POEM
The Ninth of July
John HollanderIn 1939 the skylark had nothing to say to me
As the June sunset splashed rose light on the broad sidewalks
And prophesied no war after the end of that August;
Only, midway between playing ball in Manhattan and Poland
I turned in my sleep on Long Island, groped in the dark of July,
And found my pillow at last down at the foot of my bed.
Through the window near her bed, brakes gasped on Avenue B
In 1952; her blonde crotch shadowed and silent
Lay half-covered by light, while the iced tea grew warm,
Till the last hollow crust of icecuhe cracked to its death in the glass.
The tea was hot on the cold hilltop in the moonlight
While a buck thrashed through the gray ghosts of burnt-out trees
And Thomas whispered of the S.S. from inside his sleeping-bag.
Someone else told a tale of the man who was cured of a hurt by the bears.
The bathtub drain in the Old Elberon house gucked and snorted
When the shadows of graying maples fell across the lawn:
The brown teddybear was a mild comfort because of his silence,
And I gazed at the porthole ring made by the windowshade
String, hanging silently, seeing a head and shoulders emerge
From the burning Morro Castle I’d seen that afternoon.
The rock cried out “I’m burning, too” as the drying heat
Entered its phase of noon over the steep concrete
Walls along Denver’s excuse for a river: we read of remote
Bermudas, and gleaming Neal spat out over the parapet.
In the evening in Deal my b.b. rifle shattered a milkbottle
While the rhododendrons burned in the fading light. The tiny
Shot-sized hole in the bathhouse revealed the identical twats
Of the twins from over the hill. From over the hill on the other
Side of the lake a dark cloud turretted over the sunset;
Another lake sank to darkness on the other side of the hill,
Lake echoing lake in diminishing pools of reflection.
A trumpet blew Taps. While the drummer’s foot boomed on the grandstand
The furriers’ wives by the pool seemed to ignore the accordion
Playing “Long Ago and Far Away.” None of the alewives
Rose to our nightcrawlers, wiggling on the other side of the mirror.
She was furrier under the darkness of all the blanketing heat
Than I’d thought to find her, and the bathroom mirror flashed
White with the gleam of a car on seventy-second street.
We lay there just having died; the two of us, vision and flesh,
Contraction and dream, came apart, while the fan on the windowsill
Blew a thin breeze of self between maker and muse, dividing
Fusing of firework, love’s old explosion and outburst of voice.
This is the time most real: for unreeling time there are no
Moments, there are no points, but only the lines of memory
Streaking across the black film of the mind’s night.
But here in the darkness between two great explosions of light,
Midway between the fourth of July and the fourteenth,
Suspended somewhere in summer between the ceremonies
Remembered from childhood and the historical conflagrations
Imagined in sad, learned youth—somewhere there always hangs
The American moment.
Burning, restless, between the deed
And the dream is the life remembered: the sparks of Concord were mine
As I lit a cherry-bomb once in a glow of myth
And hurled it over the hedge. The complexities of the Terror
Were mine as my poring eyes got burned in the fury of Europe
Discovered in nineteen forty-two. On the ninth of July
I have been most alive; world and I, in making each other
As always, make fewer mistakes.
The gibbous, historical moon
Records our nights with an eye neither narrowed against the brightness
Of nature, nor widened with awe at the clouds of the life of the mind.
Crescent and full, knowledge and touch commingled here
On this dark bed, window flung wide to the cry of the city night,
We lie still, making the poem of the world that emerges from shadows.
Doing and then having done is having ruled and commanded
A world, a self, a poem, a heartbeat in the moonlight.
To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.
John Hollander, “The Ninth of July” from Selected Poetry. Copyright © 1993 by John Hollander. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Source: Selected Poetry (1993)
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