David Ferry

The sea bit, As they said it would, And the hill slid, As they said it would, And the poor dead Nodded agog The poor head. O topmost lofty Tower of Troy, The poem apparently Speaks with joy Of terrible things. Where is the pleasure The poetry brings? Tell if you can, What does it make? A city of man That will not shake, Or if it shake, Shake with the splendor Of the poem’s pleasure.

And now the heavens shift and the night comes in, And covers with its darkness earth and sky And the tricks of the Myrmidons. Throughout the city The Trojans, wearied by joy, lie fast asleep. And now the Greeks set out from Tenedos, Their ships proceeding in an ordered line, Under the friendly light of the silent moon, Making their way toward the shore they know so well, And when the royal galley’s beacon light Is lighted, Sinon sees it, and quietly goes, Protected by malign complicit fates, And furtively opens up the Horse’s flank And frees the Argive warriors from its womb. The Horse releases them to the open air And joyfully they come out: first come the captains Thessander, and Sthenelus, and dire Ulysses, Lowering themselves to the ground by means of a rope, And Acamas and Thoas, and Pyrrhus, Achilles’ son, And Machaon the prince, and Menelaus, And Epeus, he, who contrived the Wooden Horse That fooled us so. And then they enter the city, That’s deep submerged in wine and unknowing sleep; They surprise and kill the watch, and open the gates To welcome in their comrades from the fleet, Letting them in for what they are going to do.

Wearing a tawny lion pelt upon My spindly shoulders I carry both of them, My father and my mother, into the darkness, My father hoarsely singing, “They are there!” —The glimmer of something that is glimmering there— “I see the glow of weapons in the shadows!” Through which with my purblind eyes I think I see Something in the darkness waiting there. Above me in the dark my mother’s voice Calls down to me, “Who’s there? Who is it there?” Step after step together we make our way, In the darkness of my memory of our house.

By the last few times we saw her it was clear That things were different. When you tried to help her Get out of the car or get from the car to the door Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator There was a new sense of heaviness Or of inertia in the body. It wasn’t That she was less willing to be helped to walk But that the walking itself had become less willing. Maybe the stupid demogorgon blind Recalcitrance of body, resentful of the laws Of mind and spirit, was getting its own back now, Or maybe a new and subtle, alien, Intelligence of body was obedient now To other laws: “Weight is the measure of The force with which a body is drawn downward To the center of the earth”; “Inertia is The tendency of a body to resist Proceeding to its fate in any way Other than that determined for itself.” That evening, at the Bromells’ apartment, after She had been carried up through the rational structure By articulate stages, floor after flashing floor, And after we helped her get across the hall, And get across the room to a chair, somehow We got her seated in a chair that was placed A little too far away from the nearest table, At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat, Exposed, her body the object of our attention— The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg, The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe. At work between herself and us there was A new principle of social awkwardness And skillfulness required of each of us. Our tones of voice in this easy conversation Were instruments of marvelous finesse, Measuring and maintaining with exactitude “The fact or condition of the difference There was between us, both in space and time.” Her smiling made her look as if she had Just then tasted something delicious, the charm Her courtesy attributed to her friends. This decent elegant fellow human being Was seated in virtue, character, disability, Behind her the order of the ranged bookshelves, The windows monitored by Venetian blinds— “These can be raised or lowered; numerous slats, Horizontally arranged, and parallel, Which can be tilted so as to admit Precisely the desired light or air.” We were all her friends, Maggie, and Bill, and Anne, And I, and the nice Boston Brahmin elderly man Named Duncan, utterly friendly and benign. And of course it wasn’t whether or not the world Was benign but whether it looked at her too much. She wasn’t “painfully shy” but just the same I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been Painfulness in her shyness earlier on, Say at dancing school. Like others, though, she had Survived her childhood somehow. Nor do I mean She was unhappy. Maybe more or less so Before her marriage. One had the sense of trips Arranged, committees, concerts, baffled courage Living it through, giving it order and style. And one had the sense of the late marriage as of Two bafflements inventing the sense they made Together. The marriage seemed, to the outside world, And probably was, radiant and triumphant, And I think that one could almost certainly say That during the last, heroic, phase of things, After his death, and after the stroke, she had By force of character and careful management, Maintained a certain degree of happiness. The books there on the bookshelves told their stories, Line after line, all of them evenly spaced, And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces. In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story: “In the scale of being, wherever it begins, Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep; Infinite vacuities ... For surely, Nothing can so disturb the passions, or Perplex the intellects of man so much, As the disruption of this union with Visible nature, separation from all That has delighted or engaged him, a change Not only of the place but of the manner Of his being, an entrance into a state Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps A state he has not faculties to know.” The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds, And yellows, produce of the season due, And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.

By the last few times we saw her it was clear That things were different. When you tried to help her Get out of the car or get from the car to the door Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator There was a new sense of heaviness Or of inertia in the body. It wasn’t That she was less willing to be helped to walk But that the walking itself had become less willing. Maybe the stupid demogorgon blind Recalcitrance of body, resentful of the laws Of mind and spirit, was getting its own back now, Or maybe a new and subtle, alien, Intelligence of body was obedient now To other laws: “Weight is the measure of The force with which a body is drawn downward To the center of the earth”; “Inertia is The tendency of a body to resist Proceeding to its fate in any way Other than that determined for itself.” That evening, at the Bromells’ apartment, after She had been carried up through the rational structure By articulate stages, floor after flashing floor, And after we helped her get across the hall, And get across the room to a chair, somehow We got her seated in a chair that was placed A little too far away from the nearest table, At the edge of the abyss, and there she sat, Exposed, her body the object of our attention— The heaviness of it, the helpless graceless leg, The thick stocking, the leg brace, the medical shoe. At work between herself and us there was A new principle of social awkwardness And skillfulness required of each of us. Our tones of voice in this easy conversation Were instruments of marvelous finesse, Measuring and maintaining with exactitude “The fact or condition of the difference There was between us, both in space and time.” Her smiling made her look as if she had Just then tasted something delicious, the charm Her courtesy attributed to her friends. This decent elegant fellow human being Was seated in virtue, character, disability, Behind her the order of the ranged bookshelves, The windows monitored by Venetian blinds— “These can be raised or lowered; numerous slats, Horizontally arranged, and parallel, Which can be tilted so as to admit Precisely the desired light or air.” We were all her friends, Maggie, and Bill, and Anne, And I, and the nice Boston Brahmin elderly man Named Duncan, utterly friendly and benign. And of course it wasn’t whether or not the world Was benign but whether it looked at her too much. She wasn’t “painfully shy” but just the same I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been Painfulness in her shyness earlier on, Say at dancing school. Like others, though, she had Survived her childhood somehow. Nor do I mean She was unhappy. Maybe more or less so Before her marriage. One had the sense of trips Arranged, committees, concerts, baffled courage Living it through, giving it order and style. And one had the sense of the late marriage as of Two bafflements inventing the sense they made Together. The marriage seemed, to the outside world, And probably was, radiant and triumphant, And I think that one could almost certainly say That during the last, heroic, phase of things, After his death, and after the stroke, she had By force of character and careful management, Maintained a certain degree of happiness. The books there on the bookshelves told their stories, Line after line, all of them evenly spaced, And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces. In one of the books Dr. Johnson told the story: “In the scale of being, wherever it begins, Or ends, there are chasms infinitely deep; Infinite vacuities...For surely, Nothing can so disturb the passions, or Perplex the intellects of man so much, As the disruption of this union with Visible nature, separation from all That has delighted or engaged him, a change Not only of the place but of the manner Of his being, an entrance into a state Not simply which he knows not, but perhaps A state he has not faculties to know.” The dinner was delicious, fresh greens, and reds, And yellows, produce of the season due, And fish from the nearby sea; and there were also Ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink.

Saturday afternoon. The barracks is almost empty. The soldiers are almost all on overnight pass. There is only me, writing this letter to you, And one other soldier, down at the end of the room, And a spider, that hangs by the thread of his guts, His tenacious and delicate guts, Swift’s spider, All self-regard, or else all privacy. The dust drifts in the sunlight around him, as currents Lie in lazy, drifting schools in the vast sea. In his little sea the spider lowers himself Out of his depth. He is his own diving bell, Though he cannot see well. He observes no fish, And sees no wonderful things. His unseeing guts Are his only hold on the world outside himself. I love you, and miss you, and I find you hard to imagine. Down at the end of the room, the other soldier Is getting ready, I guess, to go out on pass. He is shining his boots. He sits on the edge of his bunk, Private, submissive, and heedful of himself, And, bending over himself, he is his own nest. The slightest sound he makes is of his being. He is his mother, and nest, wife, brother, and father. His boots are bright already, yet still he rubs And rubs till, brighter still, they are his mirror, And in this mirror he observes, I guess, His own submissiveness. He is far from home.

A man and a woman are sitting at a table. It is supper time. The air is green. The walls Are white in the green air, as rocks under water Retain their own true color, though washed in green. I do not know either the man or the woman, Nor do I know whatever they know of each other. Though washed in my eye they keep their own true color. The man is all his own hunched strength, the body’s Self and strength, that bears, like weariness, Itself upon itself, as a stone’s weight Bears heavily on itself to be itself. Heavy the strength that bears the body down. And the way he feeds is like a dreamless sleep. The dreaming of a stone is how he feeds. The woman’s arms are plump, mottled a little The flesh, like standing milk, and on one arm A blue bruise, got in some household labor or other, Flowering in the white. Her staring eye, Like some bird’s cry called from some deepest wood, Says nothing of what it is but what it is. Such silence is the bird’s cry of the stone.

I sit here in a shelter behind the words Of what I’m writing, looking out as if Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here. The words are like a scrim upon a page, Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim. I can dimly see there’s something or someone there. But I can’t tell if it’s God, or one of his angels, Or the past, or future, or who it is I love, My mother or father lost, or my lost sister, Or my wife lost when I was too late to get there, I only know that there’s something, or somebody, there. Tell me your name. How was it that I knew you?

In memoriam Mary Ann, 1932–1980 The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like Listening to music. Several of them are teachers, One is a psychologist, one is reading a book, The page glares white in the summer sunlight; Others are just sunning themselves, or just Sitting there looking out over the water; A couple of them seem to be talking together; From this far off you can’t hear what they are saying. The day is hot, the absolute middle of summer. Someone has written an obscenity In huge letters on the rocks above and behind This group of people, and someone else, one of them, Maybe, or maybe a neighbor, the owner of one Of the cottages up behind and back in the woods, Has tried to erase it and only partly done so, So that for years it will say hoarsely fuck To the random winds and to the senseless waves. One of them is sitting with her back turned To me and to the others on the rocks. The purple Loosestrife and the tigerlilies are like the flags Of some celebration; they bloom along the edge Of a small stream that makes its way unseen Down to the rocks and sand. Her shoulders are round, And rather luxuriously heavy, and the whole figure Has a youthful and graceful amplitude of being Whose beauty will last her her whole life long. The voices of some people out in a boat somewhere Are carried in over the water with surprising Force and clarity, though saying I don’t know what: Happiness; unhappiness; something about the conditions Of all such things; work done, not done; the saving Of the self in the intense work of its singleness, Learning to live with it. Their lives have separate ends. Suddenly she turned her head and seems to look Toward me and toward the others on the rocks, So that her body, turned away, is more expressive Than her blank face, a pure reflector of light.

The style a form of concealment the way style is. His manners seemed a parody, almost, Of manners, a movie star of bygone days; Strangely elaborate, highly stylized manners, Complicit with his fame and with your praise; Looking toward you and then away from you, Star-like, movie-star-like, a dance routine, The walk almost a glide, or elegant shuffle, Always on the verge of veering away, Circling away and over to the other side Of the frozen skating arena that he was on; A dancer’s courtesy, the courtesy, I mean, of the dancer to the audience, Flirtatious and familiar, only for you, And entirely impersonal and withheld. All of the above, though, maybe, misses the point, Because it seems to say he knew about What he was doing or what the style was for, And nothing let one be sure that this was so; A look on his face of amusement, as if he knew A secret that he shared with you and yet Kept to himself, as if it only showed The cryptogram but wouldn’t provide the key To read it with. But could he read the code? One night, late at night, as we were driving Home from having had dinner out, in Boston, We saw him figure skating through Charles Street Circle, Right through and among the circling lights of cars As if with champion skill on thin ice whirling Oblivious to the astonished blaring horns, As a dancer or skater seems, while dancing to The music that we hear, oblivious to The music that we hear and listening to Some other music heard from somewhere else. So Peter moved like a dancer or skater through And among the dangerous outraged cars as if Untouchable and untouched and moving to The sounds of something else from somewhere else— The music maybe of his madness was it? It was as if he skated in solitude And glided whirling on a lonely tarn Far out away from everything there is.