by Jane Kenyon
got to be inside out? There must be
a trickster in the hamper, a backward,
unclean spirit.
The clothes—the thicker
things—may not get dry by dusk.
The days are getting shorter. . . .
You’ll laugh, but I feel it—
some power has gone from the sun.
Geranium
How many years did I lug it, pale and leggy,
onto the porch for the summer? There its stems
turned thick, its leaves curly and dark,
and it bloomed almost immediately.
Before first frost I’d bring it back inside
where it yellowed like the soles of the feet
of someone very old. Its flowers fell apart.
One spring I cut back all but one shoot,
and that I tied against a bamboo stake
to make a long straight stem.
Then I pinched out the new growth repeatedly
until I had a full, round ball on a stick,
like topiary at Versailles. It pleased me well;
its flowers were salmon pink.
I fed it fish emulsion, bonemeal, wood
ashes; mulched it with cocoa pod hulls,
gave it a Tuscan terra-cotta pot.
It was my nightingale, my goose, my golden
child. We drank from the same cup.
After the night’s downpour I find the top
snapped off, lying on the ground like a rack
of antlers. Not even wilted yet—I’ve come
upon the fresh disaster. ... Like Beethoven’s
head its head had grown too large.
Cultural Exchange
A postcard arrives from a friend
visiting the Great Wall of China.
“Life couldn’t be better,” says M.
I was there once, in March. Unkind wind
bore down from the north. Mongolia . . .
how steep it is! In places even presidents
are forced to drop down on all fours.
On the way back to Beijing
our embassy car rushed wildly
through a succession of hamlets, forcing
bicycles off the road, dooryard
fowl to flap and fluster, and from
grandmother, bundled in her blue jacket
to take the pale sun, such a look!
Tired? Tired was not the word.
Getting sleepy in the warm car
I considered the Wall, the scale
of enterprise. A lock of hair had fallen
across my eyes. At last my brain
convinced my hand to move it.
That night I was honored by a banquet
in a room so cold I could see my breath.
Homesick
My clothes and hair smell stale,
and more than once I have slept in my coat
on trains that crashed past isolated stations
where magnolias bloom all night
beside dusty platform benches.
Twice I bought dried fish rolled
in cellophane, thinking it was pastry.
Leaving the pebbled Buddhist garden
such a dreadful languor overtook me;
I could hardly step over the threshold.
The monks were eating bean curd
fixed eleven different ways
and drinking bowls of frothy bitter green tea.
Oh my bed, and the dear dust under it!
Bath towels that don’t smell like miso soup;
my own little dog, one ear up
and one ear down, and a speaker of English;
the teller at the village bank
who never asks to see my passport. . .
“Yes,” I’ll say, “we had a wonderful time.
We slept on pillows filled with cottonseed,
ate cuttlefish, dried squid, and black bean
paste, and drank pink laurel wine.”
Summer: 6:00 A.M.
From the shadowy upstairs bedroom
of my mother-in-laws house in Hamden
I hear the neighbors’ children waking.
“Ahhhhhhhh,” says the infant, not
unhappily. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”
replies the toddler to his mother,
who must have forbidden something.
It is hot already at this hour
and the houses are wholly open.
If she is cross with the child
anyone with ears will hear.
The slap of sprinkler water
hitting the sidewalk and street,
and the husband’s deliberate footfalls
receding down the drive . . .
His Japanese sedan matches the house.
Beige, brown . . . Yesterday he washed it,
his arm thrust deep into something
that looked like a sheepskin oven mitt.
His wife had put the babies
in the shallow plastic wading
pool, and she took snapshots, trying
repeatedly to get both boys to look.
The older one’s wail rose
and matched the pitch of the cicada
in a nearby tree. Why
is the sound of a spoon on a plate
next door a thing so desolate?
I think of the woman pouring a glass of juice
for the three-year-old, and watching him
spill it, knowing he must spill it,
seeing the ineluctable downward course
of the orange-pink liquid, the puddle
swell on the kitchen
floor beside the child’s shoe.
Walking Notes: Hamden, Connecticut
Wearing only her nightdress
with a white sweater thrown over her shoulders,
a woman stands at the curb, watching
with a look of love and patience
as her aged poodle snuffles at a candy wrapper.
I see her as her husband of forty years
sees her: hair tied back by a broad, pink
ribbon, eyes swollen with sleep.
My daily walk takes me past a house
where roses scramble lustily
up the trellises, a Dorothy Perkins
and a climbing Peace.
The house where two dentists, Dr. Charles Molloy
and Dr. Everett Condon, drill and pack . . .
The boys in the neighborhood call Dr. Condon
Dr. Condom. They know all about such things
though their parents have told them little
about sex, leaving that to luck, or the lack
of it, or lurid films on hygiene in gym class.
The girl next door, a real beauty, her long black
curls drawn up with combs like someone in Turgenev,
waters the lawn, not thoroughly. Her father
is about to be indicted for racketeering.
For a long time they didn’t mow. The wind
carried weed seeds into the neighbors’ yards.
Everyone was irate.. . .Then suddenly
he mowed, and now she waters listlessly.
Last Days
Over the orchard a truly black cloud appeared.
Then horizontal rain began, and apples fell
before their time. Leaves blew
in phalanxes along the ground. Doors
opened and closed of their own accord. The lights
went out, but then thought better of it.
So I sat with her in a room made small
by the paraphernalia of the mortally ill.
Among ranks of brown bottles from the pharmacy
a hymnbook lay open on the chest of drawers:
“Saf
ely Through Another Week.” Indifferent,
a housefly lit on her blue-white brow.
Looking at Stars
The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.
At the Dime Store
Since I saw him last his teeth have gone.
The gaps draw my eyes, and like Saint
Paul I give way: that very thing I would
not do, I do. He notices, abashed.
Most of one summer he was around, coming
by seven each morning with his rascally look
to build a new wing and replace the old
north sill. Sometimes he’d disappear for a day
or a week. There was trouble at home
and on his lunch hour he’d call—just over
the town line and so long distance—
thinking we couldn’t hear or wouldn’t
care. This was years ago.
When I encounter him again in the aisles
we both grin shyly. His boy, tall suddenly,
and bulky, not built like his father at all,
joins him at the checkout.
They’ve got an aquarium in their cart.
At last the job was finished. All but
taking up the piles of extra shingles,
sawhorses, and lumber from the back
yard. Weeks passed. I called. Yes,
his wife assured me, he’d be coming by.
And finally one day he did
while I was up in town having a filling
replaced. When I got home, shaky
and feeling mussed, I saw that everything
of substance was gone, leaving only
white rectangular spaces on the lawn.
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
With the Dog at Sunrise
Although we always come this way
I never noticed before that the poplars
growing along the ravine
shine pink in the light of winter dawn.
What am I going to say
in my letter to Sarah—a widow
at thirty-one, alone in the violence
of her grief, sleepless,
and utterly cast down?
I look at the lithe, pink trees more carefully,
remembering Stephen, the photographer.
With the hunger of two I take them in.
Perhaps I can tell her that.
The dog furrows his brow while pissing long
and thoughtfully against an ancient hemlock.
The snow turns the saffron of a monk’s robe
and acrid steam ascends.
Searching for God is the first thing and the last,
but in between such trouble, and such pain.
Far up in the woods where no one goes
deer take their ease under the great
pines, nose to steaming nose. . . .
