also by john hollander Poetry Figurehead and Other Poems 1999 Tesserae and Other Poems 1993 Selected Poetry 1993 Harp Lake 1988 In Time and Place 1986 Powers of Thirteen 1983 Blue Wine and Other Poems 1979 Spectral Emanations: New and Selected Poems 1978 Reflections on Espionage 1976 Tales Told of the Fathers 1975 The Head of the Bed 1974 Town and Country Matters 1972 The Night Mirror 1971 Types of Shape 1969 Visions from the Ramble 1965 Movie-Going 1962 A Crackling of Thorns 1958 Criticism The Poetry of Everyday Life 1998 The Work of Poetry 1997 The Gazer’s Spirit 1995 Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language 1988 Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse 1981 The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After 1981 Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form 1975 The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 1961 For Children The Immense Parade on Supererogation Day and What Happened to It 1972 The Quest of the Gole 1966 PICTURE WINDOW PICTURE WINDOW Poems by John Hollander Alfred A Knopf New York 2003 this is a borzoi book published by alfred a knopf Copyright © 2003 by John Hollander All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Alfred A Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry Knopf, Borzoi Books and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hollander, John Picture window : poems / by John Hollander.—1st ed p cm isbn 1-4000-4007-8 (alk paper) I Title ps3515.o3485 p53 2003 811'.54—dc21 2002030194 Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition For Adam, Lucy, & Noah, eventually Contents I by heart in transit those fields and most of all, i wanna thank considered speech entwining 10 columnar 12 picture window 15 light glass still life 16 rooms by the sea 19 ruined tower 21 names on trees 23 song, 25 CON SORDINO hope 27 EN REVENANT D’AUVERGNE 29 the institute 30 II horace, ode ii.14 U B I S U N T, etc 33 34 to donald hall 35 on a stanza of h leyvick 37 commemorative stanzas 40 four timepieces 43 a mutual flame 45 semiology 46 sue you have seen 47 oggi 48 vii III open in close 51 an old palindrome 52 tailor-made 53 a rainbow for lunch 54 to andrew forge, on receipt of his wash drawing, life-size, of the huge dobsonfly (Corydalus cornutus) 55 black mask 57 fooh-fooh 58 IV viii horace, ode i.9 63 to an old latin teacher 64 where it comes from 68 a kind of fear 71 from a palace diary 73 three sisters 75 tales of three brothers 79 dead animals 81 Notes 83 Acknowledgments 85 I BY HEART The songs come at us first; and then the rhymed Verses like speech that half sings; then the tunes Of summer evening—the train whistle’s sigh Westering, fading, as I lay in bed, Sunset still creeping past the lowered shade, The gossip of swallows, the faint, radioed Reed section of a dance band through an open Window down at the far end of the street; The Good Humor man’s bells who tolled for me And then the strings of digits that we learn To keep like bunched keys ready to unlock All the boxes we get assigned to us By the uncaring sheriffs of life itself We play by ear but learn the words by heart (Visions we have by head); yet even when The sight of the remembered page has dimmed The jingles that we gleaned from it remain Lodged with us, useful, sometimes, for the work Of getting a grip on certain fragile things We are ourselves from birth committed to Memory, to broad access to a past Framing and filling any presentness Of self that we could really call our own We grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head, And keep it in a soft continuingness That we first learned to get by soul, or something IN TRANSIT All symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead —Emerson Well, then, if that’s the case, let’s start packing and get going—not “packing it all in,” of course, But “all up”—and with some brawny friends and brainy lovers, let’s get all our stuff loaded on Some truck and get it on its way, whatever way that may indeed be toward whatever place “Metaphoron,” in modern Greek, conveys the sense of “moving van” (if you speak modern Greek), A vehicle crammed with the mishmash of tenors that should not be allowed to rot at home (Too much of the untransferred literal all too soon rots in the due course) On with it, then, And off we go, the cityside, the chartered views high from the cabled bridges, the long haul Through the enclosing tunnel, the wide traverse of nonurban sprawl, and then the countryside, Its various selves, all rushing by to fill spaces we vacate, one by fleeting one Are we talking about the springtime here, early forsythia moving the very air Forward into another placelike state of things (the scheduled time for moving)? But even The dullest February dawn gives up its first catatonic sulk and soon starts loading Up with the innermost of motions assuring that each new morning will be moving day Semper eadem, constant?—true enough for some things (such as Latin mottoes like itself), But with all the stuff of our lives, we have to keep going, going, or we will all be gone A KIND OF FEAR Golden does, one fawn, move among afternoon trees shading the long lawn standing as if framed in some bad landscape painting still of course untamed yet seeming somehow quite domestic, grazing there like a sheep or cow not much can disturb; that the deer have overrun most of our suburb follows from our own civilized interventions who removed their one local natural predator—our hunters—by limiting the fall hunting season and just by being too many of us on the land What had all been farm went back into second growth where, quick with alarm and with fleeting grace, the deer returned to what now seemed their native place 71 when a second tier of cultivation should have then displaced the deer once more, but they grew fruitful and multiplied as if after a new deluge and now reclaim driveway, summerhouse, and pool as if they were game for anything here in their own third-growth wild But a kind of fear touches me, that they appear to fear me not, but, fifteen feet away, stand and stand and stare, ears untrembling, curious but unalarmed there, irredentist and innocent of the language of right and demand I could feel it then better to be living in a milder time, when deer such as these three would start up suddenly, in healthy fear of me 72 FROM A PALACE DIARY The procession was still arriving, the trumpets and drums Were coming and then their echoes, and then the queen herself, A black jewel, a shining darkness that glowed in the sunset Then came a slow halt, with all of her servants dismounting And then their shadows And I the expectant child, youngest Princess in my grandfather’s palace, peering out, seeing Her arrival from my high window above the Great Gate My grandfather the wise king was told by an informed bird— A prophetic hoopoe—that of the kingdoms of the earth Only that of Sheba was not subject to him, its queen Alone did not bend the knee to him in acknowledgment He thereupon dispatched that bird over the sand and sea A letter folded tight, bound to its long-sustaining wing And then in answer many, many ships arrived, bearing Many more many wonderful gifts, bearing six thousand Young men dressed all in red, of just the same size and stature (All of whom were born, they said, at the same hour), themselves Bearing the queen’s word, carrying her promise to appear In three years And so that day, bearing her own dark grandeur, And countless many other gifts, the queen arrived, amid The trumpets and drums, among harps and high-sounding cymbals And came in by the Great Gate, thus she entered the palace That evening she appeared to the king, approaching his throne (I saw this standing there among the household as she came), Walking through the long shining hall, along the polished floor Of yellow stone, and saw herself reflected there darkly In the flickering of so much lamplight and, believing That it was a shallow pool of water returning her Image, lifted the skirt of her long golden robe, baring Her ebon legs, but swiftly Grandfather, leaning over, Whispered to her, of her mistake, at which she sweetly smiled As in acknowledgment of it, of him, of everything 73 At a great feast some days after, she set him three riddles, Put to him three knotted but living engimas whose breath Was to be drawn out of them, leaving their shells of dead words “Two things, no, three, scurry away from all understanding: What may look at you, O Solomon, whenever it wants? The second is: what is most wise when most it is silent? The third, What most will give of love through loving of itself?” “My own image in the mirror of the great floor,” the king Answered the first of these; and to the second he replied, “The water of the river having entered the deep lake.” But before he could answer the third engima, two small Furry creatures crept out of a basket her servant held— Two creatures smaller than our mongoose who frees the palace Of rats and mice—creatures with pointed ears and active tails, One black as the queen herself, one tawny as the desert Sand over which she’d traveled Scurrying across the floor, They came to rest at last, at which they seemed to wrap themselves, Each in itself, there at the feet of the visiting queen The king, wise himself as the water of the deep lake, laughed, And the queen laughed, as if delighted by her own error About the water-smooth floor; and I laughed and was reproved Until the queen presented them to me to keep I did, And we have had secret cats in the palace ever since It will be said by one of the old men fussing over Legalities in later times that Moses had allowed Our ancestors to take their cats out of Egypt with them But we had known no cats until the day when Sheba’s queen And her all train departed, heading for the many ships, Leaving in my care these creatures the Egyptians call miw Only thereafter did we have them or a name for them, But only I knew what the queen knew, how they in themselves Each answered each of her three enigmas, each one of which Had, in its double way, one light answer and one dark one 74 THREE SISTERS Daughter of thunder, she of lightning, she Of rain, met on the heath, with what Remained for him to find out and for them To know: their three identities Blending into one tempest, loud and dark, Of foresight, none of them in need Of any specific name to their jobs with, So that “Three Witches” will always do, Their power growing from their threesomeness The Gray Three, passing their one eye Back and forth and back once again among them To see what they will see, which is, Of course, to see what there will be, what is To come, simply as somewhere in What is at present: they search up and down, Yon and hither among the horrid Rocks they inhabit, gathering their glimpsed Spots of the unalterable The loony Cynthia with Hecate— The moon’s dark side we are not meant To see—and silver-arrowed Artemis, Those three who manifestly Not preside over, nor indeed decide, Anything in particular, but Contraction and growth, birth and virginity, Not to speak of charms and spells Evening things out among the three 75 High on a mountain meadow three Great ones vie, with their mighty promises, For what the shepherd prince extends Toward them in all its gold rotundity, Gleaming with strife, inducing more; And what by way of ships, dead men, and towers Burnt would there have been had he, Silly Paris, become too strong or wise For his own good, for the wide world’s? Patty, Betty, and Betty’s familiar, Deffy (Invisible to the camera But known to be shorter than the shorter girl In like proportion), on the lawn Stare unsmiling into the westering Sun, unknowing that they look Blindly into a certain but amorphous Future (Deffy will vanish and The girls get boys and girls, and— ah, the years ) Among the Parcae, worst of Threes, Who did the spinning, the measuring, and who The final cutting, workloads were clear: From each according to her disposition, To each according to her grim Needs: Clotho, spinner of the DNA, Lachesis, spinner of another Sort—the roulette wheel—and the unturning one, Dead-ender Atropos, at last Faith Hope and Charity, the neighbor’s three Girls have lived here far too long, We can recall, though, still the days when their 76 High backward laughter floated over The shrubs till Charity, always the fattest, Fair-haired and vulnerable, gave Out before the others, last but not least, Yet most easily lost of all; They’re living somewhere: I have lost track of them The cautionary little girls— Elsie, Lacey, and Tillie—Alice was told of At the bottom of a well, a treacle well, Drawing treacle from their well—in buckets? On drawing pads? (We are not told.) And fictional treacle dripping from a spoon Or fictional picturers of it: which Is the more real? (We are not told.) But that they were three is surely true Thalia, Aglaia, and Euphrosyne, Merry, bright, and cheerful, dance Their caroling dance, each one ever facing Her sisters two, meaning that what We give will be returned twofold? Or just That one of them—whichever one We see facing her sisters facing us (And who that is, is always changing)— Likes it the most to get it from behind? And also three anonymous Veiled Weirds, day laborers available To rig whatever will occur Within some fair field full of happenings Or some dim, nearly empty room Where possibility can only seem 77 To lurk like something of dust in dark Corners or wherever such Three as these Were needed Better not think of them But older than the folds of blanket among Which they sit or lie, our own Gray three, the household goddesses, longhaired, Thick-tailed, and variously voiced— Graces and fates and daughters, modes of moon And virtues (whichever ones you want) And casual triads of women, young or old, All immanent in them—day by day Mark out the edges of the place of love 78 TALES OF THREE BROTHERS Three little pigs; the tedious three sons Of fairy tale, the older two just Narrative straight men for the youngest; Huey, Dewey, and Louie, triumvirs of Quack; Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior; The three “men” there at Abraham’s Tent at Mamre, one of whom blew his cover When, piqued by incredulity (One great scholar insisted that these three Must have been Gabriel, Raphael, And Michael, as he said, “because each angel Can only have a single task” —A smoke screen—and besides, only the Parcae Exhibit such division of labor): Banal and ordinal, the triplex male Why can’t they preside, like Three Graces or other female triads, over Our lives from the great distances Of symbol? Why must they remain Agents merely of tale-telling, so That who did what and when and in what order, Who was good and who was bad, who got Along with, who fell out with, whom? These trios Of boys are the real deities Of realism None of them has ever Ruled our powers, our desires, Our destinies, our arts—These threes are all, 79 Like men and women in the modern World, of, and merely all about, themselves, Paradigmatic (A, B, C) But various enough so that there will Always be stories, always life itself 80 DEAD ANIMALS Granted, then, that the punishment —Whether appropriate or not—for that One tiny universal act (“Come, try it!” “Yum-yum!”) of disobedience was death, It seems obscenely inappropriate That all the other creatures, furry, smooth, Scaly, or feathered, shelled, gelatinous, Great- or tiny-winged, swift-legged or slow (I need—however lovingly—not name Them all right now), have been condemned, like us, To death, just to provide those symmetries And analogues, just to allow us to Compare ourselves to them, whether or not Condescendingly—I don’t know I think I’ll trade this one in for another story 81 Notes “IN TRANSIT”: Semper eadem (“always the same”) was the motto of Elizabeth I “EN REVENANT D’AUVERGNE”: The title is that of a French folk song I was taught as a child “PICTURE WINDOW”: Rückfiguren particularly inhabit the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich “ROOMS BY THE SEA”: The epigraph is from “Sun in an Empty Room,” an earlier poem of mine directed to Edward Hopper’s related painting of that name In the present poem, the speaker in the second part is the back room itself “NAMES ON TREES”: “Kilroy was here” was ubiquitous in graffiti wherever there were U.S troops in World War II Elizabeth Boyle was the lady courted in Edmund Spenser’s sonnets who became his wife John Keats’s own epitaph has him as “one whose name was writ in water.” “SONG, CON SORDINO”: Con sordino is an instruction to string players to mute their strings Morpheus is the god of dreams One meaning of the noun gain is controlled volume in electronic sound systems “HOPE”: Elpis, pistis, agapê are the “faith, hope, and charity” of I Corinthians 13 “Electric adjunct” is from Emily Dickinson “UBI SUNT, ETC.”: Ubi sunt (“where are they now?”) was formulaic in medieval poetry; timor mortis conturbat me (“fear of death disturbs me”) is the refrain of a fifteenth-century lament by William Dunbar “TO DONALD HALL”: The hopeful scene in these lines is from a dinner at the Society of Fellows at Harvard; those mentioned in the fifth and sixth stanzas were junior fellows contemporary with the author and dedicatee, and those in the seventh were some of our mentors there The sleeping giant at the end is the name of a hill in Hamden, Connecticut, and of a poem by Donald Hall “ON A STANZA OF H LEYVICK”: Halpern Leyvick, 1888–1962, was an important poet in what was then a living language; the quoted stanza is from his “Yiddish Poets” (ca 1935) Poets mentioned are Moishe Leib Halpern (1886–1932), A Leyeles (1889 – 1966), Mani Leib (1883–1953), Jacob Glatshteyn (1896–1971), Judd L Teller (1912 – 1972), and Yehoash (Solomon Bloomgarden) (1870–1927), poet and translator into Yiddish of The Song of Hiawatha They did the major part of their work in New York “COMMEMORATIVE STANZAS”: This was written for Yale’s three hundredth anniversary Urim v’thummim: these Hebrew words, sharing Yale’s seal with the 83 quoted Latin ones, refer to part of the high priest’s breastplate in the temple in Jerusalem “SUE YOU HAVE SEEN”: James Thurber’s madly bogus writer Elliot Vereker (in “Something to Say”) had written a play, “more or less in the manner of Gertrude Stein,” called Sue You Have Seen, something he had “worked out, for some obscure reason, from the familiar expression ‘See you soon.’ ” “AN OLD PALINDROME”: The familiar palindrome was Napoleon’s putative complaint: “Able was I ere I saw Elba.” “TO ANDREW FORGE”: This creature was about eight inches long “BLACK MASK”: Black Mask was the title of a pulp magazine in the nineteen twenties and thirties, publishing “hard-boiled” (as it was then called) detective fiction “FROM A PALACE DIARY”: There is no mention of cats in the Hebrew bible, and the word for cat, chatul, is of a much later date “THREE SISTERS”: Invoked here are the witches in Macbeth, the ancient Greek Graiae, the Parcae or Fates, the Graces Elsie and the others are from the tale started by the Dormouse in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Patty and the others are purely notional “TALES OF THREE BROTHERS”: Huey, Dewey, and Louie are Donald Duck’s once-celebrated nephews 84 Acknowledgments Some of the poems in this collection were previously published in the following: The Brooklyn Rail: “Tailor-made” Daedalus: “The Institute” The Kenyon Review: “A Rainbow for Lunch” The New Republic: “An Old Palindrome,” “Oggi,” “On a Stanza of H Leyvick,” “Picture Window” The New Yorker: “By Heart,” “Light Glass Still Life” The Oxford Quarterly: “Semiology” The Paris Review: “A Mutual Flame,” “En Revenant d’Auvergne,” “Hope,” “Three Sisters,” “To an Old Latin Teacher,” “To Donald Hall” Poetry: “And Most of All, I Wanna Thank ,” “Dead Animals,” “Tales of Three Brothers,” “The Figure in the Face,” “Entwining” Princeton Library XXXX: “From a Palace Diary” Raritan: “Considered Speech,” “In Transit,” “Where It Comes From” Southern Theological Review: “Ruined Tower” Stand: “To Karl Kirchwey, on Receiving His Gift of a Stopwatch” Thumbscrew: “Another Sundial,” “Fooh-fooh,” “Those Fields” The Times Literary Supplement: “Open in Close” TriQuarterly: “A Kind of Fear,” “Ubi Sunt, Etc.” Western Humanities Review: “Black Mask,” “Sue You Have Seen” The Yale Review: “Commemorative Stanzas,” “Columnar,” “Names on Trees,” “Song, Con Sordino” “Rooms by the Sea” appeared in Words for Images: A Gallery of Poems, edited by John Hollander and Joanna Weber (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2001) “Horace, Ode I.9” and “Horace, Ode II.14” both appeared in Horace: Odes, edited by J D McClatchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) 85 About the Author John Hollander is the author of seventeen previous books of poetry His first, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W H Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets He has written eight books of criticism and edited The Laurel Ben Jonson; with Harold Bloom, The Wind and the Rain, an anthology of verse for young people; and an anthology of contemporary poetry, Poems of Our Moment; he was a coeditor of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature He is the coeditor (with Anthony Hecht, with whom he shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1983) of Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls Mr Hollander attended Columbia and Indiana universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University; he taught at Connecticut College and Yale, and was a professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY He is Sterling Professor emeritus of English at Yale In 1990 he received a MacArthur Fellowship A Note on the Type This book was set in Caledonia, a Linotype face designed by W A Dwiggins (1880–1956) It belongs to the family of printing types called “modern face” by printers—a term used to mark the change in style of the type letters that occurred around 1800 Caledonia borders on the general design of Scotch Roman but it is more freely drawn than that letter Composed by Creative Graphics, Allentown, Pennsylvania Printed and bound by United Book Press, Baltimore, Maryland Designed by Anthea Lingeman .. .PICTURE WINDOW PICTURE WINDOW Poems by John Hollander Alfred A Knopf New York 2003 this is a borzoi book published by alfred a knopf Copyright © 2003 by John Hollander All... trademarks of Random House, Inc Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hollander, John Picture window : poems / by John Hollander.—1st ed p cm isbn 1-4000-4007-8 (alk paper) I Title ps3515.o3485... its own way, joining at the close in a silent chord 14 PICTURE WINDOW The handsome fellow, visiting us in The mountains, stood at the picture window “Giving on”—as they used to say—a view Of three