Five New Poems
HINE, DARYL & MOSS, HOWARD & HECHT, ANTHONY & CORN, ALFRED & VIERECK, PETER
FIVE NEW POEMS: DARYL HINE HOWARD MOSS ANTHONY HECHT ALFRED CORN PETER VIERECK SCENE FROM THE23RD STORY Myopically my gaze falls on the city, Or what I can see of it: it winks Back with myriad...
...5. AND "Dust doesn't know it's dust...
...Dwarf no bigger...
...It might be stubbornness...
...Shakespeare's, though watered down, is spoken now By all of us...
...7. LUDDITE "Brave new machine, 'tis I, thy Luddite lover, Still splitting metal mind from Gothic heart, Medievally mod...
...A dot And ring...
...Did the caveman who genius'd the wheel, stop painting the wall...
...Though the truest author Will put little credit in a captive future...
...Was in on Birth (two squirm asunder) and spawn (two squirm in tune...
...yardstick smaller...
...Mystic Marina, be Our oracle...
...KNOW-HOW "Launched by the apple of know-how, I play ball With moon-rocks...
...What's that squeak way Out there...
...I'll carve me power, strut in steel...
...won't, I won't...
...The dolphin sometimes swims In oil-stained seas...
...A t the rate that cities live and die Of course it's changed a lot—so have we all...
...Yes, and does our brash, If aging new world, El Dorado on wheels, Stand on a plane with the old, a proper stage For acts of global import framed in speech...
...and double that for a patched-up thing Like The Prince of Tyre...
...Anthony Hecht READING PERICLES IN NEW LONDON The driven are the only ones to read In cars...
...How odd—look up—that an apple pit Has grown a mushroom shape...
...And fell freezing between...
...How come I'm now suddenly squirming—save me...
...I wonder what a Bard would write About New London...
...Caliban wasn't Caliban, Prospero was...
...The more ingenious the tool, the cruder the hand...
...Or kill me...
...Now first, now second, now In third—a different gear for every act Up to the last...
...Little of it visible to my Long-range, lackadaisical researches Into the afterlife of Montreal...
...The day it does, it's not...
...2. COURTROOM What will you do to your brother On the most future-utopian star colony...
...4. THE OLD ADAM Eve spat a seed on mulch most fit: On dung heap of her macho ape...
...the voice of the nonhuman Questioner is without quotes, and is in roman...
...What properties back up This scene where we are now...
...3. THEORY OF RELATIVITY "Tech makes giants...
...Who's run off with my skin...
...The bells keep tinkling in the empty churches...
...Who's that shouting so In here...
...And signs across the way are advertising The Mystic Marina...
...This Prologue says, "The older a good thing, the better...
...all alone...
...All jackboots hide Achilles' heel...
...God's right with you...
...From above the pigeons look like people On the pavement, busy little peckers Among the dust and rubbish underfoot, As with abrupt, acquisitive yet feeble Bobs and scrapes they scramble for their brekkers In business suits immaculate with soot...
...And the heart goes numb in a tide of fear and awe For those we cherish, their hopes, their frailty...
...by this man here, who nods And takes a credit card as sunlight gilds His hands...
...8. INSIDE "Toy-makers who look aside Assume blank faces on the toys they tried...
...Three—I've spied three kinds of squirm here...
...Perhaps the past is just a disappearance The present is unable to explain...
...Here comes my fist between your eyes...
...It would be different if we called to witness His finest plays—The Tempest, say, and Lear?Which do, I think, still sound contemporary Depths...
...How in the fleshy inside of an elbow The warm hollow trembles with blue silk-All luscious opaque roundness in a blur Of bedroom coverlet, of rind and mound, Those supple thighs I nested in at twelve Whose milk-white forms melted the horizon's Aggregate of birds into empty distance...
...Measure the distances 1 flew...
...Hold still...
...Unless I'm scared he'll do it first...
...Yet only for twenty minutes or so today, On a summer afternoon, Does the splendid lancet reach to them, or sink To these dim bottoms, making its chancy way, As through the barrier reef of some lagoon In sea-green darkness, by a wavering chink, Down, neatly probing like an accurate paw Or a notched and beveled key, Through the huge cave-roof of giant oak and pine...
...as well as glimmers The I, not Shakespeare's play, am being judged...
...At last the night that napkined up the day Unfolds, and Royal Mountain is revealed Ridiculous in its sublimity, A pimple on the spotty, pock-marked plain That stretches, interrupted by the river, Cluttered by indifferent slum clearance And building blocks, apparently forever...
...To walk by heavy mirrors of a myth With the greedy mouth everyone begins with And feed on nothing but the self reflected Is to know how pleasure ceases, does away with Savor, and the attributes of Eden End up in a darkroom of details, Or a day of too much light whose sun erases Privacies gone flat, communication A letter bomb arriving in the mails...
...The fate of high-octane lines is To fuel many vehicles, the grand And budget compact both...
...Both...
...In autumn only man is heavy-eyed...
...Their shadowy fate's unfathomable design...
...Jokes, coincidence, And anachronism, the stuff of dreams and plays...
...O stately psalms, Were you prepared to end your days as proverbs...
...These daubs of sourball lime, at floating rest, Present to the loose wattage Of heaven their limelit flukes, an artifice Of archipelagian Islands of the Blessed, And in all innocence pursue their cottage Industry of photosynthesis...
...He betrays his age by having none and all Of them at once...
...Insomniac, it is because it thinks It is, the urban university Where I matriculated twenty-three Years ago, which from this twenty-third Floor has altered out of recognition, As if a revolution had occurred Without my knowledge in the intermission Between the acts that agitated me...
...9. TRANSCENDING "From skin-quilt's hell, Hurt leaped toward heal...
...Five hundred years now, Heart is a jet-propelled sitdown strike...
...Look, I'm taller...
...mean, since protest nudges And lets me know I have the choice to stop...
...Then make me see more stars in loftier skies...
...And soon pedestrians, an obsolescent Band, appear, unhurrying to work, Each self-important in his solitude...
...You, Father, thought you made us button-eyed...
...FIVE NEW POEMS: DARYL HINE HOWARD MOSS ANTHONY HECHT ALFRED CORN PETER VIERECK SCENE FROM THE23RD STORY Myopically my gaze falls on the city, Or what I can see of it: it winks Back with myriad hypnotic eyes About to be extinguished by sunrise...
...10...
...DarylHine HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN Have you forgotten the sweetness of women, Their treble cries, the underworld of milk...
...Less than the miles between yourself and you...
...A thing or not a thing...
...Peter Viereck...
...ACOUSTICS "This world of yours—I've cased the joint and I demand...
...mind can't hold out...
...Alfred Corn THIN ICE Ten Compressions of the Human Condition (In these excerpts from the author's unpublished poetry manuscript, Apptewood, the human voice is printed in quotes in each dialogue...
...Which doesn't quite account for classics, texts A few enthusiastic bookworms devour?Others content to own their fine editions Like heirloom plate they store and seldom use...
...What makes me keep on turning pages and not Just grunt "The End...
...While most have never heard of them at all...
...is it less delphic then...
...Can't hear you...
...We've rolled to a standstill here, A town that knew one fact about us, i.e., We'd need some classic service station, Gulf Or Mobil Oil...
...Solve contradictory me...
...HowardMoss A CAST OF LIGHT at a Father's Day picnic A maple bough of web-foot, golden greens, Found by an angled shaft Of late sunlight, disposed within that shed Radiance, with brilliant, hoisted baldachins, Pup tents and canopies by some underdraft Flung up to scattered perches overhead...
...My Son learnt different, being sent inside...
...6. LAB "I've jetted loose from stone-age Cain, and haven 'l...
...While in the high-rise opposite a nude Exhibitionistic adolescent Does his daily dozen, press and jerk, Fuzzy, out of focus in my field Glasses, till I have to look away, Embarrassed by our false proximity...
...Same Neanderthal...
...Those heartened words, that measured praise fallen Among the cheats and scrapes of place and time Beyond their wildest...
...Is it a chip off his flint that sparks me to Mars...
...My nose crinkles At the vibrant stench of fuel tainting the air...
Vol. 61 • December 1978 • No. 24
