The Penguin Book of American Verse

by Geoffrey Moore

  wood-smoke from splitting paint,

  sweeping stairs, brushing the thread

  of the spider aside,

  and so much yet undone,

  a woman’s work, the solstice nearing,

  and my hand still suspended

  as if above a letter

  I long and dread to close.

  Gregory Corso 1930–2001

  Marriage

  Should I get married? Should I be good?

  Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?

  Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries

  tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets

  then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries

  and she going just so far and I understanding why

  not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!

  Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone

  and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky –

  When she introduces me to her parents

  back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,

  should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa

  and not ask Where’s the bathroom?

  How else to.feel other than I am,

  often thinking Flash Gordon soap –

  O how terrible it must be for a young man

  seated before a family and the family thinking

  We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!

  After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?

  Should I tell them? Would they like me then?

  Say All right get married, we’re losing a daughter

  but we’re gaining a son –

  And should I then ask Where’s the bathroom?

  O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends

  and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded

  just wait to get at the drinks and food –

  And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated

  asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?

  And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!

  I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back

  She’s all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!

  And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on –

  Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes

  Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!

  All streaming into cozy hotels

  All going to do the same thing tonight

  The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen

  The lobby zombies they knowing what

  The whistling elevator man he knowing

  The winking bellboy knowing

  Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!

  Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!

  Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!

  running rampant into those almost climactic suites

  yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!

  O I’d live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls

  I’d sit there the Mad Honeymooner

  devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy

  a saint of divorce –

  But I should get married I should be good

  How nice it’d be to come home to her

  and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen

  aproned young and lovely wanting my baby

  and so happy about me she burns the roast beef

  and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair

  saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!

  God what a husband I’d make! Yes, I should get married!

  So much to do! like sneaking into Mr Jones’ house late at night

  and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books

  Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower

  like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence

  like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest

  grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!

  And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him

  When are you going to stop people killing whales!

  And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle

  Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust –

  Yet if I should get married and it’s Connecticut and snow

  and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn.

  up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window. the past behind me.

  finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man

  knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup –

  O what would that be like!

  Surely I’d give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus

  For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records

  Tack Delia Francesca all over its crib

  Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib

  And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

  No, I doubt I’d be that kind of father

  not rural not snow no quiet window

  but hot smelly tight New York City

  seven flights up roaches and rats in the walls

  a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!

  And five nose running brats in love with Batman

  And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired

  like those hag masses of the 18th century

  all wanting to come in and watch TV

  The landlord wants his rent

  Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus

  Impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking –

  No! I should not get married I should never get married!

  But – imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman

  tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves

  holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other

  and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window

  from which we could see all of New York and ever farther on clearer days

  No, can’t imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream –

  O but what about love? I forget love

  not that I am incapable of love

  it’s just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes –

  I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother

  And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible

  And there’s maybe a girl now but she’s already married

  And I don’t like men and –

  but there’s got to be somebody!

  Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married,

  all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear

  and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

  Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible

  then marriage would be possible –

  Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover

  so I wait – bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

  Gary Snyder 1930–

  A Walk

  Sunday the only day we don’t work:

  Mules farting around the meadow,

  Murphy fishing.

  The tent flaps in the warm

  Early sun: I’ve eaten breakfast and I’ll

  take a walk

  To Benson Lake. Packed a lunch,

  Goodbye. Hopping on creekbed boulders

  Up the rock throat three miles

  Piute Creek –

  In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country

  Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,

  The clear sky. Deer tracks.

  Bad place by a falls, boulder
s big as houses,

  Lunch tied to belt,

  I stemmed up a crack and almost fell

  But rolled out safe on a ledge

  and ambled on.

  Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone

  Then run cheep! away, hen quail fussing.

  Craggy west end of Benson Lake – after edging

  Past dark creek pools on a long white slope –

  Lookt down in the ice-black lake

  lined with cliff

  From far above: deep shimmering trout.

  A lone duck in a gunsightpass

  steep side hill

  Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,

  Down to grass, wading a wide smooth stream

  Into camp. At last.

  By the rusty three-year-

  Ago left-behind cookstove

  Of the old trail crew,

  Stoppt and swam and ate my lunch

  Things to Do Around a Lookout

  Wrap up in a blanket in cold weather and just read.

  Practise writing Chinese characters with a brush

  Paint pictures of the mountains

  Put out salt for deer

  Bake coffee cake and biscuit in the iron oven,

  Hours off hunting twisty firewood, packing it all back up and chopping.

  Rice out for the ptarmigan and the conies

  Mark well sunrise and sunset – drink lapsang soochong.

  Rolling smokes

  The Flower book and the Bird book and the Star book

  Old Readers Digests left behind

  Bullshitting on the radio with a distant pinnacle,

  like you, hid in clouds;

  Drawing little sexy sketches of bare girls.

  Reading maps, checking on the weather, airing out

  musty Forest Service sleeping bags and blankets

  Oil the saws, sharpen axes,

  Learn the names of all the peaks you see

  and which is highest

  Learn by heart the drainages between.

  Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day,

  bathe in the lukewarm water.

  Take off in foggy weather and go climbing all alone

  The Rock book, – strata, dip, and strike

  Get ready for the snow, get ready

  To go down.

  Vapor Trails

  Twin streaks twice higher than cumulus,

  Precise plane icetracks in the vertical blue

  Cloud-flaked light-shot shadow-arcing

  Field of all future war, edging off to space.

  Young expert U.S. pilots waiting

  The day of criss-cross rockets

  And white blossoming smoke of bomb,

  The air world torn and staggered for these

  Specks of brushy land and ant-hill towns –

  I stumble on the cobble rockpath,

  Passing through temples,

  Watching for two-leaf pine

  –spotting that design.

  in Daitoku-ji

  I Went into the Maverick Bar

  I went into the Maverick Bar

  In Farmington, New Mexico.

  And drank double shots of bourbon

  backed with beer.

  My long hair was tucked up under a cap

  I’d left the earring in the car.

  Two cowboys did horseplay

  by the pool tables,

  A waitress asked us

  where are you from?

  a country-and-western band began to play

  ‘We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie’

  And with the next song,

  a couple began to dance.

  They held each other like in High School dances

  in the fifties;

  I recalled when I worked in the woods

  and the bars of Madras, Oregon.

  That short-haired joy and roughness –

  America – your stupidity.

  I could almost love you again.

  We left – onto the freeway shoulders –

  under the tough old stars –

  In the shadow of bluffs

  I came back to myself,

  To the real work, to

  ‘What is to be done.’

  Sylvia Plath 1932–63

  The Colossus

  I shall never get you put together entirely,

  Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

  Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

  Proceed from your great lips.

  It’s worse than a barnyard.

  Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

  Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

  Thirty years now I have laboured

  To dredge the silt from your throat.

  I am none the wiser.

  Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol

  I crawl like an ant in mourning

  Over the weedy acres of your brow

  To mend the immense skull-plates and clear

  The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

  A blue sky out of the Oresteia

  Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

  You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

  I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

  Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

  In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

  It would take more than a lightning-stroke

  To create such a ruin.

  Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

  Of your left ear, out of the wind.

  Counting the red stars and those of plum-colour.

  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

  My hours are married to shadow.

  No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

  On the blank stones of the landing.

  Lady Lazarus

  I have done it again.

  One year in every ten

  I manage it –

  A sort of walking miracle, my skin

  Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

  My right foot

  A paperweight,

  My face a featureless, fine

  Jew linen.

  Peel off the napkin

  I my enemy.

  Do I terrify? –

  The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

  The sour breath

  Will vanish in a day.

  Soon, soon the flesh

  The grave cave ate will be

  At home on me

  And I a smiling woman.

  I am only thirty.

  And like the cat I have nine times to die.

  This is Number Three.

  What a trash

  To annihilate each decade.

  What a million filaments.

  The peanut-crunching crowd

  Shoves in to see

  Them unwrap me hand and foot –

  The big strip tease.

  Gentlemen, ladies,

  These are my hands,

  My knees.

  I may be skin and bone,

  Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

  The first time it happened I was ten.

  It was an accident.

  The second time I meant

  To last it out and not come back at all.

  I rocked shut

  As a seashell.

  They had to call and call

  And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  I do it so it feels like hell.

  I do it so it feels real.

  I guess you could say I’ve a call.

  It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

  It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

  It’s the theatrical

  Comeback in broad day

  To the same place, the same face, the same brute

  Amused shout:

 
‘A miracle!’

  That knocks me out.

  There is a charge

  For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

  For the hearing of my heart –

  It really goes.

  And there is a charge, a very large charge,

  For a word or a touch

  Or a bit of blood

  Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

  So, so, Herr Doktor.

  So, Herr Enemy.

  I am your opus,

  I am your valuable,

  The pure gold baby

  That melts to a shriek.

  I turn and burn.

  Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

  Ash, ash –

  You poke and stir.

  Flesh, bone, there is nothing there –

  A cake of soap,

  A wedding ring,

  A gold filling.

  Herr God, Herr Lucifer,

  Beware

  Beware.

  Out of the ash

  I rise with my red hair

  And I eat men like air.

  Daddy

  You do not do, you do not do

  Any more, black shoe

  In which I have lived like a foot

  For thirty years, poor and white,

  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

  Daddy, I have had to kill you.

  You died before I had time –

  Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

  Ghastly statue with one grey toe

  Big as a Frisco seal

  And a head in the freakish Atlantic

  Where it pours bean green over blue

  In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

  I used to pray to recover you.

  Ach, du.

  In the German tongue, in the Polish town

  Scraped flat by the roller

  Of wars, wars, wars.

  But the name of the town is common.

  My Polack friend

  Says there are a dozen or two.

  So I never could tell where you

  Put your foot, your root,

  I never could talk to you.

  The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  It stuck in a barb wire snare.

  Ich, ich, ich, ich,

  I could hardly speak.

  I thought every German was you.

  And the language obscene

  An engine, an engine

  Chuffing me off like a Jew.

  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

  I began to talk like a Jew.

  I think I may well be a Jew.

  The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

  Are not very pure or true.

  With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

  And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

  I may be a bit of a Jew.