Selected Poems

by Shapiro, Harvey; Atlas, James

• ISBN13: 9780819522528
• ISBN10: 081952252X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-08-01
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

Harvey Shapiro's precise, understated lyrics have garnered praise in the US, the UK, and in Israel. His early poems, hailed by The Nation as "some of the best poems of our generation," were notable in part because they gave new form to Jewish immigrant experience. This collection presents the best work from Shapiro's early books, including the classic poems "Battle Report" on World War II and "National Cold Storage Company" on the death of John Kennedy, and a wealth of new poems, more sensual, but no less wry. Shapiro sees life itself as a state of exile, and writes of the spaces where "for a moment, the light holds."

Author Biography

Harvey Shapiro's many books include How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems (Wesleyan, 2001), National Cold Storage Company (Wesleyan, 1988) and Battle Report (Wesleyan, 1966). He is senior editor of the New York Times Magazine.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	8	(1)
Introduction	9	(6)
James Atlas
The Heart	15	(1)
Summer	15	(1)
Power in America	16	(1)
Death of a Grandmother	17	(1)
Adoration of the Moon	18	(1)
The Talker	18	(1)
Mountain, Fire, Thornbush	19	(1)
The Prophet Announces	19	(1)
Exodus	20	(1)
Aleph	21	(1)
A Short History	22	(1)
Feast of the Ram's Horn	22	(1)
Spirit of Rabbi Nachman	23	(1)
Battle Report	24	(2)
News of the World	26	(1)
Monday	27	(1)
Past Time	27	(1)
Sunday Morning	28	(1)
ABC of Culture	28	(1)
Purities	28	(1)
Lines for the Ancient Scribes	29	(1)
The Night	30	(1)
The Six Hundred Thousand Letters	30	(1)
National Cold Storage Company	31	(1)
For WCW	32	(1)
Days and Nights	33	(3)
The Light Is Sown	36	(1)
By the Women's House of Detention	36	(1)
Sister	37	(1)
Riverside Drive	38	(1)
Ditty	39	(1)
Where I Am Now	39	(1)
A Message from Rabbi Nachman	40	(1)
Lines for Erwin R. Goodenough (1893-1965)	40	(1)
Cross Country	41	(1)
For Delmore Schwartz	42	(2)
From Martin Buber	44	(1)
Through the Boroughs	45	(1)
Notes at 46	45	(2)
Riding Westward	47	(1)
Saul's Progress	48	(2)
Veteran	50	(1)
A Gift	51	(1)
Like a Beach	52	(1)
Muse Poem	53	(1)
City Portrait	53	(1)
47th Street	54	(1)
Cry of Small Rabbits	54	(1)
August	55	(1)
Domestic Matters	55	(2)
O Seasons	57	(2)
A Notebook	59	(2)
Musical Shuttle	61	(1)
The Realization	62	(1)
Lines	62	(1)
Things Seen	63	(1)
July	63	(1)
May 14, 1978	64	(1)
City	64	(1)
The Wish	65	(1)
Learning	66	(1)
On a Sunday	67	(1)
Brooklyn Heights	68	(1)
Cummings	69	(1)
Blue Eyes	69	(1)
The End	70	(1)
A Memorial	71	(1)
Saturday	71	(1)
Battlements	72	(1)
A Jerusalem Notebook	73	(5)
Two Cornell Deaths	78	(1)
Cynthia	79	(3)
These Are the Streets	82	(1)
Celebrations	83	(1)
Questions	84	(1)
New York Summer	84	(1)
Meditations on a Brooklyn Bench	85	(1)
Lower East Side	85	(1)
Years Ago	86	(1)
Lessons	86	(1)
Lit Crit	87	(3)
Bible Lesson	90	(1)
For Paul Celan and Primo Levi	90	(1)
Loyalty	91	(1)
On Writing	92	(1)
Aubade	93	(1)
How It Ended	93	(1)
The Defense	94	(1)
In Tiberias	95	(1)
History	95	(1)
What It Feels Like	96	(1)
Remembering	96	(1)
Epitaph	97	(1)
Prague	97	(1)
1949	97	(2)
Choices	99	(1)
Hart	99	(1)
Generations	100	(1)
The Ticket	100	(1)
Italy, 1996	101	(1)
Traveling Through Ireland	101

Excerpts

CHAPTER ONE

Battle Report

1
The Adriatic was no sailor's sea.
We raced above that water for our lives
Hoping the green curve of Italy
Would take us in. Rank, meaningless fire

That had no other object but our life
Raged in the stunned engine. I acquired
From the scene that flickered like a silent film
New perspective on the days of man.

Now the aviators, primed for flight,
Gave to the blue expanse can after can
Of calibers, armored clothes, all
The rich paraphernalia of our war.

Death in a hungry instant took us in.
He touched me where my lifeblood danced
And said, the cold water is an ample grin
For all your twenty years.

Monotone and flawless, the blue sky
Shows to my watching face this afternoon
The chilled signal of our victory.
Again the lost plane drums home.

2
No violence rode in the glistening chamber.
For the gunner the world was unhinged.
Abstract as a drinker and single
He hunched to his task, the dumb show
Of surgical fighters, while flak, impersonal,
Beat at the floor that he stood on.

The diamond in his eye was fear;
It barely flickered.
From target to target he rode.
The images froze, the flak hardly mattered.
Europe rolled to its murderous knees
Under the sex of guns and cannon.

In an absence of pain he continued,
The oxygen misting his veins like summer.
The bomber's long sleep and the cry of the gunner,
Who knows that the unseen mime in his blood
Will startle to terror,
Years later, when love matters.

3
My pilot dreamed Or death before he died.
That stumbling Texas boy
Crew cold before the end, and told
The bombardier, who told us all.
We worried while we slept.
And when he died, on that dark morning
Over Italy in clouds,
We clapped him into dirt.
We counted it for enmity
That he had fraternized with death.
From hand to hand
We passed in wonderment
The quicksilver of our lives.

4
I turn my rubber face to the blue square
Given me to trace the fighters
As they weave their frost, and see
Within this sky the traffic
Fierce and heavy for the day:

National Cold Storage Company

The National Cold Storage Company contains
More things than you can dream of.
Hard by the Brooklyn Bridge it stands
In a litter of freight cars,
Tugs to one side; the other, the traffic
Of the Long Island Expressway.
I myself have dropped into it in seven years
Midnight tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.
Add this to the national total --
Grant's tomb, the Civil War, Arlington,
The young President dead.
Above the warehouse and beneath the stars
The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge.
But see,
They fall into the National Cold Storage Company
One by one. The wind off the river is too cold,
Or the times too rough, or the Bridge
Is not a harp at all. Or maybe
A monstrous birth inside the warehouse
Must be fed by everything -- ships, poems,
Stars, all the years of our lives.

Riverside Drive

from the Yiddish of Joseph Rolnick

Pulling myself out of bed,
I leave the house.
The blueness caresses me.
The wind pushes my hair.
A whole world of quiet
I fill with my steps
On the sidewalk,
And in the street,
The milkman's horse.
Somewhere, on a higher floor,
Along a dark corridor,
The milkman makes his shining rows.
Running, the papers
Under my arm,
I don't look at numbers.
I know the way
Like the horse.
The sun is already up
On the east side of the city.
Its flames, its grace
Spill, whole canfuls, on the cliffs
Of the Jersey shore.
At 310 Riverside Drive
A man on a low balcony,
Young but with mustache and beard --
His appearance not of here --
Stretches a hand toward
The west and shouts
Something like, See there!
And I stand like him
With my papers raised
Like an offering
To the light.
The two of us
Come for the first time
To this place,
To the red cliffs
Of this morning.

Like a Beach

Even the unlived life within us
Is worth examining.
Maybe it is all we have.
The rest is burned up
Like fuel in the furnace.
But the unlived life
Stretches within us like a beach.
There is a gull's shadow on it.
Or it is at night and the moon
Crusts the sand.
Or it is a house at night
With people talking in the next room
Over cards.

You believe
In these observations?
Doesn't the sea sweep in,
The action begin in the house
At night, the voices of the players
Loud in argument,
Their motives, their needs,
Turbulent as the sea?
Whose happiness
Even here
Is being sacrificed?

Musical Shuttle

Night, expositor of love.
Seeing the sky for the first time
That year, I watched the summer constellations
Hang in air: Scorpio with
Half of heaven in his tail.
Breath, tissue of air, cat's cradle.
I walked the shore
Where cold rocks mourned in water
Like the planets lost in air.
Ocean was a low sound.
The gatekeeper suddenly gone,
Whatever the heart cried
Voice tied to dark sound.
The shuttle went way back then,
Hooking me up to the first song
That ever chimed in my head.
Under a sky gone slick with stars,
The aria tumbling forth:
Bird and star.
However those cadences
Rocked me in the learning years,
However that soft death sang --
Of star become a bird's pulse,
Of the spanned distances
Where the bird's breath eddied forth --
I recovered the lost ground.
The bird's throat
Bare as the sand on which I walked.
Love in his season
Had moved me with that song.

July

You poets of the Late T'ang send me messages
this morning.
The eastern sky is streaked with red.
Linkages of bird song make a floating chain.
In a corner of the world, walled in by ocean
and sky,
I can look back on so many destructive days
and nights,
and forward too, ego demons as far as
mind reaches.
Here, for a moment, the light holds.

Years Ago

Rain is in the air, or
falling so gently
it seems part of the air.
My son glides in, leans
his bike beside the porch,
waiting it out. He objects
to my sieging 'April Showers'
when it's almost August.
I stop singing
and we listen to the quiet.
When the rain stops
he moves off into the sand
beside the house
to build something with a long
story attached, which he tells
himself as he goes along,
handful by handful.

What It Feels Like

The first night out of Eden
or rather the first morning
after the first night out is
what it always feels like.

I can have a bagel and coffee
but only after I arrive at work.
Until then the despair is too great.
It was different when I woke with you
and prayed to the white curve of your back
and cradled it like the ark of the covenant.