Daryl Hine

Take a statement, the same as yesterday’s dictation: Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake. Creative despair and failure have made their patient. Anyway, I’m afraid I have nothing to say. Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper With against the grain ... Taste has turned away her face Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress At table, barely capable but very vague. Mistaken praise and blame degrade profane and sacred Places so strange you may not even know their names. Vacant the gymnasium where words once played naked Amazing games that always used to end in mate. Better, then, the effort than preterite perfection, I guess. Indeed, I envy the eminent dead The special effects I am ready to inherit Less than their sentiments and impenitent sense Of aesthetic gesture. Unpleasant and pretentious, The Western hemisphere has plenty to forget. The mess men might yet make of themselves, given present Events! Are many content to accept the best? Precious as sex is, flesh, perenially wretched, Begs the bread of heaven, blessing nevertheless The unexpected sender’s address on a letter. Every breathless sentence says not yet to death. The past cannot matter except as an abstraction, A flattering caricature of happy lands Wherein many a grand, imaginary castle In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last, A vast palace that adrastic phantoms inhabit. Maps of madness, characteristically blank, Ask vatic questions, exact a magic answer: The family photograph album at a glance, Granny, Dad, Aunt Sally, that dissatisfied madame Who manages passion’s incalculable acts, Paris, everyman’s romantic trash and tarry— Abracadabra, and the vanished cast comes back! If civilization isn’t a silly gimmick, Is it the wit to wish, the will to make it stick? The mathematical vision which built this system Figures the width of a minute within an inch. Primitive physics, a sophisticated fiction, Insists that in principle everything is fixed. Visitors picnic amid pretty Chichèn Itzá With its sacrificial pit, artificial hills And cricket pitch wherein the winner is the victim. To think an instinct like iniquity exists! Hidden riches fill big individual middens; In the Wizard’s Pyramid little lizards live. Specious sweets we reach for eagerly with Eve’s evil Greed recede like the fleeting details of a dream. It seems that we have been a brief season in Eden: Chic unreal estates where immediately green Trees repeated in completely meaningless series Briefly yield to the weaker tyranny of weeds Even as we seek relief in a secret clearing. Prehistory can be too recent; need we read These steles’ queried speech? Here undefeated peoples Experienced deceit; here scenes of deepest grief Teach us to weep the cheap and easy tears of reason; Here the sea of being sleeps, a period peace. Frustration, fuss, and lust are love’s unlucky colours. Thunderstruck, the muscular monuments look dumb. Judged by the numbers that once flourished in the jungle In hundreds of miles of dull undercover scrub, Unless somebody was insufferably ugly Mistrust of one another must be in the blood. Unsuccess in a dozen tough struggles instructs us Justice is a mother-fucker. Suffering’s fun For a month, but in a millenium no wonder One becomes somewhat disgusted. Unsubtle skull, The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to. Insulted by a touch, one mutters, “Summer sucks.” Undone by the siesta and by sudden showers, Is it uncomfortable in the hungry South? Now cowed by Kulkulkan’s geometrical scowl, Now wowed by the classic brown faces in a crowd, You falter at mounds memorial to a thousand Bleeding hearts in a single holiday cut out, Submitted to the sun, insatiable flesh-flower Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, Confounded by our sound of pronounceable vowels. Myths, as the guidebook says, are handed down by mouth. Though mood and voice and person, gender, tense, and number Predicate a verb, its cases explain a noun: Proper noun or pronoun, indubitably human, Whose beautiful excuse is usually youth Doomed to the brutal usufructu of the future, Consumed by the illusions of jejune amours. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour, Tuned to the influential movements of the moon Whose smooth, translucent route through roofless rooms illumines From dewy moonrise unto lunar afternoon Tulum and its improvements, tumulus and ruins, Poorly reproduced, a too crudely stupid view. Who knew nude truth from rumour, amusement from music Soon would prove a fool. Beauty, useless, is a wound. On and off; the impossible is honour’s motto, Monotony the awful drawback of my song. What was lost was often all we had got in common, Our quasi-comic quandary depended on Qu’en dirai-je? chronic, colossal hypochondry, Neurotic complication or hypnotic calm. Gods begotten of loss, not bronze nor terra cotta, Haunt the province of law, of cause and conscious wrong. Following the Long Count a lot has been forgotten: Positive nonsense, fraud, false plots and hollow talk, Soporific concepts toppled by fall or conquest, The cosmos as a model watch that wants to stop. At any moment the doors of the soul may open And those reproachful ghosts invoked from the remote Coasts of tomorrow begin to impose the order Of bone and trophy, home and the odour of smoke. O mornings that broke on the slopes of cold volcanos, Almost frozen, golden and old-rose, like a scroll Slowly unfolded, or a brocade robe thrown over The throne of the mountains, cloaking their cones in snow! Hope, an emotion swollen by every omen, No psychotrope, only a semiprecious stone, Topaz or opal, adorns the close of the strophe. Woe wrote these notes in a code also known as prose. Ode: this leafy, streamless land where coy waters loiter Under the embroidered soil, subterfluous coin Of another culture destroyed by lack of moisture, Spoiled by the unavoidable poison of choice. Archaeological lawyers exploit the foibles Of a royalty that in time joined hoi polloi: History’s unemployed, geography’s anointed, Unlike the orchids of the forests, spin and toil. Imperfectly convinced of final disappointment, Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Pen poised for the pointless impressions of those voices That boil up like bubbles on the face of the void, Finally I try to define why divine silence Underlies the tidy designs of paradise. Priceless as the insights of the inspired psyche, Blind, violent as a geyser, right as a rhyme, Fine ideas likely to undermine the idle Mind divided between the types of fire and ice, “Highly stylized” politely describes the bright eyesores Shining like diamonds or rhinestones in the night sky, Lifelike, provided life survives its vital cycle And the tireless indictment of time’s diatribe, While mankind, sightless, frightened, like a child in twilight, Dies of the devices it was enlightened by. Amazing games that always used to end in mate! Precious as sex is, flesh, perennially wretched, In fact turns out to be a tourist trap at last. The mathematical vision which built this system Of the universe, all-devouring powerhouse, (The mysteries of dust are nothing to live up to!) Briefly yields to the weaker tyranny of weeds. You used to choose the rules with superfluous humour: Monotony, the awful drawback of my song, Slowly unfolded, like a brocade robe thrown over. Persuaded of the possibility of joy, Finally I tried to define why divine silence ...

Ce qui est beau à Leningrad, c’est Saint Petersbourg. What fellow traveller returned from the U.S.S.R., Burdened with souvenirs in the form of second thoughts, said That, rephrasing the Slavic platitude as a reactionary epigram? Thence One must count oneself privileged to have escaped empty-handed, Frisked in exit by the incompetent customs of the country Who got everything backwards, inspecting my papers with a glass: Bourgeois formalism apart, my handwriting looks like a decadent cipher. “Chto eto?” The pocket epic or this wordy verse?“Poezia.” Insisting it scans as prose they confiscate War and Peace: The classic comeback: loved her, hated him, your eponymous warhead In gremium qui saepe se reicit aeterno devictus vulnere amoris: Even apologists for free love must confess this pair legally Wed, a union no sentimental do-gooder likes to solemnize. V., I’m afraid the authorities took away your name Which they found in my notebook. Asked who you were, I said, “Someone I met in a restaurant.” Not so: You were a pick-up of sorts on Nevsky Prospekt Where as I puzzled over a plan filched from Intourist That first evening you appeared eager to be of help. In exchange for a few verbatim tips on English idiom (“Tell me, please, is it better, ‘Here you are!’ or ‘There it is!’ ”) you afforded me a smattering of Russian— Dom, dub, tsat, eima dvorets, knigi, mir, ya ne ponemayu, House—oak—garden—winter-palace—books—world—I don’t understand— And your jealous services as a guide to the environs When you were “free from class”. Unlike the other touts, Official and unofficial, who besieged the foreigners’ hotel, you never Asked for cigarettes or dollars nor offered girls or watches, But wanted books and talk. Whether you were an agent I am not absolute. If so, it doesn’t figure. Who sold me “art treasures” to take out, a nickel Samovar and the biscuit bust of Pushkin, price two rubles, From that popular Thrift Shop where one bought antiques, the Only place in Leningrad to find silverware, glass, or china, As department stores seemed to stock nothing but plastic gimcracks? Enough economics—unless I just mention in passing the maids At the hotel, patriots whom I detected to be helping Themselves to my dwindling whisky. When I locked it up One morning, on my return I found the bed unmade. Still there are things I want to ask you, V. Are you in prison or power? Were you really interrogated As you foretold if you were seen with me? Paranoid Melodrama I supposed, yet daily life in never-never land. You warned me one was followed, watched, suspected, bugged, betrayed As a matter of course, and there were certain places We mustn’t be seen together in public, like divorcées. Out of bounds to you the doldrums of the Europa. Every day you used to suggest some novel rendezvous Where until you materialized no one was in evidence. Dialectics make impossible bedfellows. Are you today the interrogator You once were, inexhaustible in futile questions of American usage? Following a call at the single synagogue, where we tapped The anti-semitic party line, you invited me back for A supper of black bread, sausage, and sweet white wine. No English on the stair or in the common hallway You cautioned, but your student’s room itself was an asylum, With an encyclopaedia, your father’s paintings, a dusty grand piano (“I was used to play.”), and the telephone. “Talk now!” The couple embracing in the entrance, were they also spies? What circuitous routes we pursued in our innocent sight-seeing, How vast the meander of the stone Hermitage which holds A pictorial history of pillaged Europe, where the fat, satisfied Intelligent bust of the Holstein Messalina smirks from its pedestal, As at Tsarskoe Selo, which the present regime calls Pushkin. There, amid monumental, autumnal ruin, in a neo-gothic folly, Lunching on lard, I learned the Russian word for cosy, Oiutny: neither Pavlovsk, that meticulously restored memorial to filial resentment Nor Peterhof’s post-war proletarian Renaissance trick pavilions quite qualify. I go on like a guidebook, there being none such. Nowhere could we find a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary Or maps less rudimentary than those of a vanished century. Lies appropriately describe this sequestrated Czarist capital founded on water, Edifice of pure will and an idea, double-glazed window Closed on the West. The past lingers along the Neva Like a revisionist prince: pink, green, ochre, robin’s-egg-blue Italianate confectionery on a Scythian scale. You wanted to know Why all foreigners are so fascinated by palaces and churches Used as cinemas and baths? Our taste is counter-revolutionary. Just fancy playing Soviet monopoly or enduring social-realist monotony! And having nothing to read but Lenin and Jack London Unless in samizdat! I am unable to appreciate a solitary Line of Russian verse in translation, from Bogan to Brodski. Although, like Leningrad at the same time fantastic and prosaic, Your novels form a sort of exotic province of English, I don’t know why, inimitable Pushkin is a noted bore. But who came here to talk about literature? The night Before leaving I invited you to squander my last vouchers Somewhere they, and we, would be accepted at face value: After two helpings of chicken you ordered another, of veal. Russkaya dusha! What if we were brothers? Haven’t men More in common than their wants, such as language, a Skeleton key rattled in so many locks? With all utopias, The farther from perfection the better; this future that works Looks so old-fashioned and unkind. Although the masses may Be content, unhappy, or indifferent, excellence is an individual gesture. Malice, too, is personal. The destroyer Aurora opposite Intourist’s incongruous Glass prison, her heroes liquidated, will she ever lift anchor For the free world? Here, perhaps better dead than read, Instead of the Concise Oxford Dictionary you wanted, this letter.

Such pejorative deformities of sound Without meaningful speech or musical equipoise, Annoyances none but

Mountains rise above us like ideas Vague in their superior extent, Part of the range of disillusionment Whose arresting outline disappears Into the circumstantial clouds that look Like footnotes from above. What wisdom said The mind has mountains? Imagination read The history of the world there like a book. Playing peek-a-boo with famous peaks Afflicted with the vapours leaves a sense, Frowned down upon by all that bleak immense City of rock and ice, that men are freaks, In the original program of creation, Afterthoughts. Each jack pine seems a brother; Even in lichens we perceive another Example of our own organization, Tenacious, patient, in a century Growing perhaps a quarter-of-an-inch: Glaciers do more daily, an avalanche In minutes. The eroded immobility Attributed to mountains is a fable, Like the Great Divide. They move when you’re not looking, Like stars and stocks, distinctly better looking From a distance, and chronically unstable.

The sight of beauty simply makes us sick: There are too many hours in the day, Too many wicked faces built like flowers And far too many bargains for a song. Jade and paste, cashmere and ormolu— Who said that all the arts aspire to music? It’s obvious, for time is obvious, That all that art aspires to is junk. Blackmailed by these mathoms of the past, One is indebted for another perspective To quaint giraffes and quainter wallabies, The nearly human and the faintly monstrous, The outrageously contemporary joke. Trespassing on a no man’s territory, Unlike the moralist one is at a loss Where to be human is not to be at home. In a zoo, you see, one can acquire nothing: Zebras aren’t wishes. Nor is the flea market Exactly the place for those who know what they want. Like far out stations on the Metro (which they are) Somewhere, in heaven perhaps, they correspond, In the heaven of open arms and unpaid bills, Where beer is drunk on the lawn all afternoon And every night we bid, and make, a slam.

I The telephone keeps talking to itself: Garbage in the streets, a butterfly, A rubber raft abandoned, floating out to sea, And late last night nearby, a conflagration— If you knew half the secrets I can tell, The accidents, the threats, the promises, All anonymous, and the voices That, like a demoniac, I have: An unwilling rhyme, a cry for help, An order for a pound of stewing beef And someone begging someone to come back— All of these proceed from my black mouth, All and more are locked in my black heart, Information, long distances, wrong numbers. II The clock at first was fast and now has stopped That holds all of our lifetimes in its hands. III “We sleep and wake watched over by machines. Are these intelligent objects our servants merely? Are they our closet masters, maybe? Will we be accomplices and equals one day?” Tool-and-Die Makers’ Manual Newly revised, 1964 IV The gun, the peppermill, the gramophone, The bee, the salamander and the swan— To be explicit, what have they in common? The corkscrew, the stethoscope, the laundromat, The lyre bird, the python and the wombat, How do these differ from the domestic cat? Is it a question of theirs and ours or this and that? What reconciles the wireless and the whale? Did he who made the lamb invent the wheel? And what was wisdom doing all the while? A catastrophe and a category will Swallow sardines and supermarkets whole. V But you or rather thou, to be archaic, Always demanding, never dull but sometimes sick, Intimate machinery, my body! Whose only raison d’etre is to be: Your pleasures and your pains are your own business; Don’t ask me for a taste or a caress, Who, when I weep, weep tear of glass, Round and brittle. Your appetites embarrass Me. Mine tire you. Old Thing, The moral is, the moral is, Keep going, And perhaps we shall meet again at the Resurrection— The wonder is, what then I shall put on?

dans le simple appareil D’une beauté qu’on vient d’arracher au sommeil. Smoothed by sleep and ruffled by your dreams The surface of the little lake Fed by unconscious tributary streams, Unbroken by the breezes nightmares make, Like your face looks fathomless and seems Bottomless till light or noises wake. You move and murmur and almost awake. I admire but do not wish to enter, Like any wanderer beside Moonlit water in midwinter Who as a simulacrum for the tide Casting a pebble into the calm centre Watches the circles spread from side to side. I wait for you and morning at your side. Such sources feed the mirror of your mind, I dare not touch the surface of your sleep. But to love by ignorance resigned, Infatuated guardian, I keep Watch beside a fountain where I find No image, for images too deep, Above your breathing regular and deep.

Echo that loved hid within a wood Would to herself rehearse her weary woe: O, she cried, and all the rest unsaid Identical came back in sorry echo. Echo for the fix that she was in Invisible, distraught by mocking passion, Passionate, ignored, as good as dumb, Employed that O unchanged in repetition. Shun love if you suspect that he shuns you, Use with him no reproaches whatsoever. Ever you knew, supposing him to know No melody from which you might recover- Cover your ears, dear Echo, do not hear. Here is no supplication but your own, Only your sighs return upon the air Ere their music from the mouth be gone.

“e to allor li prega Per quell' amor the i mena, e quei verranno.” INFERNO V This also is a place that love is known in, This hollow land beneath a lifeless sea Opposite to the place that he was born in, How far it is impossible to say. The brackish water as I crossed A bridge was delicately creased And stained and stale, like love-disordered linen. Lovers here must meet on unsure ground Like strangers in a circumspect hotel Which, although luxurious and grand, Trembles beneath their feet like earth in hell. Lifted on concentric gales Scraps of paper, leaves and gulls Fluttered dismally aloft and groaned. Here darkness grows and light itself decays; Rain falls from time to time and night falls too Upon earth’s civil centre that decoys The eternal with the promise that is now. There were no corners, every street Ran on infinite and straight, There is no gate, no warning and no keys. I hear a step approaching and refuse To look aside, a while your silhouette Persists, the fire illuminates your face From under as you light a cigarette; All-knowing, arch-angelic eyes, Human features cut in ice— The spark you struck at once attained the fuse. I recognize the vanity and scorn, The fear, the greed, in short the mask of love, Familiar and disdainful, and I turn About. Like children sharing what they have We learned in that experiment What the spirit’s weakness meant, The nature of the torment to be borne. What shall I give you? What will be your price? Your body’s mine, the rich, fantastic horde Of your embracements—angels live on praise, Take it, it is all I can afford. Outside a centrifugal wind Sustained a freight of souls that whined And wept along the terrible canals. And when I close my eyes I see a ship At anchor in the water of a bay. I cling to that imaginary shape Capable of taking me away To I do not know what ports. Perhaps tomorrow it departs, Anonymous, invulnerable, free.

It is half past ten in Stonington. The trees droop apprehensive of the heat And the sky has turned that pale suspicious colour That means that it cannot support more light. Here on the terrace I and a companion Each pretends to read. The papers say That it is 90 in New York today. Across the street work is going forward On the abominable house that once I fancied, Half, might be mine, and which was in fact the home Of the anonymous couple I used to hear At night arguing in their unhappy bedroom. Now they are throwing out another wing And the site of overlooked love is changed beyond recognition. What will the day, what will the summer bring? Psychic storms or calm productive doldrums? Our neighbours are no saner than ourselves. Perhaps it is time to give the Stones a ring Or to complain of the view from the gallery tower Falling like a shadow across the calm veranda Rich with malice and the threat of accidental meeting. This is not a house but a collection (The largest in private hands?) of sacred objects, A spiritual boutique where anyone, Even the wrecker who had come to spoil, May find himself spending more than he expected On something he cannot quite identify. Here the little horrors become the household gods. For the work of love requires a rule of thumb, Not no laws in particular but its own Whose pseudonym, at least here and now, is pleasure: The morning wasted in work and misquotation, A light but leisurely lunch, then reading Walking or just watching the sun all afternoon Till, hungry, we draw to evening and ombre. Who are we to thank for all of this? The greatest favours are conferred in absence Sometimes, as a syllable gives comfort Dependent on the time and place and person. When pleasure and reality occur Is there room for extra contemplation Or the lyrical promenade? It is enough To know (and this is surely recognition) That the world is spherical and perfect. Now I wish to introduce the copper beech We saw on our walk, English and native here as I am, Whose shade is not the green of contemplation But the imagination’s rich metallic colour Wherein, under libido, we live.