And in the Afternoons I Botanized

Abstract

Where we sat, on the flagstone terrace behind the house, Gin cooling in the spill of civilian twilight, ice cubes Doing the dead man's float, with air rough to the touch, The birch leaves blown yellow, in the lacerating shape of spades, And thin boughs heaving a little with the season's sickness, You said: We've come to calamity and the end of things. Even the bees are weary, and the honey heavy, the petals depressed. The wars you lose last longer than the wars you win. And it was true. I could feel the same breeze, pallbearer of the birch, October heading the dark cortege. Where others might trace Lifelines in the palm, I read, on the back of my hand, Liver spots like annotations on a last draft. No goldfinch Flew to the feeder of wild seed; in the worked earth, No chipmunk burrowed at the sweet root of the bulb. And yet, in the mornings, fruit still hung fresh and firm, Dew-dappled apples, frost smoke thick on the ground. You said: If that crusty north-of-Boston poet had put us In a poem, would we stand stiff as figures from a snow globe, The trees bowed down around us, each branch bent With the weight of meditation, the cling of imagery? Or would we Lean on a worm fence, blood stropped in the heart, Between us those moments where anger rubs on injury The tone medium wry, the pace pieced out in syllables That stick in the throat, the ache of everything unsaid? Well, better that than chintz and chimes, some teapot dame Who'd make us talk on stilts, or in the weak repeats of Rondeaus and rondels, French inventions that sound like Girl groups from the Sixties. Would you rather lose yourself In the cold echoes of Eliot, his vaulted voice dry as Stone commencements at the graveside? Or find yourself Edged out by the muscle of music in late Yeats? We'll take our own line, broken, with a grain of sense and salt. But no words slow down the dirt. And these drinks, Essence of emptiness from the juniper berry, can't bring back A duckweb spray of maple paddling in the slipstreams of spring, Or the flowering crab, or panicles of japonica. You said: At 47, I'm in my prime numbers, indivisible, entered Only by myself and one other-odd and middling and absolute The mind still testing out every hedge against death, The short con and the long shot, the bet called on the come. It's no wonder we nail our days to the wall, and hang Distractions of the calendar, slick colors over the Xed-out box: Gaunt barge of Venice in the green canals; the loveknot puzzles of Women in the pink; and from Monet, the blue and purple pulp of waterblooms. So all our albums fail the past: pictures of picnics and the rose ribbons of Girls dozy under the summer oak; your unparalleled apparel, That dress the shade of bittersweet; and my brand-new panama, Black band around the crown, hat like an elegy for the head. You said: If we were characters cast in a play, could we choose Some comedy written in the wit of Restoration, and call ourselves Lord and Lady Vainhope, or the Fallshorts of a London season? We'd stumble through contraptions of the plot, dull but not despised, Wanting only to be better than we were, the axis of laughter Set spinning by the jibes of gentlemen, the housemaid's joke. A frump of mangled language, a squire's fat harrumph, We'd ride out the raillery, redeemed as the footlights dimmed. It might be worse. The Greeks would strap us both behind A mask of agony, and raise, behind us both, tall columns Glazed with gore, history dripping from the choral odes. …