Against Paradise

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Wallace Stevens

The hounds that heralded the rich

would wake us up at six

on Sunday morning, hounds squandering

their cries, hounds begging

the very air for blood,

hounds poring over stones, zigzagging,

their avid noses thumbing

through the grasses, reading

our shabby field down by the swamp,

reading through our lawn,

an open library of appetites.

When, from cover in our rickety woods,

the fox hunters issued in a posse,

I'd pretend they were the British.

Outlaw in my pajamas, behind

the curtains, l'd draw my bead

on brokers, financiers, on girls

desexed in britches and strait coats,

on local names like Wheelwright, Miller,

Reeve, names with a quaint,

almost an ancient sound.

Miles from where they lived on higher ground,

like golfers or rare birds

errant in the rough,

they'd sit there, high

| and in no hurry at all over our lawn,

surveying our ramshackle little field

with its gnarled pear tree,

as if they were the owners

in their old costumes-redcoats

we could no longer recognize.

But later, when I'd mow the lawn,

not knowing any better,

I longed to give it the elegiac look

of their estates, thinned groves

arranged like furniture

within the neat ballroom of a field

where the grass, uniform and smooth

as indoor carpeting stretched wall-to-wall.

To show off your station (which is your name)

the grounds of your estate must be

conspicuously false and very trite-

the pond a polished table-top "like glass,"

the trees "stately," the pastures

"rolling" and "idyllic," the bases

of the bushes drained of leaves,

the farthest line of trees a hazy backdrop

for some diorama where, in the foreground,

kittens "sport" by a picnic basket,

fawns "gambol." Your dog,

like those dignified, melancholy dogs

varnished on the backs of playing cards,

should have a pedigree. It should maintain

a solemn, philosophical expression

and be named "Rex" or "Rusty."

Sometimes, Sunday afternoons, a rich kid

named Bradley Wheelwright asked me

over to his house to play.

The house was stifling.

It was crepuscular all day.

Always, Bradley's parents would be out,

the curtains drawn on parlors

muffled as stuffed birds, where Bradley

or the maid, like museum guards, cautioned

nothing must be touched,

as we trespassed over carpets thick

enough to suffocate our steps, past walls

of massive, leather novels, past stilled

encyclopedias, under chandeliers

and up a back staircase

to the upper stories, to the only

messy room in the whole place,

where, dutifully, Brad dragged

his Electric Baseball out.

And suddenly I'd wish that I were home

practicing my curve

against the south side of the garage,

my threadbare tennis ball alive

in the dead air-the only terms I had

back then for something I half knew but

hadn't yet learned how to say,

something about why monuments go bad,

how all that wealth can do

is to magnify a banal appetite,

but how it hangs on anyway, inherently,

like a species-this pure desire

that the names of things stay fixed

while customary services go on,

that the same torpid statuary

remain sprawled around the pool

up at the country club (a pool bluer

than the sky, a pool like glass),

nymph, fawn, satyr wired

in their casual positions,

secured in paradise-that all those precious, old

well-tended, not-especially-happy names

might be made fast

high on some wall as if alive,

perfectly composed in their huge frames.