William Meredith

(Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963) I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned. Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over, Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground. (But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea’s gray Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.) This crushing of people is something we live with. Daily, by unaccountable whim Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death, Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame, Men and women break the pledge of breath: And now under water, gone all jetsam and small In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull. (Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts? The only animal cursed with responsible sleep, We trace disaster always to our own acts. I met a monstrous self trapped in the black deep: All these years, he smiled, I’ve drilled at sea For this crush of water. Then he saved only me.) We invest ships with life. Look at a harbor At first light: with better grace than men In their movements the vessels run to their labors Working the fields that the tide has made green again; Their beauty is womanly, they are named for ladies and queens, Although by a wise superstition these are called After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine. The crushing of any ship has always been held In dread, like a house burned or a great tree felled. I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet And dark and lost were their private, funny derision And I can judge then what dark compression Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below. ( Sea-brothers, I lower to you the ingenuity of dreams, Strange lungs and bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last—

(In Plaster, with a Bronze Wash) A person is very self-conscious about his head. It makes one nervous just to know it is cast In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last. We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is, Than to the interesting and involute interior: The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria. The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown To anyone not accompanied by an adult. The marquee out front maintains a superior tone: Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult. The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty. These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city. The female head is mounted on rococo props. Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning; This is the first place everybody comes With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning. This particular head, to my certain knowledge Has been taught to read and write, make love and money, Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college, And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny. It was further taught to know and to eschew Error and sin, which it does erratically. This is the place the soul calls home just now. One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over again, like the rented animals in Aïda . In the late morning the land breeze turns and now the extras are driving all the white elephants the other way. What language are these children shouting in? He is lying on the beach listening. The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels. He tries to remember snow noise. Would powder snow ping like that? But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow. Why doesn’t the girl who takes care of the children, a Yale girl without flaw, know the difference between lay and lie? He tries to remember snow, his season. The mind is in charge of things then. Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic, all that openness and swaying. No matter how often you make love in August you’re always aware of genitalia, your own and the half-naked others’. Even with the gracefulest bathers you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises, mammals disporting themselves in a blue element, smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard watches himself awhile, like a blue movie. In the other hemisphere now people are standing up, at work at their easels. There they think about love at night when they take off their serious clothes and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets. Today the children, his own among them, are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese, using the colonial dialect of Brazil. It is just as well, they have all been changed into small shrill marginal animals, he would not want to understand them again until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

Tonight Hazard’s father and stepmother are having jazz for McGovern. In the old game-room the old liberals listen as the quintet builds crazy houses out of skin and brass, crumbling the house of decorum, everybody likes that. For decades they have paid for the refurbishing of America and they have not got their money’s worth. Now they listen, hopeful, to the hard rock for McGovern. The ceiling in this palace needs fixing, the chalky blue paint is like an old heaven but there are holes and flaking. They had movies here when grandpa was solvent. Hazard desires his wife, the way people on the trains to the death camps were seized by irrational lust. She is the youngest woman in the room, he would like to be in bed with her now, he would like to be president. He has not been to his studio in four days, he asks the bartender, a college boy with a ponytail, for more gin. He stands in the doorway. Forsythia and lilac have overgrown the porch, there is the rich smell of wood-rot. What twenty years will do to untended shrubbery and America and Hazard.

The alternative to flying is cowardice, And what is said against it excuses, excuses; Its want was always heavy in those men’s bodies Who foresaw it in some detail; and failing that, The rest were shown through its skyey heats and eases In sleep, awoke uncertain whether their waking cry Had been falling fear only, or love and falling fear. When the sudden way was shown, its possibility In terms of the familiar at last shown, (How absurdly simple the principle after all!) Any tyrant should have sensed it was controversial: Instrument of freedom; rights, not Wrights; Danger should never be given out publicly. The men could easily have been disposed of, They and their fragile vehicle. Then the sky Would perhaps have darkened, earth shaken, nothing more. In practice the martyrdom has been quiet, statistical, A fair price. This is what airmen believe. The transition to battle was smooth from here. Who resents one bond resents another, And who has unshouldered earth-restraining hand Is not likely to hear out more reasonable tyrannies. The woods where he died were dark even at sunup, Oak and long-needle pine that had come together Earlier, and waited for the event at the field’s edge. At sunset when the sky behind was gay One had seen the lugubrious shapes of the trees, Bronze and terrible, but had never known the reason, Never thought they were waiting for someone in particular. They took him at night, when they were at their darkest. How they at last convinced him is not known: The crafty engine would not fall for their softness, (Oh, where were you then, six hundred cunning horses?) In the end it had torn hungrily through the brush To lie alone in the desired clearing. Nor the wings; (And you, with your wide silver margin of safety?) They were for the field, surely, where they so often Had eased their load to ground. No, the invitation Must have been sent to the aviator in person: Perhaps a sly suggestion of carelessness, A whispered invitation perhaps to death. He was not badly disfigured compared to some, But even a little stream of blood where death is Will whimper across a forest floor, Run through that whole forest shouting. Him now unpersoned, warm, and quite informal, Dead as alive, raise softly sober interns; Lift gently, God, this wholly airborne one. Leads out all his life to this violent wood. Note that he had not fought one public battle, Met any fascist with his skill, but died As it were in bed, the waste conspicuous; This is a costly wreck and costly to happen on: Praise and humility sound through its siren shrieks, And dedication follows in car. The morning came up foolish with pink clouds To say that God counts ours a cunning time, Our losses part of an old secret, somehow no loss.

Limped out of the hot sky a hurt plane, Held off, held off, whirring pretty pigeon, Hit then and scuttled to a crooked stop. The stranger pilot who emerged—this was the seashore, War came suddenly here—talked to the still mechanics Who nodded gravely. Flak had done it, he said, From an enemy ship attacked. They wheeled it with love Into the dark hangar’s mouth and tended it. Coffee and cake for the pilot then who sat alone In the restaurant, reading the numbered sheets That tell about weather. After, toward dusk, Mended the stranger plane went back to the sky. His curly-headed picture, and mother’s and medal’s pictures Were all we knew of him after he rose again, Those few electric jewels against the moth and whining sky.

Outside the hotel window, unenlightened pigeons weave and dive like Stukas on their prey, apparently some tiny insect brother. (In India, the attainment of nonviolence is considered a proper goal for human beings.) If one of the pigeons should fly into the illusion of my window and survive (the body is no illusion when it’s hurt) he could be taken across town to the bird hospital where Jains, skilled medical men, repair the feathery sick and broken victims. There, in reproof of violence and of nothing else, live Mahavira’s brothers and sisters. To this small, gentle order of monks and nuns it is bright Vishnu and dark Shiva who are illusion. They trust in faith, cognition, and nonviolence to release them from rebirth. They think that birds and animals—like us, some predators, some prey— should be ministered to no less than men and women. The Jains who deal with creatures (and with laymen) wear white, while their more enterprising hermit brothers walk naked and are called the sky-clad . Jains pray to no deity, human kindness being their sole illusion. Mahavira and those twenty-three other airy creatures who turned to saints with him, preached the doctrine of ahimsa , which in our belligerent tongue becomes nonviolence . It’s not a doctrine congenial to snarers and poultrymen, who every day bring to market maimed pheasants. Numbers of these are brought in by the Jain brothers and brought, to grow back wing-tips and illusions, to one of the hospitals succoring such small quarry. When strong and feathered again, the lucky victims get reborn on Sunday mornings to the world’s violence, released from the roofs of these temples to illusion. It is hard for a westerner to speak about men and women like these, who call the birds of the air brothers. We recall the embarrassed fanfare for Francis and his flock. We’re poor forked sky-clad things ourselves and God knows prey to illusion— e.g. , I claim these brothers and sisters in India, stemming a little violence, among birds.

Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone. His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

We need the ceremony of one another, meals served , more love, more handling of one another with love, less casting out of those who are not of our own household. ‘This turkey is either not cooked enough or it’s tough.’ The culture is in late imperial decline. The children don’t like dark meat or pepper. They say the mother sometimes deliberately puts pepper on the things the grown-ups like better. Less casting out of those in our own household with whom we disagree. The cat will not hear of cat food, he waves it away. He has seen the big thrush taken from the cold box, dressed and put in the hot. ‘If I set the alarm clock, will you turn on the oven when it goes off?’ then she went off to see the profane dancers of the afternoon. It was done. The fact that I don’t like his pictures should not obscure the facts that he is a good man that many admire his work (his canvases threaten my existence and I hope mine his, the intolerant bastard) that we are brothers in humanity & the art. Often it does, though. The cat has followed Hazard from his studio, he looks mean. He upbraids the innocent dog and all of us, he casts us out. ‘There’s pepper in this gravy. We’re supposed to eat dry turkey and you’ve put pepper in the gravy.’ The meal is served , nevertheless with felt love, some godless benediction. The grown ones have wine after the other bottle. They cast out a lot. ‘The dancers this afternoon were, well, thinky ,’ she says. She toys with her glass. ‘He is strictly a one-joke painter,’ he replies, ‘painted that one twenty years ago and is still putting pepper on it, ha hah. Finish your turkey you two and leave a little gravy for someone else.’ The cat is taking notes against his own household. He watches. Hazard would like once to see things with the cat’s eyes, flat. Now it is time to go to bed. Hungry and alone most go to bed in this decline and in all others, yet Someone has fed us again and blessed us with the manners of bohemia. Among barbarians, a lot is expected of us, ceremony-wise. We rise to that expectation.

I. He Thinks of the Chinese Snake Who Is the Beginning and the End If you or I should die That day desire would not renew Itself in any bed. The old snake of the world, eternity That holds his tail in his mouth, Would spit it out And ease off through the grass Like a piece of music To we don’t know where. Then it would be for the living To beat the grass and bring him back. But would he be set tamely To sucking his tail again In that absence? II. He Marvels at the Persistence of Passion Like black duennas the hours sit And read our lips and watch our thighs. The years are pederasts: they wait For boys and will not meet my eyes. And children are cool astronomers Who scan us like old galaxies And calculate how many years Before we’ll turn to gas or freeze. And yet sometimes I have to shave And brush my teeth at dawn to keep My healthy middle-aged alive Hands off you where you lie asleep. III. Sometimes He Contemplates Adultery I had no insanity to excuse this, But for a week my heart ran with another love, Imagined another house, down to its books and bed. My miserable fluttered heart, you understand, chose this. Now I am led home—cold, grave, Contractual as a dog—by my scurrilous head. IV. His Hands, On a Trip to Wisconsin It is night. I am a thousand miles from home. My hands lie awake and are aware of themselves, One on my noisy chest, the other, the right one, A matter of several pounds, oppressing my forehead. It is a week since it fluted the air goodbye. I think of the path in space the thing has made since then, Veering and halting; of the shapes hands make Washing a car, or in the uses of music. Two shapes it has traced honor this right hand: The curve that a plane rides out As it leaves or takes a deck on the scalloped sea; Handily, handily then this two-pound creature Felt the wired air, let the two monsters kiss, The shapes that it graphed then fairer Than the hair of the clouds that watched Or the sea’s own scalloped hair. And he and his gauche fellow, moving symmetrically, Have described one body so well They could dress that shape in air As they long to do now though they lie Laced hunks of flesh on my belly— Ahead of them some years of roving Before the white landscape of age checks them, Your body’s disaster, sure to be traced there, Even so slight a change in a dear shape Halting them, baffled, lascivious suddenly, Or folded cold, or feeling your hands folded cold. V. Lines from His Guest-book Shelley’s houses and walks were always a clutter of women, and god knows what further arrangements he kept in his mind. Drôle de menage , Rimbaud said of himself and Verlaine, As if there were any other kind. In Yeats’ tower, in all that fakery of ghosts, Some solid women came and slept as Mrs. Yeats’ guests. We are most our own strange selves when we are hosts. Here those who have loved or befriended me came to a proof: They must lodge in my head and in company under one roof. Keeping house is the instinct of love; it is always a little ridiculous. Yet it is with no light welcome we welcome the friends of the house.