Robert Lowell
INAUGURATION DAY: JANUARY 1953
The snow had buried Stuyvesant.
The subways drummed the vaults. I heard
Uhlan-green girders charge on Third,
Manhattan's truss of adamant,
That groaned in ermine, slummed on want . . .
Cyclonic zero of the Word,
God of our armies, who interred
Cold Harbor's blue immortals, Grant!
Ice, ice; our wheels no longer move;
Horseman, your sword
is
in
the groove!
Look, the fixed stars, itinerant
As lack-land atoms, split apart,
And the Republic summons Grant,
The mausoleum in her heart.
A MAD NEGRO SOLDIE ,R
CONFINED AT MUNICH
We're all Americans, except the Doc,
A Kraut DP, who kneels and bathes my eye.
The boys who floored me, two black patients, try
To pat my hands. Rounds, rounds! Why punch a clock?
In Munich the zoo's rubble fumes with cats;
Hoydens with air-guns prowl the Ludwigplatz,
And pink the pigeons on the mustard spire.
Who but my true-love set the town on fire?
