POETRY
HYANNISPORT IN NOVEMBER
The braving geese fly down the Cape,
Eluding the icy Hunter's snare
And, hanging through the wheeling world,
Look down upon the districts where
The unfrocked diplomat reposed
And wives of middle-west tycoons
Paced up and down the pilgrim strand
Or paused beside the summer dunes.
The taut young matrons played with death
To please the elected of the Port
And teach the damned the graces of
A neat and necessary sport.
The shampooed debutantes sat down
Upon their pleasant cultural lag,
Or sank into the gelded blue
Beyond the flagstone and the flag.
In ecstasy the sun-drunk East
Shut up shop when Fall was hung
On acid boughs that ate away
The oriole's enraptured tongue.
Out of the blood of Standish's loins
The fatted matriarchs drove West
To wed Christ Cauterized, or seek
The honied Islands of the Blest.
Salt-bleached and bitten by the wind,
The Titan sprawls upon Cape Cod:
His blue-white flesh, His sun-caked brain
Are generations unto God.
Heliotrope, the Winter's eye
And old transfixing reverie
Rehearse what cycled ages slid
Into the sere and .silent sea.
489
RICHARD
c
liAS E
