Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems, 1995-1938

By Peter Viereck and Joseph Brodsky

Peter Viereck’s career in poetry is an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history. In Tide and Continuities that experiment has yielded its finest results. Included are many new poems, never before published, and stunning revisions from work as recent as his 1987 epic, Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and as early as his 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Terror and Decorum.

This collection is the revelation of a great American poet. The Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky calls Viereck “possibly the greatest rhymer of / the modern period.” This is Viereck’s most lyrical, most passionate book; hence Brodsky rhymes “lyric” with “Viereck.”

Tide and Continuities marks Viereck’s complete evolution as a poet, and brilliantly describes the arc of more than a half century’s work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9781610754286

Book preview

At My Hospital Window

(for Joseph Brodsky)

This poem first appeared in the magazine New Letters, Awards issue, spring 1991, vol. 57, #2, and in the anthology Life on the Line, 1992, published by Negative Capability Press, Mobile, Alabama.

Sick people . . . need a literature of their own. . . . A critical illness is one of our momentous experiences; yet I haven’t seen a single nonfiction book that does it justice.

—Anatole Broyard, New York Times Books, April 1, 1990

The sublime as the artistic conquest of the horrible.

—Nietzsche

Part One

1. Sacred Wood

2. Sacroiliac

3. Sacre de Printemps

4. Sacrilege

5. Sanctuary

6. Sacred Ode

Part Two

7. Sacred Code

8. Unsacrosanct

9. Safe Inland

10. Sacerdotal

11. Sacrament

Part One

1. Sacred Wood

Land of shy kindnesses and embarrassing stains.

Land of appraising stares and starched white stance.

Like cameras that reverse their glance

To photograph their cameraman’s

Own face, own disgrace,

These thousand hungry hospital windows graze

On us as if our nerves were grass.

Hospital; flesh-eater; sarco-phagus.

Here the Boojum Snark of the childhood to which we regress

Is the Conqueror Germ. Its hunters, face muffled with gauze,

Are the surgeons. You’d never guess

They’re really white blood cells in surgeon-white togas.

With gaze of Argus,

These phagocyte cops—in their bogus

Biped disguise—

Are gumshoeing after our cargoes

Of germ in blood’s archipelagoes.

As sunlessly pale as a fungus,

We breathe the air-conditioned poison gas

Of progress. In such Freudian vertigoes,

Disinfectants are stern superegos.

        And our ids? They’re the rats, down where the garbage goes.

Land—no, cocoon—where butterflies unhinge

(Regressing into caterpillars) wings.

Land of droll metaphors: doc says of gut,

You’ve got a garden hose I’ve got to cut.

Snip snip—he solves me like a Gordian knot.

When he claims I look young, is gut’s inmost decay

My Picture of Dorian Grey?

Come praise—more than the dignity of man—

The faced indignity; go clear-eyed down.

When even charm and status face the deadpan

Smirk of the bedpan, indignity

Is the great leveler.

Outside our lair,

That surreal clown, Mr. Reality,

Taunts loss—the word’s my leitmotif today.

I’ve seen lost beauty; the patina went away

Not altogether.

I’ve seen lost awe; the wonder went astray

Not too far to regather.

In the sacred wood of losers, still some tatter

Of loved-enough loss must stay.

All’s illusion—still some there is really there.

. . . And yet what’s there, no matter what its form,

Crashes. So be it. Share

Leftovers; dregs matter, ashes

        Warm.

2. Sacroiliac

Must we blubber at death (what a dowdy gaffe)

Or counterclown instead?

Uneasy (it only hurts when we laugh)

Lies the clown that wears a head.

All patients have jitters—O isn’t that why

Our cocktails are bitters, our whiskey is wry?

O.R. (I looked it up) means owner’s risk and/or

Operation room: court of last appeal

(Doc, what odds I’ll live till April?)

When odds appal.

Hospital: a nation. Where the buildings inhabit the