Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LAUGHTER, by JAMES OPPENHEIM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LAUGHTER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Yes, I say yes
Last Line: Yes, say I, and salute you.
Subject(s): Laughter; Universe


Yes, I say yes --
Yes to the dance of feet in the spring,
Yes to the shouts of children,
Yes to Laughter.

Laughter, last of the gods,
And of them the greatest,
Yes, say I, and salute you.

Man's the bad child of the universe.
I know that;
Am I not a man?
Wicked is my wickedness -- an impudent girl.
We dance on the housetops when the moon is aloft,
We dance in the street, in the public glare;
But who knows us, who sees us?
My visible feet are still, and my face is solemn.

As Sunday is the Sabbath, a day of holy unctions,
I said, I will go visit the solemn ones,
They whose mouths are turned down at the corners, and whose glassy eyes never
wink or gleam:
I will visit not the worshipers in a church;
I will go visit the fishes.

Crowded was the aquarium:
On one side the glass, the people; on the other, the solemn ones.
I stood and marveled at the miracle of their gravity.

You see, they wave their fins, open their mouths,
And hang suspended in bubbling waters;
The perfect circle of their flat eyes heaves a little without lids;
They are neither happy nor unhappy.
I knew they were fishes; but did they know they were fishes?
No, nor even that I, watching them, was a man!

O dear old Universe, you big clumsy giant who find a whole sky too small to
sprawl over,
You star-bellied monster,
Who outstare me with a galaxy of eyes --
I, that stand here, so little, that your least tremor would crush me and my
earth,
I, your bad child, your enfant terrible,
Wink at you and laugh.

Why so solemn, Universe?
Why such millenniums of ages of laughterless struggle?
Did you care only to increase life and to raise it?
To push up fiercely from sun into earth, from earth into animals,
From ape into man?
Your stars shine, your waters roar, your earthquakes quake, and the noses of
your cats sneeze,
How gravely!

Not that there is not sportiveness and joy.
Surely cubs play, and the love-season sounds with the joy of the birds;
The young colts bound in the meadow,
The rooster crows,
The whisper of new green leaves has gladness in it.
But joy is not laughter, and the deepest joy is sad.

Old Universe, you are one great flood, and the animals are all under your
waters.
Only man has poked his head up above the surface, and taken a look around,
And seen you, old Universe, and all your children, and his own absurd self,
And, opening his mouth wide, has wickedly laughed.

For joy is sacred, and laughter is wicked.
Joy is inside life; laughter is outside.
Joy is half conscious only; laughter stands off and proceeds from the intellect.
The lark sings because he must;
Man laughs because he is free.

Why does the porpoise jump out of the water, and splash?
A part of his solemn business.
But the human beings crowded around his circular tank shook the dome with
shouting laughter.
The porpoise obeyed you, old Universe;
But man disobeys you!

Consider us, Creation!
Though you bore us, though you took patient eras beyond counting to create us,
Somehow we are enough detached from you and from your purpose
To look back and laugh.

Worse than that!
Consider how your bad children circumvent you.
We put our fingers to our noses and wiggle them at you, Creation!
We make mating sterile;
We drink alcohol;
We live in places of stone and steel;
We tear our earth up and disembowel her;
We float where we were meant to sink;
You think to darken us with the night, so we light lamps;
You think to freeze us with the cold, so we start fires;
And our ha-ha shakes our theaters to the amazement of dumb heaven.
Are we not cynical, uproarious, obscene, and impudent?
Do we not proclaim ourselves the top-notch of the world?
And therein are we not godly?

Behold, though you are terrible,
Though you shadow us over with a mysterious vastness,
Though your smallest toe is as huge as the Milky Way,
And we stand just below it,
We laugh back and are unafraid, and treat you at best as a jolly comrade.

But, dear old Universe, it's the wickedest child that is the darling.
We are your darlings, are we not?
Truly now fine impudent young gods have risen to companion you,
Yes, to transcend you, and by transcending you, bring you to new fulfilments.

For your sublimity has bungled.
It simply spewed out life, chaotic, haphazard,
Till by divine accidents, and out of the deadliest purposes,
We were born: to see; to know; to take hold on creation;
To laugh away fear and vastness and the doubts that inhibit,
And so, with glad visions, to build up a world in the world,
And shape ourselves greater.

Laughter saves us;
Still more than half of us is buried in the quicksands of the tragic universe.
Still we suffer, slay, and are tortured;
Still we doubt and are damned.
But comes the moment when we look round about at ourselves,
And, seeing how absurd our own antics are, laugh and are healed.
And so at the last the laughing animal shall save creation.
Already the wizened stars must be pricking up their ears, dumfoundered,
To catch that raucous cackle and chortle from the worthless earth,
That mirth in the trenches of the dead,
That noise of relatives eating ham sandwiches after the funeral is over,
That chuckle of the rebuilders of cities following the earthquake,
That wheezing gay cough of the dying consumptive over the doctor's joke.

Come, old Universe, follow the laughters!
They are sane; they see; they shall know; they are ripe for adventures;
Their daring shall bear no limit;
Their courage is wickedly great.
Nerved with your purpose, they rise from chaos, creating;
They are out to conquer, they are out to work,
They shall sow the skies with laughter.

And now I think that your very purpose was in this:
That your great face struggled for ages on ages to break in a smile.
Ye are that smile.

So I say yes --
Yes to the dance of feet in the spring,
Yes to the shouts of children,
Yes to laughter.
Laughter, last of the gods,
And of them the greatest,
Yes, say I, and salute you.





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