Midsummer Page 3

  and from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon line

  catches nothing, I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples the floor.

  A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.

  Then, in the door light: not Nike loosening her sandal,

  but a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.

  XXVI

  Before that thundercloud breaks from its hawsers,

  those ropes of rain, a wind makes the sea grapes wince,

  and the reef signals its last flash of lime.

  Feeling her skin cool, the housemaid August

  runs into the yard to pull down clouds, like a laundress,

  from the year’s meridian, her mouth stuffed with wooden pins.

  She’s seen these flashes of quartz, she knows it’s time

  for the guests on the beach to come up to the house,

  and, hosing sand from scorched feet, let the hinges rust

  in holes for another year. But an iron band

  still binds their foreheads: the bathers stand

  begging the dark clouds, whose spinnakers race over the dunes,

  for one more day. Here, the salt vine dries

  as fast as it grows, and before you look, a year’s gone

  with your shadow. The temperate homilies can’t

  take root in sand; the cicada can fiddle his tunes

  all year, if he likes, to the twig-brown ant.

  The cloud passes high like a god staying his powers—

  the pocked sand dries, umbrellas reopen like flowers—

  but those who measure midsummer by a year’s trials

  have felt a chill grip an ankle. They put down their books

  to count the children crouched over pools, and the idolaters

  angling themselves to the god’s face, like sundials.

  XXVII

  Certain things here are quietly American—

  that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars

  of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes

  muttering the word umpire instead of empire;

  the gray, metal light where an early pelican

  coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire

  of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine’s.

  The light warms up the sides of white, eager Cessnas

  parked at the airstrip under the freckling hills

  of St. Thomas. The sheds, the brown, functional hangar,

  are like those of the Occupation in the last war.

  The night left a rank smell under the casuarinas,

  the villas have fenced-off beaches where the natives walk,

  illegal immigrants from unlucky islands

  who envy the smallest polyp its right to work.

  Here the wetback crab and the mollusc are citizens,

  and the leaves have green cards. Bulldozers jerk

  and gouge out a hill, but we all know that the dust

  is industrial and must be suffered. Soon—

  the sea’s corrugations are sheets of zinc

  soldered by the sun’s steady acetylene. This

  drizzle that falls now is American rain,

  stitching stars in the sand. My own corpuscles

  are changing as fast. I fear what the migrant envies:

  the starry pattern they make—the flag on the post office—

  the quality of the dirt, the fealty changing under my foot.

  XXVIII

  Something primal in our spine makes the child swing

  from the gnarled trapeze of a sea-almond branch.

  I have been comparing the sea almond’s shapes to the suffering

  in van Gogh’s orchards. And that, too, is primal. A bunch

  of sea grapes hangs over the calm sea. The shadows

  I shovel with a dry leaf are as warm as ash, as

  noon jerks toward its rigid, inert center.

  Sunbathers broil on their grid, the shallows they enter

  are so warm that out in the reef the blear grouper lunges

  at nothing, teased by self-scaring minnows.

  Abruptly remembering its job, a breaker glazes

  the sand that dries fast. For hours, without a heave,

  the sea suspires through the deep lungs of sponges.

  In the thatched beach bar, a clock tests its stiff elbow

  every minute and, outside, an even older iguana

  climbs hand over claw, as unloved as Quasimodo,

  into his belfry of shade, swaying there. When a

  cloud darkens, my terror caused it. Lizzie and Anna

  lie idling on different rafts, their shadows under them.

  The curled swell has the clarity of lime.

  In two more days my daughters will go home.

  The frame of human happiness is time,

  the child’s swing slackens to a metronome.

  Happiness sparkles on the sea like soda.

  XXIX

  Perhaps if I’d nurtured some divine disease,

  like Keats in eternal Rome, or Chekhov at Yalta,

  something that sharpened the salt fragrance of sweat

  with the lancing nib of my pen, my gift would increase,

  as the hand of a cloud turning over the sea will alter

  the sunlight—clouds smudged like silver plate,

  leaves that keep trying to summarize my life.

  Under the brain’s white coral is a seething anthill.

  You had such a deep faith in that green water, once.

  The skittering fish were harried by your will—

  the stingray halved itself in clear bottom sand,

  its tail a whip, its back as broad as a shovel;

  the sea horse was fragile as glass, like grass, every tendril

  of the wandering medusa: friends and poisons.

  But to curse your birthplace is the final evil.

  You could map my limitations four yards up from a beach—

  a boat with broken ribs, the logwood that grows only thorns,

  a fisherman throwing away fish guts outside his hovel.

  What if the lines I cast bulge into a book

  that has caught nothing? Wasn’t it privilege

  to have judged one’s work by the glare of greater minds,

  though the spool of days that midsummer’s reel rewinds

  comes bobbling back with its question, its empty hook?

  PART TWO

  XXX

  Gold dung and urinous straw from the horse garages,

  click-clop of hooves sparking cold cobblestone.

  From bricked-in carriage yards, exhaling arches

  send the stale air of transcendental Boston—

  tasselled black hansoms trotting under elms,

  tilting their crops to the shade of Henry James.

  I return to the city of my exile down Storrow Drive,

  the tunnel with its split seraphs flying en face,

  with finite sorrow; blocks long as paragraphs

  pass in a style to which I’m not accustomed,

  since, if I were, I would have been costumed

  to drape the cloaks of couples who arrive

  for dinner, drawing their chairs from tables where each glass,

  catching the transcendental clustered lights,

  twirled with perceptions. Style is character—

  so my forehead crusts like brick, my sockets char

  like a burnt brownstone in the Negro Quarter;

  but when a fog obscures the Boston Common

  and, up Beacon Hill, the old gas standards stutter

  to save their period, I see a black coachman,

  with gloves as white as his white-ankled horse,

  who counts their laughter, their lamplit good nights,

  then jerks the reins of his brass-handled hearse.

  XXXI

  Along Cape Cod, salt crannies of white harbors,

  white spires, white filling stations, the orthodox

&n
bsp; New England offering of clam-and-oyster bars,

  like drying barnacles leech harder to their docks

  as their day ebbs. Colonies of dark seamen,

  whose ears were tuned to their earringed ancestors’

  hymn of the Mediterranean’s ground bass,

  thin out like flocks of some endangered species,

  their gutturals, like a parched seal’s, on the rocks.

  High on the hillsides, the crosstrees of pines

  endure the Sabbath with the nerves of aspens.

  They hear the Pilgrim’s howl changed from the sibyl’s,

  that there are many nations but one God,

  black hat, black-suited with his silver buckle,

  damning the rock pool for its naiad’s chuckle,

  striking this coast with his priapic rod.

  A chilling wind blows from my Methodist childhood.

  The Fall is all around us—it is New England’s

  hellfire sermon, and my own voice grows hoarse in

  the fog whose bellowing horn is the sea siren’s:

  a trawler groping from the Port of Boston,

  snow, mixed with steam, blurring the thought of islands.

  XXXII

  The sirens will keep on singing, they will never break

  the flow of their one-voiced river to proselytize:

  “Come back, come back!”; your head will roll like the others,

  the rusted, open-mouthed tins with their Orphic cries.

  The city of Boston will not change for your sake.

  Cal’s bulk haunts my classes. The shaggy, square head tilted,

  the mist of heated affection blurring his glasses,

  slumped, but the hands repeatedly bracketing vases

  of air, the petal-soft voice that has never wilted—

  its flowers of illness carpet the lanes of Cambridge,

  and the germ of madness is here. Tonight, on the news,

  some black kids, one bandaged, were escorted with drawn baton

  to police cars. The slicing light on their hoods

  divides the spitters from those who should be spat on,

  keeping a red eye on colored neighborhoods.

  The sirens go on singing, while Lowell’s head

  rolls past the Harvard boathouse, and his Muse

  roars for the Celtics in the Irish bars.

  They move in schools, erect, pale fishes in streets;

  transparent, fish-eyed, they skitter when I divide,

  like a black porpoise heading for the straits,

  and the sirens keep singing in their echoing void.

  XXXIII

  [for Robert Fitzgerald]

  Those grooves in that forehead of sand-colored flesh

  were cut by declining keels, and the crow’s foot

  that prints an asterisk by unburied men

  reminds him how many more by the Scamander’s

  gravel fell and lie waiting for their second fate.

  Who next should pull his sword free of its mesh

  of weeds and hammer at the shield

  of language till the wound and the word fit?

  A whole war is fought backward to its cause.

  Last night, the Trojan and the Greek commanders

  stood up like dogs when his strange-smelling shadow

  hung loitering round their tents. Now, at sunrise,

  the dead begin to cough, each crabwise hand

  feels for its lance, and grips it like his pen.

  A helmsman drowns in an inkblot, an old man wanders

  a pine-gripped islet where his wound was made.

  Entering a door-huge dictionary, he finds that clause

  that stopped the war yesterday; his pulse starts the gavel

  of hexametrical time, the V’s of each lifted blade

  pull from Connecticut, like the hammers of a piano

  without the sound, as the wake, reaching gravel,

  recites in American: “Arma virumque cano …”

  XXXIV

  Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue

  on the heart! Going to the Eastern shuttle at LaGuardia,

  I mistook a swash of green-painted roof for the sea.

  And my ears, that second, were shells that held the roar

  of a burnished army scrambling down troughs of sand

  in an avalanche of crabs, to the conch’s horn in Xenophon.

  My eyes flashed a watery green, I felt through each hand,

  channel and vein, the startling change in hue

  made by the current between Pigeon Point and Store

  Bay, my blood royalled by that blue.

  I know midsummer is the same thing everywhere—

  Aix, Santa Fe, dust powdering the poplars of Arles,

  that it swivels like a dog at its shadow by the Charles

  when the footpaths swirl with dust, not snow, in eddies—

  but my nib, like the beak of the sea-swift heads nowhere else;

  to where the legions sprawl like starfish sunning themselves

  till the conch’s moan calls the slanted spears

  of the rain to march on in Anabasis.

  The sun has whitened the legions to brittle shells.

  Homer, who tired of wars and gods and kings,

  had the sea’s silence for prologue and epilogue.

  That old wave-wanderer with his drowsing gaze is

  a pelican rocked on the stern of an empty pirogue,

  a salt-grizzled gaffer, shaking rain from his wings.

  XXXV

  Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger.

  Sometimes the gusts of rain veered like the sails

  of dragon-beaked vessels dipping to Avalon

  and mist. For hours, driving along

  the skittering ridges of Wales, we carried the figure

  of Langland’s Plowman on the rain-seeded glass,

  matching the tires with his striding heels,

  while splintered puddles dripped from the roadside grass.

  Once, in the drizzle, a crouched, clay-covered ghost

  rose in his pivot, and the turning disk of the fields

  with their ploughed stanzas sang of a freshness lost.

  Villages began. We had crossed into England—

  the fields, not their names, were the same. We found a caff,

  parked in a thin drizzle, then crammed into a pew

  of red leatherette. Outside, with thumb and finger,

  a careful sun was picking the lint from things.

  The sun brightened like a sign, the world was new

  while the cairns, the castled hillocks, the stony kings

  were scabbarded in sleep, yet what made me think

  that the crash of chivalry in a kitchen sink

  was my own dispossession? I could sense, from calf

  to flinging wrist, my veins ache in a knot.

  There was mist on the window. I rubbed it and looked out

  at the helmets of wet cars in the parking lot.

  XXXVI

  The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines

  from the ale-colored skies of Warwickshire.

  Autumn has blown the froth from the foaming orchards,

  so white-haired regulars draw chairs nearer the grate

  to spit on logs that crackle into leaves of fire.

  But they grow deafer, not sure if what they hear

  is the drone of the abbeys from matins to compline,

  or the hornet’s nest of a chain saw working late

  on the knoll up there back of the Norman chapel.

  Evening loosens the moth, the owl shifts its weight,

  a fish-mouthed moon swims up from wavering elms,

  but four old men are out on the garden benches,

  talking of the bows they have drawn, their strings of wenches,

  their coined eyes shrewdly glittering like the Thames’

  estuaries. I heard their old talk carried


  through cables laid across the Atlantic bed,

  their gossip rustles like an apple orchard’s

  in my own head, and I can drop their names

  like familiars—those bastard grandsires

  whose maker granted them a primal pardon—

  because the worm that cores the rotting apple

  of the world and the hornet’s chain saw cannot touch the words

  of Shallow or Silence in their fading garden.

  XXXVII

  A trembling thought, no bigger than a hurt

  wren, swells to the pulsebeat of my rounded palm,

  pecks at its scratch marks like a mound of dirt,

  oval wings thrumming like a panelled heart.

  Mercy on thee, wren; more than you give to the worm.

  I’ve seen that pitiless beak dabbing the worm

  like a knitting needle into wool, the shudder you give

  gulping that limp noodle, its wriggle of completion

  like a seed swallowed by the slit of a grave,

  then your wink of rightness at a wren’s religion;

  but if you died in my hand, that beak would be the needle

  on which the black world kept spinning on in silence,

  your music as measured in grooves as was my pen’s.

  Keep pecking on in this vein and see what happens:

  the red skeins will come apart as knitting does.

  It flutters in my palm like the heartbeat thudding to be gone,

  as if it shared the knowledge of a wren’s elsewhere,

  beyond the world ringed in its eye, season and zone,

  in the radial iris, the targeted, targeting stare.

  XXXVIII

  Autumn’s music grates. From tuning forks of branches,

  small beaks scrape the cold. With trembling feather,

  with the squeaking nails of their notes, they pierce me, plus

  all the hauntings and evasions of gray weather,

  and the river veining with marble despite their pleas.

  Lunging to St. Martin’s marshes, toward the salt breaks

  corrugated by windy sunlight, to reed-whistling islets

  the geese chevron, too high for a shadow. Over brown bricks

  the soundless white scream of contrails made by jets