New Selected Poems Read online

  the fountain, and we splashed. We drowned

  in Eden, while Jehovah’s grass-green lyre

  was rustling all about us in the leaves

  that gurgled by us, turning upside down …

  The fountain’s failing waters flash around

  the garden. Nothing catches fire.

  Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts

  Edwards’ great millstone and rock

  of hope has crumbled, but the square

  white houses of his flock

  stand in the open air,

  out in the cold,

  like sheep outside the fold.

  Hope lives in doubt.

  Faith is trying to do without

  faith. In western Massachusetts,

  I could almost feel the frontier

  crack and disappear.

  Edwards thought the world would end there.

  We know how the world will end,

  but where is paradise, each day farther

  from the Pilgrim’s blues for England

  and the Promised Land.

  Was it some country house

  that seemed as if it were

  Whitehall, if the Lord were there?

  so nobly did he live.

  Gardens designed

  that the breath of flowers in the wind,

  or crushed underfoot,

  came and went like warbling music?

  Bacon’s great oak grove

  he refused to sell,

  when he fell,

  saying, “Why should I sell my feathers?”

  Ah paradise! Edwards,

  I would be afraid

  to meet you there as a shade.

  We move in different circles.

  As a boy, you built a booth

  in a swamp for prayer;

  lying on your back,

  you saw the spiders fly,

  basking at their ease,

  swimming from tree to tree—

  so high, they seemed tacked to the sky.

  You knew they would die.

  Poor country Berkeley at Yale,

  you saw the world was soul,

  the soul of God! The soul

  of Sarah Pierrepont!

  So filled with delight in the Great Being,

  she hardly cared for anything—

  walking the fields, sweetly singing,

  conversing with some one invisible.

  Then God’s love shone in sun, moon and stars,

  on earth, in the waters,

  in the air, in the loose winds,

  which used to greatly fix your mind.

  Often she saw you come home from a ride

  or a walk, your coat dotted with thoughts

  you had pinned there

  on slips of paper.

  You gave

  her Pompey, a Negro slave,

  and eleven children.

  Yet people were spiders

  in your moment of glory,

  at the Great Awakening—“Alas, how many

  in this very meeting house are more than likely

  to remember my discourse in hell!”

  The meeting house remembered!

  You stood on stilts in the air,

  but you fell from your parish.

  “All rising is by a winding stair.”

  On my pilgrimage to Northampton,

  I found no relic,

  except the round slice of an oak

  you are said to have planted.

  It was flesh-colored, new,

  and a common piece of kindling,

  only fit for burning.

  You too must have been green once.

  White wig and black coat,

  all cut from one cloth,

  and designed

  like your mind!

  I love you faded,

  old, exiled and afraid

  to leave your last flock, a dozen

  Housatonic Indian children;

  afraid to leave

  all your writing, writing, writing,

  denying the Freedom of the Will.

  You were afraid to be president

  of Princeton, and wrote:

  “My deffects are well known;

  I have a constitution

  peculiarly unhappy:

  flaccid solids,

  vapid, sizzy, scarse fluids,

  causing a childish weakness,

  a low tide of spirits.

  I am contemptible,

  stiff and dull.

  Why should I leave behind

  my delight and entertainment,

  those studies

  that have swallowed up my mind?”

  Caligula

  My namesake, Little Boots, Caligula,

  you disappoint me. Tell me what I saw

  to make me like you when we met at school?

  I took your name—poor odd-ball, poor spoiled fool,

  my prince, young innocent and bowdlerized!

  Your true face sneers at me, mean, thin, agonized,

  the rusty Roman medal where I see

  my lowest depths of possibility.

  What can be salvaged from your life? A pain

  that gently darkens over heart and brain,

  a fairy’s touch, a cobweb’s weight of pain,

  now makes me tremble at your right to live.

  I live your last night. Sleepless fugitive,

  your purple bedclothes and imperial eagle

  grow so familiar they are home. Your regal

  hand accepts my hand. You bend my wrist,

  and tear the tendons with your strangler’s twist …

  You stare down hallways, mile on stoney mile,

  where statues of the gods return your smile.

  Why did you smash their heads and give them yours?

  You hear your household panting on all fours,

  and itemize your features—sleep’s old aide!

  Item: your body hairy, badly made,

  head hairless, smoother than your marble head;

  Item: eyes hollow, hollow temples, red

  cheeks rough with rouge, legs spindly, hands that leave

  a clammy snail’s trail on your soggy sleeve …

  a hand no hand will hold … nose thin, thin neck—

  you wish the Romans had a single neck!

  Small thing, where are you? Child, you sucked your thumb,

  and could not sleep unless you hugged the numb

  and wooly-witted toys of your small zoo.

  There was some reason then to fondle you

  before you found the death-mask for your play.

  Lie very still, sleep with clasped hands, and pray

  for nothing, Child! Think, even at the end,

  good dreams were faithful. You betray no friend

  now that no animal will share your bed.

  Don’t think!… And yet the God Adonis bled

  and lay beside you, forcing you to strip.

  You felt his gored thigh spurting on your hip.

  Your mind burned, you were God, a thousand plans

  ran zig-zag, zig-zag. You began to dance

  for joy, and called your menials to arrange

  deaths for the gods. You worshipped your great change,

  took a cold bath, and rolled your genitals

  until they shrank to marbles …

  Animals

  fattened for your arena suffered less

  than you in dying—yours the lawlessness

  of something simple that has lost its law,

  my namesake, and the last Caligula.

  July in Washington

  The stiff spokes of this wheel

  touch the sore spots of the earth.

  On the Potomac, swan-white

  power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.

  Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,

  raccoons clean their meat in the creek.

  On the circles, green statues ride like South American

&
nbsp; liberators above the breeding vegetation—

  prongs and spearheads of some equatorial

  backland that will inherit the globe.

  The elect, the elected … they come here bright as dimes,

  and die dishevelled and soft.

  We cannot name their names, or number their dates—

  circle on circle, like rings on a tree—

  but we wish the river had another shore,

  some further range of delectable mountains,

  distant hills powdered blue as a girl’s eyelid.

  It seems the least little shove would land us there,

  that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies

  we no longer control could drag us back.

  Soft Wood

  (FOR HARRIET WINSLOW)

  Sometimes I have supposed seals

  must live as long as the Scholar Gypsy.

  Even in their barred pond at the zoo they are happy,

  and no sunflower turns

  more delicately to the sun

  without a wincing of the will.

  Here too in Maine things bend to the wind forever.

  After two years away, one must get used

  to the painted soft wood staying bright and clean,

  to the air blasting an all-white wall whiter,

  as it blows through curtain and screen

  touched with salt and evergreen.

  The green juniper berry spills crystal-clear gin,

  and even the hot water in the bathtub

  is more than water,

  and rich with the scouring effervescence

  of something healing,

  the illimitable salt.

  Things last, but sometimes for days here

  only children seem fit to handle children,

  and there is no utility or inspiration

  in the wind smashing without direction.

  The fresh paint

  on the captains’ houses hides softer wood.

  Their square-riggers used to whiten

  the four corners of the globe,

  but it’s no consolation to know

  the possessors seldom outlast the possessions,

  once warped and mothered by their touch.

  Shed skin will never fit another wearer.

  Yet the seal pack will bark past my window

  summer after summer.

  This is the season

  when our friends may and will die daily.

  Surely the lives of the old

  are briefer than the young.

  Harriet Winslow, who owned this house,

  was more to me than my mother.

  I think of you far off in Washington,

  breathing in the heat wave

  and air-conditioning, knowing

  each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.

  For the Union Dead

  “Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

  The old South Boston Aquarium stands

  in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.

  The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

  The airy tanks are dry.

  Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

  my hand tingled

  to burst the bubbles

  drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

  My hand draws back. I often sigh still

  for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

  of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,

  I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

  fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,

  yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting

  as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

  to gouge their underworld garage.

  Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

  sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

  A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

  braces the tingling Statehouse,

  shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

  and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

  on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,

  propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

  Two months after marching through Boston,

  half the regiment was dead;

  at the dedication,

  William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

  Their monument sticks like a fishbone

  in the city’s throat.

  Its Colonel is as lean

  as a compass-needle.

  He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

  a greyhound’s gentle tautness;

  he seems to wince at pleasure,

  and suffocate for privacy.

  He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,

  peculiar power to choose life and die—

  when he leads his black soldiers to death,

  he cannot bend his back.

  On a thousand small town New England greens,

  the old white churches hold their air

  of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

  quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

  The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

  grow slimmer and younger each year—

  wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

  and muse through their sideburns …

  Shaw’s father wanted no monument

  except the ditch,

  where his son’s body was thrown

  and lost with his “niggers.”

  The ditch is nearer.

  There are no statues for the last war here;

  on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

  shows Hiroshima boiling

  over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”

  that survived the blast. Space is nearer.

  When I crouch to my television set,

  the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

  Colonel Shaw

  is riding on his bubble,

  he waits

  for the blessed break.

  The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

  giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

  a savage servility

  slides by on grease.

  from

  Near the Ocean

  (1967)

  Near the Ocean

  1. WAKING EARLY SUNDAY MORNING

  O to break loose, like the chinook

  salmon jumping and falling back,

  nosing up to the impossible

  stone and bone-crushing waterfall—

  raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten

  steps of the roaring ladder, and then

  to clear the top on the last try,

  alive enough to spawn and die.

  Stop, back off. The salmon breaks

  water, and now my body wakes

  to feel the unpolluted joy

  and criminal leisure of a boy—

  no rainbow smashing a dry fly

  in the white run is free as I,

  here squatting like a dragon on

  time’s hoard before the day’s begun!

  Vermin run for their unstopped holes;

  in some dark nook a fieldmouse rolls

  a marble, hours on end, then stops;

  the termite in the woodwork sleeps—

  listen, the creatures of the night

  obsessive, casual, sure of foot,

  go on grinding, while the sun’s

  daily remorseful blackout dawns.

  Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.

  Look up and see the harbor fill:

  business as usual in eclipse

  goes down to the sea in ships—

  wake of refuse, dacron rope,

  bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,

  all bright before the morning watch

  the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.

  I
watch a glass of water wet

  with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,

  silvery colors touched with sky,

  serene in their neutrality—

  yet if I shift, or change my mood,

  I see some object made of wood,

  background behind it of brown grain,

  to darken it, but not to stain.

  O that the spirit could remain

  tinged but untarnished by its strain!

  Better dressed and stacking birch,

  or lost with the Faithful at Church—

  anywhere, but somewhere else!

  And now the new electric bells,

  clearly chiming, “Faith of our fathers,”

  and now the congregation gathers.

  O Bible chopped and crucified

  in hymns we hear but do not read,

  none of the milder subtleties

  of grace or art will sweeten these

  stiff quatrains shovelled out four-square—

  they sing of peace, and preach despair;

  yet they gave darkness some control,

  and left a loophole for the soul.

  No, put old clothes on, and explore

  the corners of the woodshed for

  its dregs and dreck: tools with no handle,

  ten candle-ends not worth a candle,

  old lumber banished from the Temple,

  damned by Paul’s precept and example,

  cast from the kingdom, banned in Israel,

  the wordless sign, the tinkling cymbal.

  When will we see Him face to face?

  Each day, He shines through darker glass.

  In this small town where everything

  is known, I see His vanishing

  emblems, His white spire and flag-

  pole sticking out above the fog,

  like old white china doorknobs, sad,

  slight, useless things to calm the mad.

  Hammering military splendor,

  top-heavy Goliath in full armor—

  little redemption in the mass

  liquidations of their brass,

  elephant and phalanx moving

  with the times and still improving,

  when that kingdom hit the crash:

  a million foreskins stacked like trash …

  Sing softer! But what if a new

  diminuendo brings no true

  tenderness, only restlessness,

  excess, the hunger for success,

  sanity of self-deception

  fixed and kicked by reckless caution,

  while we listen to the bells—

  anywhere, but somewhere else!

  O to break loose. All life’s grandeur

  is something with a girl in summer …

  elated as the President

  girdled by his establishment

  this Sunday morning, free to chaff

  his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,