New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  in the eternal return of earth’s fairer children,

  the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at dusk,

  the loved, the lover, and their fear of life,

  their unconquered flux, insensate oneness, painful “It was.…”

  After loving you so much, can I forget

  you for eternity, and have no other choice?

  from

  The Dolphin

  (1973)

  Fishnet

  Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise,

  your wandering silences and bright trouvailles,

  dolphin let loose to catch the flashing fish …

  saying too little, then too much.

  Poets die adolescents, their beat embalms them,

  the archetypal voices sing offkey;

  the old actor cannot read his friends,

  and nevertheless he reads himself aloud,

  genius hums the auditorium dead.

  The line must terminate.

  Yet my heart rises, I know I’ve gladdened a lifetime

  knotting, undoing a fishnet of tarred rope;

  the net will hang on the wall when the fish are eaten,

  nailed like illegible bronze on the futureless future.

  from Redcliffe Square

  2.

  WINDOW

  Tops of the midnight trees move helter-skelter

  to ruin, if passion can hurt the classical

  in the limited window of the easel painter—

  love escapes our hands. We open the curtains:

  a square of white-faced houses swerving, foaming,

  the swagger of the world and chalk of London.

  At each turn the houses wall the path of meeting,

  and yet we meet, stand taking in the storm.

  Even in provincial capitals,

  storms will rarely enter a human house,

  the crude and homeless wet is windowed out.

  We stand and hear the pummeling unpurged,

  almost uneducated by the world—

  the tops of the moving trees move helter-skelter.

  4.

  OXFORD

  We frittered on the long meadow of the Thames,

  our shoes laminated with yellow flower—

  nothing but the soft of the marsh, the moan of cows,

  the rooster-peacock. Before we had arrived,

  rising stars illuminated Oxford—

  the Aztecs knew these stars would fail to rise

  if forbidden the putrification of our flesh,

  the victims’ viscera laid out like tiles

  on fishponds changed to yellow flowers,

  the goldfinchnest, the phosphorous of the ocean

  blowing ambergris and ambergris,

  dolphin kissing dolphin with a smirking smile,

  not loving one object and thinking of another.

  Our senses want to please us, if we please them.

  5.

  THE SERPENT

  In my dream, my belly is yellow, panels

  of mellowing ivory, splendid and still young,

  though slightly ragged from defending me.

  My tan and green backscales are cool to touch.

  For one who has always loved snakes, it is no loss

  to change nature. My fall was elsewhere—

  how often I made the woman bathe in her waters.

  With daylight, I turn small, a small snake

  on the river path, arrowing up the jags.

  Like this, like this, as the great clock clangs round,

  and the green hunter leaps from turn to turn,

  a new brass bugle slung on his invisible baldric;

  he is groping for trout in the private river,

  wherever it opens, wherever it happens to open.

  from Hospital 1

  1.

  SHOES

  Too many go express to the house of rest,

  buffooning, to-froing on the fringe of being,

  one foot in life, and little right to that:

  “I had to stop this business going on,

  I couldn’t attack my doctor anymore,

  he lost his nerve for running out on life.…”

  “Where I am not,” we chime, “is where I am.”

  Dejection washes our pollution bare.

  My shoes? Did they walk out on me last night,

  and streak into the glitter of the blear?

  I see two dirty white, punctured tennis-shoes,

  empty and planted on the one-man path.

  I have no doubt where they will go. They walk

  the one life offered from the many chosen.

  Records

  “… I was playing records on Sunday,

  arranging all my records, and I came

  on some of your voice, and started to suggest

  that Harriet listen: then immediately

  we both shook our heads. It was like hearing

  the voice of the beloved who had died.

  All this is a new feeling … I got the letter

  this morning, the letter you wrote me Saturday.

  I thought my heart would break a thousand times,

  but I would rather have read it a thousand times

  than the detached unreal ones you wrote before—

  you doomed to know what I have known with you,

  lying with someone fighting unreality—

  love vanquished by his mysterious carelessness.”

  Mermaid

  1.

  I have learned what I wanted from the mermaid

  and her singeing conjunction of tail and grace.

  Deficiency served her. What else could she do?

  Failure keeps snapping up transcendence,

  bubble and bullfrog boating on the surface,

  belly lustily lagging three inches lowered—

  the insatiable fiction of desire.

  None swims with her and breathes the air.

  A mermaid flattens soles and picks a trout,

  knife and fork in chainsong at the spine,

  weeps white rum undetectable from tears.

  She kills more bottles than the ocean sinks,

  and serves her winded lovers’ bones in brine,

  nibbled at recess in the marathon.

  2.

  Baudelaire feared women, and wrote, “Last night, I slept

  with a hideous negress.” Woe to Black Power,

  woe to French women and the Academicians.

  Why do I blush the moon with what I say?

  Alice-in-Wonderland straight gold hair,

  fair-featured, curve and bone from crown to socks,

  bulge eyes bigger than your man’s closed fist,

  slick with humiliation when dismissed—

  you are packaged to the grave with me,

  where nothing’s opened by the addressee …

  almost a year and almost my third wife,

  by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting,

  rushing the music when the juice goes dead—

  float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

  3.

  Our meetings are no longer like a screening;

  I see the nose on my face is just a nose,

  your bel occhi grandi are just eyes

  in the photo of you arranged as figurehead

  or mermaid on the prow of a Roman dory,

  bright as the morning star or a blond starlet.

  Our twin black and tin Ronson butane lighters

  knock on the sheet, are what they are,

  too many, and burned too many cigarettes.…

  Night darkens without your necessary call,

  it’s time to turn your pictures to the wall;

  your moon-eyes water and your nervous throat

  gruffs my directive, “You must go now go.”

  Contralto mermaid, and stone-deaf at will.

  4.

  I see you as a baby killer whale,

  free to walk the seven seas for game,


  warmhearted with an undercoat of ice,

  a nerve-wrung back … all muscle, youth, intention,

  and skill expended on a lunge or puncture—

  hoisted now from conquests and salt sea

  to flipper-flapper in a public tank,

  big deal for Sunday children.… My blind love—

  on the Via Veneto, a girl

  counting windows in a glass café,

  now frowning at her menu, now counting out

  neanderthals flashed like shorebait on the walk.…

  Your stamina as inside-right at school

  spilled the topheavy boys, and keeps you pure.

  5.

  One wondered who would see and date you next,

  and grapple for the danger of your hand.

  Will money drown you? Poverty, though now

  in fashion, debases women as much as wealth.

  You use no scent, dab brow and lash with shoeblack,

  willing to face the world without more face.

  I’ve searched the rough black ocean for you,

  and saw the turbulence drop dead for you,

  always lovely, even for those who had you,

  Rough Slitherer in your grotto of haphazard.

  I lack manhood to finish the fishing trip.

  Glad to escape beguilement and the storm,

  I thank the ocean that hides the fearful mermaid—

  like God, I almost doubt if you exist.

  from Exorcism

  2.

  This morning, as if I were home in Boston, snow,

  the pure witchery-bitchery of kindergarten winters;

  my window whitens like a movie screen,

  glaring, specked, excluding rival outlook—

  I can throw what I want on this blank screen,

  but only the show already chosen shows:

  Melodrama with her stiletto heel

  dancing bullet wounds in the parquet.

  My words are English, but the plot is hexed:

  one man, two women, the common novel plot …

  what you love you are.…

  You can’t carry your talent with you like a suitcase.

  Don’t you dare mail us the love your life denies;

  do you really know what you have done?

  Plotted

  Planes arc like arrows through the highest sky,

  ducks V the ducklings across a puckered pond;

  Providence turns animals to things.

  I roam from bookstore to bookstore browsing books,

  I too maneuvered on a guiding string

  as I execute my written plot.

  I feel how Hamlet, stuck with the Revenge Play

  his father wrote him, went scatological

  under this clotted London sky.

  Catlike on a paper parapet,

  he declaimed the words his prompter fed him,

  knowing convention called him forth to murder,

  loss of free will and license of the stage.

  Death’s not an event in life, it’s not lived through.

  The Couple

  “Twice in the past two weeks I think I met

  Lizzie in the recurrent dream.

  We were out walking. What sort of street, you ask,

  fair or London? It was our own street.

  What did you hear and say? We heard ourselves.

  The sidewalk was two feet wide. We, arm in arm,

  walked, squelching the five-point oakleaves under heel—

  happily, they melted under heel.

  Our manner had some intimacy in my dream.

  What were you doing on this honeymoon?

  Our conversation had a simple plot,

  a story of a woman and a man

  versifying her tragedy—

  we were talking like sisters … you did not exist.”

  Mermaid Emerging

  The institutions of society

  seldom look at a particular—

  Degas’s snubnosed dancer swings on high,

  legging the toplights, never leaving stage,

  enchanting lovers of art, discerning none.

  Law fit for all fits no one like a glove.…

  Mermaid, why are you another species?

  “Because, you, I, everyone is unique.”

  Does anyone ever make you do anything?

  “Do this, do that, do nothing; you’re not chained.

  I am a woman or I am a dolphin,

  the only animal man really loves,

  I spout the smarting waters of joy in your face—

  rough-weather fish, who cuts your nets and chains.”

  from Another Summer

  1.

  WILDROSE

  A mongrel image for all summer, our scene at breakfast:

  a bent iron fence of straggly wildrose glowing

  below the sausage-rolls of new-mown hay—

  Sheridan splashing in his blue balloon tire:

  whatever he touches he’s told not to touch

  and whatever he reaches tips over on him.

  Things have gone on and changed, the next oldest

  daughter bleaching her hair three shades lighter with beer—

  but if you’re not a blonde, it doesn’t work.…

  Sleeping, the always finding you there with day,

  the endless days revising our revisions—

  everyone’s wildrose?… And our golden summer

  as much as such people can. When most happiest

  how do I know I can keep any of us alive?

  On the End of the Phone

  My sidestepping and obliquities, unable

  to take the obvious truth on any subject—

  why do I do what I do not want to say,

  able to understand and not to hear?

  Your rapier voice—I have had so much—

  hundred words a minute, piercing and thrilling …

  the invincible lifedrive of everything alive,

  ringing down silver dollars with each word.…

  Love wasn’t what went wrong, we kept our daughter;

  what a good father is is no man’s boast—

  to be still friends when we’re no longer children.…

  Why am I talking from the top of my mouth?

  I am talking to you transatlantic,

  we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.

  Dolphin

  My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

  captive as Racine, the man of craft,

  drawn through his maze of iron composition

  by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.

  When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

  caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,

  the glassy bowing and scraping of my will.…

  I have sat and listened to too many

  words of the collaborating muse,

  and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

  not avoiding injury to others,

  not avoiding injury to myself—

  to ask compassion … this book, half fiction,

  an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—

  my eyes have seen what my hand did.

  from

  Day by Day

  (1977)

  Last Walk?

  That unhoped-for Irish sunspoiled April day

  heralded the day before

  by corkscrews of the eternal

  whirling snow that melts and dies

  and leaves the painted green pasture marsh—

  and the same green … We could even imagine

  we enjoined our life’s great change then—

  hand in hand with balmy smiles

  graciously belittling our headlong reverse.

  We walked to an artificial pond

  dammed at both ends to reflect the Castle—

  a natural composition for the faded colorist

  on calm bright days or brighter nights.

  At first we mi
stook the pond for a lull in the river—

  the Liffey, torrential, wild,

  accelerated to murder,

  wider here than twenty miles downhill to Dublin—

  black, rock-kneed, crashing on crags—

  by excessive courage married to the ocean.

  “Those swans,” you said, “if one loses its mate,

  the other dies. This spring a Persian exile

  killed one cruelly, and its mate

  refused to be fed—

  It roused an explosion of xenophobia

  when it died.”

  Explosion is growing common here;

  Yet everything about the royal swan

  is silly, overstated, a luxury toy

  beyond the fortunate child’s allowance.

  We sat and watched a mother swan

  Enthroned like a colossal head of Pharaoh

  on her messy double goose-egg nest of sticks.

  The male swan had escaped

  their safe, stagnant, matriarchal pond

  and gallanted down the stout-enriched rapids to Dublin,

  smirking drunkenly, racing bumping,

  as if to show a king had a right to be too happy.

  I meant to write about our last walk.

  We had nothing to do but gaze—

  seven years, now nothing but a diverting smile,

  dalliance by a river, a speeding swan …

  the misleading promise

  to last with joy as long as our bodies,

  nostalgia pulverized by thought,

  nomadic as yesterday’s whirling snow,

  all whiteness splotched.

  Square of Black

  On this book, large enough to write on,

  is a sad, black, actual photograph

  of Abraham Lincoln and Tad in 1861,

  father and son,

  their almost matching silver watchchains,

  as they stare into the blank ledger,

  its murders and failures … they.

  Old Abe, and old at 52—

  in life, in office, no lurking illusion,

  clad for the moment in robes of splendor,

  passed him unchallenged …

  Only in a dream was he able to hear

  his voice in the East Room of the White House

  saying over his own dead body:

  “Lincoln is dead.”

  Dreams, they’ve had their vogue,

  so alike in their modernist invention,