by Jane Kenyon
bells and fire; her crows calling stridently
all night; India with her sandalwood
smoke, and graceful gods, many-headed and many-
armed, has taken away the one who blessed
and kept me.
The thing is done, as surely
as if my luggage had been stolen from the train.
Men and women with faces as calm as lakes at dusk
have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know
where to find him.
What is Brahman? I don’t know Brahman.
I don’t know saccidandana, the bliss
of the absolute and unknowable.
I only know that I have lost the Lord
in whose image I was made.
Whom shall I thank for this pear,
sweet and white? Food is God, Prasadam,
God’s mercy. But who is this God?
The one who is not this, not that?
The absurdity of all religious forms
breaks over me, as the absurdity of language
made me feel faint the day I heard friends
giving commands to their neighbor’s dog
in Spanish. ... At first I laughed,
but then I became frightened.
They have taken away my Lord, a person
whose life I held inside me. I saw him
heal, and teach, and eat among sinners.
I saw him break the sabbath to make a higher
sabbath. I saw him lose his temper.
I knew his anguish when he called, “I thirst!”
and received vinegar to drink. The Bible
does not say it, but I am sure he turned
his head away. Not long after he cried, “My God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I watched him reveal himself risen
to Magdalene with a single word: “Mary!”
It was my habit to speak to him. His goodness
perfumed my life. I loved the Lord, he heard
my cry, and he loved me as his own.
A man sleeps on the pavement, on a raffia mat—
the only thing that has not been stolen from him.
This stranger who loves what cannot be understood
has put out my light with his calm face.
Shall the fire answer my fears and vapors?
The fire cares nothing for my illness,
nor does Brahma, the creator, nor Shiva who sees
evil with his terrible third eye; Vishnu,
the protector, does not protect me.
I’ve brought home the smell of the streets
in the folds of soft, bright cotton garments.
When I iron them the steam brings back
the complex odors that rise from the gutters,
of tuberoses, urine, dust, joss, and death.
On a curb in Allahabad the family gathers
under a dusty tree, a few quilts hung
between lightposts and a wattle fence
for privacy. Eleven sit or lie around the fire
while a woman of sixty stirs a huge pot.
Rice cooks in a narrow-necked crock
on the embers. A small dog, with patches of bald,
red skin on his back, lies on the corner
of the piece of canvas that serves as flooring.
Looking at them I lose my place.
I don’t know why I was born, or why
I live in a house in New England, or why I am
a visitor with heavy luggage giving lectures
for the State Department. Why am I not
tap-tapping with my fingernail
on the rolled-up window of a white Government car,
a baby in my arms, drugged to look feverish?
Rajiv did not weep. He did not cover
his face with his hands when we rowed past
the dead body of a newborn nudging the grassy
banks at Benares—close by a snake
rearing up, and a cast-off garland of flowers.
He explained. When a family are too poor
to cremate their dead, they bring the body
here, and slip it into the waters of the Ganges
and Yamuna rivers.
Perhaps the child was dead
at birth; perhaps it had the misfortune
to be born a girl. The mother may have walked
two days with her baby’s body to this place
where Gandhi’s ashes once struck the waves
with a sound like gravel being scuffed
over the edge of a bridge.
“What shall we do about this?” I asked
my God, who even then was leaving me. The reply
was scorching wind, lapping of water, pull
of the black oarsmen on the oars. ...
The Sick Wife
The sick wife stayed in the car
while he bought a few groceries.
Not yet fifty,
she had learned what it’s like
not to be able to button a button.
It was the middle of the day—
and so only mothers with small children
or retired couples
stepped through the muddy parking lot.
Dry cleaning swung and gleamed on hangers
in the cars of the prosperous.
How easily they moved—
with such freedom,
even the old and relatively infirm.
The windows began to steam up.
The cars on either side of her
pulled away so briskly
that it made her sick at heart.
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
What It’s Like
And once, for no special reason,
I rode in the back of the pickup,
leaning against the cab.
Everything familiar was receding
fast—the mountain,
the motel, Huldah Currier’s
house, and the two stately maples. ...
Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale,
and cars from New Jersey and Ohio
were parked along the sandy shoulder
of Route 4. Whatever I saw
I had already passed.. . .
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.)
Indolence in Early Winter
Let them all divorce, remarry
and divorce again!
Forgive me if I doze off in my chair.
I should have stoked the stove
an hour ago. The house
will go cold as stone. Wonderful!
I won’t have to go on
balancing my checkbook.
Unanswered mail piles up
in drifts, precarious,
and the cat sets everything sliding
when she comes to see me.
I am still here in my chair,
buried under the rubble
of failed marriages, magazine
subscription renewal forms, bills,
lapsed friendships....
This kind of thinking is caused
by the sun. It leaves the sky earlier
every day, and goes off somewhere,
like a troubled husband,
or like a melancholy wife.
Breakfast at the Mount Washington Hotel
In the valley a warm spring rain....
Mount Washington, blue, but with snow
still gleaming in the ravines,
looks equably down on the old hotel,
which is painted white, and on dreary days
seems to emit light. Its long porch,
weathered like the deck of a ship, proffers
empty wicker rocking chairs
madly ajo
g in the mizzly breeze.
At the turn of the century
those who arrived by motorcar
came to a separate entrance,
so the horses on the bridlepaths
would not be frightened. All very grand .. .
and by now slightly shabby
in a European way.
Only the young—just married, and looking
shyly down—or the prosperous stay here.
We are the anomaly.
The waiter comes with coffee . . . the cups
are large, and thin at the edge. In the easy
silence of our twelfth anniversary
we look out at the mountain. Swallows dip
and tilt under the portico. After all
it’s time for them
to choose a mate and build a nest. ...
A tense man in a three-piece suit
sets out round metal tables in the rain.
Everything is in place. After Memorial Day
the real summer season will begin.
At the IGA: Franklin, New Hampshire
This is where I would shop
if my husband worked felling trees
for the mill, hurting himself badly
from time to time; where I would bring
my three kids; where I would push
one basket and pull another
because the boxes of diapers and cereal
and gallon milk jugs take so much room.
I would already have put the clothes
in the two largest washers next door
at the Norge Laundry Village. Done shopping,
I’d pile the wet wash in trash bags
and take it home to dry on the line.
And I would think, hanging out the baby’s
shirts and sleepers, and cranking the pulley
away from me, how it would be
to change lives with someone,
like the woman who came after us
in the checkout, thin, with lots of rings
on her hands, who looked us over openly.
Things would have been different
if I hadn’t let Bob climb on top of me
for ninety seconds in 1979.
It was raining lightly in the state park
and so we were alone. The charcoal fire
hissed as the first drops fell. . . .
In ninety seconds we made this life—
a trailer on a windy hill, dangerous jobs
in the woods or night work at the packing plant;
Roy, Kimberly, Bobby; too much in the hamper,
never enough in the bank.