Collected Poems, 1953-1993

by John Updike

  portrays him aging. Velvet furniture

  selected by committee shows no wear.

  The latches, black and flat, remind me of

  my boyhood home. This stately farce of learning—

  well, time to brush the teeth and face the students.

  Perfection Wasted

  And another regrettable thing about death

  is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,

  which took a whole life to develop and market—

  the quips, the witticisms, the slant

  adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest

  the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched

  in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,

  their tears confused with their diamond earrings,

  their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,

  their response and your performance twinned.

  The jokes over the phone. The memories packed

  in the rapid-access file. The whole act.

  Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;

  imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

  Working Outdoors in Winter

  It can be done. The seal of frost

  imposed upon the windows can

  be broken, and a depth of air revealed.

  Trees follow one another, one by one—

  birch, beech, white oak, a hickory or ash—

  and make a space to move in, space

  like that inside your clothes,

  which can be warmed.

                           The poison ivy dormant,

  mosquitoes dead, and leaves’ green suffocation

  lifted, you wield the clipper, swing the ax

  in an atmosphere of freedom earned, of nature

  as calligraphy, transparent to the will.

  You overheat, at last, and seem to wound

  the virgin quiet as a glowing poker

  wounds the water it is plunged into.

  To build a fire in winter’s heart!

  Now, there is self-assertion, gathering

  the heap of brush, the castoff branches,

  the kindling wood and match, and tools

  to keep the orange pet in bounds, its roar

  and snap and snarl and singing hiss all yours,

  Der Feuermeister.

                           The blue smoke soils

  blue sky, an ascent of sparks describes an S

  baroque as the sound holes in a violin,

  and a bed of frozen earth is fried,

  with all its sleeping worms. The cold day sinks

  to its ruddy ash of dusk while you recall

  in bone and vein what tough machines

  men are, their burning gristle built to push

  against the zero waiting all around.

  Indianapolis

  A passion for Roman order seized the plains.

  Desire to woo the American Legion raised

  not one but two imperial monuments

  to the oft-regretted dead. In World War One

  Das Deutsche Haus became, to lick the Huns,

  another Athenaeum. The spreading city hangs

  between brick-striped solidity and dim

  apology for being there at all.

  Metropolis of writers—Tarkington,

  James Whitcomb Riley, Vonnegut, and more

  who fled and fed New York’s ungrateful maw.

  Why flee? Come, stay beside the Hoosier Dome,

  its alabaster bubble, citizen,

  and dream your fill of plain civility—

  of logical maps, and unimpeded streets,

  and porch-swing sex like a window box in bloom.

  Zoo Bats

  In the Central Park Zoo, just past the ants

  being televised by tiny cameras,

  the bats flutter and swoop in a glassed-in gloom.

  You don’t see bats this close up very often.

  Yet they are hard to see, too quick, too faint,

  and their shapes disagree with the eyes—

  appall us, really, though we approach and peer

  determined not to be appalled, to be liberal and just

  toward this creature that is, after all,

  remarkably successful, if quietly so.

  One seventh of all mammalian species

  are Chiroptera, and their mortality rate

  is low, their predators no problem, and

  their child-rearing habits more constant than ours.

  Who begrudges them their diet of bugs?

  Their digestions are rapid, to keep themselves light.

  For all this Fourierism, this favorable press,

  these bats in the flesh are worse than we dreamed;

  if we dreamed of them often, we would swap

  such sleep for death, its featureless white glare.

  They are shapeless in flight and in repose—

  small broken umbrellas that grab the air

  like brown-gloved skeletal hands, and latch

  their sticky feet to a roost with a vile

  tenacity, and tremblingly hang; or else

  they drop to a ledge like a sudden deposit

  of excrement, shit out of nowhere, a

  product of this intestinal gray gloom.

  No doubt they have dear faces—with nose-flaps,

  some of them, to aid echolocation,

  and snouts, like the hog-nosed bat of Thailand,

  small as a bumblebee. The common bat

  that haunts our mauve suburban twilights with

  its airborne evening meal—connect the dots—

  weighs one third of an ounce, or less. How minor

  a mass for so disquieting a shadow!

  Perhaps to fly with webbed and lengthened fingers

  sits worse, with nature, than to do it with

  thoracic chitin-scales or feathered arms.

  A bird is a new shape, a fish of the sky;

  a bat, a squeaking face between a pair

  of agitated hands, that’s all. I once

  was at a party when a bat broke in.

  It dipped from room to room as people screamed.

  The host at last opened a door, and out

  it went. To make his teary daughter laugh,

  I said, “It looked like this,” and did a face—

  a-squint, stretch-mouthed. She laughed and said, “It did!”

  We see them better than we know, like the

  subliminal bits on television.

  They are subconscious, bats, and bubble up

  like prejudices. Another time, one night,

  I saw a bat sail like a flung black stone

  behind my stepson’s head. He and my wife

  reacted violently, and, slamming doors,

  delegated me to be the bat

  eliminator. Trapped, I crept upstairs,

  through hall and bedroom (nothing there) into

  the bathroom where, all fearful of its flying

  Dracula-fanged and rabid at my face,

  I found it hanging, folded, to a towel.

  Resigned and upside down, the bat had sensibly

  amid our panic put itself to sleep.

  Stealthy as a parent, I wrapped it gently up;

  it chirruped, exerting a questioning pressure

  back through the towel like the throb of a watch.

  Up, window. Up, screen. I gave the bat back

  to the night like a cup of water to the sea.

  Landing in the Rain at La Guardia

  The death-grip of the chalky clouds lets slip,

  within our oval view, a glimpse of ground:

  six city autos snug in their snail’s pace

  on rain-licked streets that we will never cruise.

  The clouds return, a hurtling wisp or two

  to measure our distressing speed; then space

  opens a
gain beneath our belly-drone

  like a wound, damp and lucidly detailed—

  flat factory roofs and empty parking lots,

  a cemetery’s ragged crowded rows.

  What meaningless angel are we thus to loom

  above the sleeping, crawling map of Queens?

  The World’s Fair globe, a toy. Shea Stadium.

  Upreaching stony water. Whumppf: we’re down.

  Mouse Sex

  In my cellar the poisoned mice, thirsty to death,

  come out to die on the cement, in the center

  of the floor. This particular corpse seemed fat,

  so sideways-plump that pregnancy crossed my mind,

  and, picking it up by the tail, I saw, sure enough,

  at the base of the tail her tiny neat vagina,

  a pumpkin-seed-shaped break in the dulcet fur.

  I had murdered a matriarch, with d-Con.

  Revelation of the vagina’s simplicity

  had come to me before. Tossing the tiny body

  into the woods, I remembered another

  woods-surrounded house, where I and another

  lay together upstairs, and had heard

  a sound downstairs, her husband or the wind.

  The phantom sound, like an alchemist’s pinch,

  turned my erection inconvenient.

  We listened, our love-flushed faces an inch apart.

  The sound was not repeated. In the silence,

  as the house resumed its enclosing, she said,

  her voice thickened and soft and distinct,

  “Put it in me.” In my wild mind’s eye I saw

  the vagina as a simple wanting, framed in fur,

  kept out of sight between the legs but always there,

  a gentle nagging, a moist accommodacy.

  A man and not a mouse, yet with a bed-squeak,

  I fell to my duty, our ungainly huddle

  and its tense outcome less memorable

  than the urgent, imperilled invitation.

  How dear she was—her husband, that creep,

  creeping about for all we knew—to sock it to

  herself and give me in words the carte blanche

  boys dream of but seldom receive spelled out.

  I loved her for it, and for afterwards

  with a touch of a blush confessing,

  “I don’t want to be coarse for you,” as if women

  could be as bluntly brutes as men.

  Until that moment I did not suspect

  that sex had an equitable basis.

  The cat creeps below, but lady mice

  still put their dulcet selves at risk, and die.

  Suppose that moment, frozen, were Heaven or Hell:

  our hearts would thump until the death of stars,

  the trees outside would stir their golden edges,

  the bed would squeak, the frightened inch

  between our skins would hold the headboard’s grain,

  her brazen thighs would simply, frankly part,

  our eyes and breath would forever entertain

  our mutual inquisition. Put it in.

  Suspended above the abyss of her desire,

  I feel as far-flung as a constellation.

  Colors: the golden-edged trees, the lilac sheets,

  the mousy green of her self-startled eyes.

  We are furtive, gigantic, our stolen hour

  together a swollen eternity.

  We enter into one another; the universe

  rises about us like a hostile house.

  Granite

  New England doesn’t kid around;

  it wears its bones outside.

  Quartz-freckled, time-rumpled granite—

  your tombstone everywhere.

  At night I wake and warily gaze

  at outcroppings on my lawn.

  These moonlit humpbacks, do they sleep

  or do their blanched surfaces sense my eyes?

  By day, you can see how earth

  engenders itself over aeons—

  pine needles silt in, and tender weeds

  take hold in the cracks, then wild roses

  and hairy-stemmed sumacs find enough

  for a footing, and oak rootlets,

  and out of the mesh comes a mulch, a soil—

  trapped particles breed trapped life.

  There is no way not to die,

  can it be? What do these stones

  coldly know? Or is moonlight warm,

  and the granite a pledge

  to which consciousness clings?

  Better rock than the mud

  of a meaningless mercy, such as men

  would devise. This outcrop

  is a wide gray glow the night has grown.

  I think with awe of the man

  who will gaze down upon it, awake,

  when I’m blinder than stone.

  Relatives

  Just the thought of them makes your jawbone ache:

  those turkey dinners, those holidays with

  the air around the woodstove baked to a stupor,

  and Aunt Lil’s tablecloth stained by her girlhood’s gravy.

  A doggy wordless wisdom whimpers from

  your uncles’ collected eyes; their very jokes

  creak with genetic sorrow, a strain

  of common heritage that hurts the gut.

  Sheer boredom and fascination! A spidering

  of chromosomes webs even the infants in

  and holds us fast around the spread

  of rotting food, of too-sweet pie.

  The cousins buzz, the nephews crawl;

  to love one’s self is to love them all.

  Thin Air

  By holding one’s head stock-still and measuring

  on a window edge the snail’s pace at which

  the plane in its airy trudge eats up

  the luminous noodles of roadway—wet boughs

  with speckled leaves and globular fruit

  (sports stadia? new-opened malls?)

  one gauges, abstractly, a speed outracing

  headlights and in seconds eclipsing cities

  spun underneath us like irregular webs

  bespangled with life’s bright dew—lives passing

  from cradle to coffin in local ignorance.

  But as we land, this speed turns non-abstract:

  the flashing grope of water, the coded lights

  that cry Come home!, the runway like a card

  the magician slips from the bottom of the deck

  murderously fast. We would die,

  squashed snails, were the world one shade more solid.

  November

  The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace

      in falling, sweeping clean the clouded sky.

  This brightness shocks the window like a face.

  Our eyes contract to hold the sudden space

                 of barrenness—bare branches, blue, up high.

  The light the sun withdrew has been replaced.

  The tiny muscles of the iris taste

      past time—old falls, slant light—recalling why

  this brightness shocks the window like a face.

  To children, years are each a separate case,

      enormous, full of presents and surprise:

  the light the sun withdraws the leaves replace.

  For grown-ups, reminiscence scores the days

      with traces veteran nerve-ends recognize

  when brightness shocks the window like a face.

  November, we know you—the grudging grace

      of clarity you grant the clouded eye.

  The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace

  with brightness at the window like a face.

  Light Switches

  Lord, but one wearies of flipping them,

  or turning them, or punching or,

  with certain rheostat
ted switches, sliding them.

  Nipples on the walls’ flat chests,

  they yield the milk of light—the creamy

  incandescence of resistant tungsten,

  and lo-fat fluorescence that comes

  in brimming, humming tubes. A modern

  miracle, O.K.; but miracles wear

  over a man’s and/or a woman’s lifetime

  to mere routines—to recurrent details

  that acquire no-meaning’s muffled sense

  of a gap between purpose and sign

  like the gap inside a careful package

  stuffed with newspapers wadded into nonsense,

  the language they were printed in no matter.

  Off. On. It goes without saying.

  And the sockets get boring, too—their twin mouths

  and little flat-sided eye for the grounding prong.

  The walls are threaded with magic, so what?

  It’s magic merely our own, cooked up

  so we can watch inane commercials—

  never a lightning arising from a sky

  beyond our brains, where electric-blue Zeus

  hurls laughing bolts that weld amino acids

  to a fantastic random hunger.

  Instead, these mechanisms we understand,

  these diagrams whose starkness shocks the soul.

  Off, on—there must be something else,

  some middle way, third eye, or shakti current.

  These tilted blond clitorises

  of plastic, their pure thrill palls

  with the morning shave and the midnight douche.

  Miami

  As in some car chase on Sunday-night TV,

  Art Deco collides with postmodern glass

  above pink-plaster, low-slung barrio;

  nothing crumples like passé luxury.

  Miami Beach is now a hustling strip

  where college kids rub naked shoulders with

  the Caribbean’s shadows, high on hopes