209 Nostalgia poems

I called Hart on my longer distance line And in case you didn’t know he is in heavine. Hart, I implored, I searched your book (Yes, you have a Collected) and could fine Nothing about the 36 cast iron bridges in Central Park, why didn’t you write about one At least. He said he wrote about the narrow Bow Bridge For peds built in 1878 which is sad and fine And always photographed through branches in the foregrine Which was sufficiently sad to make him weep all the tine He was trying to write the poem so he threw it away. He tried again and he uncontrollably wept agine. Did you try a third tine, I asked. No, he said, and here’s why: Life is uncontrollably sad all the time Unless we divert ourselves with art objects, Sex, or tequila or beer, and if we tell the truth About this, for instance when we feel it While looking at a photograph of the cast ine Bow Bridge or see in life not photos but the real bridge at a short destine Away with the actual park and branches around us, We feel like killing ourselves to stop the pain Or as you, Arthur, call it, the pine, So I didn’t try a third time To write the poem. Get off this line, He said. Wait! Don’t hang up, he said, I take it back, stay on the phine! Well, I considered calling on my second longer distance line Kenneth who in heavine has changed his name to Kenneth Kine And Barbara who I did call on my second longer distance line With Hart on hold and affirmed her name change to Barbara Gine But I didn’t ask those younger two about uncontrollable totally dominant sadness Or whether they had discarded their own poems about the 36 cast ine Bridges for people to walk on in Central Park Because they were weeping on the paper and pine Ing for Hart’s Big Deep Salty Lake to ease the pine. I didn’t call Frank because I never knew hine I mean him. I figured the next step was mine. So if you can believe it I hung up on Hart Crine.

Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe does the summer when I was seventeen come back to mind against my will, like a bird crossing my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation of the comic boundaries, defiances that never failed or brought disaster. Days on the backs and in the breath of horses, between rivers and pools that reflected the cicadas' whine, enervation and strength creeping in smooth waves over muscular water. All those things accepted, once, with unnoticing hunger, as an infant accepts the nipple, never come back to mind against the will. What comes unsummoned now, blotting out every other thought and image, is a part of the past not so deep or far away: the time of poverty, of struggle to find means not hateful—the muddy seedtime of early manhood. What returns are those moments in the diner night after night with each night's one cup of coffee, watching an old man, who always at the same hour came in and smiled, ordered his tea and opened his drawing pad. What did he fill it with? And where's he gone? Those days, that studious worker, hand moving and eyes eager in the sour light, that artist always in the same worn-out suit, are my nostalgia now. That old man comes back, the friend I saw each day and never spoke to, because I hoped soon to disappear from there, as I have disappeared, into the heaven of better days.

Just north of town, a quaint Sargasso Sea for bric-a-brac: the barn, itself antique, spills over with a grab-bag panoply of outworn stock revalued as “unique.” Typewriters tall as headstones fill the loft where they’ve been ricked away like sacks of grain; a coffer yawns the must of oak—gone soft— when one man, squinting, lifts the lid to feign intrigue. Nearby, his wife surveys the smalls: art deco bangles bright as harpsichords, a glut of iron trivets, Christmas balls, Depression glass and warping Ouija boards. One man’s junk is another’s all the same. They don’t buy much, but that’s not why they came.

The intriguing comfort of an imagined past is entered through objects the same way we continue the present but without nostalgia Parents so long for happiness they say one life is not enough and live through their children But children also live backwards through past candles crank telephones   carriages the ascendant animals that lived not in imagination but in Kansas and before there was an Oklahoma with its spotted sun In those days a metaphor for Hell was the corn sheller field corn shriven  shooting out cobs the grindstone   razor strop   even the ladder of progress from which Les Westfield slipped on a mossy rung though his son held the ladder and fell two stories: one the feudal structure of the family   two the harmonic of almost fatal necessity as the maple stump entered his hip along with the difficult remission of breath itself an antique whose furious elaborations mimicked the rose

The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it. This river, which is life, which is wayfaring. This river, which is also sky. This dipper, full of mind, which is not only the hysterical giggling of girls, but the trembling of the elderly. Not only the scales, beaks, and teeth of creatures, but also their imaginative names (elephant, peacock) and their love of one another, the excited preparations they sometimes make for their own deaths. It is as if some graceful goddess, wandering in the dark, desperate with thirst, bent down and dropped that dipper clumsily in this river. It floated away.Consciousness, memory, sensory information, the historians and their glorious war. . . The pineal gland, tiny pinecone in the forehead, our third eye:   Of course it will happen here. No doubt. Someday, here, in this little house, they will lay the wounded side by side. The blood will run into the basement through the boards. Their ghosts are already here, along with the cracked plate wrapped in old paper in the attic, and the woman who will turn one day at the window to see a long strange line of vehicles traveling slowly toward her door, which she opens (what choice does she have?) although she has not yet been born.

How did we get here so suddenly, with our bags and baggage, looking the worse for wear, the ones misfortune hasn't wrung into anything-but-perfect strangers? Old buddies, old loves, old antagonists chat at the bar in the Hilton lobby; white-haired, no-haired dyed-haired, ringers for those oldsters so irrelevant to proms and cruising, to study halls and going steady—to life as we knew it. The smithereens of yesteryear, mostly orphans who’ve buried Mom and Dad, we’re holding out in a Guadalcanal of hazard and heart-soreness: edema, angina, sarcoma, thrombosis. Casualties mount, as do the MIAs. Why aren't we vexed? Why aren't we screaming? Never mind; we're here, upright, and don't have time to skip the niceties, which never seemed so nice, or to sweat the threats, as the dead, ever younger, smile toward the future from our senior yearbook. It's too late for a fallback plan. Tonight, we'll savor the motel cuisine, pass the Inglenook, and believe there's nothing opulent as this departure.

—for Joel— Nice day, sweet October afternoon Men walk the sun-shot avenues, Second, Third, eyes intent elsewhere ears communing with transistors in shirt pockets Bars are full, quiet, discussion during commercials only Pirates lead New York 4-1, top of the 6th, 2 Yankees on base,    1 man out What a nice day for all this  ! Handsome women, even dreamy jailbait, walk nearly neglected  : men’s eyes are blank their thoughts are all in Pittsburgh Last half of the 9th, the score tied 9-all, Mazeroski leads off for the Pirates The 2nd pitch he simply, sweetly CRACK! belts it clean over the left-field wall Blocks of afternoon acres of afternoon Pennsylvania Turnpikes of afternoon  .  One diamond stretches out in the sun the 3rd base line and what men come down it The final score, 10-9 Yanquis, come home

Boston, 1973— Years had passed and I assumed a Different life when one night, while resting from Books on Marlborough Street (where things like This can happen), there came into my room images In black-and-white with a flow of light that Would not die. It all came back to me in different Terms: characters were born again, met up with Each other in adult life, drifted across the Screen to discover cattle and oil, traveled miles On horseback in dust and heat, characters whose Names emerged as if they mattered in a history Book. Some were swept up by power and prejudice Toward neighbors different from themselves, Because that is what the picture is about, with Class distinctions moving the plot along. A few Could distinguish right from wrong; those who Could not you condemned from the beginning when You noticed them at all. Still others married or Backed off from the ranch with poignant flair, Like James Dean, who in the middle of grazing land Unearthed the treasures of oil, buried his soul in Money and went incoherent with alcohol. When the 40's Came, two young men were drafted, the one called Angel Dying at war. It's a generational tale, so everybody Aged once more and said what they had to say along the Way according to the script. And then the end: the Hamburger joint brought into existence to the beat of "The Yellow Rose of Texas," Juana and her child the Color of dark amber, foreshadowing the Mexican-looking Couple and their daughter, all in muteness, wanting To be served. I climbed out of bed and in my head Was a roaring of light—words spoken and unspoken Had brought the obliterated back. Not again (I said, From my second-floor room)...let this not be happening. Three and-a-half hours had flicked by. As the sound Trailed off into nothing, memory would not dissolve.

How could I predict That my life wd become whatever, So many people Passing thru—address books Filled with names & numbers I no longer recognize, Pages torn loose, Addresses crossed out, Lives badly smudged, Decades of earnest grief, Missed opportunities, Phones disconnected. What am I now? Just another old man Among old men. Turn the calendar upside down & let the days fall out.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.