The 40s: The Story of a Decade (105 page)

Now winter downs the dying of the year,

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by waterbanks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell

And held in ice as dancers in a spell

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown

Composedly have made their long sojourns,

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze

The random hands, the loose unready eyes

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The Newyear bells are wrangling with the snow.

—Richard Wilbur
January 1, 1949

I have recently been pondering the life expectancy that the Bible allots to man,

And at this point I figure I have worked my way through nine-fourteenths of my hypothetical span.

I have been around a bit and met many interesting people and made and lost some money and acquired, in reverse order, a family and a wife,

And by now I should have drawn some valuable conclusions about life.

Well, I have learned that life is something about which you can’t conclude anything except that it is full of vicissitudes.

And where you expect logic you only come across eccentricitudes.

Life has a tendency to obfuscate and bewilder,

Such as fating us to spend the first part of our lives being embarrassed by our parents and the last part being embarrassed by our childer.

Life is constantly presenting us with experiences that are unprecedented and depleting,

Such as the friend who starts drinking at three in the afternoon and explains it’s only to develop a hearty appetite for dinner because it’s unhealthy to drink without eating.

Life being what it is, I don’t see why everybody doesn’t develop an ulcer,

Particularly Mrs. Martingale, the wife of a prominent pastry cook from Tulsa.

He had risen to fame and fortune after starting as a humble purveyor of noodles,

So he asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said a new Studebaker and he thought she said a new strudel baker and she hated strudels.

So all I know about life is that it has been well said

That such things can’t happen to a person when they are dead.

—Ogden Nash
January 15, 1949

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.

White crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare

and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.

Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,

the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,

the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.

One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire

one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.

The little ochre dredge at work off the end of the dock

already plays the dry perfectly off-beat
claves.

The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash

into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,

it seems to me, like pickaxes,

rarely coming up with anything to show for it,

and going off with humorous elbowings.

Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar

on impalpable drafts

and open their tails like scissors on the curves

or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.

The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in

with the obliging air of retrievers,

bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks

and decorated with bobbles of sponges.

There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock

where, glinting like little plowshares,

the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry

for the Chinese-restaurant trade.

Some of the little white boats are still piled up

against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,

and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,

like torn-open, unanswered letters.

The bight is littered with old correspondences.

Click. Click. Goes the dredge,

and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.

All the untidy activity continues,

awful but cheerful.

—Elizabeth Bishop
February 19, 1949

Now that I have your face by heart, I look

Less at its features than its darkening frame

Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,

Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.

Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease

The lead and marble figures watch the show

Of yet another summer loath to go

Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read

In the black chords upon a dulling page

Music that is not meant for music’s cage,

Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.

The staves are shuttled over with a stark

Unprinted silence. In a double dream

I must spell out the storm, the running stream.

The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see

The wharves with their great ships and architraves;

The rigging and the cargo and the slaves

On a strange beach under a broken sky.

O not departure, but a voyage done!

The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps

Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps

Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.