You had a window seat,
an electric blanket,
a silver hot water bottle
monogrammed like a hip-flask,
Italian china fruity
with bunches and berries
and proper
putti.
The nuptial bed,
gold, yellow and green,
was as big as a bathroom.
Born ten years and yet an aeon
too early for the
twenties,
Mother, you smile
as
if
you saw your father
inches away yet hidden, as when he groused behind a screen
over a National Geographic Magazine,
back in those settled years of World War One.
Terrible that old life of decency
without unseemly intimacy
or quarrels, when the unemancipated woman
still had her Freudian papa and maids!
WAKING IN THE BLUE
The night attendant, a B. U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on the
Meaning
ot
Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
u
though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This
is
the house of the "mentally ill.")
