Another winter was scraped-scropped away.The Toothwort White haunted our woods in May.Summer was power-mowed, and autumn, burned.Alas, the dingy cygnet never turnedInto a wood duck. And again your voice:320 “But this is prejudice! You should rejoiceThat she is innocent. Why overstressThe physical? She wants to look a mess.Virgins have written some resplendent books.Lovemaking is not everything. Good looksAre not that indispensable!” And stillOld Pan would call from every painted hill,And still the demons of our pity spoke:No lips would share the lipstick of her smoke;The telephone that rang before a ball330 Every two minutes in Sorosa HallFor her would never ring; and, with a greatScreeching of tires on gravel, to the gateOut of lacquered night, a white-scarfed beauWould never come for her; she’d never go,A dream of gauze and jasmine, to that dance.We sent her, though, to a château in France.
And she returned in tears, with new defeats,New miseries. On days when all the streetsOf College Town led to the game, she’d sit340 On the library steps, and read or knit;Mostly alone she’d be, or with that niceFrail roommate, now a nun; and, once or twice,With a Korean boy who took my course.She had strange fears, strange fantasies, strange forceOf character – as when she spent three nightsInvestigating certain sounds and lightsIn an old barn. She twisted words: pot, topSpider, redips. And “powder” was “red wop.”She called you a didactic katydid.350 She hardly ever smiled, and when she did,It was a sign of pain. She’d criticizeFerociously our projects, and with eyesExpressionless sit on her tumbled bedSpreading her swollen feet, scratching her headWith psoriatic fingernails, and moan,Murmuring dreadful words in monotone.
She was my darling: difficult, morose —But still my darling. You remember thoseAlmost unruffled evenings when we played360 Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which madeHer almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,The lights were merciful, the shadows mild.Sometimes I’d help her with a Latin text,Or she’d be reading in her bedroom, nextTo my fluorescent lair, and you would beIn your own study, twice removed from me,And I would hear both voices now and then:“Mother, what’s grimpen?” “What is what?” “Grim Pen.”Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:370 “Mother, what’s chtonic?” That, too, you’d explain,Appending: “Would you like a tangerine?”“No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?”You’d hesitate. And lustily I’d roarThe answer from my desk through the closed door.
It does not matter what it was she read(some phony modern poem that was saidIn English Lit to be a document“Engazhay and compelling” – what this meantNobody cared); the point is that the three380 Chambers, then bound by you and her and me,Now form a tryptich or a three-act playIn which portrayed events forever stay.
I think she always nursed a small mad hope.
I’d finished recently my book on Pope.Jane Dean, my typist, offered her one dayTo meet Pete Dean, a cousin. Jane’s fianceWould then take all of them in his new carA score of miles to a Hawaiian bar.The boy was picked up at a quarter past390 Eight in New Wye. Sleet glazed the roads. At lastThey found the place – when suddenly Pete DeanClutching his brow exclaimed that he had cleanForgotten an appointment with a chumWho’d land in jail if he, Pete, did not come,Et cetera. She said she understood.After he’d gone the three young people stoodBefore the azure entrance for awhile.Puddles were neon-barred; and with a smileShe said she be de trop, she’d much prefer400 Just going home. Her friends escorted herTo the bus stop and left; but she, insteadOf riding home, got off at Lochanhead.You scrutinized your wrist: “It’s eight fifteen.[And here time forked.] I’ll turn it on.” The screenIn its blank broth evolved a lifelike blur,And music welled.And music welled. He took one look at her,And shot a death ray at well-meaning Jane.
A male hand traced from Florida to MaineThe curving arrows of Aeolian wars.410 You said that later a quartet of bores,Two writers and two critics, would debateThe Cause of Poetry on Channel 8.A nymph came pirouetting, under whiteRotating petals, in a vernal riteTo kneel before an altar in a woodWhere various articles of toilet stood.I went upstairs and read a galley proof,And heard the wind roll marbles on the roof.“See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing”420 Has unmistakably the vulgar ringOf its preposterous age. Then came your call,My tender mockingbird, up from the hall.I was in time to overhear brief fameAnd have a cup of tea with you: my nameWas mentioned twice, as usual just behind(one oozy footstep) Frost.(one oozy footstep) Frost.“Sure you don’t mind?I’ll catch the Exton plane, because you knowIf I don’t come by midnight with the dough —”
And then there was a kind of travelog:430 A host narrator took us through the fogOf a March night, where headlights from afarApproached and grew like a dilating star,To the green, indigo and tawny seaWhich we had visited in thirty-three,Nine months before her birth. Now it was allPepper-and-salt, and hardly could recallThat first long ramble, the relentless light,The flocks of sails (one blue among the whiteClashed queerly with the sea, and two were red),440 The man in the old blazer, crumbing bread,The crowding gulls insufferably loud,And one dark pigeon waddling in the crowd.
“Was that the phone?” You listened at the door.Nothing. Picked up the program from the floor.More headlights in the fog. There was no senseIn window-rubbing; only some white fenceAnd the reflector poles passed by unmasked.
“Are we quite sure she’s acting right?” you asked.“It’s technically a blind date, of course.450 Well, shall we try the preview of Remorse?”And we allowed, in all tranquillity,The famous film to spread its charmed marquee;The famous face flowed in, fair and inane:The parted lips, the swimming eyes, the grainOf beauty on the cheek, odd gallicism,And the soft form dissolving in the prismOf corporate desire.Of corporate desire.“I think,” she said,“I’ll get off here.” “It’s only Lochanhead.”“Yes, that’s okay.” Gripping the stang, she peered460 At ghostly trees. Bus stopped. Bus disappeared.Thunder above the Jungle. “No, not that!”Pat Pink, our guest (antiatomic chat).Eleven struck. You sighed. “Well, I’m afraidThere’s nothing else of interest.” You playedNetwork roulette: the dial turned and trk’ed.Commercials were beheaded. Faces flicked.An open mouth in midsong was struck out.An imbecile with sideburns was aboutTo use his gun, but you were much too quick.470 A jovial Negro raised his trumpet. Trk.Your ruby ring made life and laid the law.Oh, switch it off! And as life snapped we sawA pinhead light dwindle and die in blackInfinity.Infinity. Out of his lakeside shackA watchman, Father Time, all gray and bent,Emerged with his uneasy dog and wentAlong the reedy bank. He came too late.