Collected Earlier Poems

by Anthony Hecht

  This, then, is what is called The Life.

  And we, like disinherited heirs,

  Old Adams, can inspect the void estate

  At visiting hours: the unconditional garden spot,

  The effortless innocence preserved, for God knows what,

  And think, as we depart by the toll gate:

  No one has lived here these five thousand years.

  Our world is turned on points, is whirled

  On wheels, Tibetan prayer wheels, French verb wheels,

  The toothy wheels of progress, the terrible torque

  Insisting, and in the sky, even above New York

  Rotate the marvelous four-fangled seals

  Ezekiel saw. The mother-of-pearled

  Home of the bachelor oyster lies

  Fondled in fluent shifts of bile and lime

  As sunlight strikes the water, and it is of our world,

  And will appear to us sometime where the finger is curled

  Between the frets upon a mandolin,

  Fancy cigar boxes, and eyes

  Of ceremonial masks; and all

  The places where Kilroy inscribed his name,

  For instance, the ladies’ rest room in the Gare du Nord,

  The iron rump of Buddha, whose hallowed, hollowed core

  Admitted tourists once but all the same

  Housed a machine gun, and let fall

  A killing fire from its eyes

  During the war; and Polyphemus hurled

  Tremendous rocks that stand today off Sicily’s coast

  Signed with the famous scrawl of our most travelled ghost;

  And all these various things are of our world.

  But what’s become of Paradise?

  Ah, it is lodged in glass, survives

  In Brooklyn, like a throwback, out of style,

  Like an incomprehensible veteran of the Grand

  Army of the Republic in the reviewing stand

  Who sees young men in a mud-colored file

  March to the summit of their lives,

  For glory, for their country, with the flag

  Joining divergent stars of North and South

  In one blue field of heaven, till they fall in blood

  And are returned at last unto their native mud—

  The eyes weighed down with stones, the sometimes mouth

  Helpless to masticate or gag

  Its old inheritance of earth.

  In the sweat of thy face shalt thou manage, said the Lord.

  And we, old Adams, stare through the glass panes and wince,

  Fearing to see the ancestral apple, pear, or quince,

  The delicacy of knowledge, the fleshed Word,

  The globe of wisdom that was worth

  Our lives, or so our parents thought,

  And turn away to strengthen our poor breath

  And body, keep the flesh rosy with hopeful dreams,

  Peach-colored, practical, to decorate the bones, with schemes

  Of life insurance, Ice-Cream-After-Death,

  Hormone injections, against the mort’

  Saison, largely to babble praise

  Of Simeon Pyrites, patron saint

  Of our Fools’ Paradise, whose glittering effigy

  Shines in God’s normal sunlight till the blind men see

  Visions as permanent as artists paint:

  The body’s firm, nothing decays

  Upon the heirloom set of bones

  In their gavotte. Yet we look through the glass

  Where green lies ageless under snow-stacked roofs in steam-

  Fitted apartments, and reflect how bud and stem

  Are wholly flesh, and the immaculate grass

  Does without buttressing of bones.

  In open field or public bed

  With ultraviolet help, man hopes to learn

  The leafy secret, pay his most outstanding debt

  To God in the salt and honesty of his sweat,

  And in his streaming face manly to earn

  His daily and all-nourishing bread.

  JAPAN

  It was a miniature country once

  To my imagination; Home of the Short,

  And also the academy of stunts

  Where acrobats are taught

  The famous secrets of the trade:

  To cycle in the big parade

  While spinning plates upon their parasols,

  Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,

  Or tossing seven balls

  In Most Celestial Order round and round.

  A child’s quick sense of the ingenious stamped

  All their invention: toys I used to get

  At Christmastime, or the peculiar, cramped

  Look of their alphabet.

  Fragile and easily destroyed,

  Those little boats of celluloid

  Driven by camphor round the bathroom sink,

  And delicate the folded paper prize

  Which, dropped into a drink

  Of water, grew up right before your eyes.

  Now when we reached them it was with a sense

  Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains

  Like mating weasels; our Intelligence

  Said: The Black Dragon reigns

  Secretly under yellow skin,

  Deeper than dyes of atabrine

  And deadlier. The War Department said:

  Remember you are Americans; forsake

  The wounded and the dead

  At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.

  And yet they bowed us in with ceremony,

  Told us what brands of Sake were the best,

  Explained their agriculture in a phony

  Dialect of the West,

  Meant vaguely to be understood

  As a shy sign of brotherhood

  In the old human bondage to the facts

  Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,

  Signaling tiny pacts

  With their antennae, they would wave their hands.

  At last we came to see them not as glib

  Walkers of tightropes, worshipers of carp,

  Nor yet a species out of Adam’s rib

  Meant to preserve its warp

  In Cain’s own image. They had learned

  That their tough eye-born goddess burned

  Adoring fingers. They were very poor.

  The holy mountain was not moved to speak.

  Wind at the paper door

  Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.

  Human endeavor clumsily betrays

  Humanity. Their excrement served in this;

  For, planting rice in water, they would raise

  Schistosomiasis

  Japonica, that enters through

  The pores into the avenue

  And orbit of the blood, where it may foil

  The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.

  This fruit of their nightsoil

  Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.

  Now the quaint early image of Japan

  That was so charming to me as a child

  Seems like a bright design upon a fan,

  Of water rushing wild

  On rocks that can be folded up,

  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.

  LE MASSEUR DE MA SOEUR

  I

  My demoiselle, the cats are in the street,

  Making a shrill cantata to their kind,

  Accomplishing their furry, vigorous feat,

  And I observe you shiver at it. You

  Would rather have their little guts preserved

  In the sweet excellence of a string quartet.

  But, speaking for myself, I do not mind

  This boisterous endeavor; it can do

  Miracles for a
lady who’s unnerved

  By the rude leanings of a family pet.

  II

  What Argus could not see was not worth seeing.

  The fishy slime of his one hundred eyes

  Shimmered all over his entire being

  To lubricate his vision. A Voyeur

  Of the first order, he would hardly blench

  At the fine calculations of your dress.

  Doubtless the moonlight or the liquor lies

  Somewhere beneath this visible bonheur,

  Yet I would freely translate from the French

  The labials of such fleet happiness.

  III

  “If youth were all, our plush minority

  Would lack no instrument to trick it out;

  All cloth would emphasize it; not a bee

  Could lecture us in offices of bliss.

  Then all the appetites, arranged in rows,

  Would dance cotillions absolute as ice

  In high decorum rather than in rout.”

  He answered her, “Youth wants no emphasis,

  But in extravagance of nature shows

  A rigor more demanding than precise.”

  IV

  “Pride is an illness rising out of pain,”

  Said the ensnaffled Fiend who would not wince.

  Does the neat corollary then obtain,

  Humility comes burgeoning from pleasure?

  Ah, masters, such a calculus is foul,

  Of no more substance than a wasting cloud.

  I cannot frame a logic to convince

  Your honors of the urgent lawless measure

  Of love, the which is neither fish nor fowl.

  The meekest rise to tumble with the proud.

  V

  Goliath lies upon his back in Hell.

  Out of his nostrils march a race of men,

  Each with a little spear of hair; they yell,

  “Attack the goat! O let us smite the goat!”

  (An early German vision.) They are decked

  With horns and beards and trappings of the brute

  Capricorn, who remarked their origin.

  Love, like a feather in a Roman throat,

  Returned their suppers. They could not connect

  Sentiment with a craving so acute.

  VI

  Those paragraphs most likely to arouse

  Pear-shaped nuances to an ovoid brain,

  Upstanding nipples under a sheer blouse,

  Wink from the bold original, and keep

  Their wicked parlance to confound the lewd

  American, deftly obscured from sin

  By the Fig-Leaf Edition of Montaigne.

  But “summer nights were not devised for sleep,”

  And who can cipher out, however shrewd,

  The Man-in-the-Moon’s microcephalic grin?

  AS PLATO SAID

  These public dances and other exercises of the young maidens naked, in the sight of the young men, were moreover incentives to marriage; and to use Plato’s expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attraction of love as a geometrical conclusion is drawn from the premises. PLUTARCH

  Although I do not not know your name, although

  It was a silly dance you did with apple flowers

  Bunched in your hands after the racing games,

  My friends and I have spent these several hours

  Watching. Although I do not know your name,

  I saw the sun dress half of you with shadow, and I saw

  The wind water your eyes as though with tears

  Until they flashed like newly-pointed spears.

  This afternoon there was a giant daw

  Turning above us—though I put no trust

  In all these flying omens, being just

  A plain man and a warrior, like my friends—

  Yet I am mastered by uncommon force

  And made to think of you, although it blends

  Not with my humor, or the businesses

  Of soldiering. I have seen a horse

  Moving with more economy, and know

  Armor is surer than a girl’s promises.

  But it is a compelling kind of law

  Puts your design before me, even though

  I put no faith or fancy in that daw

  Turning above us. There’s some rigor here,

  More than in nature’s daily masterpiece

  That brings for us, with absolute and clear

  Insistence, worms from their midnight soil,

  Ungodly honk and trumpeting of geese

  In the early morning, and at last the toil

  Of soldiering. This is a simple code,

  Far simpler than Lycurgus has set down.

  The sheep come out of the hills, the sheep come down

  When it rains, or gather under a tree,

  And in the damp they stink most heartily.

  Yet the hills are not so tough but they will yield

  Brass for the kitchen, and the soft wet hair

  Of the sheep will occupy some fingers. In the bottom fields

  The herd’s deposit shall assist the spring

  Out of the earth and up into the air.

  No. There is not a more unbending thing

  In nature. It is an order that shall find

  You out. There’s not a season or a bird can bring

  You to my senses or so harness me

  To my intention. Let the Helots mind

  The barley fields, lest they should see a daw

  Turning to perch on some adjacent tree

  And fancy it their sovereign ruler. No.

  However we are governed, it shall draw

  Both of us to its own conclusion, though

  I do not even know you by your name.

  DISCOURSE CONCERNING TEMPTATION

  Though learned men have been at some dispute

  Touching the taste and color, nature, name

  And properties of the Original Fruit,

  The bees that in midsummer congress swarm

  In futile search of apple blossoms can

  Testify to a sweetness such as man

  Fears in his freezing heart, yet it could warm

  Winter away, and redden the cheek with shame.

  There was a gentleman of severest taste

  Who won from wickedness by consummate strife

  A sensibility suitable to his chaste

  Formula. He found the world too lavish.

  Temptation was his constant, intimate foe,

  Constantly to be overcome by force, and so

  His formula (fearing lest the world ravish

  His senses) applied the rigors of art to life.

  But in recurrent dreams saw himself dead,

  Mourned by chrysanthemums that walked about,

  Each bending over him its massive head

  And weeping on him such sweet tender tears

  That as each drop spattered upon his limbs

  Green plant life blossomed in that place. For hymns

  Marking his mean demise, his frigid ears

  Perceived the belch of frogs, low and devout.

  The problem is not simple. In Guadeloupe

  The fer-de-lance displays his ugly trait

  Deep in the sweaty undergrowth where droop

  Pears of a kind not tasted, where depend

  Strange apples, in the shade of Les Mamelles.

  The place is neither Paradise nor Hell,

  But of their divers attributes a blend:

  It is man’s brief and natural estate.

  SAMUEL SEWALL

  Samuel Sewall, in a world of wigs,

  Flouted opinion in his personal hair;

  For foppery he gave not any figs,

  But in his right and honor took the air.

  Thus in his naked style, though well attired,

  He went forth in the city, or paid court

  To Madam Winthrop, whom he much admired,

  Most godly, but yet liberal with the p
ort.

  And all the town admired for two full years

  His excellent address, his gifts of fruit,

  Her gracious ways and delicate white ears,

  And held the course of nature absolute.

  But yet she bade him suffer a peruke,

  “That One be not distinguished from the All”;

  Delivered of herself this stern rebuke

  Framed in the resonant language of St. Paul.

  “Madam,” he answered her, “I have a Friend

  Furnishes me with hair out of His strength,

  And He requires only I attend

  Unto His charity and to its length.”

  And all the town was witness to his trust:

  On Monday he walked out with the Widow Gibbs,

  A pious lady of charm and notable bust,

  Whose heart beat tolerably beneath her ribs.

  On Saturday he wrote proposing marriage,

  And closed, imploring that she be not cruel,

  “Your favorable answer will oblige,

  Madam, your humble servant, Samuel Sewall.”

  DRINKING SONG

  A toast to that lady over the fireplace

  Who wears a snood of pearls. Her eyes are turned

  Away from the posterity that loosed

  Drunken invaders to the living room,

  Toppled the convent bell-tower, and burned

  The sniper-ridden outhouses. The face

  Of Beatrice d’Este, reproduced

  In color, offers a profile to this dark,

  Hand-carved interior. High German gloom

  Flinches before our boots upon the desk

  Where the Ortsgruppenführer used to park

  His sovereign person. Not a week ago

  The women of this house went down among

  The stacked-up kindling wood, the picturesque,

  Darkening etchings of Vesuvius,

  Piled mattresses upon themselves, and shook,

  And prayed to God in their guttural native tongue

  For mercy, forgiveness, and the death of us.

  We are indeed diminished.

  We are twelve.