A virus and its hash of knobby aches—
more than ever flying seems too lofty,
the season unlucky for visiting New York,
for telephoning kisses transatlantic.…
The London damp comes in, its smell so fertile
trees grow in my room. I read Ford’s Saddest Story,
his triangle I read as his student in Nashville.
Things that change us only change a fraction,
twenty-five years of marriage, a book of life—
a choice of endings? I have my round-trip ticket.…
After fifty so much joy has come,
I hardly want to hide my nakedness—
the shine and stiffness of a new suit, a feeling,
not wholly happy, of having been reborn.
2. WITH CAROLINE AT THE AIR-TERMINAL
“London Chinese gray or oyster gray,
every appalling shade of pitch-pitch gray—
no need to cook up far-fetched imagery
to establish a climate for my mood.…
If I have had hysterical drunken seizures,
it’s from loving you too much. It makes me wild,
I fear.… We’ve made the dining-room his bedroom—
I feel unsafe, uncertain you’ll get back.
I know I am happier with you than before.
Safer…” The go-sign blazes and my plane’s
great white umbilical ingress bangs in place.
The flight is certain.… Surely it’s a strange joy
blaming ourselves and willing what we will.
Everything is real until it’s published.
In his portrait, mostly known from frontispiece,
Dante’s too identifiable—
behind him, more or less his height, though less,
a tower tapering to a fingerend,
a snakewalk of receding galleries:
Purgatory and a slice of Europe,
less like the fact, more like the builder’s hope
It leans and begs the architect for support,
insurance never offered this side of heaven.
The last fifty years stand up like that;
people crowd the galleries to flee
the second death, they cry out manfully,
for many are women and children, but the maker
can’t lift his painted hand to stop the crash.
If I cannot love myself, can you?
I am better company depressed …
I bring myself here, almost my best friend,
a writer still free to work at home all week,
reading revisions to his gulping wife.
Born twenty years later, I might have been prepared
to alternate with cooking, and wash the baby—
I am a vacation-father … no plum—
flown in to New York.… I see the rising prospect,
the scaffold glitters, the concrete walls are white,
flying like Feininger’s skyscraper yachts,
geometrical romance in the river mouth,
conical foolscap dancing in the sky …
the runway growing wintry and distinct.
After London, the wind, the eye, my thoughts
race through New York with gaping coarse-comb teeth,
the simple-minded streets are one-way straight,
no queues for buses and every angle right,
a cowering London with twenty times the soaring;
it is fish-shaped, it is modern, it is metal,
austerity assuaged with melodrama,
an irritable reaching after fact and reason,
a love of features fame puts up for sale—
love is all here, and the house desolate.
What shall I do with my stormy life blown towards evening?
No fervor helps without the favor of heaven,
no permissive law of nature picks up the bill—
survival is talking on the phone.
Sometime I must try to write the truth,
but almost everything has fallen awry
lost in passage when we said goodbye in Rome.
Even the licence of my mind rebels,
and can find no lodging for my two lives.
Some things like death are meant to have no outcome.
I come like someone naked in my raincoat,
but only a girl is naked in a raincoat.
Planesick on New York food, I feel the old
Subway reverberate through our apartment floor,
I stop in our Christmas-papered bedroom, hearing
my Nolo, the non-Messianic man—
drop, drop in silence, then a louder drop
echoed elsewhere by a louder drop.
Did the girl in Death and the Maiden fear marriage?
No end to the adolescence we attained
by overworking, then struggled to release—
my bleak habit of counting off minutes on my fingers,
like pages of an unrequested manuscript.
that brilliant onetime moment we alone shared,
the leftovers from God’s picnic and old times.
Why do I weep for joy when others weep?
One morning we saw something, half weed, half wildflower,
rise from the only thruhole in the barn floor—
it had this chance in a hundred to survive.
We knew that it was someone in disguise,
a silly good person … thin, pealnosed, intruding,
the green girl who doesn’t know how to leave a room.
A sharper air and sharper architecture—
the old fashioned fishingtackle-box skyscrapers,
flesh of glass and ribs of tin … derisively
called modern in 1950, and now called modern.
As if one had tried to make polar bears
live in Africa—some actually survived,
curious, strong meat permutations of polar bear.…
It wasn’t so once, O it wasn’t so,
when I came here ten or twenty years ago.…
Now I look on it all with a yellow eye;
but the language of New Yorkers, unlike English,
doesn’t make me fear I am going deaf.…
Last night at four or five, whenever I woke up,
I found myself crying—not too heavily.
Home for the night on my ten years’ workbed,
where I asked the facing brick for words, and woke
to my conscious smile of self-incrimination,
hearing then as now the distant, panting siren,
small as a harbor boat patrolling the Hudson,
persistent cry without diminishment
or crescendo through the sleepless hours.
I hear its bland monotony, the voice
that holds, and never shortcircuits the transcendence
I fiddled for imperiously and too long.
All my friends are writers. Do I deserve
to sleep, because I gave myself the breaks,
self-seeking with persistent tenderness
rivals seldom lavish on a brother?
I can move around more … through the thirty years
to the New York of Jean Stafford, Pearl Harbor, the Church?
Most of my old friends are mostly dead,
entitled to grow infirm and lap the cream—
if time that hurt so much improved a little?
Our onslaught, not wholly Pyrrhic, to launch Harriet
on the heart-turning, now savage, megapolis.…
A friendly soft depression browns the air,
it’s not my glasses needing a handkerchief …
it’s as if I stood tiptoe on a chair
so that I couldn’t help but touch the ceiling—
almost obscenely, complaisantly on the phone with
my three wives, as if three-dimensional space were my breath—
three writers, none New Yorkers, had their great years there.
All too often now your voice is too bright;
I always hear you … commonsense, though verbal …
waking me to myself: truth, the truth, until
things are just as if they had never been.
I can’t tell the things we planned for you this Christmas.
I’ve written my family not to phone today,
we had to put away your photographs.
We had to. We have no choice—we, I, they?…
Our Christmas tree seems fallen out with nature,
shedding to a naked cone of triggered wiring.
This worst time is not unhappy, green sap
still floods the arid rind, the thorny needles
catch the drafts, as if alive—I too,
because I waver, am counted with the living.
The tedium and déjà-vu of home
make me love it; bluer days will come
and acclimatize the Christmas gifts:
redwood bear, lemon-egg shampoo, home-movie-
projector, a fat book, sunrise-red, inscribed
to me by Lizzie, “Why don’t you lose yourself
and write a play about the fall of Japan?”
Slight spirits of birds, light burdens, no grave duty
to seem universally sociable
and polite.… We are at home and warm,
as if we had escaped the gaping jaws—
underneath us like a submarine,
nuclear and protective like a mother,
swims the true shark, the shadow of departure.