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The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov

The University of Chicago Press

    THE IMAGE AND THE LAW (1947)


    1

    EUROPE

    Saint and demon blindly stare
    From the risen stone;
    Brought to a common character
    Neither can stand alone.

    Saint and demon both look down
    Upon the public square:
    Iubilate, says the one,
    The other says despair.

    The people knit Assyrian brows
    Like statues on the rack;
    They all have eaten up their cows
    And drink their coffee black.

    Nothing in Heaven is of stone
    And nothing dusts away.
    Of the blood of redemption
    The angels drink alway.

    No stony powder scores their throats
    Who have this saving cup,
    But saints and beasts are beams and motes
    To silt our voices up.

    Else should we Alleluia sing
    Across the withered gut,
    As fiddles over hollows sing
    To make the air sound out.

    New eucharists we must call down
    To fill our empty rooms:
    New heroes stagger into town
    Under their heavy tombs.


    THE FROZEN CITY

    1

    Visionary and not believed
    Is no longer the position
    Nor the prerogative of
    Saints, mystics, and the holy poor.
    Rather on reefers and coke
    I expound to the multitude
    Traumatic aggrandizements
    Of my person in triplicate
    At least; for this receiving
    The indifference of belief
    From those who love the miracle
    And let the doctrine go.
    I enter upon my song and dance:


    2

    I saw by moonlight New York
    Which was called in my dream
    The Island of God, and achieved
    In the paralysis of distance
    A splendid fixity, as though
    The parable of a town.
    Cold space parted me from
    The marvelous towers
    Towards which I strained.
    With every appearance of
    Solidity the city yet
    Possessed the radiant dead
    Purity of ice, glass, reflecting
    Clearly the multitudinous stars.
    Under the constellation of
    A sword, Blake and Augustine
    Swam the middle air
    Extending their perpetually
    Protecting benediction
    Over the silver port.
    All bridges were down, and ships
    Sharply broke up in the frozen rivers.
    My eyes, from the abysmal
    Heaven of the dream's stance,
    Detected no commerce or action,
    And the snow lay undisturbed
    By wheel or step and flashed
    With sidereal brilliance the
    Respeculation of Heaven.

    This was, as the dream understood,
    The artifice of eternity
    Produced by efficient suffering
    And the total wish for death.
    How the committees had worked,
    Organizations of ladies begged
    The people to refrain from eating:
    The assault on Heaven's justice
    (Scorning mercy) had been conducted
    By many the most eminent
    Citizens and public men;
    The rape of God's attention
    Employed the methods commended
    By the superior saints, with only
    A hint of economic condescension
    And the irony of the best people.

    Descending and moving closer
    I saw the sad patience of
    The people awaiting death
    (They crossed their bony legs,
    Their eyes stared, hostile and
    Bright as broken glass). The dream said:
    You must know that the period
    Of partial damage is complete:
    Nothing now will defray the costly
    Agonies of the sempiternal.
    Understand that these are dying
    Into grace by an act of the will;
    And if some still stare at the harbor
    And mutter of nipples or ten per cent
    This ghostly quality of lust retains
    No understanding of itself: for as
    All words are prayer, all words
    Are meaningless, by the last fiat
    Of the last secular council.

    This was true. Moving, I saw
    The murderer staring at his knife,
    Unable to understand, and a banker
    Regarding a dollar bill with fixed
    Incomprehension. Queerest of all,
    Children rolled skulls in the street,
    The sound of their light laughter
    Contrasting strangely with their
    Gangrenous flesh and the
    Convulsive motions of their limbs.
    Parents looked on from doorways
    And were alert with approval
    For the quickest among the children:
    But more than once I saw envy in
    Their shining eyes.
    Some, while
    I watched, died (their heads
    Rolled off, this signifying
    An abdication of the will)
    But the cold preserved them in
    Their charnel integrity.
    As from a distance, down
    Halls of column and arch, I heard
    Meanwhile many voices singing:

    Tuba mirum spargens sonum
    Per sepulcra regionum,
    Coget omnes ante thronum.
    Looking skyward then, I heard
    The mighty guardians reply
    To the city's qualified despair.
    Tears spun from their eyes
    Like suns, and wheeled glittering
    Out to space, new planets of
    Compassionate experiment:


    William
    Blake

    Jerusalem, desiring the vine
    Blindly we have built the machine:
    For the eye altering alters all.


    Saint
    Augustine

    Quomodo ardebam, deus meus,
    Revolare a terrenis ad te,
    Et nesciebam quid ageres mecum.

    Then in my dream the blind
    Mercy of the Lamb was loosed
    Upon the moral world: the sun
    Burned Heaven from the town,
    Flowers grew with monstrous
    Innocent speed. The dead arose,
    And began with spastic hands
    To gather money from the streets:
    As though ravaged by intolerable
    Heat of life, people ran to the cool
    Marble vaults of bank and tomb
    And threw themselves upon the cold
    Gold or earth, it seemed for
    Sovereign unredeeming solace.

    I found myself leaving the city
    And fading from my own dream.
    From a distance the scene
    Showed no unusual activity.
    My last sight was of Blake
    And Augustine, in whose glacial
    Eyes, frozen by their last tears,
    City and dream were locked together.


    3

    Waking, close to midnight and
    By irony in the same city,
    I listened to the usual noises:
    The argument of two women, the drunk
    Singing in the back yard, and
    Various metal, rubber, wooden
    Sounds that spoke of the normal.

    The healthy man, waking at
    Midnight, turns over to sleep
    Again. What sound began and
    Ended at once his dream, in time
    Immeasurable by clocks or
    Time for meals, was his only
    Warning from the metaphysical,
    Suspected not even by his sleep.


    FROM A RECORD OF DISAPPOINTMENT

    It is the hour of indecision,
    Decembers of Tuesday pass.
    Now consider the high
    Ridges and ridings where
    The wind blows the cold snow.

    Here, the stove has gone out
    And we reach a metropolitan
    Genteel conclusion, as the snow
    Freezes the windows open or shut.

    Look outside. The relevant
    Is everywhere, and like the snow
    (Though blown by the wind in unmanned spaces)
    Locks and latches the tall
    Shiplike city and ourselves
    In the chaste paralysis
    Of decided history.


    THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER

    The Sunday papers are on the streets.
    Several people starved in Bucharest.
    Read (because the truth is black and white)
    The truth. When one reads it is
    As much the black as the white that
    One reads, construing the letters.

    Here the human faces are gray as
    Old bread, where the camera has
    Stopped two or three on a gray day
    In a sky that seems to be raining.
    Words show that these faces have shuddered
    Instantaneously from, say, Madrid.

    The citizen reads the Sunday papers.
    He thanks his God he is not
    In Posnan or Allenstein or Belgrade.
    He is, for example, in Chicago.
    The world situation is terrible,
    The famine a terrible thing.

    The head of a great sugar refinery
    Has died of diabetes. That sounds right:
    The citizen considers divine justice,
    Reads further of the Ministers at Paris:
    A person with a flaming sword has been
    Arrested in the rain, in Schenectady.

    On Monday morning the truth comes
    In smaller packages, neat and pale
    With a brand of words over the brow.
    On Monday the wisdom of Sunday
    Drifts on the gutter tides. The pale,
    The staring faces, twirl around and go down.


    TWO POEMS

    I

    The house is named of night. Pale maidens sing
    The satisfactions of the night. We lie
    In the round of the egg, and cannot be conceived
    By drummers throbbing at the hollow round.

    In Africa, whole tribes with painted rumps
    Circle their fires, beating out no code
    Of civil overtures, but humping up
    A savage erudition to the sun.

    Yet here (already) we have invented tools
    For clawing nervously the beard or hair,
    And limbs of artifice that can outline
    Featly the spastic motions of despair.

    Seductive music all the same: a band
    Of black men with their drums and horns askew.
    Now sound, black man, your oboe's lowest O,
    That syllable eclipsed behind the sun:

    Reverberate the problems of the egg
    That was before the world; of that black king
    Or shaman that was naked principal
    Begetter of the world upon the sun.

    And here white girls reply: our genesis
    Was on a satin bed. Pythagoras
    Drummed us to being on a whore, we are
    Ladies who have intelligence of love.

    White scientists at corner tables frown,
    And isolate corruptions of the sun
    Which will, in capsules for the innocent,
    Make everglades of these pale continents
    And increase aged lust with light's increase.

    The jungle roars with carnal artifice
    And swollen creepers choke the former trails:
    Pallid spinsters sing love's pale empire.


    II

    Cases of light and shadow on Times Square
    Are facts, lucid and black. But in the jungle
    The torn and divided shadow falls as it may
    In green lightning, and on this leaf or that.

    Ideas of the jungle define the man, define
    His dream: the fragmentation of his shades
    Produces wilderness enough, in which
    All single light, refractory, cracks up.

    The jungle nights, too, with their snowy moons,
    Bring generation from carnality:
    He realizes his romantic lust
    In the erratic angles of his dream.

    Yet history begins at home. The lights
    Of fancy stain his shadow on the stone:
    It follows him through crowds, runs up the thighs
    And breasts of his impracticable wives.

    Thus affianced, divorced, he does not turn
    But paces jungle paths, a hot patrol
    Past ruined images, dishonored styles.
    Thick grasses overgrow his yielding heart.

    Also in Angkor Vat, he thinks, the sun
    And moon beat blackest rhythms from the stone.
    The spirit, the idea, the politic
    Left volumes, records, empty offices.

    What is it that he lacks? The bright machine
    With gold connecting rods is dead. He has
    Legend and image, divine relations,
    Knows of Thermopylae and Bunker Hill.

    Their insufficiency appalls. He will
    Design a history to himself: himself
    The hero, the comic and the tragic man,
    Honor himself in Marathons and studs.

    Here he begins. In Times Square, at the same
    Time in the jungle. In precise blue air
    He stands, a solitaire, and drags to begin
    His broken shadow through the green debris.


    THE STARE OF THE MAN FROM THE PROVINCES

    In the metropolis of hooligans
    Sweet May reigneth forever. Do you hear
    The pale chitter of china wings in windows?
    Glass parakeets preen and silently shrill.

    The perfumes of hooligan ladies spill
    An old delight upon the ground, their shadows
    Couple inconsequentially everywhere.
    Peacocks in windows spread up their proud fans.

    Indeed the city coruscates with eyes
    Both bold and proud, of dames and gentlemen,
    That flowerlike upon their haughty stalks
    Bulge at the perfect springtime of the streets.

    Only at night, between the snowy sheets
    Resting infected feet from pleasant walks,
    All eyelids close, confine the citizen
    Within the echoing caverns of his eyes.

    At night all hooligans in lonely bed
    Must suffer cry of birds they had thought dead.
    And diamond beak, unfashionable nails
    Tear at the eyes until in sleep sight fails.


    PORTRAIT OF THREE CONSPIRATORS

    They sit in a room. Outside the world revolves,
    And the tired despotic seasons succeed
    Each other forever. They sit there forever.

    A venomous, fanged one. One delicate
    And velvet. And a bitter man between
    Who no longer believes the world a stage.
    He arbitrates. These are the conspirators.

    Among imaginations of the world
    A room, four walls, a table and three chairs;
    Strong light and language to misunderstand.

    They plan the overthrow of something,
    Maybe by bomb, or gun, or spoken word.
    That something exists. It modifies the words
    Of the conspirators, which break against
    Implacable existence. Life, a diamond:
    I know how it is. And once I had thought
    Of diamond self with diamond life, a true
    Tension and irony; but now I know
    This life, these lives, will break.

    It is night, and it is the season of winter.
    It is in time, and time passes, and
    The world is not a stage. I thought of these
    Conspirators: the snake, the Machiavell,
    The bitter man between; and composed
    Their portraits with the clear impotence
    Of judgment. Now season and element
    Resolve, combine, distract me with their change.

    I say to my assassins, Look: the mind
    That made you cannot discompose you nor
    Rouse you to life, but you sit in the mind
    Revolving schemes referring to the real.
    You are not real, the splendor of your words
    Falls coldly on the seasons as they go
    Like disappointed kings to burial.

    I say to them, I must die, because the world
    Is not a stage. And you are growing old,
    You are not diamond that might scratch the glass
    Of Heaven or the mind: you are the shadows
    Of posturing desire, and you effect no change
    In the position of things as they are.

    Nothing can change them. They sit there as if
    Immortal, and mutter, like actors on a stage,
    Of art and wisdom, and a change of life.


    THE TRIUMPH OF EDUCATION

    The children's eyes were like lakes of the sea
    And baffling with their false serenity
    When they were told, and given all the cause,
    "There is no Santa Claus."

    The children's eyes did not become more bright
    Or curious of sexual delight
    When someone said, "Man couples like the beast,
    The Stork does not exist."

    The children's eyes, like smoke or drifted snow,
    White shifted over white, refused to show
    They suffered loss: "At first it may seem odd —
    There isn't any God."

    The children, not perturbed or comforted,
    Heard silently the news of their last bed:
    "For moral care you need not stint your breath,
    There's no Life after Death."

    The children's eyes grew hot, they glowed like stoves.
    Ambitious, and equipped with all our proofs,
    They ran forth little women, little men,
    And were not children then.


    IN THE GLASS OF FASHION

    I am asked why I do not
    Stop writing about death
    And do something worth while.
    To write about what would be
    Not to write about death?

    Let me hypothesize an
    Invasion of El Morocco by
    Armed insurgents, probably
    Mongol; and describe the
    Muscular economies of the
    Human face, where terror
    Would continue to smile:
    Is this funny enough?

    In the same way, one
    Goes on dealing in a set
    Of manners that do not
    Perhaps apply to the local
    Situation: with verity
    Chilled to the page: but
    There is no help for this.

    The virtuous express their
    Virtue by laughing at the
    Distant catastrophe: when
    Shanhaikwan was taken there
    Were enough people at dinner
    Who found it amusing, since
    "Whenever one laughs, a man
    Is dying."
    Admitted: and yet
    Their open faces have the look
    Of faces paralyzed during the
    Performance of an indecent act.
    Which is to say: the laugh
    That was appropriate for Spain
    Will do for Shanhaikwan
    If one is able to repeat
    Exact equivocations of the mask.

    But the verities, I say again,
    Continue to repeat themselves in
    Precisely the same manner; and the
    Resemblance to death is inescapable.


    WHO DID NOT DIE IN VAIN

    The voyager returned, but much perplexed:
    For several years himself had sacrificed
    But carried still that self-same incubus,
    Unfriendly and persistent as a wound.

    The high heroic, with its mud and blood,
    That made a virtue of a dirty face —
    He was reputed to have left it there,
    Sloughed it in meadows where the corpses lay

    Of others who, more fortunate or less,
    Had fluted in the grass final designs:
    For death, he thought, can no man take away
    From the dead, who are precisely what they are.

    Who whether mournful, reverent or proud,
    Or deprecating, supercilious,
    Have no man's message in their open mouth:
    Whose silence will support no politic.

    However it had been, here he came back
    Tired, to drag the gangrene — all his past —
    Along familiar ways, to carry home
    Whatever viciousness he learned to breathe.

    And his acquaintance-dead, that never left
    Bastogne, or sank beneath the China Sea,
    Their death the death of movies, amplified
    Beyond his power or belief to share —

    Their silence was by politicians used,
    Their teeth opened with phrase, their puppet heads
    Voided comic balloons: their speaking death
    Supposed his debt, and gave him much advice.


    THE PLACE OF VALUE

    The way MacLane died, they set
    His feet in a bucket of drying
    Cement and let him off the bridge
    Late one night. He screamed once,
    An adequate criticism and his best
    Epigram. It was a private fight.

    What shall I say? That the world
    Is set in its hardening history
    Like MacLane, to scream going down?
    Or that MacLane was like
    MacLane and no one else, and he
    Is dead and there is no other,
    Unique and unimportant?

    The white moon breaks to dust
    On the river where he sank;
    The Septentrion shines high
    In cold temporal distance.
    Let everyone go home: MacLane
    Is no longer known by that name.

    The "place of value in
    A world of fact" is to supply
    Cohesiveness, weight, stability,
    And to give reason and point
    To the particular screams
    Which otherwise merely would
    Echo between empty buildings
    Or make bubbles in the water.
    As it is, irrelevance
    Already surrounds us, and
    I have known people to die
    By the failure of a cotter pin
    Who believed they were fighting for truth.

    Consider the position: the light-
    Minded faces met on every street,
    The vacant expressions of
    The habitually wary, the snide
    Incredulous stares of the
    Proprietors of contemporary thought,
    Are facts: their screams are facts
    And their silences also scream.
    The parietal structure (bone
    Or cement), in order to operate
    At all, must act at a level
    Common to all, the level of
    Eating and defecation, of sex
    And sleeping, and the careful
    Conveyance away of waste products
    (On which nightmares are known
    To feed). The history of
    These faces, whose death-masks,
    Already taken, are wrapped
    In wet newspaper and kept on file,
    Is of necessity disregarded:
    MacLane is his own business,
    Who dealt by night in surrogates —
    Money, cigars, amniotic beer —
    For unreckoned satisfactions.

    Even the greatest state subsists
    By necrocytosis and the nightly
    Secession of its smallest unit
    Into the unexampled lechery
    And soft gluttony of dreams:
    MacLane made concrete equivalence
    And died of relevance and justice
    By his lights. The rest of us,
    Amazed mice, face the neurosis
    Of the continual choice on which
    All depends; or play the hopeless
    Shell game against the cheerful
    Healthy statistician, who knows
    "Pretty well" the final result.

    Numberless stars, like snow
    In Heaven, shine on the black
    Water, so dancing and so still:
    Reflect inextricable confusions
    Of value in fact. The singular
    Angel of each event protects
    That event from being perfectly seen.

    In a bucket of cement
    Cohesiveness, weight, stability.
    It is a private fight.

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Excerpted from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov by Howard Nemerov. Copyright © 1977 Howard Nemerov. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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