with weeds—goldenrod, cinquefoil, moth
mullein, then blackberries, sapling
pine, deciduous trees . . . but for now
the dog rolls, jovial, in the pungent
disturbance of wood and earth.
I summon him with a word, turn back,
and we go the long way home.
We Let the Boat Drift
I set out for the pond, crossing the ravine
where seedling pines start up like sparks
between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.
The grass in the field would make a second crop
if early autumn rains hadn’t washed
the goodness out. After the night’s hard frost
it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.
The water is utterly still. Here and there
a black twig sticks up. It’s five years today,
and even now I can’t accept what cancer did
to him—not death so much as the annihilation
of the whole man, sense by sense, thought
by thought, hope by hope.
Once we talked about the life to come.
I took the Bible from the nightstand
and offered John 14: “I go to prepare
a place for you.” “Fine. Good,” he said.
“But what about Matthew? ‘You, therefore,
must be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.’” And he wept.
My neighbor honks and waves driving by.
She counsels troubled students; keeps bees;
her goats follow her to the mailbox.
Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond.
Something terrible at school had shaken her.
We talked quietly far from shore. The paddles
rested across our laps; glittering drops
fell randomly from their tips. The light
around us seemed alive. A loon—itinerant—
let us get quite close before it dove, coming up
after a long time, and well away from humankind.
Spring Changes
The autumnal drone of my neighbor
cutting wood across the pond
and the soundlessness of winter
give way to hammering. Must be
he’s roofing, or building a shed
or fence. Some form of spring-induced
material advance.
Mother called early to say she’s sold the house.
I’ll fly out, help her sort and pack,
and give and throw away. One thing I’d like:
the yellow hand-painted pottery
vase that’s crimped at the edge
like the crust of a pie—so gay, but
they almost never used it, who knows why?
A new young pair will paint and mow,
and fix the picket fence, wash windows face
to face in May, he outside on a ladder,
she inside on a chair, mouthing kisses
and “Be Careful!” through the glass
Insomnia
The almost disturbing scent
of peonies presses through the screens,
and I know without looking how
those heavy white heads lean down
under the moon’s light. A cricket chafes
and pauses, chafes and pauses,
as if distracted or preoccupied.
When I open my eyes to document
my sleeplessness by the clock, a point
of greenish light pulses near the ceiling.
A firefly ... In childhood I ran out
at dusk, a jar in one hand, lid
pierced with airholes in the other,
getting soaked to the knees
in the long wet grass.
The light moves unsteadily, like someone
whose balance is uncertain after traveling
many hours, coming a long way.
Get up. Get up and let it out.
But I leave it hovering overhead, in case
it’s my father, come back from the dead
to ask, “Why are you still awake? You can
put grass in their jar in the morning.”
April Chores
When I take the chilly tools
from the shed’s darkness, I come
out to a world made new
by heat and light.
The snake basks and dozes
on a large flat stone.
It reared and scolded me
for raking too close to its hole.
Like a mad red brain
the involute rhubarb leaf
thinks its way up
through loam.
The Clearing
The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.
He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss;
twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls
and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth;
his pink tongue lolls.
I look for sticks of proper heft
to throw for him, while he sits, prim
and earnest in his love, if it is love.
All night a soaking rain, and now the hill
exhales relief, and the fragrance
of warm earth. . . .The sedges
have grown an inch since yesterday,
and ferns unfurled, and even if they try
the lilacs by the barn can’t
keep from opening today.
I longed for spring’s thousand tender greens,
and the white-throated sparrow’s call
that borders on rudeness. Do you know—
since you went away
all I can do
is wait for you to come back to me.
Work
It has been light since four. In June
the birds find plenty to remark upon
at that hour. Pickup trucks, three men
to a cab, rush past burgeoning hay
and corn to summer constructions
up in town.
Here, soon, the mowing, raking
and baling will begin. And I must tell
how, before the funeral all those years ago,
we lay down briefly on your grandparents’
bed, and that when you stood to put on
your jacket the change slipped
from your pants pocket.
Some dropped on the chenille
spread, and some hit the threadbare rug,
and one coin rolled onto the wide pine
floorboard under the dresser, hit
the molding, teetered and fell silent
like the rest. And oh, your sigh—
the sigh you sighed then. . . .
Private Beach
It is always the dispossessed—
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that’s burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.
Today before seven I saw, through
the morning fog, his car leave the road,
turning into the field. It must be
his day off, I thought, or he’s out
of work and drinking, or getting stoned.
Or maybe as much as anything
he wanted to see
where the lane through the hay goes.
It goes to the bluff overlooking
the lake, where we’ve cleared
brush, swept the slippery oak
leaves from the path, and tried to destroy
the poison ivy that runs
over the scrubby, sandy knolls.
Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear
gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car
needing a new muffler backs out
to the road, headlights withdrawing
from the lowest branches of the pines.
Next day I find beer cans, crushed;
sometimes a few fish too small
to bother cleaning and left
on the moss to die; or the leaking
latex trace of outdoor love. . . .
Once I found the canvas sling chairs
broken up and burned.
Whoever laid the fire gathered stones
to contain it, like a boy pursuing
a merit badge, who has a dream of work,
and proper reward for work.
At the Spanish Steps in Rome
for the mild Roman winter. Afternoons
they walked to the Borghese Gardens
to see fine ladies, nannies with babies,
and handsome mounted officers,
whose horses moved sedately
along the broad and sandy paths.
But soon the illness kept him in.
Severn kept trying in that stoutly
cheerful English way: he rented a spinet,
hauled it three flights, turning it end
up on the landings, and played Haydn every day.
Love letters lay unopened in a chest.
“To see her hand writing would break my heart.”
The poet’s anger rose as his health sank.
He began to refer to his “posthumous
existence.” One day while Severn and the porter
watched he flung, dish by dish, his catered
meal into the street.
Now the room where Keats died is a museum,
closed for several hours midday with the rest
of Rome. Waiting on the Steps in the wan
October sun I see the curator’s pale,
exceptionally round face looking down.
Everything that was not burned that day
in accordance with the law is there.
Waiting
At the grocery store on a rainy July day
I pull in beside a family wagon:
Connecticut plates but no luggage—
summer people then, up for bright days
and cool nights, and local church fairs.
They may have been coming here for years.
Three little boys and a golden retriever
are steaming up the windows already smudged
by the dog’s nose. The smallest boy
pitches himself repeatedly over the seat,
arms and legs flying, like some rubbery toy.
From time to time the dog woofs abstractedly.
Inside I look for their mother. And what
about their father—-is he here too, or does he
come only on weekends and holidays
from Stamford, Farmington, or Darien?
There she is: of the right age, dressed
expensively, stiffly, carrying a straw
summer bag with a scrimshaw whale on the lid,
a hard little basket out of which she draws
a single large bill for the food. Clearly
this time she’s come alone.
She will fill the cottage cupboards
and refrigerator, settle the boys
on the sleeping porch with one bunk bed
and one cot, and arbitrate the annual fight
over who gets to sleep on top.
And she will wait. Life is odd. . ..
I too am waiting, though if you asked
what for, I wouldn’t know what to say.
Staying at Grandma's
Sometimes they left me for the day
while they went—what does it matter
where—away. I sat and watched her work
the dough, then turn the white shape
yellow in a buttered bowl.
A coleus, wrong to my eye because its leaves
were red, was rooting on the sill
in a glass filled with water and azure
marbles. I loved to see the sun
pass through the blue.
“You know,” she’d say, turning
her straight and handsome back to me,
“that the body is the temple
of the Holy Ghost.”
The Holy Ghost, the oh, oh . . . the uh
oh, I thought, studying the toe of my new shoe,
and glad she wasn’t looking at me.
Soon I’d be back in school. No more mornings
at Grandma’s side while she swept the walk
or shook the dust mop by the neck.
If she loved me why did she say that
two women would be grinding at the mill,
that God would come out of the clouds
when they were least expecting him,
choose one to be with him in heaven
and leave the other there alone?
Church Fair
Who knows what I might find
on tables under the maple trees—
perhaps a saucer in Aunt Lois’s china pattern
to replace the one I broke
for a week. Never in all these years
have I thought of it without
a warm surge of embarrassment.
I’ll go through my own closets and cupboards
to find things for the auction.
I’ll bake a peach pie for the food table,
and rolls for the supper,
Grandma Kenyon’s recipe, which came down to me
along with her sturdy legs and brooding disposition.
“Mrs. Kenyon,” the doctor used to tell her,
“you are simply killing yourself with work.”
This she repeated often, with keen satisfaction.
She lived to be a hundred and three,
surviving all her children,
including the one so sickly at birth
that she had to carry him everywhere on a pillow
for the first four months. Father
suffered from a weak chest—bronchitis,
pneumonias, and pleurisy—and early on
books and music became his joy.
Surely these clothes are from another life—
not my own. I’ll drop them off on the way
to town. I’m getting the peaches
today, so they’ll be ripe by Saturday.
A Boy Goes into the World
My brother rode off on his bike
into the summer afternoon, but
Mother called me back
from the end of the sandy drive:
“It’s different for girls.”
He’d be gone for hours, come back
with things: a cocoon, gray-brown
and papery around a stick;
a puffball, ripe, wrinkled,
and exuding spores; owl pellets—
bits of undigested bone and fur;
and pieces of moss that might
have made toupees for preposterous
green men, but went instead
into a wide-necked jar for a terrarium.
He mounted his plunder on poster
board, gluing and naming
each piece. He has long since
forgotten those days and things, but
I at last can claim them as my own.
The Three Susans
Ancient maples mingle over us, leaves
the color of pomegranates.
The days are warm with honey light,
but the last two nights have finished
every ga
rden in the village.
The provident have left: green tomatoes
to ripen on newspaper in the darkness of sheds.
The peppers were already in.
Now there will be no more corn.
I let myself through the wrought-iron gate
of the graveyard, and—meaning to exclude
the dog—I close it after me. But he runs
to the other end, and jumps the stone
wall overlooking Elbow Pond.
Here Samuel Smith lay down at last
with his three wives, all named Susan.
I had to see it for myself. They died
in their sixties, one outliving him.
So why do I feel indignant? He suffered.
Love and the Smiths’ peculiar fame
“to nothingness do sink.” And down the row
Sleepers are living up to their name.
The dog cocks his leg on a stone.
But animals do not mock, and the dead
may be glad to have life breaking in.
The sun drops low over the pond.
Long shadows move out from the stones,
and a chill rises from the moss,
prompt as a deacon. And at Keats’s grave
in the Protestant cemetery in Rome
it is already night,
and wild cats are stalking in the moat.
Learning in the First Grade
“The cup is red. The drop of rain
is blue. The clam is brown.”
So said the sheet of exercises—
purple mimeos, still heady
from the fluid in the rolling
silver drum. But the cup was