I close the book I am reading in which
there’s a picnic in the country before the Great War.
William Carlos Williams has motored over
from Rutherford and lots of the Greenwich
Village crowd come up with cheese and bread
and Marianne Moore arrives with her bright red hair
in braids wound twice around her head,
as long as that. She’s the same age as my mother,
who deftly plays four hands at the piano
in the Conservatory and flirts so
outrageously she has to elope with my father.
At this picnic, Alfred Kreymborg—it’s his place—
hands around the stuffed eggs and everyone
sits on the ground in attitudes of such grace
that tears come into my eyes for what is gone,
for the intensity of it, I think I mean,
the way the poets turn up in each other’s
richly detailed literary memoirs
making the dangerous era we live in seem
pallid, empty at least of artistic passion.
That same year my father buys a Stanley Steamer.
He and my mother wheel past, the toast of the town
in their matching linen dusters and gay demeanor,
but this perfect picture is flawed with spider cracks.
His only brother is soon to be gassed at the Marne.
My housebound mother, crazed with her first-born,
opens the lid of the Steinway with an axe.
Nevertheless, the next babe and the next and next
come forth in jig time, though Pa, ascending
among the nouveaux riches on Wall Street specs,
is seldom home. Released from baby-tending
by a starchy Nanny, Momma finds renown
as a demon shopper. Chopin is packed away.
A wet bar flows in the space of the vanquished Steinway
and obsequious salesladies all over town
call up to describe designer frocks on sale.
Meanwhile, Marianne’s father, in despair
over his failure to provide the wherewithal
for his family, blinks twice and disappears.
Our heroine, undaunted, graduates
from Bryn Mawr and teaches stenography
in an American Indian school upstate,
becomes a librarian, an editor, and inch
by inch the closet poet emerges. “We
must be as clear as our natural reticence
will allow,” she announces. Rapturously
I try this statement on like a negligee
that’s neither diaphanous nor yet opaque.
Crisp lyrics from her quirky intellect
flare across Modern Poetry Survey
where she’s sandwiched between Pound and Ransom.
But not once in my four years as a Cliffie,
humble in Harvard Yard, do I find that phantom
I long for, a woman professor, trailed by her covey.
Pearl Harbor bursts apart. Cambridge fills
with uniforms. How to accommodate
the life of the mind with the inmost patriot?
Six days a week at dawn in Sever Hall
toward that end, take intensive Russian
with crewcut p.f.c.’s quickmarched from barracks.
My mother attends air raid warden sessions.
Marianne writes “In Distrust of Merits”:
Strengthened to live, strengthened to die, for medals. .
My brothers ship out, each to a different theater.
Sunlight glints on the B School’s 90-day wonders,
those all-boy ensigns. I try for the WACS but am stalled.
Hiroshima melts down. Sweet peace, reprieve.
Marianne embarks on La Fontaine.
I graduate, get married; too young, Mother weeps,
and yet we’re liver-spotted with dead friends.
Soon after, my mother’s a volunteer. She reads
to the blind, pricks Beethoven in braille, makes
weekly side trips to the Philharmonic
and suddenly it’s the fifties. I’ve become
a freshman English instructor, a freshman poet
as well. Marianne is reading her poems
at Wellesley. Surely the ones I know by heart
will trickle through the leaky microphone.
My fingers riffle pages of the texts
but the black tricorn bending low deflects
that flat small voice from reaching anyone.
I tell myself, it’s like Faulkner’s “The Bear”:
You must relinquish everything to enter
into its presence. Except that having come there
I’m eye to eye with what? An eccentric spinster
whom I can’t emulate, however much
I admire her words that “cluster like chromosomes.”
Strong emotion has no place in her poems
but slithers into every line I touch.
We never meet. I am content to take
to heart her praise of idiosyncrasy,
exactitude, intensity, technique.
Her “be accurate and modest” speaks to me.
When Robert Lowell puffs her as “the best
woman poet in English,” I thrill to hear
Langston Hughes’s riposte: “I consider her
[it’s 1953] the most famous
Negro woman poet in America.”
A vintage year—my third child is born.
From her grandmother bracelet, nine criteria
of my mother’s worth dangle, each name a charm.
Here’s Marianne posing for Life magazine
at the zoo. Here, rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Here, The New Yorker prints an exchange of letters
between the poet and the corporate machine
as Ford invites Miss Moore to find a name
for its disastrous Edsel. None of hers
would do, though fanciful and fleet of limb.
The sixties roll round. My first book appears.
This is the decade in which assassination
catches on, like a vile pop tune. We mourn
a president who was briefly everyone’s darling.
We mourn his brother. Sexton and I in the rain
sway with thousands on Boston Common
to hear Martin Luther King. And then we lose him
and lose Evers and Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman
and all of us lose heart in Vietnam.
Little from Marianne of praise or caveat
in these years. Reviewing a new anthology
she opens herself to report that Allen G.
“can foul the nest in a way to marvel at,”
but nothing she says impinges on events.
“Greed seems to me the vice of the century,”
she writes in Seventeen. On a Central Park bench
she poses with Mickey Spillane for an airline venture,
not for the fee from Braniff, but because it feels
impolite to her to refuse. My mother, I’m sure
would agree. I wonder, at that early dejeuner sur
l’herbe, can Marianne turn down the wassail?
Over the years each tries on rich disguises.
The poet becomes her beasts in armor and shell,
a woman adept at the wittiest camouflages
but under them always lurks the shy red-haired girl
while my mother pretends not to find old age bewildering.
Widowed, she takes up art. She goes on cruises.
Snapshots of the several great-grandchildren
accompany her. Though she hears less and less
she keeps her Friday seat at Symphony
and keeps the program notes, along with clips
of my reviews. Thus pass the seventies.
The end’s in sight. First Marianne slips
away, original and last of her line.
Soon after, my mother, the dowager queen
leaving behind descendants like a string
of worry beads. I claim them both as mine
whose lives began in a gentler time and place
of horse-drawn manners, parlor decorum
-though no less stained with deception and regret―
before man split the atom, thrust the jet,
procured the laser, shot himself through space,
both shapers of my alphabet.
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