The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems Read online

  Louts in a bar aloud, The People, sucking beer.

  A barefoot kiss. Who trembles?

  Peach-bloom, sorb-apple sucked in what fine year!

  I am a wine, he wonders; when?

  Am I what I can do? My large white hands.

  Boater & ascot, in grandstands

  Coups. Concentrations of frightful cold, and then

  Warm limbs below a pier.

  The Master is sipping his identity.

  Ardours & stars! Trash humped on trash.

  The incorporated yacht, the campaign cheque

  Signed one fall on the foredeck

  Hard on a quarrel, to amaze the fool. Who brash

  Hectored out some false plea?

  Brownpaper-blind, his morning passions trailed

  Home in the clumsy dusk,—how now

  Care which from which, trapped on a racing star

  Where we know not who we are! . .

  The whipcord frenzy curls, he slouches where his brow

  Works like the rivals’ failed.

  Of six young men he flew to breakfast as,

  Only the magpie, rapist, stayed

  For dinner, and the rapist died, so that

  Not the magpie but the cat

  Vigil upon the magpie stalks, sulky parade,

  Great tail switching like jazz.

  Frightened, dying to fly, pied and obscene,

  He blinks his own fantastic watch

  For the indolent Spring of what he was before;

  A stipple of sunlight, clouded o’er,

  Remorse a scribble on the magic tablet which

  A schoolboy thumb jerks clean.

  Heat lightning straddles the horizon dusk

  Above the yews: the fresh wind blows:

  He flicks a station on by the throne-side . .

  Out in the wide world, Kitty—wide

  Night—far across the sea . . Some guardian accent grows

  Below the soft voice, brusque:

  ‘You are: not what you wished but what you were,

  The decades’ vise your gavel brands,

  You glare the god who gobbled his own fruit,

  He who stood mute, lucid and mute,

  Under peine forte et dure to will his bloody lands,

  Then whirled down without heir.’

  The end of which he will not know. Undried,

  A prune-skin helpless on his roof.

  His skin gleams in the lamplight dull as gold

  And old gold clusters like mould

  Stifling about his blood, time’s helm to build him proof.

  Thump the oak, and preside!

  An ingrown terrible smile unflowers, a sigh

  Blurs, the axle turns, unmanned.

  Habited now forever with his weight

  Well-housed, he rolls in the twilight

  Unrecognizable against the world’s rim, and

  A bird whistles nearby.

  Whisked off, a voice, fainter, faint, a guise,

  A gleam, pin of a, a. Nothing.

  —One look round last, like rats, before we leave.

  A famous house. Now the men arrive:

  Horror, they swing their cold bright mallets, they’re breaking

  Him up before my eyes!

  Wicked vistas! The wolves mourn for our crime

  Out past the grey wall. On to our home,

  Whereby the barley may seed and resume.

  Mutter of thrust stones palls this room,

  The crash of mallets. He is going where I come.

  Barefoot soul fringed with rime.

  A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away

  Your letter came.—Glutted the earth & cold

  With rains long heavy, follows intense frost;

  Snow howls and hides the world

  We workt awhile to build; all the roads are lost;

  Icy spiculae float, filling strange air;

  No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where,

  And when was it one crossed?

  You have been there.

  I too the breaking blizzard’s eddies bore

  One year, another year: tempted to drop

  At my own feet forlorn

  Under the warm fall, frantic more to chop

  Wide with the gale until my thought ran numb

  Clenching the blue skin tight against what white spikes come

  And the sick brain estop.

  Your pendulum

  Mine, not stilled wholly, has been sorry for,

  Weeps from, and would instruct . . Unless I lied

  What word steadies that cord?

  Glade grove & ghyll of antique childhood glide

  Off; from our grown grief, weathers that appal,

  The massive sorrow of the mental hospital,

  Friends & our good friends hide.

  They came to call.

  Hardly theirs, movement when the tempest gains,

  Loose heart convulses. Their hearts bend off dry,

  Their fruit dangles and fades.

  —Solicitudes of the orchard heart, comply

  A little with my longing, a little sing

  Our sorrow among steel & glass, our stiffening,

  That hers may modify:

  O trembling Spring.—

  Immortal risks our sort run, to a house

  Reported in a wood . . mould upon bread

  And brain, breath giving out,

  From farms we go by, barking, and shaken head,

  The shrunk pears hang, Hölderlin’s weathercock

  Rattles to tireless wind, the fireless landscape rock,

  Artists insane and dead

  Strike like a clock:

  If the fruit is dead, fast. Wait. Chafe your left wrist.

  All these too lie, whither a true form strays.

  Sweet when the lost arrive.

  Foul sleet ices the twigs, the vision frays,

  Festoons all signs; still as I come to name

  My joy to you my joy springs up again the same,—

  The thaw alone delays,—

  Your letter came!

  New Year’s Eve

  The grey girl who had not been singing stopped,

  And a brave new no-sound blew through acrid air.

  I set my drink down, hard. Somebody slapped

  Somebody’s second wife somewhere,

  Wheeling away to long to be alone.

  I see the dragon of years is almost done,

  Its claws loosen, its eyes

  Crust now with tears & lust and a scale of lies.

  A whisky-listless and excessive saint

  Was expounding his position, whom I hung

  Boy-glad in glowing heaven: he grows faint:

  Hearing what song the sirens sung,

  Sidelong he web-slid and some rich prose spun.

  The tissue golden of the gifts undone

  Surpassed the gifts. Miss Weirs

  Whispers to me her international fears.

  Intelligentsia milling. In a semi-German

  (Our loss of Latin fractured how far our fate,—

  Disinterested once, linkage once like a sermon)

  I struggle to articulate

  Why it is our promise breaks in pieces early.

  The Muses’ visitants come soon, go surly

  With liquor & mirrors away

  In this land wealthy & casual as a holiday.

  Whom the Bitch winks at. Most of us are linsey-

  woolsey workmen, grandiose, and slack.

  On m’analyse, the key to secrets. Kinsey

  Shortly will tell us sharply back

  Habits we stuttered. How revive to join

  (Great evils grieve beneath: eye Caesar’s coin)

  And lure a while more home

  The vivid wanderers, uneasy with our shame?

  Priests of the infinite! ah, not for long.

  The dove whispers, and diminishes

  Up the blue leagues. And no doubt we heard wrong—

  Wax of our lives coll
ects & dulls; but was

  What we heard hurried as we memorized,

  Or brightened, or adjusted? Undisguised

  We pray our tongues & fingers

  Record the strange word that blows suddenly and lingers.

  Imagine a patience in the works of love

  Luck sometimes visits. Ages we have sighed,

  And cleave more sternly to a music of

  Even this sore word ‘genocide’.

  Each to his own! Clockless & thankless dream

  And labour Makers, being what we seem.

  Soon soon enough we turn

  Our tools in; brownshirt Time chiefly our works will burn.

  I remember: white fine flour everywhere whirled

  Ceaselessly, wheels rolled, a slow thunder boomed,

  And there were snowy men in the mill-world

  With sparkling eyes, light hair uncombed,

  And one of them was humming an old song,

  Sack upon sack grew portly, until strong

  Arms moved them on, by pairs,

  And then the bell clanged and they ran like hares.

  Scotch in his oxter, my Retarded One

  Blows in before the midnight; freezing slush

  Stamps off, off. Worst of years! . . no matter, begone;

  Your slash and spells (in the sudden hush)

  We see now we had to suffer some day, so

  I cross the dragon with a blessing, low,

  While the black blood slows. Clock-wise,

  We clasp upon the stroke, kissing with happy cries.

  Of 1947

  The Dispossessed

  ‘and something that … that is theirs—no longer ours’

  stammered to me the Italian page. A wood

  seeded & towered suddenly. I understood.—

  The Leading Man’s especially, and the Juvenile Lead’s,

  and the Leading Lady’s thigh that switches & warms,

  and their grimaces, and their flying arms:

  our arms, our story. Every seat was sold.

  A crone met in a clearing sprouts a beard

  and has a tirade. Not a word we heard.

  Movement of stone within a woman’s heart,

  abrupt & dominant. They gesture how

  fings really are. Rarely a child sings now.

  My harpsichord weird as a koto drums

  adagio for twilight, for the storm-worn dove

  no more de-iced, and the spidery business of love.

  The Juvenile Lead’s the Leader’s arm, one arm

  running the whole bole, branches, roots, (O watch)

  and the faceless fellow waving from her crotch,

  Stalin-unanimous! who procured a vote

  and care not use it, who have kept an eye

  and care not use it, percussive vote, clear eye.

  That which a captain and a weaponeer

  one day and one more day did, we did, ach

  we did not, They did . . cam slid, the great lock

  lodged, and no soul of us all was near was near,—

  an evil sky (where the umbrella bloomed)

  twirled its mustaches, hissed, the ingenue fumed,

  poor virgin, and no hero rides. The race

  is done. Drifts through, between the cold black trunks,

  the peachblow glory of the perishing sun

  in empty houses where old things take place.

  The Cage

  (1950)

  The Cage

  And the Americans put Pound in a cage

  In the Italian summer coverless

  On a hillside up from Pisa in his age

  Roofless the old man with a blanket yes

  On the ground. Shih in his pocket luck jammed there

  When the partigiani with a tommy-gun

  Broke in the villa door. Great authors fare

  Well; for they fed him, the Americans

  And after four weeks were afraid he’d die

  So the Americans took him out of the cage

  And tented him like others. He lay wry

  To make the Pisan cantos with his courage

  Sorrow and memory in a slowing drive

  (And after five months they told Dorothy

  Where Ezra was, and what,—i.e., alive)

  Until from fingers such something twitcht free

  … O years go bare, a madman lingered through

  The hall-end where we talked and felt my book

  Till he was waved away; Pound tapped his shoe

  And pointed and digressed with an impatient look

  ‘Bankers’ and ‘Yids’ and ‘a conspiracy’

  And of himself no word, the second worst,

  And ‘Who is seeryus now?’ and then ‘J. C.

  Thought he’d got something, yes, but Ari was first’

  His body bettered. And the empty cage

  Sings in the wringing winds where winds blow

  Backward and forward one door in its age

  And the great cage suffers nothing whatever no

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

  (1953)

  Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

  [Born 1612 Anne Dudley, married at 16 Simon Bradstreet, a Cambridge man, steward to the Countess of Warwick and protégé of her father Thomas Dudley secretary to the Earl of Lincoln. Crossed in the Arbella, 1630, under Governor Winthrop.]

  1

  The Governor your husband lived so long

  moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,

  you were a patient woman.—

  I seem to see you pause here still:

  Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored

  before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,

  all the children still.

  ‘Simon…’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.

  2

  Outside the New World winters in grand dark

  white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands

  foxes down foxholes sigh,

  surely the English heart quails, stunned.

  I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,

  spares from his rigour for your poetry

  more. We are on each other’s hands

  who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,

  3

  thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air

  your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,

  from the centuries it.

  I think you won’t stay. How do we

  linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,

  implausibly visible, to whom, a year,

  years, over interims; or not;

  to a long stranger; or not; shimmer & disappear.

  4

  Jaw-ript, rot with its wisdom, rending then;

  then not. When the mouth dies, who misses you?

  Your master never died,

  Simon ah thirty years past you—

  Pockmarkt & westward staring on a haggard deck

  it seems I find you, young. I come to check,

  I come to stay with you,

  and the Governor, & Father, & Simon, & the huddled men.

  5

  By the week we landed we were, most, used up.

  Strange ships across us, after a fortnight’s winds

  unfavouring, frightened us;

  bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so were ill

  many as one day we could have no sermons;

  broils, quelled; a fatherless child-unkennelled; vermin

  crowding & waiting: waiting.

  And the day itself he leapt ashore young Henry Winthrop

  6

  (delivered from the waves; because he found

  off their wigwams, sharp-eyed, a lone canoe

  across a tidal river,

  that water glittered fair & blue

  & narrow, none of the other men could swim

  and the plantation’s prime theft up to him,

  shouldered on a glad day

  hard on the glorious feasting of thanksgivi
ng) drowned.

  7

  How long with nothing in the ruinous heat,

  clams & acorns stomaching, distinction perishing,

  at which my heart rose,

  with brackish water, we would sing.

  When whispers knew the Governor’s last bread

  was browning in his oven, we were discourag’d.

  The Lady Arbella dying—

  dyings—at which my heart rose, but I did submit.

  8

  That beyond the Atlantic wound our woes enlarge

  is hard, hard that starvation burnishes our fear,

  but I do gloss for You.

  Strangers & pilgrims fare we here,

  declaring we seek a City. Shall we be deceived?

  I know whom I have trusted, & whom I have believed,

  and that he is able to

  keep that I have committed to his charge.

  9

  Winter than summer worse, that first, like a file

  on a quick, or the poison suck of a thrilled tooth;

  and still we may unpack.

  Wolves & storms among, uncouth

  board-pieces, boxes, barrels vanish, grow

  houses, rise. Motes that hop in sunlight slow

  indoors, and I am Ruth

  away: open my mouth, my eyes wet: I wóuld smile:

  10

  vellum I palm, and dream. Their forest dies

  to greensward, privets, elms & towers, whence

  a nightingale is throbbing.

  Women sleep sound. I was happy once . .

  (Something keeps on not happening; I shrink?)

  These minutes all their passions & powers sink

  and I am not one chance

  for an unknown cry or a flicker of unknown eyes.

  11

  Chapped souls ours, by the day Spring’s strong winds swelled,

  Jack’s pulpits arched, more glad. The shawl I pinned

  flaps like a shooting soul

  might in such weather Heaven send.

  Succumbing half, in spirit, to a salmon sash

  I prod the nerveless novel succotash—

  I must be disciplined,

  in arms, against that one, and our dissidents, and myself.

  12

  Versing, I shroud among the dynasties;

  quarternion on quarternion, tireless I phrase

  anything past, dead, far,

  sacred, for a barbarous place.

  —To please your wintry father? all this bald

  abstract didactic rime I read appalled

  harassed for your fame

  mistress neither of fiery nor velvet verse, on your knees

  13

  hopeful & shamefast, chaste, laborious, odd,

  whom the sea tore. —The damned roar with loss,