Collected Poems, 1953-1993

by John Updike

  Siberian tourists dumbly tramp.

  The streets are wide as silences.

  The cobblestones between the GUM

  And Kremlin echo—an abyss

  Lies sealed within a giant room.

  The marble box where Lenin sleeps

  Receives the Tartar gaze of those

  Who come from where Far Russia keeps

  Her counsels wrapped in deadening snows.

  St. Basil’s, near at hand, erects

  The swirlings that so charmed the czar

  He blinded both the architects

  To keep such beauty singular.

  Leningrad

  “To build a window on the west”

  Great Peter came to Neva’s mouth

  And found a swamp, which he oppressed

  With stones imported from the south.

  The city, subtly polychrome

  (Old ochre, green, and dull maroon),

  Can make Italians feel at home

  Beneath the tilted arctic noon.

  The Palace holds, pistachio,

  A wilderness of treasure where

  The ghosts of plump czarinas go

  On dragging diamonds up the stair.

  Suburban acres of the dead

  Memorialize the Siege, a hell

  Of blackened snow and watered bread.

  Some couples Twist in our hotel.

  Kiev

  Clutching his cross, St. Vladimir

  Gazes with eyes that seem to grieve

  Across the sandy Dnieper, where

  He baptized godforsaken Kiev.

  Now deconverted trolleys turn

  Around the square, emitting sparks.

  The churches, cold as attics, burn

  With gilt above the poplar parks.

  Beneath the earth, in catacombs,

  Dried patriarchs lie mummified;

  Brocaded silk enmeshed with bones

  Offends our trim, mascaraed guide,

  Who, driving homeward, gestures toward

  The ruins of Moussorgsky’s Gate—

  Like some old altar, unrestored,

  Where peasant women supplicate.

  Tbilisi

  Rich Georgian farmers send their sons

  (Black-haired, with pointed stares and feet)

  To town for educations—

  They loiter laughing on the street.

  A “working” church: its inside smells

  Of tallow, mold, incense, and chrism.

  The long-haired priest, wax-pallid, sells

  His candles with a shopgirl’s grimace.

  The poets, overhonored, toast

  Themselves with liquid syllables;

  The alphabet is strange. They boast

  Their tongue is older than their hills.

  Instead of Stalin, who indulged

  His native land with privilege,

  A blank steel woman, undivulged

  By name, surmounts the once-walled ridge.

  Yerevan

  Armenia, Asia’s waif, has here

  At last constructed shelter proof

  Against all Turkish massacre.

  A soft volcanic rock called tuff

  Carves easily and serves to be

  The basis of the boulevards

  That lead from slums of history

  Into a future stripped of swords

  · · ·

  The crescent-shaped hotel is rose

  And looks toward Lenin Square and tan

  Dry mountains down which power flows

  From turbines lodged in Lake Sevan.

  Mount Ararat, a conscience, floats

  Cloudlike, in sight but unpossessed,

  For there, where Noah docked his boat,

  Begins the brutal, ancient West.

  Camera

  Let me gaze, gaze forever

  into that single, vaguely violet eye:

  my fingertips dilate

  the veiled pupil circumscribed

  by crescent leaves of metal

  overlapping, fine as foil, and oiled.

  Let me walk, walk with its weight

  as telling as gold, declaring

  precious works packed tight:

  the air is light,

  all light, pure light alive

  with the possibility of capture.

  Let all, all be still until

  the cleaver falls: I become female,

  having sealed secure

  in the quick clicked womb of utter black, bright semen

  of a summer day, coiled fruit

  of my eyes’ axed rapture.

  Roman Portrait Busts

  Others in museums pass them by,

  but I, I

  am drawn like a maggot to meat

  by their pupilless eyes

  and their putrefying individuality.

  They are, these Livias and Marcuses,

  these pouting dead Octavias,

  no two alike: never has art

  so whorishly submitted

  to the importunities of the real.

  In good conscience one must admire

  the drab lack of exaggeration,

  the way each head,

  crone’s, consul’s, or child’s,

  is neither bigger nor smaller than life.

  Their eyes taste awful.

  It is vile,

  deliciously, to see selves so

  unsoftened by history, such

  indigestible gristle.

  Fellatio

  How beautiful to think

  that each of these clean secretaries

  at night, to please her lover, takes

  a fountain into her mouth

  and lets her insides, drenched in seed,

  flower into landscapes:

  meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,

  hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude

  of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking

  of its upturned humus, and small farms each

  with a silver silo.

  Décor

  Brown dominates this bar

  where men come to age:

  the waiters Negro,

  the whiskey unwatered,

  the overheard voices from Texas,

  the cigars and varnished wood.

  Brown, the implication is,

  is a shade of the soul,

  the color of a man:

  welltanned and stained

  to the innermost vein

  as if life is a long curing.

  Poem for a Far Land

  Russia, most feminine of lands,

      Breeder of stupid masculinity,

  Only Jesus understands

      Your interminable virginity.

  Raped, and raped, and raped again,

      You rise snow-white, the utter same,

  With tender birches and ox-eyed men

      Willing to perish for your name.

  Though astronauts distress the sky

      That mothers your low, sad villages,

  Your vastness yearns in sympathy

      Between what was and that which is.

  Late January

  The elms’ silhouettes

  again relent,

  leafless but furred

  with the promise of leaves,

  dull red in a sky dull yellow

  with the threat of snow.

  That blur, verging on growth:

  Time’s sharp edge is slitting

  another envelope.

  Dog’s Death

  She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.

  Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn

  To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor

  And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

  We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.

  The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.

  As we teased her with play, blood was fi
lling her skin

  And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

  · · ·

  Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed

  And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.

  We found her twisted and limp but still alive.

  In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

  To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur

  And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.

  Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,

  Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

  Back home, we found that in the night her frame,

  Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame

  Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor

  To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

  Home Movies

  How the children have changed! Rapt, we stare

      At flickering lost Edens where

      Pale infants, squinting, seem to hark

  To their older selves laughing in the dark.

  And then, by the trellis of some old spring—

      The seasons are unaltering—

      We gather, smoother and less bald,

  Innocently clowning, having been called

  To pose by the off-screen cameraman.

      How strangely silently time ran!

      We cannot climb back, nor can our friends,

  To that calm light. The brief film ends.

  Antigua

  The wind, transparent, cannot displace

      The vertical search of sun for skin.

  The colonel’s fine-veined florid face

      Has bloomed though sheltered deep within

  His shining hat’s mauve shade. His eyes

      Glare bluer than the coral-bleached

      Soft sea that feebly nags the beach

  And hones its scimitar with sighs.

  His wife, in modest half-undress,

      Swings thighs pinched red between the sea

      And sky, and smiles, serenely free

  Of subcutaneous distress.

  Above, sere cliffs attend their hike,

      And colored scraps give tattered hints

  Of native life, and, higher, like

      A flaw in glass, an airplane glints.

  Amoeba

  Mindless, meaning no harm,

  it ingested me.

  It moved on silent pseudopods

  to where I was born, inert, and I

  was inside.

  Digestive acids burned my skin.

  Enzymes nuzzled knees and eyes.

  My ego like a conjugated verb

  retained its root, a narrow fear

  of being qualified;

  alas, suffixes swarmed.

  I lost my mother’s arms, my teeth,

  my laugh, my protruding faith.

  Reduced to the O of a final sigh,

  in time I died.

  Elm

  My thousand-thousand-leaved,

  with what a graceful straining

  you greet the year’s gray turning

  and put forth green.

  Sleepless, at two this morning,

  above the lakelike street,

  I saw your far fronds hanging

  like long hands trailed in water;

  I saw your ferny curtains

  translucent like distant fields,

  your crown’s impassive dreaming

  powdered with uneclipsed stars.

  Great shape, most godly thing

  I know, don’t die. The blight

  is a cliff’s edge each year you skirt,

  returning to dye the night.

  Daughter

  I was awakened from a dream,

  a dream entwined with cats,

  by a cat’s close presence.

  In the darkness by my bedside there

  had loomed a form with shining hair—

  squarish, immense-eyed, still.

  Its whiskers pricked my lips:

  I screamed.

                           My daughter cried,

  in just proportion terrified.

  I realized that,

  though only four, all skin and smiles,

  my daughter is a lioness, taken as a cat.

  Eurydice

  Negress serene though underground,

  what weddings in northward Harlem

  impressed upon you this cameo

  stamp of stoic repose?

  Beauty should never be bored

  with being beautiful.

  Bright lights are shattered by our speed.

  The couplings cluck, the darkness yells.

  The child beside you sidles in

  and out of sleep, and I,

  poor sooty white man scarcely visible,

  try not to stare.

  O loveliness blind to itself:

  sockets thumbed from clay wherein

  eyelids are petals of shadow,

  cheekbones and jawbone whose carriage

  is of a proud rider in velvet,

  lips where eleven curves live.

  Eurydice, come follow me,

  my song is silent, listen:

  I’ll hold your name in love so high

  oceans of years will leave it dry;

  mountains of time will not begin

  to move a moment of your skin.

  The doors gape wide at Fifty-ninth.

  The kiosk steps are black with blood.

  I turn and find,

  rebuked by light,

  you gone, Negress serene,

  tugged northward into night.

  Seal in Nature

  Observed from down the beach, the seal

  seemed a polished piece of the rock he was on.

  Closer approached, he became distinct

  from the boat-shaped barnacled mineral mass,

  twenty yards safe from shore, he had chosen

  to be his pedestal—a living sculpture,

  a Noguchi, an Arp, a Brancusi smoothed

  from a flexible wood whose grain was hair,

  whose gray was white in the abstract glisten,

  and black where his curve demanded a shadow.

  The sea his amphitheatre, the mammal,

  both water and stone, performed aloof tricks:

  he wound the line of horizon on his nose

  and scratched his back with the top of his head

  and, twisting like a Möbius strip, addressed

  the sky with a hollowing desolate howl

  echoing empty epochs when,

  in acres of basalt sown thick with steam,

  beneath dull skies, life’s circus performed

  for the silent Observer Supreme.

  Air Show

  (Hanscom Field, Bedford, Mass.)

      In shapes that grow organic and bizarre

  Our Air Force ramifies the forms of war.

  The stubby bomber, dartlike fighter yield

  To weirder beasts caught browsing on this field,

  With wry truncated wings, anteater snouts,

  And burnished bellies full of ins and outs.

      Caressing curves of wind, the metal smiles

  And beds the pilot down in sheets of dials.

  Eggheaded, strapped, and sucking gas, he roars

  To frozen heights all other life abhors,

  Where, having left his dirty sound behind,

  In pure blue he becomes pure will and mind.

      These planes, articulate in every part,

  Outdo the armor-forger’s Tuscan art—

  The rivets as unsparingly displayed

  As pearls upon a chasuble’s brocade,

  The wiring bundled thick, like chordate brains,

  The posing turbine balan
ced grain by grain,

  The silver skin so stencilled it amounts

  To an encyclical of do’s and don’t’s.

      Our dollars! Dumb, like muzhiks come from far

  To gaze upon the trappings of a czar,

  Their sweat turned into gems and cold faïence,

  We marvel at our own extravagance:

  No mogul’s wasteful lust was half so wide

  And deep as this democracy’s quick pride.

  Omega

  This little lightweight manacle whereby

  My wrist is linked to flux and feels time fly,

  This constant bracelet with so meek a jewel,

  Shall prove at last implacable and cruel

  And like a noose jerk taut, and hold me still,

  And add me to the unseen trapper’s kill.

  The Angels

  They are above us all the time,

  the good gentlemen, Mozart and Bach,

  Scarlatti and Handel and Brahms,

  lavishing measures of light down upon us,

  telling us, over and over, there is a realm

  above this plane of silent compromise.

  They are around us everywhere, the old seers,

  Matisse and Vermeer, Cézanne and Piero,

  greeting us echoing in subway tunnels,

  springing like winter flowers from postcards

  Scotch-taped to white kitchen walls,

  waiting larger than life in shadowy galleries

  to whisper that edges of color

  lie all about us innocent as grass.

  They are behind us, beneath us,

  the abysmal books, Shakespeare and Tolstoy,

  the Bible and Proust and Cervantes,