Collected Earlier Poems (8 page)

               Similarly the Turks, but know

    Nothing of the more delicate thin sweat

Of plants, breathing their scented oxygen upon

Brooklyn’s botanical gardens, roofed with glass and run

    So to the pleasure of each leafy pet,

               Manured, addressed in Latin, so

               To its thermostatic happiness—

    Spreading its green and innocence to the ground

Where pipes, like Satan masquerading as the snake,

Coil and uncoil their frightful liquid length, and make

    Gurglings of love mixed with a rumbling sound

               Of sharp intestinal distress—

               So to its pleasure, as I said,

    That each particular vegetable may thrive,

Early and late, as in the lot first given Man,

Sans interruption, as when Universal Pan

    Led on the Eternal Spring. The spears of chive,

               The sensitive plant, showing its dread,

               
The Mexican flytrap, that can knit

    Its quilled jaws pitilessly, and would hurt

A fly with pleasure, leading Riley’s life in bed

Of peat moss and of chemicals, and is thoughtfully fed

    Flies for the entrée, flies for the dessert,

               Fruit flies for fruit, and all of it

               Administered as by a wife—

    Lilith our lady, patroness of plants,

Who sings,
Lullay myn lykyng, myn owyn dere derlyng
,

Madrigals nightly to the spiny stalk in sterling

    Whole notes of admiration and romance—

               This, then, is what is called The Life.

               And we, like disinherited heirs,

    Old Adams, can inspect the void estate

At visiting hours: the unconditional garden spot,

The effortless innocence preserved, for God knows what,

    And think, as we depart by the toll gate:

               No one has lived here these five thousand years.

               Our world is turned on points, is whirled

    On wheels, Tibetan prayer wheels, French verb wheels,

The toothy wheels of progress, the terrible torque

Insisting, and in the sky, even above New York

    Rotate the marvelous four-fangled seals

               Ezekiel saw. The mother-of-pearled

               Home of the bachelor oyster lies

    Fondled in fluent shifts of bile and lime

As sunlight strikes the water, and it is of our world,

And will appear to us sometime where the finger is curled

    Between the frets upon a mandolin,

               Fancy cigar boxes, and eyes

               
Of ceremonial masks; and all

    The places where Kilroy inscribed his name,

For instance, the ladies’ rest room in the Gare du Nord,

The iron rump of Buddha, whose hallowed, hollowed core

    Admitted tourists once but all the same

               Housed a machine gun, and let fall

               A killing fire from its eyes

    During the war; and Polyphemus hurled

Tremendous rocks that stand today off Sicily’s coast

Signed with the famous scrawl of our most travelled ghost;

    And all these various things are of our world.

               But what’s become of Paradise?

               Ah, it is lodged in glass, survives

    In Brooklyn, like a throwback, out of style,

Like an incomprehensible veteran of the Grand

Army of the Republic in the reviewing stand

    Who sees young men in a mud-colored file

               March to the summit of their lives,

               For glory, for their country, with the flag

    Joining divergent stars of North and South

In one blue field of heaven, till they fall in blood

And are returned at last unto their native mud—

    The eyes weighed down with stones, the sometimes mouth

               Helpless to masticate or gag

               Its old inheritance of earth.

    In the sweat of thy face shalt thou manage, said the Lord.

And we, old Adams, stare through the glass panes and wince,

Fearing to see the ancestral apple, pear, or quince,

    The delicacy of knowledge, the fleshed Word,

               The globe of wisdom that was worth

               
Our lives, or so our parents thought,

    And turn away to strengthen our poor breath

And body, keep the flesh rosy with hopeful dreams,

Peach-colored, practical, to decorate the bones, with schemes

    Of life insurance, Ice-Cream-After-Death,

               Hormone injections, against the
mort
’

               
Saison
, largely to babble praise

    Of Simeon Pyrites, patron saint

Of our Fools’ Paradise, whose glittering effigy

Shines in God’s normal sunlight till the blind men see

    Visions as permanent as artists paint:

               The body’s firm, nothing decays

               Upon the heirloom set of bones

    In their gavotte. Yet we look through the glass

Where green lies ageless under snow-stacked roofs in steam-

Fitted apartments, and reflect how bud and stem

    Are wholly flesh, and the immaculate grass

               Does without buttressing of bones.

               In open field or public bed

    With ultraviolet help, man hopes to learn

The leafy secret, pay his most outstanding debt

To God in the salt and honesty of his sweat,

    And in his streaming face manly to earn

               His daily and all-nourishing bread.

It was a miniature country once

To my imagination; Home of the Short,

And also the academy of stunts

               Where acrobats are taught

    The famous secrets of the trade:

    To cycle in the big parade

While spinning plates upon their parasols,

Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,

               Or tossing seven balls

In Most Celestial Order round and round.

A child’s quick sense of the ingenious stamped

All their invention: toys I used to get

At Christmastime, or the peculiar, cramped

               Look of their alphabet.

    Fragile and easily destroyed,

    Those little boats of celluloid

Driven by camphor round the bathroom sink,

And delicate the folded paper prize

               Which, dropped into a drink

Of water, grew up right before your eyes.

Now when we reached them it was with a sense

Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains

Like mating weasels; our Intelligence

               Said: The Black Dragon reigns

    Secretly under yellow skin,

    Deeper than dyes of atabrine

And deadlier. The War Department said:

Remember you are Americans; forsake

               The wounded and the dead

At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.

And yet they bowed us in with ceremony,

Told us what brands of Sake were the best,

Explained their agriculture in a phony

               Dialect of the West,

    Meant vaguely to be understood

    As a shy sign of brotherhood

In the old human bondage to the facts

Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,

               Signaling tiny pacts

With their antennae, they would wave their hands.

At last we came to see them not as glib

Walkers of tightropes, worshipers of carp,

Nor yet a species out of Adam’s rib

               Meant to preserve its warp

    In Cain’s own image. They had learned

    That their tough eye-born goddess burned

Adoring fingers. They were very poor.

The holy mountain was not moved to speak.

               Wind at the paper door

Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.

Human endeavor clumsily betrays

Humanity. Their excrement served in this;

For, planting rice in water, they would raise

               Schistosomiasis

    Japonica, that enters through

    The pores into the avenue

And orbit of the blood, where it may foil

The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.

               This fruit of their nightsoil

Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.

Now the quaint early image of Japan

That was so charming to me as a child

Seems like a bright design upon a fan,

               Of water rushing wild

    On rocks that can be folded up,

    A river which the wrist can stop

With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks

And silk of what had been a fan before,

               And like such winning tricks,

It shall be buried in excelsior.

My demoiselle, the cats are in the street,

Making a shrill cantata to their kind,

Accomplishing their furry, vigorous feat,

And I observe you shiver at it. You

Would rather have their little guts preserved

In the sweet excellence of a string quartet.

But, speaking for myself, I do not mind

This boisterous endeavor; it can do

Miracles for a lady who’s unnerved

By the rude leanings of a family pet.

What Argus could not see was not worth seeing.

The fishy slime of his one hundred eyes

Shimmered all over his entire being

To lubricate his vision. A Voyeur

Of the first order, he would hardly blench

At the fine calculations of your dress.

Doubtless the moonlight or the liquor lies

Somewhere beneath this visible
bonheur
,

Yet I would freely translate from the French

The labials of such fleet happiness.

“If youth were all, our plush minority

Would lack no instrument to trick it out;

All cloth would emphasize it; not a bee

Could lecture us in offices of bliss.

Then all the appetites, arranged in rows,

Would dance cotillions absolute as ice

In high decorum rather than in rout.”

He answered her, “Youth wants no emphasis,

But in extravagance of nature shows

A rigor more demanding than precise.”

“Pride is an illness rising out of pain,”

Said the ensnaffled Fiend who would not wince.

Does the neat corollary then obtain,

Humility comes burgeoning from pleasure?

Ah, masters, such a calculus is foul,

Of no more substance than a wasting cloud.

I cannot frame a logic to convince

Your honors of the urgent lawless measure

Of love, the which is neither fish nor fowl.

The meekest rise to tumble with the proud.

Goliath lies upon his back in Hell.

Out of his nostrils march a race of men,

Each with a little spear of hair; they yell,

“Attack the goat! O let us smite the goat!”

(An early German vision.) They are decked

With horns and beards and trappings of the brute

Capricorn, who remarked their origin.

Love, like a feather in a Roman throat,

Returned their suppers. They could not connect

Sentiment with a craving so acute.

Those paragraphs most likely to arouse

Pear-shaped nuances to an ovoid brain,

Upstanding nipples under a sheer blouse,

Wink from the bold original, and keep

Their wicked parlance to confound the lewd

American, deftly obscured from sin

By the Fig-Leaf Edition of Montaigne.

But “summer nights were not devised for sleep,”

And who can cipher out, however shrewd,

The Man-in-the-Moon’s microcephalic grin?

These public dances and other exercises of the young maidens naked, in the sight of the young men, were moreover incentives to marriage; and to use Plato’s expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attraction of love as a geometrical conclusion is drawn from the premises.
    
PLUTARCH

Although I do not not know your name, although

It was a silly dance you did with apple flowers

Bunched in your hands after the racing games,

My friends and I have spent these several hours

Watching. Although I do not know your name,

I saw the sun dress half of you with shadow, and I saw

The wind water your eyes as though with tears

Until they flashed like newly-pointed spears.

This afternoon there was a giant daw

Turning above us—though I put no trust

In all these flying omens, being just

A plain man and a warrior, like my friends—

Yet I am mastered by uncommon force

And made to think of you, although it blends

Not with my humor, or the businesses

Of soldiering. I have seen a horse

Moving with more economy, and know

Armor is surer than a girl’s promises.

But it is a compelling kind of law

Puts your design before me, even though

I put no faith or fancy in that daw

Turning above us. There’s some rigor here,

More than in nature’s daily masterpiece

That brings for us, with absolute and clear

Insistence, worms from their midnight soil,

Ungodly honk and trumpeting of geese

In the early morning, and at last the toil

Of soldiering. This is a simple code,

Far simpler than Lycurgus has set down.

The sheep come out of the hills, the sheep come down

When it rains, or gather under a tree,

And in the damp they stink most heartily.

Yet the hills are not so tough but they will yield

Brass for the kitchen, and the soft wet hair

Of the sheep will occupy some fingers. In the bottom fields

The herd’s deposit shall assist the spring

Out of the earth and up into the air.

No. There is not a more unbending thing

In nature. It is an order that shall find

You out. There’s not a season or a bird can bring

You to my senses or so harness me

To my intention. Let the Helots mind

The barley fields, lest they should see a daw

Turning to perch on some adjacent tree

And fancy it their sovereign ruler. No.

However we are governed, it shall draw

Both of us to its own conclusion, though

I do not even know you by your name.