1. FLASHBACK TO WASHINGTON SQUARE 1966
Two babies in your stroller, perhaps three,
all four of you in Bloomingdale polo coats;
they seemed to rush on one course, you another—
your brute joy in slanting them to the curb.…
We were Sunday people gone before we met.
We meet too many people, wives and husbands;
the family endures, the child is never weaned,
parents never err in guessing wrong.…
How mean the drink-money for the hour of joy,
its breathy charity and brag of body.…
I hesitate to argue for our love unloosed—
though we earn less credit than we burn,
joy in the moment crowns credulity,
dying to be what we are.
One foot in last year, one in last July,
the motionless month, the day that lasts a month.
We reach mid-journey, you lag by fifteen summers,
half a year more than Harriet’s whole life.
The clock looks over my shoulder crazily.
This hospital is tinder … retards the sun,
melancholia sprinkles the blind root,
the cat nibbles little shoots foretelling rain,
sultry August is my wandering eye.
Hope grows less malign or thinks it might,
I wait for the hospital to catch on fire.
Keep me in your shadow … gold grizzling your undyed hair,
frail body of an athlete, her big hand—
your honor is humor and fragility.
In hospital I read the news to sleep:
the Fourth of July, Bastille Day, the 16th
your Birthday … my two-month bankholiday.
August is summer lost in England.
Green nettles prick the oversoil with acid,
eat up the vestiges of last summer’s clearing.…
One simultaneous sickness was enough
for us. From Brighton to Folkestone, the heads lie prone,
the patients mend, the doctors die in peace,
plucking the transient artificial flower—
the father fails to mail a single lobster
or salty nude to prove his pilgrimage.
I have no one to stamp my letters … I love you,
a shattered lens to burn the clinging smoke.
“I think of you every minute of the day,
I love you every minute of the day;
you gone is hollow, bored, unbearable.
I feel under some emotional anaesthetic,
unable to plan or think or write or feel;
mais ca ira, these things will go, I feel
in an odd way against appearances,
things will come out right with us, perhaps.
As you say, we got across the Godstow Marsh,
reached Cumberland and its hairbreadth Roman roads,
climbed Hadrian’s Wall, and scared the stinking Pict.
Marriage? That’s another story. We saw
the diamond glare of morning on the tar.
For a minute had the road as if we owned it.”
The bathwater honks in and in, ten minutes, twenty,
twists of fire and cooling jobless bubbles;
I am exposed, keep guessing if I can take
the chill of the morning and its dressing.
The bathroom is a daub of daylight,
the beefy, flustered pigeons swish their quills—
in time the pigeons will forget the window;
I cannot—I, in flight without a ledge.
Up the carpetted stairway, your shoes clack,
clack nearer, and absentmindedly withdraw,
life withdrawn like a bad lead in poker.
Life is withdrawn, but after all it will be.…
It’s safer outside; in the open air,
the car flying forward to hit us, has room to swerve.