John Frederick Nims

I’d have you known! It puzzles me forever To hear, day in, day out, the words men use, But never a single word about you, never. Strange!—in your every gesture, worlds of news. On busses people talk. On curbs I hear them; In parks I listen, barbershop and bar. In banks they murmur, and I sidle near them; But none allude to you there. None so far. I read books too, and turn the pages, spying: You must be there, one beautiful as you! But never, not by name. No planes are flying Your name in lacy trailers past the blue Marquees of heaven. No trumpets cry your fame. Strange!—how no constellations spell your name!

Seeing in crowded restaurants the one you love You wave at the door, tall girl in imperious fur, And make for him, bumping waiters, dropping a glove, Arriving soft with affectionate slur. As ladies half-turn, gazing, and men appraise You heap the linen with purse, scarf, cigarettes, lighter, Laughing some instantaneous droll phrase. As if sudden sun came out, the table is brighter. All moods: at a party everybody’s delight; Intent while brown curls shadow the serious page; When people are stuffy (more correct than right) The stamp and turn on heel of a little girl’s rage. But woman mostly, as winter moonlight sees, Impetuous midnight, and the dune’s dark trees.

Not knowing in what season this again Not knowing when again the arms outyearning Nor the flung smile in eyes not knowing when Not sure beyond all doubt of full return Not sure of time now nor the film’s reversal This all done opposite, the waif regathered Like our lost parents in the blinded song We bag in hand with wandering steps and slow Through suburbs take our solitary way Not that all clouds are garrisoned and stung Not that horizons loom with coppered legions Not that the year is dark with weird condition All who parted in all days looked back Saw the white face, the waving. And saw the sea Not knowing in what season this again For well they knew, the parters in all evenings Druid and Roman and the rocked Phoenician: The blood flows one imposed way, and no other

I Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters, I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation— From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality, Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . . Fingers clamped to iron railings in a tremor of earth’s vibration, I look upstream: foam and boulders wail with a biblical desolation, Tree roots, broken oar, a pier end, wrack of the continent dissolving . . . Braced, like tunnel workers hunching from implosion of locomotives, I look down: to ancient chaos, scrawl of the fog for commentary, Misty scripture—Delphic, Jungian—all mythology in gestation, Mists that chill our face in passing, soar to a mushroom luminescence . . . In between, where halos dazzle—as, on a high wire, spangled dancers— On the brink those waters sluice to, in the devil-may-care insouciance Of their roistering to glory, no forewarning of what impends, till Solid earth dissolves beneath them; all they had banked on once, vacuity . . . Kindled in the hollow wind they flare to a greenish incandescence; Channels they defined so smartly in the gusto of their careening All behind them now; before them, blinding haze and the noon’s diffusion . . . II Ten feet over those, our railing perched on a spur where verge and void—there!— Hiss and arc to touch each other, matter and shadow-matter fuming, We stare through the flow to bedrock, flashing its Kodachrome geology. Images swirl by—real, fancied—bits of hallucinated litter: Gold of oak leaf, taffy wrapper, lavender airmail—assignation? Yellow Kodak pack, pied comics, tissue a crimson lip had stippled (Let’s imagine). Some shows vivid, fresh-shellacked in the river’s sepia, All no sooner seen than vanished—on to the brink, its foaming rotos Hoarse as all earth’s turbines turning in a thunder of synchronicity. How deep toward the edge? waist? shoulder? as through a woozy lens we scan its Floor, old temple tesselation— No, terrain of the moon! Medusa’s Ancient face, and we stare frozen: stony glare in its vipers’ tangle . . . Still a thought returns and troubles: “no forewarning of what impends, till—” Shadow of impends—more menace coiled in the word than fact itself has: Fact erodes in action: Athens, in the arroyos of her theater, Leaned to watch the self-destructing of her blinded grandiosities, Willfulness and Will, a crash course; then, too late for it, anagnorisis; Purged of trivia through immersion in the clotted baths of tragedy, Then she knew and was transfigured by contrarious exaltations . . . III Eyes can’t leave the livid seething, its reiterative Memento! Reading, in this bubble chamber, stuff of the world as effervescence, Reading every life as half-life, reading in foam the one prognosis . . . Mac the trucker—checkered mackinaw, sort of a baseball cap with earflaps, Fists to crinkle up his beer cans—here at the falls is philosophical: “Down the tube. That’s life”—he’s waggish, nudging his cozy blonde—“You know, hon?” And she knows. We all know: Nature, making a splendor of our banalities, Lavishes Niagara on us, nudging our knack for the anagogical . . . Meanwhile, earth itself rolls over, nations caught in its tug of traction, From the brink of noon to darkness (but the grandeur of the transition!) Gone, like taffy wrapper, tissue: ferny world of the stegosaurus, Heraclitus, toe in rivers, Coriolanus in Corioli, Dancing T’ang girl, belles of Bali, kings of France with the Roman numerals, Gone, the fripperies and follies glossed in an Architectural Digest, Halls of mortuary marble, dinky glitz of the rare objet, the Aubusson, netsuke, scrimshaw, Tiffany, Tanagra, Bohara, All things au courant, things current—what a word with the gorge before us!— All our bookshelves, facts in folio, paleontology, agronomy, Jewels from that cluttered dump, statistics— many a scuffed Aladdin’s lamp there: As: one cell’s genetic lore’d fill seventy-five Manhattan phone books; As: for each poor soul among us, many a galaxy out there somewhere, Each of us more precious—rarer!—than a glittering island universe . . . We could catalogue forever; there’s no end to the world’s diversity, All that affluence from somewhere, more than a continent behind it; There’s no diminution either from the torrential cornucopia Since that primal burst of fireworks, first explosion from singularity; All the things, their scree, diluvium—go to the malls for confirmation: Lurid brass shop, teak shop, tech shop, patio ’n’ pool shop, campy duds shop . . . IV Most we’re through with soon enough, but some! how they lacerate the heart—not Savage indignation’s gash—but thrilling, with finer blade, pain’s inmost Nerve: the unsigned card I love you kept in a bureau drawer for decades; Sweater she wore once, that autumn, rich with the campfire musk; then letters, Lavish o, impulsive flourish, “When you’re away, in other cities, It’s their weather reports I look for, first thing in the morning papers . . .” So once the Provençal poet, in his rapture about freid’aura: “Winter winds that blow from your land feel like heaven upon my cheek here . . .” They’ve gone too, Provence and poet, off in the jumble-carts of history, Who was she? that rueful beauty, jewel of the court and joy of kings, who Dying murmured, “Je me regrette!”—wistful dear, with her curls disheveled On that last of all her pillows, feeling the dark impend—“I’ll miss me!” Images swirl by: châteaux that dance in the pool’s hallucination, Fêtes and follies effervescing—champagne, glass, and the hand that held them— Last, herself, the self where soul is, world of her lavalieres and lovers. Did she dream, through mists arising, how on the high wire, floodlit dancer, She had lived her brilliant moment? Hear, as the blood ran hushed, sonorous Thunders of the living river, more than a continent its source? And Not divine—so near the brink where verve like hers and the void meet, seething— Wreathed in opulence of sunset, some transfiguring of the waters?

Beside the rivers of the midnight town Where four-foot couples love and paupers drown, Shots of quick hell we took, our final kiss, The great and swinging bridge a bower for this. Your cheek lay burning in my fingers’ cup; Often my lip moved downward and yours up Till both adjusted, tightened, locksmith-true: The flesh precise, the crazy brain askew. Roughly the train with grim and piston knee Pounded apart our pleasure, you from me; Flare warned and ticket whispered and bell cried. Time and the locks of bitter rail divide. For ease remember, all that parted lie: Men who in camp of shot or doldrum die, Who at land’s-end eternal furlough take —This for memento as alone you wake.

what more can man desire? Always, he woke in those days With a sense of treasure, His heart a gayer glow Than his window grand with sun, As a child, its mind all whirring With green and hollied pleasure Wakes in a haze of Christmas! The season of secrets done. Or as one on country linen Wakes with a start one morning— Then on comfort snugger than pillows Floats: July at the lake. Or has married a golden girl And can hardly believe, but turning Sees blossom for him that very face Worshipping cameras take. Toy trains whirr perky on Till springs contort beneath; The middle-age rower slumps Like a sack—indignant seizure! Late editions wail Screen Star in Mystery Death— Yet in those same days He woke with a sense of treasure. Knowing: my love is safe Though the Rockies plunge like water, Though surf like a wildfire rage And omens roam the sky; Though limbs of the swimmer laze Pale where the seaweed caught her, Nothing can touch my love As dangerous time goes by.

Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings For her—maniacal in the clouds. No need for Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates: Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier. Won’t nurse—unlike the magnetic powers—repugnance; Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love. No terrors lurking in her depths, like those Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom, Terrors that, lossened, turn the hills vesuvian, Trace in cremation where the cities were. No, she’s our quiet mother, sensible. But therefore down-to-earth, not suffering Fools who play fast and loose among the mountains, Who fly in her face, or, drunken, clown on cornices. She taught our ways of walking. Her affection Adjusted the morning grass, the sands of summer Until our soles fit snug in each, walk easy. Holding her hand, we’re safe. Should that hand fail, The atmosphere we breathe would turn hysterical, Hiss with tornadoes, spinning us from earth Into the cold unbreathable desolations. Yet there—in fields of space—is where she shines, Ring-mistress of the circus of the stars, Their prancing carousels, their ferris wheels Lit brilliant in celebration. Thanks to her All’s gala in the galaxy. Down here she Walks us just right, not like the jokey moon Burlesquing our human stride to kangaroo hops; Not like vast planets, whose unbearable mass Would crush us in a bear hug to their surface And into the surface, flattened. No: deals fairly. Makes happy each with each: the willow bend Just so, the acrobat land true, the keystone Nestle in place for bridge and for cathedral. Let us pick up—or mostly—what we need: Rake, bucket, stone to build with, logs for warmth, The fallen fruit, the fallen child . . . ourselves. Instructs us too in honesty: our jointed Limbs move awry and crisscross, gawky, thwart; She’s all directness and makes that a grace, All downright passion for the core of things, For rectitude, the very ground of being: Those eyes are leveled where the heart is set. See, on the tennis court this August day: How, beyond human error, she’s the one Whose will the bright balls cherish and obey —As if in love. She’s tireless in her courtesies To even the klutz (knees, elbows all a-tangle), Allowing his poky serve Euclidean whimsies, The looniest lob its joy: serene parabolas.

We had a city also. Hand in hand Wandered happy as travellers our own land. Murmured in turn the hearsay of each stone Or, where a legend faltered, lived our own. The far-seen obelisk my father set (Pinning two roads forever where they met) Waved us in wandering circles, turned our tread Where once morass engulfed that passionate head. Cornice rose in ranges, rose so high It saw no sky, that forum, but noon sky. Marble shone like shallows; columns too Streamed with cool light as rocks in breakers do. O marble many-colored as reach of thought, Tones so recollected and so distraught. Golden: like swimmers when the August shore Brightens their folklore poses more and more. Or grey with silver: moon’s whirling spell Over the breathless olives we knew well; Ivory as shoulders there that summer-dressed Curve to come shyly naked, then find rest (The tresses love dishevelled leaning dazed And grateful). Or the wayward stone that blazed As cheeks do. Or as eyes half-lowered flare. Violet as veins are, love knows where. Fine coral as the shy and wild tonguetip, Undersea coral, rich as inner lip. There was a stone to build on! Friezes ran In strong chorales that where they closed began; And statues: each a wrung or ringing phrase In the soul’s passionate cadence of her days. O stone so matched and massive, worked so well, Who could believe it when the first brick fell? Who could imagine the unlucky word Would darken to the worldwide sigh we heard? How our eyes wrenched together and held fast Each face tightening to a chalky cast (So poor a copy of one hour before). Who could believe the gloom, the funnelled roar Of cornice falling, forum falling, all Falling? Or dream it fallen? Not a wall With eaves to route the rain. The rivers swelled Till roads groped in lakebottom. Nothing held Clean edge or corner. Caking, the black flood Left every luminous room tunnels of mud. Earth shook: the columns walked, in midair clashed, And the steep stone exploded as it crashed. Soon the barbarian swarmed like locusts blown Between the flood and spasm of our stone. Grunted to tug their huts and marble sties Where friezes broke like foam in the blue skies. Blue noses poked, recoiling as they found Our young and glad-eyed statues underground; Singing salvation, the lewd chisel pecks At boy and girl: one mutilated sex. All our high moments cheapened—greed and grime Charred them in rickety stithies to quicklime. Murderous world. That town that seemed a star Rose in our soul. And there the ruins are. We’ll not walk there again. Who’d wish to walk Where the rats gather and grey tourists talk? Who’d walk there even alive? Or bid his ghost Trail phosphor on the melancholy coast?

It’s brief and bright, dear children; bright and brief. Delight’s the lightning; the long thunder’s grief.

legato con amore in un volume ciò che per l’universo si squaderna . . . If what began (look far and wide) will end: This lava globe huddle and freeze, its core Brittle with cold, or pulled too near its friend Pop once like one gun in a long-drawn war, And the stars sputter one by one, the night So empty judging empty’s out of date (Space and time gone), then only, height on height, Mind that impelled those currents and that freight, Mind that after five days (see those days! Regions all tropic one day, one all ice!) Whistled man from the sea-moss, saw him raise The blundering forepaw, blink from shaggy eyes— If image, likeness in the ox-yoke brow Long out of focus, focused mind to Mind— Ah what unspeakable two and two allows That silence huddle and all eyes go blind? Our ups and downs—there! that remembered makes Memory which is the single mind. How sweet Carmine stars of the maple fumed in rakes At 1350 such and such a street. A thing to keep in mind. Yes and keep yet When the vile essence violescence lies. Once in winter by the richening sill Quiet, the fireplace tiny in our eyes— I mention this; there’s more. The Almighty will Aeons late stumble on it with surprise.