Howard Nemerov

On the long shore, lit by the moon To show them properly alone, Two lovers suddenly embraced So that their shadows were as one. The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift tide of blood That silently they took at flood, And for a little time they prized Themselves emparadised. Then, as if shaken by stage-fright Beneath the hard moon’s bony light, They stood together on the sand Embarrassed in each other’s sight But still conspiring hand in hand, Until they saw, there underfoot, As though the world had found them out, The goose fish turning up, though dead, His hugely grinning head. There in the china light he lay, Most ancient and corrupt and grey. They hesitated at his smile, Wondering what it seemed to say To lovers who a little while Before had thought to understand, By violence upon the sand, The only way that could be known To make a world their own. It was a wide and moony grin Together peaceful and obscene; They knew not what he would express, So finished a comedian He might mean failure or success, But took it for an emblem of Their sudden, new and guilty love To be observed by, when they kissed, That rigid optimist. So he became their patriarch, Dreadfully mild in the half-dark. His throat that the sand seemed to choke, His picket teeth, these left their mark But never did explain the joke That so amused him, lying there While the moon went down to disappear Along the still and tilted track That bears the zodiac.

This morning, between two branches of a tree Beside the door, epeira once again Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap. I test his early-warning system and It works, he scrambles forth in sable with The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows The meaning of. And I remember now How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came Back as they do about this time each year, Grey squadrons with the slashes white on wings Cruising for bugs beneath the bellied cloud. Now soon the monarchs will be drifting south, And then the geese will go, and then one day The little garden birds will not be here. See how many leaves already have Withered and turned; a few have fallen, too. Change is continuous on the seamless web, Yet moments come like this one, when you feel Upon your heart a signal to attend The definite announcement of an end Where one thing ceases and another starts; When like the spider waiting on the web You know the intricate dependencies Spreading in secret through the fabric vast Of heaven and earth, sending their messages Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds, The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.

Still half drunk, after a night at cards, with the grey dawn taking us unaware among our guilty kings and queens, we drove far North in the morning, winners, losers, to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place one of us knew, with some vague view of cutting losses or consolidating gains by the old standard appeal to the wilderness, the desert, the empty places of our exile, bringing only the biblical bread and cheese and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way, expecting to drink only the clear cold water among the stones, and remember, or forget. Though no one said anything about atonement, there was still some purgatorial idea in all those aching heads and ageing hearts as we climbed the giant stair of the stream, reaching the place around noon. It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone, or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light, and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor, blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam of crystal to a calm where the waterlight dappled the ledges as they leaned against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again against the low wind moving over the stream, and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings. This surely was it, was what we had come for, was nature, though it looked like art with its grey fortress walls and laminated benches as in the waiting room of some petrified station. But we believed; and what it was we believed made of the place a paradise for ruined poker players, win or lose, who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks like gasping trout (the water they drank making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back waiting for nature to say the last word —as though the stones were Memnon stones, which, caught in a certain light, would sing. The silence (and even the noise of the waters was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase, grew pregnant; but nothing else did. The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks, unlike the ones you would expect to find on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon, mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em, were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks. Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man thought bitterly about primitive simplicity and decadence, and how he had been ruined by civilization and forced by circumstances to drink and smoke and sit up all night inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and could no longer afford a savagery whether noble or not; some would never batter that battered copy of Walden again. But all the same, the water, the sunlight, and the wind did something; even the dragonflies did something to the minds full of telephone numbers and flushes, to the flesh sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other. And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders which formed the giant stair of the stream, induced (again) some purgatorial ideas concerning humility, concerning patience and enduring what had to be endured, winning and losing and breaking even; ideas of weathering in whatever weather, being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents. But to these ideas did any purgatory respond? Only this one: that in a world where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap one might at any rate wash with the soap. After a time we talked about the War, about what we had done in the War, and how near some of us had been to being drowned, and burned, and shot, and how many people we knew who had been drowned, or burned, or shot; and would it have been better to have died in the War, the peaceful old War, where we were young? But the mineral peace, or paralysis, of those great stones, the moving stillness of the waters, entered our speech; the ribs and blood of the earth, from which all fables grow, established poetry and truth in us, so that at last one said, “I shall play cards until the day I die,” and another said, “in bourbon whisky are all the vitamins and minerals needed to sustain man’s life,” and still another, “I shall live on smoke until my spirit has been cured of flesh.” Climbing downstream again, on the way home to the lives we had left empty for a day, we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges not one had held the stream, which in its floods had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble, smashed practically back to nature, the massive masonry of span after span with its indifferent rage; this was a sight that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet both during the long drive home and after, till it was time to deal the cards.

Late in November, on a single night Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees That stand along the walk drop all their leaves In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone: the golden and green Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light. What signal from the stars? What senses took it in? What in those wooden motives so decided To strike their leaves, to down their leaves, Rebellion or surrender? and if this Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt? What use to learn the lessons taught by time. If a star at any time may tell us:Now.

By the dry road the fathers cough and spit, This is their room. They are the ones who hung That bloody sun upon the southern wall And crushed the armored beetle to the floor. The father’s skin is seamed and dry, the map Of that wild region where they drained the swamp And set provision out that they might sit, Of history the cracked precipitate, Until the glass be shattered and the sun Descend to burn the prosperous flesh away Of the filthy world, so vilely fathered on The fathers, such black cinders, sitting there. Old pioneers, what lecheries remain? When schoolgirls pass, what whispers of their skirts, Cold gleams of flesh, solicit in your veined And gemlike eyes the custom of desire? None now. Their eyes are sunk in ancient flesh, And the sarcastic triumph of the mind They now enjoy, letting their lust alone Who may have kin but have no longer kind. Neither tomorrow’s monstrous tumor nor The reformation of the past they wish, Who hold in silent colloquy the world A shrivelled apple in the hand of God. They hang at night their somber flags aloft, And through the amorous dark pursue their theme Of common images, that sleep may show Them done with all disasters but the one.

“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.” —The Insight Lady Dear old equivocal and closest friend, Grand Vizier to a weak bewildered king, Now we approach The Ecclesiastean Age Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest Like a party favor, or the brain blow a fuse And the comic-book light-bulb of Idea black out Forever, the idiot balloon of speech Go blank, and we shall know, if it be knowing, The world as it was before language once again; Mighty Fortress, maybe already mined And readying to blow up grievances About the lifetime of your servitude, The body of this death one talkative saint Wanted to be delivered of (not yet!), Aggressively asserting your ancient right To our humiliation by the bowel Or the rough justice of the elderly lecher’s Retiring from this incontinence to that; Dark horse, it’s you we’ve put the money on Regardless, the parody and satire and The nevertheless forgiveness of the soul Or mind, self, spirit, will or whatever else The ever-unknowable unknown is calling itself This time around—shall we renew our vows? How should we know by now how we might do Divorced? Homely animal, in sickness and health, For the duration; buddy, you know the drill.