From “The Days” by Donald Hall
[...]
“Though leaves rot, or leaves burn in the gutter;
though the complications of this morning’s breakfast
dissolve in faint shudders of light
at a great distance, he continues to daydream
that the past is a country under the ground
where the days practice their old habits
over and over, as faint and persistent
as cigarette smoke in airless rooms.”
[...]
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Tags: Donald Hall, The Alligator Bride
December, and the closing of the year;
The momentary carolers complete
Their Christmas Eves, and quickly disappear
Into their houses on each lighted street.
Each car is put away in each garage;
Each husband home from work, to celebrate,
Has closed his house around him like a cage,
And wedged the tree until the tree stood straight.
Tonight you lie in Whitneyville again,
Near where you lived, and near the woods or farms
Which Eli Whitney settled with the men
Who worked at mass-producing firearms.
The main street, which was nothing after all
Except a school, a stable, and two stores,
Was improvised and individual,
Picking its way alone, among the wars.
Now Whitneyville is like the other places,
Ranch houses stretching flat beyond the square,
Same stores and movie, same composite faces
Speaking the language of the public air.
Old houses of brown shingle still surround
This graveyard where you wept when you were ten
And helped to set a coffin in the ground.
You left a friend from school behind you then,
And now return, a man of fifty-two.
Talk to the boy. Tell him about the years
When Whitneyville quadrupled, and how you
And all his friends went on to make careers,
Had cars as long as hayricks, boarded planes
For Rome and Paris where the pace was slow,
And took the time to think how yearly gains,
Profit and volume made the business grow.
“The things you had to miss,” you said last week,
“Or thought you had to, take your breath away.”
You propped yourself on pillows, where your cheek
Was hollow, stubbled lightly with new gray.
This love is jail; another sets us free.
Tonight the houses and their noise distort
The thin rewards of solidarity.
The houses lean together for support.
The noises fail, and lights go on upstairs.
The men and women are undressing now
To go to sleep. They put their clothes on chairs
To take them up again. I think of how,
All over Whitneyville, when midnight comes
They lie together and are quieted,
To sleep as children sleep, who suck their thumbs,
Cramped in the narrow rumple of each bed.
They will not have unpleasant thoughts tonight.
They make their houses jails, and they will take
No risk of freedom for the appetite,
Or knowledge of it, when they are awake.
The lights go out and it is Christmas Day.
The stones are white, the grass it black and deep.
I will go back and leave you here to stay
Where the dark houses harden into sleep.
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Tags: Donald Hall, The Alligator Bride
[...]
I number out the virtues that are dead,
Remembering his soft, consistent voice,
His gentleness, and most,
The bone that showed in each deliberate word.
[...]
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Tags: Donald Hall, The Alligator Bride
Late snow fell this early morning of spring.
At dawn I rose from bed, restless, and looked
Out of my window, to wonder if there the snow
Fell outside your bedroom, and you watching.
I played my game of solitaire. The cards
Came out the same the third time through the deck.
The game was stuck. I threw the cards together,
And watched the snow that could not do but fall.
Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations
Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains
As distant as the curving of the earth,
Where snow still hangs in the middle of the air.
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Tags: Donald Hall, The Alligator Bride
“Wedding Party” by Donald Hall
The pock-marked player of the accordion
Empties and fills his squeeze box in the corner,
Kin to the tiny man who pours champagne,
Kin to the caterer. These solemn men,
Amid the sounds of silk and popping corks,
Stand like pillars. And the white bride
Moves through the crowd as a chaired relic moves.
Now all at once the pock-marked player grows
Immense and terrible beside the bride
Whose marriage withers to a rind of years
And curling photograph in a dry box;
And in the storm that hurls upon the room
Above the crowd he holds his breathing box
That only empties, fills, empties, fills.
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Tags: Donald Hall, The Alligator Bride
SHEPHERD
Not the blue-fountained Florida hotel,
Bell-capped, bellevued, straight-jacketed and decked
With chromium palms and a fromage of the moon,
Not goodnight chocolates, nor the soothing slide
Of huîtres and sentinel straight-up martinis,
Neither the yacht heraldic nor the stretch
Limos and pants, Swiss banks or Alpine stocks
Shall solace you, or quiet the long pain
Of cold ancestral disinheritance,
Severing your friendly commerce with the beasts,
Gone, lapsed, and cancelled, rendered obsolete
As the gonfalon of Bessarabia,
The shawn, the jitney, the equestrian order,
The dark daguerrotypes of Paradise.
TOWNIE
No humble folding cot, no steaming sty
Or sheep-dipped meadow now shall dignify
Your brute and sordid commerce with the beasts,
Scotch your flea-bitten bitterness or down
The voice that keeps repeating, “Up your Ars
Poetica, your earliest diapered dream
Of the long-gone Odd Fellows amity
Of bunny and scorpion, the entente cordiale
Of lamb and lion, the old nursery fraud
And droll Aesopic zoo in which the chatter
Of chimp and chaffinch, manticore and mouse,
Diverts us from all thought of entrecôtes,
Prime ribs and rashers, filet mignonnettes,
Provided for the paired pythons and jackals,
Off to their catered second honeymoons
On Noah’s forty-day excursion cruise.”
SHEPHERD
Call it, if this should please you, but a dream,
A bald, long-standing lie and mockery,
Yet it deserves better than your contempt.
Think also of that interstellar darkness,
Silence and desolation from which the Tempter,
Like a space capsule exiled into orbit,
Looks down upon our green cabinet of peace,
A place classless and weaponless, without
Envy or fossil fuel or architecture.
Think of him as at dawn he views a snail
Traveling with blind caution up the spine
Of a frond asway with its inching weight
In windless nods that deepen with assent
Till the ambler at least come back to earth,
Leaving his route, as on the boughs of heaven,
Traced with a silver scrawl. The morning mist
Haunts all about that action till the sun
Makes of it a small glory, and the dew
Holds the whole scale of rainbow, the accord
Of stars and waters, luminously viewed
At the same time by water-walking spiders
That dimple a surface with their passages.
In the lewd Viennese catalogue of dreams
It’s one of the few to speak of without shame.
TOWNIE
It is the dream of a shepherd-king or child,
And it is without all blemish except one:
That it supposes all virtue to stem
From pure simplicity. But many cures
Of body and spirit are the fruit
Of cultivated thought. Kindness itself
Depends on what we call consideration.
Your fear of corruption is a fear of thought,
Therefore you would be thoughtless. Think again.
Consider the perfect hexagrams of snow,
Those broadcast emblems of divinity,
That prove in their unduplicable shapes
Insights of Thales and Pythagoras.
If you must dream, dream of the ratio
Of Nine to Six to Four Palladio used
To shape those rooms and chapels where the soul
Imagines itself blessed, and finds its peace
Even in the chambers of the Malcontenta,
Those just proportions we hypothesize
Not as flat prairies but the City of God.
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Tags: Anthony Hecht, The Transparent Man
“Nobody Comes” by Thomas Hardy
Tree-leaves labour up and down
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.
A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.
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Tags: Thomas Hardy
Having commanded Adam to bestow
Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew
To empyrean palaces of blue
That warm and windless morning long ago,
And seemed to take no notice of the vexed
Look on the young man’s face as he took thought
Of all the miracles the Lord had wrought
Now to be labelled, dubbed, yclept, indexed.
Before an addled mind and puddled brow,
The feathered nation and the finny prey
Passed by; there went a biped and a quadruped.
Adam looked forth with bottomless dismay
Into the tragic eyes of his first cow,
And shyly ventured, “Thou shalt be called ‘Fred.’”
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Tags: Anthony Hecht, Sonnets: From Dante to the Present
THE VENETIAN VESPERS
for Harry and Kathleen Ford
…where’s that palace whereinto foul things Sometimes intrude not? Who has a breast so pure But some uncleanly apprehensions Keep leets and law days, and in session sit With meditations lawful?Othello: III, iii, 136-41
We cannot have our gardens now, nor our pleasant fields to meditate in at eventide.RUSKIN: The Stones of Venice BK. I, CH. XXX
I.
What’s merciful is not knowing where you are,
What time it is, even your name or age,
But merely a clean coolness at the temple—
That, says the spirit softly, is enough
For the mind to adventure on its half-hidden path
Like starlight interrupted by dense trees
Journeying backward on a winter trip
While you are going, as you fancy, forward,
And the stars are keeping pace with everything.
Where to begin? With the white, wrinkled membrane,
The disgusting skin that gathers on hot milk?
Or narrow slabs of jasper light at sundown
That fit themselves softly around the legs
Of chairs, and entertain a drift of motes,
A tide of sadness, a failing, a dying fall?
Or the glass jar, like a wet cell battery,
Full of electric coils and boiling resins,
It’s tin Pinocchio nose with one small nostril,
And both of us under a tent of towels
Like child conspirators, the tin nose breathing
Health at me steadily, like the insufflation of God?
Yes, but also the sight, on a gray morning,
Beneath the crossbar of an iron railing
Painted a glossy black, of six waterdrops
Slung in suspension, sucking into themselves,
As if it were some morbid nourishment,
The sagging blackness of the rail itself,
But edged with brilliant fingernails of chrome
In which the world was wonderfully disfigured
Like faces seen in spoons, like mirrorings
In the fine spawn, the roe of air bubbles,
That tiny silver wampum along the stems,
Yellow and magnified, of aging flowers
Caught in the lens of stale water and glass
In the upstairs room where somebody had died.
Just like the beads they sprinkled over cookies
At Christmas. Or perhaps those secret faces
Known to no one but me, slyly revealed
In repetitions of the wallpaper,
My tight network of agents in the field.
Well, yes. Any of these might somehow serve
As a departure point. But, perhaps, best
Would be those first precocious hints of hell,
Those intuitions of living desolation
That last a lifetime. These were never, for me,
Some desert place that humans had avoided
In which I could get lost, to which I might
In dreams condemn myself—a wilderness
Natural but alien and unpitying.
There were instead those derelict waste places
Abandoned by mankind as of no worth,
Frequented, if at all, by the dispossessed,
Nocturnal shapes, the crippled and the shamed.
Here in the haywire weeds, concealed by wilds
Of goldenrod and toadflax, lies a spur
With its one boxcar of brick-colored armor,
At noon, midsummer, fiercer than a kiln,
Rippling the thinness of the air around it
With visible distortions. Among the stones
Of the railbed, fragments of shattered amber
That held a pint of rye. The carapace
Of a dried beetle. A broken orange crate
Streaked with tobacco stains at the nailheads
In the gray, fractured slats. And over all,
The dust of oblivion finer than milled flour
Where chips of brick, clinkers and old iron
Burn in their slow, invisible decay.
Or else it is late afternoon in autumn,
The sunlight rusting on the western fronts
Of a long block of Victorian brick houses,
Untenanted, presumably condemned,
Their brownstone grapes, their grand entablatures,
Their straining caryatid muscle-men
Rendered at once ridiculous and sad
By the black scars of zigzag fire escapes
That double themselves in isometric shadows.
And all their vacancy is give voice
By the endless flapping of one window shade.
And then there is the rank, familiar smell
Of underpasses, the dark piers of bridges,
Where old men, the incontinent, urinate.
The acid smell of poverty, the jest
Of adolescent boys exchanging quips
About bedpans, the motorman’s comfort,
A hospital world of siphons and thick tubes
That they know nothing of. Nor do they know
The heatless burnings of the elderly
In memorized, imaginary lusts,
Visions of noontide infidelities,
Crude hallway gropings, cruel lubricities,
A fire cold and slow as rusting metal.
It is but a child’s step, it’s but an old man’s totter
From this to the appalling world of dreams.
Gray bottled babies in formaldehyde
As in their primal amniotic bath.
Pale dowagers hiding their liver-spots
In a fine chalk, confectionary dust.
And then the unbearable close-up of a wart
With a tough bristle of hair, like a small beast
With head and feet tucked under, playing possum.
A meat-hooked ham, hung like a traitor’s head
For the public’s notice in a butcher shop,
Faintly resembling the gartered thigh
Of an acrobatic, overweight soubrette.
And a scaled, crusted animal whose head
Fits in a Nazi helmet, whose webbed feet
Are cold on the flanks of dreaming lovers
While thorned and furry legs embrace each other
As black mandibles tick. Immature girls,
Naked but for the stockings they stretch tight
To tempt the mucid glitter of an eye.
And the truncated snout of a small bat,
Like one whose nose, undermined by the pox,
Falls back to the skull’s socket. Deepest of all,
Like the converging lines in diagrams
Of vanishing points, those underwater blades,
Those quills or sunburst spokes of marine light,
Flutings and gilded shafts in which one sees
In the drowned star of intersecting beams
Just at that final moment of suffocation
The terrifying and unmeaning rictus
Of the sandshark’s stretched, involuntary grin.
In the upstairs room, when somebody had died,
There were flowers, there in underwater globes,
Mercury seedpearls. It was my mother died.
After a long illness and long ago.
San Pantaleone, heavenly buffoon,
Patron of dotards and of gondolas
Forgive us the obsessional daydream
Of our redemption at work in black and white,
The silent movie, the old Commedia,
Which for the sake of the children in the house
The projectionist has ventured to run backwards.
(The reels must be rewound in any case.)
It is because of jumped, elided frames
That people make their way by jigs and spasms,
Impetuous leapings, violent semaphores,
Side-slipping, drunk discontinuities,
Like the staggered, tossed career of butterflies.
Here, in pure satisfaction of our hunger,
The Keystone Cops sprint from hysteria,
From brisk, slaphappy bludgeonings of crime,
Faultlessly backward into calm patrol;
And gallons of spilled paint, meekly obedient
As a domestic pet, home in and settle
Securely into casually offered pails,
Leaving the Persian rugs immaculate.
But best of all are the magically dry legs
Emerging from a sudden crater of water
That closes itself up like a healed wound
To plate-glass polish as the diver slides
Upwards, attaining with careless arrogance
His unsought footing on the highest board.
Something profoundly soiled, pointlessly hurt
And beyond cure in us yearns for this costless
Ablution, this impossible reprieve,
Unpurchased at a scaffold, free, bequeathed
As rain upon the just and the unjust,
As in the fall of mercy, unconstrained,
Upon the poor, infected place beneath.
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Tags: Anthony Hecht, The Venetian Vespers
“The Hobos” – Maurice Manning
Earlier, they had met a man who was building a fire in a tin can; he was scratching himself all over and telling a joke about chickens. The boys got afraid of the laughing man with the pin-head scabs; they became scared of getting their legs cut off and lonliness.
But still the second boy says: I swear I’ll jump on the very next train and you might never see me again! The first boy looks back: Yo pants is on fire – and keeps on walking. The first boy is a baby-skinned black boy with big arms. The other boy is skinny as a rail and sings like the rain.
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Tags: Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, Maurice Manning
Recent Entries
- From “The Days” by Donald Hall
- “Christmas Eve in Whitneyville” by Donald Hall
- From “Elegy for Wesley Wells” by Donald Hall
- “Love Is Like Sounds” by Donald Hall
- “Wedding Party” by Donald Hall
- “Eclogue of the Shepherd and the Townie” by Anthony Hecht
- “Nobody Comes” by Thomas Hardy
- “Naming the Animals” by Anthony Hecht
- From “The Venetian Vespers” by Anthony Hecht
- “The Hobos” – Maurice Manning
- “Clearing” – Christian Wiman
