Nothing by Design Read online

  the sea-sprayed eagle too.

  No kinsman can console

  or protect a sorry soul.

  In fact, a city dweller

  who revels and swills wine

  far from travel’s perils,

  barely could believe

  how often, wearily,

  I weathered the sea paths.

  The shadows of night deepened,

  snow fell from the north,

  and on the frost-bound earth

  hail fell like the coldest grain.

  For all that, my heart’s thoughts

  pound now with the salt

  wave’s surging; on high seas

  my spirit urges me

  forward, to seek far

  from here a foreign land.

  The truth is that no man—

  however generous

  in gifts, however bold

  in youth, however brave,

  however loyally

  his own lord may attend him—

  is ever wholly free

  in his seafaring from worry

  at what is the Lord’s will.

  No, it is not for him,

  the harp’s song, nor the rings

  exchanged, nor pleasure in women,

  nor any worldly glory,

  nothing but welling waves;

  the longing of seagoing

  man is what he has.

  Groves break into blossom,

  the towns and fields grow fair

  and the world once more is new:

  all of this spurs on

  the man whose mind and spirit

  are eager for the journey,

  who yearns to steer his course

  far across the sea.

  Mournfully the cuckoo’s

  voice cries out in warning,

  the harbinger of summer

  bitterly foretells

  in song the soul’s distress.

  To the wealthy warrior

  blessed with worldly fortune,

  this is all unknown—

  what we face who follow

  the vast and alien way.

  And now my thought roams far

  beyond my heart; my mind

  flows out to the water,

  soars above the whale’s path

  to the wide world’s corners

  and returns with keen desire;

  the lone bird, flying, shrieks

  and leads the willing soul

  to the whale road, and over

  the tumbling of the waves.

  The joys of the Lord can kindle

  more in me than dead

  and fleeting life on land.

  I do not believe the riches

  of this world will last forever.

  Always, without fail,

  of three things one will turn

  uncertain for a man

  before his fatal hour:

  sickness, age, or the sword

  will rip the life right out

  of the doomed and done for.

  So it is for every man:

  the best praise will come after,

  from people who outlive him;

  today, then, he must toil

  against enemies and the Devil;

  undaunted he must dare

  so that sons of men extol him,

  that in time to come his fame

  endures amid the angels,

  and his glory goes on, ceaseless,

  among the celestial hosts.

  The days are dwindling now

  of the kingdoms of this earth;

  there are no kings or Caesars

  as before, and no gold givers

  as once, when men of valor

  performed great deeds and lived

  majestically among

  themselves in high renown.

  Their delights too are dead.

  The weakest hold the world

  in their hands, and wear it out

  with labor, while all splendor,

  like the earth, grows older;

  its noble aspect withers

  as man does everywhere.

  Age creeps up on him,

  his face grows pale; his head,

  gray-haired, bewails old friends,

  sons of princes, already

  given to the earth.

  As his body fails,

  life leaks away, he tastes

  sweetness in things no more,

  nor feels pain, nor can move

  his hand, nor use his mind.

  When a kinsman dies, he wants

  to strew the grave with gold,

  or bury with the dead

  treasures he amassed.

  But no, it cannot be;

  gold once hid and hoarded

  in life is no good now

  for the soul full of sin

  before the force of God.

  Terrible and great

  is the Lord, and the very world

  turns from Him in awe.

  He made the firm foundations,

  the earth’s face and the heavens.

  Foolish is he who does not fear

  his Lord; death comes to him

  though he is unprepared.

  Blessed is he who lives in all

  humility; what comes to him

  in Heaven is forgiveness.

  God gave to him that spirit

  to bow to all His power.

  A man must steer his passions,

  be strong in staying steady;

  keep promises, be pure.

  He must be wise and fair

  with foes as much as friends,

  well-tempered in himself.

  He dreads to see a dear one

  engulfed in flames, yet patience

  tells him to trust the sway

  of Fate, and that God’s might

  is greater than we know.

  Let us ponder where our true

  home is, and how to reach it.

  Let us labor to gain entry

  into the eternal,

  to find the blessedness

  of belonging to the Lord

  joyfully on high.

  Thanks be to God who loved us,

  the endless Father, the Prince

  of Glory forever. Amen.

  VII

  LOST ORIGINALS

  VOICE OF AMERICA

  I sit at my desk

  My life is grotesque.

  —JOSEPH BRODSKY

  1. Open to the Public

  Hard labor? But you’d claim it wasn’t hard.

  You sat in your log cabin, ably sketching

  another cabin, and some chickens scratching

  out their appointed living in the yard.

  A farmhand reading poems by kerosene,

  you plotted carefully the coup d’état

  of yourself, and boiled another cup of tea;

  a well-turned sentence made you feel serene.

  I sit in Russia’s National Library,

  rifling through folders of your private stuff.

  They came easily—or not easily enough,

  illiterate as I am in the very

  language which to you was the first god.

  Your faintly ruled, cheap spiral notebooks hatched

  fresh images, new chickens came unlatched

  from their coop, and from a corner, a man’s head—

  a twenty-something profile. That was yours.

  You doodled, and you knew your keepers well.

  You studied English, though you couldn’t spell;

  you daydreamed in unguarded metaphors.

  Well, here’s one for you, touching and grotesque.

  After you died, a citizen of the States,

  they shipped some furniture of yours in crates

  to Petersburg: your velvet couch, your desk—

  actually two of them—from your South Hadley

  room and a half. Or so your house had seemed,

  those maple floors as slippery as in th
e dreamed

  Leningrad apartment; brightly, sadly,

  you’d write your parents, who had watched you jammed

  into a taxi, snapped in a photograph,

  and lost forever. Your desk sent here? I’d laugh,

  if it were funny, studying a framed

  Madonna and child, a cat, a Mandelstam,

  an Auden; a pocket-sized address book, still

  open to the last call; your manual

  typewriter, outdated as a ham

  radio no one again can operate.

  The last icon is you. Incredible.

  That’s you in tuxedo tails, with your Nobel,

  in a video that loops as if your fate

  had always been a hero’s. Applause and cheers

  repeat on the TV screen within a house

  that once was your old friend Akhmatova’s:

  hero without a poem for years and years.

  2. Tears at the Fountain House

  Out in the garden, where for years her spies

  chain-smoked while she sat indoors and nearly starved,

  an art show. Wine and cheese are being served.

  Today’s the opening, and a viewer’s eyes

  are free to interpret anyhow, it appears.

  Hung as if on cobwebs, or on memories

  of traumas left unspoken, from the trees

  giant water balloons droop like the tears

  in your poetry that welled and wouldn’t land.

  (Your mother told you weeping was for grave

  occasions: obedient, you were brave.)

  Don’t touch the tears. I brush one with my hand,

  stroll about the grounds, and though I doubt

  you’d love the installation, you’d round up

  some artsy types—high-booted girls and hip

  boyfriends in ripped jeans—and ask them out

  to a smoky bar nearby, if you were here.

  But you never will be. Never came back to grill

  the next generation, shame them, crush their will—

  or that’s how your taunts and teasing, your severe

  quizzing came off, exiled to the warm

  and fuzzy American classroom. Coeds cried.

  You shrugged and tried again: identified

  lines where native speakers missed the poem.

  “Ms. Salter? Andrew Marvell. Tell the class.”

  I heard my heart pound loudly in my head.

  Tell them what? Declaim “An Horatian Ode

  upon Cromwell’s Return …” perhaps? What an ass

  I was—or maybe you were; I wasn’t sure.

  Now it occurs to me: the poem of his

  to recite into these flower beds would be less

  “The Garden” than the twining “Eyes and Tears,”

  where “all the jewels which we prize,” he wrote,

  “melt in these pendants of the eyes”; and “happy they

  whom grief doth bless, that weep the more, and see

  the less.” Lovely; but the tears stayed in the throat,

  or were meted out in rhyming drops of ink.

  Lament was Russian, roughly; in the English

  of Marvell, Hardy, Frost, you got your wish

  for irony’s containments. You could think.

  3. Border Crossing

  You had them in your head—Pushkin, Gogol,

  Dostoevsky. Best memory I ever met.

  Nobody learns by rote now; quotes come out

  from under the patchwork overcoat of Google—

  a development you’d have found unnerving,

  at least until you found some figure for it.

  In Venice, you wrote, “a gigantic china teaset”

  was heard vibrating when church bells were serving

  “on a silver tray” their peals to the “pearl-gray sky.”

  Your mind, a gondola on the lagoon

  of time, skimmed the reflections in your own

  outlandish, errant, metaphysical eye,

  as if everything in the world could be amassed

  on a single page in white with words in black,

  although a tear might drop to it, a “throwback,

  a tribute of the future to the past.”

  Somebody boarded up, because they could,

  the door from your parents’ room to yours. Or yours

  to your parents’; but to me it hardly matters:

  the living border crossing to the dead

  is what I’m after. I stepped onto a plane

  because I could, and joined your friend who’d taken

  snapshots of your departure; though I’m shaken

  to be standing in their one room—mute and plain,

  erased of bed and table, of evidence

  of birthday parties, songs at the piano,

  piled‑up cups and saucers, the radio

  from which state “drivel” flowed like water once—

  I don’t need much, only to turn and walk

  down warped linoleum in the communal hall

  where the black phone still cowers on the wall,

  to see you—overheard—pick up and talk.

  4. Watermark

  The Foundation’s conference room. Tea and coffee,

  biscuits, sugar, brisk handshakes, respect,

  and quick interpreters for the select

  Americans invited to a country

  some of us know little of. Academician

  Likhachev, they tell us, would have liked

  to meet us all. Your fellowships, in fact,

  our conversations here, were his late mission,

  he whose life would closely coincide

  with the twentieth century; who bore the stamp

  of public servant, scholar, and of camp

  prisoner. A miracle he hadn’t died

  at Solovki, where he heard three hundred gunned

  down as he hid, three hundred on the dot—

  he was to be among them, but was not,

  which meant that someone else…The thought-of sound

  reverberates on walls washed with the sun.

  This was his radio. Mid-century relic,

  midsized, ordinary, somehow orphic.

  Likhachev marked it—see the painted line

  dripping down the tuner? That’s the Voice

  of America. Others marked the BBC.

  This was a sign we wanted you to see…

  The hardened teardrop holds its frequency.

  ENGLISH COUNTRY DOLLHOUSE

  Which scholar among the dolls

  that stepped out from this room

  (in volume, like one volume

  of the O.E.D.)

  needed spectacles?

  A wire-rimmed, folded pair—

  like a glossy insect

  crushable in one swat—

  lies lenses-up, not seeing

  but wanting to be seen

  as a letter, a giant B

  for Book, upon a tiny,

  leather-bound, gilt-edged tome

  in which the words must be

  unthinkably minute.

  Are there really words in there?

  The book, after all, is shut.

  If I could step through the glass

  of the museum case,

  I’d shrink myself to fit

  in that empty chair and put

  those glasses on—whereby

  I’d know whatever it was

  I needed to magnify.

  CRUSOE’S FOOTPRINT

  At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me so long as he lived.

  —DANIEL DEFOE, Robinson Crusoe

  The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself.

  —W. H. AUDEN


  And Elizabeth Bishop did it, in her “Crusoe

  in England”: though she needn’t have scanned a foot

  in writing it, every step was itself alone

  and demanded whatever served. Sometimes she cast

  her thought in sestinas; found at her typewriter keys

  to set free memories otherwise confined,

  or labored within a villanelle to find

  lost houses, continents, like the geometer Crusoe,

  whose world to map had no scale and no keys;

  who saw the surf wash in, efface his foot-

  print like a sandpiper’s. The melted cast-

  les of sand we’ve made are in the end all one:

  what company we have when we feel alone!

  A solitary stroll on the beach to find

  ourselves rewards us, largely due to the cast

  supporting us from the wings, the backstage crew so

  handy, the believable props, and the foot-

  lights revealing the beaming spectators: keys

  to our happiness, in which the fashionable quais

  Auden wrote of slosh with talk about us alone.

  We’re not, in fact, entirely sorry for the foot-

  note-in-mouth disease of the critics who find

  what was never there in two-dimensional Crusoe.

  Surely he would have liked to attend the cast-

  away party that followed him—the downcast,

  austere “Robinson” poems of Weldon Kees

  the suicide, or Émile by that crank Rousseau,

  who thought he’d bring up a boy on Defoe alone.

  Swiss Family Robinson? There: we’ve defined

  the branching tree-house of writing. Friday’s foot

  is at his master’s head, and at the poet’s foot

  the subject’s breathing: admittedly these are caste

  systems, and guilty as charged, we the jury find.

  No man is an island; we’re more like the Florida Keys—

  a stanza of lines that each began alone.