Collected Earlier Poems

by Anthony Hecht

  At Christmas. Or perhaps those secret faces

  Known to no one but me, slyly revealed

  In repetitions of the wallpaper,

  My tight network of agents in the field.

  Well, yes. Any of these might somehow serve

  As a departure point. But, perhaps, best

  Would be those first precocious hints of hell,

  Those intuitions of living desolation

  That last a lifetime. These were never, for me,

  Some desert place that humans had avoided

  In which I could get lost, to which I might

  In dreams condemn myself—a wilderness

  Natural but alien and unpitying.

  They were instead those derelict waste places

  Abandoned by mankind as of no worth,

  Frequented, if at all, by the dispossessed,

  Nocturnal shapes, the crippled and the shamed.

  Here in the haywire weeds, concealed by wilds

  Of goldenrod and toadflax, lies a spur

  With its one boxcar of brick-colored armor,

  At noon, midsummer, fiercer than a kiln,

  Rippling the thinness of the air around it

  With visible distortions. Among the stones

  Of the railbed, fragments of shattered amber

  That held a pint of rye. The carapace

  Of a dried beetle. A broken orange crate

  Streaked with tobacco stains at the nailheads

  In the gray, fractured slats. And over all

  The dust of oblivion finer than milled flour

  Where chips of brick, clinkers and old iron

  Burn in their slow, invisible decay.

  Or else it is late afternoon in autumn,

  The sunlight rusting on the western fronts

  Of a long block of Victorian brick houses,

  Untenanted, presumably condemned,

  Their brownstone grapes, their grand entablatures,

  Their straining caryatid muscle-men

  Rendered at once ridiculous and sad

  By the black scars of zigzag fire escapes

  That double themselves in isometric shadows.

  And all their vacancy is given voice

  By the endless flapping of one window-shade.

  And then there is the rank, familiar smell

  Of underpasses, the dark piers of bridges,

  Where old men, the incontinent, urinate.

  The acid smell of poverty, the jest

  Of adolescent boys exchanging quips

  About bedpans, the motorman’s comfort,

  A hospital world of syphons and thick tubes

  That they know nothing of. Nor do they know

  The heatless burnings of the elderly

  In memorized, imaginary lusts,

  Visions of noontide infidelities,

  Crude hallway gropings, cruel lubricities,

  A fire as cold and slow as rusting metal.

  It’s but a child’s step, it’s but an old man’s totter

  From this to the appalling world of dreams.

  Gray bottled babies in formaldehyde

  As in their primal amniotic bath.

  Pale dowagers hiding their liver-spots

  In a fine chalk, confectionery dust.

  And then the unbearable close-up of a wart

  With a tough bristle of hair, like a small beast

  With head and feet tucked under, playing possum.

  A meat-hooked ham, hung like a traitor’s head

  For the public’s notice in a butcher shop,

  Faintly resembling the gartered thigh

  Of an acrobatic, overweight soubrette.

  And a scaled, crusted animal whose head

  Fits in a Nazi helmet, whose webbed feet

  Are cold on the white flanks of dreaming lovers,

  While thorned and furry legs embrace each other

  As black mandibles tick. Immature girls,

  Naked but for the stockings they stretch tight

  To tempt the mucid glitter of an eye.

  And the truncated snout of a small bat,

  Like one whose nose, undermined by the pox,

  Falls back to the skull’s socket. Deepest of all,

  Like the converging lines in diagrams

  Of vanishing points, those underwater blades,

  Those quills or sunburst spokes of marine light,

  Flutings and gilded shafts in which one sees

  In the drowned star of intersecting beams

  Just at that final moment of suffocation

  The terrifying and unmeaning rictus

  Of the sandshark’s stretched, involuntary grin.

  In the upstairs room, when somebody had died,

  There were flowers, there were underwater globes,

  Mercury seedpearls. It was my mother died.

  After a long illness and long ago.

  San Pantaleone, heavenly buffoon,

  Patron of dotards and of gondolas,

  Forgive us the obsessional daydream

  Of our redemption at work in black and white,

  The silent movie, the old Commedia,

  Which for the sake of the children in the house

  The projectionist has ventured to run backwards.

  (The reels must be rewound in any case.)

  It is because of jumped, elided frames

  That people make their way by jigs and spasms,

  Impetuous leapings, violent semaphores,

  Side-slipping, drunk discontinuities,

  Like the staggered, tossed career of butterflies.

  Here, in pure satisfaction of our hunger,

  The Keystone Cops sprint from hysteria,

  From brisk, slaphappy bludgeonings of crime,

  Faultlessly backwards into calm patrol;

  And gallons of spilled paint, meekly obedient

  As a domestic pet, home in and settle

  Securely into casually offered pails,

  Leaving the Persian rugs immaculate.

  But best of all are the magically dry legs

  Emerging from a sudden crater of water

  That closes itself up like a healed wound

  To plate-glass polish as the diver slides

  Upwards, attaining with careless arrogance

  His unsought footing on the highest board.

  Something profoundly soiled, pointlessly hurt

  And beyond cure in us yearns for this costless

  Ablution, this impossible reprieve,

  Unpurchased at a scaffold, free, bequeathed

  As rain upon the just and the unjust,

  As in the fall of mercy, unconstrained,

  Upon the poor, infected place beneath.

  II

  Elsewhere the spirit is summoned back to life

  By bells sifted through floating schools and splices

  Of sun-splashed poplar leaves, a reverie

  Of light chromatics (Monet and Debussy),

  Or the intemperate storms and squalls of traffic,

  The coarse, unanswered voice of a fog horn,

  Or, best, the shy, experimental aubade

  Of the first birds to sense that ashen cold

  Grisaille from which the phoenix dawn arises.

  Summoned, that is to say, to the world’s life

  From Piranesian Carceri and rat holes

  Of its own deep contriving. But here in Venice,

  The world’s most louche and artificial city,

  (In which my tale some time will peter out)

  The summons comes from the harsh smashing of glass.

  A not unsuitable local industry,

  Being the frugal and space-saving work

  Of the young men who run the garbage scows.

  Wine bottles of a clear sea-water green,

  Pale, smoky quarts of acqua minerale,

  Iodine-tinted liters, the true-blue

  Waterman’s midnight ink of Bromo Seltzer,

  Light-bulbs of packaged fog
, fluorescent tubes

  Of well-sealed, antiseptic samples of cloud,

  Await what is at once their liquidation

  And resurrection in the glory holes

  Of the Murano furnaces. Meanwhile

  Space must be made for all ephemera,

  Our cast-offs, foulings, whatever has gone soft

  With age, or age has hardened to a stone,

  Our city sweepings. Venice has no curbs

  At which to curb a dog, so underfoot

  The ochre pastes and puddings of dogshit

  Keep us earthbound in half a dozen ways,

  Curbing the spirit’s tendency to pride.

  The palaces decay. Venice is rich

  Chiefly in the deposits of her dogs.

  A wealth swept up and gathered with its makers.

  Canaries, mutts, love-birds and alley cats

  Are sacked away like so many Monte Cristos,

  There being neither lawns, meadows nor hillsides

  To fertilize or to be buried in.

  For them the glass is broken in the dark

  As a remembrance by the garbage men.

  I am their mourner at collection time

  With an invented litany of my own.

  Wagner died here, Stravinsky’s buried here,

  They say that Cimarosa’s enemies

  Poisoned him here. The mind at four AM

  Is a poor, blotched, vermiculated thing.

  I’ve seen it spilled like sweetbreads, and I’ve dreamed

  Of Byron writing, “Many a fine day

  I should have blown my brains out but for the thought

  Of the pleasure it would give my mother-in-law.”

  Thus virtues, it is said, are forced upon us

  By our own impudent crimes. I think of him

  With his consorts of whores and countesses

  Smelling of animal musk, lilac and garlic,

  A ménage that was in fact a menagerie,

  A fox, a wolf, a mastiff, birds and monkeys,

  Corbaccios and corvinos, spintriae,

  The lees of the Venetian underworld,

  A plague of iridescent flies. Spilled out.

  O lights and livers. Deader than dead weight.

  In a casket lined with tufted tea-rose silk.

  O that the soul should tie its shoes, the mind

  Should wash its hands in a sink, that a small grain

  Of immortality should fit itself

  With dentures. We slip down by grades and degrees,

  Lapses of memory, the vacant eye

  And spittled lip, by soiled humiliations

  Of mind and body into the last ditch,

  Passing, en route to the Incurabili,

  The backwater way stations of the soul,

  Conveyed in the glossy hearse-and-coffin black

  And soundless gondola by an overpriced

  Apprentice Charon to the Calle dei Morti.

  One approaches the Venetian underworld

  Silently and by water, the gondolier

  Creating eddies and whirlpools with each stroke

  Like oak roots, silver, smooth and muscular.

  One slides to it like a swoon, nearing the regions

  Where the vast hosts of the dead mutely inhabit,

  Pulseless, indifferent, deeply beyond caring

  What shape intrudes itself upon their fathoms.

  The oar-blade flings broadcast its beads of light,

  Its ordinary gems. One travels past

  All of these domiciles of raw sienna,

  Burnt umber, colors of the whole world’s clays.

  One’s weakness in itself becomes delicious

  Towards the end, a kindly vacancy.

  (Raise both your arms above your head, and then

  Take three deep breaths, holding the third. Your partner,

  Your childhood guide into the other world,

  Will approach from behind and wrap you in a bear hug,

  Squeezing with all his might. Your head will seethe

  With prickled numbness, like an arm or leg

  From which the circulation is cut off,

  The lungs turn warm with pain, and then you slip

  Into a velvet darkness, mutely grateful

  To your Anubis-executioner…)

  Probably I shall die here unremarked

  Amid the albergo’s seedy furniture,

  Aware to the last of the faintly rotten scent

  Of swamp and sea, a brief embarrassment

  And nuisance to the management and the maid.

  That would be bad enough without the fear

  Byron confessed to: “If I should reach old age

  I’ll die ‘at the top first,’ like Swift.” Or Swift’s

  Lightning-struck tree. There was a visitor,

  The little Swiss authority on nightmares,

  Young Henry Fuseli, who at thirty-one

  Suffered a fever here for several days

  From which he recovered with his hair turned white

  As a judicial wig, and rendered permanently

  Left-handed. And His Majesty, George III,

  Desired the better acquaintance of a tree

  At Windsor, and heartily shook one of its branches,

  Taking it for the King of Prussia. Laugh

  Whoso will that has no knowledge of

  The violent ward. They subdued that one

  With a hypodermic, quickly tranquilized

  And trussed him like a fowl. These days I find

  A small aperitif at Florian’s

  Is helpful, although I do not forget.

  My views are much like Fuseli’s, who described

  His method thus : “I first sits myself down.

  I then works myself up. Then I throws in

  My darks. And then I takes away my lights.”

  His nightmare was a great success, while mine

  Plays on the ceiling of my rented room

  Or on the bone concavity of my skull

  In the dark hours when I take away my lights.

  Lights. I have chosen Venice for its light,

  Its lightness, buoyancy, its calm suspension

  In time and water, its strange quietness.

  I, an expatriate American,

  Living off an annuity, confront

  The lagoon’s waters in mid-morning sun.

  Palladio’s church floats at its anchored peace

  Across from me, and the great church of Health,

  Voted in gratitude by the Venetians

  For heavenly deliverance from the plague,

  Voluted, levels itself on the canal.

  Further away the bevels coil and join

  Like spiraled cordon ropes of silk, the lips

  Of the crimped water sped by a light breeze.

  Morning has tooled the bay with bright inlays

  Of writhing silver, scattered scintillance.

  These little crests and ripples promenade,

  Hurried and jocular and never bored,

  Ils se promènent like families of some means

  On Sundays in the Bois. Observing this

  Easy festivity, hypnotized by

  Tiny sun-signals exchanged across the harbor,

  I am for the moment cured of everything,

  The future held at bay, the past submerged,

  Even the fact that this Sea of Hadria,

  This consecrated, cool wife of the Doge,

  Was ploughed by the merchantmen of all the world,

  And all the silicate fragility

  They sweat for at the furnaces now seems

  An admirable and shatterable triumph.

  They take the first crude bulb of thickened glass,

  Glowing and taffy-soft on the blow tube,

  And sink it in a mold, a metal cup

  Spiked on its inner surface like a pineapple.

  Half the glass now is regularly dimpled,

  And when these dimples are covered with a glaze

&
nbsp; Of molten glass they are prisoned air-bubbles,

  Breathless, enameled pearly vacancies.

  III

  I am a person of inflexible habits

  And comforting rigidities, and though

  I am a twentieth century infidel

  From Lawrence, Massachusetts, twice a week

  I visit the Cathedral of St. Mark’s,

  That splendid monument to the labors of

  Grave robbers, body snatchers, those lawless two

  Entrepreneurial Venetians who

  In compliance with the wishes of the Doge

  For the greater commercial and religious glory

  Of Venice in the year 828

  Kidnapped the corpse of the Evangelist

  From Alexandria, a sacrilege

  The saint seemed to approve. That ancient city

  Was drugged and bewildered with an odor of sanctity,

  Left powerless and mystified by oils,

  Attars and essences of holiness

  And roses during the midnight exhumation

  And spiriting away of the dead saint

  By Buono and his side-kick Rustico—

  Goodness in concert with Simplicity

  Effecting the major heist of Christendom.

  I enter the obscure aquarium dimness,

  The movie-palace dark, through which incline

  Smoky diagonals and radiant bars

  Of sunlight from the high southeastern crescents

  Of windowed drums above. Like slow blind fingers

  Finding their patient and unvarying way

  Across the braille of pavement, edging along

  The pavonine and lapidary walls,

  Inching through silence as the earth revolves

  To huge compulsions, as the turning spheres

  Drift in their milky pale galactic light

  Through endless quiet, gigantic vacancy,

  Unpitying, inhuman, terrible.

  In time the eye accommodates itself

  To the dull phosphorescence. Gradually

  Glories reveal themselves, grave mysteries

  Of the faith cast off their shadows, assume their forms

  Against a heaven of coined and sequined light,

  A splatter of gilt cobblestones, flung grains

  Or crumbs of brilliance, the vast open fields

  Of the sky turned intimate and friendly. Patines

  And laminae, a vermeil shimmering

  Of fish-scaled, cataphracted golden plates.

  Here are the saints and angels brought together

  In studied reveries of happiness.

  Enormous wings of seraphim uphold

  The crowning domes where the convened apostles

  Receive their fiery tongues from the Godhead

  Descended to them as a floating dove,

  Patriarch and collateral ancestor