The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems Page 6
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,