striated with hairs of gold, like an almond-shell?
The old, needless story. For if I’m here
it is by choice and when at last
I smell my own rising nausea, feel the air
tighten around my stomach like a surgical bandage,
I can’t pretend surprise. What is it I so miscarry?
If what I spew on the tiles at last,
helpless, disgraced, alone,
is in part what I’ve swallowed from glasses, eyes,
motions of hands, opening and closing mouths,
Isn’t it also dead gobbets of myself,
abortive, murdered, or never willed?
1959
JUVENILIA
Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined,
each flaking its gold arabesque!
Again I sit, under duress, hands washed,
at your inkstained oaken desk,
by the goose-neck lamp in the tropic of your books,
stabbing the blotting-pad, doodling loop upon loop,
peering one-eyed in the dusty reflecting mirror
of your student microscope,
craning my neck to spell above me
A DOLLS HOUSELITTLE EYOLF
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN
Unspeakable fairy tales ebb like blood through my head
as I dip the pen and for aunts, for admiring friends,
for you above all to read,
copy my praised and sedulous lines.
Behind the two of us, thirsty spines
quiver in semi-shadow, huge leaves uncurl and thicken.
1960
DOUBLE MONOLOGUE
To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-
shaft of doubt, and still
mime illusions for others? A puzzle
for the maker who has thought
once too often too coldly.
Since I was more than a child
trying on a thousand faces
I have wanted one thing: to know
simply as I know my name
at any given moment, where I stand.
How much expense of time and skill
which might have set itself
to angelic fabrications! All merely
to chart one needle in the haymow?
Find yourself and you find the world?
Solemn presumption! Mighty Object
no one but itself has missed,
what’s lost, if you stay lost? Someone
ignorantly loves you—will that serve?
Shrug that off, and presto!—
the needle drowns in the haydust.
Think of the whole haystack—
a composition so fortuitous
it only looks monumental.
There’s always a straw twitching somewhere.
Wait out the long chance, and
your needle too could get nudged up
to the apex of that bristling calm.
Rusted, possibly. You might not want
to swear it was the Object, after all.
Time wears us old utopians.
I now no longer think
“truth” is the most beautiful of words.
Today, when I see “truthful”
written somewhere, it flares
like a white orchid in wet woods,
rare and grief-delighting, up from the page.
Sometimes, unwittingly even,
we have been truthful.
In a random universe, what more
exact and starry consolation?
Don’t think I think
facts serve better than ignorant love.
Both serve, and still
our need mocks our gear.
1960
A WOMAN MOURNED BY DAUGHTERS
Now, not a tear begun,
we sit here in your kitchen,
spent, you see, already.
You are swollen till you strain
this house and the whole sky.
You, whom we so often
succeeded in ignoring!
You, are puffed up in death
like a corpse pulled from the sea;
we groan beneath your weight.
And yet you were a leaf,
a straw blown on the bed,
you had long since become
crisp as a dead insect.
What is it, if not you,
that settles on us now
like satin you pulled down
over our bridal heads?
What rises in our throats
like food you prodded in?
Nothing could be enough.
You breathe upon us now
through solid assertions
of yourself: teaspoons, goblets,
of old plants to be watered,
an old man in an adjoining
room to be touched and fed.
And all this universe
dares us to lay a finger
anywhere, save exactly
as you would wish it done.
1960
READINGS OF HISTORY
He delighted in relating the fact that he had been born
near Girgenti in a place called Chaos during a raging
cholera epidemic.
—Domenico Vittorini, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello
I. The Evil Eye
Last night we sat with the stereopticon,
laughing at genre views of 1906,
till suddenly, gazing straight into
that fringed and tasseled parlor, where the vestal
spurns an unlikely suitor
with hairy-crested plants to right and left,
my heart sank. It was terrible.
I smelled the mildew in those swags of plush,
dust on the eyepiece bloomed to freaks of mold.
I knew beyond all doubt how dead that couple was.
Today, a fresh clean morning.
Your camera stabs me unawares,
right in my mortal part.
A womb of celluloid already
contains my dotage and my total absence.
II. The Confrontation
Luigi Pirandello
looked like an old historian
(oval head, tufted white beard,
not least the hunger
for reconciliation in his eye).
For fourteen years, facing
his criminal reflection
in his wife’s Grand Guignol mind,
he built over and over
that hall of mirrors
in which to be appears
to be perceived.
The present holds you like a raving wife,
clever as the mad are clever,
digging up your secret truths
from her disabled genius.
She knows what you hope
and dare not hope:
remembers
what you’re sick
of forgetting.
What are you now
but what you know together, you and she?
She will not let you think.
It is important
to make connections. Everything
happens very fast in the minds
of the insane. Even you
aren’t up to that, yet.
Go out, walk,
think of selves long past.
III. Memorabilia
I recall
Civil War letters of a great-grand-uncle,
fifteen at Chancellorsville,
no raconteur,
no speller, either; nor to put it squarely,
much of a mind;
the most we gather
is that he did write home:
I am well,
how are my sisters, hope you are the same.
Did Spartan battle-echoes rack his head?
Dying, he turned into his father’s memory.
History’s queerly strong perfumes
rise from the crook of this day�
�s elbow:
Seduction fantasies of the public mind,
or Dilthey’s dream from which he roused to see
the cosmos glaring through his windowpane?
Prisoners of what we think occurred,
or dreamers dreaming toward a final word?
What, in fact, happened in these woods
on some obliterated afternoon?
IV. Consanguinity
Can history show us nothing
but pieces of ourselves, detached,
set to a kind of poetry,
a kind of music, even?
Seated today on Grandmamma’s
plush sofa with the grapes
bursting so ripely from the curved mahogany,
we read the great Victorians
weeping, almost, as if
some family breach were healed.
Those angry giantesses and giants,
lately our kith and kin!
We stare into their faces, hear
at last what they were saying
(or some version not bruited
by filial irritation).
The cat-tails wither in the reading-room.
Tobacco-colored dust
drifts on the newest magazines.
I loaf here leafing ancient copies
of LIFE from World War II.
We look so poor and honest there:
girls with long hair badly combed
and unbecoming dresses—
where are you now?
You sail
to shop in Europe, ignorantly freed
for you, an age ago.
Your nylon luggage matches
eyelids
expertly azured.
I, too, have lived in history.
V. The Mirror
Is it in hopes
to find or lose myself
that I
fill up my table now
with Michelet and Motley?
To “know how it was”
or to forget how it is—
what else?
Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,
Yankee nor Rebel, born
in the face of two ancient cults,
I’m a good reader of histories.
And you,
Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,
when you sit at night
tracing your way through your volumes
of Josephus, or any
of the old Judaic chronicles,
do you find yourself there, a simpler,
more eloquent Jew?
or do you read
to shut out the tick-tock of self,
the questions and their routine answers?
VI. The Covenant
The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,
our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.
Nothing will thaw these bones except
memory like an ancient blanket wrapped
about us when we sleep at home again,
smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,
old nightmare,
and insomnia’s spreading stain.
Or say I sit with what I halfway know
as with a dying man who heaves the true
version at last, now that it hardly matters,
or gropes a hand to where the letters
sewn in the mattress can be plucked and read.
Here’s water.Sleep.No more is asked of you.
I take your life into my living head.
1960
TO THE AIRPORT
Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks
of diamond battlements flush high and cold.
Alarm clocks strike a million sparks of will.
Weeping:all night we’ve wept and watched the hours
that never will be ours again: Now
weeping, we roll through unforgettable
Zion, that rears its golden head from sleep
to act, and does not need us as we weep.
You dreamed us, City, and you let us be.
Grandiloquence, improvidence, ordure, light,
hours that seemed years, and ours—and over all
the endless wing of possibility,
that mackerel heaven of yours, fretted with all
our wits could leap for, envy batten on.
Our flights take off from you into the sea;
nothing you need wastes, though we think we do.
You are Canaan now and we are lifted high
to see all we were promised, never knew.
1960
THE AFTERWAKE
Nursing your nerves
to rest, I’ve roused my own; well,
now for a few bad hours!
Sleep sees you behind closed doors.
Alone, I slump in his front parlor.
You’re safe inside. Good. But I’m
like a midwife who at dawn
has all in order: bloodstains
washed up, teapot on the stove,
and starts her five miles home
walking, the birthyell still
exploding in her head.
Yes, I’m with her now: here’s
the streaked, livid road
edged with shut houses
breathing night out and in.
Legs tight with fatigue,
we move under morning’s coal-blue star,
colossal as this load
of unexpired purpose, which drains
slowly, till scissors of cockcrow snip the air.
1961
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
To GPS
Over the chessboard now,
Your Artificiality concludes
a final check; rests; broods—
no—sorts and stacks a file of memories,
while I
concede the victory, bow,
and slouch among my free associations.
You never had a mother,
let’s say? no digital Gertrude
whom you’d as lief have seen
Kingless? So your White Queen
was just an “operator.”
(My Red had incandescence,
ire, aura, flare,
and trapped me several moments in her stare.)
I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition
of human waste. Why not
dump the whole reeking snarl
and let you solve me once for all?
(Parameter: a black-faced Luddite
itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)
Still, when
they make you write your poems, later on,
who’d envy you, force-fed
on all those variorum
editions of our primitive endeavors,
those frozen pemmican language-rations
they’ll cram you with? denied
our luxury of nausea, you
forget nothing, have no dreams.
1961
A MARRIAGE IN THE ’SIXTIES
As solid-seeming as antiquity,
you frown above
the New York Sunday Times
where Castro, like a walk-on out of Carmen,
mutters into a bearded henchman’s ear.
They say the second’s getting shorter—
I knew it in my bones—
and pieces of the universe are missing.
I feel the gears of this late afternoon
slip, cog by cog, even as I read.
“I’m old,” we both complain,
half-laughing, oftener now.
Time serves you well. That face—
part Roman emperor, part Raimu—
nothing this side of Absence can undo.
Bliss, revulsion, your rare angers can
only carry through what’s well begun.
When
I read your letters long ago
in that half-defunct
hotel in Magdalen Street
every word primed my nerves.
; A geographical misery
composed of oceans, fogbound planes
and misdelivered cablegrams
lay round me, a Nova Zembla
only your live breath could unfreeze.
Today we stalk
in the raging desert of our thought
whose single drop of mercy is
each knows the other there.
Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock,
may have at last the perfect hour of talk
that language aches for; still—
two minds, two messages.
Your brows knit into flourishes. Some piece
of mere time has you tangled there.
Some mote of history has flown into your eye.
Will nothing ever be the same,
even our quarrels take a different key,
our dreams exhume new metaphors?
The world breathes underneath our bed.
Don’t look. We’re at each other’s mercy too.
Dear fellow-particle, electric dust
I’m blown with—ancestor
to what euphoric cluster—
see how particularity dissolves
in all that hints of chaos. Let one finger
hover toward you from There
and see this furious grain
suspend its dance to hang
beside you like your twin.
1961
FIRST THINGS
I can’t name love now
without naming its object—
this the final measure
of those flintspark years
when one believed
one’s flash innate.
Today I swear
Only in the sun’s eye
Do I take fire.
1961
ATTENTION
The ice age is here.
I sit burning cigarettes,
burning my brain.
A micro-Tibet,
deadly, frivolous, complete,
blinds the four panes.
Veils of dumb air
unwind like bandages
from my lips
half-parted, steady as the mouths