Randall Jarrell

 

The Woman At The Washington Zoo

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.  
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief--
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains--small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death--
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left, 
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

Randall Jarrell

 

    Photograph by Rollie McKenna, 1952.

The Refugees

In the shabby train no seat is vacant.
The child in the ripped mask
Sprawls undisturbed in the waste
Of the smashed compartment. Is their calm extravagant?
They had faces and lives like you. What was it they possessed
That they were willing to trade for this?
The dried blood sparkles along the mask
Of the child who yesterday possessed
A country welcomer than this.
Did he? All night into the waste
The train moves silently. The faces are vacant.
Have none of them found the cost extravagant?
How could they? They gave what they possessed.
Here all the purses are vacant.
And what else could satisfy the extravagant
Tears and wish of the child but this?
Impose its canceling terrible mask
On the days and faces and lives they waste?
What else are their lives but a journey to the vacant
Satisfaction of death? And the mask
They wear tonight through their waste
Is death's rehearsal. Is it really extravagant
To read in their faces: What is there we possessed
That we were unwilling to trade for this?

Randall Jarrell

 

                Painting by Betty Watson, 1963

The Black Swan

When the swans turned my sister into a swan
I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.

Out on the lake, a girl would laugh.
"Sister, here is your porridge, sister,"
I would call; and the reeds would whisper,
"Go to sleep, go to sleep, little swan."
My legs were all hard and webbed, and the silky

Hairs of my wings sank away like stars
In the ripples that ran in and out of the reeds:
I heard through the lap and hiss of water
Someone's "Sister . . . sister," far away on the shore,
And then as I opened my beak to answer

I heard my harsh laugh go out to the shore
And saw - saw at last, swimming up from the green
Low mounds of the lake, the white stone swans:
The white, named swans . . . "It is all a dream,"
I whispered, and reached from the down of the pallet

To the lap and hiss of the floor.
And "Sleep, little sister," the swan all sang
From the moon and stars and frogs of the floor.
But the swan my sister called, "Sleep at last, little sister,"
And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.

Stanley Kunitz

Halley's Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk 
across the board and told us 
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course 
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills 
with a wild look in his eyes 
stood in the public square 
at the playground's edge 
proclaiming he was sent by God 
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted, 
waving his hand-lettered sign. 
At supper I felt sad to think 
that it was probably 
the last meal I'd share 
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate. 
So mother scolded me 
and sent me early to my room. 
The whole family's asleep 
except for me. They never heard me steal 
into the stairwell hall and climb 
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof 
of the red brick building 
at the foot of Green Street --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky, 
waiting for the world to end.

Stanley Kunitz

 

After The Last Dynasty

Reading in Li Po
how "the peach blossom follows the water"
I keep thinking of you
because you were so much like
Chairman Mao,
naturally with the sex 
transposed
and the figure slighter.
Loving you was a kind
of Chinese guerilla war.
Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage
so nibbled the advantage.
Even with your small bad heart
you made a dance of departures.
In the cold spring rains
when last you failed me
I had nothing left to spend
but a red crayon language
on the character of the enemy
to break appointments,
to fight us not
with his strength
but with his weakness,
to kill us
not with his health
but with his sickness.
Pet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony,
here is a new note
I want to pin on your door,
though I am ten years late
and you are nowhere:
Tell me,
are you stillmistress of the valley,
what trophies drift downriver,
why did you keep me waiting?

Ai (FlorenceAnthony)

Barquisimeto, Venezuela, October 27, 1561 

Today it rained vengefully and hard 
and my men deserted me. 
My kingdom was as close 
as calling it by name. Peru. 
I braid your hair, daughter, 
as you kneel with your head in my lap. 
I talk softly, stopping to press your face to my chest. 
Vera Cruz. Listen. My heart is speaking. 
I am the fishes, the five loaves. 
The women, the men I killed simply ate me. 
There is no dying, only living in death. 
I was their salvation. 
I am absolved by their hunger. 
El Dorado, the kingdom of gold, 
is only a tapestry I wove from their blood. 
Stand up. My enemies will kill me 
and they won't be merciful with you. 
I unsheathe my dagger. Your mouth opens. 
I can't hear you. I want to. Tell me you love me. 
You cover your mouth with your hands. 
I stab you, then fall beside your body. 
Vera Cruz. See my skin covered with gold dust 
and tongues of flame, 
Transfigured by the pentecost of my own despair. 
I, Aguirre the wanderer, Aguirre the traitor, 
the Gilded Man. 
Does God think that because it rains in torrents 
I am not to go to Peru and destroy the world? 
God. The boot heel an inch above your head is mine. 

God, say your prayers. 

Ai (Florence Anthony)

Riot Act, April 29, 1992

I'm going out and get something. 
I don't know what. 
I don't care. 
Whatever's out there, I'm going to get it. 
Look in those shop windows at boxes 
and boxes of Reeboks and Nikes 
to make me fly through the air 
like Michael Jordan 
like Magic. 
While I'm up there, I see Spike Lee. 
Looks like he's flying too 
straight through the glass 
that separates me 
from the virtual reality 
I watch everyday on TV. 
I know the difference between 
what it is and what it isn't. 
Just because I can't touch it 
doesn't mean it isn't real. 
All I have to do is smash the screen, 
reach in and take what I want. 
Break out of prison. 
South Central homey's newly risen 
from the night of living dead, 
but this time he lives, 
he gets to give the zombies 
a taste of their own medicine. 
Open wide and let me in, 
or else I'll set your world on fire, 
but you pretend that you don't hear. 
You haven't heard the word is coming down 
like the hammer of the gun 
of this black son, locked out of this big house, 
while massa looks out the window and sees only smoke. 
Massa doesn't see anything else, 
not because he can't, 
but because he won't. 
He'd rather hear me talking about mo' money, 
mo' honeys and gold chains 
and see me carrying my favorite things 
from looted stores 
than admit that underneath my Raider's cap, 
the aftermath is staring back 
unblinking through the camera's lens, 
courtesy of CNN, 
my arms loaded with boxes of shoes 
that I will sell at the swap meet 
to make a few cents on the declining dollar. 
And if I destroy myself 
and my neighborhood 
"ain't nobody's business, if I do," 
but the police are knocking hard 
at my door 
and before I can open it, 
they break it down 
and drag me in the yard. 
They take me in to be processed and charged, 
to await trial, 
while Americans forget 
the day the wealth finally trickled down 
to the rest of us.

John Ashbery's letters

From Mark Ford's article "Letters/And So it goes/Letters from Young Mr Grace. PN Review 239 (January-February 2018)

The names he used to sign his letters convey a similar breadth of interests: Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (from an American radio sitcom of the forties and fifties); Mrs Harold Chillywater (from Ronald Firbank); Oriane de Guermantes; Boob McNutt (a 1930s comic strip character); Fleda Vetch (heroine of Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton); Sybil Fawlty; Pastor Fido (from an opera by Handel); The Countess Gruffanuff (from a Thackeray fairytale); Wackford Squeers and Mrs Fezziwig and Miss Havisham; Miss Turnstiles (from the 1949 movie On the Town); Dagwood Bumstead (from the comic strip Blondie); Diggory Venn (from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native); Adinolfa, Carmichael, Bob Boucharessas (from Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique); Marjory Frobisher (from To the Manor Born); The Sea Hag (from Popeye); Puzzled in Pomona; Captain Peacock, Mr Grainger, Cuthbert Rumbold and Young Mr Grace (from Are You Being Served?). 

Like these characters, John seemed indestructible. I am still finding it hard to believe I have no more of his witty, elegant, erudite, goofy, gossipy, supremely entertaining letters to look forward to – and then to answer as best I could. 

Thanks so much for your letter and its accompaniments. Of course I remember you, first at Adelphi College, then the greasy spoon on 23rd St., then at a pub near the Tate with your friend Julian, two girls and John Ash. Meanwhile I have gratefully noted your reviews of me in the TLS, most recently of Flow Chart, which seems to have been trounced more severely than the usual Ashbery tome in the English press… These things tend to be cyclical; after a few bleak years review-wise in the US, I came out rather well with Flow Chart. Undoubtedly this stimulated a counter-reaction in the UK, even if no one there was aware of the American reviews, the two countries being rather like the woman with the watering can and the mackintosh-clad man in my Swiss barometer; when the former emerges from their chalet you can expect the heavens to unzip. 

Enough of me and my reviews, let’s talk about YOU. Although you correctly intuit that I haven’t (yet) cracked your dissertation (beyond the three quotes at the beginning, which elicited a guffaw)*, I have read Landlocked several times and am absolutely bonkers about it, to the point of writing some poems ‘influenced’ by it, which I’ll send you some time if wheedled. One of them is called ‘The Decline of the West’ and is about my not having read Spengler. I was rather pleased with its first line: ‘O Oswald, O Spengler, this is very sad to find!’ Unfortunately no one in the US recognizes its origins in the first line of Browning’s ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, but you, with your Oxford PhD, will have done so. And so back to you. I love the form you invented in ‘Then She Said She Had to Go’. Surely there are no more beautiful lines in English than ‘Away flies / A carrot I was about to eat’. It’s right up there with ‘The broken sheds looked sad and strange’ from Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’. But I want more! Are there different poems in Chatto Poets II, and if so could you maybe have them send it to me? Also I’d love to see any unpublished ones you might care to send winging this way. 

Ah, Kyoto! Home of blowfish and Haagen-Daz! My Rousselian memory particularly retains a building just across the street from the old royal palace which looks like a Tudor-style mansion in Westchester County… 

(18 March 1992)

[*These quotes were: ‘No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time.’ (Harold Bloom) ‘Ashbery, it has to be said, is a poet so talentless that it’s a wonder his work has been published, let alone received the extravagantly lunatic praise some critics have accorded it.’ (Tom Paulin) ‘Once as I was falling asleep, I sort of imagined a debate between two critics, one of them was saying, ‘I don’t wanna raise my children in the world where John Ashbery can win the Pulitzer Prize,’ and the other one something like, ‘It’s not his fault that he’s responsible for my soul.’] 

Just got an e-mail this morning from Olivier [Brossard], who says that Claire is dragging him to The Secret of Brokeback Mountain [sic]. I seem to be the last of my race who hasn’t seen it and I no longer have the excuse that it’s not playing at the redneck-oriented mall in Hudson, because it is. Actually, those red necks have taken on a distinctly mauve cast in recent years, which has made for hard feelings all round (no pun intended). Recently, my friend the novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, who’s very tall and athletic and in his late 60s, had to settle his deceased mother’s Park Avenue apartment and somehow dispose of her toy poodle, which he brought up to Hudson while deciding what to do with it. One morning as he was making coffee in just his pajama pants, he let the dog out and noticed it slipping through a gap in the board fence, rushed out and chased it down the street, finally catching it by the hind leg in the middle of a busy thoroughfare at the same moment his pants fell down to his ankles, which prompted a passenger in a passing pickup truck to yell ‘Hey, you old faggot, why don’t you go back where you came from?’ Rudy, who is acutely straight, mustered as much dignity as possible under the circumstances and yelled back ‘I’m not old!’ 

(2 February 2006)

Frank O'Hara

Ode to Joy 

 

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying

on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs

for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter

over an insatiable sexual appetite

and the streets will be filled with racing forms

and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars

will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms

to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably

as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin

and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg

and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith

that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness

near the grave of love

No more dying

 

Denis Johnson

 

Sway

 

Since I find you will no longer love,

from bar to bar in terror I shall move

past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

suffer the light from the wrestling arena

to fall all over them. And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

of all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends I did not know who she was.

  

A. R. Ammons

Loss

When the sun 

falls behind the sumac 

thicket the 

wild 

yellow daisies 

in diffuse evening shade 

lose their 

rigorous attention 

and 

half-wild with loss 

turn 

any way the wind does 

and lift their 

petals up 

to float 

off their stems 

and go  

Adrienne Rich

 

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

 

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

 

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

 

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

James Merrill

 

A Dedication

  

Hans, there are moments when the whole mind 

Resolves into a pair of brimming eyes, or lips 

Parting to drink from the deep spring of a death 

That freshness they do not yet need to understand. 

These are the moments, if ever, an angel steps 

Into the mind, as kings into the dress 

Of a poor goatherd, for their acts of charity. 

There are moments when speech is but a mouth pressed 

Lightly and humbly against the angel’s hand. 

James Tate

Failed Tribute To The Stonemason Of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers

We traveled down to see your house, 
Tor House, Hawk Tower, in Carmel, 
California. It was not quite what 
I thought it would be: I wanted it 
to be on a hill, with a view of the ocean 
unobstructed by other dwellings. 
Fifty years ago I know you had 
a clean walk to the sea, hopping 
from boulder to boulder, the various 
seafowl rightly impressed with 
your lean, stern face. But today 

with our cameras cocked we had to 
sneak and crawl through trimmed lawns 
to even verify the identity of 
your strange carbuncular creation, 
now rented to trillionaire non- 
literary folk from Pasadena. 
Edged in on all sides by trilevel 
pasteboard phantasms, it took 
a pair of good glasses to barely see 
some newlyweds feed popcorn 
to an albatross. Man is 

a puny thing, divorced, 
whether he knows it or not, and 
pays his monthly alimony, 
his child-support. Year after year 
you strolled down to this exceptionally 
violent shore and chose your boulder; 
the arms grew as the house grew 
as the mind grew to exist outside 
of time, beyond the dalliance 
of your fellows. Today I hate 
Carmel: I seek libation in the Tiki 

Bar: naked native ladies are painted 
in iridescent orange on velvet cloth: 
the whole town loves art. 
And I donate this Singapore Sling 
to the memory of it, and join 
the stream of idlers simmering outside. 
Much as hawks circled your head 
when you cut stone all afternoon, 
kids with funny hats on motorscooters 
keep circling the block. 
Jeffers, ...

James Tate

The Painter of the Night

Someone called in a report that she had 
seen a man painting in the dark over by the 
pond. A police car was dispatched to go in- 
vestigate. The two officers with their big 
flashlights walked all around the pond, but 
found nothing suspicious. Hatcher was the 
younger of the two, and he said to Johnson, 
'What do you think he was painting?' Johnson 
looked bemused and said, 'The dark, stupid. 
What else could he have been painting?' Hatcher, 
a little hurt, said, 'Frogs in the Dark, Lily- 
pads in the Dark, Pond in the Dark. Just as 
many things exist in the dark as they do in 
the light.' Johnson paused, exasperated. Then 
Hatcher added, 'I'd like to see them. Hell, 
I might even buy one. Maybe there's more out 
there than we know. We are the police, after- 
all. We need to know.'

James Tate

 

Never Ever the Same

Speaking of sunsets, 
last night's was shocking. 
I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are they? 
Well, this one was terrifying. 
People were screaming in the streets. 
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful. 
It wasn't natural. 
One climax followed another and then another 
until your knees went weak 
and you couldn't breathe. 
The colors were definitely not of this world, 
peaches dripping opium, 
pandemonium of tangerines, 
inferno of irises, 
Plutonian emeralds, 
all swirling and churning, swabbing, 
like it was playing with us, 
like we were nothing, 
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this, 
this for which nothing could have prepared us 
and for which we could not have been less prepared. 
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly. 
And when it was finally over 
we whimpered and cried and howled. 
And then the streetlights came on as always 
and we looked into one another's eyes? 
ancient caves with still pools 
and those little transparent fish 
who have never seen even one ray of light. 
And the calm that returned to us 
was not even our own.

James Tate

 

I long for some, even
one would be a beginning,
not this long flat stretch
of just me and my improvising
of waste, of a kind of heroic
negligence that life does not
appreciate. My loved one
is wobbling—O creme de menthe!
See, I am making my own
interference, jerked stratagem—
her overcoat, my cottage.
Why are we so bad? I hear them
faintly knocking, neutral ducks,
and I am reprimanded.
I am thinking “scalloped potatoes”
are of absolutely no use.
I’m thumping my canteen
and pointing at my nose.
Yes, I lied about “her,”
there wasn’t one, but for
that moment a gourd drifted
down the chimney on the pretext
of weeding a peninsula
and nourishing the articulation
of a single bud. Am I forgiven?
Forgotten? This is the constellation
of my own bewilderment. Please,
someone interrupt me.
Hence, whatever, reverts.

James Tate

I Am a Finn

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).

Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger

no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
on the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid

to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910 – why

is everybody leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
Eighty-six percent of Finnish men have blue

or grey eyes. Today is Charlie Chaplin’s
one hundredth birthday, though he is not
Finnish or alive: ‘Thy blossom, in the bud

laid low.’ The commonest fur-bearing animals
are the red squirrel, musk-rat, pine-marten
and fox. There are about 35,000 elk.

But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
assuming I pass. Finnish Literature

really came alive in the 1860s.
Here, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.

They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.