by John Updike
Nothing is poorly made; nothing is dull:
The Crabgrass thinks itself adorable.
Cherish your work; take profit in the task:
Doing’s the one reward a Man dare ask.
The Wood confides its secrets to the plane;
The Dovetail fits, and reconfirms the Grain.
The white-hot writhing Steel is tonged and plunged,
A-sizzle, into Form, all flecks expunged.
The Linotyper leans above his keys,
And feathers down a ton of journalese;
Engraver and Apprentice, in their room
Of acid baths and photophobic gloom,
Transform to metal dots ten shades of gray,
And herald Everyman’s beginning day.
The Clergyman, beside the sighing bed,
Strains for a sign of Credence from the dead.
The Lawyer eagle-eyed for Falsehood’s glint,
The Doctor bent on Hardening’s murmured hint,
The Biochemist analyzing sera,
The Astrophysicist alone with Lyra,
The Archaeologist with pick and brush,
The Nature-walker having heard a thrush—
Attentiveness! The pinpoint is the locus
Of Excellence in lands of softened focus.
Applaud your Neighbor; admire his style
That grates upon you like a bastard file.
His trespasses resemble yours in kind;
He, too, is being crowded from behind.
Don’t kill; or, if you must, while killing, grieve.
Doubt not; that is, until you can’t believe.
Don’t covet Mrs. X; or if you do,
Make sure, before you leap, she covets you.
Like meat upon the table, we will spoil:
Time is the troubled water; Faith, the oil.
The curse of Tempo regulates the dance;
To move necessitates Impermanence.
So flow, flow outward; Heraclitus saw,
In Nature’s crystalline, the fluid flaw:
Our Guilt inheres in sheer Existing, so
Forgive yourself your death, and freely flow.
Transcendent Goodness makes elastic claims;
The merciful Creator hid His Aims.
Beware false Gods: the Infallible Man,
The flawless formula, the Five-Year Plan.
Abjure bandwagons; be shy of machines,
Charisma, Ends that justify the Means,
And oaths that bind the postulant to kill
His own Self-love and independent Will.
A Mussolini leads to Hitler; hate
Apostles of the all-inclusive State.
Half-measures are most human; Compromise,
Inglorious and gray, placates the Wise.
By messianic hopes is Mankind vexed;
The Book of Life shows margin more than text.
Ecclesiastes and our glands agree:
A time for love, for work, for sleep, for tea.
Organic drumbeats score our ancient nerves:
Hark to their rhythms, conform to their curves.
All wrong? Advice, however sound, depends
Upon a meliorism Truth upends;
A certain Sinkingness resides in things.
The restless heart rejects what Fortune brings;
The Ego, too athletic, grows perverse
And muscle-builds by choosing worse and worse.
Our bones are prison-bars, our flesh is cells:
Where Suicide invites, Death-wish impels.
Earthquake, Diseases, Floods, Eruptions, Drought,
Black Comets, Starry Landslides, Wreck and Rout—
Beneath a cliff of vast Indifference
We light our frail fires, peg our poor tents.
The sleepless mouse-gray hours gnaw and stress:
“The Wisdom of the Earth is Foolishness.”
Yet morning here, by Chilmark Pond, is fair.
The water scintillates against the air,
The grassy Earth spins seed from solar rage,
And patiently denies its awful age.
I am another world, no doubt; no doubt
We come into this World from well without.
The seasons lessen; Summer’s touch betrays
A tired haste, a cool Autumnal trace.
The playground dust was richer, once, than loam,
And green, green as Eden, the slow path home.
No snows have been as deep as those my sled
Caressed to ice before I went to bed.
Perhaps Senility will give me back
The primitive rapport I lately lack.
Adulthood has its comforts: these entail
Sermons and sex and receipt of the mail,
Elimination’s homely paean, dreams’
Mad gaiety, avoidance of extremes,
The friendship of children, the trust of banks,
Thoracic pangs, a stiffness in the shanks,
Foretastes of death, the aftertaste of sin,
In Winter, Whiskey, and in Summer, Gin.
The marsh gives way to Pond, to Dunes, to Sea;
Cicadas call it good, and I agree.
At midpoint, center of a Hemisphere
Too blue for words, I’ve grown to love it here.
Earth wants me, it shall have me, yet not yet;
Some task remains, whose weight I can’t forget,
Some package, anciently addressed, of praise,
That keeps me knocking on the doors of days.
The time is gone, when Pope could ladle Wit
In couplet droplets, and decanter it.
Wordsworth’s sweet brooding, Milton’s pride,
And Tennyson’s unease have all been tried;
Fin-de-siècle sickliness became
High-stepping Modernism, then went lame.
Art offers now, not cunning and exile,
But blank explosions and a hostile smile.
Deepest in the thicket, thorns spell a word.
Born laughing, I’ve believed in the Absurd,
Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can,
I must impersonate a serious man.
April–August 1968
Chloë’s Poem
When Chloë flies on silken wings
She pulls the sky itself along,
And every tugging moment brings
The butterfly’s request: “Be strong.”
Her several mouths are graciousness;
Her many hands, discovery:
A hurricane in each caress
Is Chloë’s way of treating me.
Minority Report
My beloved land,
here I sit in London
exiled by success of sorts.
I listen to Mozart
in my English suit and weep,
remembering a Swedish film.
But it is you,
really you I think of:
your nothing streetcorners
your ugly eateries
your dear barbarities
and vacant lots
(Brer Rabbit demonstrated:
freedom is made of brambles).
They say over here you are choking
to death on your cities and slaves,
but they have never smelled dry turf,
smoked Kools in a drugstore,
or pronounced a flat “a,” an honest “r.”
Don’t read your reviews,
you are the only land.
Living with a Wife
At the Piano
Barefoot in purple pants
and my ski sweater you
play the piano most seriously
Mozart fumbled with a grimace
the lamplight fumbling unfelt
in the down of your neck
Kind field from which my progeny
have fled to grow voices and fangs
you are an arena where art
like a badly killed bull swerves again
Your bare foot lifts
the lamplight pedals on
my house is half music
my wife holds no harm
In the Tub
You are a pond mirroring
pink clouds there is moss
where your white roots meet
when you lift your arm to shave
you are a younger kind of tree
Silver you rise from the lead
your swan arm seeks a towel
magic has taken place because
my Excalibur razor is dull
and the water would boil a man
Under the Sunlamp
Neuter your hair tugged back
harshly your face a shield
of greased copper less sexy
than a boy by Donatello
too bright to look at long
eyelids sealed in Urfreude
metal locked in blinding earth
During Menstruation
My house is on fire red
pain flickers on the walls wet
flame runs downstairs eggs
are hurled unripe from the furnace
and a frown hurts like smoke
Help I am sliding my cry
stands helpless as Galileo
at the side of moons revolving
of unwinding novae burning
flinging Tampax tubes of ash
All the While
Upstairs to my downstairs
echo to my silence
you walk through my veins shopping
and spin food from my sleep
I hear your small noises
you hide in closets without handles
you surprise me from the cellar
your foot-soles bright black
You slip in and out of beauty
and imply that nothing is wrong
Who sent you?
What is your assignment?
Though years sneak by like children
you stay as unaccountable
as the underwear set to soak
in the bowl where I brush my teeth
À l’École Berlitz
Mademoiselle Printemps, my sometimes instructress,
with whom I slowly form pained sentences
(Je n’y en ai pas vu,
par exemple, ou
À quelle heure vous ětes-vous couchée hier soir?),
at the end of one lesson
let down her French, and we faced
each other naked, I stripped
of the strange tongue that stiffly cloaks
each cretin utterance in dignity,
and she exposed in all her English vowels,
as luminous and slow as skin,
her consonants curling like bits of fleece,
the sense of her sentence as stunning and clear
as a tear-filled surrender.
“I am interested in doing translation,”
she said, and I couldn’t think of a word. Not one.
South of the Alps
Signorina Angeli, veteran of Vogue
and a New York marriage, had a heavy foot
between Milan and Como.
The speedometer swung
to 160 kilometers per hour,
pressed through, trembling, and clung
like a locust husk that cannot let go.
Presto, troppo presto!
the sides of our Alfa Romeo hissed
at aquavita trucks we narrowly missed.
Less fluidly, in middle distance, villages
in red hats slowly turned to gaze
like groups of streetcorner pensioners
who had seen worse ruins than ours.
Green Alps, bearing aqueducts,
drew dreamily near—
a quattrocento paradise
extending its wings to bear us away.
Her chatting lover occupied the death seat. As
I cringed behind him, I felt my face
on the edge of explosion, my tender teeth
strewn in a stew of glass, my spine
a row of dominoes, my ghostless flesh
an interval of metal; and I saw her eyes
suspended in the rearview mirror,
immaculately calm:
fringed jewels flattered
by the velvet hypnosis of her task.
She was an icon nailed
to the blank wall of our blinding speed:
her nose stiletto-straight, her nostrils
nice as a skull’s, her lips downdrawn
upon the candy of her pout—
reversed details that linked
in clever foldout to the real:
to the empress oval of her tight-pulled hair,
her ear’s pearl curve, her hands
at rest, with tips of nacre, on the wheel.
Beauty, deep in hock to time,
is reckless with its assets; I,
a cowardly word-hoarder, hugged my wish
to smudge more proofs with dubious
corrections. She was clean copy,
her future a back issue.
Of course I adored her, though my fate
was a midge on her wrist she could twitch away;
the Old Testament said truly: fear
is love and love is rigid-making fear.
A traffic circle. The lake. We slowed.
Acknowledging my grazie, Signorina showed
on her smiling jaw a small mole Vogue
had airbrushed out.
Her mother—
who calls the Pope “Montini” and considers
him a Communist—had had the marriage annulled.
Hence, she is still “Signorina.”
We ate, she, I, and her beau,
above Lake Como
in green air so
soft we were not dizzy though
the lake was a little sky below,
the motorboats blunt comets.
The wine
was Piedmontese and suave; the breeze
like a nerved-up gambler fidgeted with chips
of sunlight on the faded tablecloth.
Bella, troppo bella.
Her hand fell heavy on my arm and grasped.
“Tell me—why doesn’t anything last?”
A Bicycle Chain
Left lying in the grass,
unconnected to anything,
rusted and disjunct,
it becomes itself.
Dangled, it will stiffly dance,
�
�� parodying legs,
or curl upon itself in balky knots
nothing like string’s.
Neither liquid nor rigid,
it returns its metal
to organic semi-looseness: consult
a snake’s skeleton
in a museum case, or watch
a python’s differential curve
parabolize in oozy increments
behind safe glass.
Think of Insecta
rigged and riveted together,
of protein atoms
lightninged into viral chains,
of language’s linked lines.
The thing is weighty
with its ancient seedtime secret,
articulation.
Tossing and Turning
The spirit has infinite facets, but the body
confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
