terror of man and horse.
2. THE BATH
My sisters walk around touching things, or loll
On the bed with last month's New Yorkers. My skin, Beaded with bath-oil, gleams like a hot-house fake: My body holds me like an empty bowl. It is three, it is four, it is time to come in From thinking about the cake to eat the cake. My sisters' voices whir like cardboard birds On sticks: married, they flutter and wheel to find In this misted looking-glass their own lost words, In the exhaled smoke.
There isn't a sound,
Even the shadows compose like waiting wings.
I am the hollow circle closed by the ring.
3. NIGHT
I am thrown open like a child's damp hand
In sleep. You turn your back in sleep, unmanned.
How can I be so light, at the core of things?
My way was long and crooked to your hand!
What could your jeweled glove command
But flight of my stone wings?
Our honeymoon lake, ignoring the lit-up land,
Shows blank Orion where to dip his hand.
Afterbirth
I loiter in the eye of the Slough,
Every joint aching for sleep;
The sky, inhumanly deep,
Sarcastically casts back the Slough.
Did my child take breath to cry
At the slick hand that hooked her out,
Or cry to breathe? or did she lie
Still in her private dark, curled taut
Under her sleep's hobgoblin shout?
Anesthesia blew me out:
I gardened shadows in my lost crib
While they took her from me like a rib.
Swaddled and barred, she curls in sleep
At the dry edge of mortality.
If the sky's side proves too steep
Who will take up the little old lady,
Who will call her by her name
When she's a crumble of bones?
What logos lights the filament of time,
Carbon arc fusing birth-stone to head-stone?
The mud pulls harder: the stepping stones
Shake in front of my swimming eyes.
There dear, there dear, here's a pill:
Sleep, sleep, all will be well:
Lull-lullaby.
Sarah's Christening Day
Our Lord, today is Sarah's christening day.
I wouldn't build the child a house of straw,
Teach her to wait and welcome the holy face
With candles of prayer, or pray, if the wager were all.
But I have never seen or loved the holy face.
I don't believe the half of what I pray.
This world is straw: straw mother, father, friend,
Per omnia saecula saeculorum, amen. But Lord! it shines, it shines, like light, today.
Tired of London
When you came to town,
Warm bubbling rains came, the teething leaves,
Steaming spring earth, and the tough, small-footed birds;
Reckless colors sifted the closed, dense sky
As we went hand in hand through our larky maze
In the cultivated stubble of Hampstead Heath:
Monkshood, Foxglove, Canterbury Bells
Composed themselves to drink the bovril air
Thinned by the watery sun.
You, with no sense of giving,
Brought all the dangers I no longer dared;
Netted the wind that roared through my rented bed,
And, poised like Eros over Picadilly,
Were always there.
I cannot find the words to leave you with.
This way love's conversation, the body and mind of it, goes
On after love: we shall come to call this love,
And this roar in our ears which before very long
We become, we shall call our song.
CambridgeApril 27, 1957
Your letter made me see myself grown old
With only the past's poor wing-dust shadows to hold,
Dressed in violet hand-me-downs, half-asleep, only half,
Queer as nines in the violet dust of my mind,
Leaning in some sloping attic, like this one where I write
You all night,
The wet, metaphorical Cambridge wind
Sorry on the skylight.
The New England landscape goes
Like money: but here on Agassiz Walk we save
Everything we have
Under Great-Aunt Georgie's georgian bed;
A knot garden roots through Great-Aunt Georgie's toes
Three floors below: when summer comes, God knows
We'll dry the herbs Aunt Georgie grows:
