We might have married as Christ says man must not

  in heaven where marriage is not, and giving

  in marriage has the curse of God and Blake.

  I am in bondage here, and cannot fly;

  when marriage is surmounted, what is left?

  “Heaven, if such things are,” you gruff into the phone.

  4. LEAF-LACE DRESS

  Leaf-lace, a simple intricate design—

  if you were not inside it, nothing much,

  bits of glinting silver on crinkled lace—

  you fall perhaps metallic and as good.

  Hard to work out the fact that makes you good,

  whole spirit wrought from toys and nondescript,

  though nothing less than the best woman in the world.

  Cold the green shadows, iron the seldom sun,

  harvest has worn her swelling shirt to dirt.

  Agony says we cannot live in one house,

  or under a common name. This was the sentence—

  I have lost everything. I feel a strength,

  I have walked five miles, and still desire to throw

  my feet off, be asleep with you … asleep and young.

  5. KNOWING

  This night and the last, I cannot play or sleep,

  thinking of Grandfather in his last poor days.

  Caroline, he had such naked nights,

  and brought his tortures of the damned to breakfast—

  when his son died, he made his grandchildren plant trees;

  his blood lives, not his name.… We have our child,

  our bastard, easily fathered, hard to name …

  illegibly bracketed with us. My hand

  sleeps in the bosom of your sleeping hands,

  firm in the power of your impartial heat.

  I’m not mad and hold to you with reason,

  you carry our burden to the narrow strait,

  this sleepless night that will not move, yet moves

  unless by sleeping we think back yesterday.

  6. GOLD LULL

  This isn’t the final calm … as easily,

  as naturally, the belly of the breeding

  mother lifts to every breath in sleep—

  I feel tomorrow like I feel today

  in this gold lull of sleep … the muzzled lover

  lies open, takes on the world for what it is,

  a minute more than a minute … as many a writer

  suffers illusions that his phrase might live:

  power makes nothing final, words are deeds.

  President Lincoln almost found this faith;

  once a good ear perhaps could hear the heart

  murmur in the square thick hide of Lenin

  embalmed, wide-eyed in the lull that gives a mother

  courage to be merciful to her child.

  7. GREEN SORE

  We wake too early, the sun’s already up,

  the too early chain-twitter of the swallows fatigues,

  words of a moment’s menace stay for life:

  not that I wish you entirely well, far from it.

  That was my green life, even heard through tears.…

  We pack, leave Milgate, in a rush as usual

  for the London train, leaving five lights burning—

  to fool the burglar? Never the same five lights.

  Sun never sets without our losing something,

  keys, money—not everything. “Dear Caroline,

  I have told Harriet that you are having a baby

  by her father. She knows she will seldom see him;

  the physical presence or absence is the thing.”—

  a letter left in a page of a book and lost.

  8. LETTER

  “I despair of letters. You say I wrote H. isn’t

  interested in the thing happening to you now.

  So what? A fantastic untruth, misprint, something;

  I meant the London scene’s no big concern, just you.…

  She’s absolutely beautiful, gay, etc.

  I’ve a horror of turmoiling her before she flies

  to Mexico, alone, brave, half Spanish-speaking.

  Children her age don’t sit about talking the thing

  about their parents. I do talk about you,

  and I have never denied I miss you …

  I guess we’ll make Washington this weekend;

  it’s a demonstration, like all demonstrations,

  repetitious, gratuitous, unfresh … just needed.

  I hope nothing is mis-said in this letter.”

  9. HEAVY BREATHING

  Your heavier breathing moves a lighter heart,

  the sun glows on past midnight on the meadow,

  willing, even in England, to stretch the day.

  I stand on my head, the landscape keeps its place,

  though heaven has changed. Conscience incurable

  convinces me I am not writing my life;

  life never assures which part of ourself is life.

  Ours was never a book, though sparks of it

  spotted the page with superficial burns:

  the fiction I colored with first-hand evidence,

  letters and talk I marketed as fiction—

  but what is true or false tomorrow when surgeons

  let out the pus, and crowd the circus to see us

  disembowelled for our afterlife?

  10. LATE SUMMER AT MILGATE

  A sweetish smell of shavings, wax and oil

  blows through the redone bedroom newly aged;

  the sun in heaven enflames a sanded floor.

  Age is our reconciliation with dullness,

  my varnish complaining, I will never die.

  I still remember more things than I forgo:

  once it was the equivalent of everlasting

  to stay loyal to my other person loved—

  in the fallen apple lurked a breath of spirits,

  the uninhabitable granite shone

  in Maine, each rock our common gravestone.…

  I sit with my staring wife, children … the dour Kent sky

  a smudge of mushroom. In temperate years the grass

  stays green through New Year—I, my wife, our children.

  11. NINTH MONTH

  For weeks, now months, the year in burden goes,

  a happiness so slow burning, it is lasting;

  our animated nettles are black slash

  by August. Today I leaned through lunch on my elbows,

  watching my nose bleed red lacquer on the grass;

  I see, smell and taste blood in everything—

  I almost imagine your experience mine.

  This year by miracle, you’ve jumped from 38

  to 40, joined your elders who can judge:

  woman has never forgiven man her blood.

  Sometimes the indictment dies in your forgetting.

  You move on crutches into your ninth month,

  you break things now almost globular—

  love in your fullness of flesh and heart and humor.

  12. QUESTION

  I ask doggishly into your face—

  dogs live on guesswork, heavens of submission,

  but only the future answers all our lies—

  has perfect vision. A generation back,

  Harriet was this burdensome questionmark—

  we had nowhere then to step back and judge the picture.…

  I fish up my old words, Dear and Dear Ones;

  the dealer repeats his waterfall of cards—

  will the lucky number I threw down

  come twice? Living is not a numbers game,

  a poor game for a father when I am one.…

  I eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes up here,

  I’ll get my books back when we’ve lived together—

  in this room on which all other rocks bear down.

  13. ROBERT SHERIDAN LOWELL

  Your midnight ambulances, the first knife-saw

  of the child, feet-first, a string of tobacco tied

  to your throat that won’t go down, your window heaped

  with brown paper bags leaking peaches and avocados,

  your meals tasting like Kleenex … too much blood is seeping …

  after twelve hours of labor to come out right,

  in less than thirty seconds swimming the blood-flood:

  Little Gingersnap Man, homoform,

  flat and sore and alcoholic red,

  only like us in owning to middle-age.

  “If you touch him, he’ll burn your fingers.”

  “It’s his health, not fever. Why are the other babies so pallid?

  His navy-blue eyes tip with his head.… Darling,

  we have escaped our death-struggle with our lives.”

  14. OVERHANGING CLOUD

  This morning the overhanging clouds are piecrust,

  milelong Luxor Temples based on rich runny ooze;

  my old life settles down into the archives.

  It’s strange having a child today, though common,

  adding our further complication to

  intense fragility.

  Clouds go from dull to dazzle all the morning;

  we have not grown as our child did in the womb,

  met Satan like Milton going blind in London;

  it’s enough to wake without old fears,

  and watch the needle-fire of the first light

  bombarding off your eyelids harmlessly.

  By ten the bedroom is sultry. You have double-breathed;

  we are many, our bed smells of hay.

  15. CARELESS NIGHT

  So country-alone, and O so very friendly,

  our heaviness lifted from us by the night …

  we dance out into its diamond suburbia,

  and see the hill-crown’s unrestricted lights—

  all day these encroaching neighbors are out of sight.

  Huge smudge sheep in burden becloud the grass,

  they swell on moonlight and weigh two hundred pounds—

  hulky as you in your white sheep-coat, as nervous to gallop.…

  The Christ-Child’s drifter shepherds have left this field,

  gone the shepherd’s breezy too predictable pipe.

  Nothing’s out of earshot in this daylong night;

  nothing can be human without man.

  What is worse than hearing the late-born child crying—

  and each morning waking up glad we wake?

  16. MORNING AWAY FROM YOU

  This morning in oystery Colchester, a single

  skeleton black rose sways on my flour-sack window—

  Hokusai’s hairfine assertion of dearth.

  It wrings a cry of absence.… My host’s new date,

  apparently naked, carrying all her clothes

  sways through the dawn in my bedroom to the shower.

  Goodmorning. My nose runs, I feel for my blood,

  happy you save mine and hand it on,

  now death becomes an ingredient of my being—

  my Mother and Father dying young and sixty

  with the nervous systems of a child of six.…

  I lie thinking myself to night internalized;

  when I open the window, the black rose-leaves

  return to inconstant greenness. A good morning, as often.

  Another Summer

  1. WILDROSE

  A mongrel image for all summer, our scene at breakfast:

  a bent iron fence of straggly wildrose glowing

  below the sausage-rolls of new-mown hay—

  Sheridan splashing in his blue balloon tire:

  whatever he touches he’s told not to touch

  and whatever he reaches tips over on him.

  Things have gone on and changed, the next oldest

  daughter bleaching her hair three shades lighter with beer—

  but if you’re not a blonde, it doesn’t work.…

  Sleeping, the always finding you there with day,

  the endless days revising our revisions—

  everyone’s wildrose?… And our golden summer

  as much as such people can. When most happiest

  how do I know I can keep any of us alive?

  2. DOLPHINS

  Those warmblooded watchers of children—do not say

  I have never known how to talk to dolphins,

  when I try to they just swim away.

  We often share the new life, the new life—

  I haven’t stilled my New England shades by combing

  the Chinese cowlicks from our twisted garden,

  or sorted out the fluff in the boiler room,

  or stumbled on the lost mouth of the cesspool.

  Our time is shorter and brighter like the summer,

  each day the chill thrill of the first day at school.

  Coughs echo like swimmers shouting in a pool—

  a mother, unlike most fathers, must be manly.

  Will a second dachshund die of a misborn lung?

  Will the burned child drop her second boiling kettle?

  3. IVANA

  Small-soul-pleasing, loved with condescension,

  even through the cro-magnon tirades of six,

  the last madness of child-gaiety

  before the trouble of the world shall hit.

  Being chased upstairs is still instant-heaven,

  not yet tight-lipped weekends of voluntary scales,

  accompanying on a recorder carols

  rescored by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Kent.

  Though burned, you are hopeful, experience cannot tell you

  experience is what you do not want to experience.

  Are teenagers the dominant of all ache?

  Or flirting seniles, their conversation three noises,

  their life-expectancy shorter than the martyrs?

  How all ages hate another age,

  and lifelong wonder what was the perfect age!

  4. ALIMONY

  (A Dream in the Future)

  3, 4, and then 5 children, fortunately

  fortune’s hostages and not all ours—

  the sea comes in to us, we move it outward.…

  I’m somewhere, nowhere; four Boston houses I grew from,

  slash-brick expressionist New England fall;

  I walk, run, gay with frost … with Harriet …

  a barracuda settlement. (Santo Domingo,

  quick divorces, solid alimony,

  its dictator’s marina unsafe because of sharks

  checking in twice daily like grinning, fawning puppies

  for our sewage, even for their own excrement.…)

  “I am not sure I want to see her again.”

  Harriet laughing without malice … with delight:

  “That’s how mother talks about you.”

  5. THE NEW (CAROLINE)

  The one moment that says, I am, I am, I am.…

  My girlfriends tell me I must stay in New York,

  one never has such new friends anywhere;

  but they don’t understand,

  wherever he is is my friend.

  Leaving America for England

  1. AMERICA

  My lifelong taste for reworking the same water—

  a day is day there, America all landscape,

  ocean monolithic past weathering;

  the lakes are oceans, nature tends to gulp.…

  Change I earth or sky I am the same;

  aging retreats to habit, puzzles repeated

  and remembered, games repeated and remembered,

  the runner trimming on his mud-smooth path,

  the gamefish fattening in its narrow channel,

  deaf to the lure of personality.

  May the entertainment of uncertainty

  help me from seeing through anyone I love.…

  Overtrained for England, I find America …

  under unmoved heaven changing sky.

  2. LOST FISH

  My heavy step is treacherous in the shallows—

  once squinting in the sugared eelgrass for game,

  I saw the glass torpedo of a big fish,

  power strayed from unilluminating depth,

  roaming through the shallows worn to bone.

  I was seven, and fished without a hook.

  Luckily, Mother was still omnipotent—

  a battered sky, a more denuded lake,

  my heavy rapier trolling rod bent L,

  drowned stumps, muskrat huts, my record fish,

  its endless waddling outpull like a turtle.…

  The line snapped, or my knots pulled—I am free

  to reach the end of the marriage on my knees.

  The mud we stirred sinks in the lap of plenty.

  3. TRUTH

  Downstairs the two children’s repeating piano duet,

  when truth says goodmorning, it means goodbye.

  The scouring voice of 1930 Oxford,

  “Nothing pushing the personal should be published,

  not even Proust’s Research or Shakespeare’s Sonnets,

  a banquet of raw ingredients in bad taste.…

  No Irishman can understate or drink.…

  W. B. Yeats was not a gent,

  he didn’t tell the truth: and for an hour,

  I’ve walked and prayed—who prays exactly an hour?

  Yeats had bad eyes, saw nothing … not even peahens:

  What has a bard to do with the poultry yard?

  Dying, he dished his stilts, wrote one good poem,

  small penance for all that grandeur of imperfection.”

  4. NO TELLING

  (For Caroline)

  How much less pretentiously, more maliciously

  we talk of a close friend to other friends

  than shine stars for his festschrift! Which is truer—

  the uncomfortable full dress of words for print,

  or wordless conscious not even no one ever sees?

  The best things I can tell you face to face

  coarsen my love of you in solitary.

  See that long lonesome road? It must end

 

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