THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright © 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1982 by John Updike.
Copyright Renewed 1982 by John Updike.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Of the fifty-five poems in this book, thirty-eight, plus E, J, M, and Q of “A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects,” appeared originally in The New Yorker.

Among the other poems, “The One-Year-Old” was first published in The Ladies’ Home Journal, “A Wooden Darning Egg” in Harper’s Magazine, “A Modest Mound of Bones” and “Ode III.ii: Horace” in Commonweal, “The Population of Argentina” in The Harvard Lampoon, and “Recitative for Sorely Tested Products” (under the title “Recitative for Punished Products”) in Punch.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Updike, John.
The carpentered hen and other tame creatures.

I. Title.
PS3571.P4C3    1982      811′.54    81-48133
eISBN: 978-0-307-96195-2      AACR2

v3.1

To Mary

When she [Philosophy] saw that the Muses of poetry were present by my couch giving words to my lamenting, she was stirred a while; her eyes flashed fiercely, and said she, “Who has suffered these seducing mummers to approach this sick man? Never do they support those in sorrow by any healing remedies, but rather do ever foster the sorrow by poisonous sweets. These are they who stifle the fruit-bearing harvest of reason with the barren briars of the passions: they free not the minds of men from disease, but accustom them thereto.”

—BOETHIUS, DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE

FOREWORD TO THE 1982 EDITION

This my first book yet had a long foreground of verse written since my early teens in imitation of Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley, Arthur Guiterman, Richard Armour, Robert Service, E. B. White, and others; the magical progression from frisson to words and thence from words to print first seemed feasible, to me, as a matter of stanzas and rhyme, and more poems than the number collected here were published in such available display cases as the Shillington High School Chatterbox, The Harvard Lampoon, and Jerry Kobrin’s hospitable column in the Reading (Pa.) Eagle. So when, in the June of my graduation from college, The New Yorker accepted “Duet, with Muffled Brake Drums,” a long campaign bore fruit and an old dream came true. This was in 1954. In the following three years—spent in Moretown, Vermont; Plowville, Pennsylvania; Oxford, England; New York City; and finally Ipswich, Massachusetts—I ruthlessly exploited with my offerings the editorial breach I had made, and The New Yorker, perhaps bemused by the apparition of so eager a young practitioner of the dying art of light verse, accepted enough to make me feel that I had become a professional writer.

The oldest poem in The Carpentered Hen is, if memory serves, “Why the Telephone Wires Dip and the Poles Are Cracked and Crooked,” written in high school, under the influence of science fiction. “The Population of Argentina” is one of many composed at Harvard, though not one of the three included in Max Shulman’s Guided Tour of Campus Humor (Hanover House, 1955). The translation of the Horatian ode was done in my senior year for a competition, which it did not win; but years later Garry Wills, then a classics scholar, chose it for his anthology Roman Culture (Braziller, 1966). The latest poems here are “Planting a Mailbox,” penned in observation of a rural rite performed soon after my hopeful move to a small New England town, and “A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects,” written one letter per day while I lay on the sands of Crane’s Beach in the summer of 1957. The infant son the alphabet was dedicated to now is twenty-five; twenty-four years have passed since Harper & Row, then Harper & Brothers, brought out The Carpentered Hen in a pretty mint-green jacket, and twenty-three years since my first novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf, who now, as a present to me on my fiftieth birthday, issues this new edition of my slim and no doubt expendable fledgling volume. Thank you, Alfred. Thank you, all, from the Chatterbox on.

Light verse did not need to exist as long as its qualities of playfulness and formality and mundane perception were present in the high verse of Donne and Marvell, Dryden and Pope. Even Blake, in such quatrains as those of “Infant Sorrow” and “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau,” had the trick of it. But with the onset of Romanticism an alternative convention emerged in the society verses of W. M. Praed (Don Juan’s tune minus Byron’s bass) and became mixed, in Carroll and Lear and Calverley, with parody of Victorian solemnities. Calverley, the most exquisite of these, had a pedantic, Horatian streak also present, some generations and an ocean removed, in that American promulgator of the deft art Franklin P. Adams. Light verse as practiced by F.P.A. and Guiterman, and then by White and McGinley and Morris Bishop, can now be seen as a form of Georgian poetry; the modernism of Eliot and Auden and Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens leaves no space where wit can strike its own separate music.

Polishing my post-adolescent jingles, I took small notice of these historical trends. But I did notice, around the time of John Kennedy’s assassination, that the market for comic, topical rhymes was slowly drying up, and my inspiration docilely dried up with it. Light verse makes up the bulk of this collection and exactly half of my next, Telephone Poles (1963); the fraction in Midpoint (1969) and Tossing and Turning (1977) is progressively smaller. I write no light verse now. Yet the aesthetic bliss of generating such lines as “My stick fingers click with a snicker” or “Superphosphate-fed foods feed me” or “thusiastically, and thus” is as keen as any I have experienced, and this week of preparing The Carpentered Hen for its new venture forth—changing a few words, readjusting the order slightly—has been one of peaceful communion with an estimable former self. Of course, in my early twenties I attempted not only light verse. The second poem here, and the second accepted by The New Yorker, is “serious” and has enjoyed a healthy anthology life, though its second stanza now reads strangely to students.* The lines welcoming my first child to the month of March (in fact she arrived late, on April Fools’ Day, the joke being on me) and those describing the inside of an English train compartment and Room 28 of the National Portrait Gallery seek to express what perhaps flickers at the edge of the light verse as well—the forebodings of a shy soul freshly embarked upon the uncharted ocean of adult life. “The blue above is mostly blue. / The blue below and I are, too.”

Those lines were written in anticipation of the sea voyage that would take me and my pregnant young wife to England. Many of these poems were written there, of the oddities around me in a land whose details seemed lifted, page after page, from the illustrations to books of my childhood, and of an America that when glimpsed through the telescope of an overseas Life also seemed quaint. England, where Belloc and Stevenson wrote their Cautionary Tales and Child’s Garden of Verses—models of the light mode—and where the present poet laureate is the supreme neo-Georgian Sir John Betjeman, indulges sheer versifying more freely than our no-nonsense republic, and this collection (titled in its British edition Hoping for a Hoopoe) is colored for me by a green English something that tinged as well my few years in gray Manhattan.

Like any art, light verse aspires to maximum density and an appearance of inevitability. On the other hand any ordering of language by means of meter and rhyme and their ghosts partakes of that “encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic” which Bergson defined as the essence of the comic. There is a lightness to all poetry, it being so drastic a distillation, and an echo of the primitive chant raised against the darkness. Light verse’s hyper-ordering of language through alliteration, rhyme, and pun is a way of dealing with the universe, an exercise of the Word not entirely lacking in Promethean resonance. High spirits are what Nature endows us with, that we may survive her crushing flux long enough to propagate. It will brighten my second half-century to have these old evidences of my own high spirits still in print.

J.U.

* That is, they have never seen glass-headed pumps, or gas stations with a medley of brands of gasoline, or the word ESSO. Other unredeemably obsolete references include: the first-wave trade names invoked in “A Rack of Paperbacks”; the forty-eight states and innocent patriotism of “Quilt” in the “Cheerful Alphabet”; and, in “Popular Revivals, 1956,” the reference to the motion picture The Last Hunt, which starred Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger.

DUET, WITH MUFFLED BRAKE DRUMS

50 Years Ago Rolls met Royce—a Meeting that made Engineering History

—advertisement in The New Yorker

Where gray walks slope through shadows shaped like lace

Down to dimpleproof ponds, a precious place

Where birds of porcelain sing as with one voice

Two gold and velvet notes—there Rolls met Royce.

“Hallo,” said Rolls. His umber silhouette

Seemed mounted on a blotter brushed when wet

To indicate a park. Beyond, a brown

Line hinted at the profile of The Town.

And Royce, his teeth and creases straight, his eye

A perfect match for that well-lacquered sky

(Has zenith since, or iris, been so pure?),

Responded, “Pleased to meet you, I am sure.”

A graceful pause, then Rolls, the taller, spake:

“Ah—is there anything you’d care to make?

A day of it? A fourth at bridge? Some tea?”

Royce murmured, “If your afternoon is free,

I’d rather, much, make engineering history.”

EX-BASKETBALL PLAYER

Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,

Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off

Before it has a chance to go two blocks,

At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage

Is on the corner facing west, and there,

Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.

Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—

Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,

Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.

One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes

An E and O. And one is squat, without

A head at all—more of a football type.

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46

He bucketed three hundred ninety points,

A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.

He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,

Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,

As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,

But most of us remember anyway.

His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.

It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.

Off work, he hangs around Mae’s luncheonette.

Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,

Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.

Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods

Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers

Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

PLAYER PIANO

My stick fingers click with a snicker

As, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;

Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker

And pluck from these keys melodies.

My paper can caper; abandon

Is broadcast by dint of my din,

And no man or band has a hand in

The tones I turn on from within.

At times I’m a jumble of rumbles,

At others I’m light like the moon,

But never my numb plunker fumbles,

Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.

SHIPBORED

That line is the horizon line.

The blue above it is divine.

The blue below it is marine.

Sometimes the blue below is green.

Sometimes the blue above is gray,

Betokening a cloudy day.

Sometimes the blue below is white,

Foreshadowing a windy night.

Sometimes a drifting coconut

Or albatross adds color, but

The blue above is mostly blue.

The blue below and I are, too.

AN ODE

(Fired into Being by Life’s 48-Star Editorial, “Wanted: An American Novel”)

STROPHE

Ours is the most powerful nation in the world. It has had a decade of unparalleled prosperity. Yet it is still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual.…

ANTISTROPHE

I’m going to write a novel, hey,

    I’ll write it as per Life:

I’m going to say, “What a splendid day!”

    And, “How I love my wife!”

Let heroines be once again

    Pink, languid, soft, and tall,

For from my pen shall flow forth men

    Heterosexual.

STROPHE

Atomic fear or not, the incredible accomplishments of our day are surely the raw stuff of saga.

ANTISTROPHE

Raw stuff shall be the stuff of which

    My saga will be made:

Brown soil, black pitch, the lovely rich,

    The noble poor, the raid

On Harpers Ferry, Bunker Hill,

    Forefathers fairly met,

The home, the mill, the hearth, the Bill

    Of Rights, et cet., et cet.

STROPHE

Nobody wants a Pollyanna literature.

ANTISTROPHE

I shan’t play Pollyanna, no,

    I’ll stare facts in the eye:

Folks come and go, experience woe,

    And, when they’re tired, die.

Unflinchingly, I plan to write

    A book to comprehend

Rape, fury, spite, and, burning bright,

    A sunset at The End.

STROPHE

In every healthy man there is a wisdom deeper than his conscious mind, reaching beyond memory to the primeval rivers, a yea-saying to the goodness and joy of life.

ANTISTROPHE

A wise and not unhealthy man,

    I’m telling everyone

That deeper than the old brainpan

    Primeval rivers run;

For Life is joy and Time is gay

    And Fortune smiles on those

Good books that say, at some length, “Yea,”

    And thereby spite the Noes.

THE CLAN

Emlyn reads in Dickens’ clothes.

Tennessee writes fleshy prose;

William Carlos, bony poems.

Esther swims in hippodromes.

Ted likes hits but hates his fans;

Gluyas draws Americans.

Vaughan pens music, score on score;

Soapy sits as governor.

I trust everybody is

Thankful for the Williamses.

WHY THE TELEPHONE WIRES DIP AND THE POLES ARE CRACKED AND CROOKED

The old men say

young men in gray

hung this thread across our plains

acres and acres ago.

But we, the enlightened, know

in point of fact it’s what remains

of the flight of a marvellous crow

no one saw:

Each pole, a caw.

THE POPULATION OF ARGENTINA

The Rand McNally Co.:

How little does it know!

    How much those clerks have missed

    Who blithely list

Argentina’s pop. as four-

Teen million, and no more,

    And even slightly less!

Why, I can count

Twice that amount

    By skimming through the columns of the daily press.

For every new edition

    Sees another harried soul

Seek a haven from sedition,

    Flee assassins, jump parole,

Or escape a harsh decision

    Of the anti-vice patrol

               By visiting that vast arena

               Of refugees called Argentina.

On the pampas, it is certain,

Lounges Richard Halliburton,

Adolf Hitler, Martha Raye,

Leon Trotsky’s ex-valet,

Greta Garbo, Mildred Fletcher,

“Fingers” Pico—you can betcher

Bottom dollar they are there,

Inhaling bueno air,

               As well

As seven aunts of Sun Yat-sen,

               Plus ten

Lost Tribes of Israel,

               Side by side

With every Balkan prince who never died.

Rand, recount; recount, McNally:

There’s been some slip-up in your tally;

    Count Argentinian heads again.

Search every cellar, scan each alley,

And you’ll discover Axis Sally

    Playing cribbage with Hart Crane.

EVEN EGRETS ERR

Egregious was the egret’s error, very.

    Egressing from a swamp, the bird eschewed

No egriot (a sour kind of cherry)*

    It saw, and reaped extremest egritude.§

* Obs.

§ Rare form of obs. Aegritude, meaning sickness.

SCENIC

O when in San Francisco do

As natives do: they sit and stare

And smile and stare again. The view

Is visible from anywhere.

Here hills are white with houses whence,

Across a multitude of sills,

The owners, lucky residents,

See other houses, other hills.

The meanest San Franciscan knows,

No matter what his sins have been,

There are a thousand patios

Whose view he is included in.

The Golden Gate, the cable cars,

Twin Peaks, the Spreckels habitat,

The local ocean, sun, and stars—

When fog falls, one admires that.

Here homes are stacked in such a way

That every picture window has

An unmarred prospect of the Bay

And, in its center, Alcatraz.

RECITATIVE FOR SORELY TESTED PRODUCTS

I was once a tire. To bolster sales

My cunning maker filled me full of nails.

My treads were shredded. I was made a flat

By great machines designed to do just that.

I was a typewriter. Harsh was my test.

Ten years I toiled unoiled without a rest.

One billion times, so claim the pedagogues,

The quick brown foxes jumped my lazy cogs.

I used to be a watch. My tick and tock

Were interchanged by polychronic shock.

The bit of bounce my spring retained was sapped

By tales of clocks alarmed, of watches strapped.

I am a shears. My thin lips prophesy

The Day to Come when angles cloud the sky,

When rugs rise up, mute tools get out of hand,

And sorely tested products scourge the land.

                                        All:

Then, then, the Holy Catalogue avers,

Will products test their manufacturers.

CAPACITY

CAPACITY 26 PASSENGERS

—sign in a bus

Affable, bibulous,

corpulent, dull,

eager-to-find-a-seat,

formidable,

garrulous, humorous,

icy, jejune,

knockabout, laden-

with-luggage (maroon),

mild-mannered, narrow-necked,

oval-eyed, pert,

querulous, rakish,

seductive, tart, vert-

iginous, willowy,

xanthic (or yellow),

young, zebuesque are my

passengers fellow.

V. B. NIMBLE, V. B. QUICK

Science, Pure and Applied, by V. B. Wigglesworth, F.R.S., Quick Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge.

—a talk listed in the B.B.C. Radio Times

V. B. Wigglesworth wakes at noon,

Washes, shaves, and very soon

Is at the lab; he reads his mail,

Tweaks a tadpole by the tail,

Undoes his coat, removes his hat,

Dips a spider in a vat

Of alkaline, phones the press,

Tells them he is F.R.S.,

Subdivides six protocells,

Kills a rat by ringing bells,

Writes a treatise, edits two

Symposia on “Will Man Do?,”

Gives a lecture, audits three,

Has the Sperm Club in for tea,

Pensions off an aging spore,

Cracks a test tube, takes some pure

Science and applies it, finds

His hat, adjusts it, pulls the blinds,

Instructs the jellyfish to spawn,

And, by one o’clock, is gone.

TUNE, IN AMERICAN TYPE

Set and printed in Great Britain by Tonbridge Printers, Ltd., Peach Hall Works, Tonbridge, in Times nine on ten point, on paper made by John Dickenson at Croxley, and bound by James Burn at Esher.

—colophon in a book published by Michael Joseph (London)

Ah, to be set and printed in

Great Britain now that Tonbridge Prin-

ters, Limited, employ old John

Dickenson, at Croxley. On

his pages is Times nine-on-ten-

point type impressed, and, lastly, when

at Peach Hall Works the job is done,

James Burn at Esher’s job’s begun.

    Hey nonny nonny nonny,

    Hey nonny nonny nay!

Tonbridge! Croxley! Esher! Ah,

is there, in America,

a tome contrived in such sweet towns?

No. English, English are the downs

w2here Jim Burn, honest craftsman, winds

beneath his load of reams; he binds

the sheets that once John Dickenson

squeezed flat from British pulp. Hey non-

    ny nonny, etc.

LAMENT, FOR COCOA

The scum has come.

    My cocoa’s cold.

The cup is numb,

    And I grow old.

It seems an age

    Since from the pot

It bubbled, beige

    And burning hot—

Too hot to be

    Too quickly quaffed.

Accordingly,

    I found a draft

And in it placed

    The boiling brew

And took a taste

    Of toast or two.

Alas, time flies

    And minutes chill;

My cocoa lies

    Dull brown and still.

How wearisome!

    In likelihood,

The scum, once come,

    Is come for good.

SONG OF THE OPEN FIREPLACE

When silly Sol in winter roisters

And roasts us in our closed-up cloisters

Like hosts of out-of-season oysters,

               The logs glow red.

When Sol grows cool and solely caters

To polar bears and figure skaters

And homes are turned refrigerators,

               The flames are dead.

And when idyllically transpires

The merger every man desires

Of air that nips and wood that fires,

               It’s time for bed.

MARCH: A BIRTHDAY POEM

for Elizabeth

My child as yet unborn, the doctors nod,

Agreeing that your first month shall be March,

A time of year I know by heart and like

To talk about—I, too, was born in March.

March, like November a month largely unloved,

Parades before April, who steals all shows

With his harlequinade of things renewed.

Impatient for that pastel fool’s approach,

Our fathers taunted March, called him Hlyd-monath,

Though the month is mild, and a murmurer.

Indeed, after the Titan’s fall and shatter

Of February, March seems a silence.

The Romans, finding February’s ruins

At the feet of March, heard his wind as boasting

And hailed his guilt with a war-god’s name.

As above some street in a cobbled sea-town

From opposing walls two huge boards thrust

To advertise two inns, so do the signs

Of Pisces the Fish and Aries the Ram

Overhang March. Depending on the day,

Your fortunate gem shall be the bloodstone

Or the diamond, your lucky color crimson

Or silver gray. You shall prove affable,

Impulsive, lucky in your friends, or cross,

According to the counterpoint of stars.

So press your business ventures, wear cravats,

And swear not by the moon. If you plant wheat,

Do it at dawn. The same for barley. Let

The tide transplant kohlrabi, leeks, and beans.

Toward the month’s end, sow hardy annuals.

It was this month when Caesar fell, Stalin died,

And Beethoven. In this month snowflakes melt—

Those last dry crusts that huddle by the barn.

Now kites and crocuses are hoisted up.

Doors slap open. Dogs snuffle soggy leaves,

Rehearsing rusty repertoires of smells.

The color of March is the one that lies

On the shadow side of young tree trunks.

March is no land of extremes. Dull as life,

It offers small flowers and minor holidays.

Clouds stride sentry and hold our vision down,

While underfoot the agony of roots

Is hidden by earth. Much, much is opaque.

The thunder bluffs, wind cannot be gripped,

And kites and crocuses are what they are.

Still, child, it is far from a bad month,

For all its weight of compromise and hope.

As modest as a monk, March shall be there

When on that day without a yesterday

You, red and blind and blank, gulp the air.

POETESS

At verses she was not inept,

    Her feet were neatly numbered.

She never cried, she softly wept,

    She never slept, she slumbered.

She never ate and rarely dined;

    Her tongue found sweetmeats sour.

She never guessed, but oft divined

    The secrets of a flower.

A flower! Fragrant, pliant, clean,

    More dear to her than crystal.

She knew what yearnings dozed between

    The stamen and the pistil.

Dawn took her thither to the wood,

    At even, home she hithered.

Unto the gentle, Pan is good—

    She never died, she withered.

POOEM

Writing here last autumn of my hopes of seeing a hoopoe …

—Sir Stephen Tallents in the London Times

I, too, once hoped to have a hoopoe

Wing its way within my scoopoe,

Crested, quick, and heliotroopoe,

    Proud Upupa epops.

    For what seemed an eternity,

I sat upon a grassy sloopoe,

Gazing through a telescoopoe,

Weaving snares of finest roopoe,

    Fit for Upupa epops.

    At last, one day, there came to me,

Inside a crusty enveloopoe,

This note: “Abandon hope, you doopoe;

The hoopoe is a misanthroopoe.

    (Signed) Your far-off friend, U. e.”

AN IMAGINABLE CONFERENCE

(Mr. Henry Green, Industrialist, and Mr. Wallace Stevens, Vice-President of the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., Meet in the Course of Business)

Exchanging gentle grips, the men retire,

prologued by courteous bumbling at the door,

retreat to where a rare room deep exists

on an odd floor, subtly carpeted. The walls

wear charts like checkered vests and blotters ape

the green of cricket fields. Glass multiplies

the pausing men to twice infinity.

An inkstand of blue marble has been carven:

no young girl’s wrist is more discreetly veined.

An office boy misplaced and slack intrudes,

apologizes speaking without commas

“Oh sorry sirs I thought” which signifies

what wellmeant wimbly wambly stuff it is

we seem to be made of. Beyond the room,

a gander sun’s pure rhetoric ferments

imbroglios—zut!—of bloom. The stone is so.

The pair confers in murmurings, with words

select and Sunday-soft. No more is known,

but rumor goes that as they hatched the deal,

vistas of lilac weighted their shrewd lids.

SUNFLOWER

Sunflower, of flowers

the most lonely,

yardstick of hours,

long-term stander

in empty spaces,

shunner of bowers,

indolent bender

seldom, in only

the sharpest of showers:

tell us, why

is it your face is

a snarl of jet swirls

and gold arrows, a burning

old lion face high

in a cornflower sky,

yet by turning

your head, we find

you wear a girl’s

bonnet behind?

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

Fernando Valenti, enthusiast, Yale graduate, and himself represented by numerous recordings of Scarlatti.

—The Saturday Review

Enthused I went to Yale, enthused

I graduated. Still infused

with this enthusiasm when

Scarlatti called, I answered enthusiastically, and thus

I made recordings numerous,

so numerous that I am classed,

quite simply, as “enthusiast.”

THE NEWLYWEDS

After a one-day honeymoon, the Fishers rushed off to a soft drink bottlers’ convention, then on to a ball game, a TV rehearsal and a movie preview.

—Life

“We’re married,” said Eddie.

Said Debbie, “Incredi-

ble! When is our honey-

moon?” “Over and done,” he

replied. “Feeling logy?

Drink Coke.” “Look at Yogi

go!” Debbie cried. “Groovy!”

“Rehearsal?” “The movie.”

“Some weddie,” said Debbie.

Said Eddie, “Yeah, mebbe.”

HUMANITIES COURSE

Professor Varder handles Dante

    With wry respect; while one can see

It’s all a lie, one must admit

    The “beauty” of the “imagery.”

Professor Varder slyly smiles,

    Describing Hegel as a “sage”;

But still, the man has value—he

    Reflects the “temper” of his “age.”

Montaigne, Tom Paine, St. Augustine:

    Although their notions came to naught,

They still are “crucial figures” in

    The “pageantry” of “Western thought.”

ENGLISH TRAIN COMPARTMENT

These faces make a chapel where worship comes easy:

Homo enim naturaliter est animal sociale.

The flutter of a Guardian, the riveted image

of Combe-in-Teignhead, faded by decades of eyes,

the sting of smoke, the coughs, the whispering

lend flavor to piety’s honest bone.

Half-sick, we suck our teeth, consult our thumbs,

through brown-stained glass confront the barbered hills

and tailored trees of a tame and castrate land.

Sheep elegant enough for any eclogue

browse under Constable clouds. The unnatural

darkness swells, and passengers stir

at the sound of tapping fingernails. Rain,

beginning, hyphenates our racing windows.

And hands and smiles are freed by the benediction.

The lights, always on, now tell. One man talks,

and the water, sluicing sideways, teases our direction.

Indeed, we are lively, smug, and brave

as adventurers safe after some great hazard,

while beside our shoulders the landscape streams

as across the eye of a bathysphere surfacing.

TIME’S FOOL

Frederick Alexander Pott

Arrives at parties on the dot.

The drinks have not been mixed, the wife

Is still applying, with a knife,

Extract of shrimp and chicken spread

To parallelograms of bread

When Pott appears, remarking, “I’m

Afraid I’m barging in on time.”

Frederick Pott is never late

For any rendezvous or date.

Arrange to meet at some hotel;

You’ll find he’s been there since the bell

Tolled the appointed hour. Not

Intending to embarrass, Pott

Says shyly, “Punctuality

Is psychological with me.”

Pott takes the most preposterous pains

To suit the scheduled times of trains.

He goes to concerts, races, plays,

Allowing nicely for delays, And at the age three score and ten

Pott plans to perish; doubtless then

He’ll ask, as he has often done,

“This was the time agreed upon?”

PHILOLOGICAL

The British puss demurely mews;

His transatlantic kin meow.

The kine in Minnesota moo;

Not so the gentle Devon cows:

                         They low,

As every school child ought to know.

CLOUD SHADOWS

(New Hampshire)

I

That white coconut, the sun,

    is hidden by his blue leaves,

piratical great galleons.

Our sky their spanking sea,

    they thrust us to an ocean floor,

withal with certain courtesy.

II

These courtly cotton-bellies rub

    around the jewel we live within

and down to the muddled hub

drop complements.

    Down shafts of violet fall

counterweights of shadow, hence

brown, blue, and gray occur

    upon the chipmunk-colored

earth’s fur.

III

Pine islands in a broken lake.

    Beyond Laconia the hills,

islanded by shadows, take

in cooling middle distance

    a motion from above, and lo!

grave mountains belly dance.

A MODEST MOUND OF BONES

(Pennsylvania)

That short-sleeved man, our

    uncle, owns

the farm next our farm, south

    and west of us, and

he butchers for a living, hand-to-mouth.

    Once walking on his land

we found a hill, topped by a flower,

    a hill of bones.

They were rain-scrubbed clean—

    lovely things.

Depending how the white

    sun struck, chips of col-

or (green, yellow, dove-blue, a light

    bay) flew off the sul-

len stilled turning there. To have seen

    those clickless rings,

those prisonerless

    ribs, complex

beyond the lathe’s loose jaws,

    convolute compounds

of knobs, rods, hooks, moons, absurd paws,

    subtle flats and rounds:

no man could conceive such finesse,

    concave or -vex.

Some curve like umbrella

    handles, keys

to mammoth locks. Some bend

    like equations hunting

infinity, toward which to tend.

    How it sags!—what bunting

is flesh to be hung from such ele-

    gant balconies?

TO AN USHERETTE

Ah, come with me,

Petite chérie,

And we shall rather happy be.

I know a modest luncheonette

Where, for a little, one can get

A choplet, baby Lima beans,

And, segmented, two tangerines.

Le coup de grâce,

My petty lass,

Will be a demi-demitasse

Within a serviette conveyed

By weazened waiters, underpaid,

Who mincingly might grant us spoons

While a combo tinkles trivial tunes.

Ah, with me come,

Ma faible femme,

And I shall say I love you some.

SUNGLASSES

On an olive beach, beneath a turquoise sky

And a limeade sun, by a lurid sea,

While the beryl clouds went blithely by,

We ensconced ourselves, my love and me.

O her verdant hair! and her aqua smile!

O my soul, afloat in an emerald bliss

That retained its tint all the watery while—

And her copper skin, all verdigris!

YOUTH’S PROGRESS

Dick Schneider of Wisconsin … was elected “Greek God” for an interfraternity ball.

—Life

When I was born, my mother taped my ears

So they lay flat. When I had aged ten years,

My teeth were firmly braced and much improved.

Two years went by; my tonsils were removed.

At fourteen, I began to comb my hair

A fancy way. Though nothing much was there,

I shaved my upper lip—next year, my chin.

At seventeen, the freckles left my skin.

Just turned nineteen, a nicely molded lad,

I said goodbye to Sis and Mother; Dad

Drove me to Wisconsin and set me loose.

At twenty-one, I was elected Zeus.

DILEMMA IN THE DELTA

An extra quarter-inch on Cleopatra’s nose would have changed the entire course of history.

—Pascal, misquoted in a newspaper

Osiris pales; the palace walls

Blush east; through slatted arches falls

The sun, who stripes the cushions where

Empires have been tucked away.

Light fills her jewels and rims her hair

And Cleopatra ripens into day.

Awake, she flings her parakeets

Some chips of cinnamon, and beats

Her scented slave, a charming thing

Who chokes back almond tears. The queen,

Her wrist fatigued, then bids them bring

Her mirror, a mammoth aquamarine.

She rests the gem upon her thighs

And checks her features. First, the eyes:

Weight them with ink. The lips need rose

Tint: crush a rose. And something’s wrong

Between her mouth and brow—her nose,

Her nose seems odd, too long. It is too long!

These stupid jokes of Ra! She sees,

Through veils of fury, centuries

Shifting like stirred-up camels. Men

Who wrought great deeds remain unborn,

Unthought-of heroes fight like ten,

And her own name is lost to praise or scorn.

As she lies limp, seduced by grief,

There enters, tall beyond belief,

Marc Antony, bronze-braceleted,

Conceived where Rome on Tiber sits.

Six sprigs of laurel gird his head.

His mouth expels two avocado pits.

“Now dies,” she cries, “your love, my fame!

My face shall never seem the same!”

But Marc responds, “Deorum artis

Laudemus! Bonum hoc est omen.

Egyptian though your wicked heart is,

I can’t resist a nose so nobly Roman.”

A WOODEN DARNING EGG

The carpentered hen

unhinges her wings,

abandons her nest

of splinters, and sings.

The egg she has laid

is maple and hard

as a tenpenny nail

and smooth as a board.

The grain of the wood

embraces the shape

as brown feathers do

the rooster’s round nape.

Under pressure of pride,

her sandpapered throat

unwarps when she cries

Cross-cut! ka-ross-cut!

Beginning to brood,

she tests with a level

the angle, sits down,

and coos Bevel bevel.

MR. HIGH-MIND

Then went the Jury out, whose names were Mr. Blind-man, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Lyar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable.

—The Pilgrim’s Progress

Eleven rogues and he to judge a fool—

He files out with the jury, but distaste

Constricts his fluting nostrils, and his cool

Mind turns tepid with contempt. There is brought

A basin for him, in which to wash his hands.

Laving his palms and fingertips, he finds

An image of his white, proportioned thought

Plunged in the squalid suds of other minds.

Unmoved by Lust’s requests or Hate’s commands

Or Superstition’s half-embarrassed bribe,

His brain takes wing and flutters up the course

First plotted by the Greeks, up toward the sphere

Where issues and alternatives are placed

In that remorseless light that knows no source.

Here, in this saddle-shaped, vanilla void,

The wise alone have cause for breathing; here

Lines parallel on Earth, extended, meet.

Here priests in tweeds gyrate around the feet

Of Fact, their bride, and hymn their gratitude

That each toe of her ten is understood.

From this great height, the notion of the Good

Is seen to be a vulgar one, and crude.

High-mind as Judge descends to Earth, annoyed,

Despairing Justice. Man, a massy tribe,

Cannot possess one wide and neutral eye.

He casts his well-weighed verdict with a sigh

And for a passing moment is distressed

To see it coinciding with the rest.

THE ONE-YEAR-OLD

(After Reading the Appropriate Chapter in Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, by Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg)

Wakes wet; is promptly toileted;

Jargons to himself; is fed;

Executively grips a cup;

Quadrupedal, will sit up

Unaided; laughs; applauds; enjoys

Baths and manipulative toys;

Socializes (parents: shun

Excess acculturation);

Demonstrates prehension; will

Masticate yet seldom spill;

Creeps (gross motor drives are strong);

And jargons, jargons all day long.

SUPERMAN

I drive my car to supermarket,

    The way I take is superhigh,

A superlot is where I park it,

    And Super Suds are what I buy.

Supersalesmen sell me tonic—

    Super-Tone-O, for Relief.

The planes I ride are supersonic.

    In trains, I like the Super Chief.

Supercilious men and women

    Call me superficial—me,

Who so superbly learned to swim in

    Supercolossality.

Superphosphate-fed foods feed me;

    Superservice keeps me new.

Who would dare to supersede me,

    Super-super-superwho?

PUBLIUS VERGILIUS MARO, THE MADISON AVENUE HICK

This was in Italy. The year was the thirty-seventh before the birth of Christ. The people were mighty hungry, for there was a famine in the land.

—the beginning of a Heritage Club advertisement, in The New Yorker, for The Georgics

It takes a heap o’ pluggin’ t’ make a classic sell,

Fer folks are mighty up-to-date, an’ jittery as hell;

They got no yen to set aroun’ with Vergil in their laps

When they kin read the latest news in twenty-four-point caps.

Ye’ve got t’ hit ’em clean an’ hard, with simple predicates,

An’ keep the clauses short becuz these days nobody waits

T’ foller out a sentence thet all-likely lacks a punch

When in the time o’ readin’ they could grab a bite o’ lunch.

Ye’ve got t’ hand ’em place an’ time, an’ then a pinch o’ slang

T’ make ’em feel right comfy in a Latinate shebang,

An’ ef your taste buds curdle an’ your tum turns queasy—well,

It takes a heap o’ pluggin’ t’ make a classic sell.

IN MEMORIAM

In the novel he marries Victoria but in the movie he dies.

—caption in Life

Fate lifts us up so she can hurl

    Us down from heights of pride,

Viz.: in the book he got the girl

    But in the movie, died.

The author, seeing he was brave

    And good, rewarded him,

Then, greedy, sold him as a slave

    To mean old M-G-M.

He perished on the screen, but thrives

    In print, where serifs keep

Watch o’er the happier of his lives:

    Say, Does he wake, or sleep?

LITTLE POEMS

OVERCOME, Kim flees in bitter frustration to her TV studio dressing room where she angrily flings a vase of flowers to the floor and sobs in abandon to a rose she destroys: “I’m tearing this flower apart like I’m destroying my life.” As she often does, she later turned the episode into a little poem.

—photograph caption in Life

I woke up tousled, one strap falling

    Off the shoulder, casually.

In came ten Time-Life lensmen, calling,

    “Novak, hold that déshabillé!”

I went to breakfast, asked for java,

    Prunes, and toast. “Too dark,” they said.

“The film we use is fast, so have a

    Spread of peaches, tea, and bread.”

I wrote a memo, “To my agent—”

    “Write instead,” they said, “ ‘Dear Mum.’ ”

In conference, when I made a cogent

    Point, they cried, “No, no! Act dumb.”

I told a rose, “I tear you as I

    Tear my life,” and heard them say,

“Afraid that ‘as’ of yours is quasi-

    Classy. We like ‘like.’ O.K.?”

I dined with friends. The Time-Life crewmen

    Interrupted: “Bare your knees,

Project your bosom, and, for human

    Interest, look ill at ease.”

I, weary, fled to bed. They hounded

    Me with meters, tripods, eyes

That winked and winked—I was surrounded!

    The caption read, “ALONE, Kim cries.”

TSOKADZE O ALTITUDO

“Tsokadze has invented a new style—apparently without knowing it. He does not bend from the waist at all. His body is straight and relaxed and leaning far out over his skis until his face is only two feet above them, his arms at his side, his head up. His bindings and shoes are so loose that only his toes touch his skies. He gets enormous distances and his flight is so beautiful.”

—Thorlief Schjelderup, quoted in The New York Times, of a young Russian ski-jumper

Tsokadze leans unknowingly

    Above his skis, relaxed and tall.

    He bends not from the waist at all.

This is the way a man should ski.

He sinks; he rises, up and up,

    His face two feet above the wood.

    This way of jumping, it is good,

Says expert Thorlief Schjelderup.

Beneath his nose, the ski-tips shake;

    He plummets down the deepening wide

    Bright pit of air, arms at his side,

His heart aloft for Russia’s sake.

Loose are the bindings, taut the knees,

    Relaxed the man—see, still he flies

    And only his toes touch his skies!

Ah, c’est beau, when Tsokadze skis.

PLANTING A MAILBOX

Prepare the ground when maple buds have burst

    And when the daytime moon is sliced so thin

His fibers drink blue sky with litmus thirst.

    This moment come, begin.

The site should be within an easy walk,

    Beside a road, in stony earth. Your strength

Dictates how deep you delve. The seedling’s stalk

    Should show three feet of length.

Don’t harrow, weed, or water; just apply

    A little gravel. Sun and motor fumes

Perform the miracle: in late July,

    A young post office blooms.

TAO IN THE YANKEE STADIUM BLEACHERS

(Having Taken Along to the Ball Game Arthur Waley’s Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China)

Distance brings proportion. From here

the populated tiers

as much as players seem part of the show:

a constructed stage beast, three folds of Dante’s rose,

or a Chinese military hat

cunningly chased with bodies.

“Falling from his chariot, a drunk man is unhurt

because his soul is intact. Not knowing his fall,

he is unastonished, he is invulnerable.”

So, too, the “pure man”—“pure”

in the sense of undisturbed water.

“It is not necessary to seek out

a wasteland, swamp, or thicket.”

The opposing pitcher’s pertinent hesitations,

the sky, this meadow, Mantle’s thick baked neck,

the old men who in the changing rosters see

a personal mutability,

green slats, wet stone are all to me

as when an emperor commands

a performance with a gesture of his eyes.

“No king on his throne has the joy of the dead,”

the skull told Chuang-tzu.

The thought of death is peppermint to you

when games begin with patriotic song

and a democratic sun beats broadly down.

The Inner Journey seems unjudgeably long

when small boys purchase cups of ice

and, distant as a paradise,

experts, passionate and deft,

hold still while Berra flies to left.

DUE RESPECT

They [members of teen-age gangs] are respectful of their parents and particularly of their mothers—known as “moo” in their jargon.

—The New York Times Magazine

Come moo, dear moo, let’s you and me

Sit down awhile and talk togee;

My broo’s at school, and faa’s away

A-gaaing rosebuds while he may.

Of whence we come and whii we go

Most moos nee know nor care to know,

But you are not like any oo:

You’re always getting in a poo

Or working up a dreadful laa

Over nothing—nothing. Bah!

Relax. You love me, I love you,

And that’s the way it shapes up, moo.

TAX-FREE ENCOUNTER

We have $3,000 savings to invest and believe in the dignity of man. Box Y-920.

—Personal notice in The Saturday Review

I met a fellow in whose hand

Was hotly held a cool three grand.

“Inform me of,” he said, “the best

Technique of gaining interest.”

“Lend money at usurious rates,”

I said. “It soon accumulates.”

“Oh no!” he cried. “It is unsound

Artistically. Read Ezra Pound.”

“Invest,” I then suggested. “Deal

Yourself a hand in U.S. Steel.”

He snapped, “Big businessmen are sharks.

Peruse Das Kapital, by Marx.”

“Then buy some U.S. Savings Bonds,

For Our Defense, which corresponds

To Yours and Mine.” He told me, “Cease!

Defense degrades. Read War and Peace.”

He added, “Dignity of men

Is what we most believe in.” Then

He slyly smiled and slowly backed

Away, his principal intact.

ROOM 28

National Portrait Gallery, London

Remembered as octagonal, dark-panelled,

    And seldom frequented, except by me—

                         Indeed, a bower

Attained down avenues where, framed and annalled,

    Great England’s great with truculence outlive

                         Their hour

And staringly endure mean immortality—

    The room gave rest as some libraries give.

The visitor, approaching, brushed a girlish

    Bust of Lord Byron. Sir James George Frazer’s head,

                         An unarmed sentry,

Austere, tormented, brazen-browed, and churlish,

    Guarded with sternness fit for Stygian gates

                         The entry

To harmless walls where men of letters lately dead

    Were hung. The envied spot was held by Yeats.

His mask, alone a mask among the paintings,

    Attracted to itself what little sun

                         The sky admitted.

Half-bronze, half-black, his Janus-face at matins

    Amazed that dim arena of the less

                         Weird-witted

Survivors of a blurred time: presbyters upon

    Whose faces grieved the ghost of earnestness.

The whites of Rider Haggard’s eyes were showing

    When last I saw them. Conrad’s cheeks were green,

                         And Rudyard Kipling’s

Pink profile burned against his brown works, glowing

    With royalties and loyal choler. Fine

                         Sweet stipplings

Limned the long locks that Ellen Terry, seventeen,

    Pre-Raphaelite, and blonde, let down to shine.

There Stevenson looked ill and ill-depicted;

    Frail Patmore, plucked yet gamey; Henry James,

                         Our good grammarian,

More paunched and politic than I’d expected.

    Among the lone-faced portraits loomed a trin-

                         Itarian

Composite: Baring, Chesterton, Belloc. The frame’s

    Embellished foursquare dogma boxed them in.

Brave room! Where are they now? In college courses,

    Perused in inferior light, then laid

                         On library tables.

Fair knights mismounted on empirical horses,

    Flagbearers for a tattered heraldry

                         Of labels,

Their universe did not deserve their vows. They fade

    In pale sun, placed in neither century.

THE SENSUALIST

Each Disc contains not more than ¼ minim of Chloroform together with Capsicum, Peppermint, Anise, Cubeb, Licorice, and Linseed.

—from a box of Parke-Davis throat discs

Come, Capsicum, cast off thy membranous pods;

Thy Guinea girlhood’s blossoms have been dried.

Come, Peppermint, belovèd of the gods

(That is, of Hades; Ceres, in her pride,

So Strabo says, transmogrified

Delicious Mintha, making her a plant).

Come, Anise, sweet stomachic stimulant,

Most umbelliferous of condiments,

Depart thy native haunt, the hot Levant.

Swart Licorice, or Liquorice, come hence,

And Linseed, too, of these ingredients

Most colorless, most odorless, most nil.

And Javan Cubeb, come—thy smokable

Gray pericarps and pungent seeds shall be

Our feast’s incense. Come, Chloroform, née Phyll,

In demiminims dance unto the spree.

Compounded spices, come: dissolve in me.

MOUNTAIN IMPASSE

“I despise mountains,” Stravinsky declared contemptuously, “they don’t tell me anything.”

—Life

Stravinsky looks upon the mountain,

    The mountain looks on him;

They look (the mountain and Stravinsky)

    And both their views are dim.

“You bore me, mountain,” says Stravinsky,

    “I find you dull, and I

Despise you!” Says the mountain:

    “Stravinsky, tell me why.”

Stravinsky bellows at the mountain

    And near-by valleys ring:

“You don’t confide in me—Stravinsky!

    You never tell me anything!”

The hill is still before Stravinsky.

    The skies in silence glisten.

At last, a rumble, then the mountain:

    “Igor, you never listen.”

SNAPSHOTS

How good of Mrs. Metz! The blur

Must be your cousin Christopher.

A scenic shot Jim took near Lyme.

Those rocks seemed lovely at the time.

And here’s a product of the days

When Jim went through his gnarled-tree phase.

The man behind the man in shorts—

His name is Shorer, Shaw, or Schwartz.

The kids at play. This must be Keith.

Can that be Wilma underneath?

I’d give my life to know why Josh

Sat next to Mrs. McIntosh.

Jim looked so well in formal clothes.

I was much slimmer than this shows.

Yes, Jim and I were so in love.

That hat: what was I thinking of?

This disappointed Mrs. Striker.

I don’t know why, it’s very like her.

The dog is Skip. He loved to play.

We had to have him put away.

I guess these people are the Wrens.

An insect landed on the lens.

This place is where I was inspired

To—stop me, if your eyes are tired.

A BITTER LIFE

Dr. Ycas [of the Quartermaster Research and Development Center, in a report to the National Academy of Sciences] holds that the ocean itself was alive. There were no living creatures in it.

—The New York Times

O you Dr. Ycas you!

    In one convulsive motion

Your brain has given birth unto

    A viable young ocean.

All monsters pale beside the new:

    The Hydra, Hap, Garuda, Ra,

Italapas, Seb, Hua-hu

    Tiao, Gulltopr, Grendel’s ma,

Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan,

    Onniont, Audhumbla, Ix,

Geryon, Leviathan,

    666,

The ox Ahura Mazda made,

    The Fomors, deevs, Graiae,

And others of this ilk all fade

    Alongside Ycas’ sea.

The straits were sinews, channelways

    Were veins, and islands eyes,

Rivers tails, reefs bones, and bays,

    Depending on their size,

Fists, shoulders, heads, ears, mouths, or feet.

    The fjords, as fingers, froze

Sometimes, as did the arctic pate

    And pale antarctic toes.

O horrid, horrid Ocean! The

    Foul grandmother of Tyr,

Who had nine hundred crania,

    Did not look half so queer.

It whistled with a mournful hiss

    In darkness; scared and bored,

It lapped the land, yet every kiss

    Was stonily ignored.

A spheric skin, or blue-green hide,

    Alone the ocean kept

Our planet’s house, yet when it died

    One aeon, no one wept.

Hap: Apis, bull-god of Egypt, reincarnation of Osiris. Garuda: man-bird, steed of Vishnu, Hindu. Italapas: coyote, one of chief Chinook Indian deities. Seb: otherwise Geb, Keb, or Qeb; divine goose, Egyptian. Hua-hu Tiao: Protean creature, snake or white rat, has the power to assume the shape of a man-eating elephant with wings, etc., Chinese. Gulltopr: also Goldropf; Heimdall’s horse, Teutonic. Quetzalcoatl: name means “serpent dressed with green feathers,” though he was, of course, an anthropomorphic god, Aztec. Kukulkan: again, feathered serpent, Maya. Onniont: monster snake worshiped by Huron Indians. Audhumbla: cow who nourished Ymir, the first giant; both sprang from the mist, Norse. Ix: one of the four Bacabs, who stood at the four corners of the world and held it up, Maya. Geryon: three heads, three bodies, enormous wings, son of Chrysaor and Callirrhoë, lived on Erytheia, Greek. 666: beast of Revelation 13. The ox Ahura Mazda made: a raging, senseless creature; the first creative effort in the animal line made by the Persian Lord of Wisdom. Fomors: hideous misshapen monsters representing the kingdom of darkness, Celtic. deevs: Persian evil spirits, huge and ugly; long horns, tails, and fangs. Graiae: sisters to the Gorgons, had only one tooth and one eye among them, Greek.

A RACK OF PAPERBACKS

Gateway, Grove,

    and Dover say,

“Unamuno

    any day.”

Beacon Press

    and Torchlight chorus,

“Kierkegaard

    does nicely for us.”

“Willey, Waley,”

    Anchor bleats,

“Auden, Barzun,

    Kazin, Keats.”

“Tovey, Glover,

    Cohen, Fry”

is Meridian’s

    reply.

“Bentley’s best,”

    brags Dramabooks.

Harvest brings forth

    Cleanth Brooks.

All, including

    Sentinel,

Jaico, Maco,

    Arco, Dell,

Noonday, Vintage,

    Living Age,

Mentor, Wisdom—

    page on page

of classics much

    too little known

when books were big

    and bindings sewn—

agree: “Lord Raglan,

    Margaret Mead,

Moses Hadas,

    Herbert Read,

the Panchatantra,

    Hamsun’s Pan,

Tillich, Ilg,

    Kahlil Gibran,

and Henry James

    sell better if

their spines are not

    austerely stiff.”

GLASSES

I wear them. They help me. But I

Don’t care for them. Two birds, steel hinges

Haunt each an edge of the small sky

My green eyes make. Rim-horn impinges

Upon my vision’s furry fringes;

Faint dust collects upon the dry,

Unblinking shield behind which cringes

My naked, deprecated eye.

My gaze feels aimed. It is as if

Two manufactured beams had been

Lodged in my sockets—hollow, stiff,

And gray, like mailing tubes—and when

I pivot, vases topple down

From tabletops, and women frown.

POPULAR REVIVALS, 1956

The thylacine, long thought to be extinct,

Is not. The ancient dog-like creature, linked

To kangaroos and platypi, still pounces

On his Tasmanian prey, the Times announces.

The tarpan (stumpy, prehistoric horse)

Has been rebred—in Germany, of course.

Herr Heinz Heck, by striking genetic chords,

Has out of plowmares beat his tiny wards.

The California fur seal, a refined

And gullible amphibian consigned

By profit-seeking sealers to perdition,

Barked at the recent Gilmore expedition.

The bison, butchered on our Western prairie,

Took refuge in our coinage. Now, contrary

To what was feared, the herds are out of danger

And in the films, co-starred with Stewart Granger.

ODE III.ii : HORACE

Let the boy, timber-tough from vigorous soldiering,

learn to endure lack amicably,

and let him, horseman feared for his javelin,

plague the ferocious men of Parthos;

let him live his life lower than heaven

in the midst of restless things. Seeing him

from enemy ramparts, may the warring tyrant’s wife

and the young ripe woman breathe, “Ah,

let not our kingly lover, clumsy

in the swirl of combat, stroke the lion

rough to the touch, whom fury for blood

thrusts through the thick of the slaughter!”

Sweet it is, and seemly, to die for country.

Death overtakes the runaway as well,

and does not spare the coward backs

and knees of youths who are not warlike.

Manliness, not knowing the taint of defeat,

flashes forth with unsullied glory,

neither lifts nor lowers the axes

at a whisper from the scatterbrained mob.

Manliness, that throws open heaven to those

undeserving of death, plots its course

by a route denied to most, and on pinion

soaring scorns the common crowd, the damp earth.

There is, for faithful silence, too,

sure reward. I will forbid the man who spreads abroad

occult Ceres’ sacred rites

to share a roof or to unmoor a frail craft

with me. Often slighted Jupiter

involves the unpolluted with the impure;

rarely does Poena not catch the wicked man,

though he has the head start, and her step is hesitant.

A CHEERFUL ALPHABET OF PLEASANT OBJECTS

for David

APPLE

Since Time began, such alphabets begin

With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin.

My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man

Brought out as well the best in Paul Cézanne.

BIRDBATH

The birdbath is a placid eye

Beneath the apple trees; the sky

Is by the birdbath seldom seen,

And hence its water is brown-green.

When blackbirds come to purge their wings,

The water darkens. One wren brings

A touch of rust. The oriole

Casts down a casual aureole.

Trees ripen; then the birdbath glows

With muddled hints of gold and rose.

Leaves fall, and thus unveil the sky;

But now the birdbath is bone dry.

COG

No, not for him the darkly planned

    Ambiguities of flesh.

His maker gave him one command:

    Mesh.

DOLLY

Along the upland meadows

of the dining-table bloom

the doilies, openfaced and

white; within the living-room

they cling to every slope of

chair, and dot each teak plateau.

Around the trunks of lamps whose

shades exude a healthy glow,

the doilies spread their petals

tinted ivory and cream.

Hands off! Who plucks a doily

bothers Mother’s farflung scheme.

EASY CHAIR

Avoid the clicking three-way lamp; beware

    The throw rug’s coils, the two-faced sofabed,

    The vile lowboy; but more than any, dread

The hippopotomastic easy chair.

For, seated, you shall sink and never rise.

    The slow osmosis of the chair’s embrace

    Shall make your arms its arms, and make your face

An antimacassar monogrammed with eyes.

FLOWERPOT

GERANIUM

This clayey fez,

Who has this home?

inverted, is

Geranium,

a shoe for roots:

a maiden plant

an orange boot

and aspirant

wherein one leg

to broader green.

goes down to beg

Against the screen

more dirt. Alas,

she leans her head,

in vain it asks.

inhibited.

More Dirt (the moral runs) Or Else We Wane—See D. H. Lawrence, Ovid, or Mark Twain.

HAIRBRUSH

Made of hair,

it brushes locks

of hair:

   and there,

my son,

you have a Chinese paradox,

but not much of one.

ICEBOX

In Daddy’s day there were such things:

    Wood cabinets of cool

In which a cake of ice was placed

    While he was off at school.

Blue-veined, partitioned in itself,

    The cake seemed cut of air

Which had exploded; one cracked star

    Appeared imprisoned there.

It melted slowly through the day;

    The metal slats beneath

Seeped upwards, so the slippery base

    Developed downward teeth.

Eventually an egg so small

    It could be tossed away,

The ice cake vanished quite, as has

    That rather distant day.

JACK

A card, a toy, a hoist,

a flag, a stay, a fruit,

a sailor, John, a pot,

a rabbit, knife, and boot;

o’-lantern, in-the-box

or -pulpit, Ketch, a daw,

a-dandy, of-all-trades,

anapes, an ass, a straw.

KNOB

Conceptually a blob,

the knob

is a smallish object which,

hitched

to a larger,

acts as verger.

It enables

us to gain access to drawers in end tables;

it shepherds

us into cupboards.

LETTER SLOT

Once each day this broad mouth spews

Love letters, bills, ads, pleas, and news.

MIRROR

NUTCRACKER

His teeth are part of his shoulders because

A     nut

Is broken best by arms that serve as jaws.

OTTOMAN

Lessons in history: the Greeks

Were once more civilized than Swedes.

Iranians were, for several weeks,

Invincible, as Medes.

The mild Mongolians, on a spree,

Beheaded half of Asia; and

The Arabs, in their century,

Subdued a world of sand.

Just so, the cushioned stool we deign

To sit on, called the Ottoman:

We would not dare, were this the reign

Of Sultan Selim Khan.

From India to Hungary

The Ottoman held sway; his scope

Extended well into the sea

And terrified the Pope.

And Bulgar, Mameluke, and Moor

All hastened to kowtow

To tasselled bits of furniture.

It seems fantastic now.

QUILT

The quilt that covers all of us, to date,

Has patches numbered 1 to 48,

Five northern rents, a crooked central seam,

    A ragged eastern edge, a way

    Of bunching uglily, and a

Perhaps too energetic color scheme.

Though shaken every twenty years, this fine

Old quilt was never beaten on the line.

It took long making. Generations passed

    While thread was sought, and calico

    And silk were coaxed from Mexico

And France. The biggest squares were added last.

Don’t kick your covers, son. The bed is built

So you can never shake the clinging quilt

That blanketed your birth and tries to keep

    Your waking warm, impalpable

    As atmosphere. As earth it shall

Be tucked about you through your longest sleep.

RAINSPOUT

Up the house’s nether corner,

Snaky-skilled, the burglar shinnies,

Peeking, cautious, in the dormer,

Creeping, wary, where the tin is.

Stealthily he starts to burgle.

Hear his underhanded mutter;

Hear him, with a guilty gurgle,

Pour his loot into the gutter.

STOPPER

Take instead the honest stopper,

Crying “Halt!” to running water,

Chained to duty, as is proper

For a piece of rubber mortar.

Dense resistance is the raison

D’ětre of this dull sentry; certes

He shall hold the brimming basin

Even after water dirties.

TRIVET

“What is it? Why?” Thus the trivet,

    Like a piece of algebra,

Embraces mysteries which give it

    Quelque chose, je ne sais quoi.

UMBRELLA

Pterodactylic complement

    Of black and evil weather,

It lifts on ribbing badly bent

    One wing without a feather.

Don’t treat it as a cane. Don’t poke

    The end at friends; you’re liable

To give offense. Don’t stick a spoke

    In anybody’s eyeball.

Don’t open it indoors, your great-

    Grandmother used to scold me;

What all befell who disobeyed

    The good soul never told me.

Unfurl it when the heavens burst,

    And hold it over ladies.

On better days, hands off; accurst,

    The bird was hatched in Hades.

VACUUM CLEANER

This baggy broom,

Its hum is doom.

Its stern caress

Is nothingness.

WHEEL

For all of his undoubted skill

The Inca lacked the wheel until

Pizarro came to high Peru

And said that llamas wouldn’t do.

The Eskimos had never heard

Of centripetal force when Byrd

Bicycled up onto a floe

And told them, “This how white man go.”

Nepal’s Joe Averageperson feels

He should get by on prayer wheels.

The Navajos retread their squaws.

So lucky, lucky you, because

Whereas, below the pyramids

In Africa, some hominids

Have waited since the Pliocene,

You’ll get the wheel at age sixteen.

XYSTER

“An instrument for scraping bones”

    Describes the knife.

The word is rarely used—but why?

    What else is life?

YARDSTICK

ZEPPELIN

A German specialty, since men

    Of other nations must inveigle

Helium or hydrogen;

    But Germany had Hegel.

It fell, as do Philosophy’s

    Symmetric, portly darlings,

Fell down from skies where one still sees

    Religion’s narrow starlings.

A Note About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

Books by John Updike

POEMS

The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)

NOVELS

The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

SHORT STORIES

The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems and Other Stories (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maple Stories (2009)

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011)

PLAY

Buchanan Dying (1974)

MEMOIRS

Self-Consciousness (1989)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)