To be a mite at all! To be so small

  you can rest as in a bunk bed beneath a flea’s scales,

  or expend a lifetime in a single chicken feather

  or the mite-pouch (acarinarium) of a carpenter bee!

  To dwell happy in the mouth of a long-nosed bat,

  like one species of Macronyssidae’s protonymph,

  causing tissue destruction and loss of teeth,

  or beneath the skin of a mammal, creating mange!

  Think how Nature slaved over these arrangements!

  Thirty thousand species of acarines,

  fifty from the Antarctic alone, and some found

  five miles up Everest, or a mile down in the sea!

  Itch mites, cheese mites, monkey-lung mites, each

  making its way through the several larval stages

  to an awkward copulation (discounting

  parthenogenetic ticks) and easy death—

  what fresh perspectives! Specks of our shed skin

  delicious boulders, our human pores

  lubricious dish-shaped living rooms, and particles

  our largeness elides palpable to mites, who loom

  in the scanning electron microscope’s gray light

  as many-tentacled, with chelicerae—

  as hobbled as stegosaurs by their quaint

  equipment, as endearing as baffled bears,

  these mini-spiders characterized by

  lack of a waist, lateral eyes, and tininess.

  We marvel; we pity; we loathe; we try to forget

  perspectives from which we are smaller yet.

  An Open Letter to Voyager II

  Dear Voyager:

                           This is to thank you for

  The last twelve years, and wishing you, what’s more,

  Well in your new career in vacant space.

  When you next brush a star, the human race

  Will be a layer of old sediment,

  A wrinkle of the primates, a misspent

  Youth of some zoömorphs. But you, your frail

  Insectoid form, will skim the sparkling vale

  Of the void practically forever. As

  The frictionless light-years and -epochs pass,

  The rigid constellations Earth admires

  Will shift and rearrange their twinkling fires.

  No tipped antenna-dish will strain to hear

  Your whispered news, nor poet call you dear.

  Ere then, let me assure you you’ve been grand.

  A little shaky at the outset, and

  Arthritic in the swivel-joints, antique

  In circuitry, virtually deaf, and weak

  As a refrigerator bulb, you kept

  Those picture postcards coming. Signals crept

  To Pasadena; there they were enhanced

  Until those planets clear as daylight danced.

  The stripes and swirls of Jupiter’s slow boil,

  Its crazy moons—one cracked, one fried in oil,

  One glazed with ice, and one too raw to eat,

  Still bubbling with the juice of inner heat—

  Arrived on our astonished monitors.

  Then, following a station break of years,

  Fat Saturn rode your feeble beam, and lo!—

  Not corny as we feared, but Art Deco—

  The hard-edge, Technicolor rings; they spin

  At different speeds, are merely meters thin,

  And cast a flash-bulb’s shadows. Planet three

  Was Uranus (accented solemnly,

  By anchormen, on the first syllable,

  Lest viewers think the “your” too personal):

  A glassy globe of gas upon its side,

  Its nine faint braided rings at last descried,

  Its corkscrew-shaped magnetic passions bared,

  Its pocked attendants digitized and aired.

  Last loomed, against the Oort Cloud, blue Neptune,

  Its counterrevolutionary moon,

  Its wispy arcs of rings and whitish streaks

  Of unpredicted tempests—thermal freaks,

  As if an unused backyard swimming pool,

  Remote from stirring sunlight, dark and cool

  (Sub-sub-sub-freezing), chose to make a splash.

  Displays of splendid waste, of rounded trash!

  Your looping miles of guided drift brought home

  How fruitless cosmic space would be to roam.

  One awful ball succeeds another, none

  Fit for a shred or breath of life. Our lone

  Delightful, verdant orb was primed to cede

  The H2O and O and N we need.

  Your survey, in its scrupulous depiction,

  Purged from the solar system science fiction—

  No more Uranians or Io-ites,

  Just Earthlings dreaming through their dewy nights.

  You saw where we could not, and dared to go

  Where we would be destroyed; you showed

  A kind of metal courage, and faithfulness.

  Your cryptic, ciphered, graven messages

  Are for ourselves, designed to boomerang

  Back like a prayer from where the angels sang,

  That shining ancient blank encirclement.

  Your voyage now outsoars mundane intent

  And joins blind matter’s motions. Au revoir,

  You rickety free-falling man-made star!

  Machines, like songs, belong to all. A man

  Aloft is Russian or American,

  But you aloft were simply sent by Man

  At large.

                           Sincerely yours,

                                          A fan.

  Classical Optical

  The gray Graeae—

  Deino, Enyo, Pemphredo—

  shared one eye,

  but boasted two

  “ae”s—ae ae.

  If ae’s could see

  those three Graeae

  need not have grieved.

  But ancient Greece

  was heavily into

  fate and tragedy,

  not therapy;

  even Tiresias’s

  sex-change operation was

  permitted to

  stall halfway through.

  Neoteny

  According to Webster’s, “the condition

  of having the period of immaturity indefinitely prolonged,

  as in the axolotl.” The axolotl?

  Who invited this Mexican salamander

  to the party? According to The New York Times Magazine,

  neoteny is what we human beings share

  with sheep and dogs, housecats and cattle—

  the retention, that is, of childish trust and openness,

  of “expectation of care and feeding,”

  which drew us all together in domestication’s epoch,

  at the messy end of the Pleistocene—

  all those glaciers, retreating and advancing

  rather impetuously, as geology goes.

  In that unsettled era, evolution favored

  the late-developing, the infantile-tentative,

  the experimentally wandering, the young-at-heart

  neotenates, their characteristics not stodgily locked in.

  Welcome, we said, in our ramshackle settlements,

  to the waggle-tailed dog, all overeager helpfulness,

  and the violet-eyed sheep, with no thought in its head

  but Feed me, and the cow, thinking Milk me

  and Please fence me in. Came the cunning kitty-cat,

  mewing, only superficially aloof, not above it all

  at all, but slyly grateful for a bed

  of warm straw (the grasses and grains themselves

  clamoring to be domesticated) in exchange for the catch

  of an odd mouse or
two, the mice themselves

  in from the fields for a crash pad and a crumb.

  Neotenates bumble about, mounting ewes not in heat

  or even of their own species—this trait, too,

  conducing to one big family, chomping as one, huddling,

  shivering at the thought of the glaciers coming back.

  In the horse’s wide jelly of an eye, his rider

  is just another horse, of another color.

  O paradise of babes! The saber-toothed tiger, mature

  to a fault, has joined the voluptuously hairy mammoth

  in time’s tarpit, while we, saying goo-goo,

  saying bow-wow and baa, saying moo and meow,

  go flocking down the chutes and corrals of the future,

  all woolly and cozy and docile, ever trusting,

  our trustingness vindicated, our populations exploding

  while the untameable rhino runs vainly for cover

  and the axolotl (“esteemed for food in Mexico,”

  says Webster’s) covets our loveableness.

  Notes

  Ex-Basketball Player. My only oft-anthologized poem. The second stanza receives footnotes in some textbooks, to explain that once upon a time a gasoline station might offer a variety of brands of gasoline, with the trade names identified on glass heads above the pumps, and that ESSO, predecessor of EXXON, was one of the brands. The crowdlike candies are behind the luncheonette counter, beyond reach.

  March: A Birthday Poem. The child, in the event, came late: Elizabeth Pennington Updike was born in Oxford, England, early in the morning of April 1, 1955, the joke being on me. In the United States, it was still the last hours of March.

  Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers. I had taken along to the ball game a paperback copy of Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, and peeked into it between innings.

  Mobile of Birds. Perhaps the same mobile evoked in the short story “Toward Evening,” which was brought home by the young New Yorker, Rafe, to his wife and infant daughter: “The mobile was not a success. Alice had expected a genuine Calder, made of beautiful polished woods, instead of seven rubber birds with celluloid wings, hung from a piece of coarse wire. Elizabeth wanted to put the birds in her mouth and showed no interest in, perhaps did not even see, their abstract swinging, quite unlike the rapt infant shown on the box.”

  Shillington. Written for the semicentennial celebration of my home town’s incorporation in 1908, at the request of the late Charles J. Hemmig. Mr. Hemmig was a remarkable man, a loyal Shillingtonian for ninety years, who loomed large to our household, for as the supervising principal of the Shillington public schools he had considerable power over my schoolteacher father. My mother always thought that Mr. Hemmig, then a young principal, could have done more to ease her own initiation, in the mid-Twenties, into the world of teaching; she walked out of the classroom after a few hours, with lasting reverberations and self-recriminations. On the other hand, Mr. Hemmig sold my grandfather the only shares of stock that held their value after the Crash, and he wrote a generous and shrewd letter, which my mother preserved, supporting my family’s wild idea of sending me to Harvard. One of my earliest starts at a novel had Mr. Hemmig shadowily in mind, as the man in whose “interpretation everything was very relative”—a quote from Kierkegaard that I later attached to the historical figure of James Buchanan. I was pleased that he asked me.

  Lines 14–16. Sizable spheres of artificial stone were ornaments quite common on the retaining walls of towns in eastern Pennsylvania.

  Suburban Madrigal. Sitting in the first house I (et ux.) owned, 26 East Street, Ipswich, Massachusetts, waxing lyrical as I survey my domain.

  Telephone Poles, lines 21–22. Based on my understanding that many telephone conversations are simultaneously transmitted over the wires and unscrambled at the end.

  Mosquito. A number of correspondents informed me that only female mosquitoes “bite”; they need the sip of protein-rich blood to mature their eggs. Yet to make the pronoun “she” or “it” (I have tried it both ways) diminishes the music of the lines and falsifies the subjective experience. The mosquito felt, to the male poet as he lay there, like a male antagonist in the ominous bedroom dark. “It” ticks. “She” rather brutally sexualizes the encounter, and overloads the metaphor of “lover.” I would omit the poem as hopelessly marred but for losing the last two, gender-free stanzas.

  Trees Eat Sunshine. Cf. “Fever,” this page. A religious vision abetted, as is not infrequently the case, by illness.

  Winter Ocean. Flavored by a translation I did soon after college, combining avian allusions in two Anglo-Saxon poems, “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”:

  …Again the wretch wakens

  to sight dead-leaflike waves before him;

  sleet, frost, and hail, confused, fall;

  the sea-fowls bathe, broaden their feathers.

  Now in my heart-mood circles my thought,

  out of the breastlock, swings with the flood;

  over the whale-land widely it turns.

  Back to me comes my solitary soarer

  greedy and screaming, urging the whale-path,

  my heart irresistibly to the lakes of the sea.

  Seagulls. My distinct memory is that I was pondering gulls while lying on Crane Beach in Ipswich when the first stanza came over me in a spasm of inspiration. Penless and paperless, I ran to the the site of a recent beach fire and wrote in charcoal on a large piece of unburned driftwood. Then I cumbersomely carried my improvised tablet home. It must have been late in the beach season, and my final stanzas slow to ripen, for the poem’s completion is dated early December.

  Seven Stanzas at Easter. Composed for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, which I sometimes attended. Norman Kretzmann was pastor. Gratifyingly, the poem won first prize and has figured in a number of neo-orthodox sermons.

  B.W.I. Composed on the island of Anguilla, while lying on a dark Edwardian sofa, where I wrote during our weeks of tropical sabbatical. A brother effort, “Tropical Beetles,” with its bouncier metrics, is consigned to Light Verse (this page).

  Summer: West Side. The 1960 date on this surprised me, the poem so savors of my months of living at 126 Riverside Drive, just below Eighty-fifth Street, late in 1955.

  The Soli