Leaves fall, and thus unveil the sky;
But now the birdbath is bone dry.
COG
No, not for him the darkly planned
Ambiguities of flesh.
His maker gave him one command:
Mesh.
DOLLY
Along the upland meadows
of the dining-table bloom
the doilies, openfaced and
white; within the living-room
they cling to every slope of
chair, and dot each teak plateau.
Around the trunks of lamps whose
shades exude a healthy glow,
the doilies spread their petals
tinted ivory and cream.
Hands off! Who plucks a doily
bothers Mother’s farflung scheme.
EASY CHAIR
Avoid the clicking three-way lamp; beware
The throw rug’s coils, the two-faced sofabed,
The vile lowboy; but more than any, dread
The hippopotomastic easy chair.
For, seated, you shall sink and never rise.
The slow osmosis of the chair’s embrace
Shall make your arms its arms, and make your face
An antimacassar monogrammed with eyes.
FLOWERPOT
GERANIUM
This clayey fez,
Who has this home?
inverted, is
Geranium,
a shoe for roots:
a maiden plant
an orange boot
and aspirant
wherein one leg
to broader green.
goes down to beg
Against the screen
more dirt. Alas,
she leans her head,
in vain it asks.
inhibited.
More Dirt (the moral runs) Or Else We Wane—See D. H. Lawrence, Ovid, or Mark Twain.
HAIRBRUSH
Made of hair,
it brushes locks
of hair:
and there,
my son,
you have a Chinese paradox,
but not much of one.
ICEBOX
In Daddy’s day there were such things:
Wood cabinets of cool
In which a cake of ice was placed
Blue-veined, partitioned in itself,
The cake seemed cut of air
Which had exploded; one cracked star
Appeared imprisoned there.
It melted slowly through the day;
The metal slats beneath
Seeped upwards, so the slippery base
Developed downward teeth.
Eventually an egg so small
It could be tossed away,
The ice cake vanished quite, as has
That rather distant day.
JACK
A card, a toy, a hoist,
a flag, a stay, a fruit,
a sailor, John, a pot,
a rabbit, knife, and boot;
o’-lantern, in-the-box
or -pulpit, Ketch, a daw,
a-dandy, of-all-trades,
anapes, an ass, a straw.
KNOB
Conceptually a blob,
the knob
is a smallish object which,
hitched
to a larger,
acts as verger.
It enables
us to gain access to drawers in end tables;
it shepherds
us into cupboards.
LETTER SLOT
Once each day this broad mouth spews
Love letters, bills, ads, pleas, and news.
MIRROR
NUTCRACKER
His teeth are part of his shoulders because
A nut
Is broken best by arms that serve as jaws.
OTTOMAN
Lessons in history: the Greeks
Were once more civilized than Swedes.
Iranians were, for several weeks,
Invincible, as Medes.
The mild Mongolians, on a spree,
Beheaded half of Asia; and
The Arabs, in their century,
Subdued a world of sand.
Just so, the cushioned stool we deign
To sit on, called the Ottoman:
We would not dare, were this the reign
Of Sultan Selim Khan.
From India to Hungary
The Ottoman held sway; his scope
Extended well into the sea
And terrified the Pope.
And Bulgar, Mameluke, and Moor
All hastened to kowtow
It seems fantastic now.
QUILT
The quilt that covers all of us, to date,
Has patches numbered 1 to 48,
Five northern rents, a crooked central seam,
A ragged eastern edge, a way
Of bunching uglily, and a
Perhaps too energetic color scheme.
Though shaken every twenty years, this fine
Old quilt was never beaten on the line.
It took long making. Generations passed
While thread was sought, and calico
And silk were coaxed from Mexico
And France. The biggest squares were added last.
Don’t kick your covers, son. The bed is built
So you can never shake the clinging quilt
That blanketed your birth and tries to keep
Your waking warm, impalpable
As atmosphere. As earth it shall
Be tucked about you through your longest sleep.
RAINSPOUT
Up the house’s nether corner,
Snaky-skilled, the burglar shinnies,
Peeking, cautious, in the dormer,
Creeping, wary, where the tin is.
Stealthily he starts to burgle.
Hear his underhanded mutter;
Hear him, with a guilty gurgle,
Pour his loot into the gutter.
STOPPER
Take instead the honest stopper,
Crying “Halt!” to running water,
Chained to duty, as is proper
For a piece of rubber mortar.
Dense resistance is the raison
D’ětre of this dull sentry; certes
He shall hold the brimming basin
Even after water dirties.
TRIVET
“What is it? Why?” Thus the trivet,
Like a piece of algebra,
Embraces mysteries which give it
Quelque chose, je ne sais quoi.
UMBRELLA
Pterodactylic complement
Of black and evil weather,
It lifts on ribbing badly bent
One wing without a feather.
Don’t treat it as a cane. Don’t poke
The end at friends; you’re liable
To give offense. Don’t stick a spoke
In anybody’s eyeball.
Don’t open it indoors, your great-
Grandmother used to scold me;
What all befell who disobeyed
The good soul never told me.
Unfurl it when the heavens burst,
And hold it over ladies.
On better days, hands off; accurst,
VACUUM CLEANER
This baggy broom,
Its hum is doom.
Its stern caress
Is nothingness.
WHEEL
For all of his undoubted skill
The Inca lacked the wheel until
Pizarro came to high Peru
And said that llamas wouldn’t do.
The Eskimos had never heard
Of centripetal force when Byrd
Bicycled up onto a floe
And told them, “This how white man go.”
Nepal’
s Joe Averageperson feels
He should get by on prayer wheels.
The Navajos retread their squaws.
So lucky, lucky you, because
Whereas, below the pyramids
In Africa, some hominids
Have waited since the Pliocene,
You’ll get the wheel at age sixteen.
XYSTER
“An instrument for scraping bones”
Describes the knife.
The word is rarely used—but why?
What else is life?
YARDSTICK
ZEPPELIN
A German specialty, since men
Of other nations must inveigle
Helium or hydrogen;
But Germany had Hegel.
It fell, as do Philosophy’s
Symmetric, portly darlings,
Fell down from skies where one still sees
Religion’s narrow starlings.
A Note About the Author
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
Books by John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORIES
The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems and Other Stories (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maple Stories (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011)
PLAY
Buchanan Dying (1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)