Five New Poems
HOLLANDER, JOHN & MCPHERSON, SANDRA & LEVINE, PHILIP & FELDMAN, IRVING & HOWARD, RICHARD
FIVE NEW POEMS: JOHN HOLLANDER SANDRA MCPHERSON PHILIP LEVINE RICHARD HOWARD IRVING FELDMAN THREE OF THE FA TES CLOTHO The spinster: it would be given to no Mother to make this thread of short...
...Ancient of days and innocent of days, take this day our daily darkness for who you were, the chiaroscuro lesson taken, but never given: there is only one pleasure-that of being alive...
...Curse the sky...
...Yourself...
...FIVE NEW POEMS: JOHN HOLLANDER SANDRA MCPHERSON PHILIP LEVINE RICHARD HOWARD IRVING FELDMAN THREE OF THE FA TES CLOTHO The spinster: it would be given to no Mother to make this thread of short fibers That twistingly stretch into years-that would Be too true...
...I told this to the woman who loved me more than life, and she wept inconsolably, and thus I learned we must love nothing more than life for when I am gone who will she take her one loss to...
...John Hollander LAST WEEK OF WINTER Horrible tinctures of ginger and cayenne and sage for colds, From the Back to Eden book that recommends Blue violet, white pine, rock rose which we do not have, Have given way to turned earth smells and hourly checkups For breakthroughs from seeds, cavernous or should I say cadaverous Peas, and Burpee's new golden beet that does not bleed...
...philip Levine VICTOR HUGO The deathbed portrait by Nadar You made darkness your own secret and declared "no one keeps secrets better than children...
...Not knowing, I wore a little amulet to keep the evil from my heart, and yet when the Day of Atonement came I did not bow my head or bind myself at wrist and brow because I knew I would atone...
...But neither the pure Straight nor the twisted straight are there any More: here are only frayed fibers, as if Gone back to an original dead grass...
...Her body Takes a new turn weekly we must discuss: "We are not New minted any more...
...My friend has set a fine lunch for us oflox, Croissants, alfalfa tea with a leaf of mint...
...Sometimes it is a four-Mile run or mood or dry eyes, insomnia, or piano pain...
...Dismissive, she shows Old bundled photos of the snow...
...Now it can be told: I lived wisely, in the sight of everything, and told no one how to live, and one day after the spring rains I helped a child find his way...
...And suppose these three sisters Were all crammed into one mother who did The three things...
...we are not allowed to Suppose that she is some poor semi-comic Dummy like ourselves, hopefully spinning A rope of escape for some loved one, duped By her sisters, or by someone beyond...
...I am ready...
...All we could do is regard That huge fable, know its truth, and vomit...
...I love to see her razzled, flickery, Turbid like the winter floods...
...Who troubles now to identify such remains, consequences of a theory condemned, like every theory, to masterpieces or else to oblivion-who finds you out today...
...LACHESIS Random measurer: why is it that all We can do in her case is to question...
...Irving Feldman...
...Sandra McPherson NO WIT CAN BE TOLD What would it mean to lose this life and go wandering the hallways of that house in search of another self...
...Asking what we are to do when our play, As with this very figure, fancying Up the old fiction for a moment, ends...
...And then Even the literal unravels: that Is when we most need the intertwining, The turning, the making taught, in order That the rope lie right...
...There are no tropes where the thread is Cut there is no turning of strands, no twist Of the literal line of cord...
...Warmed, close to life, though dull and ancient, I still gleam, like worn cloth, not like a woman's eyes...
...In the high grasses of mountain meadows, though it is marshy underfoot, I could come to rest even in wind...
...Silently I would become all the small deaths which gave me this one life...
...Asking if some pretty code of roughness In the wrapped strands of fiber leads her to Declare that some length is now at an end, Asking whether she sits and deciphers Such messages-Is this not all our play...
...And splashed but couldn't speak, having no words in the imageless sea...
...What way Of casting lots, what chance does she choose...
...As If in answer, the sharp winds of whether It matters or not alternately rise And fall in no necessary order...
...Or achievement of her narrow fingers into Chopin's hair-Fine, hair-thick notes...
...Will she know that somewhere close, perhaps in the glow of old wood or in the frost that glistens on the ripening orange, is the grist and sweat of the one she loved...
...Swinburne was your last zealot, Gide regretted, and we-we doubt everything but the frenzied aquarelles, which prove real silence is the end of language, not just the stopping of it...
...No: the thread that seems unending, and That seems unendingly to be being Spun, is made only that it can be cut...
...But why should she tell me then She is a secret mother...
...Then startled, started...
...Such instinct: to tell a child given away You gave your own away...
...Perhaps a thousand years from now, a lost boy or girl will catch the sight of the bronze star that fortunately saved me from nothing, and as he stoops to untangle the blackened chain he will have bowed his head the one time I could not...
...I walk the paths the children made, under the canopy of branches and heavy leaves, I find small tunnels where I could find warmth and silence for a century...
...She wants her picture Taken well before she gets too old...
...If there are tears, they should be tears of joy, for I am found who was lost, and once more I've come back to this earth, smudged and clouded with a child's wonder...
...I say, Get old, use black and white, it's more Revealing, you want to be more shocking, old...
...Is this not all our late work...
...and what she may remember or Have ever known of love puzzles us-we Can never hear her humming some old tune, Older than winds...
...Richard Howard THE ECSTASIES che fe Nettuno ammirar Vombra d'Argo-dante He swam, but swam in place, the place was his, the whole of it, all the sea, and he its self and sway, storming or still-and never still, ecstatic platitude of the sea dazzle and reaches, the dark reverie downward, dreaming itself toward a fluent point dispersed in a thousand silvery centers, bubbles lofting and kissing themselves into nothingness, the spray lifted and blown, expatiating in broken syllables -and he held close by the dream of the sea, a wonder of water where he moved and touched the light, saw the transparency, always light moving, the clear ecstasy...
...These years I've known her...
...All the others are a misery...
...No darkness here, no secret save the impression of being a personage who became extinct without ever having been a volcano...
...Yours kept theirs best of all, dying or delirious before you?no: you were always mad, but always alive until this pious keepsake showed you had no secrets left to keep, lying dead as Charles and Francois, mad as Adele, merely one more carcass in your century's series of clean old men who look like God...
...O, what book Of random digits does she use...
...And we whisper across the picnic cloth, in the strong Burning smell of narcissus: "Flowering plum, Buson said, and the dancing ladies go to buy obis...
...Your face is Faust's but with the light of hell gone out of it, replaced by magnesium and an embargo from heaven, Daumier said, because you offended God by calling him cher maitre...
...Yet cover yourself with light as with a garment?even your beard, still growing under eyes grown still, becomes a burning bush...
...Among her and her sisters a dark sort Of motherhood is there all right, but still The old tale will only tell of coldness And utter distance among the high crags...
...The little blindness of the marvelous Argo's opacity pierced Neptune's brow, and wavered into sound-the image sang, and sang inside his coursing bones the inconceivable commonplaces, Sky, fire, star, and offered him to all the openness...
...ATROPOS A trope...
...Curse the sun, and perhaps the dead moon will dawn tomorrow on a planet equally dead...
...She brings us into the world only with Her hands, no longer a mere girl at her Spinning...
...All it can answer with is rain or snow...
...He will raise the last persistent portion of me and under a clear sky wonder at its meaing, and let it fall back to rest...
Vol. 61 • May 1978 • No. 11
