A mongrel image for all summer, our scene at breakfast:
a bent iron fence of straggly wildrose glowing
below the sausage-rolls of new-mown hay—
Sheridan splashing in his blue balloon tire:
whatever he touches he’s told not to touch
and whatever he reaches tips over on him.
Things have gone on and changed, the next oldest
daughter bleaching her hair three shades lighter with beer—
but if you’re not a blonde, it doesn’t work.…
Sleeping, the always finding you there with day,
the endless days revising our revisions—
everyone’s wildrose?… And our golden summer
as much as such people can. When most happiest
how do I know I can keep any of us alive?
Those warmblooded watchers of children—do not say
I have never known how to talk to dolphins,
when I try to they just swim away.
We often share the new life, the new life—
I haven’t stilled my New England shades by combing
the Chinese cowlicks from our twisted garden,
or sorted out the fluff in the boiler room,
or stumbled on the lost mouth of the cesspool.
Our time is shorter and brighter like the summer,
each day the chill thrill of the first day at school.
Coughs echo like swimmers shouting in a pool—
a mother, unlike most fathers, must be manly.
Will a second dachshund die of a misborn lung?
Will the burned child drop her second boiling kettle?
Small-soul-pleasing, loved with condescension,
even through the cro-magnon tirades of six,
the last madness of child-gaiety
before the trouble of the world shall hit.
Being chased upstairs is still instant-heaven,
not yet tight-lipped weekends of voluntary scales,
accompanying on a recorder carols
rescored by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Kent.
Though burned, you are hopeful, experience cannot tell you
experience is what you do not want to experience.
Are teenagers the dominant of all ache?
Or flirting seniles, their conversation three noises,
their life-expectancy shorter than the martyrs?
How all ages hate another age,
and lifelong wonder what was the perfect age!
(A Dream in the Future)
3, 4, and then 5 children, fortunately
fortune’s hostages and not all ours—
the sea comes in to us, we move it outward.…
I’m somewhere, nowhere; four Boston houses I grew from,
slash-brick expressionist New England fall;
I walk, run, gay with frost … with Harriet …
a barracuda settlement. (Santo Domingo,
quick divorces, solid alimony,
its dictator’s marina unsafe because of sharks
checking in twice daily like grinning, fawning puppies
for our sewage, even for their own excrement.…)
“I am not sure I want to see her again.”
Harriet laughing without malice … with delight:
“That’s how mother talks about you.”
The one moment that says, I am, I am, I am.…
My girlfriends tell me I must stay in New York,
one never has such new friends anywhere;
but they don’t understand,
wherever he is is my friend.