209 Nostalgia poems

Once when I was harmless and didn’t know any better, a mirror to the front of me and an ocean behind, I lay wedged in the middle of daylight, paper-doll thin, dreaming, then I vanished. I gave the day a fingerprint, then forgot. I sat naked on a towel on a hot June Monday. The sun etched the inside of my eyelids, while a boy dozed at my side. The smell of all oceans was around us— steamy salt, shell, and sweat, but I reached for the distant one. A tide rose while I slept, and soon I was alone. Try being a figure in memory. It’s hollow there. For truth’s sake, I’ll say she was on a beach and her eyes were closed. She was bare in the sand, long, and the hour took her bit by bit.

for Lewis Ellingham The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . . James Fenton, “In a Notebook” White decorators interested in Art, Black file clerks with theatrical ambitions, kids making pharmaceutical revisions in journals Comp. instructors urged they start, the part-Cherokee teenage genius (maybe), the secretary who hung out with fairies, the copywriter wanting to know, where is my husband? the soprano with the baby, all drank draft beer or lethal sweet Manhattans or improvised concoctions with tequila in summer when, from Third Street, we could feel a night breeze waft in whose fragrances were Latin. The place was run by Polish refugees: squat Margie, gaunt Speedy (whose sobriquet transliterated what?). He’d brought his play from Łódź. After a while, we guessed Margie’s illiteracy was why he cashed checks and she perched near the threshold to ban pros, the underage, the fugitive, and those arrayed impertinently to their sex. The bar was talk and cruising; in the back room, we danced: Martha and the Vandellas, Smokey and the Miracles, while sellers and buyers changed crisp tens for smoke and smack. Some came in after work, some after supper, plumage replenished to meet who knew who. Behind the bar, Margie dished up beef stew. On weeknights, you could always find an upper to speed you to your desk, and drink till four. Loosened by booze, we drifted, on the ripples of Motown, home in new couples, or triples, were back at dusk, with IDs, at the door. Bill was my roommate, Russell drank with me, although they were a dozen years my seniors. I walked off with the eighteen-year-old genius —an Older Woman, barely twenty-three. Link was new as Rimbaud, and better looking, North Beach bar paideon of doomed Jack Spicer, like Russell, our two-meter artificer, a Corvo whose ecclesia was cooking. Bill and Russell were painters. Bill had been a monk in Kyoto. Stoned, we sketched together, till he discovered poppers and black leather and Zen consented to new discipline. We shared my Sixth Street flat with a morose cat, an arch cat, and pot plants we pruned daily. His boyfriend had left him for an Israeli dancer; my husband was on Mykonos. Russell loved Harold, who was Black and bad, and lavished on him dinners “meant for men” like Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin. Staunch blond Dora made rice. When she had tucked in the twins, six flights of tenement stairs they’d descend, elevenish, and stroll down Third Street, desultory night patrol gone mauve and green under the virulent streetlights, to the bar, where Bill and I (if we’d not come to dinner), Link, and Lew, and Betty had already had a few. One sweat-soaked night in pitiless July, wedged on booth benches of cracked Naugahyde, we planned a literary magazine where North Beach met the Lower East Side Scene. We could have titled it When Worlds Collide. Dora was gone, “In case the children wake up.” Link lightly had decamped with someone else (the German engineer? Or was he Bill’s?). Russell’s stooped vale brushed my absent makeup. Armed children spared us home, our good-night hugs laissez-passer. We railed against the war. Soon, some of us bused south with SNCC and CORE. Soon, some of us got busted dealing drugs. The file clerks took exams and forged ahead. The decorators’ kitchens blazed persimmon. The secretary started kissing women, and so did I, and my three friends are dead.

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult. You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade, and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular, the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework. Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon, and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.” Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today. Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone. Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room. We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang. These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code. The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big. People would take walks to the very tops of hills and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking. Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft. We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs. It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead. I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821. Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits. And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment, time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps, or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me recapture the serenity of last month when we picked berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe. Even this morning would be an improvement over the present. I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks. As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past, letting my memory rush over them like water rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream. I was even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess.

Les morts C’est sous terre; Ça n’en sort Guère. LAFORGUE Our diaries squatted, toad-like, On dark closet ledges. Forget-me-not and thistle Decalcomaned the pages. But where, where are they now, All the sad squalors Of those between-wars parlors?— Cut flowers; and the sunlight spilt like soda On torporous rugs; the photo Albums all outspread ... The dead Don’t get around much anymore.

The black water. Lights dotting the entire perimeter. Their shaky reflections. The dark tree line. The plap-plapping of water around the pier. Creaking boats. The creaking pier. Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections (the words themselves just out of reach). A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut. Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair. Footsteps shuffling through sand, animated youthful voices (how many?)— distinct, disappearing. A sudden guffaw; some giggles; a woman’s—no, a young girl’s—sarcastic reply; someone’s assertion; a high-pitched male cackle. Somewhere else a child laughing. Bug-zappers. Tires whirring along a pavement... not stopping ... receding. Shadows from passing headlights. A cat’s eyes caught in a headlight. No moon. Connect-the-dot constellations filling the black sky—the ladle of the Big Dipper not quite directly overhead. The radio tower across the lake, signaling. Muffled quacking near the shore; a frog belching; crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc.—their relentless sexual messages. A sudden gust of wind. Branches brushing against each other—pine, beech. A fiberglass hull tapping against the dock. A sudden chill. The smell of smoke, woodstove fires. A light going out. A dog barking; then more barking from another part of the lake. A burst of quiet laughter. Someone in the distance calling someone too loud. Steps on a creaking porch. A screen-door spring, the door banging shut. Another light going out (you must have just undressed for bed). My bare feet on the splintery pier turning away from the water.

for Kenward Elmslie Up from the valley now and then a chain saw rising to a shriek, subsiding to a buzz “Someone” is “cutting in his wood lot” another day shows they are not someone is two men clearing shoulders of a narrow high-crowned road stacked poles were lately sapling the leaves on the slash gone limp, unstarched, unsized one man with one fierce eye and where the other should be an ill-knit cicatrix men who don’t make much aren’t much for spending what they do on glass eyes, tooth-straightening devices (“a mouth like the back of a switchboard”), nose jobs, dewenning operations a country look prevails and a vestigial fear of the evil eye lurks “. . . my skin creeps . . .” Out of Adamant Co-op men in “overhauls” step into evening rising in long-shadowed bluish haze to gold and pink by Sodom Lake (was it that any Bible name was an OK name?) and boys stare unabashed and unaggressive not what the man on the bus fled from his one day job talking excitedly about “teen-age Puerto Rican tail-bait” and “You can have New York!” Some present you’d rather have wouldn’t you an apple tree that climbed up into keels over sad, and too bad, the best apples on Apple Hill still, it can be propped or budded on new stock or just that it once was there Driving past, driving down, driving over along the Winooski through the home of Granite City Real Ice Cream The Monument Capitol buildings of rusticated granite marred to our eyes by etched polished granite remodeled downstairs may be found by a future happily heterodox “There’s a touch of autumn— there’s another touch of autumn” and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields “You can’t make a living plowing stones” subsistence farming is well out of style: “You can’t call it living without the margin” coveted obsolescence! a margin like that on this page a paper luxury “Collectors” the lady in the antique shop said “are snapping up silver” “Since we’re off the silver standard?” “Why, maybe so” Perhaps six 1827 Salem coin-silver spoons for $18 or what about “Have you The Pearl of Orr’s Island?” “That’s a book I’d want to read myself. I’m from here but live in Florida. Winters are too hard: 40 below. You don’t feel it though like zero in Boston. I’ll take St. Johnsbury any day over Boston.” Over St. Johnsbury the clouds shift in curds and a street goes steeply down into Frenchtown by the railroad station into which anachronistically comes a real train: yesterday’s torment of dust-exhaling plush on the backs of bare knees today’s nostalgia but not much. Curls cut out of wood, brick of a certain cut and color, a hopped-up cripple on a hill above his pond, a slattern frowning at the early-closed state liquor store, an attic window like a wink, The Scale Co., St. Johnsbury has everything Not this high hill a road going in undergrowth leads up to by walls of flat cleared-field stones so many and so long a time to take so much labor so long ago and so soon to be going back, a host to hardhack and blueberry baby steps first fallings from a sky in which the wind is moving furniture the upholstery of summer coming all unstitched the air full of flying kapok and resolutions: “remember to fetch the ax whack back pine intrusions” from the road turning down to a lower field and across the roughest one the County keeps a woman and a boy come up on heavy horses. “Morning! Had frost last night at Adamant. Might have a killing frost tonight.” Quick and clear as the water where cress grows the cold breaks on the hills to the soft crash of a waterfall beyond a beaver pond and slides on flinging imaginary fragments of cat’s ice from its edges to flash a bright reality in the night sky and it — the cold—stands, a rising pool, about Sloven’s farmhouse and he dreams of dynamite. A bog sucks at his foundations. Somewhere a deer breaks branches. The trees say Wesson. Mazola replies a frog. It doesn’t happen though the cold that is not that night. It happens all right not then when the white baneberry leans secretively where a road forks met with surprise: “Why here it is: the most beautiful thing.” The spirit of Gelett Burgess sets Mother Nature gabbing. “That’s my Actea pachypoda, dear, we call it Doll’s-Eyes.” Got up as smart as ever in muck and dank she belches —“’Scuse: just a touch of gas”— swamp maple flames and ambles over and plunks down on a dead rubber tire to contemplate smashed glass and a rusty tin and “some of my choicer bits: that I call Doctor’s Dentures. These are Little Smellies.” Not the sort you look to meet so near gold-domed, out of scale Montpelier a large-windowed kind of empty public bigness so little to show, so much to take pride in rather more than on the way to Stowe a pyrocrafted maple board in a Gyp-to-teria IF MORE MEN WERE SELF STARTERS FEWER WIVES WOULD HAVE TO CRANK. Welcome to the chair lift and cement chalet. Days of unambiguous morning when dawn peels back like a petal to disclose blue depths deep beyond all comprehending and tall field growth bends with a crushing weight of water cut into sac-shaped portions, each less than a carat and which streak an early walker’s trouser legs “You’re soaked!” crossing on a door the spill to where Nodding Ladies’ Tresses pallidly braid their fragrance and the woods emit their hum. Days when the pond holds on its steel one cloud in which thin drowned trees stand spare shapes of winter when summer is just loosening to fall and bits of ribbon from an electric typewriter patch a screen. Croquet days, scissor-and-paste nights after dinner on the better sort of ham and coffee strong enough to float a goose egg. Are those geese, that V, flying so early? Can it be so late? in the green state needles, leaves, fronds, blades, lichens and moss create Can it be so soon before the long white refrozen in frost on frost on all twigs again will flash cross cutting star streaks—the atoms dance—on a treacherous night in headlights? “Horrible Cold Night Remain at Home” “Clear and Beautiful Remain at Home”

I. –THE FIRST FUNERAL (The first corpse I saw was on the German wires, and couldn’t be buried) The whole field was so smelly; We smelt the poor dog first: His horrid swollen belly Looked just like going burst. His fur was most untidy; He hadn’t any eyes. It happened on Good Friday And there was lots of flies. And then I felt the coldest I’d ever felt, and sick, But Rose, ’cause she’s the oldest, Dared poke him with her stick. He felt quite soft and horrid: The flies buzzed round his head And settled on his forehead: Rose whispered: ‘That dog’s dead. ‘You bury all dead people, When they’re quite really dead, Round churches with a steeple: Let’s bury this,’ Rose said. ‘And let’s put mint all round it To hide the nasty smell.’ I went to look and found it— Lots, growing near the well. We poked him through the clover Into a hole, and then We threw brown earth right over And said: ‘Poor dog, Amen!’

Steel horses nodding In the petroleum field are beasts That suck The crude of earth. They have lived here for as long as I Remember. This moment, I smell wild incense: Heather, abducted by a desert wind. Its growth hides The rain-carved ribs of the foothills. Evening swallows The city fasting on late fall. Years ago, after hearing the story About a boy who lost Both legs while playing on an oil pump, I was dared to straddle one. All my friends were there to watch The Pacific behind me burning with dusk. The brute lifted me to the sky, Where I merged with the twilight, A warm breeze embracing my back. None of them noticed The world stopped to breathe. When I looked, they disappeared. Nearby in pink-flowered bushes Someone found The girl who’d been missing for weeks. They stood in awe, the body Decomposing, while I rode The slow bucking animal. Two months later, off the same pump, A man dove, An imperfect swan into night. He landed in the dirt gully Breaking the soft, white wings He never had. Today, I catch in my hand An insect charged with lightning. It tickles The obscure scoop of my palm As I hold it to my mouth and explain A wish so simple By morning I will have forgotten it. I release The bug to a desert wind That is racing toward the sea, A brutal dryness in its wake. Fire in the hills everywhere.

Ye distant spires, ye antique tow'rs, That crown the wat'ry glade, Where grateful Science still adores Her Henry's holy Shade; And ye, that from the stately brow Of Windsor's heights th' expanse below Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey, Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowr's among Wanders the hoary Thames along His silver-winding way. Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade, Ah, fields belov'd in vain, Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales, that from ye blow, A momentary bliss bestow, As waving fresh their gladsome wing, My weary soul they seem to soothe, And, redolent of joy and youth, To breathe a second spring. Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen Full many a sprightly race Disporting on thy margent green The paths of pleasure trace, Who foremost now delight to cleave With pliant arm thy glassy wave? The captive linnet which enthrall? What idle progeny succeed To chase the rolling circle's speed, Or urge the flying ball? While some on earnest business bent Their murm'ring labours ply 'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint To sweeten liberty: Some bold adventurers disdain The limits of their little reign, And unknown regions dare descry: Still as they run they look behind, They hear a voice in ev'ry wind, And snatch a fearful joy. Gay hope is theirs by fancy fed, Less pleasing when possest; The tear forgot as soon as shed, The sunshine of the breast: Theirs buxom health of rosy hue, Wild wit, invention ever-new, And lively cheer of vigour born; The thoughtless day, the easy night, The spirits pure, the slumbers light, That fly th' approach of morn. Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond to-day: Yet see how all around 'em wait The ministers of human fate, And black Misfortune's baleful train! Ah, show them where in ambush stand To seize their prey the murth'rous band! Ah, tell them they are men! These shall the fury Passions tear, The vultures of the mind Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear, And Shame that skulks behind; Or pining Love shall waste their youth, Or Jealousy with rankling tooth, That inly gnaws the secret heart, And Envy wan, and faded Care, Grim-visag'd comfortless Despair, And Sorrow's piercing dart. Ambition this shall tempt to rise, Then whirl the wretch from high, To bitter Scorn a sacrifice, And grinning Infamy. The stings of Falsehood those shall try, And hard Unkindness' alter'd eye, That mocks the tear it forc'd to flow; And keen Remorse with blood defil'd, And moody Madness laughing wild Amid severest woe. Lo, in the vale of years beneath A griesly troop are seen, The painful family of Death, More hideous than their Queen: This racks the joints, this fires the veins, That ev'ry labouring sinew strains, Those in the deeper vitals rage: Lo, Poverty, to fill the band, That numbs the soul with icy hand, And slow-consuming Age. To each his suff'rings: all are men, Condemn'd alike to groan, The tender for another's pain; Th' unfeeling for his own. Yet ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.

Oft, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood’s years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone, Now dimm’d and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me. When I remember all The friends, so link’d together, I’ve seen around me fall, Like leaves in wintry weather; I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed! Thus, in the stilly night, Ere slumber’s chain has bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me.