Date of publication in ePub format: 2012.
Throughout, this is poetry with its eyes wide open, restlessly alert for the oddities of reality and the double entendres of imagination. Fanciers of light verse will find a middle section of delicate fossil prints left by this vanished form; readers of Mr. Updike’s fiction will recognize some of the landscapes and preoccupations.
In three long poems he, in turn, remembers a boyhood Sunday in Pennsylvania, addresses aspects of a Harvard education, and contemplates, with a Dionysian verve, the aesthetic challenge posed by the new sexual candor (“We must assimilate cunts to our creed of beauty”).
Shorter poems treat of spring and flying, of gold and the Caribbean, of sand dollars and bicycle chains, of the shades of bliss and variety of phenomena accessible to a man past the midpoint of his life, trying to pace himself as he heads toward Nandi.
excellence— Loom in memory’s mists as an iceberg, slow In motion and sullenly radiant. I think, those years, it often snowed because My freshman melancholy took the print Of a tread-marked boot in slush, crossing to Latin Under Cerberean Dr. Havelock In Sever 2, or to Lamont’s Math 1 With some tall nameless blameless section man To whom the elegant was obvious, Who hung Greek letters on his blackboard curves Like trinkets on a Christmas tree and who I hope is happy in Schenectady,
—Headline in The New York Times When I was known as Aphrodite, men Were wont to bounce their prayers off my side. I shrugged, and granted some, and some denied, And even slept with mortals now and then. But then Jehovah stormed in on a star And put a rapid end to such requests. “Well, cultures change,” I thought; “the gods are guests On Earth.” I made the sky my sole boudoir. Just yesterday, I felt an odd caress, A tickle or a whisper or a hum That smacked of
—Headline in The New York Times When I was known as Aphrodite, men Were wont to bounce their prayers off my side. I shrugged, and granted some, and some denied, And even slept with mortals now and then. But then Jehovah stormed in on a star And put a rapid end to such requests. “Well, cultures change,” I thought; “the gods are guests On Earth.” I made the sky my sole boudoir. Just yesterday, I felt an odd caress, A tickle or a whisper or a hum That smacked of
Detection of Neutral Weak Currents,” in Scientific American) They haven’t found the W wee particle for carrying the so-called “weak force” yet, but you can bet they’ll find some odder thing. Neutrinos make a muon when a proton, comin’ through the rye, hits in a burst of hadrons; then eureka! γ splits from π and scintillation counters say that here a neutral lepton swerved. Though parity has had its day, the thing called “strangeness” is preserved. SIN CITY, D.C. as of our
arm seeks a towel magic has taken place because my Excalibur razor is dull and the water would boil a man Under the Sunlamp Neuter your hair tugged back harshly your face a shield of greased copper less sexy than a boy by Donatello too bright to look at long eyelids sealed in Urfreude metal locked in blinding earth During Menstruation My house is on fire red pain flickers on the walls wet flame runs downstairs eggs are hurled unripe from the furnace and a frown hurts like smoke
