Siberian tourists dumbly tramp.
The streets are wide as silences.
The cobblestones between the GUM
And Kremlin echo—an abyss
Lies sealed within a giant room.
The marble box where Lenin sleeps
Receives the Tartar gaze of those
Who come from where Far Russia keeps
Her counsels wrapped in deadening snows.
St. Basil’s, near at hand, erects
The swirlings that so charmed the czar
He blinded both the architects
To keep such beauty singular.
Leningrad
“To build a window on the west”
Great Peter came to Neva’s mouth
And found a swamp, which he oppressed
With stones imported from the south.
The city, subtly polychrome
(Old ochre, green, and dull maroon),
Can make Italians feel at home
Beneath the tilted arctic noon.
The Palace holds, pistachio,
A wilderness of treasure where
The ghosts of plump czarinas go
On dragging diamonds up the stair.
Suburban acres of the dead
Memorialize the Siege, a hell
Of blackened snow and watered bread.
Some couples Twist in our hotel.
Kiev
Clutching his cross, St. Vladimir
Gazes with eyes that seem to grieve
Across the sandy Dnieper, where
He baptized godforsaken Kiev.
Now deconverted trolleys turn
Around the square, emitting sparks.
The churches, cold as attics, burn
With gilt above the poplar parks.
Beneath the earth, in catacombs,
Dried patriarchs lie mummified;
Brocaded silk enmeshed with bones
Offends our trim, mascaraed guide,
Who, driving homeward, gestures toward
The ruins of Moussorgsky’s Gate—
Like some old altar, unrestored,
Where peasant women supplicate.
Tbilisi
Rich Georgian farmers send their sons
(Black-haired, with pointed stares and feet)
To town for educations—
They loiter laughing on the street.
A “working” church: its inside smells
Of tallow, mold, incense, and chrism.
The long-haired priest, wax-pallid, sells
His candles with a shopgirl’s grimace.
The poets, overhonored, toast
Themselves with liquid syllables;
The alphabet is strange. They boast
Their tongue is older than their hills.
Instead of Stalin, who indulged
His native land with privilege,
A blank steel woman, undivulged
By name, surmounts the once-walled ridge.
Yerevan
Armenia, Asia’s waif, has here
At last constructed shelter proof
Against all Turkish massacre.
A soft volcanic rock called tuff
Carves easily and serves to be
The basis of the boulevards
That lead from slums of history
Into a future stripped of swords
· · ·
The crescent-shaped hotel is rose
And looks toward Lenin Square and tan
Dry mountains down which power flows
From turbines lodged in Lake Sevan.
Mount Ararat, a conscience, floats
Cloudlike, in sight but unpossessed,
For there, where Noah docked his boat,
Begins the brutal, ancient West.
Camera
Let me gaze, gaze forever
into that single, vaguely violet eye:
my fingertips dilate
the veiled pupil circumscribed
by crescent leaves of metal
overlapping, fine as foil, and oiled.
Let me walk, walk with its weight
as telling as gold, declaring
precious works packed tight:
the air is light,
all light, pure light alive
Let all, all be still until
the cleaver falls: I become female,
having sealed secure
in the quick clicked womb of utter black, bright semen
of a summer day, coiled fruit
of my eyes’ axed rapture.
Roman Portrait Busts
Others in museums pass them by,
but I, I
am drawn like a maggot to meat
by their pupilless eyes
and their putrefying individuality.
They are, these Livias and Marcuses,
these pouting dead Octavias,
no two alike: never has art
so whorishly submitted
to the importunities of the real.
In good conscience one must admire
the drab lack of exaggeration,
the way each head,
crone’s, consul’s, or child’s,
is neither bigger nor smaller than life.
Their eyes taste awful.
It is vile,
deliciously, to see selves so
unsoftened by history, such
indigestible gristle.
Fellatio
How beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched in seed,
flower into landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.
Décor
Brown dominates this bar
where men come to age:
the waiters Negro,
the whiskey unwatered,
the overheard voices from Texas,
the cigars and varnished wood.
Brown, the implication is,
is a shade of the soul,
the color of a man:
welltanned and stained
to the innermost vein
as if life is a long curing.
Poem for a Far Land
Russia, most feminine of lands,
Breeder of stupid masculinity,
Only Jesus understands
Your interminable virginity.
Raped, and raped, and raped again,
You rise snow-white, the utter same,
With tender birches and ox-eyed men
Willing to perish for your name.
Though astronauts distress the sky
That mothers your low, sad villages,
Your vastness yearns in sympathy
Between what was and that which is.
Late January
The elms’ silhouettes
again relent,
leafless but furred
with the promise of leaves,
dull red in a sky dull yellow
with the threat of snow.
That blur, verging on growth:
Time’s sharp edge is slitting
another envelope.
Dog’s Death
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was fi
lling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
· · ·
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
Home Movies
How the children have changed! Rapt, we stare
At flickering lost Edens where
Pale infants, squinting, seem to hark
To their older selves laughing in the dark.
And then, by the trellis of some old spring—
The seasons are unaltering—
We gather, smoother and less bald,
Innocently clowning, having been called
To pose by the off-screen cameraman.
How strangely silently time ran!
We cannot climb back, nor can our friends,
To that calm light. The brief film ends.
Antigua
The wind, transparent, cannot displace
The vertical search of sun for skin.
The colonel’s fine-veined florid face
Has bloomed though sheltered deep within
His shining hat’s mauve shade. His eyes
Glare bluer than the coral-bleached
Soft sea that feebly nags the beach
And hones its scimitar with sighs.
His wife, in modest half-undress,
Swings thighs pinched red between the sea
And sky, and smiles, serenely free
Of subcutaneous distress.
Above, sere cliffs attend their hike,
And colored scraps give tattered hints
Of native life, and, higher, like
A flaw in glass, an airplane glints.
Amoeba
Mindless, meaning no harm,
it ingested me.
It moved on silent pseudopods
to where I was born, inert, and I
was inside.
Digestive acids burned my skin.
Enzymes nuzzled knees and eyes.
My ego like a conjugated verb
retained its root, a narrow fear
of being qualified;
alas, suffixes swarmed.
I lost my mother’s arms, my teeth,
my laugh, my protruding faith.
Reduced to the O of a final sigh,
in time I died.
Elm
My thousand-thousand-leaved,
with what a graceful straining
you greet the year’s gray turning
and put forth green.
Sleepless, at two this morning,
above the lakelike street,
I saw your far fronds hanging
like long hands trailed in water;
I saw your ferny curtains
translucent like distant fields,
your crown’s impassive dreaming
powdered with uneclipsed stars.
Great shape, most godly thing
I know, don’t die. The blight
is a cliff’s edge each year you skirt,
returning to dye the night.
Daughter
I was awakened from a dream,
a dream entwined with cats,
by a cat’s close presence.
In the darkness by my bedside there
had loomed a form with shining hair—
squarish, immense-eyed, still.
Its whiskers pricked my lips:
I screamed.
My daughter cried,
in just proportion terrified.
I realized that,
though only four, all skin and smiles,
my daughter is a lioness, taken as a cat.
Eurydice
Negress serene though underground,
what weddings in northward Harlem
impressed upon you this cameo
stamp of stoic repose?
Beauty should never be bored
with being beautiful.
Bright lights are shattered by our speed.
The couplings cluck, the darkness yells.
The child beside you sidles in
and out of sleep, and I,
poor sooty white man scarcely visible,
try not to stare.
O loveliness blind to itself:
sockets thumbed from clay wherein
eyelids are petals of shadow,
cheekbones and jawbone whose carriage
is of a proud rider in velvet,
lips where eleven curves live.
Eurydice, come follow me,
my song is silent, listen:
I’ll hold your name in love so high
oceans of years will leave it dry;
mountains of time will not begin
to move a moment of your skin.
The doors gape wide at Fifty-ninth.
The kiosk steps are black with blood.
I turn and find,
rebuked by light,
you gone, Negress serene,
tugged northward into night.
Seal in Nature
Observed from down the beach, the seal
seemed a polished piece of the rock he was on.
Closer approached, he became distinct
from the boat-shaped barnacled mineral mass,
twenty yards safe from shore, he had chosen
to be his pedestal—a living sculpture,
a Noguchi, an Arp, a Brancusi smoothed
from a flexible wood whose grain was hair,
whose gray was white in the abstract glisten,
and black where his curve demanded a shadow.
The sea his amphitheatre, the mammal,
both water and stone, performed aloof tricks:
he wound the line of horizon on his nose
and scratched his back with the top of his head
and, twisting like a Möbius strip, addressed
the sky with a hollowing desolate howl
echoing empty epochs when,
in acres of basalt sown thick with steam,
beneath dull skies, life’s circus performed
for the silent Observer Supreme.
Air Show
(Hanscom Field, Bedford, Mass.)
In shapes that grow organic and bizarre
Our Air Force ramifies the forms of war.
The stubby bomber, dartlike fighter yield
To weirder beasts caught browsing on this field,
With wry truncated wings, anteater snouts,
And burnished bellies full of ins and outs.
Caressing curves of wind, the metal smiles
And beds the pilot down in sheets of dials.
Eggheaded, strapped, and sucking gas, he roars
To frozen heights all other life abhors,
Where, having left his dirty sound behind,
In pure blue he becomes pure will and mind.
These planes, articulate in every part,
Outdo the armor-forger’s Tuscan art—
The rivets as unsparingly displayed
As pearls upon a chasuble’s brocade,
The wiring bundled thick, like chordate brains,
The posing turbine balan
ced grain by grain,
The silver skin so stencilled it amounts
To an encyclical of do’s and don’t’s.
Our dollars! Dumb, like muzhiks come from far
To gaze upon the trappings of a czar,
Their sweat turned into gems and cold faïence,
We marvel at our own extravagance:
No mogul’s wasteful lust was half so wide
And deep as this democracy’s quick pride.
Omega
This little lightweight manacle whereby
My wrist is linked to flux and feels time fly,
This constant bracelet with so meek a jewel,
Shall prove at last implacable and cruel
And like a noose jerk taut, and hold me still,
And add me to the unseen trapper’s kill.
The Angels
They are above us all the time,
the good gentlemen, Mozart and Bach,
Scarlatti and Handel and Brahms,
lavishing measures of light down upon us,
telling us, over and over, there is a realm
above this plane of silent compromise.
They are around us everywhere, the old seers,
Matisse and Vermeer, Cézanne and Piero,
greeting us echoing in subway tunnels,
springing like winter flowers from postcards
Scotch-taped to white kitchen walls,
waiting larger than life in shadowy galleries
to whisper that edges of color
lie all about us innocent as grass.
They are behind us, beneath us,
the abysmal books, Shakespeare and Tolstoy,
the Bible and Proust and Cervantes,