“What a record year, even for us—
last March, I knew you’d manage by yourself,
you were the true you; now finally
your clowning makes visitors want to call a taxi,
you tease the patients as if they were your friends,
your real friends who want to save your image
from this genteel, disgraceful hospital.
Your trousers are worn to a mirror.… That new creature,
when I hear her name, I have to laugh.
You left two houses and two thousand books,
a workbarn by the ocean, and two slaves
to kneel and wait upon you hand and foot—
tell us why in the name of Jesus.” Why
am I clinging here so foolishly alone?
“In London last month I encountered only
exhausted traffic and exhausting men—
the taxi driver might kill us, but at least he cared.”
Cold summer London, your purer cold is Maine,
where each empty sweater and hollow bookcase hurts,
every pretext for their service gone.
We wanted to be buried together in Maine …
you didn’t, “impractical, cold, out of touch.”
The terrible postcards you bought and stamped for me
go off to Harriet, the Horseguards, the Lifeguards,
the Lord Mayor’s Chariot, Queen Bess who could not bear—
true as anything else to fling a child.…
I shout into the air, my voice comes back—
nothing reaches your black silhouette.
3. OLD SNAPSHOT FROM VENICE 1952
From the salt age, yes from the salt age,
courtesans, Christians fill the churchyard close;
that silly swelled tree is a spook with a twig for a head.
Carpaccio’s Venice is as wide as the world,
Jerome and his lion lope to work unfeared.…
In Torcello, the stone lion I snapped behind you,
venti anni fa, still keeps his poodled hair—
wherever I move this snapshot, you have moved—
it’s twenty years. The courtesans and lions
swim in Carpaccio’s brewing tealeaf color.
Was he the first in the trade of painting to tell tales?…
You are making Boston in the sulfury a.m.,
dropping Harriet at camp, Old Love,
Eternity, You … a future told by tealeaves.