The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

A river which the wrist can stop

  With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks

  And silk of what had been a fan before,

  And like such winning tricks,

  It shall be buried in excelsior.

  Denise Levertov 1923–1997

  O Taste and See

  The world is

  not with us enough.

  O taste and see

  the subway Bible poster said,

  meaning The Lord, meaning

  if anything all that lives

  to the imagination’s tongue,

  grief, mercy, language,

  tangerine, weather, to

  breathe them, bite,

  savor, chew, swallow, transform

  into our flesh our

  deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,

  living in the orchard and being

  hungry, and plucking

  the fruit.

  What Wild Dawns There Were

  What wild dawns there were

  in our first years here

  when we would run outdoors naked

  to pee in the long grass behind the house

  and see over the hills such streamers,

  such banners of fire and blue (the blue

  that is Lilith to full day’s honest Eve) –

  What feathers of gold under the morning star

  we saw from dazed eyes before

  stumbling back to bed chilled with dew

  to sleep till the sun was high!

  Now if we wake early

  we don’t go outdoors – or I don’t –

  and you if you do go

  rarely call me to see the day break.

  I watch the dawn through glass: this year

  only cloudless flushes of light, paleness

  slowly turning to rose,

  and fading subdued.

  We have not spoken of these tired

  risings of the sun.

  The Malice of Innocence

  A glimpsed world, halfway through the film,

  one slow shot of a ward at night

  holds me when the rest is quickly

  losing illusion. Strange hold,

  as of romance, of glamor: not because

  even when I lived in it I had

  illusions about that world: simply because

  I did live there and it was

  a world. Greenshaded lamp glowing

  on the charge desk, clipboards

  stacked on the desk for the night,

  sighs and waiting, waiting-for-morning stirrings

  in the dim long room, warm, orderly,

  and full of breathings as a cowbarn.

  Death and pain dominate this world, for though

  many are cured, they leave still weak,

  still tremulous, still knowing mortality

  has whispered to them; have seen in the folding

  of white bedspreads according to rule

  the starched pleats of a shroud.

  It’s against that frozen

  counterpane, and the knowledge too

  how black an old mouth gaping at death can look

  that the night routine has in itself –

  without illusions – glamor, perhaps. It had

  a rhythm, a choreographic decorum:

  when all the evening chores had been done

  and a multiple restless quiet listened

  to the wall-clock’s pulse, and turn by turn

  the two of us made our rounds

  on tiptoe, bed to bed,

  counting by flashlight how many pairs

  of open eyes were turned to us,

  noting all we were trained to note,

  we were gravely dancing – starched

  in our caps, our trained replies,

  our whispering aprons – the well-rehearsed

  pavanne of power. Yes, wasn’t it power,

  and not compassion,

  gave our young hearts

  their hard fervor? I hated

  to scrub out lockers, to hand out trays of

  unappetizing food, and by day, or the tail-end of night

  (daybreak dull on gray faces – ours and theirs)

  the anxious hurry, the scolding old-maid bosses.

  But I loved the power

  of our ordered nights,

  gleaming surfaces I’d helped to polish

  making patterns in the shipshape

  halfdark –

  loved

  the knowing what to do, and doing it,

  list of tasks getting shorter

  hour by hour. And knowing

  all the while that Emergency

  might ring with a case to admit, anytime,

  if a bed were empty. Poised,

  ready for that.

  The camera

  never returned to the hospital ward,

  the story moved on into the streets,

  into the rooms where people lived.

  But I got lost in the death rooms a while,

  remembering being (crudely, cruelly,

  just as a soldier or one of the guards

  from Dachau might be) in love with order,

  an angel like the chercheuses de poux, floating

  noiseless from bed to bed,

  smoothing pillows, tipping

  water to parched lips, writing

  details of agony carefully into the Night Report.

  Kenneth Koch 1925–2002

  Mending Sump

  ‘Hiram, I think the sump is backing up.

  The bathroom floor boards for above two weeks

  Have seemed soaked through. A little bird, I think

  Has wandered in the pipes, and all’s gone wrong.’

  ‘Something there is that doesn’t hump a sump,’

  He said; and through his head she saw a cloud

  That seemed to twinkle. ‘Hiram, well,’ she said,

  ‘Smith is come home! I saw his face just now

  While looking through your head. He’s come to die

  Or else to laugh, for hay is dried-up grass

  When you’re alone.’ He rose, and sniffed the air.

  ‘We’d better leave him in the sump,’ he said.

  You Were Wearing

  You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.

  In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.

  Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, ‘Do most boys think that most girls are bad?’

  I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s girls who think that boys are bad.’ Then we read Snowbound together

  And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes.

  Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair.

  We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville

  As well as with illustrations from his book Moby Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno.

  Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: ‘How about a drink, everyone?’

  I said, ‘Let’s go outside a while.’ Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.

  You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.

  In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into the likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

  Frank O’Hara 1926–66

  To the Film Industry in Crisis

  Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals

  with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,

  nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition

  is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you,

  promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you

 
are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry,

  it’s you I love!

  In time of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.

  And give credit where it’s due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me

  how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed

  herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church

  which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment,

  not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you,

  glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope,

  stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all

  your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To

  Richard Barthelmess as the ‘tol’able’ boy barefoot and in pants,

  Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck.

  Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car

  and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage

  on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet,

  Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers’ gasping spouses,

  the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer

  Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled,

  her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon,

  its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer,

  Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea’s yacht

  and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney

  from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx,

  Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates,

  Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls,

  Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining,

  and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining

  and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell

  in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you

  and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines, my love!

  Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!

  The Day Lady Died

  It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

  three days after Bastille day, yes

  it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

  because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

  at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

  and I don’t know the people who will feed me

  I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

  and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

  an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

  in Ghana are doing these days

  I go on to the bank

  and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

  doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life

  and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

  for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

  think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

  Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

  of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

  after practically going to sleep with quandariness

  and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

  Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

  then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

  and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

  casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

  of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

  and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

  leaning on the John door in the 5 SPOT

  while she whispered a song along the keyboard

  to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

  Why I am not a Painter

  I am not a painter, I am a poet.

  Why? I think I would rather be

  a painter, but I am not. Well,

  for instance, Mike Goldberg

  is starting a painting. I drop in.

  ‘Sit down and have a drink’ he

  says. I drink; we drink. I look

  up. ‘You have SARDINES in it.’

  ‘Yes, it needed something there.’

  ‘Oh.’ I go and the days go by

  and I drop in again. The painting

  is going on, and I go, and the days

  go by. I drop in. The painting is

  finished. ‘Where’s SARDINES?’

  All that’s left is just

  letters, ‘It was too much,’ Mike says.

  But me? One day I am thinking of

  a color: orange. I write a line

  about orange. Pretty soon it is a

  whole page of words, not lines.

  Then another page. There should be

  so much more, not of orange, of

  words, of how terrible orange is

  and life. Days go by. It is even in

  prose, I am a real poet. My poem

  is finished and I haven’t mentioned

  orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

  it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

  I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

  Ave Maria

  Mothers of America

  let your kids go to the movies!

  get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to

  it’s true that fresh air is good for the body

  but what about the soul

  that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images

  and when you grow old as grow old you must

  they won’t hate you

  they won’t criticize you they won’t know

  they’ll be in some glamorous country

  they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey

  they may even be grateful to you

  for their first sexual experience

  which only cost you a quarter

  and didn’t upset the peaceful home

  they will know where candy bars come from

  and gratuitous bags of popcorn

  as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it’s over

  with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg

  near the Williamsburg Bridge

  oh mothers you will have made the little tykes

  so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies

  they won’t know the difference

  and if somebody does it’ll be sheer gravy

  and they’ll have been truly entertained either way

  instead of hanging around the yard

  or up in their room hating you

  prematurely since you won’t have done anything horribly mean yet

  except keeping them from the darker joys

  it’s unforgivable the latter

  so don’t blame me if you won’t take this advice

  and the family breaks up

  and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set

  seeing

  movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young

  A. R. Ammons 1926–2001

  Coon Song

  I got one good look

  in the raccoon�
��s eyes

  when he fell from the tree

  came to his feet

  and perfectly still

  seized the baying hounds

  in his dull fierce stare,

  in that recognition all

  decision lost,

  choice irrelevant, before the

  battle fell

  and the unwinding

  of his little knot of time began:

  Dostoevsky would think

  it important if the coon

  could choose to

  be back up the tree:

  or if he could choose to be

  wagging by a swamp pond,

  dabbling at scuttling

  crawdads: the coon may have

  dreamed in fact of curling

  into the holed-out gall

  of a fallen oak some squirrel

  had once brought

  high into the air

  clean leaves to: but

  reality can go to hell

  is what the coon’s eyes said to me:

  and said how simple

  the solution to my

  problem is: it needs only

  not to be: I thought the raccoon

  felt no anger,

  saw none; cared nothing for cowardice,

  bravery; was in fact

  bored at

  knowing what would ensue:

  the unwinding, the whirling growls,

  exposed tenders,

  the wet teeth – a problem to be

  solved, the taut-coiled vigor

  of the hunt

  ready to snap loose:

  you want to know what happened,

  you want to hear me describe it,

  to placate the hound’s-mouth

  slobbering in your own heart:

  I will not tell you: actually the coon

  possessing secret knowledge

  pawed dust on the dogs

  and they disappeared, yapping into

  nothingness, and the coon went

  down to the pond

  and washed his face and hands and beheld

  the world: maybe he didn’t:

  I am no slave that I

  should entertain you, say what you want

  to hear, let you wallow in

  your silt: one two three four five:

  one two three four five six seven eight nine ten:

  (all this time I’ve been

  counting spaces

  while you were thinking of something else)

  mess in your own sloppy silt:

  the hounds disappeared

  yelping (the way you would at extinction)