Free Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht Page B

hastening to a storm
    Of the full spectrum, rushing from red to red.
    I have watched its refinements since the dawn,
    When, at the birdcall, all the ghosts were gone.
    The wolf, the fig tree, and the woodpecker
    Were sacred once to Undertaker Mars;
    Honor was done in Rome to that home-wrecker
    Whose armor and whose ancient, toughened scars
    Made dance the very meat of Venus’ heart,
    And hot her ichor, and immense her eyes,
    Till his rough ways and her invincible art
    Locked and laid low their shining, tangled thighs.
    My garden yields his fig tree, even now
    Bearing heraldic fruit at every bough.
    Someone I have not seen for six full years
    Might pass this garden through, and might pass by
    The oleander bush, the bitter pears
    Unfinished by the sun, with only an eye
    For the sun-speckled shade of the fig tree,
    And shelter in its gloom, and raise his hand
    For tribute and for nourishment (for he
    Was once entirely at the god’s command)
    But that his nature, being all undone,
    Cannot abide the clarity of the sun.
    Morning deceived him those six years ago.
    Morning swam in the pasture, being all green
    And yellow, and the swallow coiled in slow
    Passage of dials and spires above the scene
    Cluttered with dandelions, near the fence
    Where the hens strutted redheaded and wreathed
    With dark, imponderable chicken sense,
    Hardly two hundred yards from where he breathed,
    And where, from their declamatory roosts,
    The cocks cried brazenly against all ghosts.
    Warmth in the milling air, the warmth of blood;
    The dampness of the earth; the forest floor
    Of fallen needles, the dried and creviced mud,
    Lay matted and caked with sunlight, and the war
    Seemed elsewhere; light impeccable, unmixed,
    Made accurate the swallow’s traveling print
    Over the pasture, till he saw it fixed
    Perfectly on a little patch of mint.
    And he could feel in his body, driven home,
    The wild tooth of the wolf that suckled Rome.
    What if he came and stood beside my tree,
    A poor, transparent thing with nothing to do,
    His chest showing a jagged vacancy
    Through which I might admire the distant view?
    My house is solid, and the windows house
    In their fine membranes the gelatinous light,
    But darkness follows, and the dark allows
    Obscure hints of a tapping sound at night.
    And yet it may be merely that I dream
    A woodpecker attacks the attic beam.
    It is as well the light keeps him away;
    We should have little to say in days like these,
    Although once friends. We should have little to say,
    But that there will be much planting of fig trees,
    And Venus shall be clad in the prim leaf,
    And turn a solitary. And her god, forgot,
    Cast by that emblem out, shall spend his grief
    Upon us. In that day the fruit shall rot
    Unharvested. Then shall the sullen god
    Perform his mindless fury in our blood.
A ROMAN HOLIDAY
    I write from Rome. Last year, the Holy Year,
    The flock was belled, and pilgrims came to see
    How milkweed mocked the buried engineer,
    Wedging between his marble works, where free
    And famished went the lions forth to tear
    A living meal from the offending knee,
    And where, on pagan ground, turned to our good,
    Santa Maria sopra Minerva
stood.
    And came to see where Caesar Augustus turned
    Brick into marble, thus to celebrate
    Apollo’s Peace, that lately had been learned,
    And where the Rock that bears the Church’s weight,
    Crucified Peter, raised his eyes and yearned
    For final sight of heavenly estate,
    But saw ungainly huge above his head
    Our stony base to which the flesh is wed.
    And see the wealthy, terraced Palatine,
    Where once the unknown god or goddess ruled
    In mystery and silence, whose divine
    Name has been lost or hidden from the fooled,
    Daydreaming employee who guards the shrine
    And has forgotten how men have been schooled
    To hide the Hebrew Vowels, that craft or sin
    Might not pronounce their sacred origin.
    And has forgot that on the temple floor
    Once was a Vestal Virgin overcome Even by muscle of the god of war,
    And ran