talking to myself, or reading, or writing,
or fearlessly holding back nothing from a friend,
who believes me for a moment
to keep up conversation.
I was surer, wasn’t I, once …
and had flashes when I first found
a humor for myself in images,
farfetched misalliance
that made evasion a revelation?
Dr. Merrill Moore, the family psychiatrist,
had unpresentable red smudge eyebrows,
and no infirmity for tact—
in his conversation or letters,
each phrase a new
paragraph,
implausible as the million
sonnets he rhymed into his dictaphone,
or dashed on windshield writing-pads,
while waiting out a stoplight—
scattered pearls, some true.
Dead he is still a mystery,
once a crutch to writers in crisis.
I am two-tongued, I will not admit
his Tennessee rattling saved my life.
Did he become mother’s lover
and prey
by rescuing her from me?
He was thirteen years her junior …
When I was in college, he said, “You know
you were an unwanted child?”
Was he striking my parents to help me?
I shook him off the scent by pretending
anyone is unwanted in a medical sense—
lust our only father … and yet
in that world where an only child
was a scandal—
unwanted before I am?
That year Carl Jung said to mother in Zurich,
“If your son is as you have described him,
he is an incurable schizophrenic.”
In 1916
father on sea-duty, mother with child
in one house with her affectionate mother-in-law,
unconsuming, already consumptive …
bromidic to mother … Mother,
I must not blame you for carrying me in you
on your brisk winter lunges across
the desperate, refusey Staten Island beaches,
their good view skyscrapers on Wall Street …
for yearning seaward, far from any home, and saying,
“I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead.”
Unforgivable for a mother to tell her child—
but you wanted me to share your good fortune,
perhaps, by recapturing the disgust of those walks;
your credulity assumed we survived,
while weaklings fell with the dead and dying.
That consuming love,
woman’s everlasting cri de coeur,
“When you have a child of your own, you’ll know.”
Her dowry for her children …
One thing is certain—compared with my wives,
mother was stupid. Was she?
Some would not have judged so—
among them, her alcoholic patients,
those raconteurish, old Boston young men,
whose fees, late in her life
and to everyone’s concern,
she openly halved with Merrill Moore.
Since time out of mind, mother’s gay hurting
assessments of enemies and intimates
had made her a formidable character
to her “reading club,” seven ladies,
who since her early twenties
met once a week through winters
in their sitting rooms for confidence and tea—
she couldn’t read a book …
How many of her statements began with,
But Papá always said or Oh Bobby …
if she Byronized her father and son,
she saw her husband as a valet sees through a master.
She was stupider than my wife …
When I was three months,
I rocked back and forth howling
for weeks, for weeks each hour …
Then I found the thing I loved most
was the anorexia Christ
swinging on Nellie’s gaudy rosary.
It disappeared, I said nothing,
but mother saw me poking strips of paper
down a floor-grate to the central heating.
“Oh Bobby, do you want to set us on fire?”
“Yes … that’s where Jesus is.” I smiled.
Is the one unpardonable sin
our fear of not being wanted?
For this, will mother go on cleaning house
for eternity, and making it unlivable?
Is getting well ever an art,
or art a way to get well?
Thanks-Offering for Recovery
The airy, going house grows small
tonight, and soft enough to be crumpled up
like a handkerchief in my hand.
Here with you by this hotbed of coals,
I am the homme sensuel, free
to turn my back on the lamp, and work.
Something has been taken off,
a wooden winter shadow—
goodbye nothing. I give thanks, thanks—
thanks too for this small
Brazilian ex voto, this primitive head
sent me across the Atlantic by my friend …
a corkweight thing,
to be offered Deo gratias in church
on recovering from head-injury or migraine—
now mercifully delivered in my hands,
though shelved awhile unnoticing and unnoticed.
Free of the unshakable terror that made me write …
I pick it up, a head holy and unholy,
tonsured or damaged,
with gross black charcoaled brows and stern eyes
frowning as if they had seen the splendor
times past counting … unspoiled,
solemn as a child is serious—
light balsa wood the color of my skin.
It is all childcraft, especially
its shallow, chiseled ears,
crudely healed scars lumped out
to listen to itself, perhaps, not knowing
it was made to be given up.
Goodbye nothing. Blockhead,
I would take you to church,
if any church would take you …
This winter, I thought
I was created to be given away.
Epilogue
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
from
Last Poems
(1977)
Summer Tides
Tonight
I watch the incoming moon swim
under three agate veins of cloud,
casting crisps of false silver-plate
to the thirsty granite fringe of the shore.
Yesterday, the sun’s gregarious sparklings;
tonight, the moon has no satellite.
All this spendthrift, in-the-house summer,
our yacht-jammed harbor
lay unattempted—
pictorial to me like your portrait.
I wonder who posed you so artfully
for it in the prow of his Italian skiff,
like a maiden figurehead without legs to fly.
Time lent its wings. Last year
our drunken quarrels had no explanation,
except everything, except everything.
Did the oak provoke the lightning,
when we heard its boughs and foliage fall?…
My wooden beach-ladder swings by one bolt,
and repeats its single creaking rhythm—
I cannot go down to the sea.
After so much logical interrogation,
I can do nothing that matters.
The east wind carries disturbance for leagues—
I think of my son and daughter,
and three stepdaughters
on far-out ledges
washed by the dreaded clock-clock of the waves …
gradually rotting the bulwark where I stand.
Their father’s unmotherly touch
trembles on a loosened rail.
Index of Titles and First Lines
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Poem titles are italicized.
A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,—
A miniature mad talent? Sylvia Plath
A mongrel image for all summer, our scene at breakfast
Abraham Lincoln
After the Democratic Convention
Again and then again … the year is born
All day I bang and bang at you in thought
“All our French poets can turn an inspired line
Another Summer
Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise
At Beverly Farms, a portly, uncomfortable boulder
At dawn, the crisp goodbye of friends; at night
Back and forth, back and forth
Beethoven
Between the Porch and the Altar
Beyond the Alps
Blizzard in Cambridge
Bobby Delano
Boston’s used bookshops, anachronisms from London
BRINGING A TURTLE HOME
Brunetto Latini
Burnished, burned-out, still burning as the year
Buttercups
By miracle, I left the party half
Caligula
Caroline in Sickness
Caught between two streams of traffic, in the gloom
Circles
Close the Book
Coleridge
Coleridge stands, he flamed for the one friend.…
Couple, The
Dark swallows will doubtless come back killing
Day, The
Dolphin
Dream, the Republican Convention
Edwards’ great millstone and rock
End of a Year
Epilogue
Exorcism
Eye and Tooth
Eyes shut, I hunt the vision through my eyelids
Ezra Pound
Fall 1961
Father’s Bedroom
Fishnet
Five Dreams
For Elizabeth Bishop 4
For Robert Kennedy 1925–68
For Sale
For the Union Dead
Gone now the baby’s nurse
Grass Fires
Half a year, then a year and a half, then
HARRIET, BORN JANUARY 4, 1957
Her Dead Brother
Here in my workroom, in its listlessness
History
History has to live with what was here
Home After Three Months Away
Horizontal on a deckchair in the ward
Hospital I
I fish until the clouds turn blue
I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid
I saw the sky descending, black and white
I saw the spiders marching through the air
“… I was playing records on Sunday
In my Father’s bedroom
In the Cage
In the realistic memory
Infinite, The
It was a Maine lobster town—
It’s amazing
Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts
July in Washington
Last Walk?
Late Summer
Leaves espaliered jade on our barn’s loft window
Lesson, The
Life, hope, they conquer death, generally, always
Logan Airport, Boston
Long Summer
Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich, A
Man and Wife
Marriage
Meeting his mother makes him lose ten years
Memories of West Street and Lepke
Mermaid
Mermaid Emerging
MOTHER AND SON
Mr. Edwards and the Spider
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise
My namesake, Little Boots, Caligula
My sidestepping and obliquities, unable
My whole eye was sunset red
Napoleon
Nautilus Island’s hermit
Near the Ocean
New Year’s Day
NEW YEAR’S EVE
New York
Nihilist as Hero, The
91 Revere Street
No longer to lie reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Notice
O to break loose, like the chinook
Obit
… “Oh, Oh”
OLD ORDER, THE
On the End of the Phone
On the road to Bangor, we spotted a domed stone
On this book, large enough to write on
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
Our cookbook is bound like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—
Our Dead Poets
Our love will not come back on fortune’s wheel—
OUR TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY I (ELIZABETH)
Pastime
Pigeons
Plotted
Poet at Seven, The
Poor sheepish plaything
Public Garden, The
Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The
Randall Jarrell
Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge
Records
Redcliffe Square
Risen from the blindness of teaching to bright snow
Robert Frost
Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone
Sailing Home from Rapallo
Seesaw
Shaving
Shaving’s the one time I see my face
Shifting Colors
SHOES
Skunk Hour
Soft Wood
Sometimes I have supposed seals
Square of Black
Suburban Surf
Summer
Summer Tides
Sylvia Plath
T. S. Eliot
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed
Ten Minutes
Terminal Days at Beverly Farms
Thanks-Offering for Recovery
That hill pushed off by itself was always dear
That night the mustard bush and goldenrod
That unhoped-for Irish sunspoiled April day
The account of him is platitudinous, worldly and fond, but he has
The airy, going house grows small
The book is finished and the air is lighter
The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo
“The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open
The institutions of society
The labor to breathe
that younger, rawer air
The lifers file into the hall
The Lion of St. Mark’s upon the glass
The new painting must live on iron rations
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore
The night dark before its hour—
The old South Boston Aquarium stands
The resident doctor said
The same old flights, the same old homecomings
The single sheet keeps shifting on the double bed
The stiff spokes of this wheel
Their lines string out from nowhere, stretch to sorrow
These conquered kings pass furiously away
They are all outline, uniformly gray
This morning, as if I were home in Boston, snow
Those Before Us
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
To Delmore Schwartz
“To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage”
Tonight
Tonight the full moon is stopped by trees
Too late, all shops closed—
Too many go express to the house of rest
Tops of the midnight trees move helter-skelter
“Twice in the past two weeks I think I met
Unorthodox sleep in the active hour
Unwanted
WAKING EARLY SUNDAY MORNING
Waking in the Blue
Water
We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit!
We were middle-class and verismo
“We’re all Americans, except the Doc
“When the Pulitzers showered on some dope
When the timeless, daily, tedious affair
When we were children our papas were stout
Where the Rainbow Ends
Who loved more? William Carlos Williams
WILDROSE
Will Not Come Back
William Carlos Williams
WINDOW
Words for Hart Crane
You lie in my insomniac arms
Your blouse
Your nurse could only speak Italian
ALSO BY ROBERT LOWELL
Land of Unlikeness (1944)
Lord Weary’s Castle (1946)
The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)
Life Studies (1959)
Phaedra (translation) (1961)
Imitations (1961)
For the Union Dead (1964)
The Old Glory (plays) (1965)
Near the Ocean (1967)
The Voyage & Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (1969)
Prometheus Bound (translation) (1969)
Notebook 1967–68 (1969) (Notebook, revised and expanded edition, 1970)
History (1973)
For Lizzie and Harriet (1973)
The Dolphin (1973)
Selected Poems (1976) (revised edition, 1977)