My lifelong taste for reworking the same water—
a day is day there, America all landscape,
ocean monolithic past weathering;
the lakes are oceans, nature tends to gulp.…
Change I earth or sky I am the same;
aging retreats to habit, puzzles repeated
and remembered, games repeated and remembered,
the runner trimming on his mud-smooth path,
the gamefish fattening in its narrow channel,
deaf to the lure of personality.
May the entertainment of uncertainty
help me from seeing through anyone I love.…
Overtrained for England, I find America …
under unmoved heaven changing sky.
My heavy step is treacherous in the shallows—
once squinting in the sugared eelgrass for game,
I saw the glass torpedo of a big fish,
power strayed from unilluminating depth,
roaming through the shallows worn to bone.
I was seven, and fished without a hook.
Luckily, Mother was still omnipotent—
a battered sky, a more denuded lake,
my heavy rapier trolling rod bent L,
drowned stumps, muskrat huts, my record fish,
its endless waddling outpull like a turtle.…
The line snapped, or my knots pulled—I am free
to reach the end of the marriage on my knees.
The mud we stirred sinks in the lap of plenty.
Downstairs the two children’s repeating piano duet,
when truth says goodmorning, it means goodbye.
The scouring voice of 1930 Oxford,
“Nothing pushing the personal should be published,
not even Proust’s Research or Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
a banquet of raw ingredients in bad taste.…
No Irishman can understate or drink.…
W. B. Yeats was not a gent,
he didn’t tell the truth: and for an hour,
I’ve walked and prayed—who prays exactly an hour?
Yeats had bad eyes, saw nothing … not even peahens:
What has a bard to do with the poultry yard?
Dying, he dished his stilts, wrote one good poem,
small penance for all that grandeur of imperfection.”
(For Caroline)
How much less pretentiously, more maliciously
we talk of a close friend to other friends
than shine stars for his festschrift! Which is truer—
the uncomfortable full dress of words for print,
or wordless conscious not even no one ever sees?
The best things I can tell you face to face
coarsen my love of you in solitary.
See that long lonesome road? It must end
at the will and second of the end-all—
I am still a young man not done running around.…
The great circuit of the stars lies on jewellers’ velvet;
be close enough to tell me when I will die—
what will love do not knowing it will die?
No telling, no telling … not even a last choice.
I wake now to find myself this long alone,
the sun struggling to renounce ascendency—
two elephants are hauling at my head.
It might have been redemptive not to have lived—
in sickness, mind and body might make a marriage
if by depression I might find perspective—
a patient almost earns the beautiful,
a castle, two cars, old polished heirloom servants,
Alka Seltzer on his breakfast tray—
the fish for the table bunching in the fishpond.
None of us can or wants to tell the truth,
pay fees for the over-limit we caught, while floating
the lonely river to senility
to the open ending. Sometimes in sickness,
we are weak enough to enter heaven.
After a day indoors I sometimes see
my face in the shaving mirror looks as old,
frail and distinguished as my photographs—
as established. But it doesn’t make one feel
the temptation to try to be a Christian.