no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—
envoy from some village in the moldings …
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
AUTUMN EQUINOX
The leaves that shifted overhead all summer
Are marked for earth now, and I bring the baskets
Still dark with clingings of another season
Up from the cellar. All the house is still,
Now that I’ve left it. Lyman in his study
Peers on a page of Dryden by the window,
Eyes alone moving, like a mended quaint
Piece of old clockwork. When the afternoon
Trails into half-light, he will never notice
Until I come indoors to light the lamps
And rouse him blinking from the brownish type,
The gilt and tarnished spine of volume five
Out of the glass-doored cabinet in the hall.
Why Satires, I have wondered? For I’ve seen
The title-page, and riffled through the volume,
When he was gone. I thought that growing old
Returned one to a vague Arcadian longing,
To Ovid, Spenser, something golden-aged,
Some incorruptible myth that tinged the years
With pastoral flavours. Lyman, too, as gentle
As an old shepherd, half-apologetic
When I come bustling to disturb his dreams—
What in that bitterness can speak to him
Or help him down these final sloping decades
With kindly arm? I’ve never been a scholar—
Reader, perhaps at times, but not a scholar,
Not in the way that Lyman used to be—
And yet I know there’s acid on the page
He pores—that least acidulous of men.
While I, who spent my youth and middle-age
In stubbornness and railing, pass the time
Now, after fifty, raking in the sun
The leaves that sprinkle slowly on the grass,
And feel their gold like firelight at my back,
In slow preoccupation with September.
Sometimes I call across to Alice Hume
And meet her at the fence as women meet
To say the weather’s seasonably fine,
Talk husbands, bargains, or philosophize—
The dry philosophy of neighborhood.
She thinks perhaps how sharp of tongue and quick
I used to be, and how I’ve quieted down,
Without those airs because I’d married Lyman,
Professor at the college, while her husband
Was just another farmer. That was pride
As raw and silly as the girl I was—
Reading too much, sneering at other girls
Whose learning was of cookery and flirtation.
Father would have me clever, sometimes said
He’d let me train for medicine, like a son,
To come into his practice. So I studied
German and botany, and hated both.
What good for me to know the Latin name
For huckleberry, while the others climbed
To pick the fruit and kissed across the bushes?
I never was a scholar, but I had
A woman’s love for men of intellect,
A woman’s need for love of any kind.
So Lyman came to ask me of my father:
Stiff-collared, shy, not quite the man I’d dreamed—
(Byron and Matthew Arnold vaguely mingled
Without the disadvantages of either.)
And yet he seemed superb in his refusal
To read aloud from Bryant to the ladies
Assembled on the boarding-house piazza
Among the moth-wings of a summer evening.
His quick withdrawal won my heart. I smile
Sometimes to think what quirks of vanity
Propel us toward our choices in the end.
The wedding-picture in the bureau drawer
Has on the back in Lyman’s measured writing:
“September twenty-second, nineteen-twelve.”
I keep it in its folder, deckle-edged
And yellowing. I see myself again,
Correct and terrified on our wedding-day,
Wearing the lace my mother wore before me
And buttoned shoes that pinched. I feel again
The trembling of my hand in Lyman’s fingers,
Awkwardly held in that ungainly pose
While aunts around us nodded like the Fates
That nemesis was accomplished. Lyman stood
So thin and ministerial in his black,
I thought he looked a stranger. In the picture
We are the semblance of a bride and groom
Static as figures on a mantelpiece,
As if that moment out of time existed
Then and forever in a dome of glass,
Where neither dust nor the exploring fly
Could speck its dry immutability.
Thus I became his partner in a life
Annual, academic; we observed
Events momentous as the ceremony
To dedicate the chapel carillon
(Memorial to Edward Stephens Hodge,
Class of nineteen-fourteen). There we heard
Those sounds converge upon the rural air
That soon became familiar as a hinge
Creaking and never silenced. In our meadow
The angular young took up their bats and shouted
Throughout the afternoon, while I was pouring
Tea for the dean’s arthritic wife. For Lyman
The world was all the distance he pursued
From home to lecture-room, and home again,
Exchanging nods with colleagues, smiling vaguely
Upon a shirtsleeved trio, tanned and jostling,
Who grinned and gave him room upon the path.
I bit my fingers, changed the parlor curtains
To ones the like of which were never seen
Along our grave and academic street.
I brought them home from Springfield in a bundle
And hung them in defiance. I took a walk
Across the fields one heavy summer night
Until the college from a mile away
Looked sallow, insignificant in the moonlight.
It seemed the moon must shine on finer things
I had not seen, things that could show with pride
Beneath that silver globe. Along the walls
Of Lyman’s study there were steel engravings
Framed in black oak: the crazy tower of Pisa,
The Pyramids, rooted in desert sand,
Cologne Cathedral with its dangerous spires
Piercing the
atmosphere. I hated them
For priggishly enclosing in a room
The marvels of the world, as if declaring
Such was the right and fitting rôle of marvels.
Night, and I wept aloud; half in my sleep,
Half feeling Lyman’s wonder as he leaned
Above to shake me. “Are you ill, unhappy?
Tell me what I can do.”
“I’m sick, I guess—
I thought that life was different than it is.”
“Tell me what’s wrong. Why can’t you ever say?
I’m here, you know.”
Half shamed, I turned to see
The lines of grievous love upon his face,
The love that gropes and cannot understand.
“I must be crazy, Lyman—or a dream
Has made me babble things I never thought.
Go back to sleep—I won’t be so again.”
Young lovers talk of giving all the heart
Into each others’ trust: their rhetoric
Won’t stand for analyzing, I’m aware,
But have they thought of this: that each must know
Beyond a doubt what’s given, what received?
Now we are old like Nature; patient, staid,
Unhurried from the year’s wellworn routine,
We wake and take the day for what it is,
And sleep as calmly as the dead who know
They’ll wake to their reward. We have become
As unselfconscious as a pair of trees,
Not questioning, but living. Even autumn
Can only carry through what spring began.
What else could happen now but loss of leaf
And rain upon the boughs? So I have thought,
And wondered faintly where the thought began,
And when the irritable gust of youth
Stopped turning every blade of grass to find
A new dissatisfaction. Meanwhile Lyman
Reads satire in the falling afternoon—
A change for him as well. We finish off
Not quite as we began. I hear the bells
Wandering through the air across the fields.
I’ve raked three bushel baskets full of leaves—
Enough for one September afternoon.
THE STRAYED VILLAGE
He had come nearly half a thousand miles,
And then to find it gone … He knew too well
Ever to be mistaken, where the hills
Dipped to reveal it first: the line of chimneys
Reflected in the unimportant stream,
The monument, worth half a line in guidebooks—
“Tower of a church that Cromwell’s army burned,
Fine early Perpendicular”—itself
Subservient neither to theologies
Nor changing styles of architecture, still
A cipher on the landscape, something clear
In that unostentatious scenery.
Well, if the tower was gone—and who should say,
Depend on any landmark to remain?
He had been too far and known too many losses
Not to be reconciled that even landmarks
Go out like matches when you need them most.
So it could be with this. But not a house,
Not anything reflected in the river
But willows that could grow by any river,
Feminine, non-committal in their postures.
Willows: a bridge then? But the bridge was gone,
The piles had left no trace, no signature
Of stones beside the water. If, indeed,
There ever had been bridge or tower or house.
That was the question that enforeigned him,
Brushed forty years of memory aside
And made of him another obtuse tripper
Staring at signposts to be reassured:
This is the place—where I grew into manhood,
The place I had to leave when I was grown?
So often he had thought a man’s whole life
Most rightly could be written, like his own,
In terms of places he was forced to leave
Because their meaning, passing that of persons,
Became too much for him.
“This is the place?”
He heard himself demand; and heard the other—
A youthful rector, by the look of him,
Pausing upon his evening stroll—reply,
“Oh, yes, this is the place…. The village went,
As I should reckon, twenty years ago.
Across the hill, in our town, there was once
Talk and conjecture; now you might suppose
Only the antiquarians breathe its name.
The memory of man, my friend, is short.”
“Shorter and longer than it’s credited,”
He answered; “but you say the village went?
I hardly care to ask, and yet I ask—
By flood? by fire? There used to be a tower
That Cromwell’s zealots failed to bully down.
But there’s no mark. It went? How did it go?”
“It went away. You’ve heard of men who went,
Suddenly, without partings or annulments,
Not carried off by accident or death,
But simply strayed? That was the way it went.
We went to bed on Thursday and could hear
The bells, as usual on a quiet night,
Across the hill between. On Friday morning
There were no bells. There wasn’t anything.
The landscape stood as if since Magna Carta,
Empty, as it stands now. The village had gone,
Quite without taking leave. Strayed, is the word
We found ourselves as if by acquiescence
Using to speak of it, as if we thought
Someday to come upon it somewhere else
And greet our former neighbors as before.
No one has ever found it, though. One can’t
‘Lost, with one early Perpendicular tower,
A village numbering four hundred souls,
With stone and wooden footbridge.’ And, as I say,
Men’s memories grow short like winter daylight.
So much gets strayed that has to be replaced—
Dogs, wits, affections …”
“Yes, so much gets strayed;
But one of all the things a man can lose
I thought would keep till I could come again.
It almost seems it went lest I should come,
Because I always promised I would come,
And had this latest penalty in store,
The last of losses.”
So he said goodbye,
And watched the little rector climb the hill
Back to his parish town. The stream ran on,
And all that walking was to do again.
THE PERENNIAL ANSWER
The way the world came swinging round my ears
I knew what Doctor meant the day he said,
“Take care, unless you want to join your dead;
It’s time to end this battling with your years.”
He knew I’d have the blackest word told straight,
Whether it was my child that couldn’t live,
Or Joel’s mind, thick-riddled like a sieve
With all that loving festered into hate.
Better to know the ways you are accurst,
And stand up fierce and glad to hear the worst.
The blood is charged, the back is stiffened so.
Well, on that day that was a day ago,
And yet so many hours and years ago
Numbered in seizures of a darkening brain,
I started up the attic stairs again—
The fifth time in the hour—not thinking then
That it was hot, but knowing the air sat stiller
Und
er the eaves than when the idiot killer
Hid in the Matthews barn among the hay
And all the neighbors through one August day
Waited outside with pitchforks in the sun.
Joel waited too, and when they heard the gun
Resound so flatly in the loft above
He was the one to give the door a shove
And climb the ladder. A man not made for love,
But built for things of violence; he would stand
Where lightning flashed and watch with eyes so wide
You thought the prongs of fire would strike inside;
Or sit with some decaying book in hand,
Reading of spirits and the evil-eyed,
And witches’ Sabbaths in a poisoned land.
So it was Joel that brought the fellow out,
Tarnished with hay and blood. I still can see
The eyes that Joel turned and fixed on me
When it was done—as if by rights his wife
Should go to him for having risked his life
And say—I hardly knew what thing he wanted.
I know it was a thing I never granted,
And what his mind became, from all that woe,
Those violent concerns he lived among,
Was on my head as well. I couldn’t go,
I never went to him, I never clung
One moment on his breast. But I was young.
And I was cruel, a girl-bride seeing only
Her marriage as a room so strange and lonely
She looked outside for warmth. And in what fashion
Could I be vessel for that somber passion—
For Joel, decreed till death to have me all?
The tortured grandsire hanging in the hall
Depicted by a limner’s crabbed hand
Seemed more a being that I could understand.
How could I help but look beyond that wall
And probe the lawful stones that built it strong
With questions sharper than a pitchfork’s prong?
If Joel knew, he kept his silence long.
But Evans and I were hopeless from the start:
He, collared early by a rigorous creed,
Not man of men but man of God indeed,
Whose eye had seen damnation, and whose heart
Thrust all it knew of passion into one
Chamber of iron inscribed Thy will be done.
Yet sense will have revenge on one who tries
To down his senses with the brand of lies.
The road was empty from the village home,
Empty of all but us and that dark third,
The sudden Northern spring. There must be some