Collected Earlier Poems (21 page)

Like all the poor, their safety lies in numbers

And hardihood and anonymity

In a world of dripping browns and duns and umbers.

They have inherited the lower sky,

Their Lake of Constants, their blue modality

That they are borne upon and battered by.

Those little shin-bones, hollow at the core,

Emaciate finger-joints, those fleshless wrists,

Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,

As though the harvests of earth had never been,

Where have we seen such frailty before?

In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.

Yet here they are, these chipper stratoliners,

Unsullen, unresentful, full of the grace

Of cheerfulness, who seem to greet all comers

With the wild confidence of Forty-Niners,

And, to the lively honor of their race,

Rude canticles of “Summers, Summers, Summers.”

What well-heeled knuckle-head, straight from the unisex

Hairstylist and bathed in
Russian Leather
,

Dallies with you these late summer days, Pyrrha,

In your expensive sublet? For whom do you

Slip into something simple by, say, Gucci?

The more fool he who has mapped out for himself

The saline latitudes of incontinent grief.

Dazzled though he be, poor dope, by the golden looks

Your locks fetched up out of a bottle of
Clairol
,

He will know that the wind changes, the smooth sailing

Is done for, when the breakers wallop him broadside,

When he’s rudderless, dismasted, thoroughly swamped

In that mindless rip-tide that got the best of me

Once, when I ventured on your deeps, Piranha.

(
FREELY FROM HORACE
)

for Harry and Kathleen Ford

. .
where’s that palace whereinto foul things
Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law days, and in session sit
With meditations lawful?

Othello: III, iii, 136–41

We cannot all have our gardens now, nor our
pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide
.

RUSKIN
:
The Stones of Venice
,
BK. I, CH. XXX

    What’s merciful is not knowing where you are,

What time it is, even your name or age,

But merely a clean coolness at the temple—

That, says the spirit softly, is enough

For the mind to adventure on its half-hidden path

Like starlight interrupted by dense trees

Journeying backwards on a winter trip

While you are going, as you fancy, forward,

And the stars are keeping pace with everything.

Where to begin? With the white, wrinkled membrane,

The disgusting skin that gathers on hot milk?

Or narrow slabs of jasper light at sundown

That fit themselves softly around the legs

Of chairs, and entertain a drift of motes,

A tide of sadness, a failing, a dying fall?

Or the glass jar, like a wet cell battery,

Full of electric coils and boiling resins,

Its tin Pinocchio nose with one small nostril,

And both of us under a tent of towels

Like child conspirators, the tin nose breathing

Health at me steadily, like the insufflation of God?

Yes, but also the sight, on a gray morning,

Beneath the crossbar of an iron railing

Painted a glossy black, of six waterdrops

Slung in suspension, sucking into themselves,

As if it were some morbid nourishment,

The sagging blackness of the rail itself,

But edged with brilliant fingernails of chrome

In which the world was wonderfully disfigured

Like faces seen in spoons, like mirrorings

In the fine spawn, the roe of air bubbles,

That tiny silver wampum along the stems,

Yellowed and magnified, of aging flowers

Caught in the lens of stale water and glass

In the upstairs room when somebody had died.

Just like the beads they sprinkled over cookies

At Christmas. Or perhaps those secret faces

Known to no one but me, slyly revealed

In repetitions of the wallpaper,

My tight network of agents in the field.

Well, yes. Any of these might somehow serve

As a departure point. But, perhaps, best

Would be those first precocious hints of hell,

Those intuitions of living desolation

That last a lifetime. These were never, for me,

Some desert place that humans had avoided

In which I could get lost, to which I might

In dreams condemn myself—a wilderness

Natural but alien and unpitying.

They were instead those derelict waste places

Abandoned by mankind as of no worth,

Frequented, if at all, by the dispossessed,

Nocturnal shapes, the crippled and the shamed.

Here in the haywire weeds, concealed by wilds

Of goldenrod and toadflax, lies a spur

With its one boxcar of brick-colored armor,

At noon, midsummer, fiercer than a kiln,

Rippling the thinness of the air around it

With visible distortions. Among the stones

Of the railbed, fragments of shattered amber

That held a pint of rye. The carapace

Of a dried beetle. A broken orange crate

Streaked with tobacco stains at the nailheads

In the gray, fractured slats. And over all

The dust of oblivion finer than milled flour

Where chips of brick, clinkers and old iron

Burn in their slow, invisible decay.

Or else it is late afternoon in autumn,

The sunlight rusting on the western fronts

Of a long block of Victorian brick houses,

Untenanted, presumably condemned,

Their brownstone grapes, their grand entablatures,

Their straining caryatid muscle-men

Rendered at once ridiculous and sad

By the black scars of zigzag fire escapes

That double themselves in isometric shadows.

And all their vacancy is given voice

By the endless flapping of one window-shade.

And then there is the rank, familiar smell

Of underpasses, the dark piers of bridges,

Where old men, the incontinent, urinate.

The acid smell of poverty, the jest

Of adolescent boys exchanging quips

About bedpans, the motorman’s comfort,

A hospital world of syphons and thick tubes

That they know nothing of. Nor do they know

The heatless burnings of the elderly

In memorized, imaginary lusts,

Visions of noontide infidelities,

Crude hallway gropings, cruel lubricities,

A fire as cold and slow as rusting metal.

It’s but a child’s step, it’s but an old man’s totter

From this to the appalling world of dreams.

Gray bottled babies in formaldehyde

As in their primal amniotic bath.

Pale dowagers hiding their liver-spots

In a fine chalk, confectionery dust.

And then the unbearable close-up of a wart

With a tough bristle of hair, like a small beast

With head and feet tucked under, playing possum.

A meat-hooked ham, hung like a traitor’s head

For the public’s notice in a butcher shop,

Faintly resembling the gartered thigh

Of an acrobatic, overweight soubrette.

And a scaled, crusted animal whose head

Fits in a Nazi helmet, whose webbed feet

Are cold on the white flanks of dreaming lovers,

While thorned and furry legs embrace each other

As black mandibles tick. Immature girls,

Naked but for the stockings they stretch tight

To tempt the mucid glitter of an eye.

And the truncated snout of a small bat,

Like one whose nose, undermined by the pox,

Falls back to the skull’s socket. Deepest of all,

Like the converging lines in diagrams

Of vanishing points, those underwater blades,

Those quills or sunburst spokes of marine light,

Flutings and gilded shafts in which one sees

In the drowned star of intersecting beams

Just at that final moment of suffocation

The terrifying and unmeaning rictus

Of the sandshark’s stretched, involuntary grin.

In the upstairs room, when somebody had died,

There were flowers, there were underwater globes,

Mercury seedpearls. It was my mother died.

After a long illness and long ago.

    San Pantaleone, heavenly buffoon,

Patron of dotards and of gondolas,

Forgive us the obsessional daydream

Of our redemption at work in black and white,

The silent movie, the old
Commedia
,

Which for the sake of the children in the house

The projectionist has ventured to run backwards.

(The reels must be rewound in any case.)

It is because of jumped, elided frames

That people make their way by jigs and spasms,

Impetuous leapings, violent semaphores,

Side-slipping, drunk discontinuities,

Like the staggered, tossed career of butterflies.

Here, in pure satisfaction of our hunger,

The Keystone Cops sprint from hysteria,

From brisk, slaphappy bludgeonings of crime,

Faultlessly backwards into calm patrol;

And gallons of spilled paint, meekly obedient

As a domestic pet, home in and settle

Securely into casually offered pails,

Leaving the Persian rugs immaculate.

But best of all are the magically dry legs

Emerging from a sudden crater of water

That closes itself up like a healed wound

To plate-glass polish as the diver slides

Upwards, attaining with careless arrogance

His unsought footing on the highest board.

Something profoundly soiled, pointlessly hurt

And beyond cure in us yearns for this costless

Ablution, this impossible reprieve,

Unpurchased at a scaffold, free, bequeathed

As rain upon the just and the unjust,

As in the fall of mercy, unconstrained,

Upon the poor, infected place beneath.

    Elsewhere the spirit is summoned back to life

By bells sifted through floating schools and splices

Of sun-splashed poplar leaves, a reverie

Of light chromatics (Monet and Debussy),

Or the intemperate storms and squalls of traffic,

The coarse, unanswered voice of a fog horn,

Or, best, the shy, experimental aubade

Of the first birds to sense that ashen cold

Grisaille from which the phoenix dawn arises.

Summoned, that is to say, to the world’s life

From Piranesian
Carceri
and rat holes

Of its own deep contriving. But here in Venice,

The world’s most louche and artificial city,

(In which my tale some time will peter out)

The summons comes from the harsh smashing of glass.

A not unsuitable local industry,

Being the frugal and space-saving work

Of the young men who run the garbage scows.

Wine bottles of a clear sea-water green,

Pale, smoky quarts of
acqua minerale
,

Iodine-tinted liters, the true-blue

Waterman’s midnight ink of Bromo Seltzer,

Light-bulbs of packaged fog, fluorescent tubes

Of well-sealed, antiseptic samples of cloud,

Await what is at once their liquidation

And resurrection in the glory holes

Of the Murano furnaces. Meanwhile

Space must be made for all ephemera,

Our cast-offs, foulings, whatever has gone soft

With age, or age has hardened to a stone,

Our city sweepings. Venice has no curbs

At which to curb a dog, so underfoot

The ochre pastes and puddings of dogshit

Keep us earthbound in half a dozen ways,

Curbing the spirit’s tendency to pride.

The palaces decay. Venice is rich

Chiefly in the deposits of her dogs.

A wealth swept up and gathered with its makers.

Canaries, mutts, love-birds and alley cats

Are sacked away like so many Monte Cristos,

There being neither lawns, meadows nor hillsides

To fertilize or to be buried in.

For them the glass is broken in the dark

As a remembrance by the garbage men.

I am their mourner at collection time

With an invented litany of my own.

Wagner died here, Stravinsky’s buried here,

They say that Cimarosa’s enemies

Poisoned him here. The mind at four
AM

Is a poor, blotched, vermiculated thing.

I’ve seen it spilled like sweetbreads, and I’ve dreamed

Of Byron writing, “Many a fine day

I should have blown my brains out but for the thought

Of the pleasure it would give my mother-in-law.”

Thus virtues, it is said, are forced upon us

By our own impudent crimes. I think of him

With his consorts of whores and countesses

Smelling of animal musk, lilac and garlic,

A
ménage
that was in fact a menagerie,

A fox, a wolf, a mastiff, birds and monkeys,

Corbaccios and corvinos,
spintriae
,

The lees of the Venetian underworld,

A plague of iridescent flies. Spilled out.

O lights and livers. Deader than dead weight.

In a casket lined with tufted tea-rose silk.

O that the soul should tie its shoes, the mind

Should wash its hands in a sink, that a small grain

Of immortality should fit itself

With dentures. We slip down by grades and degrees,

Lapses of memory, the vacant eye

And spittled lip, by soiled humiliations

Of mind and body into the last ditch,

Passing, en route to the
Incurabili
,

The backwater way stations of the soul,

Conveyed in the glossy hearse-and-coffin black

And soundless gondola by an overpriced

Apprentice Charon to the
Calle dei Morti
.

One approaches the Venetian underworld

Silently and by water, the gondolier

Creating eddies and whirlpools with each stroke

Like oak roots, silver, smooth and muscular.

One slides to it like a swoon, nearing the regions

Where the vast hosts of the dead mutely inhabit,

Pulseless, indifferent, deeply beyond caring

What shape intrudes itself upon their fathoms.

The oar-blade flings broadcast its beads of light,

Its ordinary gems. One travels past

All of these domiciles of raw sienna,

Burnt umber, colors of the whole world’s clays.

One’s weakness in itself becomes delicious

Towards the end, a kindly vacancy.

(Raise both your arms above your head, and then

Take three deep breaths, holding the third. Your partner,

Your childhood guide into the other world,

Will approach from behind and wrap you in a bear hug,

Squeezing with all his might. Your head will seethe

With prickled numbness, like an arm or leg

From which the circulation is cut off,

The lungs turn warm with pain, and then you slip

Into a velvet darkness, mutely grateful

To your Anubis-executioner…)

Probably I shall die here unremarked

Amid the albergo’s seedy furniture,

Aware to the last of the faintly rotten scent

Of swamp and sea, a brief embarrassment

And nuisance to the management and the maid.

That would be bad enough without the fear

Byron confessed to: “If I should reach old age

I’ll die ‘at the top first,’ like Swift.” Or Swift’s

Lightning-struck tree. There was a visitor,

The little Swiss authority on nightmares,

Young Henry Fuseli, who at thirty-one

Suffered a fever here for several days

From which he recovered with his hair turned white

As a judicial wig, and rendered permanently

Left-handed. And His Majesty, George III,

Desired the better acquaintance of a tree

At Windsor, and heartily shook one of its branches,

Taking it for the King of Prussia. Laugh

Whoso will that has no knowledge of

The violent ward. They subdued that one

With a hypodermic, quickly tranquilized

And trussed him like a fowl. These days I find

A small aperitif at Florian’s

Is helpful, although I do not forget.

My views are much like Fuseli’s, who described

His method thus : “I first sits myself down.

I then works myself up. Then I throws in

My darks. And then I takes away my lights.”

His nightmare was a great success, while mine

Plays on the ceiling of my rented room

Or on the bone concavity of my skull

In the dark hours when I take away my lights.