Read Collected Earlier Poems Online
Authors: Anthony Hecht
Evening is clogged with gnats as the light fails,
And branches bloom with gold and copper screams
Of birds with figured and sought-after tails
To plume a lady’s gear; the motet wails
Through Africa upon dissimilar themes.
A little snuffbox whereon Daphnis sings
In pale enamels, touching love’s defeat,
Calls up the color of her underthings
And plays upon the taut memorial strings,
Trailing her laces down into this heat.
One day he found, topped with a smutty grin,
The small corpse of a monkey, partly eaten.
Force of the sun had split the bluish skin,
Which, by their questioning and entering in,
A swarm of bees had been concerned to sweeten.
He could distill no essence out of this.
That yellow majesty and molten light
Should bless this carcass with a sticky kiss
Argued a brute and filthy emphasis.
The half-moons of the fingernails were white,
And where the nostrils opened on the skies,
Issuing to the sinus, where the ant
Crawled swiftly down to undermine the eyes
Of cloudy aspic, nothing could disguise
How terribly the thing looked like Philinte.
Will-o’-the-wisp, on the scum-laden water,
Burns in the night, a gaseous deceiver,
In the pale shade of France’s foremost daughter.
Heat gives his thinking cavity no quarter,
For he is burning with the monkey’s fever.
Before the bees have diagrammed their comb
Within the skull, before summer has cracked
The back of Daphnis, naked, polychrome,
Versailles shall see the tempered exile home,
Peruked and stately for the final act.
For
HELEN
of whom I have
Receiv’d a second life
…
Why, let the stricken deer go weep
,
The hart ungallèd play
…
Think how some excellent, lean torso hugs
The brink of weight and speed,
Coasting the margins of those rival tugs
Down the thin path of friction,
The athlete’s dancing vectors, the spirit’s need,
And muscle’s cleanly diction,
Clean as a Calder, whose interlacing ribs
Depend on one another,
Or a keen heeling of tackle, fluttering jibs
And slotted centerboards,
A fleet of breasting gulls riding the smother
And puzzle of heaven’s wards.
Instinct with joy, a young Italian banks
Smoothly around the base
Of Trajan’s column, feeling between his flanks
That cool, efficient beast,
His Vespa, at one with him in a centaur’s race,
Fresh from a Lapith feast,
And his Lapith girl behind him. Both of them lean
With easy nonchalance
Over samphire-tufted cliffs which, though unseen,
Are known, as the body knows
New risks and tilts, terrors and loves and wants,
Deeply inside its clothes.
She grips the animal-shouldered naked skin
Of his fitted leather jacket,
Letting a wake of hair float out the spin
And dazzled rinse of air,
Yet for all their headlong lurch and flatulent racket
They seem to loiter there,
Forever aslant in their moment and the mind’s eye.
Meanwhile, around the column
There also turn, and turn eternally,
Two thousand raw recruits
And scarred veterans coiling the stone in solemn
Military pursuits,
The heft and grit of the emperors’ Dacian Wars
That lasted fifteen years.
All of that youth and purpose is, of course,
No more than so much dust.
And even Trajan, of his imperial peers
Accounted “the most just,”
Honored by Dante, by Gregory the Great
Saved from eternal Hell,
Swirls in the motes kicked up by the cough and spate
Of the Vespa’s blue exhaust,
And a voice whispers inwardly, “My soul,
It is the cost, the cost,”
Like some unhinged Othello, who’s just found out
That justice is no more,
While Cassio, Desdemona, Iago shout
Like true Venetians all,
“Go screw yourself; all’s fair in love and war!”
And the bright standards fall.
Better they should not hear that whispered phrase,
The young Italian couple;
Surely the mind in all its brave assays
Must put much thinking by,
To be, as Yeats would have it, free and supple
As a long-legged fly.
Look at their slender purchase, how they list
Like a blown clipper, brought
To the lively edge of peril, to the kissed
Lip, the victor’s crown,
The prize of life. Yet one unbodied thought
Could topple them, bring down
The whole shebang. And why should they take thought
Of all that ancient pain,
The Danube winters, the nameless young who fought,
The blood’s uncertain lease?
Or remember that that fifteen-year campaign
Won seven years of peace?
for Thomas Cornell
Peace, tawny slave, half me and half thy dam!
Did not thy hue bewray whose brat thou art
,
…
Villain, thou mightst have been an emperor
.
Summer. A hot, moth-populated night.
Yesterday’s maples in the village park
Are boxed away into the vaults of dark,
To be returned tomorrow, like our flag,
Which was brought down from its post office height
At sunset, folded, and dumped in a mailbag.
Wisdom, our Roman matron, perched on her throne
In front of the library, the Civil War
Memorial (History and Hope) no more
Are braced, trustworthy figures. Some witching skill
Softly dismantled them, stone by heavy stone,
And the small town, like Bethlehem, lies still.
And it is still at the all-night service station,
Where Andy Warhol’s primary colors shine
In simple commercial glory, the Esso sign
Revolving like a funland lighthouse, where
An eighteen-year-old black boy clocks the nation,
Reading a comic book in a busted chair.
Our solitary guardian of the law
Of diminishing returns? The President,
Addressing the first contingent of draftees sent
To Viet Nam, was brief: “Life is not fair,”
He said, and was right, of course. Everyone saw
What happened to him in Dallas. We were there,
We suffered, we were Whitman. And now the boy
Daydreams about the White House, the rising shares
Of Standard Oil, the whited sepulchres.
But what, after all, has he to complain about,
This expendable St. Michael we employ
To stay awake and keep the darkness out?
The lichens, like a gorgeous, soft disease
In rust and gold rosette
Emboss the bouldered wall, and creepers seize
In their cup-footed fret,
Ravelled and bare, such purchase as affords.
The sap-tide slides to ebb,
And leafstems, like the drumsticks of small birds,
Lie snagged in a spiderweb.
Down at the stonework base, among the stump-
Fungus and feather moss,
Dead leaves are sunken in a shallow sump
Of energy and loss,
Enriched now with the colors of old coins
And brilliance of wet leather.
An earthen tea distills at the roots-groins
Into the smoky weather
A deep, familiar essence of the year:
A sweet fetor, a ghost
Of foison, gently welcoming us near
To humus, mulch, compost.
The last mosquitoes lazily hum and play
Above the yeasting earth
A feeble
Gloria
to this cool decay
Or casual dirge of birth.
for Cyrus Hoy
The Discus Thrower’s marble heave,
Captured in mid-career,
That polished poise, that Parian arm
Sleeved only in the air,
Vesalian musculature, white
As the mid-winter moon—
This, and the clumsy snapshot of
An infantry platoon,
Those grubby and indifferent men,
Lounging in bivouac,
Their rifles aimless in their laps,
Stop history in its tracks.
We who are all aswim in time,
We, “the inconstant ones,”
How can such fixture speak to us?
The chisel and the lens
Deal in a taxidermy
Of our arrested flights,
And by their brute translation we
Turn into Benthamites.
Those soldiers, like some senior class,
Were they prepared to dye
In silver nitrate images
Behind the camera’s eye?
It needs a Faust to animate
The wan homunculus,
Construe the stark, unchanging text,
Winkle the likes of us
Out of a bleak geology
That art has put to rest,
And by a sacred discipline
Give breath back to the past.
How, for example, shall I read
The expression on my face
Among that company of men
In that unlikely place?
Easy enough to claim, in the dawn of hindsight,
That Mozart’s music perfectly enacts
Pastries and powdered wigs, an architecture
Of white and gold rosettes, balanced parterres.
More difficult to know how the spirit learns
Its scales, or the exact dimensions of fear:
The nameless man dressed head-to-foot in black,
Come to commission a requiem in a hurry.
In the diatonic house there are many mansions:
A hunting lodge in the mountains, a peaceable cloister,
A first-class restaurant near the railroad yards,
But also a seedy alms-house, the granite prisons
And oubliettes of the soul. Just how such truth
Gets itself stated in pralltrillers and mordents
Not everyone can say. But the ’cellist,
Leaning over his labors, his eyes closed,
Is engaged in that study, blocking out, for the moment,
Audience, hall, and a great part of himself
In what, not wrongly, might be called research,
Or the most private kind of honesty.
We begin with the supreme donnée, the world,
Upon which every text is commentary,
And yet they play each other, the oak-leaf cured
In sodden ditches of autumn darkly confirms
Our words; and by the frailest trifles
(A doubt, a whisper, and a handkerchief)
Venetian pearl and onyx are cast away.
It is, in the end, the solitary scholar
Who returns us to the freshness of the text,
Which returns to us the freshness of the world
In which we find ourselves, like replicas,
Dazzled by glittering dawns, upon a stage.
Pentelic balconies give on the east;
The clouds are scrolled, bellied in apricot,
Adrift in pools of Scandinavian blue.
Light crisps the terraces of dolomite.
Enter The Prologue, who at once declares,
“We begin with the supreme donnée, the word.”
It is rather strange to be speaking, but I know you are there
Wanting to know, as if it were worth knowing.
Nor is it important that I died in combat
In a good cause or an indifferent one.
Such things, it may surprise you, are not regarded.
Something too much of this.
You are bound to be disappointed,
Wanting to know, are there any trees?
It is all different from what you suppose,
And the darkness is not darkness exactly,
But patience, silence, withdrawal, the sad knowledge
That it was almost impossible not to hurt anyone
Whether by action or inaction.
At the beginning of course there was a sense of loss,
Not of one’s own life, but of what seemed
The easy, desirable lives one might have led.
Fame or wealth are hard to achieve,
And goodness even harder;
But the cost of all of them is a familiar deformity
Such as everyone suffers from:
An allergy to certain foods, nausea at the sight of blood,
A slight impediment of speech, shame at one’s own body,
A fear of heights or claustrophobia.
What you learn has nothing whatever to do with joy,
Nor with sadness, either. You are mostly silent.
You come to a gentle indifference about being thought
Either a fool or someone with valuable secrets.
It may be that the ultimate wisdom
Lies in saying nothing.
I think I may already have said too much.