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  Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness

  At all or charm in that expressionless

  Face with its heavy eyelids. As before,

  This face, for centuries a memory,

  Non est species, neque decor,

  Expressionless, expresses God: it goes

  Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows,

  Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem

  Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham.

  VII.

  The empty winds are creaking and the oak

  Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,

  The boughs are trembling and a gaff

  Bobs on the untimely stroke

  Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell

  In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well;

  Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,

  Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:

  Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh

  Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers,

  Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil

  You could cut the brackish winds with a knife

  Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time

  When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime

  And breathed into his face the breath of life,

  And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.

  The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

  Buttercups

  When we were children our papas were stout

  And colorless as seaweed or the floats

  At anchor off New Bedford. We were shut

  In gardens where our brassy sailor coats

  Made us like black-eyed susans bending out

  Into the ocean. Then my teeth were cut:

  A levelled broom-pole butt

  Was pushed into my thin

  And up-turned chin—

  There were shod hoofs behind the horseplay. But

  I played Napoleon in my attic cell

  Until my shouldered broom

  Bobbed down the room

  With horse and neighing shell.

  Recall the shadows the doll-curtains veined

  On Ancrem Winslow’s ponderous plate from blue

  China, the breaking of time’s haggard tide

  On the huge cobwebbed print of Waterloo,

  With a cracked smile across the glass. I cried

  To see the Emperor’s sabered eagle slide

  From the clutching grenadier

  Staff-officer

  With the gold leaf cascading down his side—

  A red dragoon, his plough-horse rearing, swayed

  Back on his reins to crop

  The buttercup

  Bursting upon the braid.

  Between the Porch and the Altar

  I.

  MOTHER AND SON

  Meeting his mother makes him lose ten years,

  Or is it twenty? Time, no doubt, has ears

  That listen to the swallowed serpent, wound

  Into its bowels, but he thinks no sound

  Is possible before her, he thinks the past

  Is settled. It is honest to hold fast

  Merely to what one sees with one’s own eyes

  When the red velvet curves and haunches rise

  To blot him from the pretty driftwood fire’s

  Façade of welcome. Then the son retires

  Into the sack and selfhood of the boy

  Who clawed through fallen houses of his Troy,

  Homely and human only when the flames

  Crackle in recollection. Nothing shames

  Him more than this uncoiling, counterfeit

  Body presented as an idol. It

  Is something in a circus, big as life,

  The painted dragon, a mother and a wife

  With flat glass eyes pushed at him on a stick;

  The human mover crawls to make them click.

  The forehead of her father’s portrait peels

  With rosy dryness, and the schoolboy kneels

  To ask the benediction of the hand,

  Lifted as though to motion him to stand,

  Dangling its watch-chain on the Holy Book—

  A little golden snake that mouths a hook.

  II.

  ADAM AND EVE

  The Farmer sizzles on his shaft all day.

  He is content and centuries away

  From white-hot Concord, and he stands on guard.

  Or is he melting down like sculptured lard?

  His hand is crisp and steady on the plough.

  I quarrelled with you, but am happy now

  To while away my life for your unrest

  Of terror. Never to have lived is best;

  Man tasted Eve with death. I taste my wife

  And children while I hold your hands. I knife

  Their names into this elm. What is exempt?

  I eye the statue with an awed contempt

  And see the puritanical façade

  Of the white church that Irish exiles made

  For Patrick—that Colonial from Rome

  Had magicked the charmed serpents from their home,

  As though he were the Piper. Will his breath

  Scorch the red dragon of my nerves to death?

  By sundown we are on a shore. You walk

  A little way before me and I talk,

  Half to myself and half aloud. They lied,

  My cold-eyed seedy fathers when they died,

  Or rather threw their lives away, to fix

  Sterile, forbidding nameplates on the bricks

  Above a kettle. Jesus rest their souls!

  You cry for help. Your market-basket rolls

  With all its baking apples in the lake.

  You watch the whorish slither of a snake

  That chokes a duckling. When we try to kiss,

  Our eyes are slits and cringing, and we hiss;

  Scales glitter on our bodies as we fall.

  The Farmer melts upon his pedestal.

  III.

  KATHERINE’S DREAM

  It must have been a Friday. I could hear

  The top-floor typist’s thunder and the beer

  That you had brought in cases hurt my head;

  I’d sent the pillows flying from my bed,

  I hugged my knees together and I gasped.

  The dangling telephone receiver rasped

  Like someone in a dream who cannot stop

  For breath or logic till his victim drop

  To darkness and the sheets. I must have slept,

  But still could hear my father who had kept

  Your guilty presents but cut off my hair.

  He whispers that he really doesn’t care

  If I am your kept woman all my life,

  Or ruin your two children and your wife;

  But my dishonor makes him drink. Of course

  I’ll tell the court the truth for his divorce.

  I walk through snow into St. Patrick’s yard.

  Black nuns with glasses smile and stand on guard

  Before a bulkhead in a bank of snow,

  Whose charred doors open, as good people go

  Inside by twos to the confessor. One

  Must have a friend to enter there, but none

  Is friendless in this crowd, and the nuns smile.

  I stand aside and marvel; for a while

  The winter sun is pleasant and it warms

  My heart with love for others, but the swarms

  Of penitents have dwindled. I begin

  To cry and ask God’s pardon of our sin.

  Where are you? You were with me and are gone.

  All the forgiven couples hurry on

  To dinner and their nights, and none will stop.

  I run about in circles till I drop

  Against a padlocked bulkhead in a yard

  Where faces redden and the snow is hard.

  IV.

  AT THE ALTAR

>   I sit at a gold table with my girl

  Whose eyelids burn with brandy. What a whirl

  Of Easter eggs is colored by the lights,

  As the Norwegian dancer’s crystalled tights

  Flash with her naked leg’s high-booted skate,

  Like Northern Lights upon my watching plate.

  The twinkling steel above me is a star;

  I am a fallen Christmas tree. Our car

  Races through seven red-lights—then the road

  Is unpatrolled and empty, and a load

  Of ply-wood with a tail-light makes us slow.

  I turn and whisper in her ear. You know

  I want to leave my mother and my wife,

  You wouldn’t have me tied to them for life …

  Time runs, the windshield runs with stars. The past

  Is cities from a train, until at last

  Its escalating and black-windowed blocks

  Recoil against a Gothic church. The clocks

  Are tolling. I am dying. The shocked stones

  Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones

  That snap and splinter and descend in glass

  Before a priest who mumbles through his Mass

  And sprinkles holy water; and the Day

  Breaks with its lightning on the man of clay,

  Dies amara valde. Here the Lord

  Is Lucifer in harness: hand on sword,

  He watches me for Mother, and will turn

  The bier and baby-carriage where I burn.

  In the Cage

  The lifers file into the hall,

  According to their houses—twos

  Of laundered denim. On the wall

  A colored fairy tinkles blues

  And titters by the balustrade;

  Canaries beat their bars and scream.

  We come from tunnels where the spade

  Pick-axe and hod for plaster steam

  In mud and insulation. Here

  The Bible-twisting Israelite

  Fasts for his Harlem. It is night,

  And it is vanity, and age

  Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear,

  The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

  Mr. Edwards and the Spider

  I saw the spiders marching through the air,

  Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day

  In latter August when the hay

  Came creaking to the barn. But where

  The wind is westerly,

  Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly

  Into the apparitions of the sky,

  They purpose nothing but their ease and die

  Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;

  What are we in the hands of the great God?

  It was in vain you set up thorn and briar

  In battle array against the fire

  And treason crackling in your blood;

  For the wild thorns grow tame

  And will do nothing to oppose the flame;

  Your lacerations tell the losing game

  You play against a sickness past your cure.

  How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

  A very little thing, a little worm,

  Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,

  Can kill a tiger. Will the dead

  Hold up his mirror and affirm

  To the four winds the smell

  And flash of his authority? It’s well

  If God who holds you to the pit of hell,

  Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,

  Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy

  On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die

  When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:

  There’s no long struggle, no desire

  To get up on its feet and fly—

  It stretches out its feet

  And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;

  Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat

  Then sinews the abolished will, when sick

  And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.

  But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?

  Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast

  Into a brick-kiln where the blast

  Fans your quick vitals to a coal—

  If measured by a glass,

  How long would it seem burning! Let there pass

  A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze

  Is infinite, eternal: this is death,

  To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

  Where the Rainbow Ends

  I saw the sky descending, black and white,

  Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore

  The skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates,

  And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers tore

  The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits

  Its victim and tonight

  The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot

  Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,

  Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;

  The wild ingrafted olive and the root

  Are withered, and a winter drifts to where

  The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans

  Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles.

  I saw my city in the Scales, the pans

  Of judgment rising and descending. Piles

  Of dead leaves char the air—

  And I am a red arrow on this graph

  Of Revelations. Every dove is sold

  The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold

  On serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph.

  In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.

  The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:

  “Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast

  Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:

  I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.”

  At the high altar, gold

  And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat

  My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give

  You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,

  The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

  from

  The Mills of the Kavanaughs

  (1951)

  from Her Dead Brother

  I.

  The Lion of St. Mark’s upon the glass

  Shield in my window reddens, as the night

  Enchants the swinging dories to its terrors,

  And dulls your distant wind-stung eyes; alas,

  Your portrait, coiled in German-silver hawsers, mirrors

  The sunset as a dragon. Enough light

  Remains to see you through your varnish. Giving

  Your life has brought you closer to your friends;

  Yes, it has brought you home. All’s well that ends:

  Achilles dead is greater than the living;

  My mind holds you as I would have you live,

  A wintering dragon. Summer was too short

  When we went picnicking with telescopes

  And crocking leather handbooks to that fort

  Above the lank and heroned Sheepscot, where its slopes

  Are clutched by hemlocks—spotting birds. I give

  You back that idyll, Brother. Was it more?

  Remember riding, scotching with your spur

  That four-foot milk-snake in a juniper?

  Father shellacked it to the ice-house door.

  Then you were grown; I left you on your own.

  We will forget that August twenty-third,

  When Mother motored with the maids to Stowe,

  And the pale summer shades were drawn—so low

  No one could see us; no, nor catch your hissing word,

  As false as Cressid! Let our deaths atone:

  The fingers on your sword-knot are alive,

  And Hope, that fouls my brightness with its grace,

  Will anchor in the narrows of your face.

>   My husband’s Packard crunches up the drive.

  from

  Life Studies

  (1959)

  Beyond the Alps

  (On the train from Rome to Paris. 1950, the year Pius XII defined the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption.)

  Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge

  in once again and Everest was still

  unscaled, I watched our Paris pullman lunge

  mooning across the fallow Alpine snow.

  O bella Roma! I saw our stewards go

  forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs.

  Life changed to landscape. Much against my will

  I left the City of God where it belongs.

  There the skirt-mad Mussolini unfurled

  the eagle of Caesar. He was one of us

  only, pure prose. I envy the conspicuous

  waste of our grandparents on their grand tours—

  long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe,

  while breezing on their trust funds through the world.

  When the Vatican made Mary’s Assumption dogma,

  the crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.

  The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,

  and listened. His electric razor purred,

  his pet canary chirped on his left hand.

  The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle

  to Mary risen—at one miraculous stroke,

  angel-wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!

  But who believed this? Who could understand?

  Pilgrims still kissed Saint Peter’s brazen sandal.

  The Duce’s lynched, bare, booted skull still spoke.

  God herded his people to the coup de grâce—

  the costumed Switzers sloped their pikes to push,

  O Pius, through the monstrous human crush.…

  Our mountain-climbing train had come to earth.

  Tired of the querulous hush-hush of the wheels,

  the blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth

  lay still, and saw Apollo plant his heels

  on terra firma through the morning’s thigh …

  each backward, wasted Alp, a Parthenon,

  fire-branded socket of the Cyclops’ eye.

  There were no tickets for that altitude

  once held by Hellas, when the Goddess stood,

  prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough,

  pure mind and murder at the scything prow—

  Minerva, the miscarriage of the brain.

  Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up

  like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

  A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich

  “We’re all Americans, except the Doc,