SHAPIRO, Karl


Elegy for a dead soldier XI

The time to mourn is short that best becomes

The military dead. We lift and fold the flag,

Lay bare the coffin with its written tag,

And march away. Behind, four others wait

To lift the box, the heaviest of loads.

The anesthetic afternoon benumbs,

Sickens our senses, forces back our talk.

We know that others on tomorrow’s roads

Will fall, ourselves perhaps, the man beside,

Over the world the threatened, all who walk:

And could we mark the grave of him who died

We would write this beneath his name and date:


A Garden In Chicago

In the mid-city, under an oiled sky,

I lay in a garden of such dusky green

It seemed the dregs of the imagination.

Hedged round by elegant spears of iron fence

My face became a moon to absent suns.

A low heat beat upon my reading face;

There rose no roses in that gritty place

But blue-gray lilacs hung their tassels out.

Hard zinnias and ugly marigolds

And one sweet statue of a child stood by.

A gutter of poetry flowed outside the yard,

Making me think I was a bird of prose;

For overhead, bagged in a golden cloud,

There hung the fatted souls of animals,

Wile at my eyes bright dots of butterflies

Turned off and on like distant neon signs.

Assuming that this garden still exists,

One ancient lady patrols the zinnias

(She looks like George Washington crossing the Delaware),

The janitor wanders to the iron rail,

The traffic mounts bombastically out there,

And across the street in a pitch-black bar

With midnight mirrors, the professional

Takes her first whiskey of the afternoon--

Ah! It is like a breath of country air.


Manhole Covers

The beauty of manhole covers—what of that?

Like medals struck by a great savage khan,

Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable,

Not like the old electrum, chased and scored,

Mottoed and sculptured to a turn,

But notched and whelked and pocked and smashed

With the great company names

(Gentle Bethlehem, smiling United States).

This rustproof artifact of my street,

Long after roads are melted away will lie

Sidewise in the grave of the iron-old world,

Bitten at the edges,

Strong with its cryptic American,

Its dated beauty.


The Leg

Among the iodoform, in twilight-sleep,

What have I lost? he first inquires,

Peers in the middle distance where a pain,

Ghost of a nurse, hazily moves, and day,

Her blinding presence pressing in his eyes

And now his ears. They are handling him

With rubber hands. He wants to get up.

One day beside some flowers near his nose

He will be thinking, When will I look at it?

And pain, still in the middle distance, will reply

At what? and he will know it's gone,

O where! and begin to tremble and cry.

He will begin to cry as a child cries

Whose puppy is mangled under a screaming wheel.

Later, as if deliberately, his fingers

Begin to explore the stump. He learns a shape

That is comfortable and tucked in like a sock.

This has a sense of humor, this can despise

The finest surgical limb, the dignity of limping,

The nonsense of wheel-chairs. Now he smiles to the wall:

The amputation becomes an acquisition.

For the leg is wondering where he is (all is not lost)

And surely he has a duty to the leg;

He is its injury, the leg is his orphan,

He must cultivate the mind of the leg,

Pray for the part that is missing, pray for peace

In the image of man, pray, pray for its safety,

And after a little it will die quietly.

The body, what is it, Father, but a sign

To love the force that grows us, to give back

What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud?

Knead, knead the substance of our understanding

Which must be beautiful in flesh to walk,

That if Thou take me angrily in hand

And hurl me to the shark, I shall not die!

Auto Wreck

Its quick soft silver bell beating, beating

And down the dark one ruby flare

Pulsing out red light like an artery,

The ambulance at top speed floating down

Past beacons and illuminated clocks

Wings in a heavy curve, dips down,

And brakes speed, entering the crowd.

The doors leap open, emptying light;

Stretchers are laid out, the mangled lifted

And stowed into the little hospital.

Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,

And the ambulance with its terrible cargo

Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away,

As the doors, an afterthought, are closed.

We are deranged, walking among the cops

Who sweep glass and are large and composed.

One is still making notes under the light.

One with a bucket douches ponds of blood

Into the street and gutter.

One hangs lanterns on the wrecks that cling,

Empty husks of locusts, to iron poles.

Our throats were tight as tourniquets,

Our feet were bound with splints, but now,

Like convalescents intimate and gauche,

We speak through sickly smiles and warn

With the stubborn saw of common sense,

The grim joke and the banal resolution.

The traffic moves around with care,

But we remain, touching a wound

That opens to our richest horror.

Already old, the question, Who shall die?

Becomes unspoken, Who is innocent?

For death in war is done by hands;

Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;

And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms.

But this invites the occult mind,

Cancels our physics with a sneer,

And spatters all we knew of dénouement

Across the expedient and wicked stones.

Buick

As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine

And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,

Leaning and laughing, my warm-hearted beauty, you ride, you ride,

You tack on the curves with parabola speed and a kiss of goodbye,

Like a thoroughbred sloop, my new high-spirited spirit, my kiss.

As my foot suggests that you leap in the air with your hips of a girl,

My finger that praises your wheel and announces your voices of song,

Flouncing your skirts, you blueness of joy, you flirt of politeness,

You leap, you intelligence, essence of wheelness with silvery nose,

And your platinum clocks of excitement stir like the hairs of a fern.

But how alien you are from the booming belts of your birth and the smoke

Where you turned on the stinging lathes of Detroit and Lansing at night

And shrieked at the torch in your secret parts and the amorous tests,

But now with your eyes that enter the future of roads you forget;

You are all instinct with your phosphorous glow and your streaking hair.

And now when we stop it is not as the bird from the shell that I leave

Or the leathery pilot who steps from his bird with a sneer of delight,

And not as the ignorant beast do you squat and watch me depart,

But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love,

And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep