Collected Earlier Poems (23 page)

    Seeing is misbelieving, as may be seen

By the angled stems, like fractured tibias,

Misplaced by water’s anamorphosis.

Think of the blonde with the exposed midriff

Who grins as the cross-cut saw slides through her navel,

Or, better, the wobbled clarity of streams,

Their graveled bottoms strewn with casual plunder

Of earthen golds, shark grays, palomino browns

Giddily swimming in and out of focus,

Where, in a passing moment of accession,

One thinks one sees in all that spangled bath,

That tarsial, cosmatesque bespattering,

The anchored floating of a giant trout.

All lenses—the corneal tunic of the eye,

Fine scopes and glazier’s filaments—mislead us

With insubstantial visions, like objects viewed

Through crizzled and quarrelled panes of Bull’s Eye Glass.

It turned out in the end that John Stuart Mill

Knew even less about happiness than I do,

Who know at last, alas, that it is composed

Of clouded, cataracted, darkened sight,

Merciful blindnesses and ignorance.

Only when paradisal bliss had ended

Was enlightenment vouchsafed to Adam and Eve,

“
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew
…”

I, for example, though I had lost my parents,

Thought I was happy almost throughout my youth.

Innocent, like Othello in his First Act.

“
I saw ’t not, thought it not, it harmed not me
.”

The story I have to tell is only my story

By courtesy of painful inference.

So far as I can tell it, it is true,

Though it has comprised the body of such dreams,

Such broken remnant furnishings of the mind

That my unwilling suspension of disbelief

No longer can distinguish between fact

As something outward, independent, given,

And the enfleshment of disembodied thought,

Some melanotic malevolence of my own.

I know this much for sure : When I was eighteen

My father returned home. In a boxcar, dead.

I learned, or else I dreamed, that heading west

He got no further than Toledo, Ohio,

Where late one night in a vacant parking lot

He was robbed, hit on the head with a quart bottle,

Left bleeding and unconscious and soaked with rum

By a couple of thugs who had robbed a liquor store

And found in my father, besides his modest savings,

A convenient means of diverting the police.

He came to in the hospital, walletless,

Paperless, without identity.

He had no more than a dozen words of English

Which, in hysterical anxiety

Or perhaps from the concussion, evaded him.

The doctors seemed to be equally alarmed

By possible effects of the blow to his head

And by his wild excitability

In a tongue nobody there could understand.

He was therefore transferred for observation

To the State Mental Hospital where he stayed

Almost a year before, by merest chance,

A visitor of Lithuanian background

Heard and identified his Lettish speech,

And it could be determined that he was

In full possession of his faculties,

If of little else, and where he had come from

And all the rest of it. The Toledo police

Then wrote my uncle a letter. Without unduly

Stressing their own casualness in the matter,

They told my uncle where his brother was,

How he had come to be there, and that because

He had no funds or visible means of support

He would be held pending a money order

That should cover at least his transportation home.

They wrote three times. They didn’t get an answer.

    The immigrants to Lawrence, Massachusetts,

Were moved as by the vision of Isaiah

To come to the New World, to become new

And enter into a peaceful Commonwealth.

This meant hard work, a scrupulous adoption

Of local ways, endeavoring to please

Clients and neighbors, to become at length,

Despite the ineradicable stigma

Of a thick accent, one like all the rest,

Homogenized and inconspicuous.

So much had the prophetic vision come to.

It would not do at all to have it known

That any member of the family

Had been in police custody, or, worse,

In an asylum. All the kind good will

And friendly custom of the neighborhood

Would be withdrawn at the mere breath of scandal.

Prudence is one of the New England virtues

My uncle was at special pains to learn.

And it paid off, as protestant virtue does,

In cold coin of the realm. Soon he could buy

His own store and take his customers with him

From the A. & P. By the time I was in high school

He and his brothers owned a modest chain

Of little grocery stores and butcher shops.

And he took on as well the unpaid task

Of raising me, making himself my parent,

Forbearing and encouraging and kind.

Or so it seemed. Often in my nightmares

Since then I appear craven and repulsive,

Always soliciting his good opinion

As he had sought that of the neighborhood.

The dead keep their own counsel, let nothing slip

About incarceration, so it was judged

Fitting to have the funeral back home.

Home now had changed. We lived, uncle and I,

In a whole house of our own with a German cook.

The body was laid out in the living room

In a casket lined with tufted tea-rose silk,

Upholstered like a Victorian love-seat.

He had never been so comfortable. He looked

Almost my age, more my age than my uncle’s,

Since half his forty years had not been lived,

Had merely passed, like birthdays or the weather.

He was, strangely enough, a total stranger

Who bore a clear family resemblance.

And there was torture in my uncle’s face

Such as I did not even see at war.

The flowers were suffocating. It was like drowning.

The day after the burial I enlisted,

And two and a half years later was mustered out

As a Section Eight, mentally unsound.

    What is our happiest, most cherished dream

Of paradise? Not harps and fugues and feathers

But rather arrested action, an escape

From time, from history, from evolution

Into the blessèd stasis of a painting :

Those tributes, homages, apotheoses

Figured upon the ceilings of the rich

Wherein some rather boorish-looking count,

With game leg and bad breath, roundly despised

By all of his contemporaries, rises

Into the company of the heavenly host

(A pimpled donor among flawless saints)

Viewed by us proletarians on the floor

From under his thick ham and dangled calf

As he is borne beyond our dark resentment

On puffy quilts and comforters of cloud.

Suspended always at that middle height

In numinous diffusions of soft light,

In mild soft-focus, in the “tinted steam”

Of Turner’s visions of reality,

He is established at a pitch of triumph,

That shall not fail him, by the painter’s skill.

Yet in its way even the passage of time

Seems to inch toward a vast and final form,

To mimic the grand metastasis of art,

As if all were ordained. As the writ saith :

The fathers (and their brothers) shall eat grapes

And the teeth of the children shall be set on edge.

Ho fatto un fiasco
, which is to say,

I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life,

A frangible and a transparent failure.

My efforts at their best are negative :

A poor attempt not to hurt anyone,

A goal which, in the very nature of things,

Is ludicrous because impossible.

Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes

Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses,

Ducts and arterial sluices of my body

As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote :

“Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,

Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,

Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.”

At least I pass them on to nobody,

Not having married, or authored any children,

Leading a monkish life of modest means

On a trust fund established by my uncle

In a will of which I am the single heir.

I am not young any more, and not very well,

Subject to nightmares and to certain fevers

The doctors cannot cure. There’s a Madonna

Set in an alley shrine near where I live

Whose niche is filled with little votive gifts,

Like cookie molds, of pressed tin eyes and legs

And organs she has mercifully cured.

She is not pretty, she is not high art,

But in my infidel way I’m fond of her—

Saint Mary Paregoric, Comforter.

Were she to cure me, what could I offer her?

The gross, intestinal wormings of the brain?

    A virus’s life-span is twenty minutes.

Think of its evolutionary zeal,

Like the hyper-active balance-wheel of a watch,

Busy with swift mutations, trundling through

Its own Silurian epochs in a week;

By fierce ambition and Darwinian wit

Acquiring its immunities against

Our warfares and our plagues of medication.

Blessed be the unseen micro-organisms,

For without doubt they shall inherit the earth.

Their generations shall be as the sands of the sea.

I am the dying host by which they live;

In me they dwell and thrive and have their being.

I am the tapered end of a long line,

The thin and febrile phylum of my family :

Of all my father’s brothers the one child.

I wander these by-paths and little squares,

A singular Tyrannosauros Rex,

Sauntering towards extinction, an obsolete

Left-over from a weak
ancien régime

About to be edged out by upstart germs.

I shall pay out the forfeit with my life

In my own lingering way. Just as my uncle,

Who, my blood tells me on its nightly rounds,

May perhaps be “a little more than kin,”

Has paid the price for his unlawful grief

And bloodless butchery by creating me

His guilty legatee, the beneficiary

Of his money and his crimes.

                                        In these late days

I find myself frequently at the window,

Its glass a cooling comfort to my temple.

And I lift up mine eyes, not to the hills

Of which there are not any, but to the clouds.

Here is a sky determined to maintain

The reputation of Tiepolo,

A moving vision of a shapely mist,

Full of the splendor of the insubstantial.

Against a diorama of palest blue

Cloud-curds, cloud-stacks, cloud-bushes sun themselves.

Giant confections, impossible meringues,

Soft coral reefs and powdery tumuli

Pass in august processions and calm herds.

Great stadiums, grandstands and amphitheaters,

The tufted, opulent litters of the gods

They seem; or laundered bunting, well-dressed wigs,

Harvests of milk-white, Chinese peonies

That visibly rebuke our stinginess.

For all their ghostly presences, they take on

A colorful nobility at evening.

Off to the east the sky begins to turn

Lilac so pale it seems a mood of gray,

Gradually, like the death of virtuous men.

Streaks of electrum richly underline

The slow, flat-bottomed hulls, those floated lobes

Between which quills and spokes of light fan out

Into carnelian reds and nectarines,

Nearing a citron brilliance at the center,

The searing furnace of the glory hole

That fires and fuses clouds of muscatel

With pencilings of gold. I look and look,

As though I could be saved simply by looking—

I, who have never earned my way, who am

No better than a viral parasite,

Or the lees of the Venetian underworld,

Foolish and muddled in my later years,

Who was never even at one time a wise child.

The Eastern tip of the Empire dives into night;

Cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;

On classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight

As a finial cross darkens and then is gone

Like the nearly empty bottle on the table.

From the empty street’s patrol-car a refrain

Of Ray Charles’ keyboard tinkles away like rain.

Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet

Of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea-lather

And sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower

Rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.

The street lamps glisten in the stifling weather,

Formally spaced,

Like white shirt buttons open to the waist.

It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stop-light

In its journey to the whiskey across the room

On the night-stand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom

Goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,

Comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,

Rolled-up road-map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.

It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.

Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length

Around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened

Darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,

And so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,

Not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,

But rather to those now disappeared from sight.