burning in memory like leaky furnace doors,

  minepits of honesty from which we escaped

  with dilated suspicions. Love us, dead thrones:

  sing us to sleep, awaken our eyes,

  comfort with terror our mortal afternoons.

  Bath After Sailing

  From ten to five we whacked the waves,

  the hostile, mobile black

  that lurched beneath the leeward winch

  as helplessly we heeled.

  Now, after six, I lie at ease,

  at ease in a saltless sea my size,

  my fingertips shrivelled as if dead,

  the sway of the sloop still haunting the tub.

  I can’t stop seeing the heartless waves

  the mirthless color of green tar

  sliding on themselves like ball-bearings,

  deep and opaque and not me,

  not me: I was afraid,

  afraid of heeling over in the wind

  and inhaling bubbling lead

  and sinking, opaque as stone.

  Lord, how light my feet,

  wed to their salt-soaked sneakers,

  felt on the dock, amid the mysterious

  steadiness of trees and air.

  I did not want, I had not wanted

  to die. I saw death’s face

  in that mass absorbed

  in shrugging off its timeless weight,

  the same dull mass blond Vikings scanned,

  impervious to all the sailor love

  thrust onto it. My shredded hand

  ached on the jib-sheet line.

  The boat would clumsily, broken

  wings flapping, come about,

  and the slickered skipper search

  the sea-face and find me gone,

  his surprise not total,

  and one wave much like the rest,

  a toppling ton, a rib of time,

  an urgent message from nothing to nothing.

  I thank you, God of trees and air,

  whose steeples testify

  to something steady slipped by chance

  upon Your tar-green sliding face,

  for this my mock survival.

  My children’s voices plumb my death.

  My rippling legs are hydra limbs.

  My penis, my representative,

  my emissary to darkness, survivor

  of many a plunge, flipflops

  sideways, alive and small

  and pallid in reprieve.

  Black sea, deep sea, you dangle

  beneath my bliss like a dreadful gamble.

  Mute, white as a swimming-pool cork,

  I float on the skin

  of sleepiness, of my sleep,

  of all sleep.…How much I prefer

  this microcosmic version

  of flirting with immersion.

  Topsfield Fair

  Animals seem so sad to be themselves—

  the turkey a turkey even to his wattle,

  the rabbit with his pink, distinctly, eyes,

  the prize steer humble in his stall.

  What are they thinking, the pouter pigeons,

  shaped like opulent ladies’ hats,

  jerking and staring in aisles of cages;

  what does the mute meek monkey say?

  Our hearts go out to them, then stop:

  our fellows in mortality, like us

  stiff-thrust into marvellous machines

  tight-packed with chemical commands

  to breathe, blink, feed, sniff, mate,

  and, stuck like stamps in species, go out of date.

  Pompeii

                 They lived, Pompeiians,

      as installments of flesh in slots of stone;

                 they died in postures preserved,

  by a ghoulish casting process, in the dank museum here.

      Outside the gates, living Pompeiian men

                 peddle antique pornography.

                 One feels this place

      was cursed before that noon in 79

        when lunching gluttons found

  their sturgeon mouths hot-stuffed with screaming ash.

      There’s not much to admire but the fact

                 of preservation, and the plumbing.

                 The plumbing lingers

      like a sour aftertaste—the loving conduits,

                 the phallic fountains, the three degrees,

  so technically astute, of public bath. These Romans

      enslaved their liquids well; pornography

                 became their monument.

  Sand Dollar

  This disc, stelliferous,

  survived the tide

  to tell us some small creature

  lived and died;

  its convex delicacy

  defies the void

  that crushed a vanished

  echinoid.

  Stoop down, delighted;

  hoard in your hand

  this sand-colored coin

  redeemed from the sand

  and know, my young sudden

  archaeologist,

  that other modes of being

  do exist.

  Behold the horizon.

  Vastness acts

  the wastrel with

  its artifacts.

  The sea holds lives

  as a dream holds clues;

  what one realm spends

  another can use.

  Washington

  Diagonal white city dreamed by a Frenchman—

  the nouveau republic’s Senecan pretension

  populated by a grid of blacks—

  after midnight your taxi-laced streets

  entertain noncommittal streetlight shadows

  and the scurry of leaves that fall still green.

  Site, for me, of a secret parliament

  of which both sides agreed to concede

  and left the issue suspended in brandy,

  I think of you longingly, as a Yankee

  longs for Lee, sorry to have won,

  or as Ho Chi Minh mourns for Johnson.

  My capital, my alabaster Pandemonium,

  I rode your stunned streets with a groin

  as light and docile as a baby’s wrist,

  guilt’s senators laughing in my skull’s cloakroom,

  my hurried heart corrupt with peace,

  with love of my country, of cunt, and of sleep.

  Dream Objects

  Strangest is their reality,

  their three-dimensional workmanship:

  veined pebbles that have an underside,

  maps one could have studied for minutes longer,

  books we seem to read page after page.

  If these are symbols cheaply coined

  to buy the mind a momentary pardon,

  whence this extravagance? Fine

  as dandelion polls, they surface and explode

  in the wind of the speed of our dreaming,

  so that we awake with the sense

  of having missed everything, tourists

  hustled by bus through a land whose history

  is our rich history, whose artifacts

  were filed to perfection by beggars we fear.

  Midpoint

  I. Introduction

  ARGUMENT: The poet begins, and describes his beginnings. Early intimations of wonder and dread. His family on the Hill of Life in 1939, and his own present uncomfortable maturity. Refusing to take good advice, he insists on the endurance of the irreducible.

  Of nothing but me, me

  —all wrong, all wrong—

  as I cringe in the face of glory

  I sing, lacking
another song.

  Proud mouths around me clack

  that the livelong day is long

  but the nip of night tugs back

  my would-be celebrant brain

  to the bricks of the moss-touched walk,

  the sweet cold grass that had no name,

  the arbor, and the wicker chair

  turned cavernous beneath the tapping rain.

  Plain wood and paint pressed back my stare.

  Stiff cardboard apples crayoned to sell

  (for nickels minted out of air)

  from orange crates with still a citrus smell:

  the thermometer: the broom:

  this code of things contrived to tell

  a timid God of a continuum

  wherein he was delimited.

  Vengeful, he applied his sense of doom

  with tricycle tires to coppery-red

  anthills and, dizzy in his Heaven, grieved

  above his crushed Inferno of the dead.

  A screen of color said, You are alive.

  A skin of horror floated at my feet.

  The corpses, comma-shaped, indicted, If

  a wheel from far above (in summer heat,

  loose thunders roamed the sky like untongued wagons)

  would turn, you’d lie squashed on the street.

  That bright side porch in Shillington:

  under the sun, beneath grape leaves,

  I feared myself an epiphenomenon.

  The crucial question was, Why am I me?

  In China boys were born as cherishing

  of their small selves; in buried Greece

  their swallowed spirits wink

  like mica lost in marble.

  Sickened by Space’s waste, I tried to cling

  to the thought of the indissoluble:

  a point infinitely hard

  was luminous in me, and cried I will.

  I sought in middling textures part-

  icles of iridescence, scintillae

  in dullish surfaces; and pictured art

  as my descending, via pencil, into dry

  exactitude. Behind the beaded curtain

  of Matter lurked an understanding Eye.

  Clint Shilling’s drawing lessons: in

  the sun he posed an egg on paper, and said

  a rainbow ran along the shadow’s rim—

  the rainbow at the edge of the shadow of the egg.

  My kindergarten eyes were sorely strained

  to see it there. My still-soft head

  began to ache, but docilely I feigned

  the purple ghosts of green in clumsy wax:

  thus was I early trained

  and wonder, now, if Clint were orthodox.

  He lived above a spikestone-studded wall

  and honed his mustache like a tiny ax

  and walked a brace of collies down our alley

  in Pennsylvania dusk

  beside his melodic wife, white-haired and tall.

  O Philadelphia Avenue! My eyes lift up

  from the furtive pencilled paper

  and drown, are glad to drown, in a flood

  of light, of trees and houses: our neighbors

  live higher than we, in gaunt

  two-family houses glaring toward our arbor.

  Five-fingered leaves hold horse chestnuts.

  The gutter runs with golden water

  from Flickinger’s ice plant. Telephone wires hunt

  through the tree crowns under orders

  to find the wider world

  the daily Eagle and the passing autos

  keep hinting the existence of. And girls

  stroll toward Lancaster Avenue and school

  in the smoke of burning leaves, in the swirl

  of snow, in the cruel

  brilliance that follows, in the storm of buds that marries

  earth to the iron sky and brings renewal

  to the town so wide and fair from quarry

  to trolley tracks, from Kenhorst to Mohnton,

  from farmers’ market to cemetery,

  that a boy might feel himself point N

  in optics, where plane ABCD—

  a visual phenomenon—

  converges and passes through to be

  (inverted on the other side,

  where film or retina receives it)

  a kind of afterlife,

  knife-lifted out of flux

  and developed out of time:

  the night sky, with a little luck,

  was a camera back, the constellations

  faint silver salts, and I the crux

  of radii, the tip of two huge cones,

  called Empyrean and Earth,

  that took their slant and spin from me alone.

  I was that N, that white-hot nothing, yet

  my hands, my penis, came also into view,

  and as I grew I half unwilling learned

  to seem a creature, to subdue

  my giant solipsism to a common scale.

  Reader, it is pure bliss to share with you

  the plight of love, the fate

  of death, the need for food,

  the privileges of ignorance, the ways

  of traffic, competition, and remorse.

  I look upon my wife, and marvel that

  a woman, competent and good,

  has shared these years; my children, protein-fat,

  echo my eyes and my laugh: I am disarmed

  to think that my body has mattered,

  has been enrolled like a red-faced farm-

  boy in the beautiful country club

  of mankind’s copulating swarm.

  I did not expect it; humble

  as a glow-worm, my boneless ego asked

  only to witness, to serve as the hub

  of a wheeling spectacle that would not pass.

  My parents, my impression was,

  had acted out all parts on my behalf;

  their shouting and their silences

  in the hissing bedroom dark

  scorched the shadows; a ring of ashes

  expanded with each smoldering remark

  and left no underbrush of fuel

  of passion for my intimidated spark.

  My mother’s father squeezed his Bible

  sighing, and smoked five-cent cigars

  behind the chickenhouse, exiling the smell.

  His wife, bespectacled Granma,

  beheaded the chickens

  in their gritty wire yard

  and had a style of choking during dinner;

  she’d run to the porch, where one of us

  would pound her on the back until her inner

  conflict had resolved. Like me, she was nervous;

  I had sympathetic stomach cramps.

  We were, perhaps, too close,

  the five of us. Our lamps

  were dim, our carpets worn, the furniture

  hodgepodge and venerable and damp.

  And yet I never felt that we were poor.

  Our property included several stray

  cats, one walnut tree, a hundred feet or more

  of privet hedge, and fresh ice every other day.

  The brothers pressing to be born

  were kept, despite their screams, offstage.

  The fifth point of a star, I warmed

  to my onliness, threw tantrums,

  and, for my elders’ benison, performed.

  Seven I was when to amuse them

  I drew the Hill of Life.

  My grandfather, a lusty sixty-some,

  is near the bottom, beside

  the Tree to God, though twice twelve years

  in fact would pass before he, ninety, died,

  of eating an unwashed peach.

  His wife, crippled but chipper, stepped

  above him downward and, true, did not precede

  him up that Tree, but snored and slept

  six seasons more before her speechless spirit

  into unresi
sted silence crept.

  A gap, and then my father, Mr.

  Downdike of high-school hilarity,

  strides manful down the dry, unslippery

  pencil line. My mother is at the peak—

  eleven days short of thirty-five—

  and starting up the lonely slope is me,

  dear Chonny. Now on the downward side

  behold me: my breath is short,

  though my parents are still alive.

  For conscientious climbing, God gave me these rewards:

  fame with its bucket of unanswerable letters,

  wealth with its worrisome market report,

  rancid advice from my critical betters,

  a drafty house, a voluptuous spouse,

  and quatre enfants—none of them bed-wetters.

  From Time’s grim cover, my fretful face peers out.

  Ten thousand soggy mornings have warped my lids

  and minced a crafty pulp of this my mouth;

  and yet, incapable of being dimmed,

  there harbors still inside me like the light

  an anchored ketch displays, among my ribs,

  a hopeful burning riding out the tide

  that this strange universe employs

  to strip itself of wreckage in the night.

  “Take stock. Repent. The motion that destroys

  creates elsewhere; the looping sun

  sees no world twice.” False truths! I vouch for boys

  impatient, inartistically, to get things done,

  armored in speckled cardboard