by John Updike
of cobwebbed storage among belittling ants
while the grasshopper world above basks.
Stacked, they savor of the crypt,
of the unvisitable nook
and the stinking pipe, irreparable.
In place, they merely mitigate
death’s whisper at the margins,
the knifing chill that hisses how
the Great Outer cares not a pin for our skins
and the airtight hearts that tremble therein.
We, too, are warped each fall.
They resemble us, storm windows,
in being gaunt, in losing putty,
in height, transparency, fragility—
weak slabs, poor shields, dull clouds.
Ambiguous, we have no place
where we, once screwed, can say, That’s it.
Calder’s Hands
In the little movie
at the Whitney
you can see them
at the center of the spell
of wire and metal:
a clumsy man’s hands,
square and mitten-thick,
that do everything
without pause:
unroll a tiny rug
with a flick,
tug a doll’s arm up,
separate threads:
these hands now dead
never doubted, never rested.
The Grief of Cafeterias
Everyone sitting alone with a sorrow,
overcoats on. The ceiling was stamped
of tin and painted over and over.
The walls are newer, and never matched.
SALISBURY STEAK SPECIAL $1.65.
Afterwhiffs of Art Deco chrome,
and the space is as if the space
of the old grand railroad terminals
has been cut up, boxcarred out, and reused.
SOUP SALAD & SANDWICH $1.29.
Nobody much here. The happiness
of that at least—of vacancy, mopped.
Behind cased food, in Hopper light,
the servers attend to each other, forever.
Spanish Sonnets
I.
By the light of insomnia, truths
that by daylight don’t look so bad—
one is over the hill, will die, and has
an appointment tomorrow that can’t be broken—
become a set of slippery caves.
Bare facts that cast no shadow at noon
echo and shudder, swallow and loom.
To be alive is to be mad.
Can it be? Only Goya pictures it.
Those last brown paintings smeared in Madrid
fill a room with insomnia’s visions,
a Spanish language rapid as a curse.
Prayer’s a joke, love a secretion;
the tortured torture, and worse gets worse.
II.
He omits, Goya, not even the good news:
the pink-cheeked peasants in the ideal open,
the village health, the ring of children,
in days when everyone dressed like lords.
Carlos the Fourth wears a fool’s mild smile,
and the royal family, a row of breeders,
are softly human, and in this style still
the white-shirted rebel throws up his arms.
The red scream darkens, the brushstrokes plunge
headlong into Rouault, where evil
faces are framed like saints’ by lead.
The astonishing Half-Hidden Dog
for a sky has a Turner. Pain is paint
and people are meat, as for Francis Bacon.
III.
Yes, self-obsession fills our daily clothes,
bulges them outward like armor,
but at night self must be shed,
the room must be hollow, each lamp
and table crazily exact, and the door
snug in the frame of its silence. When we
can imagine the room when we are not there,
we are asleep. The world hasn’t ended.
I worry for you a hemisphere away,
awaiting the edge of evening while I,
deep in midnight, plump the pillow,
turn on the light, and curse the clock.
The planet’s giant motion overpowers us.
We cannot stop clinging where we are.
IV.
Each day’s tour, I gather sandy castles,
cathedrals of marzipan gone bad,
baroque exploding sunbursts in Toledo,
filigreed silver crosses in Ávila,
like magnified mold proliferating.
The tragical stink of old religion—
greasy-eyed painters trying too hard,
crucifix-carvers gone black in the thumb.
And the Moor piled up brick and ochre,
and the Christian nailed iron in turn
to the gates of the city, and the land breathes green
under power lines hung upon windmills,
and I try to picture your body part by part
to supplant the day’s crenellated loot.
V.
The land is dry enough to make the rivers
dramatic here. You say you love me;
as the answer to your thirst, I splash,
fall, and flow, a varied cool color.
Here fountains celebrate intersections,
and our little Fiats eddy and whirl
on the way to siesta and back.
They say don’t drink tap water, but I do.
Unable to sleep, I make water at night
to lighten myself for a phantom trip.
My image in the mirror is undramatic,
merely old and nude—a wineskin.
Who could ever love me? Misread
road maps pour out of me in a stream.
VI.
Neumático punturado—we stopped
on the only empty spot in Spain,
a concrete stub road forgotten between
a steep grass slope up to an orange wall
and a froth of mustard veiling two poppies.
Blessedly, the native space held back,
the Fiat held mute while we puzzled through
its code of metal to the spare and the jack.
¡Milagro! It rose like a saint, the car,
on a stiff sunbeam; nuts fell from the wheel
with the ease of bread breaking. The change
achieved, we thankfully looked up. Three men
in sky-blue work clothes in a sky of green
in silence wielded sickles. They had seen.
VII.
All crises pass, though not the condition of crisis.
Today I saw Franco as a bookend, with Juan Carlos.
The king is much on television, and indeed
seems telegenic. Slept well last night,
with dreams in deeper colors than there are.
Imagine a cardinal’s biscuit palace, friable,
from whose uncountable windows peep
hospital bedsteads painted lime-green:
I saw this in sunlight. The people
are clean, white, courteous, industrious.
To buy an inner tube, pay a traffic fine,
order Cinzano—this is civilization.
The streets, though dim, are safe at night. Lovers
touch, widows wear black, all is known.
VIII.
These islands of history amid traffic snarls—
Joanna the Mad in Tordesillas
played the harpsichord, leaned on the parapet,
saw a river, great fields, a single man
hooking a sheep who had gone the wrong way;
in Valladolid, Alvaro de Luna
knelt in the tiny, now dirty plaqued plaza
called Ochavo to be beheaded.
These souls thought the stars heaved with them.
My life has seamed shut; I sleep
as return to you
dawns like a comet.
Rubber tires burn where martyrs bled,
the madness of sunshine melts the plain,
tulips outnumber truths in my Madrid.
To Ed Sissman
I.
I think a lot about you, Ed:
tell me why. Your sallow owlish face
with the gray wart where death had kissed it,
drifting sideways above your second gin
in Josèph’s, at lunch, where with a what-the-hell
lurch you had commanded the waiter
to bring more poison, hangs in my mind
as a bloated star I wish to be brave on.
I loved your stuff, and the way
it came from nowhere, where poetry
must come from, having no credentials.
Your talk was bland, with a twist of whine,
of the obvious man affronted. You stooped
more and more, shouldering the dark for me.
II.
When you left, the ceiling caved in.
The impossible shrank to the plausible.
In that final room, where one last book
to be reviewed sat on your chest, you said,
like an incubus, transparent tubes
moved in and out of your veins
and nurses with volleyball breasts
mocked us with cheerleader health.
You were sicker than I, but I huddled in
my divorcing man’s raincoat by your bed
like a drenched detective by the cozy fire
a genial suspect has laid in his manor,
unsuspecting he is scheduled Next Victim.
I mourned I could not solve the mystery.
III.
You told me, lunching at Josèph’s,
foreseeing death, that it would be
a comfort to believe. My faith,
a kind of rabbit frozen in the headlights,
scrambled for cover in the roadside brush
of gossip; your burning beams passed by.
“Receiving communications from beyond”: thus
you once described the fit of writing well.
The hint hangs undeveloped, like
my mental note to send you Kierkegaard.
Forgive me, Ed; no preacher, I—
a lover of the dust, like you,
who took ten years of life on trial
and gave pentameter another voice.
Ohio
I.
Rolling along through Ohio,
lapping up Mozart on the radio
(Piano
Concerto No. 21, worn but pure),
having awoken while dawn
was muddying a rainy sky,
I learned what human was:
human was the music,
natural was the static
blotting out an arpeggio
with clouds of idiot rage,
exploding, barking, blind.
The stars sit athwart our thoughts
just so.
II.
To be fair, though, about that day—
dull sky, scuds of goldenrod,
fields dried flat, the plain hinting
at a tornado,
the choleric sun
a pillowed sort of face upon
which an antic wisp of cirrus
had set a mustache—
at dawn, I remembered all day,
I had parked beneath an overpass
to check my lights, and breathed
the secret green, the rain.
Like hammered melody the empty road
soared east and west. No static. Air.
Iowa
White barns this morning match the trees
whitewashed by fog that tiptoed in
among the little hills and froze.
Was all land once so innocent?
Did all our country uncles come to rest
on such long porches fortified
by moats of lawn where fireflies and dew
compounded the smoke of their summer cigars?
Those fireflies! From gloomy aisles of corn,
from lakeside groves the lanterns come.
This winter holds them in it like a jar—
contours of ripeness cast in frost
like old lawn furniture of iron,
our fruited plain as virgin as the moon.
Waiting Rooms
Boston Lying-In
Here women, frightened, bring their sex
as black men bring their wounds to the nighttown ward,
red evidence of rampages they ask
abstracted doctors to forgive,
forgive and understand and heal.
That snubnose has a secret in her crotch;
she holds some kind of order slip, a clue
in triplicate, at a loss for the proper desk.
They will bleed her and splay her and bed her
in sheets too white, in a bed too narrow;
black women will tend her sardonically
while men with hands scrubbed too often will peer
into the heart of anfractuous love.
Our bottoms betray us and beg for the light.
Mass. Mental Health
The mad are mad for cigarettes;
slightly shouting in their brain-deaf way,
they bum from one another with angry eyes
that run on separate circuits from their mouths.
The men, a-twitch, in curious rags
of their own combining, seem to have shaved
at some half-lit hour when nothing counted.
Glowering, knotted, their brows are shamed.
The women are different—haughty tramps
exhaling. One wears a paper hat
and has good legs, though bitten nails.
She asks me, “You a doctor?” I say, “No,”
all agitated. When men crack, we expect
murder to out; when women crack, sex.
On the Way to Delphi
Oedipus slew his father near this muddy field
the bus glides by as it glides by many another,
and Helicon is real; the Muses hid and dwelled
on a hill, less than a mountain, that we could climb
if the bus would stop and give us the afternoon.
From these small sites, now overrun by roads and fame,
dim chieftains stalked into the world’s fog and grew huge.
Where shepherds sang their mistaken kings, stray factories
mar with cement and smoke the lean geology
that wants to forget—has forgotten—the myths it bred.
We pass stone slopes where houses, low, of stone, blend in
like utterings on the verge of sleep—accretions scarce
distinguishable from scree, on the uphill way
to architecture and law. No men are visible.
All out: Parnassus. The oracle’s voice is wild.
An Oddly Lovely Day Alone
The kids went off to school,
the wife to the hairdresser,
or so she said, in Boston—
“He takes forever. ’Bye.”
I read a book, doing my job.
Around eleven, the rat man came—
our man from Pest Control,
though our rats have long since died.
He wears his hair rat-style—
cut short, brushed back—and told me
his minister had written a book
and “went on television with it.”
The proceeds, however, unlike mine,
would be devoted, every cent,
to a missionary church
in Yucatán.
Time went by silently. For lunch,
I warmed up last night’s pizza,
and added my plate to the dishwasher,
and soap, and punched FULL CYCLE.
A book, a box of raisins,
and bed. The phone rang once,
a woman whose grant had
not come through,
no fault of mine.
“That’s all right,” I told her.
“Just yesterday,
I failed to win
the National Book Critics’ Circle Prize.”
The book was good. The bed was warm.
Each hour seemed a rubber band
the preoccupied fingers of God
were stretching at His desk.
A thump, not a dishwasher thump.
The afternoon paper: it said
an earthquake had struck Iran
mere minutes after the shah had left.
The moral seemed clear.
More time passed, darkening.
All suddenly unbeknownst,
the afternoon had begun to snow—
to darken, darken and snow:
a fantastic effect, widespread.
If people don’t entertain you,
Nature will.
Taste
I have, alas, no taste—
taste, that Talleyrand, that ally of the minimal,
that foreign-accented intuiter
of what sly harmonies exist
betwixt the draped, the draper, and the drape:
that advocate of the right as it teeters
on its tightrope above the abyss of excess,
beneath the airy tent-top of not quite enough.
My first wife had taste.
White walls were her answer, and, Take that
to the attic. Nothing pleased her, quite,
save Cézanne and emptiness
and a shabby Oriental rug so full
of dust and virtue it made me sneeze,
descended as it was from her ancestors,
exemplary in piety and in the China trade.
Yet she was right, right in all things,
and draped herself in cocktail dresses
