Kumin - The long marriage: poems

MAXINE AND VICTOR KUMIN WITH GUS AND CLAUDE (1978) . Kelly Wise MAXINE KUMIN The Long Marriage POEMS For Victor, on the dark lake... Contents I lie by the pond in utter nakedness thinking of you, Will, your epiphanies of woodcock, raven, rills, and craggy steeps, the solace that seductive nature bore, and how in my late teens I came to you with other Radcliffe pagans suckled in a creed outworn , declaiming whole swatches of Intimations to each other. Moist-eyed with reverence, lying about the common room, rising to recite Great God! Id rather be ... How else redeem the first flush of experience? How else create it again and again? Not in entire forgetfulness I raise up my boyfriend, a Harvard man who could outquote me in his Groton elocutionary style. Groping to unhook my bra he swore poetry could change the world for the better.

The War was on. Was I to let him die unfulfilled? Soon afterward we parted. Years later, he a decorated vet, I a part-time professor, signed the same guest book in the Lake District. Stunned by coincidence we gingerly shared a room. Ah, Will, high summer now; how many more of these? Fair seed-time had my soul, you sang; what seed-times still to come? How I mistrust them, cheaters that will flame, gutter and go out, like the scarlet tanager who lights in the apple tree but will not stay. Here at the pond, your meadow, grove, and stream lodged in my head as tight as lily buds, sun slants through translucent minnows, dragonflies in paintbox colors couple in midair.

The fickle tanager flies over the tasseled field. I lay my Prelude down under the willow. My old gnarled body prepares to swim to the other side. Come with me, Will. Let us cross over sleek as otters, each of us bobbing in the old-fashioned breaststroke, each of us centered in our beloved Vales. It wasnt exactly raining but a little wetness still dribbled down.

I had been reading and sorrowing and set out with the dogs as an antidote. They went ahead snuffling in the leaf plaster. Despite the steady snick of my clippers boletus mushrooms kept popping soundlessly out of the ground. How else account for the ones with mouse-bites out of the caps when I doubled back on my tracks? The animals have different enzymes from us. They can eat amanitas we die of. The woodpeckers fledglings clack like a rattle of drumsticks each time crumpled dragonflies arrive and are thrust into the bud vases of their gullets.

The chipmunk crosses in front of me tail held up like a banner. Who knows what he has in his cheeks? Beechnuts would be good, or a morsel of amanita. Gorki disliked his face with its high Mongol cheekbones. It would be good to be a bandit , he said, to rob rich misers and give their money to the poor . Saturnine Gorki, at the 1929 International Congress of Atheists. By then he was famous, but twice, in his teens, he tried to kill himself.

Called before an ecclesiastical tribunal and excommunicated, he declared God is the name of my desire . The animals have no Holy Synod to answer to. They simply pursue their vocations. In general, I desire to see God lifting the needy up out of their dung heap, as it is written. I did not seek this ancient porcupine curled in the hollow of a dead ash tree, delicately encoded on top of a mountain of his own dung, pale buff-colored pellets that must have taken several seasons to accumulate. At this moment, I desire the dogs, oblivious so far, not to catch sight or scent of him.

I am the rightful master of my soul Gorki said, and is this not true of the porcupine? Born Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov he chose his own name gorki bitter and a century later I carry him like a pocket guide on this secret trail clearing and wool-gathering as we go. Surrounded, blundered into by these gorgeous tropical ephemerae, we watch their pinwheel colors compose an arcane calligraphy on air under a quarter-acre of fine mesh. I almost step on a slender young botanist in a shocking-pink smock, lying flat to pollinate certain recalcitrant flowers with a single-haired paintbrush. You bend to inspect her handiwork your twice-wound braids frizzing red against the sun to form a sort of web. Marianne, I was appalled you dared to chloroform a cat and then dissect it at Bryn Mawr. Was it the miniaturist impulse even then, a schoolgirls red desire to see fine things in place? When our guide uses her second and third fingers to clasp a palm-sized Heliconid by one wing, you murmur approvingly, Precisionist .

We peer at the owl eye it wears as a scare tactic. I see a frisson pierce you just as the peacocks on the grass at Oxford once made your hair stand on end, the eyes of their tail feathers holding you fast. Worlds apart we are undergraduates again. Letting the brilliant mimicry shiver through us. We are the beasts , you whisper and I nod, releasing you. The noiseless Heliconid soars to another silent flower.

Again, look overhead How air is azurd.... THE WORKS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS The paper in this book was produced from pure wood pulp without the use of chlorine or any other substance harmful to the environment. I bore it to the indifferent cashier who could not know that according to Robert Bridges introduction although touchy and arrogant, you had great sweetness, nor how sweet it is to replace my lost edition loaned to a student forty years ago with this paperback wearing your portrait as a rosy-lipped boy on the cover. Dear Gerard, how gentle, how British the rest of the disclaimer, which ends: thereby conserving fossil fuels and contributing little to the greenhouse effect. Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and greenworld all together.... In your lifetime and most of mine, greenhouse suggested roses out of season, fleshy gladiolas, even European cucumbers trained to trellises: in short, the kind of fervor that made you burn those early poems for the love of God, you would have said, on becoming a Jesuit.

For the love of posterity Bridges saved most of them, and for the love of the environment, Wordsworth Editions reprinted you with ah! bright wings. MURIEL RUKEYSER 19131980 Once a day I lie flat on my back stretch out the bent sapling of my torso and raise my four-pound yellow dumbbell. Working out makes me think of Muriel. Muriel after her next-to-last stroke standing a little spraddle-legged for balance the way I do, although I try to hide my disequilibrium by leaning casually against railings, blackboards, doorjambs. Passionate Muriel, tough as a tree trunk, her sure voice containing a vibrato had it always been there? I felt it as a splinter she worked past, line by line declaiming surely it is time for the true grace of women ... obdurate Muriel demanding human rights for Kim Chi Ha in his Korean cage a poet in solitary, glare-lit, I hear, without books, without pen or paper Muriel eulogizing Matty Defend us from doing what he had to do.... obdurate Muriel demanding human rights for Kim Chi Ha in his Korean cage a poet in solitary, glare-lit, I hear, without books, without pen or paper Muriel eulogizing Matty Defend us from doing what he had to do....

Harvards F. O. Mattheissen my favorite professor, who leapt from the closet out of a Boston hotel window and I thought how she was the first woman-poet I knew who was willing to say the unsaid. In rehab I was learning how to put one foot in front of the other, how to lift a teaspoon from the soup bowl to my lips. Three months of that. I had a one-pound weight.