Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht

is turned on points, is whirled
        On wheels, Tibetan prayer wheels, French verb wheels,
    The toothy wheels of progress, the terrible torque
    Insisting, and in the sky, even above New York
        Rotate the marvelous four-fangled seals
                   Ezekiel saw. The mother-of-pearled
                   Home of the bachelor oyster lies
        Fondled in fluent shifts of bile and lime
    As sunlight strikes the water, and it is of our world,
    And will appear to us sometime where the finger is curled
        Between the frets upon a mandolin,
                   Fancy cigar boxes, and eyes
                   Of ceremonial masks; and all
        The places where Kilroy inscribed his name,
    For instance, the ladies’ rest room in the Gare du Nord,
    The iron rump of Buddha, whose hallowed, hollowed core
        Admitted tourists once but all the same
                   Housed a machine gun, and let fall
                   A killing fire from its eyes
        During the war; and Polyphemus hurled
    Tremendous rocks that stand today off Sicily’s coast
    Signed with the famous scrawl of our most travelled ghost;
        And all these various things are of our world.
                   But what’s become of Paradise?
                   Ah, it is lodged in glass, survives
        In Brooklyn, like a throwback, out of style,
    Like an incomprehensible veteran of the Grand
    Army of the Republic in the reviewing stand
        Who sees young men in a mud-colored file
                   March to the summit of their lives,
                   For glory, for their country, with the flag
        Joining divergent stars of North and South
    In one blue field of heaven, till they fall in blood
    And are returned at last unto their native mud—
        The eyes weighed down with stones, the sometimes mouth
                   Helpless to masticate or gag
                   Its old inheritance of earth.
        In the sweat of thy face shalt thou manage, said the Lord.
    And we, old Adams, stare through the glass panes and wince,
    Fearing to see the ancestral apple, pear, or quince,
        The delicacy of knowledge, the fleshed Word,
                   The globe of wisdom that was worth
                   Our lives, or so our parents thought,
        And turn away to strengthen our poor breath
    And body, keep the flesh rosy with hopeful dreams,
    Peach-colored, practical, to decorate the bones, with schemes
        Of life insurance, Ice-Cream-After-Death,
                   Hormone injections, against the
mort
’
                   
Saison
, largely to babble praise
        Of Simeon Pyrites, patron saint
    Of our Fools’ Paradise, whose glittering effigy
    Shines in God’s normal sunlight till the blind men see
        Visions as permanent as artists paint:
                   The body’s firm, nothing decays
                   Upon the heirloom set of bones
        In their gavotte. Yet we look through the glass
    Where green lies ageless under snow-stacked roofs in steam-
    Fitted apartments, and reflect how bud and stem
        Are wholly flesh, and the immaculate grass
                   Does without buttressing of bones.
                   In open field or public bed
        With ultraviolet help, man hopes to learn
    The leafy secret, pay his most outstanding debt
    To God in the salt and honesty of his sweat,
        And in his streaming face manly to earn
                   His daily and all-nourishing bread.
JAPAN
    It was a miniature country once
    To my imagination; Home of the Short,
    And also the academy of stunts
                   Where acrobats are taught
        The famous secrets of the trade:
        To cycle in the big parade
    While spinning