John Ciardi

No one can wish nothing. Even that death wish sophomores are nouveau-glib about reaches for a change of notice. “I’ll have you know,” it will say thirty years later to its son, “I was once widely recognized for the quality of my death wish.” That was before three years of navel-reading with a guru who reluctantly concluded some souls are bank tellers; perhaps more than one would think at the altitude of Intro. Psych., or turned on to a first raga, or joining Polyglots Anonymous. One trouble with this year’s avant-garde is that it has already taken it fifty years to be behind the avant-garde of the twenties with the Crash yet to come. And even free souls buy wives, fall in love with automobiles, and marry a mortgage. At fifty, semisustained by bourbon, you wonder what the kids see in that Galactic Twang they dance the Cosmic Konk to. You will have forgotten such energy, its illusion of violent freedoms. You must suffer memory to understanding in the blare of a music that tires you. There does come a death wish, but you will be trapped by your begetting, love what you have given, be left waiting in a noise for the word that must be whispered. No one can wish nothing. You can learn to wish for so little a word might turn you all the bent ways to love, its mercies practiced, its one day at a time begun and lived and slept on and begun.

Night after night forever the dolls lay stiff by the children’s dreams. On the goose-feathers of the rich, on the straw of the poor, on the gypsy ground— wherever the children slept, dolls have been found in the subsoil of the small loves stirred again by the Finders After Everything. Down lay the children by their hanks and twists. Night after night grew over imagination. The fuzzies shed, the bright buttons fell out of the heads, arms ripped, and down through goose-feathers, straw; and the gypsy ground the dolls sank, and some—the fuzziest and most loved changed back to string and dust, and the dust moved dream-puffs round the Finders’ boots as they dug, sieved, brushed, and came on a little clay dog, and a little stone man, and a little bone girl, that had kept their eyes wide open forever, while all the children slept.

The catalpa’s white week is ending there in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full of its own flowering now, but the least air spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall whole coronations. There is not much more of what this is. Is every gladness quick? That tree’s a nuisance, really. Long before the summer’s out, its beans, long as a stick, will start to shed. And every year one limb cracks without falling off and hangs there dead till I get up and risk my neck to trim what it knows how to lose but not to shed. I keep it only for this one white pass. The end of June’s its garden; July, its Fall; all else, the world remembering what it was in the seven days of its visible miracle. What should I keep if averages were all?

Morning glories, pale as a mist drying, fade from the heat of the day, but already hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg hooks have found and are boarding them. This could do for the sack of the imaginary fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they one by one vanish and leave still real only what has been snatched out of the spell. I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except when the hive is threatened. They know the good of it must be grabbed and hauled before the whole feast wisps off. They swarm in light and, fast, dive in, then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy with gold and sunlight. The line of them, like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge. And back again to find the fleet gone. Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off they cruise to what stays open longer. Nothing green gives honey. And by now you’d have to look twice to see more than green where all those white sails trembled when the world was misty and open and the prize was there to be taken.

I am in Rome, Vatican bells tolling a windowful of God and Bernini. My neighbor, the Pope, has died and God overnight, has wept black mantles over the sainted stone age whose skirted shadows flit through to the main cave. I nurse a cold. It must be error to sniffle in sight of holiness. “Liquids,” the doctor said. He has no cure, but since I have my choice, I sip champagne. If I must sit dropsical to Heaven, let me at least be ritual to a living water. In the crypt under the cave the stone box in its stone row has been marked for months now. My neighbor knew where he was going. I half suspect I, too, know, and that it is nothing to sneeze at, but am left to sneeze. I drink my ritual Moët et Chandon and wish (my taste being misformed for the high authentic) I had a California—a Korbel or an Almaden. I like it “forward,” as clerics of such matters say, not schooled to greatness. It is loud in Heaven today and in the great stone school my neighbor kept. The alumni procession of saints is forming for him. Bells clobber the air with portents. I sniffle and sneeze, wad kleenex, and sip champagne, trying to imagine what it might be to take part in a greatness, or even in the illusion of something like. The experience might deepen my character, though I am already near the bottom of it, among wads and butts of what was once idea. And the last swallow I do not like the after-taste, if that is what I am tasting. But this is ritual. I toast my neighbor: may he find his glass, and may its after-taste be all that he was schooled to.

I Once I had 1000 roses. Literally 1000 roses. I was working for a florist back in the shambling ‘Thirties when iced skids of 250 roses sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall. So for $8 I bought 1000 roses, 500 white and 500 red, for Connie’s wedding to steadiness. I strewed the church aisle whole and the bride came walking on roses, roses all the way: The white roses and the red roses. White for the bed we had shared. Red for the bed she went to from the abundance in her to the fear in what she wanted. The gift was not in the roses but in the abundance of the roses. To her whose abundance had never wholly been mine, and could never be his. He had no gift of abundance in him but only the penuries of sobriety. A good steady clerk, most mortgageable, returning in creaking shoes over the white and the red roses. Returning over the most flowering he would ever touch, with the most flowering I had ever touched. A feast of endings. II This morning I passed a pushcart heaped with white carnations as high as if there had fallen all night one of those thick-flaked, slow, windless, wondering snows that leave shakos on fence posts, polar bears in the hedges, caves in the light, and a childhood on every sill. Once, twice a year, partially, and once, twice a lifetime, perfectly, that snow falls. In which I ran like a young wolf in its blood leaping to snap the flower-flakes clean from the air; their instant on the tongue flat and almost dusty and not enough to be cold. But as I ran, face-up, mouth open, my cheeks burned with tears and flower-melt, and my lashes were fringed with gauze, and my ears wore white piping. There is no feast but energy. All men know—have known and will remember again and again—what food that is for the running young wolf of the rare days when shapes fall from the air and may be had for the leaping. Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty. And how they are instantly nothing— a commotion in the air and in the blood. —And how they are endlessly all. III My father’s grave, the deepest cave I know, was banked with snow and lilies. We stuck the dead flowers into the snow banks dirty with sand and trampled by digger’s boots. The flowers, stiff and unbeckoning, ripped from their wires in the wind and blew their seasons out as snow Purer than the snow itself. A last abundance correcting our poverties. I remember the feasts of my life, their every flowing. I remember the wolf all men remember in his blood. I remember the air become a feast of flowers. And remember his last flowers whitening winter in an imitation of possibility, while we hunched black in the dirtied place inside possibility where the prayers soiled him. If ever there was a man of abundances he lies there flowerless at that dirty center whose wired flowers try and try to make the winter clean again in air. And fail. And leave me raging as the young wolf grown from his day’s play in abundance to the ravening of recollection. Creaking to penury over the flower-strew. IV This morning I passed a pushcart heaped beyond possibility, as when the sun begins again after that long snow and the earth is moonscaped and wonderlanded and humped and haloed in the light it makes: an angel on every garbage can, a god in every tree, that childhood on every sill.—At a corner of the ordinary. Where is she now? Instantly nothing. A penury after flower-strew. Nothing. A feast of glimpses. Not fact itself, but an idea of the possible in the fact. —And so the rare day comes: I was again the young wolf trembling in his blood at the profusions heaped and haloed in their instant next to the ordinary. And did not know myself what feast I kept —till I said your name. At once all plenty was. It is the words starve us, the act that feeds. The air trembling with the white wicks of its falling encloses us. To be perfect, I suppose, we must be brief. The long thing is to remember imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude the grave of abundance. O flower-banked, air-dazzling, and abundant woman, though the young wolf is dead, all men know—have known and must remember— You.

The thing about a shark is—teeth, One row above, one row beneath. Now take a close look. Do you find It has another row behind? Still closer—here, I’ll hold your hat: Has it a third row behind that? Now look in and...Look out! Oh my, I’ll never know now! Well, goodbye.