Karl Shapiro

To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew Is the curriculum. In mid-September The entering boys, identified by hats, Wander in a maze of mannered brick Where boxwood and magnolia brood And columns with imperious stance Like rows of ante-bellum girls Eye them, outlanders. In whited cells, on lawns equipped for peace, Under the arch, and lofty banister, Equals shake hands, unequals blankly pass; The exemplary weather whispers, “Quiet, quiet” And visitors on tiptoe leave For the raw North, the unfinished West, As the young, detecting an advantage, Practice a face. Where, on their separate hill, the colleges, Like manor houses of an older law, Gaze down embankments on a land in fee, The Deans, dry spinsters over family plate, Ring out the English name like coin, Humor the snob and lure the lout. Within the precincts of this world Poise is a club. But on the neighboring range, misty and high, The past is absolute: some luckless race Dull with inbreeding and conformity Wears out its heart, and comes barefoot and bad For charity or jail. The scholar Sanctions their obsolete disease; The gentleman revolts with shame At his ancestor. And the true nobleman, once a democrat, Sleeps on his private mountain. He was one Whose thought was shapely and whose dream was broad; This school he held his art and epitaph. But now it takes from him his name, Falls open like a dishonest look, And shows us, rotted and endowed, Its senile pleasure.

It stops the town we come through. Workers raise Their oily arms in good salute and grin. Kids scream as at a circus. Business men Glance hopefully and go their measured way. And women standing at their dumbstruck door More slowly wave and seem to warn us back, As if a tear blinding the course of war Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish. Fruit of the world, O clustered on ourselves We hang as from a cornucopia In total friendliness, with faces bunched To spray the streets with catcalls and with leers. A bottle smashes on the moving ties And eyes fixed on a lady smiling pink Stretch like a rubber-band and snap and sting The mouth that wants the drink-of-water kiss. And on through crummy continents and days, Deliberate, grimy, slightly drunk we crawl, The good-bad boys of circumstance and chance, Whose bucket-helmets bang the empty wall Where twist the murdered bodies of our packs Next to the guns that only seem themselves. And distance like a strap adjusted shrinks, Tightens across the shoulder and holds firm. Here is a deck of cards; out of this hand Dealer, deal me my luck, a pair of bulls, The right draw to a flush, the one-eyed jack. Diamonds and hearts are red but spades are black, And spades are spades and clubs are clovers—black. But deal me winners, souvenirs of peace. This stands to reason and arithmetic, Luck also travels and not all come back. Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains, And trains to death or trucks, and trucks to death, Or trucks lead to the march, the march to death, Or that survival which is all our hope; And death leads back to trucks and trains and ships, But life leads to the march, O flag! at last The place of life found after trains and death— Nightfall of nations brilliant after war.

The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers, The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn, From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs, Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him. Our faces washed, our hearts in the right place, We kneel or stand or listen from our tents; Half-naked natives with their kind of grace Move down the road with balanced staffs like mendicants. And over the hill the guns bang like a door And planes repeat their mission in the heights. The jungle outmaneuvers creeping war And crawls within the circle of our sacred rites. I long for our disheveled Sundays home, Breakfast, the comics, news of latest crimes, Talk without reference, and palindromes, Sleep and the Philharmonic and the ponderous Times . I long for lounging in the afternoons Of clean intelligent warmth, my brother’s mind, Books and thin plates and flowers and shining spoons, And your love’s presence, snowy, beautiful, and kind.

Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white, And soon down ladders of reflected light The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually They separate on paths of long ago, Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew That leads, live as a nerve, to memory. But often when too steep her dream descends, Perhaps to the grotto where her father bends To pick her up, the husband wakes as though He had forgotten something in the house. Motionless he eyes the room that glows With the little animals of light that prowl This way and that. Soft are the beasts of light But softer still her hand that drifts so white Upon the whiteness. How like a water-plant It floats upon the black canal of sleep, Suspended upward from the distant deep In pure achievement of its lovely want! Quietly then he plucks it and it folds And is again a hand, small as a child’s. He would revive it but it barely stirs And so he carries it off a little way And breaks it open gently. Now he can see The sweetness of the fruit, his hand eats hers.

What should the wars do with these jigging fools? The man behind the book may not be man, His own man or the book’s or yet the time’s, But still be whole, deciding what he can In praise of politics or German rimes; But the intellectual lights a cigarette And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile Is the merest hyphen—lest he should forget What he has been resuming all the while. He talks to overhear, she to withdraw To some interior feminine fireside Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride, Making him think of cats, a stray of which Some days sets up a howling in his brain, Pure interference such as this neat bitch Seems to create from listening disdain. But talk is all the value, the release, Talk is the very fillip of an act, The frame and subject of the masterpiece Under whose film of age the face is cracked. His own forehead glows like expensive wood, But back of it the mind is disengaged, Self-sealing clock recording bad and good At constant temperature, intact, unaged. But strange, his body is an open house Inviting every passerby to stay; The city to and fro beneath his brows Wanders and drinks and chats from night to day. Think of a private thought, indecent room Where one might kiss his daughter before bed! Life is embarrassed; shut the family tomb, Console your neighbor for his recent dead; Do something! die in Spain or paint a green Gouache, go into business (Rimbaud did), Or start another Little Magazine, Or move in with a woman, have a kid. Invulnerable, impossible, immune, Do what you will, your will will not be done But dissipate the light of afternoon Till evening flickers like the midnight sun, And midnight shouts and dies: I’d rather be A milkman walking in his sleep at dawn Bearing fat quarts of cream, and so be free, Crossing alone and cold from lawn to lawn. I’d rather be a barber and cut hair Than walk with you in gilt museum halls, You and the puma-lady, she so rare Exhaling her silk soul upon the walls. Go take yourselves apart, but let me be The fault you find with everyman. I spit, I laugh, I fight; and you, l’homme qui rît ; Swallow your stale saliva, and still sit.

I am an atheist who says his prayers. I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that. I take the loyalty oath. I am a deviate. I fondle and contribute, backscuttle and brown, father of three. I stand high in the community. My name is in Who’s Who . People argue about my modesty. I drink my share and yours and never have enough. I free-load officially and unofficially. A physical coward, I take on all intellectuals, established poets, popes, rabbis, chiefs of staff. I am a mystic. I will take an oath that I have seen the Virgin. Under the dry pandanus, to the scratching of kangaroo rats, I achieve psychic onanism. My tree of nerves electrocutes itself. I uphold the image of America and force my luck. I write my own ticket to oblivion. I am of the race wrecked by success. The audience brings me news of my death. I write out of boredom, despise solemnity. The wrong reason is good enough for me. I am of the race of the prematurely desperate. In poverty of comfort I lay gunpowder plots. I lapse my insurance. I am the Babbitt metal of the future. I never read more than half of a book. But that half I read forever. I love the palimpsest, statues without heads, fertility dolls of the continent of Mu. I dream prehistory, the invention of dye. The palms of the dancers’ hands are vermillion. Their heads oscillate like the cobra. High-caste woman smelling of earth and silk, you can dry my feet with your hair. I take my place beside the Philistine and unfold my napkin. This afternoon I defend the Marines. I goggle at long cars. Without compassion I attack the insane. Give them the horsewhip! The homosexual lectures me brilliantly in the beer booth. I can feel my muscles soften. He smiles at my terror. Pitchpots flicker in the lemon groves. I gaze down on the plains of Hollywood. My fine tan and my arrogance, my gray hair and my sneakers, O Israel! Wherever I am I become. The power of entry is with me. In the doctor’s office a patient, calm and humiliated. In the foreign movies a native, shabby enough. In the art gallery a person of authority (there’s a secret way of approaching a picture. Others move off). The high official insults me to my face. I say nothing and accept the job. He offers me whiskey. How beautifully I fake! I convince myself with men’s room jokes and epigrams. I paint myself into a corner and escape on pulleys of the unknown. Whatever I think at the moment is true. Turn me around in my tracks; I will take your side. For the rest, I improvise and am not spiteful and water the plants on the cocktail table.

O hideous little bat, the size of snot, With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes, To populate the stinking cat you walk The promontory of the dead man’s nose, Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe The smoking mountains of my food And in a comic mood In mid-air take to bed a wife. Riding and riding with your filth of hair On gluey foot or wing, forever coy, Hot from the compost and green sweet decay, Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy— You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool, In the tight belly of the dead Burrow with hungry head And inlay maggots like a jewel. At your approach the great horse stomps and paws Bringing the hurricane of his heavy tail; Shod in disease you dare to kiss my hand Which sweeps against you like an angry flail; Still you return, return, trusting your wing To draw you from the hunter’s reach That learns to kill to teach Disorder to the tinier thing. My peace is your disaster. For your death Children like spiders cup their pretty hands And wives resort to chemistry of war. In fens of sticky paper and quicksands You glue yourself to death. Where you are stuck You struggle hideously and beg, You amputate your leg Imbedded in the amber muck. But I, a man, must swat you with my hate, Slap you across the air and crush your flight, Must mangle with my shoe and smear your blood, Expose your little guts pasty and white, Knock your head sidewise like a drunkard’s hat, Pin your wings under like a crow’s, Tear off your flimsy clothes And beat you as one beats a rat. Then like Gargantua I stride among The corpses strewn like raisins in the dust, The broken bodies of the narrow dead That catch the throat with fingers of disgust. I sweep. One gyrates like a top and falls And stunned, stone blind, and deaf Buzzes its frightful F And dies between three cannibals.

With focus sharp as Flemish-painted face In film of varnish brightly fixed And through a polished hand-lens deeply seen, Sunday at noon through hyaline thin air Sees down the street, And in the camera of my eye depicts Row-houses and row-lives: Glass after glass, door after door the same, Face after face the same, the same, The brutal visibility the same; As if one life emerging from one house Would pause, a single image caught between Two facing mirrors where vision multiplies Beyond perspective, A silent clatter in the high-speed eye Spinning out photo-circulars of sight. I see slip to the curb the long machines Out of whose warm and windowed rooms pirouette Shellacked with silk and light The hard legs of our women. Our women are one woman, dressed in black. The carmine printed mouth And cheeks as soft as muslin-glass belong Outright to one dark dressy man, Merely a swagger at her curvy side. This is their visit to themselves: All day from porch to porch they weave A nonsense pattern through the even glare, Stealing in surfaces Cold vulgar glances at themselves. And high up in the heated room all day I wait behind the plate glass pane for one, Hot as a voyeur for a glimpse of one, The vision to blot out this woman’s sheen; All day my sight records expensively Row-houses and row-lives. But nothing happens; no diagonal With melting shadow falls across the curb: Neither the blinded negress lurching through fatigue, Nor exiles bleeding from their pores, Nor that bright bomb slipped lightly from its rack To splinter every silvered glass and crystal prism, Witch-bowl and perfume bottle And billion candle-power dressing-bulb, No direct hit to smash the shatter-proof And lodge at last the quivering needle Clean in the eye of one who stands transfixed In fascination of her brightness.

Your landscape sickens with a dry disease Even in May, Virginia, and your sweet pines Like Frenchmen runted in a hundred wars Are of a child’s height in these battlefields. For Wilson sowed his teeth where generals prayed —High-sounding Lafayette and sick-eyed Lee— The loud Elizabethan crashed your swamps Like elephants and the subtle Indian fell. Is it for love, you ancient-minded towns, That on the tidy grass of your great graves And on your roads and riverways serene Between the corn with green flags in a row, Wheat amorous as hair and hills like breasts Each generation, ignorant of the last, Mumbling in sheds, embarrassed to salute, Comes back to choke on etiquette of hate? You manufacture history like jute— Labor is cheap, Virginia, for high deeds, But in your British dream of reputation The black man is your conscience and your cost. Here on the plains perfect for civil war The clapboard city like a weak mirage Of order rises from the sand to house These thousands and the paranoid Monroe; The sunrise gun rasps in the throat of heaven; The lungs of dawn are heavy and corrupt; We hawk and spit; our flag walks through the air Breathing hysteria thickly in each face. Through the long school of day, absent in heart, Distant in every thought but self we tread, Wheeling in blocks like large expensive toys That never understand except through fun. To steal aside as aimlessly as curs Is our desire; to stare at corporals As sceptically as boys; not to believe The misty-eyed letter and the cheap snapshot. To cross the unnatural frontier of your name Is our free dream, Virginia, and beyond, White and unpatriotic in our beds, To rise from sleep like driftwood out of surf. But stricter than parole is this same wall And these green clothes, a secret on the fields, In towns betray us to the arresting touch Of lady-wardens, good and evil wives. And far and fabulous is the word “Outside” Like “Europe” when the midnight liners sailed, Leaving a wake of ermine on the tide Where rubies drowned and eyes were softly drunk. Still we abhor your news and every voice Except the Personal Enemy’s, and songs That pumped by the great central heart of love On tides of energy at evening come. Instinctively to break your compact law Box within box, Virginia, and throw down The dangerous bright habits of pure form We struggle hideously and cry for fear. And like a very tired whore who stands Wrapped in the sensual crimson of her art High in the tired doorway of a street And beckons half-concealed the passerby, The sun, Virginia, on your Western stairs Pauses and smiles away between the trees, Motioning the soldier overhill to town To his determined hungry burst of joy.

The gates clanged and they walked you into jail More tense than felons but relieved to find The hostile world shut out, the flags that dripped From every mother’s windowpane, obscene The bloodlust sweating from the public heart, The dog authority slavering at your throat. A sense of quiet, of pulling down the blind Possessed you. Punishment you felt was clean. The decks, the catwalks, and the narrow light Composed a ship. This was a mutinous crew Troubling the captains for plain decencies, A Mayflower brim with pilgrims headed out To establish new theocracies to west, A Noah’s ark coasting the topmost seas Ten miles above the sodomites and fish. These inmates loved the only living doves. Like all men hunted from the world you made A good community, voyaging the storm To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat; Trouble or calm, the men with Bibles prayed, The gaunt politicals construed our hate. The opposite of all armies, you were best Opposing uniformity and yourselves; Prison and personality were your fate. You suffered not so physically but knew Maltreatment, hunger, ennui of the mind. Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach Erupting in his face damn all your kind. Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us Are equally with those who shed the blood The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is What we come back to in the armistice.