by John Updike
wall-broad in this instance,
house-high:
splendiferous surface, the stucco
worn bare
here and there, stones nicked, cracked,
flecked, marked,
scored warmly, worn considerably, having
wept rust,
borne whitewash, mortar, known weather,
these spots
seem meditating irregularities:
Lord’s thoughts.
The Stunt Flier
I come into my dim bedroom
innocently and my baby
is lying in her crib face-down;
just a hemisphere of the half-bald head
shows, and the bare feet, uncovered,
the small feet crossed at the ankles
like a dancer doing easily
a difficult step—or,
more exactly, like a cherub
planing through Heaven,
cruising at a middle altitude
through the cumulus of the tumbled covers,
which disclose the feet crossed
at the ankles à la small boys who,
exulting in their mastery of bicycles,
lift their hands from the handlebars
to demonstrate how easy gliding is.
Calendar
Toward August’s end,
a hard night rain;
and the lawn is littered
with leaves again.
How the seasons blend!
So seeming still,
summer is fettered
to a solar will
which never rests.
The slanting ray
ignites migration
within the jay
and plans for nests
are hatching when
the northern nation
looks white to men.
The Short Days
I like the way, in winter, cars
Ignite beneath the lingering stars
And, with a cough or two, unpark,
And roar to work still in the dark.
Like some great father, slugabed,
Whose children crack the dawn with play,
The sun retains a heavy head
Behind the hill, and stalls the day.
Then red rims gild the gutter-spouts;
The streetlamp pales; the milk-truck fades;
And housewives—husbands gone—wash doubts
Down sinks and raise the glowing shades.
The cars are gone, they will return
When headlights in a new night burn;
Between long drinks of Acheron
The thirst of broad day has begun.
Boil
In the night the white skin
cries aloud to be broken,
but finds itself a cruel prison;
so it is with reason,
which holds the terror in,
undoubted though the infection.
Widener Library, Reading Room
Eight years removed from them, I sit among
The weary faces of the hopeful young.
All self-reflectively, my gaze is bent
To where the mirror proves recalcitrant.
The frosted glass of vanished time before
My eyes suggests the firm-locked office door
Of some august professor who has sent
For me and then forgot our appointment.
Mater, behold your son, not prodigal
But having, eager pen in hand, done all
Your discipline implied; the feat feels meant
Ill, here in the vault of its vague intent.
Movie House
View it, by day, from the back,
from the parking lot in the rear,
for from this angle only
the beautiful brick blankness can be grasped.
Monumentality
wears one face in all ages.
No windows intrude real light
into this temple of shades,
and the size of it,
the size of the great rear wall measures
the breadth of the dreams we have had here.
It dwarfs the village bank,
outlooms the town hall,
and even in its decline
makes the bright-ceilinged supermarket seem mean.
Stark closet of stealthy rapture,
vast introspective camera
wherein our most daring self-projections
were given familiar names:
stand, stand by your macadam lake
and tell the aeons of our extinction
that we, too, could house our gods,
could secrete a pyramid
to sight the stars by.
Vibration
The world vibrates, my sleepless nights
discovered. The air conditioner hummed;
I turned it off. The plumbing
in the next apartment sang;
I moved away, and found a town
whose factories shuddered as they worked
all night. The wires on the poles
outside my windows quivered in an ecstasy
stretched thin between horizons.
I went to where no wires were; and there,
as I lay still, a dragon tremor
seized my darkened body, gnawed
my heart, and murmured, I am you.
The Blessing
The room darkened, darkened until
our nakedness became a form of gray;
then the rain came bursting,
and we were sheltered, blessed,
upheld in a world of elements
that held us justified.
In all the love I had felt for you before,
in all that love,
there was no love
like that I felt when the rain began:
dim room, enveloping rush,
the slenderness of your throat,
the blessèd slenderness.
My Children at the Dump
The day before divorce, I take my children
on this excursion;
they are enchanted by
a wonderland of discard where
each complicated star cries out
to be a momentary toy.
· · ·
To me, too, the waste seems wonderful.
Sheer hills of television tubes, pale lakes
of excelsior, landslides
of perfectly carved carpentry-scraps,
sparkplugs like nuggets, cans iridescent
as peacock plumes, an entire lawnmower
all pluck at my instinct to conserve.
I cannot. These things
were considered, and dismissed
for a reason. But my children
wander wondering among tummocks of junk
like stunted starvelings cruelly set free
at a heaped banquet of food too rich to eat.
I shout, “Don’t touch the broken glass!”
The distant metal delicately rusts.
The net effect is floral: a seaward wind
makes flags of cellophane and upright weeds.
The seagulls weep; my boys bring back
bent tractors, hoping what some other child
once played to death can be revived by them.
No. I say, “No.” I came to add
my fragments to this universe of loss,
purging my house, ridding a life
no longer shared of remnants.
My daughter brings a naked armless doll,
still hopeful in its dirty weathered eyes,
and I can only tell her, “Love it now.
Love it now, but we can’t take it home.”
The Great Scarf of Birds
Playing golf on Cape Ann in October,
I saw something to remember.
Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets
of their branc
hes. The maples
were colored like apples,
part orange and red, part green.
The elms, already transparent trees,
seemed swaying vases full of sky. The sky
was dramatic with great straggling V’s
of geese streaming south, mare’s-tails above them;
their trumpeting made us look up and around.
The course sloped into salt marshes,
and this seemed to cause the abundance of birds.
As if out of the Bible
or science fiction,
a cloud appeared, a cloud of dots
like iron filings which a magnet
underneath the paper undulates.
It dartingly darkened in spots,
paled, pulsed, compressed, distended, yet
held an identity firm: a flock
of starlings, as much one thing as a rock.
One will moved above the trees
the liquid and hesitant drift.
Come nearer, it became less marvellous,
more legible, and merely huge.
“I never saw so many birds!” my partner claimed;
we returned our eyes to the game.
Later, as Lot’s wife must have done,
in a pause of walking, not thinking
of calling down a consequence,
I shifted my bag and looked back.
The rise of the fairway behind us was tinted,
so evenly tinted I might not have noticed
but that at the rim of the delicate shadow
the starlings were thicker and outlined the flock
as an inkstain in drying pronounces its edges.
The gradual rise of green was vastly covered;
I had thought nothing in nature could be so broad but grass.
And as
I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
transparent, of gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward, and then,
decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.
Long had it been since my heart
had been lifted as it was by the lifting of that great scarf.
Azores
Great green ships
themselves, they ride
at anchor forever;
beneath the tide
huge roots of lava
hold them fast
in mid-Atlantic
to the past.
The tourists, thrilling
from the deck,
hail shrilly pretty
hillsides flecked
with cottages
(confetti) and
sweet lozenges
of chocolate (land).
They marvel at
the dainty fields
and terraces
hand-tilled to yield
the modest fruits
of vines and trees
imported by
the Portuguese:
a rural landscape
set adrift
from centuries ago.
The rift
enlarges.
The ship proceeds.
Again the constant
music feeds
an emptiness astern,
Azores gone.
The void behind, the void
ahead are one.
Erotic Epigrams
I
The landscape of love
can only be seen
through a slim windowpane
one’s own breath fogs.
II
Iseult, to Tristan
(condemned to die),
is like a letter of reprieve
which is never delivered
but he knows has been dispatched.
III
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover
doth polish the face of his beloved
until he produces a skull.
Hoeing
I sometimes fear the younger generation will be deprived
of the pleasures of hoeing;
there is no knowing
how many souls have been formed by this simple exercise.
The dry earth like a great scab breaks, revealing
moist-dark loam—
the pea-root’s home,
a fertile wound perpetually healing.
How neatly the green weeds go under!
The blade chops the earth new.
Ignorant the wise boy who
has never rendered thus the world fecunder.
Report of Health
I
I am alone tonight.
The wrong I have done you
sits like a sore beneath my thumb,
burns like a boil on my heart’s left side.
I am unwell.
My viscera, long clenched in love of you,
have undergone a detested relaxation.
There is, within, a ghostly maze
of phantom tubes and nodules where
those citizens, our passions, flit; and here,
like sunlight passing from a pattern of streets,
I feel your bright love leaving.
II
Another night. Today I am told,
dear friend, by another,
you seem happy and well.
Nothing could hurt me more.
How dare you be happy, you,
shaped so precisely for me,
my cup and my mirror—
how dare you disdain to betray,
by some disarray of your hair,
my being torn from you?
I would rather believe
that you knew your friend would come to me,
and so seemed well—
“not a hair / out of place”—
like an actress blindly hurling a pose
into the fascinated darkness.
As for me, you are still the eyes of the air.
I travel from point to point in your presence.
Each unattended gesture hopes to catch your eye.
III
I may not write again. My voice
goes nowhere. Dear friend,
don’t let me heal. Don’t
worry, I am well.
I am happy
to dwell in a world whose Hell I will:
the doorway hints at your ghost
and a tiger pounces on my heart;
the lilac bush is a devil
inviting me into your hair.
Fireworks
These spasms and chrysanthemums of light
are like emotions
exploding under a curved night that corresponds
to the dark firmament within.
See, now, the libidinous flare,
spinning on its stick in vain resistance
to the upright ego and mortality’s gravity;
behold, above, the sudden bloom,
turquoise, each tip a comet,
of pride—followed, after an empty bang,
by an ebbing amber galaxy, despair.
We feel our secrets bodied forth like flags
as wide as half the sky. Now
passions, polychrome and coruscating, crowd
one upon the other in a final fit,
a terminal display
that tilts the children’s faces back in bleached dismay
and sparks an infant’s crying in the grass.
They do not understand, the younger ones,
what thunderheads and nebulae,
what waterfalls and momentary roses fill
/> the world’s one aging skull,
and are relieved when in a falling veil
the last awed outburst crumbles to reveal
the pattern on the playroom wall
of tame and stable stars.
Lamplight
Sent straight from suns
on slender stems
whose fangèd tendrils
leech the walls,
it sadly falls
on tabletops
and barren floors
where rugs lie flat
as sunburnt crops.
Yet by this glow,
while daylight leans
outside the door
like an idle ax,
green voices wax,
red tongues thrust seeds
deep in the soil
of our harrowed needs,
and conversations grow.
Nuda Natens
Anthea, your shy flanks in starlight
sank into the surf like thumbs into my heart.
Your untanned skin,
shaped like a bathing suit,
lifted me thick from my thighs,
old Adam in air
above the cool ribs of sand.
My lust was a phosphor in a wide black wash,
and your quick neck the stem of a vase,
and your shoulders a crescent perilously balanced
where darkness was sliding on darkness.
You led me up, frightened with love,
up from the wet to where warm wind
bathed us in dust, and your embarrassed beauty
bent silver about your pudenda.
Postcards from Soviet Cities
Moscow
Gold onions rooted in the sky
Grow downward into sullen, damp
Museums where, with leaden eye,
