by John Updike
of utter black, her arms no less perfect than bones.
I know a man with taste.
He lives alone on a floor of a warehouse
and designs machines that make nothing
but vivid impressions of whirling,
of ellipticity, dazzle, and flow.
He cooks on a single burner
Suprèmes de Volaille aux Champignons,
has hung his brick walls with pencilled originals
by Impressionist masters,
and lives in smiling harmony with all that is there
and is not there,
minding only the traffic noise from the street.
He and my first wife would make a pair,
but they will never meet.
My second wife, that flatterer, says
I have taste.
All decisions as to pattern are deferred to me.
A chair, a car I chose is cheered
when it arrives, like a bugle note, on pitch
with all the still-humming chords
of our clamorous, congratulatory mingling.
It makes one blush, to be credited with taste.
Chipmunk fur, wave-patterns on sand, white asters—
but for these, and some few other exceptions,
Nature has no taste, just productivity.
I want to be, like Nature, tasteless,
abundant, reckless, cheerful. Go screw, taste—
itself a tasteless suggestion.
Penumbrae
The shadows have their seasons, too.
The feathery web the budding maples
cast down upon the sullen lawn
bears but a faint relation to
high summer’s umbrageous weight
and tunnellike continuum—
black leached from green, deep pools
wherein a globe of gnats revolves
as airy as an astrolabe.
The thinning shade of autumn is
an inherited Oriental,
red worn to pink, nap worn to thread.
Shadows on snow look blue. The skier,
exultant at the summit, sees his poles
elongate toward the valley: thus
each blade of grass projects another
opposite the sun, and in marshes
the mesh is infinite,
as the winged eclipse an eagle in flight
drags across the desert floor
is infinitesimal.
And shadows on water!—
the beech bough bent to the speckled lake
where silt motes flicker gold,
or the steel dock underslung
with a submarine that trembles,
its ladder stiffened by air.
And loveliest, because least looked-for,
gray on gray, the stripes
the pearl-white winter sun
hung low beneath the leafless wood
draws out from trunk to trunk across the road
like a stairway that does not rise.
Revelation
Two days with one eye:
doctor said I had to wear a patch
to ward off infection
in the abraded cornea.
As hard to get used to as the dark:
no third dimension
and the swaddled eye
reporting a gauze blur to the brain.
You feel clumsy:
hearing and thinking affected also.
Only your sense of smell improves
in a world of foggy card-shapes.
When the patch came off on Monday,
the real world was alarming,
bulging every which way and bright:
a kind of a joke, a pop-up book.
The Shuttle
Sitting airborne on the
New York–to–Boston shuttle
for what seemed the thousandth time,
I recalled what seemed a poem:
In the time before jets,
when the last shuttle left
La Guardia at eleven,
I flew home to Logan
on a virtually empty DC-7
and one of the seven other passengers
I recognized as Al Capp.
Later, at a party,
one of those Cambridge parties
where his anti-Ho politics
were wrong, so wrong
the left eventually broke his heart,
I recalled the flight to him,
but did not recount how sleepy
he looked to me, how tired,
with his peg-legged limp
and rich man’s blue suit
and Li’l Abner shock of hair.
He laughed and said to me,
“And if the plane had crashed,
can’t you just see the headline?—
ONLY EIGHT KILLED.
ONLY EIGHT KILLED: everyone
would be so relieved!”
Now Al is dead, dead,
and the shuttle is always crowded.
Crab Crack
In the Pond
The blue crabs come to the brown pond’s edge
to browse for food where the shallows are warm
and small life thrives subaqueously,
while we approach from the airy side,
great creatures bred in trees and armed
with nets on poles of such a length
as to outreach that sideways tiptoe lurch
when, with a splash from up above, the crabs
discover themselves to be prey.
In the Bucket
We can feel
at the pole’s other end their fearful
wide-legged kicking, like the fury of scissors
if scissors had muscle. We want
their sweet muscle. Blue and a multitude
of colors less easily named (scum-green,
old ivory, odd ovals of lipstick-red
where the blue-glazed limbs are hinged),
they rest in the buckets, gripping one another
feebly, like old men fumbling in their laps,
numb with puzzlement, their brains
a few threads, each face a mere notch
on the brittle bloated pancake of the carapace.
In the Pot
But the passion with which they resist!
Even out of the boiling pot they come clattering
and try to dig holes in the slick kitchen floor
and flee as if hours parching in the sun
on the lawn beneath our loud cocktails
had not taught them a particle of despair.
On the Table
Now they are done, red. Cracking
their preposterous backs, we cannot bear
to touch the tender fossils of their mouths
and marvel at the beauty of the gills,
the sweetness of the swimmerets. All is exposed,
an intricate toy. Life spins such miracles
by multiples of millions, yet our hearts
never quite harden, never quite cease
to look for the hand of mercy in
such workmanship. If when we die we’re dead,
then the world is ours like gaudy grain
to be reaped while we’re here, without guilt.
If not, then an ominous duty to feel
with the mite and the dragon is ours,
and a burden in being.
In the Stomach
Late at night
the ghosts of the crabs patrol our intestines,
scampering sideways, hearkening à pointe
like radar dishes beneath the tide, seeking
the safe grave of sand in vain, turning,
against their burning wills, into us.
Nature
is su
ch a touching child.
When his first wife and he
had their tennis court built,
they were going to plant cedars
transplanted from the field
all around the court, to make
a windscreen.
The digging proved hard,
the wheelbarrow awkward,
and they planted only one,
at the corner.
Now, years later, returning
to drop off a child,
he sees the forgotten cedar
has grown tall enough
to be part of a windscreen
if there were others with it,
if it had not grown alone.
The Moons of Jupiter
Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io:
these four, their twinkling spied by Galileo
in his new-invented telescope, debunked
the dogma of celestial spheres—great bubbles
of crystal turning one within another,
our pancake Earth the static, sea-rimmed center,
and, like a beehive, Purgatory hung below,
and angels scattered all throughout, chiming
and trumpeting across the curved interstices
their glad and constant news. Not so. “E pur
si muove,” Galileo muttered, sotto
voce, having recanted to the Pope.
Yet, it moves, the Earth, and unideal
also the Galilean moons: their motion
and fluctuant occlusions pierced Jove’s sphere
and let out all the air that Dante breathed
as tier by singing tier he climbed to where
Beatrice awaited, frosting bride
atop the universal wedding cake.
Not Vergil now but Voyager, cloned gawker
sent spinning through asymptotic skies
and televising back celestial news,
guides us to the brink of the bearable.
Callisto is the outermost satellite
and the first our phantom footsteps tread.
Its surface underfoot is ancient ice,
thus frozen firm four billion years ago
and chipped and peppered since into a slurry
of saturated cratering. Pocked, knocked,
and rippled sullenly, this is the terrain
of unforgiven wrongs and hurts preserved—
the unjust parental slap, the sneering note
passed hand to hand in elementary school,
the sexual jibe confided between cool sheets,
the bad review, the lightly administered snub.
All, in this gloom, keep jagged edges fresh
as yesterday, and, muddied by some silicon,
the bitter spikes and uneroded rims
of ancient impact trip and lacerate
our progress. There is no horizon, just
widespread proof of ego’s cruel bombardment.
Next, Ganymede, the largest of these moons,
as large as toasted Mercury. Its ice enchants
with ponds where we can skate and peek down through
pale recent crazings to giant swarthy flakes
of mineral mystery; raked blocks like glaciers
must be traversed, and vales of strange grooves cut
by a parallel sliding, implying
tectonic activity, a once-warmed interior.
This is the realm of counterthrust—the persistent
courtship, the job application, the punch
given back to the ribs of the opposing tackle.
A rigid shame attends these ejecta,
and a grim satisfaction we did not go under
meekly, but thrust our nakedness hard
against the skin of the still-fluid world,
leaving what is called here a ghost crater.
“Cue ball of the satellites”—so joked
the National Geographic of Europa.
But, landed on the fact, the mind’s eye swims
in something somber and delicious both—
a merged Pacific and Siberia,
an opalescent prairie veined with beige
and all suffused by flickers of a rose
tint caught from great, rotating Jupiter.
Europa’s surface stretches still and smooth,
so smooth its horizon’s glossy limb betrays
an arc of curvature. The meteors here
fell on young flesh and left scars
no deeper than birthmarks; as we walk
our chins are lit from underneath, the index
of reflection, the albedo, is so high.
Around us glares the illusion of success:
a certain social polish, decent grades,
accreditations, memberships, applause,
and mutual overlookings melt together
to form one vast acceptance that makes us blind.
On Io, volcanoes plume, and sulphur tugged
by diverse gravitations bubbles forth
from a golden crust that caps a molten sea.
The atmosphere smells foul, and pastel snow
whips burningly upon us, amid the cold.
This is our heart, our bowels, ever renewed,
the poisonous churn of basic needs
suffering the pull of bodies proximate.
The bulblike limbic brain, the mother’s breast,
the fear of death, the wish to kill, the itch
to plunge and flee, the love of excrement,
the running sore and appetitive mouth
all find form here. Kilometers away,
a melancholy puckered caldera
erupts, and magma, gas, and crystals hurl
toward outer space a smooth blue column that
umbrellas overhead—some particles
escaping Io’s seething gravity.
Straining upward out of ourselves to follow
their flight, we confront the forgotten
witness, Jupiter’s thunderous mass,
the red spot roaring like an anguished eye
amid a turbulence of boiling eyebrows—
an emperor demented but enthroned,
and hogging with his gases an empyrean
in which the Sun is just another star.
So, in a city, as we hurry along
or swiftly ascend to the sixtieth floor,
enormity suddenly dawns and we become
beamwalkers treading a hand’s-breadth of steel,
the winds of space shining around our feet.
Striated by slow-motion tinted tumult
and lowering like a cloud, the planet turns,
vast ball, annihilating other,
epitome of ocean, mountain, cityscape
whose mass would crush us were we once
to stop the inward chant, This is not real.
Upon the Last Day of His Forty-Ninth Year
Scritch, scratch, saith the frozen spring snow—
not near enough, this season or the last,
but still a skin for skiing on, with care.
At every shaky turn into the fall line
one hundred eighty pounds of tired blood
and innards weakly laced with muscle seek
to give themselves to gravity and ruin.
My knees, a-tremble with old reflex, resist
and try to find the lazy dancer’s step
and pillowed curve my edges flirted with
when I had little children to amaze
and life seemed endlessly flexible. Now,
my heavy body swings to face the valley
and feels the gut pull of steep maturity.
Planting Trees
Our last connection with the mythic.
My mother remembers the day as a girl
she jumped across a little spruce
that now overtops the sandstone house
where still she lives; her face delights
at the thought of her years translated
int
o wood so tall, into so mighty
a peer of the birds and the wind.
Too, the old farmer still stout of step
treads through the orchard he has outlasted
but for some hollow-trunked much-lopped
apples and Bartlett pears. The dogwood
planted to mark my birth flowers each April,
a soundless explosion. We tell its story
time after time: the drizzling day,
the fragile sapling that had to be staked.
At the back of our acre here, my wife and I,
freshly moved in, freshly together,
transplanted two hemlocks that guarded our door
gloomily, green gnomes a meter high.
One died, gray as sagebrush next spring.
The other lives on and some day will dominate
this view no longer mine, its great
lazy feathery hemlock limbs down-drooping,
its tent-shaped caverns resinous and deep.
Then may I return, an old man, a trespasser,
and remember and marvel to see
our small deed, that hurried day,
so amplified, like a story through layers of air
told over and over, spreading.
The Fleckings
The way our American wildflowers hover
and spatter and fleck the underlying ground
was understood the best by Winslow Homer;
with brush and palette knife he marred the somber
foreground field of the mountainous Two Guides
and slashed the carpet green of Boys in a Pasture.
So all our art; these casual stabs of color—
Abstract Expressionism ere it had a name—
proclaim the violence underfoot discovered.
East Hampton—Boston by Air
Oh dear,
the plane is so small the baggage
is stuffed into its nose
and under its wings,
like the sacs of a honeybee!
There are six of us, mostly women.
