And I hoped she would show some pleasure in them
But got that mechanical enthusiastic show
She used on the telephone once in praising some friend
For thoughtfulness or good taste or whatever it was,
And when she hung up, turned to us all and said,
“God, what a bore she is!”
I think she was trying to show us how honest she was,
At least with us. But the effect
Was just the opposite, and now I don’t think
She knows what honesty is. “Your mother’s a whore,”
Someone said, not meaning she slept around,
Though perhaps this was part of it, but
Meaning she had lost all sense of honor,
And I think this is true.
But that’s not what I wanted to say.
What was it I wanted to say?
When he said that about Mother, I had to laugh,
I really did, it was so amazingly true.
Where was I?
Lie back. Relax.
Oh yes. I remember now what it was.
It was what I saw them do to the emperor.
They captured him, you know. Eagles and all.
They stripped him, and made an iron collar for his neck,
And they made a cage out of our captured spears,
And they put him inside, naked and collared,
And exposed to the view of the whole enemy camp.
And I was tied to a post and made to watch
When he was taken out and flogged by one of their generals
And then forced to offer his ripped back
As a mounting block for the barbarian king
To get on his horse;
And one time to get down on all fours to be the royal throne
When the king received our ambassadors
To discuss the question of ransom.
Of course, he didn’t want ransom.
And I was tied to a post and made to watch.
That’s enough for now. Lie back. Try to relax.
No, that’s not all.
They kept it up for two months.
We were taken to their outmost provinces.
It was always the same, and we were always made to watch,
The others and I. How he stood it, I don’t know.
And then suddenly
There were no more floggings or humiliations,
The king’s personal doctor saw to his back,
He was given decent clothing, and the collar was taken off,
And they treated us all with a special courtesy.
By the time we reached their capital city
His back was completely healed.
They had taken the cage apart—
But of course they didn’t give us back our spears.
Then later that month, it was a warm afternoon in May,
The rest of us were marched out to the central square.
The crowds were there already, and the posts were set up,
To which we were tied in the old watching positions.
And he was brought out in the old way, and stripped,
And then tied flat on a big rectangular table
So that only his head could move.
Then the king made a short speech to the crowds,
To which they responded with gasps of wild excitement,
And which was then translated for the rest of us.
It was the sentence. He was to be flayed alive,
As slowly as possible, to drag out the pain.
And we were made to watch. The king’s personal doctor,
The one who had tended his back,
Came forward with a tray of surgical knives.
They began at the feet.
And we were not allowed to close our eyes
Or to look away. When they were done, hours later,
The skin was turned over to one of their saddle-makers
To be tanned and stuffed and sewn. And for what?
A hideous life-sized doll, filled out with straw,
In the skin of the Roman Emperor, Valerian,
With blanks of mother-of-pearl under the eyelids,
And painted shells that had been prepared beforehand
For the fingernails and toenails,
Roughly cross-stitched on the inseam of the legs
And up the back to the center of the head,
Swung in the wind on a rope from the palace flag-pole;
And young girls were brought there by their mothers
To be told about the male anatomy.
His death had taken hours.
They were very patient.
And with him passed away the honor of Rome.
In the end, I was ransomed. Mother paid for me.
You must rest now. You must. Lean back.
Look at the flowers.
Yes. I am looking. I wish I could be like them.
PIG
In the manger of course were cows and the Child Himself
Was like unto a lamb
Who should come in the fulness of time on an ass’s back
And all things be redeemed—the suckling babe
Lie safe in the serpent’s home
And the lion eat straw like the ox and roar its love
to Mark and to Jerome
And God’s Peaceable Kingdom return among them all
Save one full of offense
Into which the thousand fiends of a human soul
Were cast and driven hence
And the one thus cured gone up into the hills
To worship and to pray:
O Swine that takest away our sins
That takest away
OSTIA ANTICA
for William and Dale MacDonald
Given this light,
The departing thunderhead in its anger
Off to one side, and given
These ancient stones in their setting, themselves refreshed
And rendered strangely younger
By wetness alive with the wriggling brass of heaven,
Where is the spirit’s part unwashed
Of all poor spite?
The cypress thrust,
Greened in the glass of air as never
Since the first greenness offered,
Not to desire our prayer: “To ghostly creatures,
Peace, and an end of fever
Till all this dust assemble,” but delivered
To their resistless lives and natures,
Rise as they must.
And the broken wall
Is only itself, deeply accepting
The sun’s warmth to its bricks.
The puddles blink; a snail marches the Roman
Road of its own adopting.
The marble nymph is stripped to the flush of sex
As if in truth this timeless, human
Instant were all.
Is it the bird’s
Voice, the delicious voice of water,
Addresses us on the splendid
Topic of love? And promises to youth
Still livelier forms and whiter?
Here are quick freshes, here is the body suspended
In its firm blessing, here the mouth
Finds out its words.
See, they arise
In the sign of ivy, the young males
To their strength, the meadows restored;
Concupiscence of eye, and the world’s pride;
Of love, the naked skills.
At the pool’s edge, the rippled image cleared,
That face set among leaves is glad,
Noble and wise.
What was begun,
The mastered force, breeds and is healing.
Pebbles and clover speak.
Each hanging waterdrop burns with a fierce
Bead of the sun’s instilling.
But softly, beneath the flutesong and volatile shriek
Of
birds, are to be heard discourse
Mother and son.
“If there were hushed
To us the images of earth, its poles
Hushed, and the waters of it,
And hushed the tumult of the flesh, even
The voice intrinsic of our souls,
Each tongue and token hushed and the long habit
Of thought, if that first light, the given
To us were hushed,
So that the washed
Object, fixed in the sun, were dumb,
And to the mind its brilliance
Were from beyond itself, and the mind were clear
As the unclouded dome
Wherein all things diminish, in that silence
Might we not confidently hear
God as he wished?”
Then from the grove
Suddenly falls a flight of bells.
A figure moves from the wood,
Darkly approaching at the hour of vespers
Along the ruined walls.
And bearing heavy articles of blood
And symbols of endurance, whispers,
“This is love.”
THE DOVER BITCH A Criticism of Life
for Andrews Wanning
So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, “Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.”
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’Amour.
TO A MADONNA Ex-Voto in the Spanish Style
for Allen Tate
Madonna, mistress, I shall build for you
An altar of my misery, and hew
Out of my heart’s remote and midnight pitch,
Far from all worldly lusts and sneers, a niche
Enamelled totally in gold and blue
Where I shall set you up and worship you.
And of my verse, like hammered silver lace
Studded with amethysts of rhyme, I’ll place
A hand-wrought crown upon your head, and I’ll
Make you a coat in the barbaric style,
Picked out in seedling tears instead of pearl,
That you shall wear like mail, my mortal girl,
Lined with suspicion, made of jealousy,
Encasing all your charms, that none may see.
As for the intimate part of your attire,
Your dress shall be composed of my desire,
Rising and falling, swirling from your knees
To your round hills and deep declivities.
Of the respect I owe you I shall make
A pair of satin shoes that they may take—
Though most unworthily prepared to do it—
The authentic shape and imprint of your foot.
And if I fail, for all my proffered boon,
To make a silver footstool of the moon,
Victorious queen, I place beneath your heel
The head of this black serpent that I feel
Gnawing at my intestines all the time,
Swollen with hate and venomous with crime.
You shall behold my thoughts like tapers lit
Before your flowered shrine, and brightening it,
Reflected in the semi-dome’s clear skies
Like so many fierce stars or fiery eyes.
And I shall be as myrrh and frankincense,
Rising forever in a smoky trance,
And the dark cloud of my tormented hopes
Shall lift in yearning toward your snowy slopes.
And finally, to render you more real,
I shall make seven blades of Spanish steel
Out of the Seven Deadly Sins, and I
Shall mix my love with murderous savagery,
And like a circus knife-thrower, I’ll aim
At the pure center of your gentle frame,
And plunge those blades into your beating heart,
Your bleeding, suffering, palpitating heart.
(AFTER BAUDELAIRE)
CLAIR DE LUNE
Powder and scent and silence. The young dwarf
Shoulders his lute. The moon is Levantine.
It settles its pearl in every glass of wine.
Harlequin is already at the wharf.
The gallant is masked. A pressure of his thumb
Communicates cutaneous interest.
On the smooth upward swelling of a breast
A small black heart is fixed with spirit gum.
The thieving moment is now. Deftly, Pierrot
Exits, bearing a tray of fruits and coins.
A monkey, chained by his tiny loins,
Is taken aboard. They let their moorings go.
Silence. Even the god shall soon be gone.
Shadows, in their cool, tidal enterprise,
Have eaten away his muscular stone thighs.
Moonlight edges across the empty lawn.
Taffeta whispers. Someone is staring through
The white ribs of the pergola. She stares
At a small garnet pulse that disappears
Steadily seaward. Ah, my dear, it is you.
But you are not alone. A gardener goes
Through the bone light about the dark estate.
He bows, and, cheerfully inebriate,
Admires the lunar ashes of a rose,
And sings to his imaginary loves.
Wait. You can hear him. The familiar notes
Drift toward the old moss-bottomed fishing boats:
“Happy the heart that thinks of no removes.”
This is your nightmare. Those cold hands are yours.
The pain in the drunken singing is your pain.
Morning will taste of bitterness again.
The heart turns to a stone, but it endures.
THREE PROMPTERS FROM THE WINGS
for George and Mary Dimock
ATROPOS: OR, THE FUTURE
He rushed out of the temple
And for all his young good looks,
Excellence at wrestling,
High and manly pride,
The giddy world’s own darling,
He thought of suicide.
(The facts are clear and simple
But are not found in books.)
Think how the young suppose
That any minute now
Some darkly beautiful
Stranger’s leg or throat
Will speak out in the taut
Inflections of desire,
Will choose them, will allow
Each finger its own thought
And whatever it reaches for.
A vision without clothes
Tickles the genitalia
And makes blithe the heart.
But in this most of all
He was cut out for failure.
That morning smelled of hay.
But all that he found tempting
Was a high, weathered cliff.
Now at a subtle prompting
He hesitated. If
He ended down below
He had overcome the Fates;
The oracle was false;
The gods themselves were blind.
A fate he could contravene
Was certainly not Fate.
All lay in his power.
(How this came to his mind
No child of man can say.
The clear, rational light
Touches on less than half,
And “he who hesitates …”
For who could presume to know
The decisive, inward pulse
Of things?)
After an hour
He rose to his full height,
The master of himself.
That morning smelled of hay,
The day was clear. A moisture
Cooled at the tips of leaves.
The fields were overlaid
With light. It was harvest time.
Three swallows appraised the day,
And bearing aloft their lives,
Sailed into a wild climb,
Then spilled across the pasture
Like water over tiles.
One could have seen for miles
The sun on a knife-blade.
And there he stood, the hero,
With a lascivious wind
Sliding across his chest,
(The sort of thing that women,
Who are fools the whole world over,
Would fondle and adore
And stand before undressed.)
But deep within his loins
A bitterness is set.
He is already blind.
The faceless powers summon
To their eternal sorrow
The handsome, bold, and vain,
And those dark things are met
At a place where three roads join.
They touch with an open sore
The lips that he shall kiss.
And some day men may call me,