For Constance Horton Greenleaf
In Memory of Ivor Richards and Robert Gessner
I
Inversion is a counterfeit experience there is but one irreversibility.
Chestnuts, rabid squirrels, slosh and sleet, the sullen, birdstained wisdom of John Harvard.
O Fyffes bananas, obscene planks, the flexes bared to vision like the sinews in Vessalius. I grope my way
through the intestines of heuristic house.
II
Last night we heard in Kresge Hall a lion-vested English poet fulminate like an under-paid volcano against Science, applauded by a host of boffins.
Afterwards, a girl called Shirley took my hand and wished to lead me through the maze toward the magus posing there as Tannhäuser, fettered with electric wires in a great maidenform III
‘I never liked the man.’—‘Grotesque…’
His face (a breakfast fruitjuice of a face
—like Santa’s after years of seven daily shaves) frowns towards the window. I try
another angle—Oxford, Cambridge, the sad dignified silence of his friend,
the poise of Perry Miller as a demon.
He floats like Peter Pan towards his country.
IV
Suddenly, the telephone in boredom jumps from the cluttered table, spelling its coincidence of quick relief:
the establishing of friends of future forfeits the nodding present, and we drift through mists of April with the sleepy drone of summer knocking at the door.
Time leaves us breathless at its wake.
V
The evenings walk together, and we flee, convened, rebuffed, solidified and sad.
Memory whistles round that cataleptic hour, wasted to the world but not to me.
The silent voice behind that black receiver will speak and ask and read a poem
about the mountaineers of mind (if mind has
mountains) with verses streaming from their rucksacks.
VI
One evening in the future we shall meet and speak of music, indigestion and delight, and Connie, lovely Connie, will comply to show her knickers on request. The night is full of eyes, and trees, and bushes bristle with the flat twang of summer.
We finish our drinks and walk away.
My wife and I walk home in silence.
VII
Friend, there is a carrot-farm in heaven providing food for rabbits, remedies for nightblindness. In your preferment
of the second-rate, Battersea Park amusements, walks at night through warm, protective darkness, tarry awhile, and first consider
those who dwell in darkness through the night with electronic eyes, blistered by insights.
VIII
Drinking soda pop and smoking innumerable cheap cigarettes. They
are the Kierkegaards of their own destruction, breathing hatred on their bellies. Pity them.
But think also of the truly innocent,
the lonely typists in their immaculate rooms with a small fridge and biscuits on the mantelpiece where nobody except the caretaker has ever entered.
IX
Friend, poet, the unterminated interview, unwritten poem, unmade bed, or girl, call out for completion. Do not heed them. Learn how to revere
the unfinished, generating moments from its teeth of happiness, hysteria and love
as useless, beautiful, incongruous and light
as sparks from high-heeled shoes against the flagstones outside M.I.T.
Generation
I
We children of the thirties got daubed with melancholy.
We were not lucky like the sons and daughters Of the twenties, christened in jazz fumes And the colored clothes of their first cries,
Nor free and desperate like the newborn Of the forties, soothed by blackouts,
Liberated by flak bursts and search lights in the sky.
We became late sleepers, mind readers, Violent and autocratic statues in
The sea, skin divers in our amniotic juices.
II
The streets were longer in those days, The trams made noises in the nights.
In the small room a young girl with a child, Waiting at dawn for darkness to Be sucked out into the sky, And the hours of low-paid work
Like scabs you cannot leave alone.
The hours were smaller, the winters
Longer, with more wet snow on the window-sill.
Bananas were coming in, and silver hydroplanes Descended on the dead wet sea. The pilot
Waved and thought he looked like Charles Lindbergh.
We had our games. The soldiers were Italians and Abyssinians. It seemed the Abyssinians always lost their feet and heads.
Their Jesus robes turned into moldy grey.
III
My uncle who came to America Before I was born,
In the sly and wincing first year of the depression, Went into a barbershop in Buffalo.
Shaved by a Negro he saw, against the Grayish palm the later white and jolly And heard the thick black lips say:
Du e la svensk. The black man was a Swede, too, From Gothenburg.
My uncle became a carpenter in Quincy, Mass.
But remembered the lather in the hand,
Snow on squatting slagheaps like some unwritten Dylan Thomas story.
IV
I wake before dawn
With a night’s small poems swarming in my head:
‘Now when I am forty-five and almost dead I’ll let my hair grow long and wild
And I’ll be stalking flowers in the parks And by observing learn to pick them.’
Televisiondreamroutines
Galvanizing, I would think, said Peter rabidly.
Their son, called Justin, had invented a new game.
The three men hanging from the chandelier broke the fall of the fourth clinging
To the flex and ripping the stuccoed ceiling of the Moroccan Room.
Charles fingered his brocaded necktie nervously.
Now we have to face the most unreasonable man on earth, presumably a hotelier.
Meanwhile at the Zoo, Melchisedec the Cow.
The crew, mostly dressed in rather momentous black, except for Celia who was
un-Accountably naked, were cheered on by the vicar himself.
There the victuals precede the auditorium.
Meanwhile back at the Zoo, Celia dressed in rather demure black, was naked, cheering
The cow and the vicar.
Now we have erased from this earth l’homme moyen sensual, presumably an ostler, Charles
Said, fingering his Moroccan necktie with remorse.
Well, at last, their son invented a new game. They were just in time.
Patronizing, I would think, said Peter Rabbit avidly.
Note: The phrase ‘Well, at last’ is taken from the MGM 1949 version of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner.