Can fathom her intent? Loving the Greeks,
He whispered to a nun who strove to woo
His spirit unto God by prayer and fast,
“Pray that I go to Limbo, if it please
Heaven to let my soul regard at last
Democritus, Plato and Socrates.”
And so it was. The river, as foretold,
Ran darkly by; under his tongue he found
Coin for the passage; the ferry tossed and rolled;
The sages stood on their appointed ground,
Sighing, all as foretold. The mind was tasked;
He had not dreamed that so many had died.
“But where is Alcibiades,” he asked,
“The golden roisterer, the animal pride?”
Those sages who had spoken of the love
And enmity of things, how all things flow,
Stood in a light no life is witness of,
And Socrates, whose wisdom was to know
He did not know, spoke with a solemn mien,
And all his wonderful ugliness was lit,
“He whom I loved for what he might have been
Freezes with traitors in the ultimate pit.”
BIRDWATCHERS OF AMERICA
I suffer now continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I received a singular warning: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
BAUDELAIRE, Journals
It’s all very well to dream of a dove that saves,
Picasso’s or the Pope’s,
The one that annually coos in Our Lady’s ear
Half the world’s hopes,
And the other one that shall cunningly engineer
The retirement of all businessmen to their graves,
And when this is brought about
Make us the loving brothers of every lout—
But in our part of the country a false dusk
Lingers for hours; it steams
From the soaked hay, wades in the cloudy woods,
Engendering other dreams.
Formless and soft beyond the fence it broods
Or rises as a faint and rotten musk
Out of a broken stalk.
There are some things of which we seldom talk;
For instance, the woman next door, whom we hear at night,
Claims that when she was small
She found a man stone dead near the cedar trees
After the first snowfall.
The air was clear. He seemed in ultimate peace
Except that he had no eyes. Rigid and bright
Upon the forehead, furred
With a light frost, crouched an outrageous bird.
THE SONG OF THE FLEA
Beware of those that flatter;
Likewise beware of those
That would redress the matter
By publishing their woes.
They would corrupt your nature
For their own purposes
And taint God’s every creature
With pestilent disease.
Now look you in the mirror
And swear to your own face
It never dealt in error
With pity or with praise.
Swear that there is no Circe,
And swear me, if you can,
That without aid or mercy
You are but your own man.
If you can swear thus nimbly
Then we can end our wars
And join in the assembly
Of jungle predators,
For honestly to thieve
Bespeaks a brotherhood:
Without a “by your leave”
I live upon your blood.
THE MAN WHO MARRIED MAGDALENE
Variation on a Theme by Louis Simpson
Then said the Lord, dost thou well to be angry?
I have been in this bar
For close to seven days.
The dark girl over there,
For a modest dollar, lays.
And you can get a blow-job
Where other men have pissed
In the little room that’s sacred
To the Evangelist—
If you’re inclined that way.
For myself, I drink and sleep.
The floor is knotty cedar
But the beer is flat and cheap.
And you can bet your life
I’ll be here another seven.
Stranger, here’s to my wife,
Who died and went to heaven.
She was a famous beauty,
But our very breath is loaned.
The rabbi’s voice was fruity,
And since then I’ve been stoned—
A royal, nonstop bender.
But your money’s no good here;
Put it away. Bartender,
Give my friend a beer.
I dreamed the other night
When the sky was full of stars
That I stood outside a gate
And looked in through the bars.
Two angels stood together.
A purple light was shed
From their every metal feather.
And then one of them said,
“It was pretty much the same
For years and years and years,
But since the Christians came
The place is full of queers.
Still, let them have their due.
Things here are far less solemn.
Instead of each beardy Jew
Muttering, ‘Shalom, Shalom,’
There’s a down-to-earth, informal
Fleshiness to the scene;
It’s healthier, more normal,
If you know what I mean.
Such as once went to Gehenna
Now dance among the blessed.
But Mary Magdalena,
She had it the best.”
And he nudged his feathered friend
And gave him a wicked leer,
And I woke up and fought back
The nausea with a beer.
What man shall understand
The Lord’s mysterious way?
My tongue is thick with worship
And whiskey, and some day
I will come to in Bellevue
And make psalms unto the Lord.
But verily I tell you,
She hath her reward.
IMPROVISATIONS ON AESOP
1
It was a tortoise aspiring to fly
That murdered Aeschylus. All men must die.
2
The crocodile rends man and beast to death
And has St. Francis’ birds to pick his teeth.
3
Lorenzo sponsored artists, and the ant
Must save to give the grasshopper a grant.
4
The blind man bears the lame, who gives him eyes;
Only the weak make common enterprise.
5
Frogs into bulls, sows’ ears into silk purses,
These are our hopes in youth, in age our curses.
6
Spare not the rod, lest thy child be undone,
And at the gallows cry, “Behold thy son.”
7
The Fox and Buddha put away their lust:
“Sour grapes!” they cry, “All but the soul is dust!”
8
An ass may look at an angel, Balaam was shown;
Cudgel thy wits, and leave thine ass alone.
9
Is not that pastoral instruction sweet
Which says who shall be eaten, who shall eat?
THE THOUGHTFUL ROISTERER DECLINES THE GAMBIT
I’m not going to get myself shot full of holes
For comparative strangers, like Richelieu or the King;
I prefer to investigate how a coward may cling
To the modest ways of simple civilian souls.
If I couldn’t put down a little bit of the hair
Of the dog each day, I’d be as good
as dead;
And it’s nothing to me that a man will die in bed
Or under the table without the Croix de Guerre.
So as far as I’m concerned, you can drop the act
About the Immortal Fame and Illustrious End.
I shall die unsung, but with all of me intact,
Toasting His Noble Majesty and His Grace.
And if I die by the mouth, believe me, friend,
It won’t be the cannon’s mouth, in any case.
(AFTER CHARLES VION DE DALIBRAY)
GIANT TORTOISE
I am related to stones
The slow accretion of moss where dirt is wedged
Long waxy hair that can split boulders.
Events are not important.
I live in my bone
Recalling the hour of my death.
It takes more toughness than most have got.
Or a saintliness.
Strength of a certain kind, anyway.
Bald toothless clumsy perhaps
With all the indignity of old age
But age is not important.
There is nothing worth remembering
But the silver glint in the muck
The thickening of great trees
The hard crust getting harder.
“MORE LIGHT! MORE LIGHT!”
for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
“AND CAN YE SING BALULOO WHEN THE BAIRN GREETS?”
All these years I have known of her despair.
“I was about to be happy when the abyss
Opened its mouth. It was empty, except for this
Yellowish sperm of horror that glistened there.
I tried so hard not to look as the thing grew fat
And pulsed in its bed of hair. I tried to think
Of Sister Marie Gerald, of our swaddled link
To the Lord of Hosts, the manger, and all of that.
None of it worked. And even the whip-lash wind,
To which I clung and begged to be blown away,
Didn’t work. These eyes, that many have praised as gay,
Are the stale jellies of lust in which Adam sinned.
And nothing works. Sickened since God knows when,
Since early childhood when I first saw the horror,
I have spent hours alone before my mirror.
There is no cure for me in the world of men.”
“IT OUT-HERODS HEROD. PRAY YOU, AVOID IT.”
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
And in their fairy tales
The warty giant and witch
Get sealed in doorless jails
And the match-girl strikes it rich.
I’ve made myself a drink.
The giant and witch are set
To bust out of the clink
When my children have gone to bed.
All frequencies are loud
With signals of despair;
In flash and morse they crowd
The rondure of the air.
For the wicked have grown strong,
Their numbers mock at death,
Their cow brings forth its young,
Their bull engendereth.
Their very fund of strength,
He stalks its breadth and length
And finds out even Job.
Yet by quite other laws
My children make their case;
Half God, half Santa Claus,
But with my voice and face,
A hero comes to save
The poorman, beggarman, thief,
And make the world behave
And put an end to grief.
And that their sleep be sound
I say this childermas
Who could not, at one time,
Have saved them from the gas.
FROM
A SUMMONING OF STONES
(1954)
DOUBLE SONNET
I recall everything, but more than all,
Words being nothing now, an ease that ever
Remembers her to my unfailing fever,
How she came forward to me, letting fall
Lamplight upon her dress till every small
Motion made visible seemed no mere endeavor
Of body to articulate its offer,
But more a grace won by the way from all
Striving in what is difficult, from all
Losses, so that she moved but to discover
A practice of the blood, as the gulls hover,
Winged with their life, above the harbor wall,
Tracing inflected silence in the tall
Air with a tilt of mastery and quiver
Against the light, as the light fell to favor
Her coming forth; this chiefly I recall.
It is a part of pride, guiding the hand
At the piano in the splash and passage
Of sacred dolphins, making numbers human
By sheer extravagance that can command
Pythagorean heavens to spell their message
Of some unlooked-for peace, out of the common;
Taking no thought at all that man and woman,
Lost in the trance of lamplight, felt the presage
Of the unbidden terror and bone hand
Of gracelessness, and the unspoken omen
That yet shall render all, by its first usage,
Speechless, inept, and totally unmanned.
LA CONDITION BOTANIQUE
Romans, rheumatic, gouty, came
To bathe in Ischian springs where water steamed,
Puffed and enlarged their bold imperial thoughts, and which
Later Madame Curie declared to be so rich
In radioactive content as she deemed
Should win them everlasting fame.
Scattered throughout their ice and snow
The Finns have built airtight cabins of log
Where t
hey may lie, limp and entranced by the sedative purr
Of steam pipes, or torment themselves with flails of fir
To stimulate the blood, and swill down grog,
Setting the particles aglow.
Similarly the Turks, but know
Nothing of the more delicate thin sweat
Of plants, breathing their scented oxygen upon
Brooklyn’s botanical gardens, roofed with glass and run
So to the pleasure of each leafy pet,
Manured, addressed in Latin, so
To its thermostatic happiness—
Spreading its green and innocence to the ground
Where pipes, like Satan masquerading as the snake,
Coil and uncoil their frightful liquid length, and make
Gurglings of love mixed with a rumbling sound
Of sharp intestinal distress—
So to its pleasure, as I said,
That each particular vegetable may thrive,
Early and late, as in the lot first given Man,
Sans interruption, as when Universal Pan
Led on the Eternal Spring. The spears of chive,
The sensitive plant, showing its dread,
The Mexican flytrap, that can knit
Its quilled jaws pitilessly, and would hurt
A fly with pleasure, leading Riley’s life in bed
Of peat moss and of chemicals, and is thoughtfully fed
Flies for the entrée, flies for the dessert,
Fruit flies for fruit, and all of it
Administered as by a wife—
Lilith our lady, patroness of plants,
Who sings, Lullay myn lykyng, myn owyn dere derlyng,
Madrigals nightly to the spiny stalk in sterling
Whole notes of admiration and romance—