by Jane Kenyon
not red. It was white,
or had no color of its own.
Oh, but my mind was finical.
It put the teacher perpetually
in the wrong. Called on, however,
I said aloud: “The cup is red.”
“But it’s not,” I thought,
like Galileo Galilei
muttering under his beard. . . .
At the Public Market Museum:
Charleston, South Carolina
A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy,
receives my admission and points the way.
Here are gray jackets with holes in them,
red sashes with individual flourishes,
things soft as flesh. Someone sewed
the gold silk cord onto that gray sleeve
as if embellishments
could keep a man alive.
I have been reading War and Peace,
and so the particulars of combat
are on my mind—the shouts and groans
of men and boys, and the horses’ cries
as they fall, astonished at what
has happened to them.
Blood on leaves,
blood on grass, on snow; extravagant
beauty of red. Smoke, dust of disturbed
earth; parch and burn.
Who would choose this for himself?
And yet the terrible machinery
waited in place. With psalters
in their breast pockets, and gloves
knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,
the men in gray hurled themselves
out of the trenches, and rushed against
blue. It was what both sides
agreed to do.
Lines for Akhmatova
The night train from Moscow, beginning to slow,
pulled closer to your sleeping city.
A sound like tiny bells in cold air . . . Then
the attendant appeared with glasses of strong tea.
“Wake up, ladies! This is Leningrad.”
The narrow canals gleam black and still
under ornate street lamps, and in the parks
golden leaves lie on the sandy paths
and wooden benches. By light of day
old women dressed in black sweep them away
with birch stick brooms.
Your work, your amorous life, your scholarship—
everything happened here, where the Party
silenced you for twenty-five years
for writing about love—a middle-class activity.
Husband and son, lovers, dear companions
were imprisoned or killed, emigrated or died.
You turned still further inward,
imperturbable as a lion-gate, and lived on
stubbornly, learning Dante by heart.
In the end you outlived the genocidal
Georgian with his mustache thick as a snake.
And in triumph, an old woman, you wrote:
I can’t tell if the day is ending, or the world,
or if the secret of secrets is within me again.
Heavy Summer Rain
The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day
turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.
Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.
September Garden Party
We sit with friends at the round
glass table. The talk is clever;
everyone rises to it. Bees
come to the spiral pear peelings
on your plate.
From my lap or your hand
the spice of our morning’s privacy
comes drifting up. Fall sun
passes through the wine.
While We Were Arguing
The first snow fell—or should I say
it flew slantwise, so it seemed
to be the house
that moved so heedlessly through space.
Tears splashed and beaded on your sweater.
Then for long moments you did not speak.
No pleasure in the cups of tea I made
distractedly at four.
The sky grew dark. I heard the paper come
and went out. The moon looked down
between disintegrating clouds. I said
aloud: “You see, we have done harm.’’
Dry Winter
So little snow that the grass in the field
like a terrible thought
has never entirely disappeared. . . .
On the Aisle
Leaving Maui—orchids on our plates,
whales seen from the balcony at cocktail hour,
and Mai Tais bristling with fruit—
we climb through thirty-two thousand feet
with retired schoolteachers, widows on tours,
and honeymooners. The man and woman next to me,
young, large, bronze, and prosperous,
look long without fear or shame
into each other’s faces.
Anxious, I am grateful for rum, my last
island draught, and the circulation
of the blood, and I begin Gogol’s story
about a painter whose love of luxury
destroys his art. People pull down
their window shades, shutting out the sun,
and a movie called Clue comes on.
I continue to read in my pillar of light
like a village schoolmistress, while
from the dark on my right comes
the sound of kissing. It would be a lie
to say I didn’t sneak a look.
On the slow approach to rainy San Francisco
I find I had things figured wrong:
“Don’t worry, ok? He’s still out of town.”
I stop speculating about their occupations
and combined income. They fall silent again.
We hit the runway and bounce three times.
After what seems too long the nose comes down;
I feel the brakes go on. Their grief is real
when my seatmates part at the gate. He has
a close connection to Tucson,
and runs for it.
At the Winter Solstice
The pines look black in the half-
light of dawn. Stillness. . .
While we slept an inch of new snow
simplified the field. Today of all days
the sun will shine no more
than is strictly necessary.
At the village church last night
the boys—shepherds and wisemen—
pressed close to the manger in obedience,
wishing only for time to pass;
but the girl dressed as Mary trembled
as she leaned over the pungent hay,
and like the mother of Christ
wondered why she had been chosen.
After the pageant, a ruckus of cards,
presents, and homemade Christmas sweets.
A few of us stayed to clear the bright
scraps and ribbons from the pews,
and lift the pu
lpit back in place.
When I opened the hundred-year-old Bible
to Luke’s account of the Epiphany
black dust from the binding rubbed off
on my hands, and on the altar cloth.
The Guest
I had opened the draft on the stove
and my head was tending downward when
a portly housefly dropped on the page
in front of me. Confused by the woodstove’s
heat, the fly, waking ill-tempered, lay
on its back, flailing its legs and wings.
Then it lurched into the paper clips.
The morning passed, and I forgot about
my guest, except when the buzz rose
and quieted, rose and quieted—tires
spinning on ice, chain saw far away,
someone carrying on alone. . ..
Father and Son
August. My neighbor started cutting wood
on cool Sabbath afternoons, the blue
plume of the saw’s exhaust wavering over
his head. At first I didn’t mind the noise
but it came to seem like a species of pain.
From time to time he let the saw idle,
stepping back from the logs and aromatic
dust, while his son kicked the billets
down the sloping drive toward the shed.
In the lull they sometimes talked.
His back ached unrelentingly, he assumed
from all the stooping. Sundays that fall
they bent over the pile of beech and maple,
intent on getting wood for winter, the last,
as it happened, of their life together.
Three Crows
Three crows fly across a gun-metal
sky. Turgenev, in love for forty years
with Pauline Viardot. . .
Paris, Baden, wherever she and Louis lived
the writer followed, writing books
in which love invariably goes awry.
The men hunted small game companionably.
Spring rain, relentless as obsession:
the mountain streams run swift and full.
The red tassels of blossoming maples
hang bright against wet black bark.
“I lived,” he said, “all my life
on the edge of another’s nest.”
Spring Snow
A thoughtful snow comes falling . . .
seems to hang in the air before
concluding that it must fall
here. Huge aggregate flakes
alight on the muddy ruts
of March, and the standing
water that thaws by day
and freezes by night.
Venus is content to shine unseen
this evening, having risen serene
above springs, and false springs.
But I, restless after supper, pace
the long porch while the snow falls,
dodging the clothesline I won’t
use until peonies send up red,
plump, irrepressible spear
Ice Out
As late as yesterday ice preoccupied
the pond—dark, half-melted, waterlogged.
Then it sank in the night, one piece,
taking winter with it. And afterward
everything seems simple and good.
All afternoon I lifted oak leaves
from the flowerbeds, and greeted
like friends the green-white crowns
of perennials. They have the tender,
unnerving beauty of a baby’s head.
How I hated to come in! I’ve left
the windows open to hear the peepers’
wildly disproportionate cries.
Dinner is over, no one stirs. The dog
sighs, sneezes, and closes his eyes.
Going Away
Like Varya in The Cherry Orchard
I keep the keys, and go around locking
the new deadbolts, meant to ward off
antique thieves: loud, satisfying clicks.
When I am walking down some broad, linden-
lined boulevard where people pass
whole afternoons at tables in dappled
shade, and where the cries of news vendors
mean nothing to me, I’ll be glad
that I’ve overwatered all the plants,
stopped the mail, and wound the clock
to tick and chime as if I were at home.
The dog has understood the melancholy
meaning of open satchels and has hurled
himself down by the door, hoping not to be
left in the silent house, like Firs. . . .
Now Where?
It wakes when I wake, walks
when I walk, turns back when I
turn back, beating me to the door.
It spoils my food and steals
my sleep, and mocks me, saying,
“Where is your God now?”
And so, like a widow, I lie down
after supper. If I lie down
or sit up it’s all the same:
the days and nights bear me along.
To strangers I must seem
alive. Spring comes, summer;
cool clear weather; heat, rain. . . .
Letter to Alice
Twilight. A few bats loop out of the barn,
dip and veer, feeding on flies and midges
in humid air. Before the storm
I top-dressed the perennials with manure,
ashes from the stove, and bonemeal.
The rain soaking through the black
and white makes a mad, elemental tea.
I bought the bonemeal up in New London,
where the streets are crowded for the summer
with stately Episcopalians—and I’ve noticed
that it hardly smells.
We made less than usual on the Church Fair supper,
held this year in the Blazing Star Grange,
because of rain. Down in the valley
were land-rich but cash-poor, shorter,
stouter, and lower-church.
By now the blackflies are biting more out of habit
than desire, and graduation night is over.
I’ve picked up all the beer cans
from the pond road to the bridge.
The fully open peonies seem overcome by rain
and carnality. I should stake them: white
doubles with a raspberry fleck
at the heart, blooming without restraint
in the moist summer night. I planted them
just last fall, and this is a good showing
for their first year. More flowers, more art.
Write!
After an Illness, Walking the Dog
Wet things smell stronger,
and I suppose his main regret is that
he can sniff just one at a time.
In a frenzy of delight
he runs way up the sandy road—
scored by freshets after five days
of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf.
When I whistle he halts abruptly
and steps in a circle,
swings his extravagant tail.
Then he rolls and rubs his muzzle
in a particular place, while the drizzle
falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace
and goldenrod bend low.
The top of the logging road stands open
and bright. Another day, before
hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes,
leaving word first at home.
The footing is ambiguous.
/> Soaked and muddy, the dog drops,
panting, and looks up with what amounts
to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him,
nicely winded, and looking down on the pond.
A sound commences in my left ear
like the sound of the sea in a shell;
a downward vertiginous drag comes with it.
Time to head home. I wait
until were nearly out to the main road
to put him back on the leash, and he
—the designated optimist-
imagines to the end that he is free.
Wash Day
How it rained while you slept! Wakeful,
I wandered around feeling the sills,
followed closely by the dog and cat.
We conferred, and left a few windows
open a crack.
Now the morning is clear
and bright, the wooden clothespins
swollen after the wet night.
The monkshood has slipped its stakes
and the blue cloaks drag in the mud.
Even the daisies—good-hearted
simpletons—seem cast down.
We have reached and passed the zenith.
The irises, poppies, and peonies, and the old
shrub roses with their romantic names
and profound attars have gone by
like young men and women of promise
who end up living indifferent lives.
How is it that every object in this basket
