The matter once only and, afterwards,
God.
I’d arranged a shelf of animals.
At the center was a clear space,
An ark for snow, dust, and adagios.
Comes a time you must understand, you two,
I did it for you. I left my lover
On the far side of the swimming horses.
Chincoteague, Cythera, the summer house
I never saw builded, although I am
The spook of the builders, Antoine Watteau.
Chincoteague Island is a coastal island in Accomack County, Virginia. The feral horses known as “Chincoteague Ponies” actually live and graze on the salt marshes of nearby Assateague Island, and are descended from animals released into the wild by seventeenth-century colonists. On the last Wednesday of every July, mounted riders herd some of the ponies and swim them across a narrow channel to Chincoteague, where they are auctioned off in aid of the local fire department. Once, in Colorado, a cowboy poet asked me if I’d ever seen horses eating fish out of the ocean. I think of the Chincoteague Ponies as of angels, as of tireless commuters, as recovering alcoholics in a story by Cheever. I would like to walk beside one across the Tappan Zee Bridge some early morning, whistling the adagio from Brahms’s Violin Sonata in G Major. In 1861, the residents of Chincoteague Island voted not to secede from the Union.
A place of quiet nor of such consent
Never any of it turning to say
The perfect life is ourselves this evening
Once the weight the desperation of it
Intoxicated as the mountain lights
Nearest buildings some distance away mark
Events of such glamour loves our waitress
Wanting to care to bring us the mountain
Alphabet of which your green eyes show
There is no cutting corners in color
The heaven-sent harries our evidence
Each sign each second of extremity
All rescued by the Lord gives freely
Unhappy we cannot say He
In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau’s birth, a major retrospective of his works was assembled. It traveled to several of the world’s great museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where it was on display from June 17 through September 23, 1984. I saw it there. Betrayal hung upon the face of Watteau’s Pierrot (sometimes known as Gilles) like a cloudy veil upon a weathered mask. Earlier that summer, in New York, at the Whitney Museum, I’d seen a major retrospective of the paintings of Fairfield Porter. The clouds in Maine, the houses beneath them, the lawns running down to the ocean, shone separately, each from the other, in distinctive, pious illumination. The parts of a world are alone with God, crowded together. I can never separate the Watteau exhibition, in memory, from the Fairfield Porters I’d seen a few days before, some distance to the north. Columbine might have been a dog asleep in Maine. Harlequin remains hidden somewhere in an upstairs bedroom.
Blaze of fir along the ground, I mean
Needles in a finger-splay showing
God’s direction to the wind, why now?
Could it not have saved the boy sooner?
Colin to Cuddie: Blow the fire.
Love to liking: Lullay my dear one.
Rummage the odes for a fir tree more,
A black finger-mark on pitch-black sky.
I will lug my son into the light
Soon. Blaze me then. If the ground envies
The wind, despair’s a fine thing. Mine eyes
Etcetera will lug my son soon.
Pagans were underfoot always, Watteau,
Heavy to me and not a boy for you.
Colin Clout, a shepheardes boy enamour’d of Rosalinde, is Edmund Spenser’s own avowed persona in The Shepheardes Calender. A rural musician and lay prophet, Colin is the conscience of English pastoral poetry, evermore.
Cuddie, an unhappy Heardsmans boye, is the main character of Spenser’s “Februarie” eclogue.
Lullay, myn lykyng, my dere sone, myn swetyng, / Lullay, my dere herte, myn owyn dere derlyng.
—Fifteenth-century English Christmas carol
Then you, the burlesque of our lust—and faith, / Lug us back lifeward—bone by infant bone.
—Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden”
Of smoke in Bethel no solitude can say,
Or archangel. Said Christ to me a wisp
Tilted into the trees to meet mountains,
Palm trees. Company of losels and pricks.
Say it again, Lord. We are not lonely.
Asking girls at two o’clock in the morning
Stabbed through the heart, joy’s absolute only
Saying, will you be married all these years?
Bejeweled, yes, where the dog was sick.
Heaven’s gate, yes, made of pearl and jasper.
Also I had in my mind the fountain
Wept a crazy glass into my birthday.
A new car is another Christmas morning
Farther on. Further, Antoine, my roundelay.
Bethel, literally “House of God.” In Genesis, Bethel is the site of Jacob’s dream, the one of a ladder thronged with angels ascending and descending. In my Sunday School, we read very little of the Old Testament, and so it was not until I came upon Denise Levertov’s beautiful 1961 collection that I knew anything of that dream. I never met Denise, but we did have a good correspondence over the course of several years, from 1986 until her death. Her letters seemed always to arrive when I most needed them. They were like windows in houses in paintings by Vuillard.
Losels, scoundrels, good-for-nothings, rogues.
Jasper, Revelation 21:18, “And the building of the wall of it [Jerusalem] was of jasper …” Among the secrets of why and why now, I ask you to number the death of our dog Jasper, a giant schnauzer.
A space between clockwork and the rainbow
Wrapped in wads of hay, happens a child.
Whose? Mary would say Cupid’s. Venus would
Paint rainbows across my Christ, the soar
Falcon I should learn. And so it is
Star’s lief to wander, murdering as far
As the next animal—hind, bee—nightgowned
For the fayre election, calling itself
Queenie. Children hurt one another
And themselves. Between the clockmaker God,
Combing the beaches, and His joy fell a truth
Like thousands of wounds. Watteau, it’s Christmas!
The elementary school playgrounds
Behave the night sky as if they owned it.
Covenant below my eye, self-made
Something, dread awhile to frighten rabbits
Out of the snow, but no, nothing like that.
I went to the window today nearly blind.
Christ promised me American catastrophe
All my own. My erst friends, beloved,
Would hurry away down the white, white snow,
And I would pound into the windowpanes
White names, their names. Below the eye, self-made
Imagination of a colored spree
Plays hangman. Wretched man. Wretched tree.
Ermine of the coldest kind, says Watteau.
Into my heart to write a Christ did, once,
The whole way go, on the off chance.
Windowpanes, facing into the little square of garden, Blackburn Street, 333 Blackburn Street, 1984, a letter on my desk from Terry K., thanking us both for happy days in Washington—Dumbarton Oaks, the Watteau exhibition, the screening of Another Country.
Wretched tree, I am thinking, of course, of Judas. Betrayal is the good health of hum
an helplessness every time, every time, and also of its hair.
A fold field chose The rightest boy
Something to wings Well accustomed
So that so that A long woman
Finding him nude Would love and know
The carrying Beneath her heart
Was his was he A fold field chose
In the Grecian Epigraphy
Muddle is made Of a plain truth
As if two girls Climbing a hill
To some ruins Were not two girls
And the long boy Trailing after
Were not the Christ But one Greek more
Christ’s epigone Clownish Watteau
Painted for them A hilltop home
Epigone, an undistinguished imitator or follower; also Epigon, one born after; in the plural, Epigoni, as in the sons of The Seven against Thebes.
… Time is the steward of decor.
In auctioned fittings that no longer are,
Persists the image that forever is:
Ease, class on class, and in the distance, war.
—Turner Cassity, “Epigoni Go French Line”
I met Turner Cassity only once, at the home (27 Chestnut Street, Binghamton, NY) of Patricia Wilcox, sometime in the spring of 1974. His patter was devilish and keen and kind: “Why do the wicked prosper, Patty? Because they are wicked!” Patricia Wilcox was the first friend my writing ever had, and certainly the best. She perfectly loved this world of which she perfectly despaired. God’s truth was an oxalis growing in her kitchen window. I last visited her and her family in June 1984, right around the time of my thirtieth birthday.
Very light snow of smalls. The last one,
Time at last to praise intervals when
Nightclothes speaking of angels begin
In cold beloved bed one flannel,
Falls. Afterwards there must be skating.
Lately, Watteau, I’ve found you often
Painting flannel and periwinkle
In the Twenty-Third Psalm. Is it me?
It is small enough to pray, and cold
In bed. Cupped in blue flowers, needle-
Sharp as winter starlight, the breasts of
Skating you know. The musics will stray.
Periwinkle and dots of fire
Praise Christ Cupid on snowy rapier.
This morning of the small snow / I count the blessings …
—Charles Olson, “The Songs of Maximus”
The Bishop’s Wife (1947), a film directed by Henry Koster and adapted from Robert Nathan’s novel of the same name. In the scene I’m remembering, the angel Dudley (played by Cary Grant) is seated on the floor beside a child, the bishop’s little daughter. He tells her the story of a shepherd boy’s fight with a lion, and the story becomes Psalm 23. The scene is so deeply focused, so clear and clean edged in every direction, it could only have been photographed by Gregg Toland, as indeed it was. Cinematographer of Wuthering Heights, The Grapes of Wrath, and Citizen Kane, Toland died in 1948 at the age of forty-four.
Tan-ta-ra, cries Mars on bloody rapier,
Fa-la, fa-la, fa-la, cries Venus in her chamber.
Toodle loodle loo, cries Pan that cuckoo,
With bells at his shoe, and a fiddle too.
—Thomas Weelkes, 1608
How near would you dare to row? Revisit
Your island now after so many such
Mornings, mornings the rabbits set to burst
Cornflower blue, is it smoke, is it frost
So makes the color, and you would surely
Never leave. Her. You once together set
The lintel askew from a ship’s last timber.
Her. And the animals came to your hand.
The color of foam is sound, not color.
Swale, gunnel, swamp Andromeda, choose, man,
You must choose your parcel of imagined
Land and live in it, dry, berry-brown dry.
Dressed as a clown Antony, Antony
Rows for home. Christmas, they said. Come Christmas.
… But one of my most frequent expeditions was to go from the larger island to the smaller one, disembarking and spending the afternoon there, either walking in its narrow confines among the sallows, alders, persicarias and shrubs of all kinds, or else establishing myself on the summit of a shady hillock covered with turf, wild thyme and flowers, including even red and white clover which had probably been sown there at some time in the past, a perfect home for rabbits, which could multiply there in peace, without harming anything or having anything to fear. I put the idea to the Steward, who sent for rabbits from Neuchatel, both bucks and does, and we proceeded in great ceremony, his wife, one of his sisters, Therese and I, to install them on the little island, where they were beginning to breed before my departure and where they will doubtless have flourished if they have been able to withstand the rigours of winter. The founding of this little colony was a great day.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France
Entirely forgotten they the license, hame and sky.
To manage a fine staircase, turning one’s eyes
To his angels of no help, needing any, they
Have forgotten. Take this engine now from me.
Beloved rib cage and poverty hame.
Bell. Bell. Steeple that buried my parents
Under the hill was a staircase too.
Psyche had two sisters. Of women, a man
May speak to facts but never to opinion.
I was given a flag at my father’s grave.
Beside him, my mother in death has made
A baroque staircase, a variance, a rage
Brighter than archangels. Take it from me.
Totty as busy rain, climb it, climb it.
… no unearned income / can buy us back the gait and gestures / to manage a baroque staircase, or the art / of believing footmen don’t hear / human speech.
—W. H. Auden, “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”
“Psyche Showing Her Sisters Her Gifts from Cupid” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1753 (collection of the National Gallery, London)
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain, / Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind …
—John Keats, “Ode to Psyche”
Busyrane, a wizard in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Busyrane was associated with lust and with sexual love in (and out of) marriage.
Watteau in rags: Climb! For only far is
Free. The difference between a rag and a rapier
Catches fire at extreme of sky,
Disappearing just then, sex then, leaving
Adam there, Eve until a long time
Mother mine. The baroque smiles across me.
Edna Davis pray for me and my good conduct.
Sainted depth of focus undercroft pray.
All over again shall we manage
The staircase, Watteau a ways ahead,
Rags becoming rage, brightness falling through
Busy rain. June 18th, 1961.
The final license of a final day
Says you. And of the two sisters, one says I.
At my right hand, always, when I am writing, sits The Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (1940) inscribed, in delicate blue handwriting,
For good conduct
From, Edna Davis
(Teacher)
June 18, 1961
World Book
Carole Maso
For A is the beginning of learning and the door to heaven.
—Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno
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One of the things I loved most when I was a child was to read from the children’s encyclopedia (the ice age, the oboe, the migration of birds, the origin of oceans) and hours would pass in an instant as time warped and warbled and space seemed to expand into an elongating oval shape and I would vanish into those pages. Often I would find myself lost in the many wonders of the world then: an abacus, an acorn, an airplane (the silver world), falling into a half trance I have never quite been able to lift myself from since (the velocity of light, the theory of tables, the point of indiscernibility, a logic of wings).
The volumes had been ordered by my parents from a man they said had come to our door. I see him still in the gloaming, sitting on a park bench, gathering his courage and tomes; evening. Curiously my parents had understood these books to be a crucial, even urgent addition to our universe, a fact that has always fascinated me, for who among us would have guessed how insightful they were. They were beloved creatures: Mother, with a bird’s nest on her head, and Father holding a burnished trumpet (peace in our time) but to me they seemed utterly out of touch. How could they have known, I wonder—so removed they seemed from the secret life of children (a fossil, a blue striped feather, a carapace, a chrysalis, a sarcophagus, an apple). We imagined we roamed another world entirely. Our parents some distant totem toward which we vaguely yearned.
It strikes me now on reflection, and perhaps I see it better in retrospect (the house gone to archetype: crimson, roses, summer … ) that even then it was I who was the one who was out of touch—only imagining a pack of wandering sibling comrades at my side. A clamor of children, a din—receding already back then.
I look to the ceiling where the German airship the Hindenburg hovers. The cat recently deceased in the air like a gray dirigible.
After word of the acquisition of the encyclopedias, weeks passed without another mention of them and it seemed as if we had invented the whole thing as a distraction. It does seem preposterous now: a little man selling books in the night, every letter on every volume embossed in gold to light his way, wings attached to his back.
What an odd time, that suspension between the knowledge of the existence of such books and their arrival, weeks or perhaps it was months later. It seemed like forever. That eternity strikes me, especially now, as we verge on something like World’s End, as one of the sweetest and most hopeful of my life. Who would I become? What was I to be?
Speaking Volumes Page 23
