Chaos and Harmony

The Four Seasons

Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione

[The contest between harmony and invention]

—Antonio Vivaldi

Spring tumbles down like circus clowns from a trick automobile. Red, yellow, blue blurs spill over the ground. The air fills with zany beauty. No Barnum & Bailey, more spectacular, spring juggles, rides a dapple bareback beneath a tent of blue, walks a silver high wire without any net, waves, teeters, trips, then plunges through the summer air straight toward a hard cool fall.

II

Slow as the rhetoric of Warren G. Harding, summer staggers to its knees, stunned as a poleaxed steer at slaughter. Beside the highway, vegetable stands groan, sweet corn, peaches lolling like Rubens’ nudes, tomatoes red as Red Cross plasma. In the fields scarecrows are empty-headed uncles. Ponds shadow green as Canada geese fly by. Sand congregates in swimsuit crotches. Daylilies trumpet the garden’s four corners, black-eyed susans meet the day’s eye, loosestrife floods the marshes with fire. Chipmunks assume the shape of pears, snakes snooze and dream of shrews, robins bob for worms like apples in a barrel. Air-conditioners wheeze, captive dolphins; dust-pussies lie under country beds. Crickets, domesticated Vivaldis. Night drops, a lady’s chemise, none too clean. Insects, both sexes, dive-bomb the porch light. The planet, like love, slowly turns to ice.

III

November fifteenth, and still no fall of leaves. They cling tenaciously to every branch and stem. Weeks ago they turned color, now turncoat, and will not let go. Even last night’s Sturm und Drang left them unperturbed. In the country the bushel baskets are impatient, awaiting their legacies, their windfalls. Wheelbarrows stand unmoving. Each suburban garage and cellar houses rakes and yard brooms, which lean upon one another like mourning next of kin. Gutters at rooflines are amazed: Each autumn they strangle on leaves— yet last night’s rain set them singing clear and high, a castrati choir. All the baseballs boys lost last summer long to be blanketed down for winter. Will the leaves never fall? Will this be the fall that failed?

IV

Shadows, thin, blue, razor sharp. Shadows, cutting crust, mummy mush. Silence lies like a white sheet over the dead, the earth a rigid cadaver. The sun, a withered yellow apple, shines but does not warm the glazed land. The muteness of the universe, a gash in the head of a bass drum. Cold laps and licks bare bone, enters, like an unwelcome guest, into cracks and crevices vainly stuffed with oily rags, wadded newspapers. A storm of snowbirds whirls and screeches above frozen forests, freezing beaks seeking sustenance, as if heralding the almost ready rise of spring. All nature stands poised— a young woman before her drawn bath— tiptoe on the edge of warmth, the gay splashing of this our life.

Skyscrapers

The Flatiron Building, first scraper, squat, like a snout. It hardly scrapes the sky.

The Chrysler Building, still the most beautiful, most elegant. It points its tiara toward Heaven.

The Empire State Building, majestic but haughty, imperious, indifferent, scene of many suicides.

The Twin Towers, doomed, still speak to each other, but in whispers.

Schwartz & Shapiro

Delmore left everything in chaos—his life, his work, his wives. It was as if he’d abandoned an unmade bed.

Karl left everything very tidy—his estate, his library, his wives. It was as if he’d straightened a well-made army bed.