His Toy, His Dream, His Rest Page 8

  the peopled terraces,

  slaves winding in & out, paying no income tax,

  mostly brutal one to another,

  I saw it all.

  Baseball, & the utter bloody fucking news,

  converged on miserable Henry, eh?

  Brother, they did.

  Then how did Henry make itself of use?

  apart, I mean, from these nuclear devices H & A.

  Henry hid.

  198

  —I held all solid, then I let some jangle,

  offended Henry whistled to itself.

  How few followed

  the One or both. Only some captains swallowed,

  wondering. Many sprang in to untangle

  the riddles of my little wit.

  How tiresome Spenser’s knights, their grave wounds overnight

  annealed, whilst Henry with one broken arm

  deep in hospital lay

  with real pain between shots from light to light

  ten lights, two specialists, where nurses swarm

  day after achieveless day.

  After all, it was solely the left arm

  reminding me the whole body can come to harm;

  will.

  My wife puts off my sling: I cannot think:

  I do my exercises. I wish all well,

  including Mrs Randall Jarrell.

  199

  I dangle on the rungs, an open target.

  The world grows more disgusting dawn by dawn.

  There is a ‘white backlash.’

  When everything else fails on the auto, park it

  & move away slowly. Obsolescent, on

  the rungs, out of the car, ‘ashes’.

  Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

  I will meet you then in the middle of the maidan

  jump at monsoon dawn.

  The bearer weeps, I’m going out so early.

  How to account for me? I want her dearly

  but being ill & so on

  I stumble at the lift. Henry is dying.

  Erect-squat in the corner, sweating, the bearer is crying.

  I don’t seem to make it down

  Shall I finish on the landing? They have all waited

  the foes fierce, others whom Henry baited,

  a forest of bottles.—Mr Bones, you a clown.

  200

  I am interested & amazed: on the building across the way

  from where I vaguely live there are no bars!

  Best-looking place in town.

  Only them lawyers big with great cigars

  and lesser with briefcases, instead of minds,

  move calmly in & out

  and now or then an official limousine

  with a live Supreme Court justice & chauffeur

  mounts the ramp toward me.

  We live behind, you see. It’s Christmas, and brrr

  in Washington. My wife’s candle is out

  for John F. Kennedy

  and the law rushes like mud but the park is white

  with a heavy fall for ofays & for dark,

  let’s exchange blue-black kisses

  for the fate of the Man who was not born today,

  clashing our tinsel, by the terrible tree

  whereon he really hung, for you & me.

  201

  Hung by a thread more moments instant Henry’s mind

  super-subtle, which he knew blunt & empty & incurious

  but when he compared it with his fellows’

  finding it keen & full, he didn’t know what to think

  apart from typewriters & print & ink.

  On the philosophical side

  plus religious, he lay at a loss.

  Mostly he knew the ones he would not follow

  into their burning systems

  or polar systems, Wittgenstein being boss,

  Augustine general manager. A universal hollow

  most of the other seems;

  so Henry in twilight is on his own:

  marrying, childing, slogging, shelling taxes,

  pondering, making.

  It’s rained all day. His wife has been away

  with genuine difficulty he fought madness

  whose breast came close to breaking.

  202

  With shining strides hear his redeemer come,

  in a hospital gown, bringing to bear on some

  more than they well can bear.

  Huge & dark stairwells see the one draw down

  with a strange expression, neither smile nor frown,

  intense, through trembling air.

  What can be piled on Henry Henry can take,

  peine forte et dure, and never will his silence break.

  Ex-nuns line

  the circle of the room of recognition

  transfixed in Schadenfreude like a mission.

  The orderlies serve wine

  while slow the ex-priest hauls a frantic breath

  and the gong clangs, meaning this way is death.

  We still have some to go

  when a blessed sweating waking heaves between

  this body lunging and the horrid scene

  alive back there below.

  203

  Nothing! —These young men come to interview me

  armed with taperecorders, cameras,

  the best ways of getting at you

  so far invented save the telephone

  and it costs money now to be alone:

  to shut it off you need two

  I have two & they ring from dawn to eve,

  with extras in the night—can’t shut them down:

  awaiting a long distance call.

  I read the ’paper gingerly lest I grieve,

  ignore the radio & TV, don’t go downtown:

  truly isolated, pal.

  However, I shudder & the world shrugs in,

  hilarious loves walking the streets like trees

  minus an ear,

  men from far tribes armed in the dark, women

  cantering in from the plains just as they please

  with the water up to here.

  204

  Henry, weak at keyboard music, leanèd on

  the slow movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A

  & the mysterious final soundings

  of Beethoven’s 109–10–11 & the Diabelli Variations

  You go by the rules but there the rules don’t matter

  is what I’ve been trying to say.

  Huddled, from their recesses, the goblins spring

  (I’m playing it as softly as I can)

  while the sound goes roaring.

  If I scream, who would hear me? Rilke, come on strong

  & forget our rôles, we’ll play the Housman man

  unless, of course, all this is boring.

  Tides bring the bodies back sometimes, & not.

  The bodies of the self-drowned out there wait,

  wait, & the widows wait,

  my gramophone is the most powerful in the country,

  I am trying, trying, to solve the andante

  but the ghost is off before me.

  205

  Come & dance, Housman’s hopeless heroine

  bereft of all: I take you in me arms

  burnt-cork:

  your creator is studying his celestial sphere,

  he never loved you, he never loved a woman

  or a man, save one: he was a fork

  saved by his double genius & certain emendations

  All his long life, hopeless lads grew cold

  He drew their death-masks

  To listen to him, you’d think that growing old

  at twenty-two was horrible, and the ordinary tasks

  of people didn’t exist.

  He did his almost perfect best with what he had

  Shades are sorrowing, as not called up

  by in his genius him

  Others are for his life-long omission glad

  & published their works as soon as he c
ame to a stop

  & could not review them.

  206

  Come again closer, Dr Swift & Professor Housman,

  you have in common—I repeat, in common—

  a certain failure in youth:

  which you ruined, with your hard-earn’d learning:

  seven years it took you, ancient Dean,

  & Housman came to truth

  only after ledgering, endless ledgering

  & then he squandered his brains on the youths at Cambridge—

  my own university!—

  he would accept no honours, he proud as Swift,

  merely refused them. Swift, infinitely greater

  but far more imperfect

  I hear as chiding that distinguisht man

  but the Dean must be careful: Housman lost his degree

  because he would not take

  the Platonic argument beyond what was necessary

  to establish the text. Therefore he failed

  & became the first scholar in Europe.

  207

  —How are you? —Fine, fine. (I have tears unshed.

  There is here near the bottom of my chest

  a loop of cold, on the right.

  A thing hurts somewhere up left in my head.

  I have a gang of old sins unconfessed.

  I shovel out of sight

  a-many ills else, I might mention too,

  such as her leaving and my hopeless book.

  No more of that, my friend.

  It’s good of you to ask and) How are you?

  (Music comes painful as a happy look

  to a system nearing an end

  or an empty question slides to a standstill

  while the drums increase inside an empty skull

  and the whole matter breaks down

  or would it would, had Henry left his will

  but that went sideways sprawling, collapsed & dull.)

  How are you, I say with a frown.

  208

  His mother wrote good news: somebody was still living.

  His wife gave him a hard time, unforgiving.

  He romped on the floor with his daughter.

  A special number of the London TLS came

  and he studied the Asiatic & European

  brains of late, across the water,

  and some of the articles were spectacularly stupid

  but most were par—though there appeared no Cupid—

  Vozhnezsensky was good on watermelons

  and Nevada’s Miss Breadlove outstripped the felons

  to be crowned the Narrative Poet Laureate of North America.

  Groovy, pal.

  So many thinking & feeling, in so many languages

  as it has probably, women barred, down the ages,

  but seldom so frisky as now.

  Risky & slavish looks the big big scene.

  Henry his horns waved at the future of poetry, where he had been,

  and hid back in his shell-ow.

  209

  Henry lay cold & golden in the snow

  toward whom the universe once more howled ‘No’—

  once more & again.

  ‘What pricks have you agin’ me, —liquor laws,

  the appearance in my house of owls & saws,—

  decanted unto the world of men?’

  ‘Divulge we further: somewhat is because

  you loner, you storm off away without pause

  across the sad ice

  overlain with the tricky new of all the snow

  whereat my Sisters up in Him sang ‘So:

  he’s coming: ’twill be nice?’

  Darker, of the beginning of their hopes,

  the huddled end, toward which the lost cork gropes.

  I seize the neck of the bottle

  & smash it on my sink, when from both ends

  it spurts, it rides, as if to blow amends

  for the earlier part of the bottle.

  210

  —Mr Blackmur, what are the holy cities of America?

  Sir Herbert’s son, who lives near Canterbury,

  precocious, asked my friend.

  A brain can stammer: Henry’s friend’s did: ‘Er … er…’

  Pilgrimages to Palm Springs smother me,

  I’m retreating to Atlantic City.

  Atlantic City in the winter is worth having: holy it’s not,

  empty it is, and who knows anybody in Atlantic City?

  His doctors drove him there

  for privacy: at the biggest bar in the world,

  down his hotel, shared now with a man a football field away,

  he had one drink.

  The Boardwalk, keen winds, & the timeless surf

  & the medieval torture-instruments from Nuremberg

  & shrunken heads for dollars

  and home he fled, abroad he streamed, to Autun

  & places else where holiness held forth

  & then slunk back to his north.

  211

  Forgoing the Andes, the sea-bottom, Angkor,

  he led with his typewriter. He made it fly

  & walk to them sites for him.

  He led with his tongue & taught & taught & taught,

  forgoing Truro, to mollify one creditor

  or another.

  The heat made headlines, while he lectured on,

  drencht.

  Ouzo was peaceful in the fearful nights,

  a gift from a Spartan lady

  whose life has been so far so much worse even than his

  that he stifled an American scream.

  Of the stately sights he had his modicum,

  it’s true: the Campidoglio, e.g.

  But mostly, though, the grindstone & the nose

  had it, & him, like Fragor

  When nostalgia for things unknown grips him he growls

  he’s saving it for the next time around.

  212

  With relief to public action, briefly stopt

  the lonely stalking of phrasing & concept:

  I’ll begin like a cannon

  or canon: I think the elder statesman stance will do.

  I will wear my bearded difference with rue

  before the damned young things

  flashy for knowledge of they dream not what

  until I drop the Bacchae in its slot:

  take that! and that!

  Also his brains accumulates its fat

  until their priest, squat on the altar, Skat,

  reluctant as my tot.

  The women scream adown the mountain side

  & the frisky god screams, as full well he may,

  worst is the armed mother:

  night with her knives reigns. I will stay the night

  and I have nothing more much now to say

  in the brilliance of their smother.

  213

  Wan shone my sun on Easter Monday,—ay,

  on Monday wan, and yet the snow has ceast.

  Filthy, my grass appears.

  Pavements appear. It’s spring in Minnesota.

  My summerhouse limps. My friends in the East

  stalk robins, & dot their fears.

  One of my steps is broken, free from ice,

  I notice. Henry’s steps sag in the blue

  lost of Louisiana.

  He was always in love with the wrong woman

  we can’t go on here, which would not be nice

  nor true.

  Horror absolved his movement’s strange. He hangs on

  Azured the star over the tower at the top of the hill,

  the Mayor’s wife sank into grateful sleep

  by his good side

  blonde, touseled, back from Washington.

  In which pale sun we abide.

  Jews being better than us others, still …

  214

  Which brandished goddess wide-eyed Henry’s nights—

  the temperature was even, the sky was still—

  tell me, which one
?

  Was it the one with the curve to her left knee—

  hidden her face with swung hair, masked her delights—

  or was it another one?

  Tribunals converged in vain. Honours swung to him

  doing him less good. He had a court case

  he was bound to lose.

  Photographers & reporters swarmed, as of an honour

  which all thought it was, whereupon he had

  a Chinese nightmare, whose?

  Back to the knee. We must not the divine knee

  swiftly forget. Her family don’t talk,

  nobody lately talks.

  My friends are ill or dead, who goes for walks?

  In the atlas of Henry’s women

  your happy map would be a folding map.

  215

  Took Henry tea down at the Athenaeum with Yeats

  and offered the master a fag, the which he took,

  accepting too a light

  to Henry’s lasting honour. Time abates.

  Humourless, grand, by the great fire for a look

  he set out his death in twilight.

  The goddamned scones came hot.

  He coughed with his sphincter, when it hurt

  Henry, who now that fierceness imitates.

  Empires fall, arise semi-states,

  Kleenex improves, clings to its own our dirt

  the foul same. The last of the girls had gone

  half in despair on.

  He starved & flung him on ’em. Fat then, free,

  he make a lukewarm wooer. All this hell of flesh—

  not so bulk’, after all—

  keeps him from edge, as forever he will be—

  how rottenly the prize collapse from fresh—

  a taller man than, we thought, tall.

  216

  ‘Scads a good eats’, dere own t’ree cars, the ’teens

  (until of them shall be asked one thing, they romp or doze)

  have got it made;

  no prob. was ever set them, their poor ol’ jerks

  of parents loved them, with deep-freeze, & snacks

  would keep a Hindu family-group alive.

  Well, so they’re liars & gluttons & cowards: so what?

  … It’s the Land of Plenty, maybe about to sigh.

  Why shouldn’t they terrify

  with hegemony Dad (stupido Dad) and teach’?