Door in the Mountain. Jean Valentine
by the watery sun.
You, with no sense of giving,
Brought all the dangers I no longer dared;
Netted the wind that roared through my rented bed,
And, poised like Eros over Picadilly,
Were always there.
I cannot find the words to leave you with.
This way love's conversation, the body and mind of it, goes
On after love: we shall come to call this love,
And this roar in our ears which before very long
We become, we shall call our song.
CambridgeApril 27, 1957
Your letter made me see myself grown old
With only the past's poor wing-dust shadows to hold,
Dressed in violet hand-me-downs, half-asleep, only half,
Queer as nines in the violet dust of my mind,
Leaning in some sloping attic, like this one where I write
You all night,
The wet, metaphorical Cambridge wind
Sorry on the skylight.
The New England landscape goes
Like money: but here on Agassiz Walk we save
Everything we have
Under Great-Aunt Georgie's georgian bed;
A knot garden roots through Great-Aunt Georgie's toes
Three floors below: when summer comes, God knows
We'll dry the herbs Aunt Georgie grows:
Who knows, who knows
What goes on in her head.
I read Thoreau myself, I listen for Thoreau
Up here; wonder if there's a burial mound
Anywhere for Henry: PAX, AETAT.
45. Quiet Desperation. REQUIESCAT,
Ducky: one of these nice days
My niece, the one with one glass eye,
Is driving me out to Walden Pond:
Cross my heart, I hope to die.
New YorkApril 27, 1962
When we get old, they say, we'll remember
Things that had sunk below the mind's waking reach
In our distracted years; someday, knees blanketed, I will reach out
To touch your face, your brown hair.
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth. I rest, tending children, in hollow, light rooms, Sleep in their milky fingers, after years Howling up on the tiles while my goblins threw their shoes.
The child I carry lies alone:
Which hag did we not invite to its conception?
I cat-nap, remembering the tiles.
And you?
Steps on the sidewalk outside my barred New York windows
Land on the cracks, let out the bears,
Loose them on the child who is not there;
Footsteps that gleam in their echo of SS men's heels
Off-stage in my first movies: approaching the door.
We huddle inside and wake to remember it's Peace.
Peace. But you are not here, nor are you dead.
No-one forgot my birthday. Twenty-eight.
How shall we celebrate?
Fetch my blanket, dearest, there's something in the air,
Dark, quick, quicksilver, dark eyes, brown hair,
Bringing all the presents: someone is coming late:
The babies cry, the bell rings in thin air.
September 1963
We've been at home four years, in a kind of peace,
A kind of kingdom: brushing our yellow hair
At the tower's small window,
Playing hop-scotch on the grass.
With twenty other Gullivers
I hover at the door,
Watch you shy through this riddle of primary colors,
The howling razzle-dazzle of your peers.
Tears, stay with me, stay with me, tears.
Dearest, go: this is what
School is, what the world is.
Have I sewed my hands to yours?
Five minutes later in the eye of God
You and Kate and Jeremy are dancing.
Glad, derelict, I find a park bench, read
Birmingham. Birmingham. Birmingham.
White tears on a white ground,
White world going on, white hand in hand,
World without end.
Riverside
Now, with March forcing our brittle spines like first childbirth,
Scattering our notes, making the house cold inside,
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