(Shillington, Pennsylvania 1932 - Danvers, Massachusetts, 2009)
John Updike, the great American novelist, author of the memorable Rabbit Novel Series among many other fundamental titles of Contemporary American Literature was also an accomplished poet. John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, in the home of his maternal grandparents. His father was a high-school mathematics teacher.
Graduated from Harvard College in 1954, Updike spent a year in England on the Knox Fellowship, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957, he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he contributed poems, short stories and book reviews. Since 1957, he lived in Massachusetts, where he passed away. As a poet, we can say his earliest poems date from 1953, when Updike was just twenty-one, and the last were written after he turned sixty. His poems constitute, as he said, "the thready backside of my life's fading tapestry."
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| A family man, his first wife, Martha Bernhard and childs |
"Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes" attempt to explicate the physical world with a directness seldom attempted in poetry. Updike's light verse, relegated to a separate section in his Collected Poems, was his youthful forte, and led critics such as David McCord to write of him as "a graceful border-crosser (light verse to poem) as Auden has been." Indeed, even the lightest verses within their giddy wordplay echo his recurring notes of confession, nostalgia, anxiety, and awe.NOVEMBER
The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace
in falling, sweeping clean the clouded sky.
This brightness shocks the window like a face.
Our eyes contract to hold the sudden space
of barrenness�bare branches, blue, up high.
The light the sun withdrew has been replaced.
The tiny muscles of the iris taste
past time�old falls, slant light�recalling why
this brightness shocks the window like a face.
To children, years are each a separate case,
enormous, full of presents and surprise:
the light the sun withdraws the leaves replace.
For grown-ups, reminiscence scores the days
with traces veteran nerve-ends recognize
when brightness shocks the window like a face.
November, we know you�the grudging grace
of clarity you grant the clouded eye.
The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace
with brightness at the window like a face.
PLAYER PIANO
My stick fingers click with a snicker
As, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.
My paper can caper; abandon
Is broadcast by dint of my din,
And no man or band has a hand in
The tones I turn on from within.
At times I'm a jumble of rumbles,
At others I'm light like the moon,
But never my numb plunker fumbles,
Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.
MOUSE SEX
In my cellar the poisoned mice, thirsty to death,
come out to die not he cement, in the center
of the floor. This particular corpse seemed fat,
so sideways-plump that pregnancy crossed my mind,
and, picking it up by the tail, I saw, sure enough,
at the base of the tail her tiny neat vagina,
a pumpkin-seed-shaped break in the dulcet fur.
I had murdered a matriarch, with d-Con.
Revelation of the vagina's simplicity
had come to me before. Tossing the tiny body
into the woods, I remember another
woods-surrounded house, where I and another
lay together upstairs, and had heard
a sound downstairs, her husband or the wind.
The phantom sound, like an alchemist's pinch,
turned my erection inconvenient.
We listened, our love-flushed faces an inch apart.
The sound was not repeated. In the silence,
as the house resumed its enclosing, she said,
her voice thickened and soft and distinct,
"Put it in me." In my wild mind's eye I saw
the vagina as a simple wanting, framed in fur,
kept out of sight between the legs but always there,
a gentle nagging, a moist accommodacy.
A man and not a mouse, but with a bed-squeak,
I fell to my duty, our ungainly huddle
and its tense outcome less memorable
than the urgent, imperiled invitation.
How dear she was�her husband, that creep,
creeping about for all we knew�to sock it to
herself and give me in words the carte blanche
boys dream of but seldom receive spelled out.
I loved her for it, and for afterwards
with a touch of a blush confessing,
"I don't want to be coarse for you," as if women
could be as bluntly brutes as men.
Until that moment I did not suspect
that sex had an equitable basis.
The cat creeps below, but lady mice
still put their dulcet selves at risk, and die.
Suppose that moment, frozen, were Heaven or Hell
our hearts would thump until the death of stars,
the trees outside would stir their golden edges,
the bed would squeak, the frightened inch
between our skins would hold the headboard's grain,
her brazen thighs would simply, frankly part,
our eyes and breath would forever entertain
our mutual inquisition. Put it in.
Suspended above the abyss of her desire,
I feel as far-flung as a constellation.
Colors: the golden-edged trees, the lilac sheets,
the mousy green of her self-startled eyes.
We are furtive, gigantic, our stolen hour
together a swollen eternity.
We enter into one another; the universe
rises about us like a hostile house.
RIO DE JANEIRO
Too good to be true�a city that empties
its populace, a hundred shades of brown,
upon its miles of beach in morning's low light
and takes the bodies back when darkness quells
the last long volleyball game; even then,
the sands are lit for the soccer of homeless children.
A city that exults in nakedness:
"The ass," hissed to us a man of the �lite,
"the ass has become the symbol of Rio."
Set off by suits of "dental floss", girls' buttocks
possess a meaty staring solemnness
that has us see sex as it is: a brainless act
performed by lumpy monkeys, mostly hairless.
Still, the herd vibrates, a loom of joy
threaded by vendors�a tree of suntan lotion
or of hats, or fried snacks roofed in cardboard�
whose monotonous cries in Portuguese
make the same carnival mock of human need.
Elsewhere, chaste squares preserve Machado's world
of understated tragedy, and churches
honored in their abandonment suspend
the blackened bliss of gold. Life to the living,
while politicians dazzling int heir polish,
far off in Bras�lia's cubes, feign impotence.
SIN CITY, D. C.
(As of Our Bicentennial Summer)
Hays Says Ray Lies;
Gravel Denies
Gray Houseboat Orgy Tale;
Gardner Claims Being Male
No Safeguard Against
Congressional Concupiscence;
Ray Parlays Hays Lay
Into Paperback Runaway.
References:
Bob Batchelor 2013: John Updike: A Critical Biography. ABC-CLIO: Santa Barbara.
Jack De Bellis 200: The John Updike Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing: Santa Barbara.
John Updike 1989: Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. Random House: New York.
����� 1993: Collected Poems, 1953-1993. Knopf: New York.
In Spanish:
John Updike 2002: Poemas (edici�n biling�e). Pre-textos: Valencia.
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