Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (22 page)
JOHN ASHBERY
This poem has always struck me as a wonder. I read it first when I was twenty, in
Partisan Review,
and was moved to write Elizabeth Bishop a fan letter – the only
time I’ve ever done so. I was thrilled to get a postcard from her in return, a view of the Maine
coast I think, where she might have been staying that summer. Even though I was barely an
adult, the poem seemed to sum up life ahead in its first line ‘Thus should have been our travels’, and life as viewed in retrospect in the last line, ‘and looked and looked our
infant sight away’, a line which still elicits a vagrant tear after all these years.
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Thus should have been our travels:
serious, engravable.
The Seven Wonders of the World are tired
and a touch familiar, but the other scenes,
innumerable, though equally sad and still,
are foreign. Often the squatting Arab,
or group of Arabs, plotting, probably,
against our Christian Empire,
while
one apart, with outstretched arm and hand
points to the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher.
The branches of the date-palms look like files.
The cobbled courtyard, where the Well is dry,
is like a diagram, the brickwork conduits
are vast and obvious, the human figure
far gone in history or theology,
gone with its camel or its faithful horse.
Always the silence, the gesture, the specks of birds
suspended on invisible threads above the Site,
or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads.
Granted a page alone or a page made up
of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles
or circles set on stippled gray,
granted a grim lunette,
caught in the toils of an initial letter,
when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves.
The eye drops, weighted, through the lines
the burin made, the lines that move apart
like ripples above sand,
dispersing storms, God’s spreading fingerprint,
and painfully, finally, that ignite
in watery prismatic white-and-blue.
Entering the Narrows at St. Johns
the touching
bleat of goats reached to the ship.
We glimpsed them, reddish, leaping up the cliffs
among the fog-soaked weeds and butter-and-eggs.
And at St. Peter’s the wind blew and the sun shone madly.
Rapidly, purposefully, the Collegians marched in lines,
crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants.
In Mexico the dead man lay
in a blue arcade;
the dead volcanoes
glistened like Easter lilies.
The jukebox went on playing ‘Ay, Jalisco!’
And at Volubilis there were beautiful poppies
splitting the mosaics; the fat old guide made eyes.
In Dingle harbor a golden length of evening
the rotting hulks held up their dripping plush.
The Englishwoman poured tea, informing us
that the
Duchess was going to have a baby.
And in the brothels of Marrakesh
the little pockmarked prostitutes
balanced their tea-trays on their heads
and did their belly-dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees,
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all:
A holy grave, not looking
particularly holy,
one of a group under a keyhole-arched stone baldaquin
open to every wind from the pink desert.
An open, gritty, marble trough, carved solid
with exhortation, yellowed
as scattered cattle-teeth;
half-filled with dust, not even the dust
of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there.
In a smart burnoose Khadour looked
on amused.
Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’
Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges
of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)
Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen
this old Nativity while we were at it?
– the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,
an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,
colorless, sparkless,
freely fed on straw,
and, lulled within, a family of pets,
– and looked and looked our infant sight away.
(1955)
John Ashbery (b. 1927) is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, most recently
Quick Question
(2012). Other collections include
Notes from the Air: Selected
Later Poems
(2007), which was awarded the International
Griffin Poetry Prize, and
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975), which won the three major American prizes – the Pulitzer,
the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008, and in 2012 President Obama presented him with
a National Humanities Medal.
STANLEY KUNITZ
(1905–2006)
NICHOLSON BAKER
Stanley Kunitz was a lonely, kind man, a conscientious objector during World War II who wrote a famous line: ‘The night nailed like an orange to my brow’.
It’s from a poem about his father, who killed himself by drinking poison shortly before Kunitz was born. Long ago I bought a collection of
Kunitz’s poems and read it on lunch hours, and
that’s how I discovered a short lyric called ‘End of Summer’. I’ve been muttering it to myself ever since.
When we say that a poem makes us cry, what do we really mean? Sometimes we mean that it makes us cry out inwardly in shocked agreement. That’s what happened to me when I read Kunitz
saying, as he stood in a field of stubble – he owned
a farm in Connecticut – that the year was going to ‘turn on its hinge’, like a framed poster in a swivelling poster
display. And then it happened again when, in the third stanza, looking up, he says that blue ‘poured into summer blue’. Who knew that an empty afternoon sky could be so full, so
generous, so pourably fluid? But it is. And a hawk is up there, having ridden a spiralling thermal up
to the top of an invisible aerial tower.
But now, look – the hawk is breaking away. There’s a sudden flash of reflected light from the silo’s metal roof, and our poet, rhyming the line
with
‘tower’, realises what’s happening to him: ‘Part of my life was over.’
That’s it. You see? There’s this one last moment, the superb moment of sunlit stasis. Everything is in balance, and pure, and
almost happy – a moment of en-passant perfection.
But it’s also the end, because ‘already’ the iron door of the north is opening. The change isn’t imminent, it’s already in progress – there’s nothing we
can do. And finally we come to the last three slow, fatal, resigned syllables: a ‘cruel wind blows’.
This poem itself is an orange. Nail it to your brow.
End of Summer
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke
from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
(1953)
The novels of Nicholson Baker (b. 1957) include
The Mezzanine
(1988),
Vox
(1992),
The Fermata
(1994), and two books narrated by a poet,
The
Anthologist
(2009) and
Traveling Sprinkler
(2013). Among his nonfiction works are
U and I
(1991),
Double Fold
(2001) and
Human Smoke
(2008).
EDWIN MUIR
(1887–1959)
ALEXEI SAYLE
First of all, there is a vivid but subtle evocation of some human-made apocalypse; the images of the warship piled with dead and the plane crashing into the sea are haunting
and, though used since in lesser works, remain fresh, original and profoundly disturbing. Then there is the suggestion of redemption
via a new and respectful relationship with animals and the
planet; a new beginning away from the mechanistic ways that brought us to disaster.
All the lines move me, but it’s the final two that really get me: ‘But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. / Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.’
The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven
days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon
a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields;
at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange
horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient
shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen
colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
(1956)