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Death and the Bridge

(From a Landscape by Frank Parker)
Death gallops on a bridge of red rail-ties and girder,
a onetime view of Boston humps the saltmarsh;
it is handpainted: this the eternal, provincial
city Dante saw as Florence and hell. . . .
On weekends even, the local TV station's
garbage disposer starts to sing at daybreak:
keep Sunday clean. We owe the Lord that much;
from the first, God squared His socialistic conscience,
gave universal capital punishment.
The red scaffolding relaxes and almost breathes:
no man is ever too good to die. . . .
We will follow our skeletons on the girder,
out of life and Boston, singing with Freud:
"God's ways are dark and very seldom pleasant."

At the Indian Killer's Grave

"Here, also, are the veterans of King Philip's War, who burned villages and
slaughtered young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout
the land were helping them with prayer."
HAWTHORNE
Behind King's Chapel what the earth has kept
Whole from the jerking noose of time extends
Its dark enigma to Jehoshaphat;
Or will King Philip plait
The just man's scalp in the wailing valley! Friends,
Blacker than these black stones the subway bends
About the dirty elm roots and the well
For the unchristened infants in the waste
Of the great garden rotten to its root;
Death, the engraver, puts forward his bone foot
And Grace-with-wings and Time-on-wings compel
All this antique abandon of the disgraced
To face Jehovah's buffets and his ends.

The dusty leaves and frizzled lilacs gear

This garden of the elders with baroque
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And prodigal embellishments but smoke,

Settling upon the pilgrims and their grounds,
Espouses and confounds
Their dust with the off-scourings of the town;
The libertarian crown
Of England built their mausoleum. Here
A clutter of Bible and weeping willows guards
The stern Colonial magistrates and wards
Of Charles the Second, and the clouds
Weep on the just and unjust as they will-
' For the poor dead cannot see Easter crowds
On Boston Common or the Beacon Hill
Where strangers hold the golden Statehouse dome
For good and always. Where they live is home:
A common with an iron railing: here
Frayed cables wreathe the spreading cenotaph
Of John and Mary Winslow and the laugh
Of Death is hacked in sandstone, in their year.

A green train grinds along its buried tracks

And screeches. When the great mutation racks
The Pilgrim Father's relics, will these plaques
Harness the spare-ribbed persons of the dead
To battle with the dragon? Philip's head
Grins on the platter, fouls in pantomime
The fingers of kept time:
"Surely, this people is but grass,"
He whispers, "this will pass;
But, Sirs, the trollop dances on your skulls
And breaks the hollow noddle like an egg
That thought the world an eggshell. Sirs, the gulls
Scream from the squelching wharf-piles, beg a leg
To crack their crops. The Judgment is at hand;
Only the dead are poorer in this world
Where State and elders thundered raca, hurled
Anathemas at nature and the land
That fed the hunter's gashed and green perfection
Its settled mass concedes no outlets for your puns
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And verbal Paradises. Your election,

Hawking above this slime
For souls as single as their skeletons,
Flutters and claws in the dead hand of time."

When you go down this man-hole to the drains,

The doorman barricades you in and out;
You wait upon his pleasure. All about
The pale, sand-colored, treeless chains
Of T--squared buildings strain
To curb the spreading of the braced terrain;
When you go down this hole, perhaps your pains
Will be rewarded well; no rough-cast house
Will bed and board you in King's Chapel.
Here A public servant putters with a knife
And paints the railing red
Forever, as a mouse
Cracks walnuts by the headstones of the dead
Whose chiseled angels peer
At you, as if their art were long as life.

I ponder on the railing at this park:

Who was the man who sowed the dragon's teeth,
That fabulous or fancied patriarch
Who sowed so ill for his descent, beneath
King's Chapel in this underworld and dark?
John, Matthew, Luke and Mark,
Gospel me to the Garden, let me come
Where Mary twists the warlock with her flowers
Her soul a bridal chamber fresh with flowers
And her whole body an ecstatic womb,
As through the trellis peers the sudden. Bridegroom.

For the Union Dead

"Relinquum Omnia Servare Rem Publicans."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands

in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken Windows are boarded.
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The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still

for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,

yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
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He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,

peculiar power to choose life and die
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year
wasp-waisted, they-doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument

except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosier Safe, the "Rock of Ages"

that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble, he waits
for the blessed break.
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The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Where the Rainbow Ends

I saw the sky descending, black and white,
Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore
The skulls to jack-o'-lanterns on the slates,
And Hunger's skin-and-bone retrievers tore
The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits
Its victim and tonight
The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot
Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,
Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;
The wild ingrafted olive and the root

Are withered, and a winter drifts to where

The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans
Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles.
I saw my city in the Scales, the pans
Of judgment rising and descending. Piles
Of dead leaves char the air
And I am a red arrow on this graph
Of Revelations. Every dove is sold
The Chapel's sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold
On serpent-Time, the rainbow's epitaph.

In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.

The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:
"Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast
Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:
I breathe the ether of my marriage feast."
At the high altar, gold
And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat
My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give
You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,
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The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.

The Heavenly Rain

Man is the root of everything he builds;
no nature, except the human, loves New York
the clerk won't prove Aseity's existence
running from helpless cause to helpless cause. . . .
The rain falls down from heaven, and heaven keeps
her noble distance, the dancer, seen not heard.
The rain falls down, the soil swims up to breathe,
the squatter sumac, shafted in cement,
flirts its wet leaves to heaven like the Firebird.
Two girls clasp hands in a clamshell courtyard to watch
the weed of the sumac aging visibly;
the girls age not, are always young as last week,
wish all rains one rainthis, that will not wash
the fallen leaf, turned scarlet, back to green.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in New York

Robert Lowell
The great still fever for Paris, Vienna, Milan;
which had more genius, grace, preoccupations?
Loss of grace is bagatelle to pay
for a niche in the Pantheon or New York -
and as for Europe, they could bring it with them.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings, herself her part,
Was ist Silvia, Die alte Marschallin,
until the historic rivers of both worlds,
the Hudson and the Danube burst their bar,
trembling like the water-ivy down my spine,
from satyr's tussock to the hardened hoof....
La Diva, crisped, remodelled for the boards,
roughs it with chaff and cardigan at recordings
like anyone's single and useful weekend guest.

Castine 186o
One misses Emerson drowned in luminism,
the vast serenity of emptiness,
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and Fitz Hugh Lane painting a ship moored in Castine

within shouting distance of my barn in 186o,
its bright flywings fixed in the to topographical
severity of a world reworked as glass.
Tools are honestly made, and often jails;
the horror of top-flight skyscraper villages
is the stench of loneliness they give off
elemental material, line to line to line,
the skeletal Trinity of Thomas Aquinas.
One should take a notebook into jail,
nothing is real until set down in words
we are ice returning to water.

Off Central Park

[ FOR E. H.]
Here indeed, here for a moment,
here endedthat's new.

Another new thing, your single wooden dice,

three feet high,
and marked with squares like a chessboard,
stands laughing at us on the threshold.

Our light intimacy of reference is unbroken.

The old movables keep their places;

they are more confidently out of style
in their unhurried, almost routine decline.

I can give the dates when they entered our lives:

Cousin Belle's half-sofa,

her carrot dangled before famished heirs,
is twenty years lighter.

The small portrait of Cousin Cassie,

corsetted like the Empress Eugenie
and willed to father when I was seven,
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is now too young for me to talk to.

In the bookcase, my Catholic theology,

still too high for temptation
the same radical reviews
where we first broke into print
are still new to us.