.” As she often does, she later turned the episode into a little poem.
—photograph caption in Life
I woke up tousled, one strap falling
Off the shoulder, casually.
In came ten Time-Life lensmen, calling,
“Novak, hold that déshabillé!”
I went to breakfast, asked for java,
Prunes, and toast. “Too dark,” they said.
“The film we use is fast, so have a
Spread of peaches, tea, and bread.”
I wrote a memo, “To my agent—”
“Write instead,” they said, “ ‘Dear Mum.’ ”
In conference, when I made a cogent
Point, they cried, “No, no! Act dumb.”
I told a rose, “I tear you as I
Tear my life,” and heard them say,
“Afraid that ‘as’ of yours is quasi-
Classy. We like ‘like.’ O.K.?”
I dined with friends. The Time-Life crewmen
Interrupted: “Bare your knees,
Project your bosom, and, for human
Interest, look ill at ease.”
I, weary, fled to bed. They hounded
Me with meters, tripods, eyes
That winked and winked—I was surrounded!
The caption read, “ALONE, Kim cries.”
TSOKADZE O ALTITUDO
“Tsokadze has invented a new style—apparently without knowing it. He does not bend from the waist at all. His body is straight and relaxed and leaning far out over his skis until his face is only two feet above them, his arms at his side, his head up. His bindings and shoes are so loose that only his toes touch his skies. He gets enormous distances and his flight is so beautiful.”
—Thorlief Schjelderup, quoted in The New York Times, of a young Russian ski-jumper
Tsokadze leans unknowingly
Above his skis, relaxed and tall.
He bends not from the waist
at all.
This is the way a man should ski.
He sinks; he rises, up and up,
His face two feet above the wood.
This way of jumping, it is good,
Says expert Thorlief Schjelderup.
Beneath his nose, the ski-tips shake;
He plummets down the deepening wide
Bright pit of air, arms at his side,
His heart aloft for Russia’s sake.
Loose are the bindings, taut the knees,
Relaxed the man—see, still he flies
And only his toes touch his skies!
Ah, c’est beau, when Tsokadze skis.
PLANTING A MAILBOX
Prepare the ground when maple buds have burst
And when the daytime moon is sliced so thin
His fibers drink blue sky with litmus thirst.
This moment come, begin.
The site should be within an easy walk,
Beside a road, in stony earth. Your strength
Dictates how deep you delve. The seedling’s stalk
Should show three feet of length.
Don’t harrow, weed, or water; just apply
A little gravel. Sun and motor fumes
Perform the miracle: in late July,
A young post office blooms.
TAO IN THE YANKEE STADIUM BLEACHERS
(Having Taken Along to the Ball Game Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China)
Distance brings proportion. From here