Collected Poems, 1953-1993
John Updike
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1993 by John Updike
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Most of the poems in this work are from the following Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., collections: The Carpentered Hen, copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1982 by John Updike, copyright renewed 1982 by John Updike; Telephone Poles, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963 by John Updike; Midpoint, copyright © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Updike; Tossing and Turning, copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977 by John Updike; Facing Nature, copyright © 1985 by John Updike.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Updike, John.
[Poems. Selections]
Collected poems, 1953–1993 / John Updike. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96197-6
I. Title.
PS3 571.P4A6 1993
811’.54—dc20 92–28957
v3.1
Acknowledgments
The following publications first printed certain of these poems: Agni, The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, American Way, Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, The Bennington Review, Boston Magazine, The Boston Review of the Arts, Boston University Journal, Boulevard, The Christian Century, Commonweal, The Connecticut Poetry Review, Horse, The Formalist, Grand Street, Harper’s, Harvard Advocate, The Harvard Bulletin, The Harvard Lampoon, Ladies’ Home Journal, Life, Look, Mānoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, Modern Poetry: East and West, The Nation, Negative Capability, New England Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Quarterly, The New York Times, The Ontario Review, The Oxford American, Parabola, The Paris Review, Plum, Poetry, Poetry Review, Poets and Writers Celebration Program, Polemic, Polymus, Première, Punch, Quest Magazine, River City, The Saturday Review, Scientific American, Shenandoah, South Beach, The Southern California Anthology, South Shore, Sycamore Review, Syracuse 10, The Transatlantic Review, What’s New.
And the following presses and publishers issued broadsides and limited editions of various poems: The Adams and Lowell House Printers, Albondocani Press, Bits Press, Country Squires Books, Eurographica, Frank Hallman, Halty Ferguson, Lord John Press, Mummy Mountain Press, Palaemon Press, Press-22, Rook Broadsides, Santa Susana Press, Waves Press, and Wind River Press.
for all of my families
from John Franklin Hoyer, born in 1863,
to Wesley Doudi Githiora Updike born in 1989
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Preface
Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked
Cloud Shadows
Ex-Basketball Player
A Modest Mound of Bones
Sunflower
March: A Birthday Poem
Burning Trash
English Train Compartment
Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers
How to Be Uncle Sam
3 A.M.
Mobile of Birds
Shillington
Suburban Madrigal
Telephone Poles
Mosquito
Trees Eat Sunshine
Winter Ocean
Modigliani’s Death Mask
Seagulls
Seven Stanzas at Easter
B.W.I.
February 22
Summer: West Side
Wash
Maples in a Spruce Forest
Vermont
The Solitary Pond
Flirt
Fever
Earthworm
Old-Fashioned Lightning Rod
Sunshine on Sandstone
The Stunt Flier
Calendar
The Short Days
Boil
Widener Library, Reading Room
Movie House
Vibration
The Blessing
My Children at the Dump
The Great Scarf of Birds
Azores
Erotic Epigrams
Hoeing
Report of Health
Fireworks
Lamplight
Nuda Natens
Postcards from Soviet Cities
Moscow
Leningrad
Kiev
Tbilisi
Yerevan
Camera
Roman Portrait Busts
Fellatio
Décor
Poem for a Far Land
Late January
Dog’s Death
Home Movies
Antigua
Amoeba
Elm
Daughter
Eurydice
Seal in Nature
Air Show
Omega
The Angels
Bath After Sailing
Topsfield Fair
Pompeii
Sand Dollar
Washington
Dream Objects
Midpoint
I. Introduction
II. The Photographs
III. The Dance of the Solids
IV. The Play of Memory
V. Conclusion
Chloë’s Poem
Minority Report
Living with a Wife
At the Piano
In the Tub
Under the Sunlamp
During Menstruation
All the While
À l’École Berlitz
South of the Alps
A Bicycle Chain
Tossing and Turning
On an Island
Sunday Rain
Marching Through a Novel
Night Flight, over Ocean
Phenomena
Wind
Sunday
Touch of Spring
The House Growing
Cunts
Apologies to Harvard
Commencement, Pingree School
Conversation
Melting
Query
Heading for Nandi
Sleepless in Scarsdale
Note to the Previous Tenants
Pale Bliss
Mime
Golfers
Poisoned in Nassau
You Who Swim
Sunday in Boston
Raining in Magens Bay
Leaving Church Early
Another Dog’s Death
Dream and Reality
Dutch Cleanser
Rats
The Melancholy of Storm Windows
Calder’s Hands
The Grief of Cafeterias
Spanish Sonnets
To Ed Sissman
Ohio
Iowa
Waiting Rooms
Boston Lying-In
Mass. Mental Health
On the Way to Delphi
An Oddly Lovely Day Alone
Taste
Penumbrae
Revelation
The Shuttle
Crab Crack
Nature
The Moons of Jupiter
Upon the Last Day of His Forty-Ninth Year
Planting Trees
The Fleckings
East Hampton-Boston by Air
Small-City People
L.A.
Plow Cemetery
Spring Song
Accumulation
Styles of Bloom
<
br /> Natural Question
Two Hoppers
Two Sonnets Whose Titles Came to Me Simultaneously
The Dying Phobiac Takes His Fears with Him
No More Access to Her Underpants
Long Shadow
Aerie
The Code
Island Sun
Pain
Sleeping with You
Richmond
Gradations of Black
The Furniture
Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes
Ode to Rot
To Evaporation
Ode to Growth
To Fragmentation
Ode to Entropy
To Crystallization
Ode to Healing
Switzerland
Munich
A Pear like a Potato
Airport
From Above
Oxford, Thirty Years After
Somewhere
Sonnet to Man-Made Grandeur
Klimt and Schiele Confront the Cunt
Returning Native
Snowdrops 1987
Goodbye, Göteborg
Hot Water
Squirrels Mating
Sails on All Saints’ Day
Tulsa
Washington: Tourist View
Back Bay
In Memoriam Felis Felis
Enemies of a House
Orthodontia
Condo Moon
Pillow
Seattle Uplift
The Beautiful Bowel Movement
Charleston
Frost
To a Box Turtle
Each Summer’s Swallows
Fargo
Fall
The Millipede
Generic College
Perfection Wasted
Working Outdoors in Winter
Indianapolis
Zoo Bats
Landing in the Rain at La Guardia
Mouse Sex
Granite
Relatives
Thin Air
November
Light Switches
Miami
Fly
Flurry
Bindweed
July
To a Dead Flame
Back from Vacation
Literary Dublin
Elderly Sex
Celery
São Paulo
Rio de Janeiro
Brazil
Upon Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home
At the End of the Rainbow
Academy
Light Verse
Mountain Impasse
Solitaire
Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums
Player Piano
Snapshots
An Imaginable Conference
Dilemma in the Delta
Shipbored
Song of the Open Fireplace
The Clan
Youth’s Progress
Humanities Course
V. B. Nimble, V. B. Quick
Lament, for Cocoa
Pop Smash, Out of Echo Chamber
Sunglasses
Pooem
To an Usherette
Time’s Fool
Superman
An Ode
The Newlyweds
The Story of My Life
A Bitter Life
A Wooden Darning Egg
Publius Vergilius Maro, the Madison Avenue Hick
Tsokadze O Altitudo
The One-Year-Old
Room 28
Philological
Mr. High-Mind
Tax-Free Encounter
Scenic
Capacity
Little Poems
Popular Revivals 1956
Tune, in American Type
Due Respect
A Rack of Paperbacks
Even Egrets Err
Glasses
The Sensualist
In Memoriam
Planting a Mailbox
ZULUS LIVE IN LAND WITHOUT A SQUARE
Caligula’s Dream
Bendix
The Menagerie at Versailles in 1775
Reel
Kenneths
Upon Learning That a Bird Exists Called the Turnstone
In Extremis
Blked
Toothache Man
Party Knee
The Moderate
Deities and Beasts
Within a Quad
In Praise of (C10H9O5)x
Milady Reflects
The Fritillary
Thoughts While Driving Home
Sonic Boom
Tome-Thoughts, from the Times
A Song of Paternal Care
Tropical Beetles
Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter
Young Matrons Dancing
Comp. Religion
Meditation on a News Item
Cosmic Gall
A Vision
Les Saints Nouveaux
The Descent of Mr. Aldez
Upon Learning That a Town Exists in Virginia Called Upperville
Recital
I Missed His Book, but I Read His Name
On the Inclusion of Miniature Dinosaurs in Breakfast Cereal Boxes
The High-Hearts
Marriage Counsel
The Handkerchiefs of Khaibar Khan
Dea ex Machina
Die Neuen Heiligen
Miss Moore at Assembly
White Dwarf
Exposure
Exposé
Farewell to the Shopping District of Antibes
Some Frenchmen
Sea Knell
Vow
The Amish
The Naked Ape
The Origin of Laughter
The Average Egyptian Faces Death
Painted Wives
Skyey Developments
Courtesy Call
Business Acquaintances
Seven New Ways of Looking at the Moon
Upon Shaving Off One’s Beard
The Cars in Caracas
Insomnia the Gem of the Ocean
To a Waterbed
The Jolly Greene Giant
News from the Underworld
Authors’ Residences
Sin City, D.C.
Shaving Mirror
Self-Service
The Visions of Mackenzie King
Energy: A Villanelle
On the Recently Minted Hundred-Cent Piece
Typical Optical
The Rockettes
Food
The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring
ZIP Code Ode
Déjà, Indeed
Two Limericks for the Elderly
Mites
An Open Letter to Voyager II
Classical Optical
Neoteny
Notes
Appendix A: Poems in Previous Collections Omitted
Appendix B: Poems Published in The New Yorker Omitted
Index of Titles
A Note About the Author
Books by John Updike
Preface
AS A BOY I wanted to be a cartoonist. Light verse (and the verse that came my way was generally light) seemed a kind of cartooning with words, and through light verse I first found my way into print. The older I have grown, the less of it I have written, but the idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise—the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control. In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux.
In making this collection, I wanted to distinguish my poems from my light verse. My principle of segregation has been that a poem derives from the real (the given, the substantial) world and light verse from the man-made world of information—books, newspapers, words, signs. If a set of lines brought ba
ck to me something I actually saw or felt, it was not light verse. If it took its spark from language and stylized signifiers, it was. A number of entries wavered back and forth across the border; the distinction becomes a subjective one of tone. You will find in the light category a game of solitaire, a pair of glasses, and a shaving mirror that were all real to me. Artificial in essence, light verse usually employs the artifices of rhyme and strict form, but not always. Nor are rhyming poems always light; those reporting from specific places (“Azores,” “Antigua”) seemed to me earnest enough, in delivering up a piece of our planet, to be considered poems. The very first poem here, bearing a comically long title, yet conveyed, with a compression unprecedented in my brief writing career, the mythogenetic truth of telephone wires and poles marching across a stretch of Pennsylvania farmland. I still remember the shudder, the triumphant sense of capture, with which I got these lines down, not long after my twenty-first birthday.
But every set of lines herein gave me the excited sensation of being a maker, a poiētēs. Almost all of the poems in my five previous volumes of verse have been included, along with some seventy more. I have sought out their dates of composition—given in the index of titles—and arranged them, within the two broad categories, in the order in which they were written. They form thus, with their sites and occasions, the thready backside of my life’s fading tapestry. Not included are verse translations, rhyming salutes for the birthdays and weddings of children and stepchildren, the lyrics of a children’s opera called The Fisherman and His Wife, a set of seasonal poems titled A Child’s Calendar, and a “cheerful alphabet” of “pleasant objects” composed with my infant first son in mind. An appendix lists the titles previously collected but dropped from this conclusive gathering. The stanza breaks, I trust, are all clear. Sic stat. My poems are my oeuvre’s beloved waifs, and I feared that if I did not perform the elementary bibliographical decencies for them no one would.
J.U.
Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked
The old men say
young men in gray
hung this thread across our plains
acres and acres ago.
But we, the enlightened, know
in point of fact it’s what remains
of the flight of a marvellous crow
no one saw:
each pole, a caw.
Cloud Shadows
I
That white coconut, the sun,
is hidden by his blue leaves,
piratical great galleons.
Our sky their spanking sea,
they thrust us to an ocean floor,
withal with certain courtesy.
II
These courtly cotton-bellies rub
around the jewel we live within
and down to the muddled hub
drop complements.
Down shafts of violet fall
counterweights of shadow, hence
