can weigh pounds more than they should and one can dislike having to kiss them yet,
compared with the thin-lipped, they are seldom detestable. Some waiter grieves
for the worst dead bore to be a good trencherman, and no wonder chefs mature into
choleric types, doomed to observe Beauty peck at a master-dish, their one reward to behold the mutually hostile mouth and eyes of a sinner married at the first bite by a smile.
The houses of our City are real enough but they lie haphazardly scattered over the earth, and her vagabond forum is any space where two of us happen to meet
who can spot a citizen without papers. So, too, can her foes. Where the
power lies remains to be seen, the force, though, is clearly with them: perhaps only
by falling can She become Her own vision, but we have sworn under four eyes
to keep Her up—all we ask for, should the night come when comets blaze and meres break, is a good dinner, that we may march in high fettle, left foot first, to hold her Thermopylae.
1958
IX For Friends Only
(FOR JOHN AND TECKLA CLARK)
Ours yet not ours, being set apart
As a shrine to friendship,
Empty and silent most of the year,
This room awaits from you
What you alone, as visitor, can bring,
A weekend of personal life.
In a house backed by orderly woods, Facing a tractored sugar-beet country, Your working hosts engaged to their stint, You are unlike to encounter Dragons or romance: were drama a craving, You would not have come.
Books we do have for almost any Literate mood, and notepaper, envelopes, For a writing one (to "borrow" stamps Is a mark of ill-breeding): Between lunch and tea, perhaps a drive; After dinner, music or gossip.
Should you have troubles (pets will die, Lovers are always behaving badly) And confession helps, we will hear it, Examine and give our counseclass="underline" If to mention them hurts too much, We shall not be nosey.
Easy at first, the language of friendship
Is, as we soon discover,
Very difficult to speak well, a tongue
With no cognates, no resemblance
To the galimatias of nursery and bedroom,
Court rhyme or shepherd's prose,
And, unless often spoken, soon goes rusty. Distance and duties divide us, But absence will not seem an evil If it make our re-meeting A real occasion. Come when you can: Your room will be ready.
In Tum-Turn's reign a tin of biscuits On the bedside table provided
For nocturnal munching. Now weapons have changed, And the fashion in appetites: There, for sunbathers who count their calories, A bottle of mineral water.
Felicissima notte! May you fall at once
Into a cordial dream, assured
That whoever slept in this bed before
Was also someone we like,
That within the circle of our affection
Also you have no double.
June 1964
X Tonight at Seven-Thirty
(FOR M. F. K. FISHER)
The life of plants is one continuous solitary meal, and ruminants hardly interrupt theirs to sleep or to mate, but most
predators feel ravenous most of the time and competitive always, bolting such morsels as they can contrive to snatch from the more terrified: pack-hunters do
dine en famille, it is true, with protocol and placement, but none of them play host to a stranger whom they help first. Only man,
supererogatory beast, Dame Kind's thoroughbred lunatic, can do the honors of a feast,
and was doing so before the last Glaciation when he offered mammoth-marrow and, perhaps, Long Pig, will continue till Doomsday
when at God's board the saints chew pickled Leviathan. In this age farms are no longer crenellated, only cops port arms, but the Law of the Hearth is unchanged : a brawler may not
be put to death on the spot, but he is asked to quit the sacral dining area instanter, and a foul-mouth gets the cold
shoulder. The right of a guest to standing and foster is as old as the ban on incest.
For authentic comity the gathering should be small and unpublic: at mass banquets where flosculent speeches are made
in some hired hall we think of ourselves or nothing. Christ's cenacle seated a baker's dozen, King Arthur's rundle the same, but today, when one's host may well be his own
chef, servitor and scullion, when the cost of space can double in a decade, even that holy Zodiac number is
too large a frequency for us: in fact, six lenient semble sieges, none of them perilous,
is now a Perfect Social Number. But a dinner party, however select, is a worldly rite that nicknames or endearments or family
diminutives would profane: two doters who wish to tiddle and curmurr between the soup and fish belong in restaurants, all children should be fed
earlier and be safely in bed. Well-liking, though, is a must: married maltalents engaged in some covert contrast can spoil
an evening like the glance of a single failure in the toil of his bosom grievance.
Not that a god, immune to grief, would be an ideal guest: he would be too odd to talk to and, despite his imposing presence, a bore,
for the funniest mortals and the kindest are those who are most aware of the baffle of being, don't kid themselves our care is consolable, but believe a laugh is less heartless than tears, that a hostess
prefers it. Brains evolved after bowels, therefore, great assets as fine raiment and good looks
can be on festive occasions, they are not essential like artful cooks and stalwart digestions.
I see a table at which the youngest and oldest present keep the eye grateful for what Nature's bounty and grace of Spirit can create:
for the ear's content one raconteur, one gnostic with amazing shop, both in a talkative mood but knowing when to stop, and one wide-traveled worldling to interject now and then
a sardonic comment, men and women who enjoy the cloop of corks, appreciate dapatical fare, yet can see in swallowing
a sign act of reverence, in speech a work of re-presenting the true olamic silence.
? Spring 1963
XI The Cave of Nakedness
(FOR LOUIS AND EMMIE K R O N E N B E R G E R )
Don Juan needs no bed, being far too impatient to undress, nor do Tristan and Isolda, much too in love to care
for so mundane a matter, but unmythical mortals require one, and prefer to take their clothes off,
if only to sleep. That is why bedroom farces must be incredible to be funny, why Peeping Toms are never praised, like novelists or bird watchers, for their keenness of observation: where there's a bed,
be it a nun's restricted cot or an Emperor's baldachined and nightly-redamselled couch, there are no effable data. (Dreams may be repeatable,
■ M
but our deeds of errantry in the wilderness of wish so often turn out, when told, to be less romantic than our day's routine: besides, we cannot describe them
without faking.) Lovers don't see their embraces as a viable theme for debate, nor a monk his prayers
(do they, in fact, remember them?): O's of passion, interior acts of attention, not being a story
in which the names don't matter but the way of telling, with a lawyer's wit or a nobleman's assurance,
does, need a drawing room of their own. Bed-sitting-rooms soon drive us crazy, a dormitory even sooner
turns us to brutes: bona fide architects know that doors are not emphatic enough, and interpose,
as a march between two realms, so alien, so disjunct, the no-man's-land of a stair. The switch from personage,