Nice Weather (3 page)

Such dash, such panache!

It was good to be an ace in World War II,

And rather better than being a Jew.

Visconti surrendered to communist partisans at Malpensa airfield—

Once they'd assured him no air or ground personnel of his would be killed.

His personal safety was guaranteed by the mayor of Milan.

The Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana was done. Absolutely futile to fight on.

Visconti was respected.

The partisan commander saluted.

Visconti turned to walk across the courtyard to the espresso

The commander had offered, and was shot dead. Caro mio, addio.

MOUNT STREET GARDENS

I'm talking about Mount Street.

Jackhammers give it the staggers.

They're tearing up dear Mount Street.

It's got a torn-up face like Mick Jagger's.

I mean, this is Mount Street!

Scott's restaurant, the choicest oysters, brilliant fish;

Purdey, the great shotgun maker—the street is complete

Posh plush and (except for Marc Jacobs) so English.

Remember the old Mount Street,

The quiet that perfumed the air

Like a flowering tree and smelled sweet

As only money can smell, because after all this was Mayfair?

One used to stay at the Connaught

Till they closed it for a makeover.

One was distraught

To see the dark wood brightened and sleekness take over.

Designer grease

Will help guests slide right into the zone.

Prince Charles and his design police

Are tickled pink because it doesn't threaten the throne.

I exaggerate for effect—

But isn't it grand, the stink of the stank,

That no sooner had the redone hotel just about got itself perfect

Than the local council decided: new street, new sidewalk, relocate the taxi rank!

Turn away from your life—away from the noise!—

Leaving the Connaught and Carlos Place behind.

Hidden away behind those redbrick buildings across the street are serious joys:

Green grandeur on a small enough scale to soothe your mind,

And birdsong as liquid as life was before you were born.

Whenever I'm in London I stop by this delightful garden to hear

The breeze in the palatial trees blow its shepherd's horn.

I sit on a bench in Mount Street Gardens and London is nowhere near.

MOTO POETA

IN MEMORY OF STEPHEN A. AARON (1936–2012)

You were the loudest of us all by far,

And the sweetest behind your fear,

Brilliant expositor of Arthur Miller and Shakespeare.

There you are at the beginning of your career

Bellowing like a carny barker

In the Freshman Commons, selling tickets to some

HDC production with your tuba voice and bigger nose.

The stylish fellows like myself were appalled.

Steve Aaron was a lot brasher than was posh,

And a lot shyer, and smart.

Suddenly he was mounting a staging of Eliot's

Murder in the Cathedral
to stop your head and start your heart,

The most gifted man in Harvard theater

In thirty years.

I remember him in Manhattan in analysis

Right across from the American

Museum of Natural History and its tattered old stuffed whale.

Aaron had an ungovernable phobic fear of the whale.

He asked me to go with him, literally holding hands,

So he could stare it down with an analytic harpoon—

And then backed out.

Years later, Goldie—his mother—pulled out of a closet

A brush and mirror set meant for a baby,

For baby Steve, and scrimshawed into the ivory back

Of each item was a tiny spouting whale!

The psychoanalyst's name was Tannenbaum.

One day Aaron came in and, after lying down, said: “I don't know why—

There's this tune I can't get out of my head! Tum
tum
tee tum. Tum
tum
tee tum.

O Christmas tree! O Christmas tree!
” Steve,

You're a blue forest of oceans, seagulls flying their cries.

I come from an unimaginably different plan.

I've traveled to you because my technology can.

I ride the cosmos on my poetry Ducati, Big Bang engine, einsteinium forks.

Let me tell you about the extraterrestrial Beijings and New Yorks.

You are dear planet Earth, where my light-beam spaceship will land.

I'll land, after light-years of hovering, and take your hand.

SCHOOL DAYS

I

John Updike

Updike is dead.

I remember his big nose at Harvard

When he was a kid.

Someone pointed him out on the street

As a pooh-bah at the Lampoon

As he disappeared into the Lampoon building

On Mt. Auburn.

The building should have seemed

Odd and amusing instead of intimidating,

But everything was intimidating,

Though one never let on.

Here was this strangely

Glamorous geek from New England,

With a spinnaker of a nose billowing out

From a skinny mast,

Only he was actually

Not from New England.

Those were the days when

One often didn't say hello even to a friend.

One just walked past.

I was a freshman in Wigglesworth

When I visited Ezra Pound

At St. Elizabeths,

And Updike was about to be
summa cum laude

And go off to Oxford.

These were the days of Archibald MacLeish

And his writers' class in his office

In Widener for the elite.

I remember I put taps on my shoes

To walk out loud the long Widener reading room.

 

II

House Master

Mr. Finley sat cross-legged

On top of a desk

Reciting from memory Sappho in Greek

In his galoshes, administering an IV drip of nectar

While hovering like a hummingbird.

That was Finley, magical, a bit fruity,

Warbling like a bird while the snow outside

Silenced the Yard.

We were in a Romanesque redbrick

H. H. Richardson building, Sever Hall.

I was an auditor

In a Greek lyric poetry seminar

That was somewhere over the rainbow.

Certainly it was the only time

I heard a hummingbird sing.

I remember everything.

I remember nothing.

I remember ancient Greek sparkles like a diamond ring.

Professors were called mister.

To address someone as professor was deemed vulgar.

It was good sport to refer

To one's inferiors as N.O.C.D. (Not our class, dear.)

Biddies still cleaned the student rooms.

I had a living room with a fireplace that worked.

Finley was the master of Eliot House, my house.

Somewhere else, Senator Joseph McCarthy

Of Wisconsin was chasing American communists,

But despite that, he was evil.

The snow kept falling on the world,

Big white flakes like white gloves.

 

III

Pretending to Translate Sappho

The mother of the woman I currently

Like to spank, I'm not kidding,

Was my girlfriend at Harvard.

The mother looked like a goddess

And as a matter of fact majored at Radcliffe in Greek,

Or as we would say then,

That was her field of concentration.

Please don't tell me

Anyone reading this

Believes what I'm saying or doesn't, it's irrelevant.

But anyway it's all true.

I don't believe in biographies.

I don't believe in autobiography.

It's a sort of pornography

To display oneself swollen

Into bigger-than-life

Meat-eating flies.

I remember the mother on her bicycle

Flying across Harvard Yard

All legs.

Goddesses still wore skirts.

I'm still up to the same old tricks,

But now I'm always on time.

One time, I kept her waiting for me in the old

Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria on Mass. Ave. three hours.

When I finally got the goddess

Into my student bed,

The beauty of her nineteen-year-old body

Practically made me deaf, so loud

I leaked. My arrogant boy burst into tears.

 

IV

The Golden Bough

A tiger leaps on the back

Of a boy in the Yard for the kill.

The first warm day feels hot.

That's the Boston area's

Idea of spring, tearing winter violently

Apart a little before Reading Period,

In other words late,

So actually it's almost summer before it's spring.

Tropical parrots fly into the libraries and talk.

Two beautiful girls flaunt wide-brimmed summer hats.

Phyllis Ferguson is indescribable.

Elisabeth Niebuhr is the intellectual equivalent.

Both are in summer dresses

In honor of spring.

Each gets mentioned in
The Golden Bough.

One girl went to Brearley.

One went to Chapin.

Those of you who know

What I'm talking about

Can stop reading.

The daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr rooms

With the granddaughter of Learned Hand,

Two knockouts—or rather four.

If you know what I'm talking about you nevertheless

Know it was spring

And blood was all over the Yard

Where the boy had been dragged and consumed.

Here comes the tiger with what looks like conjunctivitis

And, Jesus, he licks his lips

And looks exactly like what he ate.

 

V

Sweet Summer

I change a twenty for three tens

Could be the story of my life.

I give my bit and get a lot.

I give one back.

The sky is blue, the street fresh tar.

Tar smell. Smells like sweet summer.

Chi ci dà la luce? Il Duce!

That is to say, God.

Joe Lelyveld told me just now that Gandhi and Mussolini

Actually met. What an extraordinary thought.

Gandhi passing through Rome

On his way home.

Who knew Mussolini spoke English?

The language they used

To agree that Europe needed to change. Meaning no doubt

Their separate different things by that.

I hear the hiss of a hose.

I smell sunstroke kiss the cooling lawn.

The huge houses on Portland Place on their small lots

Are palazzi in Florence in old St. Louis.

Then came I to the shoreless shore of silence.

I stood there in Harvard Yard.

Huck Finn on his raft.

Harvard was all around me like the Mississippi

In the wet heat.

Heat shimmers upward from the hot.

Huck ties the fishing line to his toe so he can snooze

Alertly. It can make you crazy to be so happy

And on the verge of holy dictatorship and feeling you're a

Gandhi standing barefoot on a Mussolini balcony.

 

VI

Rejoice O Young Man in Thy Youth

Nelson Aldrich

Was so beautiful

He worried he was homosexual.

This was understandable.

So many men came on to him.

The Fay School, St. Paul's School, Harvard,

And his smile,

Are a certain kind of boy.

He joins the Porcellian.

He's not Everyman but he's American.

Every American boy worries

He's a fag, at least in those days

Did. I figure every boy at one

Stage or another is.

I never was,

Nor Nelson,

Even though he was called Nellie.

Not a nelly, but Nellie.

I call him Peter.

How rad is that!

BACK THEN

Negroes walking the white streets

Was how it seemed on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

One morning in 1971 it began.

I converted so to speak on the spot to the Ku Klux Klan.

My big blue heartfelt eyes hid in a hood and white sheets,

Completely ready to burn a cross and buy a gun.

A friend in the D.A.'s office said it's a gun or run.

I had thought these particular streets belonged to rich whites,

Almost as a matter of rich whites' civil rights.

The block on Seventieth between Park and Lexington Paul Mellon's sister sanctified.

The always Irish doormen along Fifth Avenue nearly died—

All of a sudden blacks were crossing over the border from their Harlem home

And there were barbarians wandering the streets of Rome.

I knew the man who wrote this poem.

ANNUNCIATION

The simple water drinks from the drinking fountain in the waiting room,

And tastes happiness—tastes a sprig, a spring from the spout.

Fresh pours purely salt-free through

The sunshine pouring down on the glassy dunes

Of in vitro fertilization taking place in a clinic,

But you are also other things, O singing oasis, O oasis, O baby bird in a nest,

O innocence breast-feeding a rainbow,

Who change everything. New York is changed. Blessed art thou.

THE GREEN NECKLACE

I'm going out for a stroll and a bite and won't take myself with me.

Look after me while I'm gone, will you.

Outside the bleary windows is my sunny city.

I have to get the window cleaner in. Things change.

A day later, it's raining quite hard, and the dirt doesn't show.

We were both at some huge dinner party or other
—this was her dream—

And you were sitting very far away from me.

I kept wondering whether