Collected Earlier Poems (20 page)

The hatred I reserve for thee

Surpasses the malignity

    Of camel and of bear,

Old witch, unseemly thaumaturge,

Whipped by the Public Hangman’s scourge

    The length of the town square.

Luring about you, like a brood,

The vulgar, curious and lewd,

    You shamelessly lay bare

Your haunches to the sight of men,

Your naked shoulder, abdomen

    Emblazoned with blood-smear.

And yet that punishment is slight

Compared to what is yours by right;

    Just Heaven must not bestow

Its mercy on so foul a thing

But rather by its whirlwind bring

    Such proud excesses low.

Still wracked by the brute overthrow

The Titans suffered long ago,

    A brooding Mother Earth,

To spite the Gods, in her old age

Shall, in an ecstasy of rage,

    At last bring you to birth.

You know the worth and power of both

Rare herbals and concocted broth

    Brought from the tropic zone;

You know the very month and hour

To pluck the lust-inducing flower

    That makes a woman groan.

There’s not, among the envenomed plants

On mountain or in valley haunts,

    One that your eyes have missed

And has not yielded up its ground

To your bright sickle-blade, and crowned

    Your formidable quest.

When, like a lunatic, all bare,

The moon lets down its mystic hair

    Of cold, enraging light,

You wrap your features in the hide

Of animals, and smoothly glide

    Abroad into the night.

Your least breath ravishes the blood

Of all dogs in the neighborhood

    And sets them on to bark,

Makes rivers flow uphill, reversed,

And baying wolves observe your cursed

    Hegira through the dark.

Chatelaine of deserted spots,

Of mouldered cemetery plots

    Where you are most at home,

Muttering diabolic runes,

You disinter the troubled bones

    From their sequestered tomb.

To grieve a mother more you don

The aspect of her only son

    Who has just met his death,

And you assume the very shape

That makes an aged widow gape

    And robs her of her breath.

You make the spell-bound moon appear

To march through the all-silvered air,

    And cast through midnight’s hush

Such tincture on a pallid face

A thousand-cymbaled crashing brass

    Could not restore its flush.

The terror of us all, we fear

Your hateful practice, and we bar

    Your presence from our door,

Afraid you will inflict a pox

Upon our persons, herds and flocks,

    With juice of hellebore.

Often I’ve watched as you espy

From far away with baleful eye

    Some shepherd on his heights;

Soon after, victim of your arts,

The man is dead, his fleshly parts

    A nest of parasites.

And yet like vile Medea, you

Could sometimes prove life-giving, too;

    You know what secret thing

Gave Aeson back his sapling youth,

Yet by your spells you have in truth

    Deprived me of my spring.

O Gods, if pity dwells on high,

May her requital be to die,

    And may her last repose,

Unblessed by burial, serve as feast

To every gross and shameful beast,

    To jackals and to crows.

(
FROM PIERRE DE RONSARD
)

Cold, blustery cider weather, the flat fields

Bleached pale as straw, the leaves, such as remain,

Pumpkin or leather-brown. These are the wilds

Of loneliness, huge, vacant, sour and plain.

The sky is hourless dusk, portending rain.

Or perhaps snow. This narrow footpath edges

A small stand of scrub pine, warped as with pain,

And baneberry lofts its little poisoned pledges.

The footpath ends in a dried waterhole,

Plastered with black like old tar-paper siding.

The fearfullest desolations of the soul

Image themselves as local and abiding.

Even if I should get away from here

My trouser legs are stuck with burrs and seeds,

Grappled and spiked reminders of my fear,

Standing alone among the beggarweeds.

Noble executors of the munificent testament

Of the late John Simon Guggenheim, distinguished bunch

Of benefactors, there are certain kinds of men

Who set their hearts on being bartenders,

For whom a life upon duck-boards, among fifths,

Tapped kegs and lemon twists, crowded with lushes

Who can master neither their bladders nor consonants,

Is the only life, greatly to be desired.

There’s the man who yearns for the White House, there to compose

Rhythmical lists of enemies, while someone else

Wants to be known to the
Tour d’Argent’s
head waiter.

As the Sibyl of Cumae said : It takes all kinds.

Nothing could bribe your Timon, your charter member

Of the Fraternal Order of Grizzly Bears to love

His fellow, whereas it’s just the opposite

With interior decorators; that’s what makes horse races.

One man may have a sharp nose for tax shelters,

Screwing the IRS with mirth and profit;

Another devote himself to his shell collection,

Deaf to his offspring, indifferent to the feast

With which his wife hopes to attract his notice.

Some at the Health Club sweating under bar bells

Labor away like grunting troglodytes,

Smelly and thick and inarticulate,

Their brains squeezed out through their pores by sheer exertion.

As for me, the prize for poets, the simple gift

For amphybrachs strewn by a kind Euterpe,

With perhaps a laurel crown of the evergreen

Imperishable of your fine endowment

Would supply my modest wants, who dream of nothing

But a pad on Eighth Street and your approbation.

(
FREELY FROM HORACE
)

Here, god-like, in a 707,

As on an air-conditioned cloud,

One knows the frailties of the proud

And comprehends the Fall from Heaven.

The world, its highways, trees and ports,

Looks much as if it were designed

With nifty model trains in mind

By salesmen at F. A. O. Schwarz.

Such the enchantment distance lends.

The bridges, matchstick and minute,

Seem faultless, intricate and cute,

Contrived for slight, aesthetic ends.

No wonder the camaraderie

Of mission-happy Air Force boys

Above so vast a spread of toys,

Cruising the skies, lighthearted, free,

Or the engaging roguishness

With which a youthful bombardier

Unloads his eggs on what appear

The perfect patchwork squares of chess;

Nor that the brass hat general staff,

Tailored and polished to a fault,

Favor an undeclared assault

On what an aerial photograph

Shows as an unstrung ball of twine,

Or that the President insist

A nation colored amethyst

Should bow to his supreme design.

But in the toy store, right up close,

Chipped paint and mucilage represent

The wounded, orphaned, indigent,

The dying and the comatose.

Sleep-walking vapor, like a visitant ghost,

               Hovers above a lake

Of Tennysonian calm just before dawn.

Inverted trees and boulders waver and coast

In polished darkness. Glints of silver break

Among the liquid leafage, and then are gone.

Everything’s doused and diamonded with wet.

               A cobweb, woven taut

On bending stanchion frames of tentpole grass,

Sags like a trampoline or firemen’s net

With all the glitter and riches it has caught,

Each drop a paperweight of Steuben glass.

No birdsong yet, no cricket, nor does the trout

               Explode in water-scrolls

For a skimming fly. All that is yet to come.

Things are as still and motionless throughout

The universe as ancient Chinese bowls,

And nature is magnificently dumb.

Why does this so much stir me, like a code

               Or muffled intimation

Of purposes and preordained events?

It knows me, and I recognize its mode

Of cautionary, spring-tight hesitation,

This silence so impacted and intense.

As in a water-surface I behold

               The first, soft, peach decree

Of light, its pale, inaudible commands.

I stand beneath a pine-tree in the cold,

Just before dawn, somewhere in Germany,

A cold, wet, Garand rifle in my hands.

The leafless trees are feathery,

    A foxed, Victorian lace,

Against a sky of milk-glass blue,

    Blank, washed-out, commonplace.

Between them and my window

    Huge helices of snow

Perform their savage, churning rites

    At seventeen below.

The obscurity resembles

    A silken Chinese mist

Wherein through calligraphic daubs

    Of artistry persist

Pocked and volcanic gorges,

    Clenched and arthritic pines,

Faint, coral-tinted herons’ legs

    Splashing among the tines

Of waving, tasselled marshgrass,

    Deep pools aflash with sharp,

Shingled and burnished armor-plate

    Of sacred, child-eyed carp.

This dimness is dynastic,

    An ashen T’ang of age

Or blur that grudgingly reveals

    A ghostly equipage,

Ancestral deputations

    Wound in the whited air,

To whom some sentry flings a slight,

    Prescriptive, “Who goes there?”

Are these the apparitions

    Of enemies or friends?

Loved ones from whom I once withheld

    Kindnesses or amends

On preterite occasions

    Now lost beyond repeal?

Or the old childhood torturers

    Of undiminished zeal,

Adults who ridiculed me,

    Schoolmates who broke my nose,

Risen from black, unconscious depths

    Of REM repose?

Who comes here seeking justice,

    Or in its high despite,

Bent on some hopeless interview

    On wrongs nothing can right?

Those throngs disdain to answer,

    Though numberless as flakes;

Mine is the task to find out words

    For their memorial sakes

Who press in dense approaches,

    Blue numeral tattoos

Writ crosswise on their arteries,

    The burning, voiceless Jews.

at a Father’s Day picnic

A maple bough of web-foot, golden greens,

               Found by an angled shaft

Of late sunlight, disposed within that shed

Radiance, with brilliant, hoisted baldachins,

Pup tents and canopies by some underdraft

Flung up to scattered perches overhead,

These daubs of sourball lime, at floating rest,

               Present to the loose wattage

Of heaven their limelit flukes, an artifice

Of archipelagian Islands of the Blessed,

And in all innocence pursue their cottage

Industry of photosynthesis.

Yet only for twenty minutes or so today,

               On a summer afternoon,

Does the splendid lancet reach to them, or sink

To these dim bottoms, making its chancy way,

As through the barrier reef of some lagoon

In sea-green darkness, by a wavering chink,

Down, neatly probing like an accurate paw

               Or a notched and beveled key,

Through the huge cave-roof of giant oak and pine.

And the heart goes numb in a tide of fear and awe

For those we cherish, their hopes, their frailty,

Their shadowy fate’s unfathomable design.

for Joe and U. T. Summers

Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class

Of travelers, nor that rarified tax bracket,

These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts

Under our eaves, nesting in withered grass,

Wormless but hopeful, and now their voice enacts

Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.

Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray

Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.

Salt of the earth, they are; the common clay;

Meek
émigrés
come over on the Ark

In steerage from the Old Country of the Drowned

To settle down along Long Island Sound,

Flatbush, Weehawken, our brownstone tenements,

Wherever the local idiom is
Cheep
.

Savers of string, meticulous and mild,

They are given to nervous flight, the troubled sleep

Of those who remember terrible events,

The wide-eyed, anxious haste of the exiled.