Howard Nemerov

Naked before the glass she said, “I see my body as no man has, Nor any shall unless I wed And naked in a stranger’s house Stand timid beside his bed. There is no pity in the flesh.” “Or else I shall grow old,” she said, “Alone, and change my likeliness For a vile, slack shape, a head Shriveled with thinking wickedness Against the day I must be dead And eaten by my crabbed wish.” “One or the other way,” she said, “How shall I know the difference, When wrinkles come, to spinster or bride? Whether to marry or burn is bless- ed best, O stranger to my bed, There is no pity in the flesh.”

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters these by themselves delight, even without a meaning, in a foreign language, in Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve all day across the lake, scoring their white records in ice. Being intelligible, these winding ways with their audacities and delicate hesitations, they become miraculous, so intimately, out there at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist balance against great skeletons of stars exactly; the blind bat surveys his way by echo alone. Still, the point of style is character. The universe induces a different tremor in every hand, from the check-forger’s to that of the Emperor Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on. Miraculous. It is as though the world were a great writing. Having said so much, let us allow there is more to the world than writing: continental faults are not bare convoluted fissures in the brain. Not only must the skaters soon go home; also the hard inscription of their skates is scored across the open water, which long remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead, Who rarely bothered coming home to die But simply stayed away out there In the clean war, the war in the air. Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea, But stayed up there in the relative wind, Shades fading in the mind, Who had no graves but only epitaphs Where never so many spoke for never so few: Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars, Per aspera, to the stars. That was the good war, the war we won As if there was no death, for goodness's sake. With the help of the losers we left out there In the air, in the empty air.

for Francis and Barbara 1 Among the high-branching, leafless boughs Above the roof-peaks of the town, Snowflakes unnumberably come down. I watched out of the attic window The laced sway of family trees, Intricate genealogies Whose strict, reserved gentility, Trembling, impossible to bow, Received the appalling fall of snow. All during Sunday afternoon, Not storming, but befittingly, Out of a still, grey, devout sky, The snowflakes fell, until all shapes Went under, and thickening, drunken lines Cobwebbed the sleep of solemn pines. Up in the attic, among many things Inherited and out of style, I cried, then fell asleep awhile, Waking at night now, as the snow- flakes from darkness to darkness go Past yellow lights in the street below. 2 I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful. And like a child I cried myself to sleep High in the head of the house, feeling the hull Beneath me pitch and roll among the steep Mountains and valleys of the many years That brought me to tears. Down in the cellar, furnace and washing machine, Pump, fuse-box, water heater, work their hearts Out at my life, which narrowly runs between Them and this cemetery of spare parts For discontinued men, whose hats and canes Are my rich remains. And women, their portraits and wedding gowns Stacked in the corners, brooding in wooden trunks; And children’s rattles, books about lions and clowns; And headless, hanging dresses swayed like drunks Whenever a living footstep shakes the floor; I mention no more; But what I thought today, that made me cry, Is this, that we live in two kinds of thing: The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky Their black patience, are one, and that branching Relation teaches how we endure and grow; The other is the snow, Falling in a white chaos from the sky, As many as the sands of all the seas, As all the men who died or who will die, As stars in heaven, as leaves of all the trees; As Abraham was promised of his seed; Generations bleed, Till I, high in the tower of my time Among familiar ruins, began to cry For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, Because all died, because I had to die. The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, And a child I slept.

The house is so quiet now The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet, Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth Grinning into the floor, maybe at my Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth. I’ve lived this way long enough, But when my old woman died her soul Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can’t bear To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust And the woolen mice, and begin to howl Because there is old filth everywhere She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair. I know now how life is cheap as dirt, And still the hungry, angry heart Hangs on and howls, biting at air.

“ The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious.” A mile out in the marshes, under a sky Which seems to be always going away In a hurry, on that Venetian land threaded With hidden canals, you will find the city Which seconds ours (so cemeteries, too, Reflect a town from hillsides out of town), Where Being most Becomingly ends up Becoming some more. From cardboard tenements, Windowed with cellophane, or simply tenting In paper bags, the angry mackerel eyes Glare at you out of stove-in, sunken heads Far from the sea; the lobster, also, lifts An empty claw in his most minatory Of gestures; oyster, crab, and mussel shells Lie here in heaps, savage as money hurled Away at the gate of hell. If you want results, These are results. Objects of value or virtue, However, are also to be picked up here, Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat, Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels No one will skid on, apple cores that caused Neither the fall of man nor a theory Of gravitation. People do throw out The family pearls by accident, sometimes, Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques To prowl this place by night, with flashlights, on The off-chance of somebody’s having left Derelict chairs which will turn out to be by Hepplewhite, a perfect set of six Going to show, I guess, that in any sty Someone’s heaven may open and shower down Riches responsive to the right dream; though It is a small chance, certainly, that sends The ghostly dealer, heavy with fly-netting Over his head, across these hills in darkness, Stumbling in cut-glass goblets, lacquered cups, And other products of his dreamy midden Penciled with light and guarded by the flies. For there are flies, of course. A dynamo Composed, by thousands, of our ancient black Retainers, hums here day and night, steady As someone telling beads, the hum becoming A high whine at any disturbance; then, Settled again, they shine under the sun Like oil-drops, or are invisible as night, By night. All this continually smoulders, Crackles, and smokes with mostly invisible fires Which, working deep, rarely flash out and flare, And never finish. Nothing finishes; The flies, feeling the heat, keep on the move. Among the flies, the purefying fires, The hunters by night, acquainted with the art Of our necessities, and the new deposits That each day wastes with treasure, you may say There should be ratios. You may sum up The results, if you want results. But I will add That wild birds, drawn to the carrion and flies, Assemble in some numbers here, their wings Shining with light, their flight enviably free, Their music marvelous, though sad, and strange.

Adorable images, Plaster of Paris Lilies of the field, You are not alive, therefore Pathos will be out of place. But I have learned A strange fact about your fate, And it is this: After you go out of fashion Beneath your many fashions, Or when your elbows and knees Have been bruised powdery white, So that you are no good to anybody— They will take away your gowns, Your sables and bathing suits, Leaving exposed before all men Your inaccessible bellies And pointless nubilities. Movers will come by night And load you all into trucks And take you away to the Camps, Where soldiers, or the State Police, Will use you as targets For small-arms practice, Leading me to inquire, Since pathos is out of place, What it is that they are practicing. November 1961

The world is full of mostly invisible things, And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye, Or its nose, in a book, to find them out, Things like the square root of Everest Or how many times Byron goes into Texas, Or whether the law of the excluded middle Applies west of the Rockies. For these And the like reasons, you have to go to school And study books and listen to what you are told, And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know What you will do with the mean annual rainfall On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be Good for you, and you will have to learn them In order to become one of the grown-ups Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole, But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world Under his hat, which is where it belongs, And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

My dear, I wonder if before the end You ever thought about a children’s game— I’m sure you must have played it too—in which You ran along a narrow garden wall Pretending it to be a mountain ledge So steep a snowy darkness fell away On either side to deeps invisible; And when you felt your balance being lost You jumped because you feared to fall, and thought For only an instant: That was when I died. That was a life ago. And now you’ve gone, Who would no longer play the grown-ups’ game Where, balanced on the ledge above the dark, You go on running and you don’t look down, Nor ever jump because you fear to fall.

People are putting up storm windows now, Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon, I saw storm windows lying on the ground, Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream Away in lines like seaweed on the tide Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind. The ripple and splash of rain on the blurred glass Seemed that it briefly said, as I walked by, Something I should have liked to say to you, Something ... the dry grass bent under the pane Brimful of bouncing water ... something of A swaying clarity which blindly echoes This lonely afternoon of memories And missed desires, while the wintry rain (Unspeakable, the distance in the mind!) Runs on the standing windows and away.