Collected Poems, 1953-1993

by John Updike

  The sea’s pale green seems evil.

  The shells seem pellets, the meals

  forced doses, Bahamian cooking

  as bitterly obsequious as

  the resentful wraiths that serve it.

  Vertigo is reading at the beach

  words a thousand miles away,

  is tasting Coppertone again,

  is closing one’s eyes once more against

  the mismatch of poverty and beauty.

  The beautiful sea is pale, it is

  sick, its fish sting like regrets.

  Perhaps it was the conch salad, or is

  the something too rich in Creation.

  You Who Swim

  You who in water move as one

  long rounded to this use, a stone

  that gently fails to sink, you tint

  as wind tints air this element.

  Androgynous, your round face shorn

  by bathing cap, you feign to drown.

  “The dead man’s float,” you say and smile,

  your lashes wet and animal.

  Soft teacher, otter, other, moth

  to the sunk sun, you play at death;

  the surface glitter slips, and air

  slices your throat with shards of glare.

  At night you rise beside me, face

  wet with the dark, your dim lips spaced

  to hold the bubble love. Your eyes

  are shut. We swim our dead men’s lives.

  Sunday in Boston

  The fags and their gay dogs are patrolling

  the Garden; on Boylston the blacks,

  hollow-backed, demonstrate styles of meander

  in this hearttown theirs by default.

  The winos on Commonwealth, wiser than wisdom,

  blink eyes pale as bottle bottoms;

  sun-pickled and lined fine as maps, their faces

  beam from within this particular nowhere.

  Pistachio George sits high. July beds bloom.

  The Ritz’s doorman sports his worn maroon.

  Above us like a nearer sky great Pei’s

  glass sheet, cerulean, clasps clouds to its chest.

  And, unapologetic in their pallor, girls

  in jigging halters and sordid shorts parade

  festive colorless flesh regathered from

  its Saturday spill, the bearded lover split.

  Brick Boston, city of students and drunks!

  In Godless, doggy righteousness we bask.

  The suburbs send us their stifling cars, and we

  in turn give back the hollow sound of bells.

  Raining in Magens Bay

  The sky, paid to be blue,

  yields at most patches of silver

  and then, salted with sun, rain

  (we can’t quite believe it)

  so heavy the branches of sea-grape

  afford no shelter. Run!

  The towel, the book, the sunglasses:

  save them, and save our fair skins

  from the pelting,

  bitter and chill, that dyes the arms

  of the bay the color of smoke

  and erases Outer Brass Island.

  Wait, there is a way,

  a way not to panic. The picnic

  by the cabañTa has not stopped cackling;

  its voices ricochet louder,

  wind-whipped, from lips

  an inch above the skin of water.

  They have gone swimming,

  and the lovers up the beach

  persist in embracing submerged.

  Come, the calm green is alive

  with drops, and soft; one’s shadow

  no longer lurks below like a shark.

  The way to get out of the rain

  is to get into the water.

  The way for rain to fall

  is mixed with sun, like salt.

  The way for man to be is mixed

  with sun and salt and sea and shadow.

  Leaving Church Early

  What, I wonder, were we hurrying to,

  my grandfather, father, mother, myself,

  as the last anthem was commencing? Were

  we avoiding the minister’s hand at the door?

  My mother shied, in summer, from being touched.

  Or was it my father, who thought life was grim

  and music superfluous, dodging the final hymn?

  Or could, I wonder now, the impetus

  that moved the small procession of us up

  and out, apologizing, from the pew

  have come from the ancient man, mysterious

  to me as an ancestor turned to ash,

  who held some thunders though, a tavern bully

  in his time and still a steadfast disliker

  of other people’s voices? Whatever the cause,

  we moved, bump and whisper, down

  the side aisle, while the organ mulled Stanza One,

  a quadruped herd, branded as kin, I

  the last of the line, adolescent, a-blush,

  out through the odor of piety and the scents

  (some purchased at Kresge’s, some given by God)

  my buxom country cousins harbored in

  their cotton dresses, to the sighing exit

  which opened on the upbeat as the choir

  in love of the Lord and imperfect unison

  flung its best self over the balcony.

  The lifted voices drifted behind us, spurned.

  Loose pebbles acknowledged our shoes.

  Our Buick, black and ’36, was parked

  in a hickory picnic grove where a quoit stake,

  invisible as Satan in the grass

  of Eden, might spear a tire “of the unwary,”

  as my grandfather put it. The interior

  of the auto hit us with an hour’s heat.

  We got in gear, our good clothes mussed,

  and, exonerated for the week, bounced home.

  Home: the fields, red, with acid rows of corn

  and sandstone corner-markers. The undertone

  of insect-hum, the birds too full to sing.

  A Sunday haze in Pennsylvania.

  My unchurched grandma stoops in the foursquare house,

  as we prattle in the door, like a burglar

  trapped in mid-theft, half-paralyzed, her frame

  hung in my memory between two tasks,

  about to do something, but what? A cream

  jug droops in her hand, empty or it would spill—

  or is it a potato-masher, or

  a wooden spoon? White-haired, stricken, she stares

  and to welcome us back searches for a word.

  What had we hurried back to? There could be

  no work: a mock-Genesiac rest reigned

  in the bewitched farmland. Our strawberries

  rotted in their rows unrummaged-for;

  no snorting, distant tractor underlined

  the rasp of my father’s pencil as he marked,

  with his disappointed grimace, math exams.

  The dogs smelled boredom, and collapsed their bones.

  The colors of the Sunday comics jangled,

  printed off-key, and my grandfather’s feet,

  settling in for a soliloquy, kicked up fuzz.

  My father stood to promenade his wounds.

  I lay down, feeling weak, and pulled a book

  across my eyes the way a Bedouin

  in waiting out a sandstorm drapes his sheet.

  The women clucked and quarrelled with the pots

  over who was cook. A foody fog

  arose. The dogs rose with it, and the day

  looked as if it might survive to noon.

  What is wrong with this picture? What is strange?

  Each figure tends its own direction, keeps

  the axis of its own theatric chore,

  scattered, anarchic, kept home by poverty,

  with nowhere else to go. A modern tribe

  would be aligned
around “the television,”

  the family show-off, the sparkling prodigy

  that needs a constant watching lest it sulk and cease

  to lift into celebrity the arc

  of interlocked anonymous: we were not such.

  We spurned all entertainment but our misery.

  “Jesus,” my father cried, “I hate the world!”

  “Mother,” my mother called, “you’re in the way!”

  “Be grateful for your blessings,” Grandpa advised,

  shifting his feet and showing a hairless shin.

  “Ach,” Grandma brought out in self-defense,

  the syllable a gem of German indignation,

  its guttural edge unchipped, while I,

  still in the sabbath shirt and necktie, bent

  my hopes into the latest Nero Wolfe, imagining

  myself orchidaceous in Manhattan and

  mentally constructing, not Whodunit,

  but How to Get Out of Here: my dastardly plot.

  The rug, my closest friend, ignored

  my jabbing elbows. Geraniums raged on the sills.

  The furniture formed a living dismal history

  of heritage, abandonment, and purchase,

  pretension, compromise, and wear: the books

  tried to believe in a better world but failed.

  An incongruous painting told of dunes

  and a dab of unattainable sea.

  Outside, a lone car passed; the mailbox held

  no hope of visitation—no peacock magazine,

  wrapped in brown paper, rife with ads, would come

  to unremind us of what we were, poor souls

  who had left church early to be about

  the business of soaking ourselves in Time,

  dunking doughnuts let fall into the cup.

  Hot Pennsylvania, hazy, hugged the walls

  of sandstone two feet thick as other cells

  enfold the carcinomic hyperactive one; we were

  diseased, unneighborly, five times alone, and quick.

  What was our hurry? Sunday afternoon

  beckoned with radioed ball games, soft ice cream,

  furtive trips in the creaking auto, naps

  for the elderly, daydreams for the young,

  while blind growth steamed to the horizon of hills,

  the Lord ignoring His own injunction to rest.

  My book grew faint. My grandfather lifted his head,

  attentive to what he alone divined;

  his glasses caught the light, his nose

  reclaimed an ancient handsomeness.

  His wife, wordless, came and sat beside.

  My father swished his hips within his bath of humor

  and called his latest recognition to the other

  co-captain of dissatisfaction; my mother

  came to the living-room doorway, and told us off.

  She is the captive, we are the clumsy princes

  who jammed the casket with our bitter kisses.

  She is our prison, the rampart of her forehead

  a fiery red. We shake our chains, amused.

  Her myths and our enactment tickle better

  the underside of facts than Bible fables;

  here to this house, this mythy then, we hurried,

  dodging the benediction to bestow,

  ourselves upon ourselves, the final word.

  Envoi

  My mother, only you remember with me—

  you alone still populate that room.

  You write me cheerful letters mentioning Cher

  and Barbara Walters as if they were there with you,

  realer than the dead. We left church early

  why? To talk? To love? To eat? To be free

  of the world’s crass consensus? Now you read,

  you write me, Aristotle and Tolstoy

  and claim to be amazed, how much they knew.

  I send you this poem as my piece of the puzzle.

  We know the truth of it, the past, how strange,

  how many corners wouldn’t bear describing,

  the angles of it, how busy we were forgiving—

  we had no time, of course, we have no time

  to do all the forgiving that we must do.

  Another Dog’s Death

  For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back

  pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,

      her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last

  I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

  in preparation for the certain. She came along,

  which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,

      such expeditions were rare, and the dog,

  spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.

  · · ·

  She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.

  We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the field.

      The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;

  I carved her a safe place while she protected me.

  I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;

  she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up earth.

      Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,

  but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.

  They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he

  injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;

      we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.

  In the wheelbarrow up to the hole, her fur took the sun.

  Dream and Reality

  I am in a room.

  Everything is white, the walls

  are white, there are no windows.

  There is a door.

  I open it, and neatly

  as a shadow a coating of snow

  falls door-shaped into the room.

  I think, Snow, not surprised

  it is inside and outside both,

  as with an igloo.

  I move through the open door

  into the next room; this, too, is

  white and windowless and perfect.

  I think, There must be more than this.

  This is a dream.

  · · ·

  My daughter finds bones

  on the marshes. I examine them:

  deer heads with sockets round as

  cartoon eyes, slender jaws broken.

  There are tiny things, too,

  no bigger than a pulled tooth,

  and just that white—burrs of bone,

  intricate, with pricking flanges

  where miniature muscles attached.

  She says, Those are mouse jaws.

  Indeed: I see teeth like rows

  of the letter “i” in diamond type.

  She tells me, I find them

  in the cough balls of owls.

  And this is reality.

  Dutch Cleanser

  My grandmother used it, Dutch Cleanser,

  in the dark Shillington house,

  in the kitchen darkened by the grape arbor,

  and I was frightened of the lady on the can.

  Why was she carrying a stick?

  Why couldn’t we see her face?

  Now I, an aging modern man,

  estranged, alone, and medium gray,

  I tip Dutch Cleanser onto a sponge,

  here in this narrow bathroom,

  where the ventilator fan has to rumble

  when all I want to switch on is light.

  · · ·

  The years have spilled since Shillington,

  the daily Eagles stacked in the closet

  have burst the roof! Look up,

  Deutsche Grossmutter—I am here!

  You have changed, I have changed,

  Dutch Cleanser has changed not at all.

  The lady is still upholding the stick

  chasing dirt, and her face

  is so an
gry we dare not see it.

  The dirt she is chasing is ahead of her,

  around the can, like a minute hand

  the hour hand pushes around.

  Rats

  A house has rotten places: cellar walls

  where mud replaces mortar every rain,

  the loosening board that begged for nails in vain,

  the sawed-off stairs, and smelly nether halls

  the rare repairman never looks behind

  and if he did would, disconcerted, find

  long spaces, lathed, where dead air grows a scum

  of fuzz, and rubble deepens crumb by crumb.

  Here they live. Hear them on their boulevards

  beneath the attic flooring tread the shards

  of panes from long ago, and Fiberglas

  fallen to dust, and droppings, and dry clues

  to crimes no longer news. The villains pass

  with scrabbly traffic-noise; their avenues

  run parallel to chambers of our own

  where we pretend we’re clean and all alone.

  The Melancholy of Storm Windows

  We touch them at the raw turns

  of the year—November,

  with its whipped trees and cellar sky,

  and April, whose air

  promises more than the earth

  seems willing to yield.

  They are unwieldy, of wood, and their panes

  monotonously ask the same question—Am I clean?

  No, the answer is.

  They fit less well, we feel, each year.

  But the weather lowers,

  watery and wider than a tide,

  and if a seam or leak of light shows, well,

  nothing’s perfect under Heaven.

  Our mortal shell,

  they used to call the body.

  In need of paint, they heave

  up from the cellar and back down again

  like a species of cloud,

  shedding a snow of flakes and grime.

  They rotate heavy in our hands; the screwdriver

  stiffly twirls; the Windex swipes evaporate

  in air ominous of coming worse

  or, at winter’s end, of Easter entombment,