if we’ve got to go on living.
Midsummer Night’s Dream
The forest in the Vosges Mountains shines.
Don’t come near me.
Foolish, foolish,
I’ve been consorting with the world.
I’ve eaten bread, I’ve drunk water,
the wind stroked me, the rain soaked me,
so beware and leave me.
And cover up your eyes.
Leave me, leave, but not by land.
Swim off, swim, but not by sea.
Fly off, fly away, my dear,
but don’t go near the air.
Let’s see each other through closed eyes.
Let’s talk together through closed mouths.
Let’s hold each other through a thick wall.
We don’t make a pretty pair of clowns,
the forest, not the moon, is shining down,
and a gust tears from your lady thus
her radioactive coat, oh Pyramus.
Atlantis
They were or they weren’t.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
swallowed them up or it didn’t.
Was there anyone to love anyone?
Did anybody have someone to fight?
Everything happened or it didn’t
there or someplace else.
Seven cities stood there.
So we think.
They were meant to stand forever.
We suppose.
They weren’t up to much, no.
They were up to something, yes.
Hypothetical. Dubious.
Uncommemorated.
Never extracted from air,
fire, water, or earth.
Not contained within a stone
or drop of rain.
Not suitable for straight-faced use
as a story’s moral.
A meteor fell.
Not a meteor.
A volcano exploded.
Not a volcano.
Someone summoned something.
Nothing was called.
On this more-or-less Atlantis.
I’m Working on the World
I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.
Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there,”
when traded with a fish,
makes both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.
The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoots of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they’re sleeping in the park!
Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.
Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.
When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.
Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.
SALT
1962
The Monkey
Evicted from the Garden long before
the humans: he had such infectious eyes
that just one glance around old Paradise
made even angels’ hearts feel sad and sore,
emotions hitherto unknown to them.
Without a chance to say “I disagree,”
he had to launch his earthly pedigree.
Today, still nimble, he retains his charme
with a primeval “e” after the “m.”
Worshiped in Egypt, pleiades of fleas
spangling his sacred and silvery mane,
he’d sit and listen in archsilent peace:
What do you want? A life that never ends?
He’d turn his ruddy rump as if to say
such life he neither bans nor recommends.
In Europe they deprived him of his soul
but they forgot to take his hands away;
there was a painter-monk who dared portray
a saint with palms so thin, they could be simian.
The holy woman prayed for heaven’s favor
as if she waited for a nut to fall.
Warm as a newborn, with an old man’s tremor,
imported to kings’ courts across the seas,
he whined while swinging on his golden chain,
dressed in the garish coat of a marquis.
Prophet of doom. The court is laughing? Please.
Considered edible in China, he makes boiled
or roasted faces when laid upon a salver.
Ironic as a gem set in sham gold.
His brain is famous for its subtle flavor,
though it’s no good for trickier endeavors,
for instance, thinking up gunpowder.
In fables, lonely, not sure what to do,
he fills up mirrors with his indiscreet
self-mockery (a lesson for us, too);
the poor relation, who knows all about us,
though we don’t greet each other when we meet.
Lesson
Subject King Alexander predicate cuts direct
This had never predicate entered anyone’s object mind before.
None of a hundred philosophers could disentangle this knot.
No wonder each now shrinks in some secluded spot.
The soldiers, loud and with great glee,
grab each one by his trembling gray goatee
and predicate drag object him out.
Enough’s enough. The king calls for his horse,
adjusts his crested helm and sallies forth.
And in his wake, with trumpets, drums, and flutes,
his subject army made of little knots
predicate marches off to indirect object war.
Museum
Here are plates but no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.
Here’s a fan—where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords—where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.
Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on the Exhibit Number . . .
Eight. Metals, clay, and feathers celebrate
their sil
ent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.
The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.
As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!
A Moment in Troy
Little girls—
skinny, resigned
to freckles that won’t go away,
not turning any heads
as they walk across the eyelids of the world,
looking just like Mom or Dad,
and sincerely horrified by it—
in the middle of dinner,
in the middle of a book,
while studying the mirror,
may suddenly be taken off to Troy.
In the grand boudoir of a wink
they all turn into beautiful Helens.
They ascend the royal staircase
in the rustling of silk and admiration.
They feel light. They all know
that beauty equals rest,
that lips mold the speech’s meaning,
and gestures sculpt themselves
in inspired nonchalance.
Their small faces
worth dismissing envoys for
extend proudly on necks
that merit countless sieges.
Those tall, dark movie stars,
their girlfriends’ older brothers,
the teacher from art class,
alas, they must all be slain.
Little girls
observe disaster
from a tower of smiles.
Little girls
wring their hands
in intoxicating mock despair.
Little girls
against a backdrop of destruction,
with flaming towns for tiaras,
in earrings of pandemic lamentation.
Pale and tearless.
Triumphant. Sated with the view.
moment of return.
Little girls
returning.
Shadow
My shadow is a fool whose feelings
are often hurt by his routine
of rising up behind his queen
to bump his silly head on ceilings.
His is a world of two dimensions,
that’s true, but flat jokes still can smart;
he longs to flaunt my court’s conventions
and drop a role he knows by heart.
The queen leans out above the sill,
the jester tumbles out for real:
thus they divide their actions; still,
it’s not a fifty-fifty deal.
My jester took on nothing less
than royal gestures’ shamelessness,
the things that I’m too weak to bear—
the cloak, crown, scepter, and the rest.
I’ll stay serene, won’t feel a thing,
yes, I will turn my head away
after I say goodbye, my king,
at railway station N., someday.
My king, it is the fool who’ll lie
across the tracks; the fool, not I.
The Rest
Her mad songs over, Ophelia darts out,
anxious to check offstage whether her dress is
still not too crumpled, whether her blond tresses
frame her face as they should.
Since real life’s laws
require facts, she, Polonius’s true
daughter, carefully washes black despair
out of her eyebrows, and is not above
counting the leaves she’s combed out of her hair.
Oh, may Denmark forgive you, my dear, and me too:
I’ll die with wings, I’ll live on with practical claws.
Non omnis moriar of love.
Clochard
In Paris, on a day that stayed morning until dusk,
in a Paris like—
in a Paris which—
(save me, sacred folly of description!)
in a garden by a stone cathedral
(not built, no, rather
played upon a lute)
a clochard, a lay monk, a naysayer,
sleeps sprawled like a knight in effigy.
If he ever owned anything, he has lost it,
and having lost it doesn’t want it back.
He’s still owed soldier’s pay for the conquest of Gaul—
but he got over that, it doesn’t matter.
And they never paid him in the fifteenth century
for posing as the thief on Christ’s left hand—
he has forgotten all about it, he’s not waiting.
He earns his red wine
by trimming the neighborhood dogs.
He sleeps with the air of an inventor of dreams,
his thick beard swarming toward the sun.
The gray chimeras (to wit, bulldogryphons,
hellephants, hippopotoads, croakodilloes, rhinocerberuses,
behemammoths, and demonopods,
that omnibestial Gothic allegro vivace)
unpetrify
and examine him with a curiosity
they never turn on me or you,
prudent Peter,
zealous Michael,
enterprising Eve,
Barbara, Clare.