by Jane Kenyon
From Room to Room
(1978)
POEMS
by
JANE KENYON
From Room to Room
(1978)
for my family
--
1
Under a Blue Mountain
For the Night
The mare kicks
in her darkening stall, knocks
over a bucket.
The goose . . .
The cow keeps a peaceful brain
behind her broad face.
Last light moves
through cracks in the wall,
over bales of hay.
And the bat lets
go of the rafter, falls
into black air.
Leaving Town
It was late August when we left. I gave away my plants, all but a few. The huge van, idling at the curb all morning, was suddenly gone.
We got into the car. Friends handed us the cats through half-closed windows. We backed out to the street, the trailer behind, dumb and stubborn.
We talked little, listening to a Tiger double-header on the car radio. Dust and cat hair floated in the light. I ate a cheese sandwich I didn’t want.
During the second game, the signal faded until it was too faint to hear. I felt like a hand without an arm. We drove all night and part of the next morning.
From Room to Room
Here in this house, among photographs
of your ancestors, their hymnbooks and old
shoes . . .
I move from room to room,
a little dazed, like the fly. I watch it
bump against each window.
I am clumsy here, thrusting
slabs of maple into the stove.
Out of my body for a while,
weightless in space . . .
Sometimes
the wind against the clapboard
sounds like a car driving up to the house.
My people are not here, my mother
and father, my brother. I talk
to the cats about weather.
“Blessed be the tie that binds .. .”
we sing in the church down the road.
And how does it go from there? The tie . . .
the tether, the hose carrying
oxygen to the astronaut,
turning, turning outside the hatch,
taking a look around.
Here
You always belonged here.
You were theirs, certain as a rock.
I’m the one who worries
if I fit in with the furniture
and the landscape.
But I “follow too much
the devices and desires of my own heart.”
Already the curves in the road
are familiar to me, and the mountain
in all kinds of light,
treating all people the same.
And when I come over the hill,
I see the house, with its generous
and firm proportions, smoke
rising gaily from the chimney.
I feel my life start up again,
like a cutting when it grows
the first pale and tentative
root hair in a glass of water.
Two Days Alone
You are not here. I keep
the fire going, though it isn’t cold,
feeding the stove-animal.
I read the evening paper
with five generations
looking over my shoulder.
In the woodshed
darkness is all around and inside me.
The only sound I hear
is my own breathing. Maybe
I don’t belong here.
Nothing tells me that I don’t.
The Cold
I don’t know why it made me happy to see the pond ice over in a day, turning first hazy, then white. Or why I was glad when the thermometer read twenty-four below, and I came back to bed—the pillows cold, as if I had not been there two minutes before.
This Morning
The barn bears the weight
of the first heavy snow
without complaint.
White breath of cows
rises in the tie-up, a man
wearing a frayed winter jacket
reaches for his milking stool
in the dark.
The cows have gone into the ground,
and the man,
his wife beside him now.
A nuthatch drops
to the ground, feeding
on sunflower seed and bits of bread
I scattered on the snow.
The cats doze near the stove.
They lift their heads
as the plow goes down the road,
making the house
tremble as it passes.
The Thimble
I found a silver thimble
on the humusy floor of the woodshed,
neither large nor small, the open end
bent oval by the wood’s weight,
or because the woman who wore it
shaped it to fit her finger.
Its decorative border of leaves, graceful
and regular, like the edge of acanthus
on the tin ceiling at church ...
repeating itself over our heads
while we speak in unison
words the wearer must have spoken
Changes
The cast-iron kitchen range
grows rust like fur
in the cold barn. Oh,
we still keep animals—cats—
inside the house, while
the last load of hay
turns dusty on the barn floor.
Gazing at us from parlor walls,
the gallery of ancestors
must think were foolish,
like Charlie Dolbey,
who used to chase cars
and bicycles, howling,
waving his arms in the air.
Finding a Long Grey Hair
I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long grey hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.
Hanging Pictures in Nanny’s Room
When people reminisce about her they say how cross she was. I saw a photograph of her down in the parlor, her jaw like a piece of granite. You’d have to plow around it.
But look at this: huge garlands of pink roses on the sunny walls. A border near the ceiling undulates like the dancers’ arms in Matisse’s painting.
I put up a poster of Mary Cassatt’s “Woman Bathing.” No doubt Nanny bent here summer mornings, her dress down about her waist, water dripping through her fingers into the china bowl.
In the drawer of the dresser I found a mouse nest, with its small hoard of seeds. But also I found a pincushion, many-colored squares of silk sewn together and then embroidered. Nanny taught the girls in the family how to do fancywork. And if the stitches weren’t good enough, you had to take them out and start over.
And if people weren’t good enough, if your husband who worked on the railroad was a philanderer, well, you could move back to the house where you were born. You could go up to your room and rock awhile, or read from the Scriptures, or snip rom the newspaper the latest episode of Pollyanna: Or, The Glad Book.
You pasted the clippings into an outdated Report on Agriculture,
a big book, well bound. The story could go on for a long time.. . .
And when your sister’s girls came upstairs to visit their fierce aunt, you would read aloud: “Miss Polly Harrington entered her kitchen hurriedly this June morning. Miss Polly did not usually make hurried movements; she specially prided herself on her repose of manner ...”
In Several Colors
Every morning, cup of coffee
in hand, I look out at the mountain
Ordinarily, it’s blue, but today
it’s the color of an eggplant.
And the sky turns
from gray to pale apricot
as the sun rolls up
Main Street in Andover.
I study the cat’s face
and find a trace of white
around each eye, as if
he made himself up today
for a part in the opera.
The Clothes Pin
How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line
with a gray-brown wooden clothes pin!
2
Edges of the Map
The Needle
Grandmother, you are as pale
as Christ’s hands on the wall above you.
When you close your eyes you are all
white—hair, skin, gown. I blink
to find you again in the bed.
I remember once you told me
you weighed a hundred and twenty-three,
the day you married Grandfather.
You had handsome legs. He watched you
working at the sink.
The soft ring is loose on your hand.
I hated coming here.
I know you can’t understand me.
I’ll try again,
like the young nurse with the needle
My Mother
My mother comes back from a trip downtown to the dime store. She has brought me a surprise. It is still in her purse.
She is wearing her red shoes with straps across the in-step. They fasten with small white buttons, like the eyes of fish.
She brings back zippers and spools of thread, yellow and green, for her work, which always takes her far away, even though she works upstairs, in the room next to mine.
She is wearing her blue plaid full-skirted dress with the large collar, her hair fastened up off her neck. She looks pretty. She always dresses up when she goes downtown.
Now she opens her straw purse, which looks like a small suitcase. She hands me the new toy: a wooden paddle with a red rubber ball attached to it by an elastic string. Sometimes when she goes downtown, I think she will not come back.
Cleaning the Closet
This must be the suit you wore
to your father’s funeral:
the jacket
dusty, after nine years,
and hanger marks on the shoulders,
sloping like the lines
on a woman’s stomach, after
having a baby, or like the down-
turned corners
of your mouth, as you watch me
fumble to put the suit
back where it was.
Ironing Grandmother’s Tablecloth
As a bride, you made it smooth,
pulling the edges straight, the corners square.
For years you went over the same piece
of cloth, the way Grandfather walked to work.
This morning I move the iron across the damask,
back and forth, up and down. You are ninety-four.
Each day you dress yourself, then go back to bed
and listen to radio sermons, staring at the ceiling.
When I visit, you tell me your troubles:
how my father left poisoned grapefruit on the back
porch at Christmas, how somebody comes at night
to throw stones at the house.
The streets of your brain become smaller,
old houses torn down. Talking to me
is hard work, keeping things straight,
whose child I am, whether I have children.
The Box of Beads
This morning I came across
a box of my grandmother’s beads,
all tangled, and coming unstrung.
I hardly knew my mother’s parents.
They lived in California—the edge of the map—
when I was growing up.
Grandfather fastened this necklace
while she held her hair.
Looking at him in the dressing-table mirror,
she let her hair
fall on the backs of his hands.
What do I know about her?
She loved to have company for dinner.
She sang contralto in the choir.
When they lived in Winnetka,
before my mother was born,
she used to put on a hat, take the train
into Chicago, and have coconut pie
at Marshall Field’s.
I went to visit when I was seven,
a long train ride across the country.
One day she took me to the Farmer’s Market
in Los Angeles. She bought me
a beaded belt that said “California,”
and a Mexican jumping bean in a plastic box.
She wore perfume.
She had a kumquat tree in her garden.
When she died, cousins sent me
her Turkish coffeepot, and my mother
gave me this box of beads.
Here is an apricot-colored glass
pendant. Some long, opaque
black beads . . . some green ones, small and bright
as fresh peas. Here is the clasp
that held them around her neck.
2
Colors
At a Motel near O’Hare Airport
I sit by the window all morning
watching the planes make final approaches.
Each of them gathers and steadies itself
like a horse clearing a jump.
I look up to see them pass,
so close I can see the rivets
on their bellies, and under their wings,
and at first I feel ashamed,
as if I had looked up a woman’s skirt.
How beautiful that one is,
slim-bodied and delicate
as a fox, poised and intent
on stealing a chicken
from a farmyard.
And now a larger one, its
tail shaped like a whale’s.
They call it sounding
when a whale dives,
and the tail comes out of the water
and flashes in the light
before going under.
Here comes a 747,
slower than the rest,
phenomenal, like some huge
basketball player
clearing space for himself
under the basket.
How wonderful to be that big
and to fly through the air,
and to make such a big shadow
in the parking lot of a motel.
The First Eight Days of the Beard
1.A page of exclamation points.
2.A class of cadets at attention.
3.A school of eels.
4.Standing commuters.
5.A bed of nails for the swami.
6.Flagpoles of unknown countries.
7.Centipedes resting on their laurels.
8. The toenails of the face.
Changing Light
Clouds move over the mountain,
methodical as ancient
scholars.
Sun comes out
in the high pasture where
cows feel heat
between their shoulder blades.
The Socks
While you were away
I matched your socks
and rolled them into balls.
Then I filled your drawer with
tight dark fists.
The Shirt
The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
Starting Therapy
1
The psychiatrist moves toward me,
a child’s sweater in his hands.
It’s my old white cardigan.
He’s going to make me wear it.
He puts my arm into one of the sleeves.
He puts it on me backwards.
This thing is a straightjacket!
Anybody in his right mind can see
this sweater doesn’t fit.
2
Thinking someone is at the door
I open it to find a small brain
hovering over the porch.
It won’t come in and it won’t go away.
I let the screen door slam.
It sounds like the door to the apartment
where I used to live.
No, it’s the door to my parents’ house
where we lived when I was four.
Colors
(for S.D.)
Sometimes I agreed with you