The 50s
Page 71
heels together
arms gracefully
for the moment
curled above his head!
Then he whirled about
bounded
into the air
and with an entrechat
perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
My mother
taken by surprise
where she sat
in her invalid’s chair
was left speechless.
“Bravo!” she cried at last
and clapped her hands.
The man’s wife
came from the kitchen:
“What goes on here?” she said.
But the show was over.
—William Carlos Williams
November 28, 1953
She had thought the studio would keep itself—
No dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
The panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
A piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
Stalking the picturesque, amusing mouse
Had been her vision when he pleaded “Come.”
Not that, at five, each separate stair would writhe
Under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light
So coldly would delineate the scraps
Of last night’s cheese and blank, sepulchral bottles;
That on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
A pair of beetle eyes would fix her own—
Envoy from some black village in the moldings.…
Meanwhile her night’s companion, with a yawn,
Sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
Declared it out of tune, inspected, whistling,
A twelve hours’ beard, went out for cigarettes,
While she, contending with a woman’s demons,
Pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
A fallen towel to dust the tabletop,
And wondered how it was a man could wake
From night to day and take the day for granted.
By evening she was back in love again,
Though not so wholly but throughout the night
She woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
Like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
—Adrienne Cecile Rich
January 23, 1954
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren’t waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr’dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians’ speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
“Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there…No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”
—Elizabeth Bishop
January 21, 1956
Spring comes and autumn goes
But we still have the town of sparrows.
Under the eaves and in the ivy
These folk keep continually busy.
If someone speaks, someone demurs;
They are indomitable bickerers.
One can easily imagine them
Asquabble in the copses when brave William
Led his band by; or even, once,
In the dust near Hannibal’s elephants.
Maybe in the primeval firs
They went at it: What’s his, what’s hers?
Apparently they do not welcome
Finality in sparrowdom.
Now, in the ivy, they are all upset;
This argument isn’t settled yet.
—Hayden Carruth
December 8, 1956
Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half asleep or half sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love speech indicative of a proper name.
Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise
Kenning you a godchild of the Moon and the West Wind,
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.
Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very new.
This, moreover, at an hour when only too often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans “do,”
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian bishops.
Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done—
So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W. H. Auden
March 9, 1957
Presently, at our touch, the teacup stirred,
Then circled lazily about
From A to Z. The first voice heard
(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)
Was that of an engineer
Originally from Cologne.
Dead in his 22nd year
Of cholera in Cairo, he had “known
No happiness.” He once met Goethe, though.
Goethe had told him: Persevere.
Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde
Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,
Some childish and, you might say, blurred
By sleep; one little boy
Named Will, reluctant, possibly in a ruff
Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled
Back the arras for that next voice,
Cold and portentous: “All is lost.
Flee this house. Otto von Thurn und Taxis.
Obey. You have no choice.”
Frightened, we stopped; but tossed
Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.
Each night since then, the moon waxes,
Small insects flit round a cold torch
We light, that sends them pattering to the porch…
But no real Sign. New voices come,
Dictate addresses, begging us to write;
Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom,
In ways that so exhilarate
We are sleeping sound of late.
Last night, the teacup shattered in a rage.
Indeed, we have grown nonchalant
Toward the other world. In the gloom here,
Our elbows on the cleared
Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred
Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone
Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,
Than by those clamoring overhead,
Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment
We still have wit to postpone
Because, once looked at, lit
By the cold reflections of the dead
Risen extinct but irresistible,
Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,
Nor the full moon more quick to chill.
—James Merrill
June 29, 1957
I came before the water-
colorists came to get the
good of the Cape light that scours
sand grit to sided crystal
and buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
of the three fishing smacks beached
on the bank of the river’s
backtracking tail. I’d come for
free fish bait: the blue mussels
clumped like bulbs at the grass-root
margin of the tidal pools.
Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt
mud stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;
heard a queer crusty scrabble
cease, and I neared the silenced
edge of a cratered pool bed.
The mussels hung dull blue and
conspicuous, yet it seemed
a sly world’s hinges had swung
shut against me. All held still.
Though I counted scant seconds,
enough ages lapsed to win
confidence of safe-conduct
in the wary otherworld
eying me. Grass put forth claws;
small mud knobs, nudged from under,
displaced their domes as tiny
knights might doff their casques. The crabs
inched from their pygmy burrows
and from the trench-dug mud, all
camouflaged in mottled mail
of browns and greens. Each wore one
claw swollen to a shield large
as itself—no fiddler’s arm
grown Gargantuan by trade,
but grown grimly, and grimly
borne, for a use beyond my
guessing of it. Sibilant
hordes, mass-motived, they sidled
out in a converging stream
toward the pool mouth, perhaps to
meet the thin and sluggish thread
of sea retracing its tide-
way up the river basin.
Or to avoid me. They moved
obliquely with a dry-wet
sound, with a glittery wisp
and trickle. Could they feel mud
pleasurable under claws
as I could between bare toes?
That question ended it—I
stood shut out, for once, for all,
puzzling the passage of their
absolutely alien
order as I might puzzle
at the clear tail of Halley’s
comet, coolly giving my
orbit the go-by, made known
by a family name it
knew nothing of. So the crabs
went about their business, which
wasn’t fiddling, and I filled
a big handkerchief with blue
mussels. From what the crabs saw,
if they could see, I was one
two-legged mussel picker.
High on the airy thatching
of the dense grasses, I found
the husk of a fiddler crab,
intact, strangely strayed above
his world of mud—green color
and innards bleached and blown off
somewhere by much sun and wind;
there was no telling if he’d
died recluse or suicide
or headstrong Columbus crab.
The crab face, etched and set there,
grimaced as skulls grimace—it
had an Oriental look,
a samurai death mask done
on a tiger tooth, less for
art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea—
where red-freckled crab backs, claws,
and whole crabs, dead, their soggy
bellies pallid and upturned,
perform their shambling waltzes
on the waves’ dissolving turn
and return, losing themselves
bit by bit to their friendly
element—this relic saved
face, to face the bald-faced sun.
—Sylvia Plath
August 9, 1958
Take the intellectual prig;
For his pretensions I do not care a whit or a fig.
I am content that he should know what name Achilles
assumed among the women, and do his crosswords
in Esperanto,
And ostentatiously comprehend the inner meaning of
Pound’s obscurest canto.
It does not disturb me that he can distinguish between
“flaunt” and “flout,” and “costive” and “costate,”
What does disturb me is his black-sheep brother, the
intellectual prig apostate.
Such a one is so erudite that he frequently thinks in Aramaic,
But he expresses himself in slang long passé in Passaic.
His signature is purple ink in an illegible curlicue,
And he compares baseball to ballet, and laments the passing
of burlesque, which he refers
to as burlicue.
He has a folksy approach to the glory that was Greece,
And professes to find more social and sociological
significance in Li’l Abner than in War and Peace.
For the most part, my feelings about him I silently conceal,
But when he comments that The Power of Positive Thinking
burns with a hard, gemlike flame, I can only cry that
he is robbing Pater to paw Peale.
—Ogden Nash
August 30, 1958
(Derived from “Golden Fleece of the Arctic,” an article in the Atlantic Monthly, by John J. Teal, Jr., who rears musk oxen on his farm in Vermont)
To wear the arctic fox
you have to kill it. Wear
qiviut—the underwool of the arctic ox—
pulled off it like a sweater;
your coat is warm, your conscience better.
I would like a suit of
qiviut, so light I did not
know I had it on, and in the
course of time another,
since I had not had to murder
the “goat” that grew the fleece
that grew the first. The musk ox
has no musk and it is not an ox—
illiterate epithet.
Bury your nose in one when wet.
It smells of water, nothing else,
and browses goatlike on
hind legs. Its great distinction
is not egocentric scent
but that it is intelligent.
Chinchillas, otters, water rats,
and beavers keep us warm.
But think! A “musk ox” grows six pounds
of qiviut; the cashmere ram,
three ounces—that is all—of pashm.
Lying in an exposed spot,
basking in the blizzard,
these ponderosos could dominate