by John Updike
That lifts me like a bark canoe
Adrift in breakers off Peru.
Neap to my spring, ebb to my flow,
It turns my pulse to undertow,
It turns my thoughts to bubbles, it
Still undulates when I would quit;
Two bags of water, it and I
In restless sympathy here lie.
To a Waterbed
No Frog Prince ever had a pond
So faithful, murmurous, and fond.
Amniotically it sings
Of broken dreams and hidden springs,
Automatically it laves
My mind in secondary waves
That answer motions of my own,
However mild—my amnion.
Fond underbubble, warm and deep,
I love you so much I can’t sleep.
The Jolly Greene Giant
Or is it more shocking … to be forced to consider that he may now be the largest of living English novelists?—Greene, the ambidextrous producer of “novels” and “entertainments”?
—Reynolds Price, in The New York Times Book Review
“You are large, Father Graham,” the young fan opined,
“And your corpus is bulky indeed;
Yet you pen ‘entertainments’ as thin as a rind—
How do you so hugely succeed?”
“In my youth,” said the writer, “I fasted on bile
With lacings of Romanish rum;
Compounded each quarter, it swells all the while—
Permit me to offer you some.”
“Do you find,” said the lad, “your Gargantuan girth
Has impaired your professional finesse?
An author must calibrate Heaven and Earth
To an eighth of an inch, I would guess.”
“It is true,” said the sage, “that my typing is rough,
Though each key is as wide as a platter;
But the swattable critics hum wonderful stuff,
And that is the heart of the matter!”
News from the Underworld
(After Blinking One’s Way Through “The Detection of Neutral Weak Currents,” in Scientific American)
They haven’t found the W
wee particle for carrying
the so-called “weak force” yet, but you
can bet they’ll find some odder thing.
Neutrinos make a muon when
a proton, comin’ through the rye,
hits in a burst of hadrons; then
eureka! γ splits from π
and scintillation counters say
that here a neutral lepton swerved.
Though parity has had its day,
the thing called “strangeness” is preserved.
Authors’ Residences
(After Visiting Hartford)
Mark Twain’s opinion was, he was entitled
To live in style; his domicile entailed
Some seven servants, nineteen rooms, unbridled
Fantasies by Tiffany
That furnished hospitality
With tons of stuff, until the funding failed.
The poet Wallace Stevens, less flamboyant,
Resided in a whiter Hartford home,
As solid as his neighbors’, slated, voyant
For all its screening shrubs; from here
He strolled to work, his life’s plain beer
Topped up with Fancy’s iridescent foam.
And I, I live (as if you care) in chambers
That number two—in one I sleep, alone
Most nights, and in the other drudge; my labors
Have brought me to a little space
In Boston. Writers, know your place
Before it gets too modest to be known.
Sin City, D.C.
(As of Our Bicentennial Summer)
Hays Says Ray Lies;
Gravel Denies
Gray Houseboat Orgy Tale;
Gardner Claims Being Male
No Safeguard Against
Congressional Concupiscence;
Ray Parlays Hays Lay
Into Paperback Runaway.
Shaving Mirror
Among the Brobdingnagians Gulliver
complained of the pores, the follicles,
“with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher,
and hairs hanging from it thicker than pack-threads.”
Swift hated everything’s being so relative,
“so varified with spots, pimples, and freckles
that nothing could appear more nauseous”;
but, hell, here we are, bad clay.
In this polished concavity mute enlargement
hovers on my skin like a flea-sized plane
surveying another earth, some solemn planet
hung long in space unknown, a furtive star.
Draw closer, visitor. These teeth
trumpet their craters; my lips are shores,
my eyes bloody lakes, the lashes alarming,
my whiskers like leafless trees—there is life!
“But the most hateful sight of all was the lice
crawling on their clothes”—an image echoed
by the king, who pronounces that men must “be
the most pernicious race of little odious
vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl
upon the surface of the earth.” Hard words
from above. I say, the more there is
of me, the more there is to love.
Beyond all reproach, beyond readjustment,
among the corruptible heavenly bodies
I swim, eluding my measure, “my complexion
made up of several colors altogether disagreeable.”
Self-Service
Always I wanted to do it myself
and envied the oily-handed boy
paid by the station to lift
the gun from its tall tin holster
and squeeze. That was power,
hi-octane or lo-, and now no-lead.
What feminism has done for some sisters
self-service has done for me.
The pulsing hose is mine, the numbers
race—the cents, the liquid tenths—
according to my pressure, mine!
I squeeze. This is power:
transparent horsepower, blood
of the sands, bane of the dollar,
soul-stuff; the nozzle might jump
from my grip, it appears to tremble
through its fumes. Myself,
I pinch off my share, and pay.
The Visions of Mackenzie King
(Based, More Closely Than You Might Think, Upon Articles in the Toronto Globe and Mail)
I, William Lyon Mackenzie King,
age seventy-three in 1948,
Prime Minister of Canada for twenty-two years,
had visions, and as such recorded them,
though merer men might call them dreams.
· · ·
In one I saw Hitler
sewing buttons on a bed quilt.
My interpretation: “a lesson in patience.”
In another, Franklin Roosevelt
and I were in the home of a wealthy man,
unnamed. As we speculated
upon the means (suspect, somehow)
whereby our host had acquired his fortune,
I had to sit awkwardly upon the floor.
The meaning was clear: I should return
to “some simpler life.”
In yet another, the then Princess
Juliana of the Netherlands
> and her charming consort, Prince Bernhard,
came up to me ceremoniously;
I looked down and discovered
I was wearing an old-fashioned nightgown!
And, later in the dream, lacked trousers.
But no interpretation
was confided to my journal.
Mr. and Mrs. Winston Churchill
were at Laurier House, my guests; in my unease
I felt things amiss, and hastened
to offer the great man a drink and a cigar.
He had already helped himself to both.
My valet took a swig from the decanter
and in my rage I hit the presuming fellow
with a felt hat that had appeared in my hand.
I climbed a tower. There was room at the top.
But my valet, Nicol, informed me
a “private woman’s club” had occupied the premises
and there could be no admission for me.
My conclusion: the summit of my calling
had been reached, but once there
I would not find the society of women
nor “what I had striven for most.”
I, W. L. Mackenzie King,
recorded these visions now released
some thirty years later, as a species
of Canadian history. Now,
as then, I am embarrassed. Among
French dignitaries, my nose began to bleed.
My handkerchief was stained with blood!
“I tried to keep it discreetly out of sight.”
Next, in a shadowy warehouse setting,
“furies” endeavored to assassinate me.
When I awoke at last, Gandhi was dead.
The world’s blood pursued me. The great
ignored my gaffes. But truth will out.
The newspapers titter that I was insecure.
Shaving soap spoke to me, of Mother and dogs,
in those decades of demons of whom I was one.
Energy: A Villanelle
The logs give back, in burning, solar fire
green leaves imbibed and processed one by one;
nothing is lost but, still, the cost grows higher.
The ocean’s tons of tide, to turn, require
no more than time and moon; it’s cosmic fun.
The logs give back, in burning, solar fire.
All microörganisms must expire
and quite a few became petroleum;
nothing is lost but, still, the cost grows higher.
The oil rigs in Bahrain imply a buyer
who counts no cost, when all is said and done.
The logs give back, in burning, solar fire
but Good Gulf gives it faster; every tire
is by the fiery heavens lightly spun.
Nothing is lost but, still, the cost grows higher.
So, guzzle gas!—the leaden night draws nigher
when cinders mark where stood the blazing sun.
The logs give back, in burning, solar fire;
nothing is lost but, still, the cost grows higher.
On the Recently Minted Hundred-Cent Piece
What have they done to our dollar, darling,
And who is this Susan B.
Anthony in her tight collar, darling,
Instead of Miss Liberty?
Why seems it the size of a quarter, dearie,
Why is it infernally small?
To fit in the palm of a porter, dearie,
As tip, though he mutter, “That’s all?”
Who shrank it, our greenback and buck, beloved,
And made it a plaything of tin?
Father Time, Uncle Sam, Lady Luck, beloved,
Have done done our doll dollar in.
Typical Optical
In the days of my youth
’Mid many a caper
I drew with my nose
A mere inch from the paper;
But now that I’m older
And life has grown hard
I find I can’t focus
Inside of a yard.
First pill-bottle labels
And telephone books
Began to go under
To my dirty looks;
Then want ads and box scores
Succumbed to the plague
Of the bafflingly quite
Unresolvably vague.
Now novels and poems
By Proust and John Donne
Recede from my ken in
Their eight-point Granjon;
Long, long in the lens
My old eyeballs enfold
No print any finer
Than sans-serif bold.
The Rockettes
Now when those girls, all thirty-six, go
to make their silky line, they do it slow,
so slow and with a smile—they know
we love it, we the audience. Our
breaths suck in with a gasp you hear
as their legs in casual unison
wave this way then, and that, and their top
hats tilt in one direction,
and their sharp feet twinkle like a starry row
as the pace picks up, and the lazy legs
(thirty-six, thirty-six, what a sex
to be limber and white and slender
and fat all at once, all at once!)
that seemed so calm go higher, higher
in the wonderful kicks, like the teeth
of a beast we have dreamed and are dreaming,
like the feathers all velvet together
of a violent contracting that pulls us in,
then lets us go, that pulls us in,
then lets us go; they smile because
they know we know they know we know.
Food
It is always there,
Man’s real best friend.
It never bites back;
it is already dead.
It never tells us we are lousy lovers
or asks us for an interview.
It simply begs, Take me;
it cries out, I’m yours.
Mush me all up, it says;
Whatever is you, is pure.
The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring
When winter’s glaze is lifted from the greens,
And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing,
Triumphantly the stifled golfer preens
In cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing.
This year, he vows, his head will steady be,
His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal;
And so they are, until upon the tee
Befall the old contortions of the real.
So, too, the tennis-player, torpid from
Hibernal months of television sports,
Perfects his serve and feels his knees become
Sheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts.
Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss,
Which shall be high, so that the racket face
Shall at a certain angle sweep across
The floated sphere with gutty strings—an ace!
The mind’s eye sees it all until upon
The courts of life the faulty way we played
In other summers rolls back with the sun.
Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.
ZIP Code Ode
To These Newly Abbreviated States, Including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia
aMERICA, you caTNip bIN,
OR DE
n of iNJury,
iNVest your HINDMOst FLimfLAMS in
PAID fARes to ALbaNY.
aCT COcKY, bUT beWAIL the trIAls
of crAZed, uNHappy MAn.
diSDain arMTwisting; tricKS and WIles
uNMAKe a GAMIng plan.
OH, shoWY land of SChemes NEwborn
(huMDinger uNCle, be adVIsed),
i very VAguely want
to hyMN your harDCore, PRessurized,
loWValue rows of OK corn
from TX to VT.
Déjà, Indeed
I sometimes fear that I shall never view
A French film lacking Gérard Depardieu.
Two Limericks for the Elderly
I.
A touchy old gent from Cohasset
Declared human contact no asset.
Said he, “When I say
‘Noli tangere,’ me
Is implicit but not, I hope, tacit!”
II.
There was an old poop from Poughkeepsie
Who tended at night to be tipsy.
Said he, “My last steps
Aren’t propelled by just Schweppes!”—
That peppy old poop from Poughkeepsie.
Mites
A house-dust mite (Dermatophagoides farinae)
is not a house-mouse mite (Liponyssoides sanguineus)
any more than speaking Portuguese is speaking Manx
or an elephant is a hyrax, though both are ungulates.
