Poems by Howard Nemerov

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Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters

these by themselves delight, even without

a meaning, in a foreign language, in

Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve

all day across the lake, scoring their white

records in ice. Being intelligible,

these winding ways with their audacities

and delicate hesitations, they become

Howard Nemerov

To D—, Dead By Her Own Hand

My dear, I wonder if before the end

You ever thought about a children’s game—

I’m sure you must have played it too—in which

You ran along a narrow garden wall

Pretending it to be a mountain ledge

So steep a snowy darkness fell away

On either side to deeps invisible;

And when you felt your balance being lost

Howard Nemerov

The War In The Air

For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,

Who rarely bothered coming home to die

But simply stayed away out there

In the clean war, the war in the air.

Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales

Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,

But stayed up there in the relative wind,

Shades fading in the mind,

Howard Nemerov

The View From An Attic Window

Among the high-branching, leafless boughs

Above the roof-peaks of the town,

Snowflakes unnumberably come down.

I watched out of the attic window

The laced sway of family trees,

Intricate genealogies

Whose strict, reserved gentility,

Trembling, impossible to bow,

Howard Nemerov

The host, he says that all is well

He didn't want to do it with skill,

He'd had enough of skill. If he never saw

Another villanelle, it would be too soon;

And the same went for sonnets. If it had been

Hard work learning to rime, it would be much

Harder learning not to. The time came

He had to ask himself, what did he want?

What did he want when he began

Howard Nemerov

The Murder Of William Remington

It is true, that even in the best-run state

Such things will happen; it is true,

What’s done is done. The law, whereby we hate

Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue

But by the smoke, and not for thought alone

It punishes, but for the thing that’s done.

And yet there is the horror of the fact,

Though we knew not the man. To die in jail,

Howard Nemerov

The Vacuum

The house is so quiet now

The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,

Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth

Grinning into the floor, maybe at my

Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.

I’ve lived this way long enough,

But when my old woman died her soul

Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can’t bear

Howard Nemerov

The Brief Journey West

By the dry road the fathers cough and spit,

This is their room. They are the ones who hung

That bloody sun upon the southern wall

And crushed the armored beetle to the floor.

The father’s skin is seamed and dry, the map

Of that wild region where they drained the swamp

And set provision out that they might sit,

Of history the cracked precipitate,

Howard Nemerov

I Only Am Escaped Alone To Tell Thee

I tell you that I see her still

At the dark entrance of the hall.

One gas lamp burning near her shoulder

Shone also from her other side

Where hung the long inaccurate glass

Whose pictures were as troubled water.

An immense shadow had its hand

Between us on the floor, and seemed

Howard Nemerov

The Author To His Body On Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80

“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.” —The Insight Lady

Dear old equivocal and closest friend,

Grand Vizier to a weak bewildered king,

Now we approach The Ecclesiastean Age

Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest

Like a party favor, or the brain blow a fuse

And the comic-book light-bulb of Idea black out

Forever, the idiot balloon of speech

Howard Nemerov

The Icehouse In Summer

A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt

thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door

the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light,

an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern:

decaying seasons keeping from decay.

A summer guest, the boy had never seen

(a servant told him of it) how the lake

froze three foot thick, how farmers came with teams,

Howard Nemerov

The Dependencies

This morning, between two branches of a tree

Beside the door, epeira once again

Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.

I test his early-warning system and

It works, he scrambles forth in sable with

The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows

The meaning of. And I remember now

How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came

Howard Nemerov