Imprinted upon me
Is the shape I run to, the sweet strange
Breath-taking contours that breathe to me: “I am yours,
Be mine!”
Following this new
Body, somehow familiar, this young shape, somehow old,
For a moment I’m younger, the century is younger.
The living Strauss, his moustache just getting gray,
Is shouting to the players: “Louder!
Louder! I can still hear Madame Schumann-Heink -”
Or else, white, bald, the old man’s joyfully
Telling conductors they must play Electra
Like A Midsummer’s Night Dream - like fairy music;
Proust, dying, is swallowing his iced beer
And changing in proof the death of Bergotte
According to his own experience, Garbo,
A commissar in Paris, is listening attentively
To the voice telling how McGillicuddy met McGillivray,
And McGillivray said to McGillicuddy - no, McGillicuddy
Said to McGillivray - that is McGillivray . . . Garbo
Says seriously: “I wish dey’d never met.”
As I walk behind this woman I remember
That before I flew here - waked in the forest
At dawn, by the piece called Birds Beginning Day
That, each day, birds play to begin the day -
I wished as men wish: “May this day be different!”
The birds were wishing, as birds wish - over and over,
With a last firmness, intensity, reality -
“May this day be the same!”
Ah, turn to me
And look into my eyes, say: “I am yours,
Be mine!”
My wish will have come true. And yet
When your eyes meet my eyes, they’ll bring into
The weightlessness of my pure wish the weight
Of a human being: someone to help or hurt,
Someone to be good to me, to be good to,
Someone to cry when I am angry
That she doesn’t like Electra, someone to start out on Proust with.
A wish, come true, is life. I have my life.
When you turn just slide your eyes across my eyes
And show in a look flickering across your face
As lightly as a leaf’s shade, a bird’s wing,
That there is no one in the world quite like me,
That if only . . . If only . . .
That will be enough.
But I’ve pretended long enough: I walk faster
And come close, touch with the tip of my finger
The nape of her neck, just where the gold
Hair stops, and the champagne-colored dress begins.
My finger touches her as the gingko shadow
Touches her.
Because, after all, it is my wife
In a new dress from Bergdorf’s, walking toward the park.
She cries out, we kiss each other, and walk arm in arm
Through the sunlight that’s much too good for New York,
The sunlight of our own house in the forest.
Still, though, the poor things need it . . . We’ve no need
To start out on Proust, to ask each other about Strauss.
We first helped each other, hurt each other, years ago.
After so many changes made and joys repeated,
Our first bewildered, transcending recognition
Is pure acceptance. We can’t tell our life
From our wish. Really I began the day
Not with a man’s wish: “May this day be different,”
But with the birds’ wish: “May this day
Be the same day, the day of my life.”
Randall Jarrell, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter Fourth Edition
Read less »
Via site feed
