If you were religious folk, how would your dramas justify unmerited suffering?
By what myths would your priests account
for the hurricanes that come twice every twenty-four hours,
each time I dress or undress, when, clinging to keratin rafts,
whole cities are swept away to perish in space. or the Flood
that scalds to death when I bathe?
Then. sooner or later, will dawn
a day of Apocalypse, when my mantle suddenly turns too cold. too rancid. for you, appetising to predators
of a fiercer sort, and I am stripped of excuse and nimbus, a Past, subject to Judgement.
May 1969
Moon Landing
It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure it would not have occurred to women to think worth while, made possible only
because we like huddling in gangs and knowing the exact time: yes, our sex may in fairness hurrah the deed, although the motives that primed it were somewhat less than menschJich.
A grand gesture. But what does it period? What does it osse? We were always adroiter with objects than lives, and more facile at courage than kindness: from the moment
the first flint was flaked this landing was merely a matter of time. But our selves, like Adam's, still don't fit us exactly, modern only in this—our lack of decorum.
Homer's heroes were certainly no braver than our Trio, but more fortunate: Hector was excused the insult of having his valor covered by television.
Worth going to see? I can well believe it. Worth seeing? Mneh! I ance rode through a desert and was not charmed: give me a watered lively garden, remote from blatherers
about the New, the von Brauns and their ilk, where on August mornings I can count the morning glories, where to die has a meaning, and no engine can shift my perspective.
Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at, Her Old Man, made of grit not protein, still visits my Austrian several
with His old detachment, and the old warnings still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to an ugly finish, Irreverence is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
August 1969
96
Old People's Home
All are limitory, but each has her own nuance of damage. The elite can dress and decent themselves,
are ambulant with a single stick, adroit to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of
easy sonatas. (Yes, perhaps their very carnal freedom is their spirit's bane: intelligent
of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious to a glum beyond tears.) Then come those on
wheels, the average majority, who endure T.V. and, led by lenient therapists, do community-singing, then
the loners, muttering in Limbo, and last the terminally incompetent, as improvident, unspeakable, impeccable as the plants they parody. (Plants may sweat profusely but never sully themselves.) One tie, though, unites them: all
appeared when the world, though much was awry there,
was more
spacious, more comely to look at, its Old Ones with an audience and secular station. Then a child,
in dismay with Mamma, could refuge with Gran to be revalued and told a story. As of now,
we all know what to expect, but their generation is the first to fade like this, not at home but assigned
to a numbered frequent ward, stowed out of conscience as unpopular luggage.
As I ride the subway to spend half-an-hour with one, I revisage who she was in the pomp and sumpture of her hey-day,
when week-end visits were a presumptive joy, not a good work. Am I cold to wish for a speedy
painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays, that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?
April 1970
97
Talking to Myself
(FOR OLIVER SACKS)
Spring this year in Austria started off benign,
the heavens lucid, the air stable, the about
sane to all feeders, vegetate or bestiaclass="underline"
the deathless minerals looked pleased with their regime,
where what is not forbidden is compulsory.
Shadows of course there are, Porn-Ads, with-it clergy, and hubby next door has taken to the bottle, but You have preserved Your poise, strange rustic object, whom I, made in God's Image but already warped, a malapert will-worship, must bow to as Me.
My mortal manor, the carnal territory alloted to my manage, my fosterling too, I must earn cash to support, my tutor also, but for whose neural instructions I could never acknowledge what is or imagine what is not.
Instinctively passive, I guess, having neither fangs nor talons nor hooves nor venom, and therefore too prone to let the sun go down upon Your funk, a poor smeller, or rather a censor of smells, with an omnivore palate that can take hot food.
Unpredictably, decades ago, You arrived among that unending cascade of creatures spewed from Nature's maw. A random event, says Science. Random my bottom! A true miracle, say I, for who is not certain that he was meant to be?
As You augmented and developed a profile, I looked at Your looks askance. His architecture should have been much more imposing: I've been let down! By now, though, I've gotten used to Your proportions and, all things considered, I might have fared far worse.
Seldom have You been a bother. For many years You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic (it did no good to tell You—But I'm not in love!): how stoutly, though, You've repelled all germ invasions, but never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.
You are the Injured Party for, if short-sighted,
I am the book-worm who tired You, if short-winded
as cigarette addicts are, I was the pusher
who got You hooked. (Had we been both a bit younger,
I might well have mischiefed You worse with a needle.)
I'm always amazed at how little I know You. Your coasts and outgates I know, for I govern there, but what-goes on inland, the rites, the social codes,
Your torrents, salt and sunless, remain enigmas: what I believe is on doctors' hearsay only.
Our marriage is a drama, but no stage-play where what is not spoken is not thought: in our theatre all that I cannot syllable You will pronounce in acts whose raison-d'etre escapes me. Why secrete fluid when I dole, or stretch Your lips when I joy?
Demands to close or open, include or eject,
must come from Your corner, are no province of mine
(all I have done is to provide the time-table
of hours when You may put them): but what is Your work
when I librate between a glum and a frolic?
For dreams I, quite irrationally, reproach You. All I know is that I don't choose them: if I could, they would conform to some prosodic discipline, mean just what they say. Whatever point nocturnal manias make, as a poet I disapprove.
Thanks to Your otherness, Your jocular concords, so unlike my realm of dissonance and anger, You can serve me as my emblem for the Cosmos: for human congregations, though, as Hobbes perceived, the apposite sign is some ungainly monster.
Whoever coined the phrase The Body Politic? All States we've lived in, or historians tell of, have had shocking health, psychosomatic cases, physicked by sadists or glozing expensive quacks: when I read the papers, You seem an Adonis.