Constance
(1993)
poems
by
JANE KENYON
Constance
(1993)
Perkins, ever for Perkins
From Psalm 139
“O Lord, thou hast searched me...”
Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me;
even the night shall be light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee;
but the night shineth as the day:
the darkness and the light are both alike to thee . . .
I
The Progress of the Beating Heart
August Rain, after Haying
Through sere trees and beheaded
grasses the slow rain falls.
Hay fills the barn; only the rake
and one empty wagon are left
in the field. In the ditches
goldenrod bends to the ground.
Even at noon the house is dark.
In my room under the eaves
I hear the steady benevolence
of water washing dust
raised by the haying
from porch and car and garden
chair. We are shorn
and purified, as if tonsured.
The grass resolves to grow again,
receiving the rain to that end,
but my disordered soul thirsts
after something it cannot name.
The Stroller
1949
It was copen blue, strong and bright,
and the metal back looked like caning
on a chair. The peanut-shaped tray
had a bar with sliding beads:
red, yellow, blue, green, white.
It was hard for Mother to push the stroller
on the sandy shoulders of the road.
Sitting in the stroller
in the driveway of the new house
on a morning in early spring, trees
leafing out, I could hear cows
lowing in their stalls across the road,
and see geese hissing and flapping
at a sheep that wandered too close
to the goslings. From the stroller I surveyed
my new domain like a dowager queen.
When something pleased me I kicked
my feet and spun the bright beads.
Spittle dropped from my lower lip
like a spider plunging on its filament.
1991
Mother is moving; we’re sorting
through fifty years’ accumulations—
a portfolio of Father’s drawings
from his brief career in Architecture
School, exercises in light and shadow,
vanishing point; renderings of acanthus
cornices, gargoyles... .Then I come upon
a drawing of my stroller, precisely to scale,
just as I remember it.
And here is a self-portrait, looser,
where he wears the T-shirt whose stripes
I know were red and white
although the drawing is pencil.
Beside Father, who sits in a blue chair
that I remember, by a bookcase I remember,
under a lamp I remember, is the empty stroller.
1951
He was forty-seven, a musician
who took other jobs to get by,
a dreamer, a reader, a would-be farmer
with weak lungs from many pneumonias
and from playing cocktail piano
late in smoky bars. On weekend mornings
we crept around so he could sleep until ten.
When he came home from his day-job
at the bookstore, I untied his shoes.
I waited all day to untie them,
wanting no other happiness. I was four.
Fie never went to town without a suit
and tie, a linen handkerchief
in his pocket, and his shoes
were good leather, the laces themselves
leather. I loved the rich pungency
of his brown, well-shined, warm shoes.
1959
Mother took in sewing.
One by one Ann Arbor’s bridge club
ladies found her. They pulled into our drive
in their Thunderbirds and Cadillacs
as I peered down between muslin curtains
from my room. I lay back on the bed, thinking
of nothing in particular, until they went
away. When I came downstairs the scent
of cigarettes and perfume persisted in the air.
One of them I liked. She took
her two dachshunds everywhere
on a bifurcated leash; they hopped comically
up the porch steps and into our house.
She was Italian, from Modena, displaced,
living in Ann Arbor as the wife
of a Chrysler executive. She never wore
anything but beige or gray knits.
She was six feet tall and not ashamed of it,
with long, loose red hair held back
by tortoiseshell combs. She left cigarette
butts in the ashtray with bright red
striated crescents on them.
She was different from the others,
attached to my mother in the way
European women are attached
to their dressmakers and hairdressers.
When she traveled abroad
she brought back classical recordings
and perfume. I thought I would not mind
being like Marcella, though I recognized
that she was lonely. Her husband traveled
frequently, and she had a son
living in Florence who never came “home.”
His enterprises were obscure....
Marcella had her dogs, her solitude,
her elegance—at once sedate and slightly
wild—and, it seemed, a new car every time
the old one got dirty, a luxury
to which she seemed oblivious.
1991
Disturbed but full of purpose, we push
Father’s indifferent drawings into the trash.
Mother saves the self-portrait and the acanthus
cornice. I save only the rendering
of the stroller, done on tracing paper, diaphanous.
Looking at it
is like looking into a mirror
and seeing your own eyes and someone else’s
eyes as well, strange to you
but benign, curious, come
to interrogate your wounds, the progress
of your beating heart.
The Argument
On the way to the village store
I drive through a downdraft
from the neighbor’s chimney.
Woodsmoke tumbles from the eaves
backlit by sun, reminding me
of the fire and sulfur of Grandmother’s
vengeful God, the one who disapproves
of jeans and shorts for girls,
dancing, strong w
aters, and adultery.
A moment later the smoke enters
the car, although the windows are tight,
insinuating that I might, like Judas,
and the foolish virgins, and the rich
young man, have been made for unquenchable
fire. God will need something to burn
if the fire is to be unquenchable.
“All things work together for the good
for those who love God,” she said
to comfort me at Uncle Hazen’s funeral,
where Father held me up to see
the maroon gladiolus that trembled
as we approached the bier, the elaborate
shirred satin, brass fittings, anything,
oh, anything but Uncle’s squelched
and made-up face.
“No! NO! How is it good to be dead?”
I cried afterward, wild-eyed and flushed.
“God’s ways are not our ways,”
she said then out of pity
and the wish to forestall the argument.
Biscuit
The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his mouth
I can’t bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bread, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.
Not Writing
A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs
at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.
Windfalls
The storm is moving on, and as the wind
rises, the oaks and pines let go
of all the snow on their branches,
an abrupt change of heart,
and the air turns utterly white.
Woooh, says the wind, and I stop
where I am, put out my arms
and look upward, allowing
myself to disappear. It is good
to be here, and not here. . . .
I see fresh cloven prints
under the apple tree, where deer come
nosing for windfalls. They must be
near me now, and having stopped
when I stopped, begin to move again.
II
Tell me how to bear myself . . .
Adrienne Rich
Having It Out with Melancholy
If many remedies are prescribed for an illness,
you may be certain that the illness has no cure.
A. P. Chekhov
The Cherry Orchard
1 From the Nursery
When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.
And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad—even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.
You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners toward God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”
I only appeared to belong to my mother,
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.
I was already yours—the anti-urge,
the mutilator of souls.
2 Bottles
Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.
The coated ones smell sweet or have
no smell; the powdery ones smell
like the chemistry lab at school
that made me hold my breath.
3 Suggestion from a Friend
You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.
4 Often
Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away
from the massive pain in sleep’s
frail wicker coracle.
5 Once There Was Light
Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time.
I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors—those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist.
Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.
6 In and Out
The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.
Sometimes the sound of his breathing
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .
7 Pardon
A piece of burned meat
wears my clothes, speaks
in my voice, dispatches obligations
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying
to be stouthearted, tired
beyond measure.
We move on to the monoamine
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night
I feel as if I had drunk six cups
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder
and bitterness of someone pardoned
for a crime she did not commit
I come back to marriage and friends,
to pink-fringed hollyhocks; come back
to my desk, books, and chair.
8 Credo
Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being. Unholy ghost,
you are certain to come again.
Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet
on the coffee table, lean back,
and turn me into someone who can’t
take the trouble to speak; someone
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing
but sleep; can’t read, or call
for an appointment for help.
There is nothing I can do
against your coming.
When I awake, I am still with thee.
9 Wood Thrush
High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
notes of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome
by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.
Litter
I poured the unused coffee grounds
from the paper filter back
into the can. I was too rattled
to spoon the dry Cre
am of Wheat
back into the packet, so I threw it away.
The neighbor who rushed over
had straightened the bedcovers.
The violets were dry; I watered them.
I picked up the blue plastic syringe
tips, strips of white tape,
and the backing from bandages
that the EMTs had dropped in haste.
Now curtains lift and fall
in windows I’ve never before seen open.
Chrysanthemums
The doctor averted his eyes
while the diagnosis fell on us,
as though the picture of the girl
hiding from her dog
had suddenly fallen off the wall.
We were speechless all the way home.
The light seemed strange.
A weekend of fear and purging....
Determined to work, he packed his
Dictaphone, a stack of letters,
and a roll of stamps. At last the day
of scalpels, blood, and gauze arrived.
Eyes closed, I lay on his tightly made
bed, waiting. From the hallway I heard
an old man, whose nurse was helping him
to walk: “That Howard Johnson’s. It’s
nothing but the same thing over and over
again.”
“That’s right. It’s nothing special.”
Late in the afternoon, when slanting
sun betrayed a wad of dust under the bed-
side stand, I heard the sound of casters
and footsteps slowing down.
The attendants asked me to leave the room
while they moved him onto the bed,
and the door remained closed a long time.