W. D. Snodgrass

For the person who obtained my debit card number and spent $11,000 in five days My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus, Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous Mexican male who prodigally claims My clan lines, identity and the sixteen Digits that unlock my bank account, Think twice. That less than proper name's been Taken by three ex-wives, each for an amount Past all you've squandered, each more than pleased To change it back. That surname you affect May have more consequence than getting teased By dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives. Don't underrate its history: one of ours played Piano on his prison's weekly broadcast; One got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made A bungle costing the World Series. My own past Could subject you to guilt by association: If you write anything more than false checks, Abandon all hope of large press publication Or prizes—critics shun the name like sex Without a condom. Whoever steals my purse Helps chain me to my writing desk again For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse: May your pen name help send you to your pen.

(Instructions for the Visit) Admire, when you come here, the glimmering hair Of the girl; praise her pale Complexion. Think well of her dress Though that is somewhat out of fashion. Don’t try to take her hand, but smile for Her hesitant gentleness. Say the old woman is looking strong Today; such hardiness. Remark, Perhaps, how she has dressed herself black Like a priest, and wears that sufficient air That does become the righteous. As you approach, she will push back Her chair, shove away her plate And wait, Sitting squat and direct, before The red mahogany chest Massive as some great Safe; will wait, By the table and her greasy plate, The bone half-chewed, her wine half-drained; She will wait. And fix her steady Eyes on you—the straight stare Of an old politician. Try once to meet her eyes. But fail. Let your sight Drift—yet never as if hunting for The keys (you keep imagining) hung By her belt. (They are not there.) Watch, perhaps, that massive chest—the way It tries to lean Forward, toward her, till it seems to rest Its whole household’s weight Of linens and clothing and provisions All on her stiff back. It might be strapped there like the monstrous pack Of some enchanted pedlar. Dense, self-contained, Like mercury in a ball, She can support this without strain, Yet she grows smaller, wrinkling Like a potato, parched as dung; It cramps her like a fist. Ask no one why the chest Has no knobs. Betray No least suspicion The necessities within Could vanish at her Will. Try not to think That as she feeds, gains Specific gravity, She shrinks, light- less as the world’s Hard core And the per- spective drains In her. Finally, above all, You must not ever see, Or let slip one hint you can see, On the other side, the girl’s Cuffs, like cordovan restraints; Forget her bony, tentative wrist, The half-fed, worrying eyes, and how She backs out, bows, and tries to bow Out of the scene, grows too ethereal To make a shape inside her dress And the dress itself is beginning already To sublime itself away like a vapor That merges into the empty twinkling Of the air and of the bright wallpaper.

Sweet beast, I have gone prowling, a proud rejected man who lived along the edges catch as catch can; in darkness and in hedges I sang my sour tone and all my love was howling conspicuously alone. I curled and slept all day or nursed my bloodless wounds until the squares were silent where I could make my tunes singular and violent. Then, sure as hearers came I crept and flinched away. And, girl, you've done the same. A stray from my own type, led along by blindness, my love was near to spoiled and curdled all my kindness. I find no kin, no child; only the weasel's ilk. Sweet beast, cat of my own stripe, come and take my milk.

Observe the cautious toadstools still on the lawn today though they grow over-evening; sun shrinks them away. Pale and proper and rootless, they righteously extort their living from the living. I have been their sort. See by our blocked foundation the cold, archaic clay, stiff and clinging and sterile as children mold at play or as the Lord God fashioned before He breathed it breath. The earth we dig and carry for flowers, is strong in death. Woman, we are the rich soil, friable and humble, where all our murders rot, where our old deaths crumble and fortify my reach far from you, wide and free, though I have set my root in you and am your tree.

(Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, once bragged that if one German city were bombed, they could call him “Meier.” At his Karinhall estate, he questions himself and his disgrace.) And why, Herr Reichsmarschall, is Italy Just like schnitzel?If they’re beaten Either one will just get bigger. Neither cuts too firm a figure.

Is it, then, your opinion Women are putty in your hands? Is this the face to launch upon A thousand one night stands? First, please, would you be so kind As to define your contribution To modern verse, the Western mind And human institutions? Where, where is the long, flowing hair, The velvet suit, the broad bow tie; Where is the other-worldly air, Where the abstracted eye? Describe the influence on your verse Of Oscar Mudwarp’s mighty line, The theories of Susan Schmersch Or the spondee’s decline. You’ve labored to present us with This mouse-sized volume; shall this equal The epic glories of Joe Smith? He’s just brought out a sequel. Where are the beard, the bongo drums, Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals, As who, released from Iowa, comes To tell of wondrous scandals? Have you subversive, out of date, Or controversial ideas? And can you really pull your weight Among such minds as these? Ah, what avails the tenure race, Ah, what the Ph.D., When all departments have a place For nincompoops like thee?

I "One Snodgrass,two Snodgrass,three Snodgrass,four . . . I took my own rollcall when I counted seconds; "One two three,Two two three,Three. . .," the drum score Showed only long rests to the tympani's entrance. "Oh-oh-oh leff; leff; leff-toh-righ-toh-leff," The sergeant cadenced us footsore recruits; The heart, poor drummer, gone lame, deaf, Then AWOL, gets frogmarched to the noose. II Old coots, at the Veterans', might catch breath If their cheeks got slapped by a nurse's aide, Then come back to life; just so, at their birth, Young rumps had been tendered warm accolades. The kick-ass rude attitude, smart-assed insult, The acid-fueled book review just might shock Us back to the brawl like smelling salts, Might sting the lulled heart up off its blocks. III I thought I'd always favor rubato Or syncopation, scorning fixed rhythms; Thought my old heartthrobs could stand up to stress; Believed one's bloodpump should skip a few beats If it fell into company with sleek young women; Believed my own bruit could beat with the best. Wrong again, Snodgrass! This new gold gadget, Snug as the watch on my wife's warm wrist, Drives my pulsetempo near twice its old pace— Go, nonstop startwatch! Go, clockwork rabbit, Keeping this lame old dog synchronized, Steady, sparked up, still in the race.

After Heinrich I. F. Biber I What’s unseen may not exist— Or so those secret powers insist That prowl past nightfall, Enabled by the brain’s blacklist To fester out of sight, So we streak from bad to worse, Through an expanding universe And see no evil. On my rounds like a night nurse Or sentry on qui vive, I make, through murkier hours, my way Where the sun patrolled all day Toward stone-blind midnight To poke this flickering flashlamp’s ray At what’s hushed up and hidden. Lacking all leave or protocol, Things, one by one, hear my footfall, Blank out their faces, Dodge between trees, find cracks in walls Or lock down offices. Still, though scuttling forces flee Just as far stars recede from me To outmost boundaries, I stalk through ruins and debris, Graveyard and underground. Led by their helmetlantern’s light Miners inch through anthracite; I’m the unblinking mole That sniffs out what gets lost or might Slip down the world’s black hole. II (ending his rounds, the watchman, somewhat tipsy, returns) What’s obscene?—just our obsessed, Incessant itch and interest In things found frightful: In bestial tortures, rape, incest; In ripe forbidden fruit Dangling, lush, just out of reach; Dim cellars nailed up under each Towering success, The loser’s envy that will teach A fierce vindictiveness, The victors’ high court that insures Pardon for winners and procures Little that’s needed But all we lust for. What endures?— Exponential greed And trash containers overflowing With shredded memos, records showing What, who, when, why ’Til there’s no sure way of knowing What’s clear to every eye: The heart’s delight in hatred, runny As the gold drip from combs of honey; The rectal intercourse Of power politics and money That slimes both goal and source. What’s obscured?—what’s abscessed. After inspection, I’d suggest It’s time we got our head Rewired. I plan to just get pissed, Shitfaced and brain-dead.

The eyelids glowing, some chill morning. O world half-known through opening, twilit lids Before the vague face clenches into light; O universal waters like a cloud, Like those first clouds of half-created matter; O all things rising, rising like the fumes From waters falling, O forever falling; Infinite, the skeletal shells that fall, relinquished, The snowsoft sift of the diatoms, like selves Downdrifting age upon age through milky oceans; O slow downdrifting of the atoms; O island nebulae and O the nebulous islands Wandering these mists like falsefires, which are true, Bobbing like milkweed, like warm lanterns bobbing Through the snowfilled windless air, blinking and passing As we pass into the memory of women Who are passing. Within those depths What ravening? What devouring rage? How shall our living know its ends of yielding? These things have taken me as the mouth an orange— That acrid sweet juice entering every cell; And I am shared out. I become these things: These lilies, if these things are water lilies Which are dancers growing dim across no floor; These mayflies; whirled dust orbiting in the sun; This blossoming diffused as rushlights; galactic vapors; Fluorescence into which we pass and penetrate; O soft as the thighs of women; O radiance, into which I go on dying ...

Sorting out letters and piles of my old Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards That meant something once, I happened to find Your picture.That picture. I stopped there cold, Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard Who has turned up a severed hand. Still, that first second, I was glad: you stand Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender, In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned Us all. Well, our needs were different, then, And our ideals came easy. Then through the war and those two long years Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear, Prove it had been, that it might come back. That was before we got married. —Before we drained out one another’s force With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still, I put back your picture. Someday, in due course, I will find that it’s still there.