They march on their soles up Main Street:
White stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air-
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garb.age pail.
She jabs her wedge-head
in
a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and
will
not scare.
TO DELMORE SCHWARTZ
(Cambridge 1946)
We couldn't even keep the furnace lit!
Even when we had disconnected it,
the antiquated
refrigerator gurgled mustard gas
through your mustard-yellow house,
and spoiled our long maneuvered visit
from T. S. Eliot's brother, Henry Ware ...
Your stuffed duck craned toward Harvard from my trunk:
its bill was a black whistle, and its brow
was high and thinner than a baby's thumb;
its webs were tough as toe-nails on its bough.
It
was your first kill; you had rushed it home,
pickled in a tin wastebasket of rum-
it looked through us, as if it'd died dead drunk.
You must have propped its eyelids with a nail,
and yet it lived with us and met our stare,
Rabelaisian, lubricious, drugged. And there,
perched on my trunk and typing-table,
it cooled our universal
