by John Updike
To be a mite at all! To be so small
you can rest as in a bunk bed beneath a flea’s scales,
or expend a lifetime in a single chicken feather
or the mite-pouch (acarinarium) of a carpenter bee!
To dwell happy in the mouth of a long-nosed bat,
like one species of Macronyssidae’s protonymph,
causing tissue destruction and loss of teeth,
or beneath the skin of a mammal, creating mange!
Think how Nature slaved over these arrangements!
Thirty thousand species of acarines,
fifty from the Antarctic alone, and some found
five miles up Everest, or a mile down in the sea!
Itch mites, cheese mites, monkey-lung mites, each
making its way through the several larval stages
to an awkward copulation (discounting
parthenogenetic ticks) and easy death—
what fresh perspectives! Specks of our shed skin
delicious boulders, our human pores
lubricious dish-shaped living rooms, and particles
our largeness elides palpable to mites, who loom
in the scanning electron microscope’s gray light
as many-tentacled, with chelicerae—
as hobbled as stegosaurs by their quaint
equipment, as endearing as baffled bears,
these mini-spiders characterized by
lack of a waist, lateral eyes, and tininess.
We marvel; we pity; we loathe; we try to forget
perspectives from which we are smaller yet.
An Open Letter to Voyager II
Dear Voyager:
This is to thank you for
The last twelve years, and wishing you, what’s more,
Well in your new career in vacant space.
When you next brush a star, the human race
Will be a layer of old sediment,
A wrinkle of the primates, a misspent
Youth of some zoömorphs. But you, your frail
Insectoid form, will skim the sparkling vale
Of the void practically forever. As
The frictionless light-years and -epochs pass,
The rigid constellations Earth admires
Will shift and rearrange their twinkling fires.
No tipped antenna-dish will strain to hear
Your whispered news, nor poet call you dear.
Ere then, let me assure you you’ve been grand.
A little shaky at the outset, and
Arthritic in the swivel-joints, antique
In circuitry, virtually deaf, and weak
As a refrigerator bulb, you kept
Those picture postcards coming. Signals crept
To Pasadena; there they were enhanced
Until those planets clear as daylight danced.
The stripes and swirls of Jupiter’s slow boil,
Its crazy moons—one cracked, one fried in oil,
One glazed with ice, and one too raw to eat,
Still bubbling with the juice of inner heat—
Arrived on our astonished monitors.
Then, following a station break of years,
Fat Saturn rode your feeble beam, and lo!—
Not corny as we feared, but Art Deco—
The hard-edge, Technicolor rings; they spin
At different speeds, are merely meters thin,
And cast a flash-bulb’s shadows. Planet three
Was Uranus (accented solemnly,
By anchormen, on the first syllable,
Lest viewers think the “your” too personal):
A glassy globe of gas upon its side,
Its nine faint braided rings at last descried,
Its corkscrew-shaped magnetic passions bared,
Its pocked attendants digitized and aired.
Last loomed, against the Oort Cloud, blue Neptune,
Its counterrevolutionary moon,
Its wispy arcs of rings and whitish streaks
Of unpredicted tempests—thermal freaks,
As if an unused backyard swimming pool,
Remote from stirring sunlight, dark and cool
(Sub-sub-sub-freezing), chose to make a splash.
Displays of splendid waste, of rounded trash!
Your looping miles of guided drift brought home
How fruitless cosmic space would be to roam.
One awful ball succeeds another, none
Fit for a shred or breath of life. Our lone
Delightful, verdant orb was primed to cede
The H2O and O and N we need.
Your survey, in its scrupulous depiction,
Purged from the solar system science fiction—
No more Uranians or Io-ites,
Just Earthlings dreaming through their dewy nights.
You saw where we could not, and dared to go
Where we would be destroyed; you showed
A kind of metal courage, and faithfulness.
Your cryptic, ciphered, graven messages
Are for ourselves, designed to boomerang
Back like a prayer from where the angels sang,
That shining ancient blank encirclement.
Your voyage now outsoars mundane intent
And joins blind matter’s motions. Au revoir,
You rickety free-falling man-made star!
Machines, like songs, belong to all. A man
Aloft is Russian or American,
But you aloft were simply sent by Man
At large.
Sincerely yours,
A fan.
Classical Optical
The gray Graeae—
Deino, Enyo, Pemphredo—
shared one eye,
but boasted two
“ae”s—ae ae.
If ae’s could see
those three Graeae
need not have grieved.
But ancient Greece
was heavily into
fate and tragedy,
not therapy;
even Tiresias’s
sex-change operation was
permitted to
stall halfway through.
Neoteny
According to Webster’s, “the condition
of having the period of immaturity indefinitely prolonged,
as in the axolotl.” The axolotl?
Who invited this Mexican salamander
to the party? According to The New York Times Magazine,
neoteny is what we human beings share
with sheep and dogs, housecats and cattle—
the retention, that is, of childish trust and openness,
of “expectation of care and feeding,”
which drew us all together in domestication’s epoch,
at the messy end of the Pleistocene—
all those glaciers, retreating and advancing
rather impetuously, as geology goes.
In that unsettled era, evolution favored
the late-developing, the infantile-tentative,
the experimentally wandering, the young-at-heart
neotenates, their characteristics not stodgily locked in.
Welcome, we said, in our ramshackle settlements,
to the waggle-tailed dog, all overeager helpfulness,
and the violet-eyed sheep, with no thought in its head
but Feed me, and the cow, thinking Milk me
and Please fence me in. Came the cunning kitty-cat,
mewing, only superficially aloof, not above it all
at all, but slyly grateful for a bed
of warm straw (the grasses and grains themselves
clamoring to be domesticated) in exchange for the catch
of an odd mouse or
two, the mice themselves
in from the fields for a crash pad and a crumb.
Neotenates bumble about, mounting ewes not in heat
or even of their own species—this trait, too,
conducing to one big family, chomping as one, huddling,
shivering at the thought of the glaciers coming back.
In the horse’s wide jelly of an eye, his rider
is just another horse, of another color.
O paradise of babes! The saber-toothed tiger, mature
to a fault, has joined the voluptuously hairy mammoth
in time’s tarpit, while we, saying goo-goo,
saying bow-wow and baa, saying moo and meow,
go flocking down the chutes and corrals of the future,
all woolly and cozy and docile, ever trusting,
our trustingness vindicated, our populations exploding
while the untameable rhino runs vainly for cover
and the axolotl (“esteemed for food in Mexico,”
says Webster’s) covets our loveableness.
Notes
Ex-Basketball Player. My only oft-anthologized poem. The second stanza receives footnotes in some textbooks, to explain that once upon a time a gasoline station might offer a variety of brands of gasoline, with the trade names identified on glass heads above the pumps, and that ESSO, predecessor of EXXON, was one of the brands. The crowdlike candies are behind the luncheonette counter, beyond reach.
March: A Birthday Poem. The child, in the event, came late: Elizabeth Pennington Updike was born in Oxford, England, early in the morning of April 1, 1955, the joke being on me. In the United States, it was still the last hours of March.
Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers. I had taken along to the ball game a paperback copy of Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, and peeked into it between innings.
Mobile of Birds. Perhaps the same mobile evoked in the short story “Toward Evening,” which was brought home by the young New Yorker, Rafe, to his wife and infant daughter: “The mobile was not a success. Alice had expected a genuine Calder, made of beautiful polished woods, instead of seven rubber birds with celluloid wings, hung from a piece of coarse wire. Elizabeth wanted to put the birds in her mouth and showed no interest in, perhaps did not even see, their abstract swinging, quite unlike the rapt infant shown on the box.”
Shillington. Written for the semicentennial celebration of my home town’s incorporation in 1908, at the request of the late Charles J. Hemmig. Mr. Hemmig was a remarkable man, a loyal Shillingtonian for ninety years, who loomed large to our household, for as the supervising principal of the Shillington public schools he had considerable power over my schoolteacher father. My mother always thought that Mr. Hemmig, then a young principal, could have done more to ease her own initiation, in the mid-Twenties, into the world of teaching; she walked out of the classroom after a few hours, with lasting reverberations and self-recriminations. On the other hand, Mr. Hemmig sold my grandfather the only shares of stock that held their value after the Crash, and he wrote a generous and shrewd letter, which my mother preserved, supporting my family’s wild idea of sending me to Harvard. One of my earliest starts at a novel had Mr. Hemmig shadowily in mind, as the man in whose “interpretation everything was very relative”—a quote from Kierkegaard that I later attached to the historical figure of James Buchanan. I was pleased that he asked me.
Lines 14–16. Sizable spheres of artificial stone were ornaments quite common on the retaining walls of towns in eastern Pennsylvania.
Suburban Madrigal. Sitting in the first house I (et ux.) owned, 26 East Street, Ipswich, Massachusetts, waxing lyrical as I survey my domain.
Telephone Poles, lines 21–22. Based on my understanding that many telephone conversations are simultaneously transmitted over the wires and unscrambled at the end.
Mosquito. A number of correspondents informed me that only female mosquitoes “bite”; they need the sip of protein-rich blood to mature their eggs. Yet to make the pronoun “she” or “it” (I have tried it both ways) diminishes the music of the lines and falsifies the subjective experience. The mosquito felt, to the male poet as he lay there, like a male antagonist in the ominous bedroom dark. “It” ticks. “She” rather brutally sexualizes the encounter, and overloads the metaphor of “lover.” I would omit the poem as hopelessly marred but for losing the last two, gender-free stanzas.
Trees Eat Sunshine. Cf. “Fever,” this page. A religious vision abetted, as is not infrequently the case, by illness.
Winter Ocean. Flavored by a translation I did soon after college, combining avian allusions in two Anglo-Saxon poems, “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”:
…Again the wretch wakens
to sight dead-leaflike waves before him;
sleet, frost, and hail, confused, fall;
the sea-fowls bathe, broaden their feathers.
Now in my heart-mood circles my thought,
out of the breastlock, swings with the flood;
over the whale-land widely it turns.
Back to me comes my solitary soarer
greedy and screaming, urging the whale-path,
my heart irresistibly to the lakes of the sea.
Seagulls. My distinct memory is that I was pondering gulls while lying on Crane Beach in Ipswich when the first stanza came over me in a spasm of inspiration. Penless and paperless, I ran to the the site of a recent beach fire and wrote in charcoal on a large piece of unburned driftwood. Then I cumbersomely carried my improvised tablet home. It must have been late in the beach season, and my final stanzas slow to ripen, for the poem’s completion is dated early December.
Seven Stanzas at Easter. Composed for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, which I sometimes attended. Norman Kretzmann was pastor. Gratifyingly, the poem won first prize and has figured in a number of neo-orthodox sermons.
B.W.I. Composed on the island of Anguilla, while lying on a dark Edwardian sofa, where I wrote during our weeks of tropical sabbatical. A brother effort, “Tropical Beetles,” with its bouncier metrics, is consigned to Light Verse (this page).
Summer: West Side. The 1960 date on this surprised me, the poem so savors of my months of living at 126 Riverside Drive, just below Eighty-fifth Street, late in 1955.
The Solitary Pond. “Route 11” in real life was Route 10, connecting Morgantown and Reading. The memory was painful, and the poem slow to find its way into print.
Earthworm. The New Yorker resisted the last stanza, though it held the kernel of my philosophy. I acceded, reluctantly, to its omission, while remaining greatly grateful for the encouragement, advice, and checks received from Katharine S. White, Howard Moss, and Alice Quinn, the magazine’s poetry editors, all these years. One hundred thirty-five times they said yes, by my calculations.
Old-Fashioned Lightning Rod, Sunshine on Sandstone, The Stunt Flier. The three were jotted down in one brief June visit to my parents in Pennsylvania, typed up on my mother’s typewriter, mailed off to The New Yorker, and—two out of the three—swiftly accepted. Those were the days! And yet, the poetic evidence indicates, I was full of aches and pains and unease. The past is paradise, but not when it is the present.
Calendar, line 12. “Jay” used, not quite correctly, to mean most any bird. Blue jays, of course, don’t generally migrate. The genus is called Garrulus, and the English word may come from the same root as the French gai.
The Short Days. Light in form, but for me it holds, along with “Wash” and “Telephone Poles,” a place and a time—the workaday East Street neighborhood where I lived with my growing family for thirteen years. As with “Summer: West Side,” I thought it composed earlier than it evidently was.
Movie House. Written with the Strand Movie Theatre in Ipswich in mind, and with no premonition that, unlike the pyramids, it would be torn down—in 1985, to make way for a bank’s expansion.
Vibration/The Blessing. This pair
ing, generated unforcedly by the chronology, makes in my mind a fragile pair of wings mirroring the duet “Flirt”/“Fever” of over two years before. Though I wasn’t counting lines in those vers-libre days, they have thirteen lines each, one more than the earlier pair.
Azores, lines 9–16. “Shrilly” modifies “hail” and “pretty” modifies “hillsides.” Harper’s, in the January 1964 issue, printed the poem with a “the” inserted before “hillsides,” which made havoc of the syntax but had made momentary sense to a tired copy editor.
Erotic Epigrams. Tristan and Iseult were much on my mind in this period; cf. the short story “Four Sides of One Story” in The Music School and “More Love in the Western World” in Assorted Prose.
Nuda Natens, first word. Originally “Marie.”
Last word. The terminal “a” is not, as I once thought, a feminine ending but the plural of the singular pudendum, a neutral noun derived from pudēre, “to be ashamed,” and usually plural, like the English term “genitals.”
Postcards from Soviet Cities, Moscow, line 6. GUM: the great emporium on Red Square, an acronym for “Gosudarstvyenni Universalni Magazin” (State Universal Department Store).
Camera. The first quality camera I ever owned, it was, strange to say, Russian—called a Zenit and purchased with some of my excess rubles. The photographs it took had a romantic tint, a warm Slavic humanity, no Nikon since has matched.
Décor. The bar, with its Southern resonances, was, I believe, in Washington, D.C.
Poem for a Far Land. The susceptible poet homesick for the Soviet Union, in which he had spent a month, being made much of.
Dog’s Death. The dog’s name was Polly; she didn’t live with us on East Street very long. Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
Seal in Nature. Seen off Martha’s Vineyard in 1966, in one of our months of summer rental.
Bath After Sailing. Late in the next summer, with Professor Manfred Karnovsky staunch at the helm of his twenty-foot sloop, we sailed from Menemsha Harbor to a boatyard beyond Falmouth on a day that got stormier and stormier. There I was, pumping the bilge while trying not to fall off of what seemed a vertical deck; mountainous waves around us were mocked by the calm, towering apparition of the Martha’s Vineyard ferry, serenely plying its route while we fought for our lives.
