New Selected Poems Read online

  I would squirm. I dared not look up because I knew that the Commander abhorred Mother’s dominion over my father, thought my asthma, supposedly brought on by the miasmal damp of Washington, a myth, and considered our final flight to Boston a scandal.

  My mother, on the other hand, would talk back sharply and explain to Billy that there was nothing second-string about the Boston Yard except its commandant, Admiral De Stahl, who had gone into a frenzy when he learned that my parents, supposed to live at the naval yard, had set themselves up without his permission at 91 Revere Street. The Admiral had commanded Father to reside at the yard, but Mother had bravely and stubbornly held on at Revere Street.

  “A really great person,” she would say, “knows how to be courteous to his superiors.”

  Then Commander Harkness would throw up his hands in despair and make a long buffoonish speech. “Would you believe it?” he’d say. “De Stahl, the anile slob, would make Bob Lowell sleep seven nights a week and twice on Sundays in that venerable twenty-room pile provided for his third in command at the yard. ‘Bobby me boy,’ the Man says, ‘henceforth I will that you sleep wifeless. You’re to push your beauteous mug into me boudoir each night at ten-thirty and each morn at six. And don’t mind me laying to alongside the Missus De Stahl,’ the old boy squeaks; ‘we’re just two oldsters as weak as babies. But Robbie Boy,’ he says, ‘don’t let me hear of you hanging on your telephone wire and bending off the ear of that forsaken frau of yours sojourning on Revere Street. I might have to phone you in a hurry, if I should happen to have me stroke.’”

  Taking hold of the table with both hands, the Commander tilted his chair backwards and gaped down at me with sorrowing Gargantuan wonder: “I know why Young Bob is an only child.”

  To Delmore Schwartz

  (Cambridge 1946)

  We couldn’t even keep the furnace lit!

  Even when we had disconnected it,

  the antiquated

  refrigerator gurgled mustard gas

  through your mustard-yellow house,

  and spoiled our long maneuvered visit

  from T. S. Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware.…

  Your stuffed duck craned toward Harvard from my trunk:

  its bill was a black whistle, and its brow

  was high and thinner than a baby’s thumb;

  its webs were tough as toenails on its bough.

  It was your first kill; you had rushed it home,

  pickled in a tin wastebasket of rum—

  it looked through us, as if it’d died dead drunk.

  You must have propped its eyelids with a nail,

  and yet it lived with us and met our stare,

  Rabelaisian, lubricious, drugged. And there,

  perched on my trunk and typing-table,

  it cooled our universal

  Angst a moment, Delmore. We drank and eyed

  the chicken-hearted shadows of the world.

  Underseas fellows, nobly mad,

  we talked away our friends. “Let Joyce and Freud,

  the Masters of Joy,

  be our guests here,” you said. The room was filled

  with cigarette smoke circling the paranoid,

  inert gaze of Coleridge, back

  from Malta—his eyes lost in flesh, lips baked and black.

  Your tiger kitten, Oranges,

  cartwheeled for joy in a ball of snarls.

  You said:

  “We poets in our youth begin in sadness;

  thereof in the end come despondency and madness;

  Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!”

  The Charles

  River was turning silver. In the ebb-

  light of morning, we stuck

  the duck

  -’s web-

  foot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we’d killed.

  Words for Hart Crane

  “When the Pulitzers showered on some dope

  or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap,

  few people would consider why I took

  to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s

  phoney gold-plated laurels to the birds.

  Because I knew my Whitman like a book,

  stranger in America, tell my country: I,

  Catullus redivivus, once the rage

  of the Village and Paris, used to play my role

  of homosexual, wolfing the stray lambs

  who hungered by the Place de la Concorde.

  My profit was a pocket with a hole.

  Who asks for me, the Shelley of my age,

  must lay his heart out for my bed and board.”

  Terminal Days at Beverly Farms

  At Beverly Farms, a portly, uncomfortable boulder

  bulked in the garden’s center—

  an irregular Japanese touch.

  After his Bourbon “old fashioned,” Father,

  bronzed, breezy, a shade too ruddy,

  swayed as if on deck-duty

  under his six pointed star-lantern—

  last July’s birthday present.

  He smiled his oval Lowell smile,

  he wore his cream gabardine dinner-jacket,

  and indigo cummerbund.

  His head was efficient and hairless,

  his newly dieted figure was vitally trim.

  Father and Mother moved to Beverly Farms

  to be a two minute walk from the station,

  half an hour by train from the Boston doctors.

  They had no sea-view,

  but sky-blue tracks of the commuters’ railroad shone

  like a double-barrelled shotgun

  through the scarlet late August sumac,

  multiplying like cancer

  at their garden’s border.

  Father had had two coronaries.

  He still treasured underhand economies,

  but his best friend was his little black Chevie,

  garaged like a sacrificial steer

  with gilded hooves,

  yet sensationally sober,

  and with less side than an old dancing pump.

  The local dealer, a “buccaneer,”

  had been bribed a “king’s ransom”

  to quickly deliver a car without chrome.

  Each morning at eight-thirty,

  inattentive and beaming,

  loaded with his “calc” and “trig” books,

  his clipper ship statistics,

  and his ivory slide rule,

  Father stole off with the Chevie

  to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem.

  He called the curator

  “the commander of the Swiss Navy.”

  Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.

  His vision was still twenty-twenty.

  After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,

  his last words to Mother were:

  “I feel awful.”

  Father’s Bedroom

  In my Father’s bedroom:

  blue threads as thin

  as pen-writing on the bedspread,

  blue dots on the curtains,

  a blue kimono,

  Chinese sandals with blue plush straps.

  The broad-planked floor

  had a sandpapered neatness.

  The clear glass bed-lamp

  with a white doily shade

  was still raised a few

  inches by resting on volume two

  of Lafcadio Hearn’s

  Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan.

  Its warped olive cover

  was punished like a rhinoceros hide.

  In the flyleaf:

  “Robbie from Mother.”

  Years later in the same hand:

  “This book has had hard usage

  on the Yangtze River, China.

  It was left under an open

  porthole in a storm.”

  For Sale

  Poor sheepish plaything,

  organized with prodigal animosity,

  lived i
n just a year—

  my Father’s cottage at Beverly Farms

  was on the market the month he died.

  Empty, open, intimate,

  its town-house furniture

  had an on tiptoe air

  of waiting for the mover

  on the heels of the undertaker.

  Ready, afraid

  of living alone till eighty,

  Mother mooned in a window,

  as if she had stayed on a train

  one stop past her destination.

  Sailing Home from Rapallo

  (February 1954)

  Your nurse could only speak Italian,

  but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week,

  and tears ran down my cheeks.…

  When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body,

  the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova

  was breaking into fiery flower.

  The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds

  blasting like jack-hammers across

  the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner,

  recalled the clashing colors of my Ford.

  Mother travelled first-class in the hold;

  her Risorgimento black and gold casket

  was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.…

  While the passengers were tanning

  on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs,

  our family cemetery in Dunbarton

  lay under the White Mountains

  in the sub-zero weather.

  The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone—

  so many of its deaths had been midwinter.

  Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts,

  its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts.

  A fence of iron spear-hafts

  black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates.

  The only “unhistoric” soul to come here

  was Father, now buried beneath his recent

  unweathered pink-veined slice of marble.

  Even the Latin of his Lowell motto:

  Occasionem cognosce,

  seemed too businesslike and pushing here,

  where the burning cold illuminated

  the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives:

  twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks.

  Frost had given their names a diamond edge.…

  In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin,

  Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL.

  The corpse

  was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

  Waking in the Blue

  The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,

  rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head

  propped on The Meaning of Meaning.

  He catwalks down our corridor.

  Azure day

  makes my agonized blue window bleaker.

  Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.

  Absence! My heart grows tense

  as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.

  (This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)

  What use is my sense of humor?

  I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,

  once a Harvard all-American fullback,

  (if such were possible!)

  still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,

  as he soaks, a ramrod

  with the muscle of a seal

  in his long tub,

  vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.

  A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,

  worn all day, all night,

  he thinks only of his figure,

  of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—

  more cut off from words than a seal.

  This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;

  the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”

  Porcellian ’29,

  a replica of Louis XVI

  without the wig—

  redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,

  as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit

  and horses at chairs.

  These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.

  In between the limits of day,

  hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts

  and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle

  of the Roman Catholic attendants.

  (There are no Mayflower

  screwballs in the Catholic Church.)

  After a hearty New England breakfast,

  I weigh two hundred pounds

  this morning. Cock of the walk,

  I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey

  before the metal shaving mirrors,

  and see the shaky future grow familiar

  in the pinched, indigenous faces

  of these thoroughbred mental cases,

  twice my age and half my weight.

  We are all old-timers,

  each of us holds a locked razor.

  Home After Three Months Away

  Gone now the baby’s nurse,

  a lioness who ruled the roost

  and made the Mother cry.

  She used to tie

  gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze—

  three months they hung like soggy toast

  on our eight foot magnolia tree,

  and helped the English sparrows

  weather a Boston winter.

  Three months, three months!

  Is Richard now himself again?

  Dimpled with exaltation,

  my daughter holds her levee in the tub.

  Our noses rub,

  each of us pats a stringy lock of hair—

  they tell me nothing’s gone.

  Though I am forty-one,

  not forty now, the time I put away

  was child’s-play. After thirteen weeks

  my child still dabs her cheeks

  to start me shaving. When

  we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,

  she changes to a boy,

  and floats my shaving brush

  and washcloth in the flush.…

  Dearest, I cannot loiter here

  in lather like a polar bear.

  Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil.

  Three stories down below,

  a choreman tends our coffin’s length of soil,

  and seven horizontal tulips blow.

  Just twelve months ago,

  these flowers were pedigreed

  imported Dutchmen; now no one need

  distinguish them from weed.

  Bushed by the late spring snow,

  they cannot meet

  another year’s snowballing enervation.

  I keep no rank nor station.

  Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.

  Memories of West Street and Lepke

  Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

  in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,

  I hog a whole house on Boston’s

  “hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”

  where even the man

  scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,

  has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,

  and is a “young Republican.”

  I have a nine months’ daughter,

  young enough to be my granddaughter.

  Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.

  These are the tranquillized Fifties,

  and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?

  I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,

  and made my manic statement,

  telling off the state and president, and then

  sat waiting sentence in the bull pen

  beside a Negro boy with curlicues

  of marijuana in his hair.

  Given a year,

  I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short

  enclosure like my school so
ccer court,

  and saw the Hudson River once a day

  through sooty clothesline entanglements

  and bleaching khaki tenements.

  Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,

  a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)

  and fly-weight pacifist,

  so vegetarian,

  he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.

  He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,

  the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.

  Hairy, muscular, suburban,

  wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,

  they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

  I was so out of things, I’d never heard

  of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  “Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.

  “No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”

  He taught me the “hospital tuck,”

  and pointed out the T-shirted back

  of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,

  there piling towels on a rack,

  or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full

  of things forbidden the common man:

  a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American

  flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.

  Flabby, bald, lobotomized,

  he drifted in a sheepish calm,

  where no agonizing reappraisal

  jarred his concentration on the electric chair—

  hanging like an oasis in his air

  of lost connections.…

  Man and Wife

  Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;

  the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;

  in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,

  abandoned, almost Dionysian.

  At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,

  blossoms on our magnolia ignite

  the morning with their murderous five days’ white.

  All night I’ve held your hand,

  as if you had

  a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—

  its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—

  and dragged me home alive.… Oh my Petite,

  clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve:

  you were in your twenties, and I,

  once hand on glass