Could stun us to stone.
· · ·
Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughened a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces.
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,
Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By being never green.
Mosquito
On the fine wire of his whine he walked,
Unseen in the ominous bedroom dark.
A traitor to his camouflage, he talked
A thirsty blue streak distinct as a spark.
I was to him a fragrant lake of blood
From which he had to sip a drop or die.
A reservoir, a lavish field of food,
I lay awake, unconscious of my size.
We seemed fair-matched opponents. Soft he dropped
Down like an anchor on his thread of song.
His nose sank thankfully in; then I slapped
At the sting on my arm, cunning and strong.
A cunning, strong Gargantua, I struck
This lover pinned in the feast of my flesh,
Lulled by my blood, relaxed, half-sated, stuck,
Engrossed in the gross rivers of myself.
Success! Without a cry the creature died,
Became a fleck of fluff upon the sheet.
The small welt of remorse subsides as side
By side we, murderer and murdered, sleep
Trees Eat Sunshine
It’s the fact:
their broad leaves lap it up like milk
and turn it into twigs.
Fish eat fish.
Lamps eat light
and when their feast has starved their filament
go out.
So do we,
and all sweet creatures—
cats eating horses, horses grass, grass earth, earth water—
except for the distant Man
who inhales the savor of souls—
let us all strive to resemble this giant!
Winter Ocean
Many-maned scud-thumper, tub
of male whales, maker of worn wood, shrub-
ruster, sky-mocker, rave!
portly pusher of waves, wind-slave.
Modigliani’s Death Mask
Fogg Museum, Cambridge
The shell of a doll’s head,
It stares askew, lopsided in death,
With nervous lips, a dirty tan,
And no bigger than my hand.
Could the man have been that small?
Or is life, like rapid motion,
An enlarging illusion?
Ringed, Italianly, with ivy,
The mask makes an effect of litter,
Preserved inside its glass case like
An oddly favored grapefruit rind.
Seagulls
A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes—
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes too many
to make them very well.
Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.
At that hour on the beach
when the flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.
It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them,
but which neither quite knows—
walk capricious paths through the scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.
Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
B.W.I.
Under a priceless sun,
Shanties and guava.
Beside an emerald sea,
Coral and lava.
On the white dirt road,
A blind man tapping.
On dark Edwardian sofas,
White men napping.
In half-caste twilight, heartfelt
Songs to Jesus.
Across the arid land,
Ocean breezes.
The sibilance of sadness
Never ceases.
The empty cistern.
The broken Victrola.
The rusted praise of
Coca-Cola.
Old yellow tablecloths,
And tea, and hairy
Goats, and airmail
Stationery.
Copies of Punch and Ebony.
Few flowers.
Just the many-petalled sun above
The endless hours.
February 22
Three boys, American, in dungarees,
walk at a slant across the street
against the mild slant of the winter sun,
moseying out this small, still holiday.
The back of the cold is broken; later snows
will follow, mixed with rain, but today
the macadam is bare, the sun loops high,
and the trees are bathed in sweet grayness.
He was a perfect hero: a man of stone,
as colorless as a monument,
anonymous as Shakespeare. We know him
only as the author of his deeds.
There may have been a man: a surveyor,
a wencher, a temper, a stubborn farmer’s mind;
but our legends seem impertinent
graffiti scratched upon his polished granite.
He gazes at us from our dollar bills
reproachfully, a strange green lady,
heavy-lidded, niggle-lipped, and wigged,
who served us better than we have deserved.
More than great successes, we love great failures.
Lincoln is Messiah; he, merely Caesar.
He suffered greatness like a curse.
He fathered our country, we feel, without great joy.
But let us love him now, for he crossed the famous ice,
brought us out of winter, stood, and surveyed
the breadth of our land exulting in the sun:
looked forward to the summer that is past.
Summer: West Side
When on the coral-red steps of old brownstones
Puerto Rican boys, their white shirts luminous,
gather, and their laughter
conveys menace as far as Central Park West,
When the cheesecake shops on Broadway
keep open long into the dark,
and the Chinaman down in his hole of seven steps
leaves the door of his laundry ajar,
releasing a blue smell of starch,
When the curbside lines of parked cars
appear embedded in the tar,
and the swish of the cars on the Drive
seems urgently loud—
Then even the lapping of wavelets
on the boards of a barge on the Hudson
is audible,
and Downtown’s foggy glow
fills your windows right up to the top.
And you walk in the mornings with your cool suit
sheathing the fresh tingle of your shower,
and the gratings idly steam,
and the damp path of the street-sweeper evaporates,
And—an oddly joyful sight—
the dentists’ and chiropractors’ white signs low
in the windows of the great ochre buildings on Eighty-sixth Street
seem slightly darkened
by one more night’s deposit of vigil.
Wash
For seven days it rained that June;
A storm half out to sea kept turning around like a dog trying to settle himself on a rug;
We were the fleas that complained in his hair.
On the eighth day, before I had risen,
My neighbors’ clothes had rushed into all the back yards
And lifted up their arms in praise.
From an upstairs window it seemed prehistorical:
Amongst the sheds and fences and vegetable gardens,
Workshirts and nightgowns, long-soaked in the cellar,
Underpants, striped towels, diapers, child’s overalls,
Bibs and black bras were thronging the sunshine
With hosannas of cotton and halleluiahs of wool.
Maples in a Spruce Forest
They live by attenuation,
Straining, vine-thin,
Up to gaps their gold leaves crowd
Like drowning faces surfacing.
Wherever dappled sun persists,
Shy leaves work photosynthesis;
Until I saw these slender doomed,
I did not know what a maple is.
The life that plumps the oval
In the open meadow full
Is beggared here, distended toward
The dying light available.
Maturity of sullen spruce
Will murder these deciduous;
A little while, the fretted gloom
Is dappled with chartreuse.
Vermont
Here green is king again,
Usurping honest men.
Like Brazilian cathedrals gone under to creepers,
Gray silos mourn their keepers.
Here ski tows
And shy cows
Alone pin the ragged slopes to the earth
Of profitable worth.
Hawks, professors,
And summering ministers
Roost on the mountainsides of poverty
And sniff the poetry,
And every year
The big black bear,
Slavering through the woods with scrolling mouth,
Comes further south.
The Solitary Pond
The fall we moved to the farm, I was thirteen;
the half-wild grapes on the dilapidated arbor
could not be eaten, and the forests and brown fields
also seemed to have no purpose. I grew accustomed,
that winter before the first spring, to hike alone,
ducking first under our barbed wire, then our neighbor’s,
through thorny and hurricane-hit woods to a store
selling candy and soft drinks and gas by Route 11.
Returning one afternoon along an old wall,
I came to a shallow, solitary pond, frozen,
not more than fifteen feet across, and lined with stalks
and briar-strands that left the center scarcely open.
Recalling the rink in the town we had moved from,
I fetched my dull skates from the attic chest and blundered
back through sharp thickets while the cold grew and a frown
from the sky deepened the ominous area under
the black branches. My fingers were numb at the laces,
and the ice was riddled with twigs, and my intent
to glide back to childhood absurd. I fell, unstable
on the clutter of wood and water bubbled and bent
like earth itself, and thrashed home through the trees hating
the very scratches left by my experiment.
Flirt
The flirt is an antelope of flame,
igniting the plain
wherever she hesitates.
She kisses my wrist, waits,
and watches the flush of pride
absurdly kindle my eyes.
She talks in riddles,
exposes her middle,
is hard and strange in my arms:
I love her. Her charms
are those of a fine old book with half-cut pages,
bound in warm plush at her white neck’s nape.
Fever
I have brought back a good message from the land of 102°:
God exists.
I had seriously doubted it before;
but the bedposts spoke of it with utmost confidence,
the threads in my blanket took it for granted,
the tree outside the window dismissed all complaints,
and I have not slept so justly for years.
It is hard, now, to convey
how emblematically appearances sat r />
upon the membranes of my consciousness;
but it is a truth long known,
that some secrets are hidden from health.
Earthworm
We pattern our Heaven
on bright butterflies,
but it must be that even
in earth Heaven lies.
The worm we uproot
in turning a spade
returns, careful brute,
to the peace he has made.
God blesses him; he
gives praise with his toil,
lends comfort to me,
and aerates the soil.
Immersed in the facts,
one must worship there;
claustrophobia attacks
us even in air.
Old-Fashioned Lightning Rod
Green upright rope
of copper, sprouting
(from my perspective) from
an amber ball—jaundiced amber,
the belly-bulb
of an old grasshopper—
braced between three
sturdy curlicues of wrought
iron (like elegancies
of logical thought)
and culminating—the rod,
the slender wand of spiral
copper weathered pistachio-pale—
in a crown, a star
of five radiating thorns
honed fine on the fine-grained
grinding blue wheel of sky:
flared fingers, a torch,
a gesture, crying,
“I dare you!”
Sunshine on Sandstone
Golden photon white on granulated red
makes brown,