by Jane Kenyon
Evening came....
While he dozed, fitfully, still stupefied
by anesthetics, I tried to read,
my feet propped on the rails of the bed.
Odette’s chrysanthemums
were revealed to me, ranks of them
in the house where Swann, jealousy
constricting his heart, made late-night calls.
And while I read, pausing again
and again to look at him, the smell
of chrysanthemums sent by friends
wavered from the sill, mixing
with the smells of drastic occasions
and disinfected sheets.
He was too out of it
to press the bolus for medication.
Every eight minutes, when he could have
more, I pressed it, and morphine dripped
from the vial in the locked box
into his arm. I made a hive
of eight-minute cells
where he could sleep without pain,
or beyond caring about pain.
Over days the IVs came out,
and freedom came back to him—
walking, shaving, sitting in a chair.
The most ordinary gestures seemed
cause for celebration.
Hazy with analgesics, he read
the Boston Globe, and began to talk
on the telephone.
Once the staples were out,
and we had the discharge papers
in hand, I brought him home, numbed up
for the trip. He dozed in the car,
woke, and looked with astonishment
at the hills, gold and quince
under October sun, a sight so
overwhelming that we began to cry,
he first, and then I.
Climb
From the porch of our house we can see
Mt. Kearsarge, the huge, black-green
presence that tells us where we are,
and what the weather is going to be.
By night we see the red beacon
on the fire warden’s tower, by day
the tower itself, minute with distance.
Yesterday I climbed it with a friend
just home from the hospital.
She’d thought the second coming was at hand,
and found herself in a private
room, tastefully appointed, on a ward
she couldn’t leave.
We talked and panted, stopped to look
at the undersides of sage and pink
opalescent mushrooms. Our shirts
were wet with effort.
At last, we sprawled on the gray granite
ledges, with veins and blotches of pink
and silver-green lichen, growing like fur.
We looked for our houses; shreds of clouds
floated between our heads; and we saw from above
the muscular shoulders of a patient hawk.
Back
We try a new drug, a new combination
of drugs, and suddenly
I fall into my life again
like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.
I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.
I remember the house and barn,
the rake, the blue cups and plates,
the Russian novels I loved so much,
and the black silk nightgown
that he once thrust
into the toe of my Christmas stocking.
Moving the Frame
Impudent spring has come
since your chest rose and fell
for the last time, bringing
the push and ooze of budding peonies,
with ants crawling over them
exuberantly.
I have framed the picture
from your obituary. It must have been
taken on a hot graduation day:
You’re wearing your academic robes
—how splendid they were—
and your hair and beard are curly
with sweat. The tassel sways. ...
No matter how I move your face
around my desk,
your eyes don’t meet my eyes.
There was one hard night
while your breath became shallower
and shallower, and then
you were gone from us. A person
simply vanishes! I came home
and fell deeply asleep for a long
time, but I woke up again.
Fear of Death Awakens Me
. . . or it’s a cloud-shadow passing over Tuckerman Ravine, darkening the warm ledges and alpine vegetation, then moving on. Sunlight reasserts itself, and that dark, moving lane is like something that never happened, something misremembered, dreamed in anxious sleep.
Or it’s like swimming unexpectedly into cold water in a spring-fed pond. Fear locates in my chest, instant and profound, and I speed up my stroke, or turn back the way I came, hoping to avoid more cold.
III
Peonies at Dusk
Winter Lambs
All night snow came upon us
with unwavering intent—
small flakes not meandering
but driving thickly down. We woke
to see the yard, the car and road
heaped unrecognizably.
The neighbors’ ewes are lambing
in this stormy weather. Three
lambs born yesterday, three more
expected . . .
Felix the ram looked
proprietary in his separate pen
while fatherhood accrued to him.
The panting ewes regarded me
with yellow-green, small-
pupiled eyes.
I have a friend who is pregnant—
plans gone awry—and not altogether
pleased. I don’t say she should
be pleased. We are creation’s
property, its particles, its clay
as we fall into this life,
agree or disagree.
Not Here
Searching for pillowcases trimmed
with lace that my mother-in-law
once made, I open the chest of drawers
upstairs to find that mice
have chewed the blue and white linen
dishtowels to make their nest,
and bedded themselves
among embroidered dresser scarves
and fingertip towels.
Tufts of fibers, droppings like black
caraway seeds, and the stains of birth
and afterbirth give off the strong
unforgettable attar of mouse
that permeates an old farmhouse
on humid summer days.
A couple of hickory nuts
roll around as I lift out
the linens, while a hail of black
sunflower shells
falls on the pillowcases,
yellow with age, but intact.
I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun
to dry. There’s almost no one left
who knows how to crochet lace. . . .
The bright-eyed squatters are not here.
They’ve scuttled out to the fields
for summer, as they scuttled in
for winter—along the wall, from chair
to skirted chair, making themselves
flat and scarce while the cat
dozed with her paws in the air,
and we read the mail
or evening paper, unaware.
Coats
I saw him leaving
the hospital
with a woman’s coat over his arm.
Clearly she would not need it.
The sunglasses he wore could not
conceal his wet face, his bafflement.
As if in mockery the day was fair,
and the air mild for December. All the same
he had zipped his own coat and tied
the hood under his chin, preparing
for irremediable cold.
In Memory of Jack
Once, coming down the long hill
into Andover on an autumn night
just before deer season, I stopped
the car abruptly to avoid a doe.
She stood, head down, perhaps twenty
feet away, her legs splayed
as if she meant to stand her ground.
For a long moment she looked
at the car, then bolted right at it,
glancing off the hood with a crash,
into a field of corn stubble.
So I rushed at your illness, your
suffering and death—the bright
lights of annihilation and release.
Insomnia at the Solstice
The quicksilver song
of the wood thrush spills
downhill from ancient maples
at the end of the sun’s single most
altruistic day. The woods grow dusky
while the bird’s song brightens.
Reading to get sleepy ... Rabbit
Angstrom knows himself so well,
why isn’t he a better man?
I turn out the light, and rejoice
in the sound of high summer, and in air
on bare shoulders—do Ice, dolce—
no blanket, or even a sheet.
A faint glow remains over the lake.
Now come wordless contemplations
on love and death, worry about
money, and the resolve to have the vet
clean the dog’s teeth, though
he’ll have to anesthetize him.
An easy rain begins, drips off
the edge of the roof, onto the tin
watering can. A vast irritation rises. . . .
I turn and turn, try one pillow,
two, think of people who have no beds.
A car hisses by on wet macadam.
Then another. The room turns
gray by insensible degrees. The thrush
begins again its outpouring of silver
to rich and poor alike, to the just
and the unjust.
The dog’s wet nose appears
on the pillow, pressing lightly,
decorously. He needs to go out.
All right, cleverhead, let’s declare
a new day.
Washing up, I say
to the face in the mirror,
“You’re still here! How you bored me
all night, and now I’ll have
to entertain you all day. . . .”
Peonies at Dusk
White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.
Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They’re staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.
The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it’s coming from.
In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one’s face.
The Secret
In a glass case marked “Estate Jewelry”
I see a ring that seems familiar,
remembered, though I’ve never seen
anything like it.
I ask the clerk, stout and garrulous
behind the counter, to take it out.
The honeybee, with opal body, garnet
head, and golden wings, slides past
my knuckle burled with middle age.
That one antenna is broken
only endears it to me. Still
it climbs into the flower’s throat,
and flies, heavy with nectar, back
to its queen. . . .
For weeks I have felt on the point
of learning a mystery, but now
my agitation has dropped away.
IV
Watch Ye, Watch Ye
and be ready to meet me,
for lo, I come at noonday.
Fear ye not, fear ye not
for with my hand I will lead you on,
and safely I’ll guide your little boat
beyond this vale of sorrow.
Shaker Hymn
Three Small Oranges
My old flannel nightgown, the elbows out,
one shoulder torn. . . . Instead of putting it
away with the clean wash, I cut it up
for rags, removing the arms and opening
their seams, scissoring across the breast
and upper back, then tearing the thin
cloth of the body into long rectangles.
Suddenly an immense sadness ...
Making supper, I listen to news
from the war, of torture where the air
is black at noon with burning oil,
and of a market in Baghdad, bombed
by accident, where yesterday an old man
carried in his basket a piece of fish
wrapped in paper and tied with string,
and three small hard green oranges.
A Portion of History
The sweet breath of someone’s laundry
spews from a dryer vent. A screen door
slams. “Carry it?”—a woman’s voice—
“You’re going to carry it!?” Now I hear
the sound of casters on the sidewalk.
Car doors close softly, engines
turn over and catch. A boy on his bike
delivers papers, I hear the smack
of the New York Times in its blue plastic
sheath, hitting the wooden porches.
In the next street a garbage truck cries out.
A woman jogs by, thrusting a child
in a stroller ahead of her, her arms
straight as shafts, the baby’s fair
head bobbing wildly on its frail stem.
Potato
In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end. The rest would have been
redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, carrot peelings.
I pitched it onto the compost
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.
When I flipped the fetid layers with a hay
fork to air the pile, the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me—
looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling. It seemed to grow
until I might have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day
dropping trees, pumping gas, pinning
hand-me-down clothes on the line.
Sleepers in Jaipur
A mango moon climbs the dark
blue sky. In the gutters of a market
a white, untethered cow browses
the day’s leavings—wilted greens,
banana peels, spilt rice,
; a broken basket.
The sleepers, oh, so many sleepers. ..
They lie on rush mats in their hot
stick hut. The man and woman
want to love wildly, uproariously;
instead, they are quiet and efficient
in the dark. Bangles ring
as his mother stirs in her sleep.
Who can say what will come of
the quickening and slowing
of their breaths on each other’s
necks, of their deep shudders?
Another sleeper, a gift of God,
ribs and shoulders to be clothed
in flesh . . .
In the dusty garden the water
she carried from the well in a jug
balanced on her black hair
stares back at the moon
from its cool terra-cotta urn.
Gettysburg: July i, 1863
The young man, hardly more
than a boy, who fired the shot
had looked at him with an air
not of anger but of concentration,
as if he were surveying a road,
or feeding a length of wood into a saw:
It had to be done just so.
The bullet passed through
his upper chest, below the collarbone.
The pain was not what he might
have feared. Strangely exhilarated
he staggered out of the pasture
and into a grove of trees.
He pressed and pressed
the wound, trying to stanch
the blood, but he could only press
what he could reach, and he could
not reach his back, where the bullet
had exited.
He lay on the earth
smelling the leaves and mosses,
musty and damp and cool