of antique statues.
1961
END OF AN ERA
This morning, flakes of sun
peel down to the last snowholds,
the barbed-wire leavings of a war
lost, won, in these dead-end alleys.
Stale as a written-out journalist,
I sort my gear.—Nothing is happening.—City,
dumb as a pack of thumbed cards, you
once had snap and glare
and secret life; now, trembling
under my five grey senses’ weight,
you flatten
onto the table.
Baudelaire, I think of you … Nothing changes,
rude and self-absorbed the current
dashes past, reflecting nothing, poetry
extends its unsought amnesty,
the roots of the great grove
atrophy underground.
Some voices, though, shake in the air like heat.
The neighborhood is changing,
even the neighbors are grown, methinks, peculiar.
I walk into my house and see
tourists fingering this and that.
My mirrors, my bric-à-brac
don’t suit their style.
Those old friends, though,
alive and dead,
for whom things don’t come easy—
Certain forests are sawdust,
from now on have to be described?
Nothing changes. The bones of the mammoths
are still in the earth.
1961
RUSTICATION
In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled
with roses, purchased dearly at auction,
goldenrod and asters spill
toward the inevitable sunset.
The houseguests trail from swimming
under huge towels.
Marianne dangles barefoot in the hammock
reading about Martin Luther King.
Vivaldi rattles on the phonograph,
flutes ricocheting off the birchtrees.
Flies buzz and are gaily murdered.
Still out of it, and guilty,
I glue the distance-glasses to my eyes
ostrich-like, hoping
you’ll think me in that clearing half a mile away.
Offstage I hear
the old time-killers dressing, banging doors,
your voice, a timbre or two too rich for love,
cheering them on.
A kestrel sails into my field of vision,
clear as a rising star.
Why should I need to quarrel
with another’s consolations?
Why, in your mortal skin,
vigorously smashing ice and smoking,
a graying pigtail down your back,
should you seem infamous to me?
1961
APOLOGY
I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever
keep a cat, a dog,
a bird—
chiefly because
I’d rather love my equals.
Today, turning
in the fog of my mind,
I knew, the thing I really
couldn’t stand in the house
is a woman
with a mindful of fog
and bloodletting claws
and the nerves of a bird
and the nightmares of a dog.
1961
SISTERS
Can I easily say,
I know you of course now,
no longer the fellow-victim,
reader of my diaries, heir
to my outgrown dresses,
ear for my poems and invectives?
Do I know you better
than that blue-eyed stranger
self-absorbed as myself
raptly knitting or sleeping
through a thirdclass winter journey?
Face to face all night
her dreams and whimpers
tangled with mine,
sleeping but not asleep
behind the engine drilling
into dark Germany,
her eyes, mouth, head
reconstructed by dawn
as we nodded farewell.
Her I should recognize
years later, anywhere.
1961
IN THE NORTH
Mulish, unregenerate,
not “as all men are”
but more than most
you sit up there in the sunset;
there are only three
hours of dark
in your night. You are
alone as an old king
with his white-gold beard
when in summer the ships
sail out, the heroes
singing, push off
in winter when
trapped in the ice
your kingdom flashes
under the northern lights
and the bees dream
in their hives, the young
men like the bees
hang near you
for lack of another,
remembering too, with some
remorseful tenderness
you are their king.
1962
THE CLASSMATE
One year, you gave us
all names, hudibrastic
titles, skywrote
our gaudy histories.
We were all sparks
struck in your head,
we mocked but listened.
You filled a whole
zoological notebook
with sly generations
of should-have-beens,
were disgraced, not distressed.
Our howls died away.
Your poetry was in
paper-dart ballads
sailing beyond our noses,
in blackboard lyrics
scrawled in our own patois,
spirals of chalkdust,
inkblot manifestos
who could read today?
You less than any.
Because later you turned
to admiration of the classics
and a sedulous ear.
Still if I hear
the slash of feet
through gutters full of oakleaves
and see the boys
still unprized, unprizing,
dancing along, tossing
books and dusty leaves
into the sun,
they chant, it would seem,
your momentary quatrains,
nose-thumbing, free-lancing
poet of the schoolyard—
prize-giver and taker
now, a pillar
swaddled in laurels—
lost classmate, look!
your glory was here.
1962
PEELING ONIONS
Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There’s not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.
Crying was labor, once
when I’d good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.
A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—
yet all that stayed
stuffed in my lungs like smog.
These old tears in the chopping-bowl.
1961
GHOST OF A CHANCE
You see a man
trying to think.
You want to say
to everything:
Keep off! Give him room!
But you only watch,
terrified
the old consolations
will get him at last
like a fish
half-dead from flopping
and almost crawling
across the shingle,
&n
bsp; almost breathing
the raw, agonizing
air
till a wave
pulls it back blind into the triumphant
sea.
1962
THE WELL
Down this old well
what leaves have fallen,
what cores of eaten apples,
what scraps of paper!
An old trash barrel.
November, no one comes.
But I come, trying
to breathe that word
into the well’s ear
which could make the leaves fly up
like a green jet
to clothe the naked tree,
the whole fruit leap to the bough,
the scraps like fleets of letters
sail up into my hands.
Leiden, 1961
NOVELLA
Two people in a room, speaking harshly.
One gets up, goes out to walk.
(That is the man.)
and washes the dishes, cracking one.
(That is the woman.)
It gets dark outside.
The children quarrel in the attic.
She has no blood left in her heart.
The man comes back to a dark house.
The only light is in the attic.
He has forgotten his key.
He rings at his own door
and hears sobbing on the stairs.
The lights go on in the house.
The door closes behind him.
Outside, separate as minds,
the stars too come alight.
1962
FACE
I could look at you a long time,
man of red and blue;
your eye glows mockingly
from the rainbow-colored flesh
Karel Appel clothed you in.
You are a fish,
drawn up dripping hugely
from the sea of paint,
laid on the canvas
to glower and flash
out of the blackness
that is your true element
1962
PROSPECTIVE
IMMIGRANTS
PLEASE NOTE
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
1962
LIKENESS
A good man
is an odd thing:
hard to find
as the song says,
he is anarchic
as a mountain freshet
and unprotected
by the protectors.
1962
THE LAG
With you it is still the middle of the night.
Nothing I know will make you know
what birds cried me awake
or how the wet light leaked
into my sky.
Day came as no clear victory,
it’s raining still, but light
washes the menace from obscure forms
and in the shaving mirror there’s
a face I recognize.
With you it is still the middle of the night.
You hug yourself, tightened as in a berth
suspended over the Grand Banks
where time is already American
and hanging fire.
I’m older now than you.
I feel your black dreams struggling at a porthole
stuffed full of night. I feel you choking
in that thick place. My words
reach you as through a telephone
where some submarine echo of my voice
blurts knowledge you can’t use.
1962
ALWAYS THE SAME
Slowly, Prometheus
bleeds to life
in his huge loneliness.
You, for whom
his bowels are exposed,
go about your affairs
dying a little every day
from the inside out
almost imperceptibly
till the late decades when
women go hysterical
and men are dumbly frightened
and far away, like the sea
Prometheus sings on
“like a battle-song after a battle.”
1962
PEACE
Lashes of white light
binding another hailcloud—
the whole onset all over
bursting against our faces,
sputtering like dead holly
fired in a grate:
And the birds go mad
potted by grapeshot
while the sun shines
in one quarter of heaven
and the rainbow
breaks out its enormous flag—
oily, unnegotiable—
over the sack-draped backs
of the cattle in their kingdom.
1961
THE ROOFWALKER
For Denise Levertov
Over the half-finished houses
night comes. The builders
stand on the roof. It is
quiet after the hammers,
the pulleys hang slack.
Giants, the roofwalkers,
on a listing deck, the wave
of darkness about to break
on their heads. The sky
is a torn sail where figures
pass magnified, shadows
on a burning deck.
I feel like them up there:
exposed, larger than life,
and due to break my neck.
Was it worth while to lay—
with infinite exertion—
a roof I can’t live under?
—All those blueprints,
closings of gaps,
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn’t choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I’m naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading—not with indifference—
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs.
1961
POEMS
(1955–1957)
AT THE JEWISH NEW YEAR
For more than five thousand years
This calm September day
With yellow in the leaf
Has lain in the kernel of Time
While the world outside the walls
Has had its turbulent say
And history like a long
Snake has crawled on its way
And is crawling onward still.
And we have little to tell
On this or any feast
Except of the terrible past.
Five thousand years are cast
Down before the wondering child
Who must expiate them all.
Some of us have replied
In the bitterness of youth
Or the qualms of middle-age:
“If Time is unsatisfied,
And all our fathers have suffered
Can never be eno
ugh,
Why, then, we choose to forget.
Let our forgetting begin
With those age-old arguments
In which their minds were wound
Like musty phylacteries;
And we choose to forget as well
Those cherished histories
That made our old men fond,
And already are strange to us.
“Or let us, being today
Too rational to cry out,
Or trample underfoot
What after all preserves
A certain savor yet—
Though torn up by the roots—
Let us make our compromise
With the terror and the guilt
And view as curious relics
Once found in daily use
The mythology, the names
That, however Time has corrupted
Their ancient purity
Still burn like yellow flames,
But their fire is not for us.”
And yet, however we choose
To deny or to remember,
Though on the calendars
We wake and suffer by,
This day is merely one
Of thirty in September—
In the kernel of the mind
The new year must renew
This day, as for our kind
Over five thousand years,
The task of being ourselves.
Whatever we strain to forget,
Our memory must be long.
May the taste of honey linger
Under the bitterest tongue.
1955
MOVING IN WINTER
Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,
is carried piecemeal through the snow:
Headboard and footboard now, the bed
where she has lain desiring him
where overhead his sleep will build
its canopy to smother her once more;
their table, by four elbows worn
evening after evening while the wax runs down;