Though faible Venus may be frantic

  At this dismissal, mundane men

      Have hearts of unmagnetic granite.

  Released from her depleted spell,

      Where shall we iron filings gather?

                 Stern Mars is cold, Uranus gassy,

  And Saturn hopelessly déclassé;

  Perhaps our lodestone lies in Hell.

      I still am drawn to Venus, rather.

  Farewell to the Shopping District of Antibes

  Next week, alas, BOULANGERIE

  Will bake baguettes, but not for me;

  The windows will be filled, although

  I’m gone, with brandy-laced gâteaux.

  TABAC, impervious, will vend

  Reynos to others who can spend

  Trois francs (moins dix centimes) per pack—

  Forget me not, très cher TABAC!

  Grim BOIS & CHARBONS & MAZOUT

  Will blacken someone else’s suit,

  And FLEURS will romance with the air

  As if I never had been there.

  ALIMENTATION won’t grieve

  As it continues, sans my leave,

  To garland oignons, peddle pommes,

  And stack endives till kingdom come.

  La mer will wash up on the sand

  Les poissons morts regardless, and

  JOURNAUX will ask, though I’m away,

  “UN AUTRE MARI POUR B.B.?”

  Some Frenchmen

  Monsieur Étienne de Silhouette*

      Was slim and uniformly black;

  His profile was superb, and yet

      He vanished when he turned his back.

  Humane and gaunt, precise and tall

      Loomed Docteur J. I. Guillotin;†

  He had one tooth, diagonal

      And loose, which, when it fell, spelled fin.

  André-Marie Ampère,‡ a spark,

      Would visit other people’s homes

  And gobble volts until the dark

      Was lit by his resisting ohms.

  Another type, Daguerre (Louis),§

      In silver salts would soak his head,

  Expose himself to light, and be

      Developed just in time for bed.

  Too brassy, tout Paris agreed

      Of Adolph Sax,|| who, Belgian-born,

  With cone-shaped bore and single reed,

      Forever tooted his own horn.

  * * *

  *1709–1767.

  †1738–1814.

  ‡1775–1836.

  §1789–1851.

  ||1814–1894

  Sea Knell

  Pulsating Tones in Ocean

  Laid to Whale Heartbeats

  —The New York Times

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

  There is society, where none intrudes,

  By the deep sea, and music in its roar.…

  —Byron

  I wandered to the surfy marge

      To eavesdrop on the surge;

  The ocean’s pulse was slow and large

      And solemn as a dirge.

  “Aha,” mused I, “the beat of Time,

      Eternally sonorous,

  Entombed forever in the brine,

      A fatal warning for us.”

  “Not so!” bespoke a jolly whale

      Who spouted into view.

  “That pulsing merely proves I’m hale

      And hearty, matey, too!

  “Rejoice, my lad—my health is sound,

      The very deeps attest!

  It permeates the blue profound

      And makes the wavelets crest!”

  With that, he plunged, in sheer excess

      Of spirits. On the shore,

  I hearkened with an ear much less

      Byronic than before.

  Vow

  (On Discovering Oneself Listed on the Back of a Concert Program as a “Museum Friend of Early Music”)

  May I forever a Muse-

  Um Friend of Early Music be;

  May I be never loath to thrill

  When three-stringed rebecs thinly trill,

  Or fail to have a lumpish throat

  When crumhorns bleat their fuzzy note.

  I’ll often audit, with ma femme,

  Duets of psaltery and shawm;

  Cross-flutes of pre-Baroque design

  Shall twit our eardrums as we dine,

  And Slavic guslas will, forsooth,

  In harsh conjunction with the crwth

  (Which is a kind of Welsh vielle,

  As all us Friends know very well),

  Lull both of us to sleep. My love,

  The keirnines (Irish harps) above

  Tune diatonically, and lyres

  Augment august celestial choirs

  That plan to render, when we die,

  “Lamento di Tristano” by

  Anonymous. With holy din

  Recorder angels will tune us in

  When we have run our mortal race

  From sopranino to contrabass.

  The Amish

  The Amish are a surly sect.

  They paint their bulging barns with hex

  Designs, pronounce a dialect

  Of Deutsch, inbreed, and wink at sex.

  They have no use for buttons, tea,

  Life insurance, cigarettes,

  Churches, liquor, Sea & Ski,

  Public power, or regrets.

  Believing motors undivine,

  They bob behind a buggied horse

  From Paradise to Brandywine,

  From Bird-in-Hand to Intercourse.

  They think the Devil drives a car

  And wish Jehovah would revoke

  The licensed fools who travel far

  To gaze upon these simple folk.

  The Naked Ape

  (Following, Perhaps All Too Closely, Desmond Morris’s Anthropological Revelations)

  The dinosaur died, and small

      Insectivores (how gruesome!) crawled

  From bush to tree, from bug to bud,

      From spider-diet to forest fruit and nut,

  Forming bioptic vision and

                 The grasping hand.

  These perfect monkeys then were faced

      With shrinking groves; the challenged race,

  De-Edenized by glacial whim,

      Sent forth from its arboreal cradle him

  Who engineered himself to run

                 With deer and lion—

  The “naked ape.” Why naked? Well,

      Upon those meaty plains, that veldt

  Of prey, as pell-mell they competed

      With cheetahs, hairy primates overheated;

  Selection pressure, just though cruel,

                 Favored the cool.

  Unlikeliest of hunters, nude

      And weak and tardy to mature,

  This ill-cast carnivore attacked,

      With weapons he invented, in a pack.

  The tribe was born. To set men free,

                 The family

  Evolved; monogamy occurred.

      The female—sexually alert

  Throughout the month, equipped to have

      Pronounced orgasms—perpetrated love.

  The married state decreed its lex

                 Privata: sex.

  And Nature, pandering, bestowed

      On virgin ears erotic lobes

  And hung on women he
mispheres

      That imitate their once-attractive rears:

  A social animal disarms

                 With frontal charms.

  All too erogenous, the ape

      To give his lusts a decent shape

  Conceived the cocktail party, where

      Unmates refuse to touch each other’s hair

  And make small “grooming” talk instead

                 Of going to bed.

  He drowns his body scents in baths

      And if, in some conflux of paths,

  He bumps another, says, “Excuse

      Me, please.” He suffers rashes and subdues

  Aggressiveness by making fists

                 And laundry lists,

  Suspension bridges, aeroplanes,

      And charts that show biweekly gains

  And losses. Noble animal!

      To try to lead on this terrestrial ball,

  With grasping hand and saucy wife,

                 The upright life.

  The Origin of Laughter

  (Again, after Desmond Morris)

  Hunched in the dark beneath his mother’s heart,

  The fetus sleeps and listens; dropped into light,

  He seeks to lean his ear against the breast

  Where the known rhythm holds its secret pace.

  Slowly, slowly, through blizzards of dozing,

  A face is gathered, starting with the eyes—

  At first, quite any face; two painted dots

  On cardboard stir a responsive smile. Soon

  No face but one will serve: the mother’s,

  A mist, a cloud that clearly understands.

  She teases him, pretends to let him drop.

  He wants to cry but knows that she is good.

  Out of this sudden mix, this terror rimmed

  With half-protective flesh, a laugh is born.

  The Average Egyptian Faces Death

  (Based upon an Article in Life)

  Anubis, jackal-headed god

  of mummification, will tenderly

  eviscerate my corpse, oil it, salt it,

  soothe it with unguent gods’ tears and honey.

  My soul will be a ba-bird,

  a shadow, free to move in and out

  of my muralled house,

  though it’s no pyramid.

  In the court of Osiris the gods

  will weigh my heart

  for virtue; in the Field of Reeds

  baboons worship Re,

  and barley grows, and

  beetle-headed Khepri, god of early morning,

  infuses with gold the misted canals.

  Atum the creator has set

  a smoky partition in the midst of things,

  but the Nile flows through;

  death has no other name than ankh, life.

  Painted Wives

  Soot, house-dust, and tar didn’t go far

  With implacably bathing Madame Bonnard;

  Her yellowish skin has immortally been

  Turned mauve by the tints she was seen floating in.

  Prim, pensive, and wan, Madame Cézanne

  Posed with her purple-ish clothes oddly on;

  Tipped slightly askew, and outlined in blue,

  She seems to be hearing, “Stop moving, damn you!”

  All lilac and cream and pink self-esteem,

  Young Madame Renoir made the sheer daylight dream;

  In boas of air, without underwear,

  She smiles through the brushstrokes at someone still there.

  Skyey Developments

  The clouds within the Milky Way

  May well be diamonds, proudly say

  Astronomers at U. of C.

  The atmospheres of two or three

  “Cool stars” could concentrate and freeze

  More ice than winks at Tiffany’s.

  The pulsars, lately found to beep

  Six times or so a sec., still keep

  Themselves invisible, but are,

  Perhaps, a kind of neutron star

  So dense a cubic inch would tip

  The scales against a battleship.

  The moon, the men who jumped it swear,

  Is like a spheric sandbox where

  A child has dabbled; gray and black

  Were all the colors they brought back.

  The mad things dreamt up in the sky

  Discomfort our philosophy.

  Courtesy Call

  We again thank you for your esteemed order and now wish to advise you that the clothes are awaiting the pleasure of your visit.

  —card from a London tailor

  My clothes leaped up when I came in;

      My trousers cried, “Oh is it

  Our own, our prince?” and split their pleats

      At the pleasure of my visit.

  My jacket tried to dance with joy

      But lacked the legs; it screamed,

  “Though our confusion is deplored,

      Your order is esteemed!”

  “Dear clothes,” I cooed, “at ease. Down, please.

      Adjust your warp and weft.”

  Said they, “We love you.” I: “I know,

      I was advised,” and left.

  Business Acquaintances

  They intimately know just how our fortune lies

  And share the murmured code of mutual enterprise,

  So when we meet at parties, like lovers out of bed,

  We blush to know that nothing real is being said.

  Seven New Ways of Looking at the Moon

  July 21, 1969

  I

  Man, am I sick

                 of the moon.

  We’ve turned it into one big

                 television screen,

  one more littered campsite,

  one more high-school yearbook

                 signed, “Lots of luck,

                           Richard Nixon.”

  II

  Still, seeing Armstrong’s strong leg

  float down in creepy silhouette

                 that first stark second

                 was worth sitting up for.

  Then it got too real, and seemed

                 a George Pal Puppettoon

                 called “Men on the Moon,”

  mocked up on a Ping-Pong table.

  III

  Never again will I think of Houston

  as full of rich men in cowboy hats:

      it is full

  of numbers that like to talk

      and cajole.

  They say, “Neil, start gathering rocks now,”

  and, “Buzz, about time to get back into

      your module.”

  IV

  And how about little Luna

                 snooping around

  like a rusty private eye

                 casing the motel

  where we’d set up the tryst?

  V

  There was a backyard something

      that happened after

  they put up the flag and laid out

  the solar tinfoil and dug some holes.

      I had been there before,

  playing marbles under a line of wash,

  skinning my knees on the lack of grass.

  VI

  Since St. Paul filed his bulletins

  standing headlines have b
een claiming

                 SECOND COMING.

  Now the type was broken up and used:

                 MOON SEDUCING,

  one “c” turned sideways as a “u.”

  Since no one came, we went.

  VII

  Well, I don’t know. The media

  have swamped the message, but anyway

                 God bless the men.

                 I loved the way they ran,

  like bear-foot ghosts let out of school to say

  that Death is probably O.K.

  if all it means is being in the sky.

                 Which answers why.

  Upon Shaving Off One’s Beard

  The scissors cut the long-grown hair;

      The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz.

  Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare

      At the forgotten boy I was.

  The Cars in Caracas

  The cars in Caracas

  create a ruckukus,

  a four-wheeled fracacas,

  taxaxis and truckes.

  Cacaphono-comic,

  the tracaffic is farcic;

  its weave leads the stomach

  to turn Caracarsick.

  Insomnia the Gem of the Ocean

  Now when I lay me down to sleep

  My waterbed says, “Gurgle gleep,”

  And when I readjustment crave

  It answers with a tidal wave