Poems New and Collected Read online

  there or someplace else.

  Seven cities stood there.

  So we think.

  They were meant to stand forever.

  We suppose.

  They weren’t up to much, no.

  They were up to something, yes.

  Hypothetical. Dubious.

  Uncommemorated.

  Never extracted from air,

  fire, water, or earth.

  Not contained within a stone

  or drop of rain.

  Not suitable for straight-faced use

  as a story’s moral.

  A meteor fell.

  Not a meteor.

  A volcano exploded.

  Not a volcano.

  Someone summoned something.

  Nothing was called.

  On this more-or-less Atlantis.

  Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition

  So these are the Himalayas.

  Mountains racing to the moon.

  The moment of their start recorded

  on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.

  Holes punched in a desert of clouds.

  Thrust into nothing.

  Echo—a white mute.

  Quiet.

  Yeti, down there we’ve got Wednesday,

  bread and alphabets.

  Two times two is four.

  Roses are red there,

  and violets are blue.

  Yeti, crime is not all

  we’re up to down there.

  Yeti, not every sentence there

  means death.

  We’ve inherited hope—

  the gift of forgetting.

  You’ll see how we give

  birth among the ruins.

  Yeti, we’ve got Shakespeare there.

  Yeti, we play solitaire

  and violin. At nightfall,

  we turn lights on, Yeti.

  Up here it’s neither moon nor earth.

  Tears freeze.

  Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,

  turn back, think again!

  I called this to the Yeti

  inside four walls of avalanche,

  stomping my feet for warmth

  on the everlasting

  snow.

  Nothing Twice

  Nothing can ever happen twice.

  In consequence, the sorry fact is

  that we arrive here improvised

  and leave without the chance to practice.

  Even if there is no one dumber,

  if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

  you can’t repeat the class in summer:

  this course is only offered once.

  No day copies yesterday,

  no two nights will teach what bliss is

  in precisely the same way,

  with exactly the same kisses.

  One day, perhaps, some idle tongue

  mentions your name by accident:

  I feel as if a rose were flung

  into the room, all hue and scent.

  The next day, though you’re here with me,

  I can’t help looking at the clock:

  A rose? A rose? What could that be?

  Is it a flower or a rock?

  Why do we treat the fleeting day

  with so much needless fear and sorrow?

  It’s in its nature not to stay:

  Today is always gone tomorrow.

  With smiles and kisses, we prefer

  to seek accord beneath our star,

  although we’re different (we concur)

  just as two drops of water are.

  Buffo

  First, our love will die, alas,

  then two hundred years will pass,

  then we’ll meet again at last—

  this time in the theater, played

  by a couple of comedians,

  him and her, the public’s darlings.

  Just a little farce, with songs,

  patter, jokes, and final bows,

  a vaudeville comedy of manners,

  certain to bring down the house.

  You’ll amuse them endlessly

  on the stage with your cravat

  and your petty jealousy.

  So will I, love’s silly pawn,

  with my heart, my joy, my crown,

  my heart broken, my joy gone,

  my crown tumbling to the ground.

  To the laughter’s loud refrain,

  we will meet and part again,

  seven mountains, seven rivers

  multiplying our pain.

  If we haven’t had enough

  of despair, grief, all that stuff,

  lofty words will kill us off.

  Then we’ll stand up, take our bows:

  hope that you’ve enjoyed our show.

  Every patron with his spouse

  will applaud, get up, and go.

  They’ll reenter their lives’ cages,

  where love’s tiger sometimes rages,

  but the beast’s too tame to bite.

  We’ll remain the odd ones out,

  silly heathens in their fools’ caps,

  listening to the small bells ringing

  day and night.

  Commemoration

  They made love in a hazel grove,

  beneath the little suns of dew;

  dry leaves and twigs got in their hair

  and dry dirt too.

  Swallow’s heart, have

  mercy on them.

  They both knelt down on the lakeshore,

  they combed the dry leaves from their hair;

  small fish, a star’s converging rays,

  swam up to stare.

  Swallow’s heart, have

  mercy on them.

  Reflected in the rippling lake,

  trees trembled, nebulous and gray;

  o swallow, let them never, never

  forget this day.

  O swallow, cloud-borne thorn,

  anchor of the air,

  Icarus improved,

  coattails in Assumption,

  o swallow, calligraphy,

  clockhand minus minutes,

  early ornithogothic,

  heaven’s cross-eyed glance,

  o swallow, knife-edged silence,

  mournful exuberance,

  the aureole of lovers,

  have mercy on them.

  from

  SALT

  1962

  The Monkey

  Evicted from the Garden long before

  the humans: he had such infectious eyes

  that just one glance around old Paradise

  made even angels’ hearts feel sad and sore,

  emotions hitherto unknown to them.

  Without a chance to say “I disagree,”

  he had to launch his earthly pedigree.

  Today, still nimble, he retains his charme

  with a primeval “e” after the “m.”

  Worshiped in Egypt, pleiades of fleas

  spangling his sacred and silvery mane,

  he’d sit and listen in archsilent peace:

  What do you want? A life that never ends?

  He’d turn his ruddy rump as if to say

  such life he neither bans nor recommends.

  In Europe they deprived him of his soul

  but they forgot to take his hands away;

  there was a painter-monk who dared portray

  a saint with palms so thin, they could be simian.

  The holy woman prayed for heaven’s favor

  as if she waited for a nut to fall.

  Warm as a newborn, with an old man’s tremor,

  imported to kings’ courts across the seas,

  he whined while swinging on his golden chain,

  dressed in the garish coat of a marquis.

  Prophet of doom. The court is laughing? Please.

  Considered edible in China, he makes boiled

  or roasted faces when laid upon a salver.

  Ironic as a gem set in sham go
ld.

  His brain is famous for its subtle flavor,

  though it’s no good for trickier endeavors,

  for instance, thinking up gunpowder.

  In fables, lonely, not sure what to do,

  he fills up mirrors with his indiscreet

  self-mockery (a lesson for us, too);

  the poor relation, who knows all about us,

  though we don’t greet each other when we meet.

  Lesson

  Subject King Alexander predicate cuts direct

  object the Gordian knot with his indirect object sword.

  This had never predicate entered anyone’s object mind before.

  None of a hundred philosophers could disentangle this knot.

  No wonder each now shrinks in some secluded spot.

  The soldiers, loud and with great glee,

  grab each one by his trembling gray goatee

  and predicate drag object him out.

  Enough’s enough. The king calls for his hone,

  adjusts his crested helm and sallies forth.

  And in his wake, with trumpets, drums, and flutes,

  his subject army made of little knots

  predicate marches off to indirect object war.

  Museum

  Here are plates but no appetite.

  And wedding rings, but the requited love

  has been gone now for some three hundred years.

  Here’s a fan—where is the maiden’s blush?

  Here are swords—where is the ire?

  Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

  Since eternity was out of stock,

  ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.

  The moss-grown guard in golden slumber

  props his moustache on the Exhibit Number . . .

  Eight. Metals, clay, and feathers celebrate

  their silent triumphs over dates.

  Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.

  The crown has outlasted the head.

  The hand has lost out to the glove.

  The right shoe has defeated the foot.

  As for me, I am still alive, you see.

  The battle with my dress still rages on.

  It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!

  Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

  A Moment in Troy

  Little girls—

  skinny, resigned

  to freckles that won’t go away,

  not turning any heads

  as they walk across the eyelids of the world,

  looking just like Mom or Dad,

  and sincerely horrified by it—

  in the middle of dinner,

  in the middle of a book,

  while studying the mirror,

  may suddenly be taken off to Troy.

  In the grand boudoir of a wink

  they all turn into beautiful Helens.

  They ascend the royal staircase

  in the rustling of silk and admiration.

  They feel light. They all know

  that beauty equals rest,

  that lips mold the speech’s meaning,

  and gestures sculpt themselves

  in inspired nonchalance.

  Their small faces

  worth dismissing envoys for

  extend proudly on necks

  that merit countless sieges.

  Those tall, dark movie stars,

  their girlfriends’ older brothers,

  the teacher from art class,

  alas, they must all be slain.

  Little girls

  observe disaster

  from a tower of smiles.

  Little girls

  wring their hands

  in intoxicating mock despair.

  Little girls

  against a backdrop of destruction,

  with flaming towns for tiaras,

  in earrings of pandemic lamentation.

  Pale and tearless.

  Triumphant. Sated with the view.

  Dreading only the inevitable

  moment of return.

  Little girls

  returning.

  Shadow

  My shadow is a fool whose feelings

  are often hurt by his routine

  of rising up behind his queen

  to bump his silly head on ceilings.

  His is a world of two dimensions,

  that’s true, but flat jokes still can smart;

  he longs to flaunt my court’s conventions

  and drop a role he knows by heart.

  The queen leans out above the sill,

  the jester tumbles out for real:

  thus they divide their actions; still,

  it’s not a fifty-fifty deal.

  My jester took on nothing less

  than royal gestures’ shamelessness,

  the things that I’m too weak to bear—

  the cloak, crown, scepter, and the rest.

  I’ll stay serene, won’t feel a thing,

  yes, I will turn my head away

  after I say good-bye, my king,

  at railway station N., some day.

  My king, it is the fool who’ll lie

  across the tracks; the fool, not I.

  The Rest

  Her mad songs over, Ophelia darts out,

  anxious to check offstage whether her dress is

  still not too crumpled, whether her blond tresses

  frame her face as they should.

  Since real life’s laws

  require facts, she, Polonius’s true