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.
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.’”
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.
