74 Friendship poems

I thank you, kind and best beloved friend, With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister, When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her, Less for the gifts than for the love you send, Less for the flowers, than what the flowers convey; If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly, And not unto myself ascribe, unduly, Things which you neither meant nor wished to say, Oh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced? And am I flattered by my own affection? But in your beauteous gift, methought I traced Something above a short-lived predilection, And which, for that I know no dearer name, I designate as love, without love’s flame.

There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and therefore never learning the end. There is no expression, in English, at least, for avoiding the sight of your own body in the mirror, for disliking the touch of the afternoon sun, for walking into the flatlands and dust that stretch out before you after your adventures are done. No adjective for gradually speaking less and less, because you have stopped being able to say the one thing that would break your life loose from its grip. Certainly no name that one can imagine for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window, in spade-shaped leaves spinning on their stems, working themselves into a pale-green, vegetable blur. No word for waking up one morning and looking around, because the mysterious spirit that drives all things seems to have returned, and is on your side again.

I’ve a friend in possession of a philosophic spin; if should I speak of art, theology, the universe, or whim, he thinks I speak of him. This enduring tic, indicative of universal spins, theology, art and whim, nonetheless makes conversation grim.

An Epistle to Mr. Cuthbert Jackson This motley piece to you I send, Who always were a faithful friend; Who, if disputes should happen hence, Can best explain the author’s sense; And, anxious for the public weal, Do, what I sing, so often feel. The want of method pray excuse, Allowing for a vapored Muse; Nor to a narrow path confined, Hedge in by rules a roving mind. The child is genuine, you may trace Throughout the sire’s transmitted face. Nothing is stolen: my Muse, though mean, Draws from the spring she finds within; Nor vainly buy what Gildon sells, Poetic buckets for dry wells. School-helps I want, to climb on high, Where all the ancient treasures lie, And there unseen commit a theft On wealth in Greek exchequers left. Then where? from whom? what can I steal, Who only with the moderns deal? This were attempting to put on Raiment from naked bodies won: They safely sing before a thief, They cannot give who want relief; Some few excepted, names well known, And justly laurelled with renown, Whose stamp of genius marks their ware, And theft detects: of theft beware; From More so lashed, example fit, Shun petty larceny in wit. First know, my friend, I do not mean To write a treatise on the spleen; Nor to prescribe when nerves convulse; Nor mend th’ alarum watch, your pulse. If I am right, your question lay, What course I take to drive away The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas Men prove mere suicides in ease; And how I do myself demean In stormy world to live serene. When by its magic lantern Spleen With frightful figures spreads life’s scene, And threat’ning prospects urged my fears, A stranger to the luck of heirs; Reason, some quiet to restore, Showed part was substance, shadow more; With Spleen’s dead weight though heavy grown, In life’s rough tide I sunk not down, But swam, ’till Fortune threw a rope, Buoyant on bladders fill’d with hope. I always choose the plainest food To mend viscidity of blood. Hail! water-gruel, healing power, Of easy access to the poor; Thy help love’s confessors implore, And doctors secretly adore; To thee, I fly, by thee dilute— Through veins my blood doth quicker shoot, And by swift current throws off clean Prolific particles of Spleen. I never sick by drinking grow, Nor keep myself a cup too low, And seldom Cloe’s lodgings haunt, Thrifty of spirits, which I want. Hunting I reckon very good To brace the nerves, and stir the blood: But after no field-honors itch, Achieved by leaping hedge and ditch, While Spleen lies soft relaxed in bed, Or o’er coal fires inclines the head, Hygeia’s sons with hound and horn, And jovial cry awake the morn. * * * To cure the mind’s wrong bias, Spleen, Some recommended the bowling-green; Some, hilly walks; all, exercise; Fling but a stone, the giant dies; Laugh and be well. Monkeys have been Extreme good doctors for the Spleen; And kitten, if the humor hit, Has harlequinned away the fit. * * * If spleen-fogs rise at close of day, I clear my evening with a play, Or to some concert take my way. The company, the shine of lights, The scenes of humor, music’s flights, Adjust and set the soul to rights. Life’s moving pictures, well-wrought plays, To others’ grief attention raise: Here, while the tragic fictions glow, We borrow joy by pitying woe; There gaily comic scenes delight, And hold true mirrors to our sight. Virtue, in charming dress arrayed, Calling the passions to her aid, When moral scenes just actions join, Takes shape, and shows her face divine. * * * Sometimes I dress, with women sit, And chat away the gloomy fit; Quit the stiff garb of serious sense, And wear a gay impertinence, Nor think nor speak with any pains, But lay on fancy’s neck the reins; Talk of unusual swell of waist In maid of honor loosely laced, And beauty borr’wing Spanish red, And loving pair with sep’rate bed, And jewels pawned for loss of game, And then redeemed by loss of fame; Of Kitty (aunt left in the lurch By grave pretence to go to church) Perceived in hack with lover fine, Like Will and Mary on the coin: And thus in modish manner we, In aid of sugar, sweeten tea. Permit, ye fair, your idol form, Which e’en the coldest heart can warm, May with its beauties grace my line, While I bow down before its shrine, And your thronged altars with my lays Perfume, and get by giving praise. With speech so sweet, so sweet a mien, You excommunicate the Spleen. * * *

December 26, 1969 Dear Kenward, What a pearl of a letter knife. It's just the thing I needed, something to rest my eyes on, and always wanted, which is to say it's that of which I felt the lack but didn't know of, of no real use and yet essential as a button box, or maps, green morning skies, islands and canals in oatmeal, the steam off oyster stew. Brown agate, veined as a woods by smoke that has to it the watery twist of eel grass in a quick, rust-discolored cove. Undulating lines of northern evening—a Munch without the angst—a hint of almost amber: to the nose, a resinous thought, to the eye, a lacquered needle green where no green is, a present after-image. Sleek as an ax, bare and elegant as a tarn, manly as a lingam, November weather petrified, it is just the thing to do what with? To open letters? No, it is just the thing, an object, dark, fierce and beautiful in which the surprise is that the surprise, once past, is always there: which to enjoy is not to consume. The un- recapturable returns in a brown world made out of wood, snow streaked, storm epi- center still in stone.

Talking, we begin to find the way into our hearts, we who knew no words, words being a rare commodity in those countries we left behind. Both refugees and similarly deprived, we marvel at the many things there are to say: so many variations and colors of the same thought, so many different lengths in the words that line up together on our tongues. No scarcity, no rationing, no waiting in line in order to buy the same answer we heard each time we asked, that one word, owned by the state, manufactured by the state, serving all purposes equally alike: No, No, No, and sometimes Never.

Except when once we drew identical lots nothing’s ever come between us. We keep our drifts of space spare and daily shake our down. You’ve glanced beyond your dirty cuffs and caught me hand-washing my clean shirts. Stuck with sharp wind, both bloods are rare and rarely do we taste the walnut’s knot of oil. We wake between our fitted sheets and shake our fists or pretend real fright but not in this do we dare touch. My rib cage can stand in yours, yours become the swinging doors through which magician’s swords will slice and miss that knotted muscle. It is a trick. We’ll make an endless show of the outright clanking, irregular beating of our acrobatic hearts. We’ve designed the double bars of depth; our hearts skip — the tumbleset we think is absence, the somersault we call forbearance — the hearts are there, doing turns that teach us to count and keep each finger close to its own sly pulse.

We drank our faces off until the sun arrived, Night after night, and most of us survived To waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue, And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new, The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too. How wonderful to be so magnified. Every Scotch and soda had been usefully applied. You were who you weren't till now. We'd been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sow And now we'd write a book, without having to know how. If you didn't get a hangover, that was one kind of bad And was a sign of something, but if you had Tranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work, Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don't be a jerk, Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don't smirk. We smoked Kools, unfiltered Camels, and papier maïs Gitanes, The fat ones Belmondo smoked in Breathless—and so did Don, Elaine's original red-haired cokehead maître d’ Who had a beautiful wife, dangerously. But stay away from the beautiful wife or else catastrophe. Many distinguished dead were there At one of the front tables, fragrant talk everywhere. Plimpton, Mailer, Styron, Bobby Short—fellows, have another drink. You had to keep drinking or you'd sink. Smoking fifty cigarettes a day made your squid-ink fingers stink. Unlucky people born with the alcoholic gene Were likely to become alcoholics. Life is mean That way, because others who drank as much or more didn't Succumb, but just kept on drinking—and didn't Do cocaine, and didn't get fucked up, and just didn't! The dead are gone— Their thousand and one nights vanished into dawn. Were they nothing but tubs of guts, suitably gowned, waiting around Till dawn turned into day?Last round! Construction of the new Second Avenue subway enters the ground. Aldrich once protested to Elaine that his bill for the night was too high. She showed him his tab was for seventeen Scotches and he started to cry. (Or was it eighteen?) We were the scene. Now the floor has been swept clean. Everyone's gone. Elaine and Elaine's have vanished into the dawn. Elaine the woman, who weighed hundreds of pounds, is floating around— Her ghost calls out:Last round! Wailing, construction of the new Second Avenue subway pounds the ground.

This time we are getting drunk on retsina in somebody’s Italian backyard. We are a long way from Georgia and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself. My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn; I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine my heart is huge and has little men walking around inside. They don’t know each other but they’re stuck there eternally and have to get along. One of them starts shouting; he finds a black horse and rides it around in a circle. The others laugh at him. He leaps from the horse and starts to choke the smallest man. Something like a hand starts pumping the heart and the men nearly go crazy from the pressure. —The first olive I picked from a tree was so bitter I nearly threw up. My wife is strolling around this strange landscape full of broken pediments as if she plans to be happy from now on. I think I have to tense it up, act like I’m in control. I don’t think I can do that. In a few hours the sun will rise over my brother’s backyard in south Georgia. He’ll come out and admire the water jewels the night has hung in the kumquat bush. He’ll hear his son say, ‘Mama, it’s too big for me to wear,’ and remember quitting the baseball team thirty years ago and wish again he hadn’t. —I get up and march down to the pond. I start to speak to my wife but then I feel a hand that is about to crush my heart.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider— lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe — should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.