Collected Earlier Poems (22 page)

    Lights. I have chosen Venice for its light,

Its lightness, buoyancy, its calm suspension

In time and water, its strange quietness.

I, an expatriate American,

Living off an annuity, confront

The lagoon’s waters in mid-morning sun.

Palladio’s church floats at its anchored peace

Across from me, and the great church of Health,

Voted in gratitude by the Venetians

For heavenly deliverance from the plague,

Voluted, levels itself on the canal.

Further away the bevels coil and join

Like spiraled cordon ropes of silk, the lips

Of the crimped water sped by a light breeze.

Morning has tooled the bay with bright inlays

Of writhing silver, scattered scintillance.

These little crests and ripples promenade,

Hurried and jocular and never bored,

Ils se promènent
like families of some means

On Sundays in the
Bois
. Observing this

Easy festivity, hypnotized by

Tiny sun-signals exchanged across the harbor,

I am for the moment cured of everything,

The future held at bay, the past submerged,

Even the fact that this Sea of Hadria,

This consecrated, cool wife of the Doge,

Was ploughed by the merchantmen of all the world,

And all the silicate fragility

They sweat for at the furnaces now seems

An admirable and shatterable triumph.

They take the first crude bulb of thickened glass,

Glowing and taffy-soft on the blow tube,

And sink it in a mold, a metal cup

Spiked on its inner surface like a pineapple.

Half the glass now is regularly dimpled,

And when these dimples are covered with a glaze

Of molten glass they are prisoned air-bubbles,

Breathless, enameled pearly vacancies.

    I am a person of inflexible habits

And comforting rigidities, and though

I am a twentieth century infidel

From Lawrence, Massachusetts, twice a week

I visit the Cathedral of St. Mark’s,

That splendid monument to the labors of

Grave robbers, body snatchers, those lawless two

Entrepreneurial Venetians who

In compliance with the wishes of the Doge

For the greater commercial and religious glory

Of Venice in the year 828

Kidnapped the corpse of the Evangelist

From Alexandria, a sacrilege

The saint seemed to approve. That ancient city

Was drugged and bewildered with an odor of sanctity,

Left powerless and mystified by oils,

Attars and essences of holiness

And roses during the midnight exhumation

And spiriting away of the dead saint

By Buono and his side-kick Rustico—

Goodness in concert with Simplicity

Effecting the major heist of Christendom.

    I enter the obscure aquarium dimness,

The movie-palace dark, through which incline

Smoky diagonals and radiant bars

Of sunlight from the high southeastern crescents

Of windowed drums above. Like slow blind fingers

Finding their patient and unvarying way

Across the braille of pavement, edging along

The pavonine and lapidary walls,

Inching through silence as the earth revolves

To huge compulsions, as the turning spheres

Drift in their milky pale galactic light

Through endless quiet, gigantic vacancy,

Unpitying, inhuman, terrible.

In time the eye accommodates itself

To the dull phosphorescence. Gradually

Glories reveal themselves, grave mysteries

Of the faith cast off their shadows, assume their forms

Against a heaven of coined and sequined light,

A splatter of gilt cobblestones, flung grains

Or crumbs of brilliance, the vast open fields

Of the sky turned intimate and friendly. Patines

And laminae, a vermeil shimmering

Of fish-scaled, cataphracted golden plates.

Here are the saints and angels brought together

In studied reveries of happiness.

Enormous wings of seraphim uphold

The crowning domes where the convened apostles

Receive their fiery tongues from the Godhead

Descended to them as a floating dove,

Patriarch and collateral ancestor

Of the pigeons out in the Square. Into those choirs

Of lacquered Thrones, enameled Archangels

And medaled Principalities rise up

A cool plantation of columns, marble shafts

Bearing their lifted pathways, viaducts

And catwalks through the middle realms of heaven.

Even as God descended into the mass

And thick of us, so is He borne aloft

As promise and precursor to us all,

Ascending in the central dome’s vast hive

Of honeyed luminosity. Behind

The altar He appears, two fingers raised

In benediction, in what seems two-thirds

Of the Boy Scout salute, wishing us well.

And we are gathered here below the saints,

Virtues and martyrs, sheltered in their glow,

Soothed by the punk and incense, to rejoice

In the warm light of Gabrieli’s horns,

And for a moment of unwonted grace

We are so blessed as to forget ourselves.

Perhaps. There is something selfish in the self,

The cell’s craving for perpetuity,

The sperm’s ignorant hope, the animal’s rule

Of haunch and sinew, testicle and groin,

That refers all things whatever, near and far,

To one’s own needs or fantasized desires.

Returning suddenly to the chalk-white sunlight

Of out-of-doors, one spots among the tourists

Those dissolute young with heavy-lidded gazes

Of cool, clear-eyed, stony depravity

That in the course of only a few years

Will fade into the terrifying boredom

In the faces of Carpaccio’s prostitutes.

From motives that are anything but kindly

I ignore their indiscreet solicitations

And far more obvious poverty. The mind

Can scarcely cope with the world’s sufferings,

Must blinker itself to much or else go mad.

And the bargain that we make for our sanity

Is the knowledge that when at length it comes our turn

To be numbered with the outcasts, the maimed, the poor,

The injured and insulted, they will turn away,

The fortunate and healthy, as I turn now

(Though touched as much with compassion as with lust,

Knowing the smallest gift would reverse our roles,

Expose me as weak and thus exploitable.

There is more stamina, twenty times more hope

In the least of them than there is left in me.)

I take my loneliness as a vocation,

A policied exile from the human race,

A cultivated, earned misanthropy

After the fashion of the Miller of Dee.

    It wasn’t always so. I was an Aid Man,

A Medic with an infantry company,

Who because of my refusal to bear arms

Was constrained to bear the wounded and the dead

From under enemy fire, and to bear witness

To inconceivable pain, usually shot at

Though banded with Red Crosses and unarmed.

There was a corporal I knew in Heavy Weapons,

Someone who carried with him into combat

A book of etiquette by Emily Post.

Most brought with them some token of the past,

Some emblem of attachment or affection

Or coddled childhood—bibles and baby booties,

Harmonicas, love letters, photographs—

But this was different. I discovered later

That he had been brought up in an orphanage,

So the book was his fiction of kindliness,

A novel in which personages of wealth

Firmly secure domestic tranquility.

He’d cite me instances. It seems a boy

Will not put “Mr.” on his calling cards

Till he leaves school, and may omit the “Mr.”

Even while at college. Bread and butter plates

Are never placed on a formal dinner table.

At a simple dinner party one may serve

Claret instead of champagne with the meat.

The satin facings on a butler’s lapels

Are narrower than a gentleman’s, and he wears

Black waistcoat with white tie, whereas the gentleman’s

White waistcoat goes with both black tie and white.

When a lady lunches alone at her own home

In a formally kept house the table is set

For four. As if three Elijahs were expected.

This was to him a sort of
Corpus Juris
,

An ancient piety and governance

Worthy of constant dream and meditation.

He haunts me here, that seeker after law

In a lawless world, in rainsoaked combat boots,

Oil-stained fatigues and heavy bandoleers.

He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire.

His helmet had fallen off. They had sheared away

The top of his cranium like a soft-boiled egg,

And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon,

His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.

    Where to begin? In a heaven of golden serifs

Or smooth and rounded loaves of risen gold,

Formed into formal Caslon capitals

And graced with a pretzeled, sinuous ampersand

Against a sanded ground of fire-truck red,

Proclaiming to the world at large, “The Great

Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.”?

The period alone appeared to me

An eighteen-karat doorknob beyond price.

This was my uncle’s store where I was raised.

A shy asthmatic child, I was permitted

To improvise with used potato sacks

Of burlap a divan behind the counter

Where I could lie and read or dream my dreams.

These were infused with the smell of fruit and coffee,

Strong odors of American abundance.

Under the pressed-tin ceiling’s coffering

I’d listen to the hissing radiator,

Hung with its can, like a tapped maple tree,

To catch its wrathful spittings, and meditate

On the arcane meaning of the mystic word

(Fixed in white letters backwards on the window)

That referred inscrutably to nothing else

Except itself. An uncracked code : SALADA.

By childhood’s rules of inference it concerned

Saladin and the camphors of the East,

And through him, by some cognate lineage

Of sound and mystic pedigree, Aladdin,

A hushed and shadowy world of minarets,

Goldsmiths, persimmons and the ninety-nine

Unutterable Arabian names of God.

I had an eye for cyphers and riddling things.

Of all my schoolmates I was the only one

Who knew that on the bottle of Worcestershire

The conjured names of Lea and Perrins figure

Forty-eight times, weaving around the border

As well as the obvious places front and back.

I became in time a local spelling champion,

Encouraged and praised at home, where emphasis

Was placed on what was then called
elocution

And upon “building” a vocabulary,

A project that seemed allied to architecture,

The unbuttressed balancing of wooden blocks

Into a Tower of Babel. Still, there were prizes

For papers in my English class : Carlyle

On The Dignity of Labor; John Stuart Mill

On Happiness. But the origin of things

Lies elsewhere. Back in some genetic swamp.

    My uncle had worked hard to get his store.

Soon as he could he brought his younger brothers

From the Old Country. My father brought his bride

Of two months to the second-story room

Above the storage. Everybody shared

Labors and profits; they stayed open late

Seven days a week (but closed on Christmas Day)

And did all right. But cutting up the pie

Of measured earnings among five adults

(Four brothers and my mother—I didn’t count,

Being one year old at the time) seemed to my father

A burden upon everyone. He announced

That he was going west to make his fortune

And would send soon as he could for mother and me.

Everyone thought him brave and enterprising.

There was a little party, with songs and tears

And special wine, purchased for the occasion.

He left. We never heard from him again.

    When I was six years old it rained and rained

And never seemed to stop. I had an oilskin,

A bright sou’wester, stiff and sunflower yellow,

And fireman boots. Rain stippled the windows

Of the school bus that brought us home at dusk

That was no longer dusk but massing dark

As that small world of kids drove into winter,

And always in that dark our grocery store

Looked like a theater or a puppet show,

Lit, warm, and peopled with the family cast,

Full of prop vegetables, a brighter sight

Than anyone else’s home. Therefore I knew

Something was clearly up when the bus door

Hinged open and all the lights were on upstairs

But only the bulb at the cash register lit

The store itself, half dark, and on the steps,

Still in his apron, standing in the rain,

My uncle. He was soaked through. He told me

He was taking me to a movie and then to supper

At a restaurant, though the next day was school

And I had homework. It was clear to me

That such a treat exacted on my part

The condition that I shouldn’t question it.

We went to see a bedroom comedy,

“Let Us Be Gay,” scarcely for six-year-olds,

Throughout the length of which my uncle wept.

And then we went to a Chinese restaurant

And sat next to the window where I could see,

Beyond the Chinese equivalent of SALADA

Encoded on the glass, the oil-slicked streets,

The gutters with their little Allagashes

Bent on some urgent mission to the sea.

Next day they told me that my mother was dead.

I didn’t go to school. I watched the rain

From the bedroom window or from my burlap nest

Behind the counter. My whole life was changed

Without my having done a single thing.

Perhaps because of those days of constant rain

I am always touched by it now, touched and assuaged.

Perhaps that early vigilance at windows

Explains why I have now come to regard

Life as a spectator sport. But I find peace

In the arcaded dark of the piazza

When a thunderstorm comes up. I watch the sky

Cloud into tarnished zinc, to Quaker gray

Drabness, its shrouded vaults, fog-bound crevasses

Blinking with huddled lightning, and await

The vast
son et lumière
. The city’s lamps

Faintly ignite in the gathered winter gloom.

The rumbled thunder starts—an avalanche

Rolling down polished corridors of sound,

Rickety tumbrels blundering across

A stone and empty cellarage. And then,

Like a whisper of dry leaves, the rain begins.

It stains the paving stones, forms a light mist

Of brilliant crystals dulled with tones of lead

Three inches off the ground. Blown shawls of rain

Quiver and luff, veil the cathedral front

In flailing laces while the street lamps hold

Fixed globes of sparkled haze high in the air

And the black pavement runs with wrinkled gold

In pools and wet dispersions, fiery spills

Of liquid copper, of squirming, molten brass.

To give one’s whole attention to such a sight

Is a sort of blessedness. No room is left

For antecedence, inference, nuance.

One escapes from all the anguish of this world

Into the refuge of the present tense.

The past is mercifully dissolved, and in

Easy obedience to the gospel’s word,

One takes no thought whatever of tomorrow,

The soul being drenched in fine particulars.