Collected Earlier Poems

by Anthony Hecht

  Pentelic balconies give on the east;

  The clouds are scrolled, bellied in apricot,

  Adrift in pools of Scandinavian blue.

  Light crisps the terraces of dolomite.

  Enter The Prologue, who at once declares,

  “We begin with the supreme donnée, the word.”

  A VOICE AT A SEANCE

  It is rather strange to be speaking, but I know you are there

  Wanting to know, as if it were worth knowing.

  Nor is it important that I died in combat

  In a good cause or an indifferent one.

  Such things, it may surprise you, are not regarded.

  Something too much of this.

  You are bound to be disappointed,

  Wanting to know, are there any trees?

  It is all different from what you suppose,

  And the darkness is not darkness exactly,

  But patience, silence, withdrawal, the sad knowledge

  That it was almost impossible not to hurt anyone

  Whether by action or inaction.

  At the beginning of course there was a sense of loss,

  Not of one’s own life, but of what seemed

  The easy, desirable lives one might have led.

  Fame or wealth are hard to achieve,

  And goodness even harder;

  But the cost of all of them is a familiar deformity

  Such as everyone suffers from:

  An allergy to certain foods, nausea at the sight of blood,

  A slight impediment of speech, shame at one’s own body,

  A fear of heights or claustrophobia.

  What you learn has nothing whatever to do with joy,

  Nor with sadness, either. You are mostly silent.

  You come to a gentle indifference about being thought

  Either a fool or someone with valuable secrets.

  It may be that the ultimate wisdom

  Lies in saying nothing.

  I think I may already have said too much.

  GREEN: AN EPISTLE

  This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,

  Cut stems struggling to put down feet,

  What saint strained so much,

  Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

  THEODORE ROETHKE

  I write at last of the one forbidden topic

  We, by a truce, have never touched upon:

  Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought

  With moral inhibitions, so at odds with

  The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness,

  And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,

  That almost all of us were taken in,

  Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,

  Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory

  Of Good and Evil, clearly identified

  By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,

  The virginal meekness of the ingénue,

  Seduced us straight into that perfect world

  Of Justice under God. Art for the sake

  Of money, glamour, ego, self-deceit.

  When we emerged into the assaulting sunlight,

  We had a yen, like bad philosophers,

  To go back to stay forever, there in the dark

  With the trumpets, horses, and ancient Certitudes

  On which, as we know, this great nation was founded,

  Washington crossed the Delaware, and so forth.

  And all of us, for an hour or so after,

  Were Humphrey Bogart dating Ingrid Bergman,

  Walking together but incommunicado

  Till subway and homework knocked us out of it.

  Yet even then, whatever we returned to

  Was not, although we thought it was, the world.

  I write at last on this topic because I am safe

  Here in this grubby little border town

  With its one cheap hotel. No one has my address.

  The food is bad, the wine is too expensive,

  And the local cathedral marred by restorations.

  But from my balcony I view the east

  For miles and, if I lean, the local sunsets

  That bathe a marble duke with what must be

  Surely the saddest light I have ever seen.

  The air is thin and cool at this elevation,

  And my desk wobbles unless propped with matchbooks.

  It began, I suppose, as a color, yellow-green,

  The tincture of spring willows, not so much color

  As the sensation of color, haze that took shape

  As a light scum, a doily of minutiae

  On the smooth pool and surface of your mind.

  A founding colony, Pilgrim amoebas

  Descended from the gaseous flux when Zeus

  Tossed down his great original thunderbolt

  That flashed in darkness like an electric tree

  Or the lit-up veins in an old arthritic hand.

  Here is the microscope one had as a child,

  The Christmas gift of some forgotten uncle.

  Here is the slide with a drop of cider vinegar

  As clear as gin, clear as your early mind.

  Look down, being most careful not to see

  Your own eye in the mirror underneath,

  Which will appear, unless your view is right,

  As a darkness on the face of the first waters.

  When all is silvery and brilliant, look:

  The long, thin, darting shapes, the flagellates,

  Rat-tailed, ambitious, lash themselves along—

  Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells

  Content to be borne on whatever tide,

  Trustful, the very image of consent—

  These are the frail, unlikely origins,

  Scarcely perceived, of all you shall become.

  Scarcely perceived? But at this early age

  (What are you, one or two?) you have no knowledge,

  Nor do your folks, nor could the gravest doctors

  Suspect that anything was really wrong.

  Nor see the pale beginnings, lace endeavors

  That with advancing ages shall mature

  Into sea lettuce, beard the rocky shore

  With a light green of soft and tidal hair.

  Whole eras, seemingly without event,

  Now scud the glassy pool processionally

  Until one day, misty, uncalendared,

  As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,

  Vascular tissue, conduit filaments

  Learn how to feed the outposts of that small

  Emerald principate. Now there are roots,

  The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,

  Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last

  Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.

  How soundlessly, shyly this came about,

  One thinks today. But that is not the truth.

  It was, from the first, an everlasting war

  Conducted, as always, at gigantic cost.

  Think of the droughts, the shifts of wind and weather,

  The many seeds washed to some salt conclusion

  Or brought to rest at last on barren ground.

  Think of some inching tendrils worming down

  In hope of water, blind and white as death.

  Think of the strange mutations life requires.

  Only the toughest endured, themselves much altered,

  Trained in the cripple’s careful sciences

  Of mute accommodation. The survivors

  Were all, one way or another, amputees

  Who learned to live with their stumps, like Brueghel’s beggars.

  Yet, for all that, it clearly was a triumph,

  Considering, as one must, what was to come.

  And, even by themselves, those fields of clover,

  Cattails, marsh bracken, water-lily pads

  Stirred by the lightest airs, pliant, submissive—

  Who could
have called their slow creation rage?

  Consider, as one must, what was to come.

  Great towering conifers, deciduous,

  Rib-vaulted elms, the banyan, oak, and palm,

  Sequoia forests of vindictiveness

  That also would go down on the death list

  And, buried deep beneath alluvial shifts,

  Would slowly darken into lakes of coal

  And then under exquisite pressure turn

  Into the tiny diamonds of pure hate.

  The delicate fingers of the clematis

  Feeling their way along a face of shale

  With all the ingenuity of spite.

  The indigestible thistle of revenge.

  And your most late accomplishment, the rose.

  Until at last, what we might designate

  As your Third Day, behold a world of green:

  Color of hope, of the Church’s springtide vestments,

  The primal wash, heraldic hue of envy.

  But in what pre-lapsarian disguise!

  Strangers and those who do not know you well

  (Yourself not least) are quickly taken in

  By a summery prospect, shades of innocence.

  Like that young girl, a sort of chance acquaintance,

  Seven or eight she was, on the New York Central,

  Who, with a blue-eyed, beatific smile,

  Shouted with joy, “Look, Mommy, quick. Look. Daisies!”

  These days, with most of us at a safe distance,

  You scarcely know yourself. Whole weeks go by

  Without your remembering that enormous effort,

  Ages of disappointment, the long ache

  Of motives twisted out of recognition,

  The doubt and hesitation all submerged

  In those first clear waters, that untroubled pool.

  Who could have hoped for this eventual peace?

  Moreover, there are moments almost of bliss,

  A sort of recompense, in which your mood

  Sorts with the peach endowments of late sunlight

  On a snowfield or on the breaker’s froth

  Or the white steeple of the local church.

  Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain

  A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun

  In lively, fluctuant geometries,

  You sometimes contemplate a single image,

  Utterly silent, utterly at rest.

  It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,

  Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,

  Gravely intent at a table propped with match-books,

  Writing this very poem—about me.

  SOMEBODY’S LIFE

  I

  Cliff-high, sunlit, in the tawny warmth of youth,

  He gazed down at the breakneck rocks below,

  Entranced by the water’s loose attacks of jade,

  The sousing waves, the interminable, blind

  Fury of scattered opals, flung tiaras,

  Full, hoisted, momentary chandeliers.

  He spent most of the morning there alone.

  He smoked, recalled some lines of poetry,

  Felt himself claimed by such rash opulence:

  These were the lofty figures of his soul.

  What was it moved him in all that swash and polish?

  Against an imperial sky of lupine blue,

  Suspended, as it seemed to him, forever,

  Blazed a sun-flooded gem of the first water.

  II

  Blazed, as it seemed, forever. Was this the secret

  Gaudery of self-love, or a blood-bidden,

  Involuntary homage to the world?

  As it happens, he was doomed never to know.

  At times in darkened rooms he thought he heard

  The soft ruckus of patiently torn paper,

  The sea’s own noise, the elderly slop and suck

  Of hopeless glottals. Once, in a bad dream,

  He saw himself stranded on the wet flats,

  As limp as kelp, among putrescent crabs.

  But to the very finish he remembered

  The flash and force, the crests, the heraldry,

  Those casual epergnes towering up

  Like Easter trinkets of the tzarevitch.

  A LOT OF NIGHT MUSIC

  Even a Pyrrhonist

  Who knows only that he can never know

  (But adores a paradox)

  Would admit it’s getting dark. Pale as a wrist-

  Watch numeral glow,

  Fireflies build a sky among the phlox,

  Imparting their faint light

  Conservatively only to themselves.

  Earthmurk and flowerscent

  Sweeten the homes of ants. Comes on the night

  When the mind rockets and delves

  In blind hyperbolas of its own bent.

  Above, the moon at large,

  Muse-goddess, slightly polluted by the runs

  Of American astronauts,

  (Poor, poxed Diana, laid open to the charge

  Of social Actaeons)

  Mildly solicits our petty cash and thoughts.

  At once with their votive mites,

  Out of the woods and woodwork poets come,

  Hauling their truths and booty,

  Each one a Phosphor, writing by his own lights,

  And with a diesel hum

  Of mosquitoes or priests, proffer their wordy duty.

  They speak in tongues, no doubt;

  High glossolalia, runic gibberish.

  Some are like desert saints,

  Wheat-germ ascetics, draped in pelt and clout.

  Some come in schools, like fish.

  These make their litany of dark complaints;

  Those laugh and rejoice

  At liberation from the bonds of gender,

  Race, morals and mind,

  As well as meter, rhyme and the human voice.

  Still others strive to render

  The cross-word world in perfectly declined

  Pronouns, starting with ME.

  Yet there are honest voices to be heard:

  The crickets keep their vigil

  Among the grass; in some invisible tree

  Anonymously a bird

  Whistles a fioritura, a light, vestigial

  Reminder of a time,

  An Aesopic Age when all the beasts were moral

  And taught their ways to men;

  Some herbal dream, some chlorophyll sublime

  In which Apollo’s laurel

  Blooms in a world made innocent again.

  A BIRTHDAY POEM

  June 22, 1976

  Like a small cloud, like a little hovering ghost

  Without substance or edges,

  Like a crowd of numbered dots in a sick child’s puzzle,

  A loose community of midges

  Sways in the carven shafts of noon that coast

  Down through the summer trees in a golden dazzle.

  Intent upon such tiny copter flights,

  The eye adjusts its focus

  To those billowings about ten feet away,

  That hazy, woven hocus-pocus

  Or shell game of the air, whose casual sleights

  Leave us unable certainly to say

  What lies behind it, or what sets it off

  With fine diminishings,

  Like the pale towns Mantegna chose to place

  Beyond the thieves and King of Kings:

  Those domes, theatres and temples, clear enough

  On that mid-afternoon of our disgrace.

  And we know at once it would take an act of will

  Plus a firm, inquiring squint

  To ignore those drunken motes and concentrate

  On the blurred, unfathomed background tint

  Of deep sea-green Holbein employed to fill

  The space behind his ministers of state,

  As if one range slyly obscured the other.

  As, in the main, it does.

>   All of our Flemish distances disclose

  A clarity that never was:

  Dwarf pilgrims in the green faubourgs of Mother

  And Son, stunted cathedrals, shrunken cows.

  It’s the same with Time. Looked at sub specie

  Aeternitatis, from

  The snow-line of some Ararat of years,

  Scholars remark those kingdoms come

  To nothing, to grief, without the least display

  Of anything so underbred as tears,

  And with their Zeiss binoculars descry

  Verduns and Waterloos,

  The man-made mushroom’s deathly overplus,

  Caesars and heretics and Jews

  Gone down in blood, without batting an eye,

  As if all history were deciduous.

  It’s when we come to shift the gears of tense

  That suddenly we note

  A curious excitement of the heart

  And slight catch in the throat:—

  When, for example, from the confluence

  That bears all things away I set apart

  The inexpressible lineaments of your face,

  Both as I know it now,

  By heart, by sight, by reverent touch and study,

  And as it once was years ago,

  Back in some inaccessible time and place,

  Fixed in the vanished camera of somebody.

  You are four years old here in this photograph.

  You are turned out in style,

  In a pair of bright red sneakers, a birthday gift.

  You are looking down at them with a smile

  Of pride and admiration, half

  Wonder and half joy, at the right and the left.

  The picture is black and white, mere light and shade.

  Even the sneakers’ red

  Has washed away in acids. A voice is spent,

  Echoing down the ages in my head:

  What is your substance, whereof are you made,

  That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

  O my most dear, I know the live imprint

  Of that smile of gratitude,

  Know it more perfectly than any book.

  It brims upon the world, a mood

  Of love, a mode of gladness without stint.

  O that I may be worthy of that look.

  RETREAT