But have recaptured a sufficiency
Of France’s cognac; and it shall be well,
Given sufficient time, if we can down
Half of it, being as we are, reduced.
Five dead in the pasture, yet they loom
As thirstily as ever. Are recalled
By daring wagers to this living room:
“I’ll be around to leak over your grave.”
And Durendal, my only Durendal,
Thou hast preserved me better than a sword;
Rest in the enemy umbrella stand
While that I measure out another drink.
I am beholden to thee, by this hand,
This measuring hand. We are beholden all.
A POEM FOR JULIA
Held in her hand of “almost flawless skin”
A small sprig of Sweet William as a badge
Of beauty, and the region of her nose
Seemed to be made so delicate and thin,
Light of the sun might touch the cartilage
With numerous golden tones and hints of rose
If she but turned to the window now to smell
The lilacs and the undulant green lawn,
Trim as a golf course, where a haze revealed
The sheep, distinguished each with a separate bell,
Grazing and moping near the neighbor field
Where all the clover-seeking bees were gone,
But stood in modesty in the full sight
Of Memling, whose accomplished busy hand
Rendered this wimpled lady in such white
Untinted beauty, that she seems to stand
Even as gently to our present gaze
As she had stood there in her breathing days.
Seeing this painting, I am put in mind
Of many a freakish harridan and clown
Who by their native clumsiness or fate
Won for themselves astonishing renown
And stand amongst us even to this date
Since art and history were so inclined:
Here, in a generous Italian scene,
A pimpled, chinless shepherd, whose rough thought
And customary labor lead the ram
Into his sheep for profit and for sport,
Guide their ungainly pleasure with obscene
Mirth at the comedy of sire and dam
Till he has grossly married every ewe—
This shepherd, in a mangy cap of fur,
Stands at the window still regarding her,
That only lady, if the Pope speaks true,
Who with a grace more than we understand
Ate of her portion with a flawless hand.
And once a chattering agent of Pope Paul,
A small, foul-minded clergyman, stood by
To watch the aging Michelangelo
Set his Last Judgment on the papal wall,
And muttered thereupon that to his eye
It was a lewd and most indecent show
Of nakedness, not for a sacred place,
Fitted to whorehouse or to public bath;
At which the painter promptly drew his face
Horribly gripped, his face a fist of pain,
Amongst those fixed in God’s eternal wrath,
And when the fool made motion to complain
He earned this solemn judgment of the Pope:
“Had art set you on Purgatory’s Mount
Then had I done my utmost for your hope,
But Hell’s fierce immolation takes no count
Of offices and prayers, for as you know,
From that place nulla est redemptio.”
And I recall certain ambassadors,
Cuffed all in ermine and with vests of mail
Who came their way into the town of Prague
Announced by horns, as history tells the tale,
To seek avoidances of future wars
And try the meaning of the Decalogue,
But whispers went about against their names.
And so it happened that a courtier-wit,
Hating their cause with an intemperate might,
Lauded his castle’s vantage, and made claims
Upon their courtesy to visit it,
And having brought them to that famous height
To witness the whole streamed and timbered view
Of his ancestral property, and smell
His fine ancestral air, he pushed them through
The open-standing window, whence they fell,
Oh, in a manner worthy to be sung,
Full thirty feet into a pile of dung.
How many poets, with profoundest breath,
Have set their ladies up to spite the worm,
So that pale mistress or high-busted bawd
Could smile and spit into the eye of death
And dance into our midst all fleshed and firm
Despite she was most perishably flawed?
She lasts, but not in her own body’s right,
Nor do we love her for her endless poise.
All of her beauty has become a part
Of neighboring beauty, and what could excite
High expectations among hopeful boys
Now leaves her to the nunnery of art.
And yet a searching discipline can keep
That eye still clear, as though in spite of Hell,
So that she seems as innocent as sheep
Where they still graze, denuded of their smell,
Where fool still writhes upon the chapel wall,
A shepherd stares, ambassadors still fall.
Adam and Eve knew such perfection once,
God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground
Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all.
But in our fallen state where the blood hunts
For blood, and rises at the hunting sound,
What do we know of lasting since the fall?
Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth,
Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree,
The grasshopper, and the failing of desire,
And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy
Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir
A secret-voweled, unutterable truth?
The heart is ramified with an old force
(Outlingering the blood, out of the sway
Of its own fleshy trap) that finds its source
Deep in the phosphorous waters of the bay,
Or in the wind, or pointing cedar tree,
Or its own ramified complexity.
CHRISTMAS IS COMING
Darkness is for the poor, and thorough cold,
As they go wandering the hills at night,
Gunning for enemies. Winter locks the lake;
The rocks are harder for it. What was grass
Is fossilized and brittle; it can hurt,
Being a torture to the kneeling knee,
And in the general pain of cold, it sticks
Particular pain where crawling is required.
Christmas is coming. The goose is getting fat.
Please put a penny in the Old Man’s hat.
Where is the warmth of blood? The enemy
Has ears that can hear clearly in the cold,
Can hear the shattering of fossil grass,
Can hear the stiff cloth rub against itself,
Making a sound. Where is the blood? It lies
Locked in the limbs of some poor animal
In a diaspora of crimson ice.
The skin freezes to metal. One must crawl
Quietly in the dark. Where is the warmth?
The lamb has yielded up its fleece and warmth
And woolly life, but who shall taste of it?
Here on the ground one cannot see the stars.
The lamb is killed. The goose is getting fat.
A wind blows steadily against the trees,
And somewhere in the blackness they are black.
Yet crawling one
encounters bits of string,
Pieces of foil left by the enemy.
(A rifle takes its temper from the cold.)
Where is the pain? The sense has frozen up,
And fingers cannot recognize the grass,
Cannot distinguish their own character,
Being blind with cold, being stiffened by the cold;
Must find out thistles to remember pain.
Keep to the frozen ground or else be killed.
Yet crawling one encounters in the dark
The frosty carcasses of birds, their feet
And wings all glazed. And still we crawl to learn
Where pain was lost, how to recover pain.
Reach for the brambles, crawl to them and reach,
Clutching for thorns, search carefully to feel
The point of thorns, life’s crown, the Old Man’s hat.
Yet quietly. Do not disturb the brambles.
Winter has taught the air to clarify
All noises, and the enemy can hear
Perfectly in the cold. Nothing but sound
Is known. Where is the warmth and pain?
Christmas is coming. Darkness is for the poor.
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, God bless you.
IMITATION
Let men take note of her, touching her shyness,
How grace informs and presses the brocade
And think all glittering enterprise, and highness
Of blood or deed were yet in something minus
Lacking the wide approval of her mouth,
And to betoken every man his drouth,
Drink, in her name, all tankards to their dryness.
Wanting her clear perfection, how may tongues
Manifest what no language understands?
Yet as her beauty evermore commands
Even the tanager with tiny lungs
To flush all silence, may she by these songs
Know it was love I looked for at her hands.
THE GARDENS OF THE VILLA D’ESTE
This is Italian. Here
Is cause for the undiminished bounce
Of sex, cause for the lark, the animal spirit
To rise, aerated, but not beyond our reach, to spread
Friction upon the air, cause to sing loud for the bed
Of jonquils, the linen bed, and established merit
Of love, and grandly to pronounce
Pleasure without peer.
Goddess, be with me now;
Commend my music to the woods.
There is no garden to the practiced gaze
Half so erotic: here the sixteenth century thew
Rose to its last perfection, this being chiefly due
To the provocative role the water plays.
Tumble and jump, the fountains’ moods
Teach the world how.
But, ah, who ever saw
Finer proportion kept. The sum
Of intersecting limbs was something planned.
Ligorio, the laurel! Every turn and quirk
Weaves in this waving green and liquid world to work
Its formula, binding upon the gland,
Even as molecules succumb
To Avogadro’s law.
The intricate mesh of trees,
Sagging beneath a lavender snow
Of wisteria, wired by creepers, perfectly knit
A plot to capture alive the migrant, tourist soul
In its corporeal home with all the deft control
And artifice of an Hephaestus’ net.
Sunlight and branch rejoice to show
Sudden interstices.
The whole garden inclines
The flesh as water falls, to seek
For depth. Consider the top balustrade,
Where twinned stone harpies, with domed and virgin breasts,
Spurt from their nipples that no pulse or hand has pressed
Clear liquid arcs of benefice and aid
To the chief purpose. They are Greek
Versions of valentines
And spend themselves to fill
The celebrated flumes that skirt
The horseshoe stairs. Triumphant then to a sluice,
With Brownian movement down the giggling water drops
Past haunches, over ledges, out of mouths, and stops
In a still pool, but, by a plumber’s ruse,
Rises again to laugh and squirt
At heaven, and is still
Busy descending. White
Ejaculations leap to teach
How fertile are these nozzles; the streams run
Góngora through the garden, channel themselves, and pass
To lily-padded ease, where insubordinate lass
And lad can cool their better parts, where sun
Heats them again to furnace pitch
To prove his law is light.
Marble the fish that puke
Eternally, marble the lips
Of gushing naiads, pleased to ridicule
Adonis, marble himself, and larger than life-sized,
Untouched by Venus, posthumously circumcised
Patron of Purity; and any fool
Who feels no flooding at the hips
These spendthrift stones rebuke.
It was in such a place
That Mozart’s Figaro contrived
The totally expected. This is none
Of your French topiary, geometric works,
Based on God’s rational, wrist-watch universe; here lurks
The wood louse, the night crawler, the homespun
Spider; here are they born and wived
And bedded, by God’s grace.
Actually, it is real
The way the world is real: the horse
Must turn against the wind, and the deer feed
For the recalcitrant; a style can teach us how
To know the world in little where the weed
Has license, where by dint of force
D’Estes have set their seal.
Their spirit entertains.
And we are honorable guests
Come by imagination, come by night,
Hearing in the velure of darkness impish strings
Mincing Tartini, hearing the hidden whisperings:
“Carissima, the moon gives too much light,”
Though by its shining it invests
Her bodice with such gains
As show their shadowed worth
Deep in the cleavage. Lanterns, lamps
Of pumpkin-colored paper dwell upon
The implications of the skin-tight silk, allude
Directly to the body; under the subdued
Report of corks, whisperings, the chaconne,
Boisterous water runs its ramps
Out, to the end of mirth.
Accommodating plants
Give umbrage where the lovers delve
Deeply for love, give way to their delight,
As Pliny’s pregnant mouse, bearing unborn within her
Lewd sons and pregnant daughters, hears the adept beginner:
“Cor mio, your supports are much too tight,”
While overhead the stars resolve
Every extravagance.
Tomorrow, before dawn,
Gardeners will come to resurrect
Downtrodden iris, dispose of broken glass,
Return the diamond earrings to the villa, but
As for the moss upon the statue’s shoulder, not
To defeat its green invasion, but to pass
Over the liberal effect
Caprice and cunning spawn.
For thus it was designed:
Controlled disorder at the heart
Of everything, the paradox, the old
Oxymoronic itch to set the formal stric
tures
Within a natural context, where the tension lectures
Us on our mortal state, and by controlled
Disorder, labors to keep art
From being too refined.
Susan, it had been once
My hope to see this place with you,
See it as in the hour of thoughtless youth.
For age mocks all diversity, its genesis,
And whispers to the heart, “Cor mio, beyond all this
Lies the unchangeable and abstract truth,”
Claims of the grass, it is not true,
And makes our youth its dunce.
Therefore, some later day
Recall these words, let them be read
Between us, let them signify that here
Are more than formulas, that age sees no more clearly
For its poor eyesight, and philosophy grows surly,
That falling water and the blood’s career
Lead down the garden path to bed
And win us both to May.
A DEEP BREATH AT DAWN
Morning has come at last. The rational light
Discovers even the humblest thing that yearns
For heaven; from its scaled and shadeless height,
Figures its difficult way among the ferns,
Nests in the trees, and is ambitious to warm
The chilled vein, and to light the spider’s thread
With modulations hastening to a storm
Of the full spectrum, rushing from red to red.
I have watched its refinements since the dawn,
When, at the birdcall, all the ghosts were gone.
The wolf, the fig tree, and the woodpecker
Were sacred once to Undertaker Mars;
Honor was done in Rome to that home-wrecker
Whose armor and whose ancient, toughened scars
Made dance the very meat of Venus’ heart,
And hot her ichor, and immense her eyes,
Till his rough ways and her invincible art
Locked and laid low their shining, tangled thighs.
My garden yields his fig tree, even now
Bearing heraldic fruit at every bough.
Someone I have not seen for six full years
Might pass this garden through, and might pass by
The oleander bush, the bitter pears
Unfinished by the sun, with only an eye