SADNESS AND HAPPINESS
I
That they have no earthly measure
is well known—the surprise is
how often it becomes impossible
to tell one from the other in memory:
the sadness of past failures, the strangely
happy—doubtless corrupt—
fondling of them. Crude, empty
though the terms are, they do
organize life: sad American house-
hunting couples with kids
and small savings visit Model Homes each
Sunday for years; humble,
they need closet space, closet
space to organize life … in older countries
people seem to be happy with less closet
space. Empty space,
I suppose, also explains post
coitum triste, a phenomenon
which on reflection I am happy
to find rare in my memory—not,
II
God knows, that sex isn’t crucial, a
desire to get more or better
must underlie the “pain” and “bliss”
of sonnets—or is it a need to do better:
A girl touched my sleeve, once,
held it, deep-eyed; life too at times
has come up, looked into my face,
My Lord, how like you this? And I?
Always distracted by some secret
movie camera or absurd audience
eager for clichés, Ivanhoe, de blues,
Young Man with a Horn, the star
tripping over his lance, quill, phallic
symbol or saxophone—miserable,
these absurd memories of failure
to see anything but oneself,
my pride, my consciousness, my shame, my
sickly haze of Romance—sick too
the root of joy? “Bale” and “bliss” merge
in a Petrarchist grin, that sleeve’s burden
III
or chivalric trophy to bear as
emblem or mark of the holy
idiot: know ye, this natural stood
posing amiss while the best prizes
of life bounced off his vague
pate or streamed between his legs—
did Korsh, Old Russia’s bedlam-sage,
enjoy having princesses visit his cell?
Would they dote on me as I shake out
a match, my fountain pen in the same
hand, freckling my dim brow with ink?
Into his muttered babble they read tips
on the market, court, marriage—I too
mutter: Fool, fool! or Death!
or Joy! Well, somewhere in the mind’s mess
feelings are genuine, someone’s
mad voice undistracted, clarity
maybe of motive and precise need
like an enameled sky, cool
blue of Indian Summer, happiness
IV
like the sex-drowsy saxophones
rolling flatted thirds of the blues
over and over, rocking the dulcet
rhythms of regret, Black music
which tumbles loss over in the mouth
like a moist bone full of marrow;
the converse is a good mood grown
too rich, like dark water steeping
willow roots in the shade, spotted
with sun and slight odor of dirt
or death, insane quibbles of self-
regard … better to mutter fool
or feel solaces of unmerited
Grace, like a road of inexplicable
dells, rises and lakes, found
in a flat place of no lakes—or feel
the senses: cheese, bread, tart
apples and wine, broiling acres
of sunflowers in Spain, mansards
in Vermont, painted shay and pard,
V
or the things I see, driving
with you: houses and cars, trees,
grasses and birds; people, incidents
of the senses—like women and men, dusk
on a golf course, waving clubs
dreamily in slow practice-gestures
profiled against a sky layered
purplish turquoise and gray, having
sport in the evening; or white
selvage of a mockingbird’s gray
blur as he dabbles wings and tail
in a gutter—all in a way fraught,
full of emotion, and yet empty—
how can I say it?—all empty
of sadness and happiness, deep
blank passions, waiting like houses
and cars of a strange place,
a profound emptiness that came once
in the car, your cheekbone, lashes,
hair at my vision’s edge, driving
VI
back from Vermont and then
into the iron dusk of Cambridge,
Central Square suddenly become
the most strange of places
as a Salvation Army band marches
down the middle, shouldering aside
the farting, evil-tempered traffic,
brass pitting its triplets and sixteenths
into the sundown fray of cops, gesturing
derelicts, young girls begging quarters,
shoppers and released secretaries, scruffy
workers and students, dropouts, children
whistling, gathering as the band
steps in place tootling and rumbling
in the square now, under an apocalypse
of green-and-pink sky, with paper
and filth spinning in the wind, crazy,
everyone—band, audience, city, lady
trumpeter fiddling spit-valve, John
Philip Sousa, me, Christianity, crazy
VII
and all empty except for you,
who look sometimes like a stranger;
as a favorite room, lake, picture
might look seen after years away,
your face at a new angle grows
unfamiliar and blank, love’s face
perhaps, where I chose once to dream
again, but better, those past failures—
“Some lovely, glorious Nothing,” Susan,
Patricia, Celia, forgive me—God,
a girl in my street was called Half-
A-Buck, not right in her head …
how happy I would be, or else
decently sad, with no past: you
only and no foolish ghosts
urging me to become some redeeming
Jewish-American Shakespeare
(or God knows what they expect,
Longfellow) and so excuse my thorny
egotism, my hard-ons of self-concern,
VIII
melodramas and speeches
of myself, crazy in love with
my status as a sad young man: dreams
of myself old, a vomit-stained
ex-jazz-Immortal, collapsed
in a phlegmy Bowery doorway
on Old Mr. Boston lemon-flavored
gin or on cheap wine—that romantic
fantasy of my future bumhood
excused all manner of lies, fumbles,
destructions, even this minute, “Mea
culpa!” I want to scream, stealing
the podium to address the band,
the kids, the old ladies awaiting
buses, the glazed winos (who accomplished
my dream while I got you, and art,
and daughters); “Oh you city of
undone deathcrotches! Terrible
the film of green brainpus! Fog
of corruption at the great shitfry! No
IX
grease-trickling sink
of disorder in your depressed
avenues is more terrible
than these, and not your whole
aggregate of pollution
is more heavy than the measure
of unplumbed muttering
remorse, shame, inchoate pride
and nostalgia in any one
sulphur-choked, grit-breathing
citizen of the place…” Sad,
the way one in part enjoys
air pollution, relishes
millennial doom, headlines,
even the troubles of friends—
or, OK, enjoys hearing
and talking about them, anyway—
to be whole-hearted is rare;
changing as the heart does, is it
the heart, or the sun emerging from
X
or going behind a cloud,
or a change somewhere in my eyes?
Terrible, to think that mere pretty
scenery—or less, the heraldic shape
of an oak leaf drifting down
curbside waters in the sun, pink
bittersweet among the few last
gray sad leaves of the fall—can bring
joy, or fail to. Shouldn’t I vow
to seek only within myself
my only hire? Or not? All my senses,
like beacon’s flame, counsel gratitude
for the two bright-faced girls
crossing the Square, beauty a light
or intelligence, no quarters for them,
long legs flashing bravely above
the grime—it is as if men were to
go forth plumed in white
uniforms and swords; how could we
ever aspire to such smartness,
XI
such happy grace? Pretty enough
plumage and all, a man in the bullshit
eloquence of his sad praises stumbles,
fumbles: fool. It is true, wonder
does indeed hinder love and hate,
and one can behold well with eyes
only what lies beneath him—
so that it takes more than eyes
to see well anything that is worth
loving; that is the sad part, the senses
are not visionary, they can tug
downward, even in pure joy—
trivial joy, the deep solid crack
of the bat. A sandlot home run
has led me to clown circling
the diamond as though cheered
by a make-believe audience
of thousands (you, dead poets, friends,
old coaches and teachers, everyone
I ever knew) cheering louder as I tip
XII
my imaginary, ironic hat and blow
false kisses crossing home, happiness
impure and oddly memorable as the sad
agony of recalled errors lived over
before sleep, poor throws awry
or the ball streaming through,
between my poor foolish legs, crouching
amazëd like a sot. Sport—woodmanship,
ball games, court games—has its cruel
finitude of skill, good-and-bad, as does
the bizarre art of words: confirmation
of a good word, polvo, dust, reddish gray
powder of the ballfield, el polvo
rising in pale puffs to glaze lightly
the brown ankles and brown bare feet in
Cervantes’ poem of the girl dancing, all
dust now, poet, girl. It is intolerable
to think of my daughters, too, dust—
el polvo—you whose invented game,
Sadness and Happiness, soothes them
XIII
to sleep: can you tell me one sad
thing that happened today, Can you think
of one happy thing to tell me that
happened to you today, organizing
life—not you too dust like the poets,
dancers, athletes, their dear skills
and the alleged glittering gaiety of
Art which, in my crabwise scribbling hand,
no less than Earth the change of all
changes breedeth, art and life
both inconstant mothers, in whose
fixed cold bosoms we lie fixed,
desperate to devise anything, any
sadness or happiness, only
to escape the clasped coffinworm
truth of eternal art or marmoreal
infinite nature, twin stiff
destined measures both manifested
by my shoes, coated with dust or dew which no
earthly measure will survive.