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Poetry

Two Cambridge Poems, by David Ferry

Wallenda

I saw him in a coffeeshop in Cambridge,
Radiant, argumentative, talking away
As joyful as anything, terrified, dying,
Sisyphus in a panic, the words pushing
The joy ahead of him like a stone up hill;
Or else he was like a bicycle racer racing,
Faster and faster racing what he was saying,
Because in what he was saying no matter what
He couldn't get out ahead of the sniggering voice
He kept on hearing whispering under his talking,
Telling him what was going to happen to him;
Or else he was standing out on the edge of a cliff
Trying his best to shout into the wind
That was blowing hard in against him from the planets;
Or else he was "carrying a twenty-three-foot
Balancing-pole and he moved out smoothly onto
The three-quarters-of-an-inch-thick cable one-
Hundred-and-twenty-feet high, beginning his
Seven-hundred-and-fifty-foot walk. The weather was bright
Cold and windy. He continued to move out smoothly
Until he reached the midpoint. Then suddenly
The wind picked up to thirty miles piles per hour.
He leaned into the wind to lean against it.
The wire was 'dancing' now under his feet.
'Sit down, sit down,' one of his family called.
He semi-crouched and called out down to the nine
Men who were working the guy wires down below,
'Tighten it, tighten it.' daredevil. Then he tried
To grab the cable but could not hold it and then
Put both hands back on the pole and silently
Daredevil Wallenda fell plummeting down to death."

The extended figure of speech beginning "carrying a twenty-three-foot balancing-pole" is versified from an article in Newsweek, April 3, 1978.
Down by the River

The page is green. Like water words are drifting
Across the notebook page on a day in June
Of irresistible good weather. Everything's easy.

On this side of the river, on a bench near the water,
A young man is peaceably stroking the arm of a girl.
He is dreaming of eating a peach. Somebody's rowing,

Somebody's running over the bridge that goes over
The highway beyond the river. The river is blue,
The river is moving along, taking it easy.

A breeze has come up, and somewhere a dog is barking,
Acknowledging the stirring of the breeze.
Nobody knows whose dog. The river is moving,

The boats are moving with it, or else against it.
People beside the river are watching the boats.
Along the pathway on this side of the river

Somebody's running, looking good in the sunshine,
Everything going along with everything else,
Moving along in participial rhythm,

Flowing, enjoying, taking its own sweet time.
On the other side of the river somebody else,
A man or woman, is painting the scene I'm part of.

A brilliantly clear diminutive figure works
At a tiny easel, and as a result my soul
Lives on forever in somebody's heavenly picture.
David Ferry is Hart professor of English emeritus at Wellesley College. He read these poems at the Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises in Sanders Theatre last June. Ferry's most recent books are Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse and Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations. His recent awards include an Ingram Merrill Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, for poetry and translation (1996). His complete translation of the odes of Horace, three of which he also read at the Phi Beta Kappa exercises, will be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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