New Selected Poems Read online

  and heart in mouth,

  outdrank the Rahvs in the heat

  of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—

  too boiled and shy

  and poker-faced to make a pass,

  while the shrill verve

  of your invective scorched the traditional South.

  Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

  Sleepless, you hold

  your pillow to your hollows like a child;

  your old-fashioned tirade—

  loving, rapid, merciless—

  breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

  “To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage”

  “It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.”

  —SCHOPENHAUER

  “The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

  Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.

  My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

  and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

  free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.

  This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

  Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust.…

  It’s the injustice … he is so unjust—

  whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

  My only thought is how to keep alive.

  What makes him tick? Each night now I tie

  ten dollars and his car key to my thigh.…

  Gored by the climacteric of his want,

  he stalls above me like an elephant.”

  Skunk Hour

  (FOR ELIZABETH BISHOP)

  Nautilus Island’s hermit

  heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

  her sheep still graze above the sea.

  Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

  is first selectman in our village;

  she’s in her dotage.

  Thirsting for

  the hierarchic privacy

  of Queen Victoria’s century,

  she buys up all

  the eyesores facing her shore,

  and lets them fall.

  The season’s ill—

  we’ve lost our summer millionaire,

  who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean

  catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

  was auctioned off to lobstermen.

  A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

  And now our fairy

  decorator brightens his shop for fall;

  his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

  orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;

  there is no money in his work,

  he’d rather marry.

  One dark night,

  my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

  I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

  they lay together, hull to hull,

  where the graveyard shelves on the town.…

  My mind’s not right.

  A car radio bleats,

  “Love, O careless Love.…” I hear

  my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

  as if my hand were at its throat.…

  I myself am hell;

  nobody’s here—

  only skunks, that search

  in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

  They march on their soles up Main Street:

  white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire

  under the chalk-dry and spar spire

  of the Trinitarian Church.

  I stand on top

  of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

  a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.

  She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

  of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

  and will not scare.

  from

  Imitations

  (1961)

  The Infinite

  That hill pushed off by itself was always dear

  to me and the hedges near

  it that cut away so much of the final horizon.

  When I would sit there lost in deliberation,

  I reasoned most on the interminable spaces

  beyond all hills, on their antediluvian resignation

  and silence that passes

  beyond man’s possibility.

  Here for a little while my heart is quiet inside me;

  and when the wind lifts roughing through the trees,

  I set about comparing my silence to those voices,

  and I think about the eternal, the dead seasons,

  things here at hand and alive,

  and all their reasons and choices.

  It’s sweet to destroy my mind

  and go down

  and wreck in this sea where I drown.

  Leopardi: L’infinito.

  The Poet at Seven

  When the timeless, daily, tedious affair

  was over, his Mother shut

  her Bible; her nose was in the air;

  from her summit

  of righteousness, she could not see the boy:

  his lumpy forehead knotted

  with turmoil, his soul returned to its vomit.

  All day he would sweat obedience.

  He was very intelligent, but wrung,

  and every now and then a sudden jerk

  showed dark hypocrisies at work.

  He would clap his hands on his rump,

  and strut where the gloom of the hallway rotted

  the hot curtains. He stuck out his tongue,

  clenched his eyes shut, and saw dots.

  A terrace gave on the twilight;

  one used to see him up there in the lamplight,

  sulking on the railing

  under an abyss of air

  which hung from the roof. His worst block

  was the stultifying slump

  of mid-summer—he would lock

  himself up in the toilet and inhale

  its freshness; there he could breathe.

  When winter snowed under the breath of flowers,

  and the moon blanched the little bower

  behind the house, he would crawl

  to the foot of the wall

  and lie with his eyeballs squeezed to his arm,

  dreaming of some dark revelation,

  or listening to the legions of termites swarm

  in the horny espaliers. As for compassion,

  the only children he could speak to

  were creepy, abstracted boys, who hid

  match-stick thin fingers yellow and black with mud

  under rags stuck with diarrhea.

  Their dull eyes drooled on their dull cheeks,

  they spoke with the selflessness of morons.

  His Mother was terrified,

  she thought they were losing caste. This was good—

  she had the true blue look that lied.

  At seven he was making novels

  about life in the Sahara,

  where ravished Liberty had fled—

  sunrises, buffaloes, jungle, savannahs!

  For his facts, he used illustrated weeklies,

  and blushed at the rotogravures of naked, red

  Hawaiian girls dancing.

  A little eight year old tomboy,

  the daughter of the next door workers,

  came, brown-eyed, terrible,

  in a print dress. Brutal and in the know,

  she would jump on his back,

  and ride him like a buffalo,

  and shake out her hair.

  Wallowing below

  her once, he bit her crotch—

  she never wore bloomers—

  kicked and scratched, he carried back

  the taste of her buttocks to his bedroom.

  What he feared most

  were the sticky, lost December Sundays,

  when he used to stand with his hair gummed back

  at a little mahog
ony stand, and hold

  a Bible pocked with cabbage-green mould.

  Each night in his alcove, he had dreams.

  He despised God, the National Guard,

  and the triple drum-beat

  of the town-crier calling up the conscripts.

  He loved the swearing

  workers, when they crowded back, black

  in the theatrical twilight to their wards.

  He felt clean

  when he filled his lungs with the smell—

  half hay fever, half iodine—

  of the wheat,

  he watched its pubic golden tassels swell

  and steam in the heat,

  then sink back calm.

  What he liked best were dark things:

  the acrid, dank rings

  on the ceiling, and the high,

  bluish plaster, as bald as the sky

  in his bare bedroom, where he could close

  the shutters and lose

  his world for hundreds of hours,

  mooning doggedly

  over his novel, endlessly

  expanding with jaundiced skies,

  drowned vegetation, and carnations

  that flashed like raw flesh

  in the underwater green

  of the jungle starred with flowers—

  dizziness, mania, revulsions, pity!

  Often the town playground

  below him grew loud with children;

  the wind brought him their voices,

  and he lay alone on pieces of unbleached canvas,

  violently breaking into sail.

  Rimbaud: Les poètes de sept ans.

  Pigeons

  (FOR HANNAH ARENDT)

  The same old flights, the same old homecomings,

  dozens of each per day,

  but at last the pigeon gets clear of the pigeon-house …

  What is home, but a feeling of homesickness

  for the flight’s lost moment of fluttering terror?

  Back in the dovecote, there’s another bird,

  by all odds the most beautiful,

  one that never flew out, and can know nothing of gentleness …

  Still, only by suffering the rat-race in the arena

  can the heart learn to beat.

  Think of Leonidas perhaps and the hoplites,

  glittering with liberation,

  as they combed one another’s golden Botticellian hair

  at Thermopylae, friends and lovers, the bride and the bridegroom—

  and moved into position to die.

  Over non-existence arches the all-being—

  thence the ball thrown almost out of bounds

  stings the hand with the momentum of its drop—

  body and gravity,

  miraculously multiplied by its mania to return.

  Rilke: Die Tauben.

  from

  For the Union Dead

  (1964)

  Water

  It was a Maine lobster town—

  each morning boatloads of hands

  pushed off for granite

  quarries on the islands,

  and left dozens of bleak

  white frame houses stuck

  like oyster shells

  on a hill of rock,

  and below us, the sea lapped

  the raw little match-stick

  mazes of a weir,

  where the fish for bait were trapped.

  Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.

  From this distance in time,

  it seems the color

  of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

  but it was only

  the usual gray rock

  turning the usual green

  when drenched by the sea.

  The sea drenched the rock

  at our feet all day,

  and kept tearing away

  flake after flake.

  One night you dreamed

  you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,

  and trying to pull

  off the barnacles with your hands.

  We wished our two souls

  might return like gulls

  to the rock. In the end,

  the water was too cold for us.

  Fall 1961

  Back and forth, back and forth

  goes the tock, tock, tock

  of the orange, bland, ambassadorial

  face of the moon

  on the grandfather clock.

  All autumn, the chafe and jar

  of nuclear war;

  we have talked our extinction to death.

  I swim like a minnow

  behind my studio window.

  Our end drifts nearer,

  the moon lifts,

  radiant with terror.

  The state

  is a diver under a glass bell.

  A father’s no shield

  for his child.

  We are like a lot of wild

  spiders crying together,

  but without tears.

  Nature holds up a mirror.

  One swallow makes a summer.

  It’s easy to tick

  off the minutes,

  but the clockhands stick.

  Back and forth!

  Back and forth, back and forth—

  my one point of rest

  is the orange and black

  oriole’s swinging nest!

  The Lesson

  No longer to lie reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles,

  while the high, mysterious squirrels

  rain small green branches on our sleep!

  All that landscape, one likes to think it died

  or slept with us, that we ourselves died

  or slept then in the age and second of our habitation.

  The green leaf cushions the same dry footprint,

  or the child’s boat luffs in the same dry chop,

  and we are where we were. We were!

  Perhaps the trees stopped growing in summer amnesia;

  their day that gave them veins is rooted down—

  and the nights? They are for sleeping now as then.

  Ah the light lights the window of my young night,

  and you never turn off the light,

  while the books lie in the library, and go on reading.

  The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge,

  cold slits the same crease in the finger,

  the same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.

  Those Before Us

  They are all outline, uniformly gray,

  unregenerate arrowheads sloughed up by the path here,

  or in the corners of the eye, they play

  their thankless, fill-in roles. They never were.

  Wormwood on the veranda! Plodding needles

  still prod the coarse pink yarn into a dress.

  The muskrat that took a slice of your thumb still huddles,

  a mop of hair and a heart-beat on the porch—

  there’s the tin wastebasket where it learned to wait

  for us playing dead, the slats it mashed in terror,

  its spoor of cornflakes, and the packing crate

  it furiously slashed to matchwood to escape.

  Their chairs were ex cathedra, yet if you draw back the blinds,

  (as full of windows as a fishnet now)

  you will hear them conspiring, slapping hands

  across the bent card-table, still leaf-green.

  Vacations, stagnant growth. But in the silence,

  some one lets out his belt to breathe, some one

  roams in negligee. Bless the confidence

  of their sitting unguarded there in stocking feet.

  Sands drop from the hour-glass waist and swallow-tail.

  We follow their gunshy shadows down the trail—

  those before us! Pardon them for existing.

  We have stopped watching them. They have stopped watching.

  Eye and Tooth

  My whol
e eye was sunset red,

  the old cut cornea throbbed,

  I saw things darkly,

  as through an unwashed goldfish globe.

  I lay all day on my bed.

  I chain-smoked through the night,

  learning to flinch

  at the flash of the matchlight.

  Outside, the summer rain,

  a simmer of rot and renewal,

  fell in pinpricks.

  Even new life is fuel.

  My eyes throb.

  Nothing can dislodge

  the house with my first tooth

  noosed in a knot to the doorknob.

  Nothing can dislodge

  the triangular blotch

  of rot on the red roof,

  a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.

  No ease from the eye

  of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,

  with reddish brown buffalo hair

  on its shanks, one ascetic talon

  clasping the abstract imperial sky.

  It says:

  an eye for an eye,

  a tooth for a tooth.

  No ease for the boy at the keyhole,

  his telescope,

  when the women’s white bodies flashed

  in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

  Nothing! No oil

  for the eye, nothing to pour

  on those waters or flames.

  I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.

  The Public Garden

  Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year

  you lead me to our stamping ground.

  The city and its cruising cars surround

  the Public Garden. All’s alive—

  the children crowding home from school at five,

  punting a football in the bricky air,

  the sailors and their pick-ups under trees

  with Latin labels. And the jaded flock

  of swanboats paddles to its dock.

  The park is drying.

  Dead leaves thicken to a ball

  inside the basin of a fountain, where

  the heads of four stone lions stare

  and suck on empty faucets. Night

  deepens. From the arched bridge, we see

  the shedding park-bound mallards, how they keep

  circling and diving in the lanternlight,

  searching for something hidden in the muck.

  And now the moon, earth’s friend, that cared so much

  for us, and cared so little, comes again—

  always a stranger! As we walk,

  it lies like chalk

  over the waters. Everything’s aground.

  Remember summer? Bubbles filled