Robert Lowell
FIVE POEMS
MEMORIES OF WEST STREET AND LEPKE
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a help-mate,
and is a "young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my grand-daughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.
These are the tranquillized
Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seed-time?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C. 0.,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and President, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull-pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street
Jail,
a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothes-line entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
