New Selected Poems

by Robert Lowell

  so dangerously distracted by commonplace,

  their literal insistence on the letter,

  trivia indistinguishable from tragedy—

  his monstrous melodrama terminating

  at a playhouse … dreaming, overhearing

  his own voice,

  the colloquial sibilance of the circuit-court,

  once freedom, the law and home to Lincoln—

  shot while sleeping through the final act.

  Fortunately

  I only dream inconsequence.

  Last night I saw a little

  flapping square of pure black cloth.

  It flew to the corners of my bedroom,

  hugging, fluttering there coquettishly—

  a bat, if wing and pelt could be one-color black.

  It was a mouse. (So my dream explained.)

  It taught me to feed and tame it

  with nagging love … only existing

  in my short dream’s immeasurable leisure.

  The Day

  It’s amazing

  the day is still here

  like lightning on an open field,

  terra firma and transient

  swimming in variation,

  fresh as when man first broke

  like the crocus all over the earth.

  From a train, we saw cows

  strung out on a hill

  at differing heights,

  one sex, one herd,

  replicas in hierarchy—

  the sun had turned

  them noonday bright.

  They were child’s daubs in a book

  I read before I could read.

  They fly by like a train window:

  flash-in-the-pan moments

  of the Great Day,

  the dies illa,

  when we lived momently

  together forever

  in love with our nature—

  as if in the end,

  in the marriage with nothingness,

  we could ever escape

  being absolutely safe.

  Marriage

  I.

  We were middle-class and verismo

  enough to suit Van Eyck,

  when we crowded together in Maidstone,

  patriarch and young wife

  with our three small girls

  to pose in Sunday-best.

  The shapeless comfort of your flowered frock

  was transparent against the light,

  but the formal family photograph in color

  shows only a rousing brawn of shoulder

  to tell us you were pregnant.

  Even there, Sheridan, though unborn,

  was a center of symmetry;

  even then he was growing in hiding

  toward gaucheness and muscle—

  to be a war-

  chronicler of vast inaccurate memory.

  Later, his weird humor

  made him elf and dustman,

  like him, early risers.

  This summer, he is a soldier—

  unlike father or mother,

  or anyone he knows,

  he can choose both sides:

  Redcoat, Minuteman, or George the Third …

  the ambivalence of the Revolution that made him

  half-British, half-American.

  II.

  I turn to the Arnolfini Marriage,

  and see

  Van Eyck’s young Italian merchant

  was neither soldier nor priest.

  In an age of Faith,

  he is not abashed to stand weaponless,

  long-faced and dwindling

  in his bridal bedroom.

  Half-Jewish, perhaps,

  he is freshly married,

  and exiled for his profit to Bruges.

  His wife’s with child;

  he lifts a hand,

  thin and white as his face

  held up like a candle to bless her …

  smiling, swelling, blossoming …

  Giovanni and Giovanna—

  even in an age of costumes,

  they seem to flash their fineness …

  better dressed than kings.

  The picture is too much like their life—

  a crisscross, too many petty facts,

  this bedroom

  with one candle still burning in the candelabrum,

  and peaches blushing on the windowsill,

  Giovanni’s high-heeled raw wooden slippers

  thrown on the floor by her smaller ones …

  dyed sang de boeuf

  to match the restless marital canopy.

  They are rivals in homeliness and love;

  her hand lies like china in his,

  her other hand

  is in touch with the head of her unborn child.

  They wait and pray,

  as if the airs of heaven

  that blew on them when they married

  were now a common visitation,

  not a miracle of lighting

  for the photographer’s sacramental instant.

  Giovanni and Giovanna,

  who will outlive him by 20 years …

  Logan Airport, Boston

  Your blouse,

  Concord grapes on white,

  a souvenir you snatched up at the airport,

  shone blindingly up the gangway

  to a sky overcrowded at rush-hour.

  Below the flying traffic,

  thin, dwindling yellow trees were feverish,

  as if frightened

  by your limitless prospect on the blue.

  I see you, you are hardly there—

  it’s as though I watched a painter

  do sketches of your head

  that by some consuming fire

  erased themselves,

  until I stared at a blank sheet.

  Now in the brown air of our rental,

  I need electricity even on fair days,

  as I decamp from window to window

  to catch the sun.

  I am blind with seeing;

  the toys you brought home like groceries

  firetrap on the stairs.

  Is it cynical to deliquesce,

  as Adam did in age,

  though outwardly goldleaf,

  true metal, and make-up?

  Our mannerisms harden—

  a bruise is immortal,

  the instant egg on my shin

  I got from braking a car

  too sharply a year ago

  stays firm brown and yellow,

  the all-weather color for death.

  I cannot bring back youth with a snap of my belt,

  I cannot touch you—

  your absence is presence,

  the undrinkable blaze

  of the sun on both shores of the airport.

  Bright sun of my bright day,

  I thank God for being alive—

  a way of writing I once thought heartless.

  Grass Fires

  In the realistic memory

  the memorable must be forgone;

  it never matters,

  except in front of our eyes.

  I made it a warning,

  a cure, that stabilized nothing.

  We cannot recast the faulty drama,

  play the child,

  unable to align

  his toppling, elephantine script,

  the hieroglyphic letters

  he sent home.

  I hold big kitchen matches to flaps of frozen grass

  to smoke a rabbit from its hole—

  then the wind bites them, then they catch,

  the grass catches, fire everywhere,

  everywhere

  inextinguishable roots,

  the tree grandfather planted for his shade,

  combusting, towering

  over the house he anachronized with stone.

  I can’t tell you how much larger

  and more important it was than I,

  how many summers
before conscience

  I enjoyed it.

  My grandfather towered above me,

  “You damned little fool,”

  nothing to quote, but for him original.

  The fire-engines deployed with stage bravado,

  yet it was I put out the fire,

  who slapped it to death with my scarred leather jacket.

  I snuffed out the inextinguishable root,

  I—

  really I can do little,

  as little now as then,

  about the infernal fires—

  I cannot blow out a match.

  Suburban Surf

  (After Caroline’s Return)

  You lie in my insomniac arms,

  as if you drank sleep like coffee.

  Then,

  like a bear tipping a hive for honey,

  you shake the pillow for French cigarettes.

  No conversation—

  then suddenly as always cars

  helter-skelter for feed like cows—

  suburban surf come alive,

  diamond-faceted like your eyes,

  glassy, staring lights

  lighting the way they cannot see—

  friction, constriction etc.

  the racket killing

  gas like alcohol.

  Long, unequal whooshing waves

  break in volume,

  always very loud enough to hear

  méchants, mechanical—

  soothe, delay, divert

  the crescendo always surprisingly attained

  in a panic of breathlessness—

  too much assertion and skipping

  of the heart to greet the day …

  the truce with uncertain heaven.

  A false calm is the best calm.

  In noonday light,

  the cars are tin, stereotype and bright,

  a farce

  of their former selves at night—

  invisible as exhaust,

  personal as animals.

  Gone

  the sweet agitation of the breath of Pan.

  Shaving

  Shaving’s the one time I see my face,

  I see it aslant as a carpenter’s problem—

  though I have gaunted a little,

  always the same face

  follows my hand with thirsty eyes.

  Never enough hours in a day—

  I lie confined and groping,

  monomaniacal,

  jealous even a shadow’s intrusion—

  a nettle

  impossible to deflect …

  unable to follow the drift

  of children, their blurting third-degree.

  For me,

  a stone is as inflammable as a paper match.

  The household comes to a stop—

  you too, head bent,

  inking, crossing out … frowning

  at times with a face open as a sunflower.

  We are lucky to have done things as one.

  Caroline in Sickness

  Tonight the full moon is stopped by trees

  or the wallpaper between our windows—

  on the threshold of pain,

  light doesn’t exist,

  and yet the glow is smarting

  enough to read a Bible

  to keep awake and awake.

  You are very sick,

  you remember how the children,

  you and your cousin,

  Miss Fireworks and Miss Icicle,

  first drove alone with learners’ cards

  in Connemara, and popped a paper bag—

  the rock that broke your spine.

  Thirty years later you still suffer

  your spine’s spasmodic, undercover life …

  Putting off a luncheon,

  you say into the telephone,

  “Next month, if I’m still walking.”

  I move to keep moving;

  the cold white wine is dis-spirited—

  Moon, stop from dark apprehension …

  shine as is your custom,

  scattering this roughage to find sky.

  Seesaw

  The night dark before its hour—

  heavily, steadily,

  the rain lashes and sprinkles

  to complete its task—

  as if assisting

  the encroachments of our bodies

  we occupy but cannot cure.

  Sufferer, how can you help me,

  if I use your sickness

  to increase my own?

  Will we always be

  one up, the other down,

  one hitting bottom, the other

  flying through the trees—

  seesaw inseparables?

  Ten Minutes

  The single sheet keeps shifting on the double bed,

  the more I kick it smooth, the less it covers;

  it is the bed I made.

  Others have destinations, my train is aimless.

  I know I will fall off into the siding and thistle—

  imagining the truth will hide my lies.

  Mother under one of her five-minute spells

  had a flair for total recall,

  and told me, item by item, person by person,

  how my relentless, unpredictable selfishness

  had disappointed and removed

  anyone who tried to help—

  but I cannot correct the delicate compass-needle

  so easily set ajar.

  I am companionless;

  occasionally, I see a late, suicidal headlight

  burn on the highway and vanish.

  Now the haunted vacancy fills with friends—

  they are waspishly familiar and aggrieved,

  a rattling makeshift of mislaid faces,

  a whiplash of voices. They cry,

  “Can you love me, can you love me?

  Oh hidden in your bubble and protected by your wife,

  and luxuriously nourished without hands,

  you wished us dead,

  but vampires are too irreplaceable to die.”

  They stop, as cars that have the greenlight

  stop, and let a pedestrian go …

  Though I work nightshift,

  there’s no truth in this processing of words—

  the dull, instinctive glow inside me

  refuels itself, and only blackens

  such bits of paper brought to feed it …

  My frightened arms

  anxiously hang out before me like bent L’s,

  as if I feared I was a laughingstock,

  and wished to catch and ward you off …

  This is becoming a formula:

  after the long, dark passage,

  I offer you my huddle of flesh and dismay.

  “This time it was all night,” I say.

  You answer, “Poseur,

  why, you haven’t been awake ten minutes.”

  • • •

  I grow too merry,

  when I stand in my nakedness to dress.

  Notice

  The resident doctor said,

  “We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—

  how can we help you?”

  I asked,

  “These days of only poems and depression—

  what can I do with them?

  Will they help me to notice

  what I cannot bear to look at?”

  The doctor is forgotten now

  like a friend’s wife’s maiden-name.

  I am free

  to ride elbow to elbow on the rush-hour train

  and copy on the back of a letter,

  as if alone:

  “When the trees close branches and redden,

  their winter skeletons are hard to find—”

  to know after long rest

  and twenty miles of outlying city

  that the much-heralded spring is here,

  and say,

  “Is this what you would call a blossom?”


  Then home—I can walk it blindfold.

  But we must notice—

  we are designed for the moment.

  Shifting Colors

  I fish until the clouds turn blue,

  weary of self-torture, ready to paint

  lilacs or confuse a thousand leaves,

  as landscapists must.

  My eye returns to my double,

  an ageless big white horse,

  slightly discolored by dirt

  cropping the green shelf diagonal

  to the artificial troutpond—

  unmoving, it shifts as I move,

  and works the whole field in the course of the day.

  Poor measured, neurotic man—

  animals are more instinctive virtuosi.

  Ducks splash deceptively like fish;

  fish break water with the wings of a bird to escape.

  A hissing goose sways in stationary anger;

  purple bluebells rise in ledges on the lake.

  A single cuckoo gifted with a pregnant word

  shifts like the sun from wood to wood.

  All day my miscast troutfly buzzes about my ears

  and empty mind.

  But nature is sundrunk with sex—

  how could a man fail to notice, man

  the one pornographer among the animals?

  I seek leave unimpassioned by my body,

  I am too weak to strain to remember, or give

  recollection the eye of a microscope. I see

  horse and meadow, duck and pond,

  universal consolatory

  description without significance,

  transcribed verbatim by my eye.

  This is not the directness that catches

  everything on the run and then expires—

  I would write only in response to the gods,

  like Mallarmé who had the good fortune

  to find a style that made writing impossible.

  Unwanted

  Too late, all shops closed—

  I alone here tonight on Antabuse,

  surrounded only by iced white wine and beer,

  like a sailor dying of thirst on the Atlantic—

  one sip of alcohol might be death,

  death for joy.

  Yet in this tempting leisure,

  good thoughts drive out bad;

  causes for my misadventure, considered

  for forty years too obvious to name,

  come jumbling out

  to give my simple autobiography a plot.

  I read an article on a friend,

  as if recognizing my obituary:

  “Though his mother loved her son consumingly,

  she lacked a really affectionate nature;

  so he always loved what he missed.”

  This was John Berryman’s mother, not mine.

  Alas, I can only tell my own story—