3.
OUR TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY 1 (ELIZABETH)
Leaves espaliered jade on our barn’s loft window,
sky stretched on a two-pane sash … it doesn’t open:
stab of roofdrip, this leaf, that leaf twings,
an assault the heartless leaf rejects.
The picture is too perfect for our lives:
in Chardin’s stills, the paint bleeds, juice is moving.
We have weathered the wet of twenty years.
Many cripples have won their place in the race;
Immanuel Kant remained unmarried and sane,
no one could Byronize his walk to class.
Often the player outdistances the game.…
This week is our first this summer to go unfretted;
we smell as green as the weeds that bruise the flower—
a house eats up the wood that made it.
5.
THE HUMAN CONDITION (HARRIET)
Should someone human, not just our machinery,
fire on sight, and end the world and us,
surely he’ll say he chose the lesser evil—
our wars were simpler than our marriages,
sea monster on sea monster drowning Saturday night—
the acid shellfish that cannot breathe fresh air.…
Home things can’t stand up to the strain of the earth.
I wake to your cookout and Charles Ives
lulling my terror, lifting my fell of hair,
as David calmed the dark nucleus of Saul.
I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty,
young when the century mislays my name—
no date I can name you can be long enough,
the impossible is allied to fact.
6.
THE HARD WAY (HARRIET)
Don’t hate your parents, or your children will hire
unknown men to bury you at your own cost.
Child, forty years younger, will we live to see
your destiny written by our hands rewritten,
your adolescence snap the feathered barb,
the phosphorescence of your wake?
Under the stars, one sleeps, is free from household,
tufts of grass and dust and tufts of grass—
night oriented to the star of youth.
I only learn from error; till lately I trusted
in the practice of my hand. In backward Maine,
ice goes in season to the tropical,
then the mash freezes back to ice, and then
the ice is broken by another wave.
8.
HEAT
For the first time in fifteen years, a furnace
Maine night that would have made summer anywhere,
in Brazil or Boston. The wooden rooms of our house
dry, redoubling their wooden farmhouse smell,
honest wooden ovens shaking with desire.
We feared the pressure was too curative.…
Outside, a young seal festers on the beach,
head snapped off, the color of a pig;
much lonelier, this formula for cures.
One nostril shut, my other attenuated—
it’s strange tonight I want to pencil myself
do-its on bits of paper. I must remember
to breathe through my mouth. Breathe only from my mouth …
as my mouth keeps shutting out the breath of morning.