His Toy, His Dream, His Rest Read online

  My Lord of Essex knew.

  Some quirk of baffled pride led to a death due,

  old men fail to follow either the pain—

  why did he leave her?—

  or the fascinated blood that led to an end:

  cold as a toad lay suddenly half their love

  and rode he by no more.

  Celtic Henry groaned with his shoulder to the door

  which never will close again, nor open enough—

  why did he leave her?

  140

  Henry is vanishing. In the first of dawn

  he fails a little, which he figured on.

  Henry broods & recedes.

  Like the great Walt, come find him on his way

  somewhere. I hear thunder in stillness. She was a good lay.

  Terror on Henry feeds

  beginning with his knees. I saw his point,

  remains much, probably, but not enough.

  When the going got rough

  elsewhere in the world lay Helen asleep with her secrets,

  the poor man is coming to pieces joint by joint.

  Does it advantage him, weak

  with violent effort, rickety, on the stairs

  It’s a race with Time & that is all it is,

  almost, given the conditions

  & the faceless monsters of the Soviet Unions

  The shadows, under the tower, in the most brilliant sun

  will get us nowhere too.

  141

  One was down on the Mass. One on the masses.

  Both grew Henry. What cause shall he cry

  down the dead of Minnesota winter

  without a singular follower nearby

  among who seem to live entirely on passes

  espouse for him or his printer?

  Who gains his housing, heat, food, alcohol

  himself & for his spouse & brood, barely.

  Nude he danced in his snow

  waking perspiring. He’d’ve run off to sea

  (but for his studies careful of the Fall)

  twenty-odd years ago.

  Duly he does his needful little then

  with a chest of ice, a head tipping with pain.

  That perhaps is his programme,

  cause: Henry for Henry in his main:

  he’ll push it: down with anything Bostonian:

  even god howled ‘I am’.

  142

  The animal moment, when he sorted out her tail

  in a rump session with the vivid hostess

  whose guests had finally gone,

  was stronger, though so limited, though failed

  all normal impulse before her interdiction, yes,

  and Henry gave in.

  I’d like to have your baby, but, she moaned,

  I’m married. Henry muttered to himself

  So am I and was glad

  to keep chaste. If this lady he had had

  scarcely could he have have ever forgiven himself

  and how would he have atoned?

  —Mr Bones, you strong on moral these days, hey?

  It’s good to be faithful but it ain’t natural,

  as you knows.

  —I knew what I knew when I knew when I was astray,

  all those bright painful years, forgiving all

  but when Henry & his wives came to blows.

  143

  —That’s enough of that, Mr Bones. Some lady you make.

  Honour the burnt cork, be a vaudeville man,

  I’ll sing you now a song

  the like of which may bring your heart to break:

  he’s gone! and we don’t know where. When he began

  taking the pistol out & along,

  you was just a little; but gross fears

  accompanied us along the beaches, pal.

  My mother was scared almost to death.

  He was going to swim out, with me, forevers,

  and a swimmer strong he was in the phosphorescent Gulf,

  but he decided on lead.

  That mad drive wiped out my childhood. I put him down

  while all the same on forty years I love him

  stashed in Oklahoma

  besides his brother Will. Bite the nerve of the town

  for anyone so desperate. I repeat: I love him

  until I fall into coma.

  144

  My orderly tender having too a gentle face

  wants to be a Trappist but not to pray:

  this convert lost his faith.

  And douroucoulis out from their nesting place

  peer with giant eyes, like lost souls, say:

  but the whole fault ends with death.

  Henry was almost clear on this subject, dying

  as all we all are dying: death grew tall

  up Henry as a child:

  the truths that are revealed he is not buying:

  he feels his death tugging within him, wild

  to slide loose & to fall:

  like the iron pear which rammed into his mouth

  swells up to four times ordinary size

  slowly cracking his skull open:

  like the figure in a forest encountered, uncouth:

  the oxygen tent: the consolation prize:

  like the green pears which ripen.

  Sorrow follows an evil thought, for the time being only.

  145

  Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong

  for going on forty years—forgiveness time—

  I touch now his despair,

  he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower

  but he did not swim out with me or my brother

  as he threatened—

  a powerful swimmer, to take one of us along

  as company in the defeat sublime,

  freezing my helpless mother:

  he only, very early in the morning,

  rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window

  and did what was needed.

  I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong

  & so undone. I’ve always tried. I—I’m

  trying to forgive

  whose frantic passage, when he could not live

  an instant longer, in the summer dawn

  left Henry to live on.

  VI

  146

  These lovely motions of the air, the breeze,

  tell me I’m not in hell, though round me the dead

  lie in their limp postures

  dramatizing the dreadful word instead

  for lively Henry, fit for debaucheries

  and bird-of-paradise vestures

  only his heart is elsewhere, down with them

  & down with Delmore specially, the new ghost

  haunting Henry most:

  though fierce the claims of others, coimedela crime

  came the Hebrew spectre, on a note of woe

  and Join me O.

  ‘Down with them all!’ Henry suddenly cried.

  Their deaths were theirs. I wait on for my own,

  I dare say it won’t be long.

  I have tried to be them, god knows I have tried,

  but they are past it all, I have not done,

  which brings me to the end of this song.

  147

  Henry’s mind grew blacker the more he thought.

  He looked onto the world like the act of an aged whore.

  Delmore, Delmore.

  He flung to pieces and they hit the floor.

  Nothing was true but what Marcus Aurelius taught,

  ‘All that is foul smell & blood in a bag.’

  He lookt on the world like the leavings of a hag.

  Almost his love died from him, any more.

  His mother & William

  were vivid in the same mail Delmore died.

  The world is lunatic. This is the last ride.

  Delmore, Delmore.

  High in the summer branches the poet sang.

  Hís throat ached, and he could sing no more.r />
  All ears closed

  across the heights where Delmore & Gertrude sprang

  so long ago, in the goodness of which it was composed.

  Delmore, Delmore!

  148

  Glimmerings

  His hours of thought grew longer, his study less,

  the data (he decided) were abundantly his,

  or if not, never.

  He called on old codes or new apperceptions,

  he fought off an anxiety attack as the Lord did nations,

  with brutal commitments, not clever.

  Almost he lost interest in the 14 books part-done

  in favour of insights fresh, a laziness in the sun,

  rapid sketchings,

  a violent level on the drop of friendship,

  ‘I am pickt up & sorted to a pip,’

  sleepless, watching.

  Gravediggers all busy, Jelly, look what you done done

  there died of late a great cat, a real boss cat

  fallen from his prime

  I’m sorry for those coming, I’m sorry for everyone

  At least my friend is rid of that

  for the present space-time.

  149

  This world is gradually becoming a place

  where I do not care to be any more. Can Delmore die?

  I don’t suppose

  in all them years a day went ever by

  without a loving thought for him. Welladay.

  In the brightness of his promise,

  unstained, I saw him thro’ the mist of the actual

  blazing with insight, warm with gossip

  thro’ all our Harvard years

  when both of us were just becoming known

  I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref

  and grief too astray for tears.

  I imagine you have heard the terrible news,

  that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,

  in New York: he sang me a song

  ‘I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz

  Harms & the child I sing, two parents’ torts’

  when he was young & gift-strong.

  150

  He had followers but they could not find him;

  friends but they could not find him. He hid his gift

  in the center of Manhattan,

  without a girl, in cheap hotels,

  so disturbed on the street friends avoided him

  Where did he come by his lift

  which all we must or we would rapidly die:

  did he remember the more beautiful & fresh poems

  of early manhood now?

  or did his subtle & strict standards allow

  them nothing, baffled? What then did self-love show

  of the weaker later, somehow?

  I’d bleed to say his lovely work improved

  but it is not so. He painfully removed

  himself from the ordinary contacts

  and shook with resentment. What final thought

  solaced his fall to the hotel carpet, if any,

  & the New York Times’s facts?

  151

  Bitter & bleary over Delmore’s dying:

  his death stopped clocks, let no activity

  mar our hurrah of mourning,

  let’s all be Jews bereft, for he was one

  He died too soon, he liked ‘An Ancient to Ancients’

  His death clouded the grove

  I need to hurry this out before I forget

  which I will never He fell on the floor

  outside a cheap hotel-room

  my tearducts are worn out, the ambulance came

  and there on the way he died

  He was ‘smart & kind,’

  a child’s epitaph. He had no children,

  nobody to stand by in the awful years

  of the failure of his administration

  He was tortured, beyond what man might be

  Sick & heartbroken Henry sank to his knees

  Delmore is dead. His good body lay unclaimed

  three days.

  152

  I bid you then a raggeder farewell

  than at any time my grief would have desired,

  you take secrets with you,

  sudden appearances, and worse to tell,

  vanishings. You said ‘My head’s on fire’

  meaning inspired O

  meeting on the walk down to Warren House

  so long ago we were almost anonymous

  waiting for fame to descend

  with a scarlet mantle & tell us who we were.

  Young poets are ridiculous, and rare

  like a man death-wounded on the mend.

  There’s a memorial today at N.Y.U.,

  your last appearance, old heroic friend.

  I hope the girls are pretty

  and the remarks radish-crisp befitting you

  to allay the horror of your lonely end,

  appease, a little, sorrow & pity.

  153

  I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation.

  First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.

  In between he gorged on Sylvia Plath.

  That was a first rate haul. He left alive

  fools I could number like a kitchen knife

  but Lowell he did not touch.

  Somewhere the enterprise continues, not—

  yellow the sun lies on the baby’s blouse—

  in Henry’s staggered thought.

  I suppose the word would be, we must submit.

  Later.

  I hang, and I will not be part of it.

  A friend of Henry’s contrasted God’s career

  with Mozart’s, leaving Henry with nothing to say

  but praise for a word so apt.

  We suffer on, a day, a day, a day.

  And never again can come, like a man slapped,

  news like this

  154

  Flagrant his young male beauty, thick his mind

  with lore and passionate, white his devotion

  to Gertrude only,

  but even that marriage fell on days were lonely

  and ended, and the trouble with friends got into motion,

  when Delmore undermined

  his closest loves with merciless suspicion:

  Dwight cheated him out of a house, Saul withheld money,

  and then to cap it all,

  Henry was not here in ’57

  during his troubles (Henry was in Asia),

  accusations to appall

  the Loyal forever, but the demands increast:

  as I said to my house in Providence

  at 8 a.m. in a Cambridge taxi,

  which he had wait, later he telephoned

  at midnight from New York, to bring my family

  to New York, leaving my job.

  All your bills will be paid, he added, tense.

  155

  I can’t get him out of my mind, out of my mind,

  Hé was out of his own mind for years,

  in police stations & Bellevue.

  He drove up to my house in Providence

  ho ho at 8 a.m. in a Cambridge taxi

  and told it to wait.

  He walked my living-room, & did not want breakfast

  or even coffee, or even even a drink.

  He paced, I’d say Sit down,

  it makes me nervous, for a moment he’d sit down,

  then pace. After an hour or so I had a drink.

  He took it back to Cambridge,

  we never learnt why he came, or what he wanted.

  His mission was obscure. His mission was real,

  but obscure.

  I remember his electrical insight as the young man,

  his wit & passion, gift, the whole young man

  alive with surplus love.

  156

  I give in. I must not leave the scene of this same death

  as most of me
strains to.

  There are all the problems to be sorted out,

  the fate of the soul, what it was all about

  during its being, and whether he was drunk

  at 4 a.m. on the wrong floor too

  fighting for air, tearing his sorry clothes

  with his visions dying O and O I mourn

  again this complex death

  Almost my oldest friend should never have been born

  to this terrible end, out of which what grows

  but an unshaven, dissheveled corpse?

  The spirit & the joy, in memory

  live of him on, the young will read his young verse

  for as long as such things go:

  why then do I despair, miserable Henry

  who knew him all so long, for better & worse

  and nearly would follow him below.

  157

  Ten Songs, one solid block of agony,

  I wrote for him, and then I wrote no more.

  His sad ghost must aspire

  free of my love to its own post, that ghost,

  among its fellows, Mozart’s, Bach’s, Delmore’s

  free of its careful body

  high in the shades which line that avenue

  where I will gladly walk, beloved of one,

  and listen to the Buddha.

  His work downhill, I don’t conceal from you,

  ran and ran out. The brain shook as if stunned,

  I hope he’s over that,

  flame may his glory in that other place,

  for he was fond of fame, devoted to it,

  and every first-rate soul

  has sacrifices which it puts in play,

  I hope he’s sitting with his peers: sit, sit,

  & recover & be whole.

  158

  Being almost ready now to say Goodbye,

  my thought limps after you. I ring you up,

  I know you are going tomorrow,

  with gashed in me with you, I am I

  gored with your leaving, for the 18th stop,

  this stop is congratulation & sorrow,

  you’ll pay high rent & whizz. Blessings on you

  the almost only surviving Jewess & Jew

  since Delmore’s dreadful death

  who had no child in bitter early age

  to turn him like a story, page on page,