Collected Earlier Poems (7 page)

But in our part of the country a false dusk

               Lingers for hours; it steams

From the soaked hay, wades in the cloudy woods,

               Engendering other dreams.

Formless and soft beyond the fence it broods

Or rises as a faint and rotten musk

               Out of a broken stalk.

There are some things of which we seldom talk;

For instance, the woman next door, whom we hear at night,

               Claims that when she was small

She found a man stone dead near the cedar trees

               After the first snowfall.

The air was clear. He seemed in ultimate peace

Except that he had no eyes. Rigid and bright

               Upon the forehead, furred

With a light frost, crouched an outrageous bird.

Beware of those that flatter;

Likewise beware of those

That would redress the matter

By publishing their woes.

They would corrupt your nature

For their own purposes

And taint God’s every creature

With pestilent disease.

Now look you in the mirror

And swear to your own face

It never dealt in error

With pity or with praise.

Swear that there is no Circe,

And swear me, if you can,

That without aid or mercy

You are but your own man.

If you can swear thus nimbly

Then we can end our wars

And join in the assembly

Of jungle predators,

For honestly to thieve

Bespeaks a brotherhood:

Without a “by your leave”

I live upon your blood.

Then said the Lord, dost thou well to be angry?

I have been in this bar

For close to seven days.

The dark girl over there,

For a modest dollar, lays.

And you can get a blow-job

Where other men have pissed

In the little room that’s sacred

To the Evangelist—

If you’re inclined that way.

For myself, I drink and sleep.

The floor is knotty cedar

But the beer is flat and cheap.

And you can bet your life

I’ll be here another seven.

Stranger, here’s to my wife,

Who died and went to heaven.

She was a famous beauty,

But
our very breath is loaned
.

The rabbi’s voice was fruity,

And since then I’ve been stoned—

A royal, nonstop bender.

But your money’s no good here;

Put it away. Bartender,

Give my friend a beer.

I dreamed the other night

When the sky was full of stars

That I stood outside a gate

And looked in through the bars.

Two angels stood together.

A purple light was shed

From their every metal feather.

And then one of them said,

“It was pretty much the same

For years and years and years,

But since the Christians came

The place is full of queers.

Still, let them have their due.

Things here are far less solemn.

Instead of each beardy Jew

Muttering, ‘Shalom, Shalom,’

There’s a down-to-earth, informal

Fleshiness to the scene;

It’s healthier, more normal,

If you know what I mean.

Such as once went to Gehenna

Now dance among the blessed.

But Mary Magdalena,

She had it the best.”

And he nudged his feathered friend

And gave him a wicked leer,

And I woke up and fought back

The nausea with a beer.

What man shall understand

The Lord’s mysterious way?

My tongue is thick with worship

And whiskey, and some day

I will come to in Bellevue

And make psalms unto the Lord.

But verily I tell you,

She hath her reward.

1             
It was a tortoise aspiring to fly

               
That murdered Aeschylus. All men must die.

2             
The crocodile rends man and beast to death

               
And has St. Francis’ birds to pick his teeth.

3             
Lorenzo sponsored artists, and the ant

               
Must save to give the grasshopper a grant.

4             
The blind man bears the lame, who gives him eyes;

               
Only the weak make common enterprise.

5             
Frogs into bulls, sows’ ears into silk purses,

               
These are our hopes in youth, in age our curses.

6             
Spare not the rod, lest thy child be undone,

               
And at the gallows cry, “Behold thy son.”

7             
The Fox and Buddha put away their lust:

               
“Sour grapes!” they cry, “All but the soul is dust!”

8             
An ass may look at an angel, Balaam was shown;

               
Cudgel thy wits, and leave thine ass alone.

9             
Is not that pastoral instruction sweet

               
Which says who shall be eaten, who shall eat?

I’m not going to get myself shot full of holes

For comparative strangers, like Richelieu or the King;

I prefer to investigate how a coward may cling

To the modest ways of simple civilian souls.

If I couldn’t put down a little bit of the hair

Of the dog each day, I’d be as good as dead;

And it’s nothing to me that a man will die in bed

Or under the table without the
Croix de Guerre
.

So as far as I’m concerned, you can drop the act

About the Immortal Fame and Illustrious End.

I shall die unsung, but with all of me intact,

Toasting His Noble Majesty and His Grace.

And if I die by the mouth, believe me, friend,

It won’t be the cannon’s mouth, in any case.

(
AFTER CHARLES VION DE DALIBRAY
)

I am related to stones

The slow accretion of moss where dirt is wedged

Long waxy hair that can split boulders.

Events are not important.

I live in my bone

Recalling the hour of my death.

It takes more toughness than most have got.

Or a saintliness.

Strength of a certain kind, anyway.

Bald toothless clumsy perhaps

With all the indignity of old age

But age is not important.

There is nothing worth remembering

But the silver glint in the muck

The thickening of great trees

The hard crust getting harder.

for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt

Composed in the Tower before his execution

These moving verses, and being brought at that time

Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:

“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,

The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.

His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap

Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.

And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;

Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;

And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,

That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.

We move now to outside a German wood.

Three men are there commanded to dig a hole

In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down

And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill

Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.

A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.

He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.

The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.

When only the head was exposed the order came

To dig him out again and to get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.

When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.

The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.

He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayers or incense rose up in those hours

Which grew to be years, and every day came mute

Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,

And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

All these years I have known of her despair.

“I was about to be happy when the abyss

Opened its mouth. It was empty, except for this

Yellowish sperm of horror that glistened there.

I tried so hard not to look as the thing grew fat

And pulsed in its bed of hair. I tried to think

Of Sister Marie Gerald, of our swaddled link

To the Lord of Hosts, the manger, and all of that.

None of it worked. And even the whip-lash wind,

To which I clung and begged to be blown away,

Didn’t work. These eyes, that many have praised as gay,

Are the stale jellies of lust in which Adam sinned.

And nothing works. Sickened since God knows when,

Since early childhood when I first saw the horror,

I have spent hours alone before my mirror.

There is no cure for me in the world of men.”

Tonight my children hunch

Toward their Western, and are glad

As, with a Sunday punch,

The Good casts out the Bad.

And in their fairy tales

The warty giant and witch

Get sealed in doorless jails

And the match-girl strikes it rich.

I’ve made myself a drink.

The giant and witch are set

To bust out of the clink

When my children have gone to bed.

All frequencies are loud

With signals of despair;

In flash and morse they crowd

The rondure of the air.

For the wicked have grown strong,

Their numbers mock at death,

Their cow brings forth its young,

Their bull engendereth.

Their very fund of strength,

Satan, bestrides the globe;

He stalks its breadth and length

And finds out even Job.

Yet by quite other laws

My children make their case;

Half God, half Santa Claus,

But with my voice and face,

A hero comes to save

The poorman, beggarman, thief,

And make the world behave

And put an end to grief.

And that their sleep be sound

I say this childermas

Who could not, at one time,

Have saved them from the gas.

I recall everything, but more than all,

Words being nothing now, an ease that ever

Remembers her to my unfailing fever,

How she came forward to me, letting fall

Lamplight upon her dress till every small

Motion made visible seemed no mere endeavor

Of body to articulate its offer,

But more a grace won by the way from all

Striving in what is difficult, from all

Losses, so that she moved but to discover

A practice of the blood, as the gulls hover,

Winged with their life, above the harbor wall,

Tracing inflected silence in the tall

Air with a tilt of mastery and quiver

Against the light, as the light fell to favor

Her coming forth; this chiefly I recall.

It is a part of pride, guiding the hand

At the piano in the splash and passage

Of sacred dolphins, making numbers human

By sheer extravagance that can command

Pythagorean heavens to spell their message

Of some unlooked-for peace, out of the common;

Taking no thought at all that man and woman,

Lost in the trance of lamplight, felt the presage

Of the unbidden terror and bone hand

Of gracelessness, and the unspoken omen

That yet shall render all, by its first usage,

Speechless, inept, and totally unmanned.

               Romans, rheumatic, gouty, came

    To bathe in Ischian springs where water steamed,

Puffed and enlarged their bold imperial thoughts, and which

Later Madame Curie declared to be so rich

    In radioactive content as she deemed

               Should win them everlasting fame.

               Scattered throughout their ice and snow

    The Finns have built airtight cabins of log

Where they may lie, limp and entranced by the sedative purr

Of steam pipes, or torment themselves with flails of fir

    To stimulate the blood, and swill down grog,

               Setting the particles aglow.