"To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage"    




"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of

these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."


--Schopenhauer


"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.

Our magnolia blossoms.  Life begins to happen.

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,

free-lancing out along the razor's edge.

This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.

Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .

It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--

whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.

My only thought is how to keep alive.

What makes him tick?  Each night now I tie

ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .

Gored by the climacteric of his want,

he stalls above me like an elephant."

Dolphin    



My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

a captive as Racine, the man of craft,

drawn through his maze of iron composition

by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself--

to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,

an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting



my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Epilogue    



Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter's vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All's misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.

For the Union Dead    




"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."


The old South Boston Aquarium stands

in a Sahara of snow now.  Its broken windows are boarded.

The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.

The airy tanks are dry.



Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;

my hand tingled

to burst the bubbles

drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.



My hand draws back.  I often sigh still

for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom

of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,

I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized



fence on the Boston Common.  Behind their cage,

yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting

as they cropped up tons of mush and grass

to gouge their underworld garage.



Parking spaces luxuriate like civic

sandpiles in the heart of Boston.

A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse,



shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.



Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication,

William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.



Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city's throat.

Its Colonel is as lean

as a compass-needle.



He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,

a greyhound's gently tautness;

he seems to wince at pleasure,

and suffocate for privacy.



He is out of bounds now.  He rejoices in man's lovely,

peculiar power to choose life and die--

when he leads his black soldiers to death,

he cannot bend his back.



On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.



The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier

grow slimmer and younger each year--

wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets

and muse through their sideburns . . .



Shaw's father wanted no monument

except the ditch,

where his son's body was thrown

and lost with his "niggers."



The ditch is nearer.

There are no statues for the last war here;

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph

shows Hiroshima boiling



over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"

that survived the blast.  Space is nearer.

When I crouch to my television set,

the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.



Colonel Shaw

is riding on his bubble,

he waits

for the blessèd break.



The Aquarium is gone.  Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.

History    



History has to live with what was here,

clutching and close to fumbling all we had--

it is so dull and gruesome how we die,

unlike writing, life never finishes.

Abel was finished; death is not remote,

a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,

his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,

his baby crying all night like a new machine.

As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,

the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter's moon ascends--

a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,

my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull's no-nose--

O there's a terrifying innocence in my face

drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

Home After Three Months Away    



Gone now the baby's nurse,

a lioness who ruled the roost

and made the Mother cry.

She used to tie

gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze--

three months they hung like soggy toast

on our eight foot magnolia tree,

and helped the English sparrows

weather a Boston winter.



Three months, three months!

Is Richard now himself again?

Dimpled with exaltation,

my daughter holds her levee in the tub.

Our noses rub,

each of us pats a stringy lock of hair--

they tell me nothing's gone.

Though I am forty-one,

not forty now, the time I put away

was child's play.  After thirteen weeks

my child still dabs her cheeks

to start me shaving.  When

we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,

she changes to a boy,

and floats my shaving brush

and washcloth in the flush. . . .

Dearest I cannot loiter here

in lather like a polar bear.



Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.

Three stories down below,

a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil,

and seven horizontal tulips blow.

Just twelve months ago,

these flowers were pedigreed

imported Dutchmen; no no one need

distinguish them from weed.

Bushed by the late spring snow,

they cannot meet

another year's snowballing enervation.



I keep no rank nor station.

Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

Homecoming    



What was is . . . since 1930;

the boys in my old gang

are senior partners.  They start up

bald like baby birds

to embrace retirement.



At the altar of surrender,

I met you

in the hour of credulity.

How your misfortune came out clearly

to us at twenty.



At the gingerbread casino,

how innocent the nights we made it

on our Vesuvio martinis

with no vermouth but vodka

to sweeten the dry gin--



the lash across my face

that night we adored . . .

soon every night and all,

when your sweet, amorous

repetition changed.



Fertility is not to the forward,

or beauty to the precipitous--

things gone wrong

clothe summer

with gold leaf.



Sometimes

I catch my mind

circling for you with glazed eye--

my lost love hunting

your lost face.



Summer to summer,

the poplars sere

in the glare--

it's a town for the young,

they break themselves against the surf.



No dog knows my smell.

Man and Wife    



Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;

the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;

in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,

abandoned, almost Dionysian.

At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,

blossoms on our magnolia ignite

the morning with their murderous five days' white.

All night I've held your hand,

as if you had

a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--

its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye--

and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,

clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:

you were in our twenties, and I,

once hand on glass

and heart in mouth,

outdrank the Rahvs in the heat

of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet--

too boiled and shy

and poker-faced to make a pass,

while the shrill verve

of your invective scorched the traditional South.



Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

Sleepless, you hold

your pillow to your hollows like a child;

your old-fashioned tirade--

loving, rapid, merciless--

breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

Memories of West Street and Lepke    



Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,

I hog a whole house on Boston's

"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"

where even the man

scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,

has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,

and is "a young Republican."

I have a nine months' daughter,

young enough to be my granddaughter.

Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.



These are the tranquilized Fifties,

and I am forty.  Ought I to regret my seedtime?

I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,

and made my manic statement,

telling off the state and president, and then

sat waiting sentence in the bull pen

beside a negro boy with curlicues

of marijuana in his hair.



Given a year,

I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short

enclosure like my school soccer court,

and saw the Hudson River once a day

through sooty clothesline entanglements

and bleaching khaki tenements.

Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,

a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")

and fly-weight pacifist,

so vegetarian,

he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.

He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,

the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.

Hairy, muscular, suburban,

wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,

they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.



I was so out of things, I'd never heard

of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.

"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."

He taught me the "hospital tuck,"

and pointed out the T-shirted back

of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,

there piling towels on a rack,

or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full

of things forbidden to the common man:

a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American

flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,

he drifted in a sheepish calm,

where no agonizing reappraisal

jarred his concentration on the electric chair

hanging like an oasis in his air

of lost connections. . . .

Skunk Hour    




For Elizabeth Bishop


 

Nautilus Island's hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son's a bishop.  Her farmer

is first selectman in our village,

she's in her dotage.



Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria's century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.



The season's ill--

we've lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean

catalogue.  His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.



And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall,

his fishnet's filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,

there is no money in his work,

he'd rather marry.



One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull,

I watched for love-cars.  Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind's not right.



A car radio bleats,

'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat . . . .

I myself am hell,

nobody's here--



only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.



I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air--

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the

     garbage pail

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.