3. Remollstrallce
Why can't you take your rest? You have been dead
so long that every cell of you has entered
my helplessly surviving body, leaching down
beneath the landscape to our children,
to the dear actuality of my second wife.
You could, like her first husband, live with us
as an invisible, cherished, and welcome presence.
You would be past sixty now. You would have stiffened,
whitened, would feel aches of your own,
and shu me, smiling at your own decline
and other such absurdities: my own.
4.
Critique
Is it worth mu ch , this sedulous retelling
of the careworn beads of the body? Why must I
catalogue its youthful urges, its middle-aged
infelicities, its eldering need to finger
its entrances, dark witnesses to history?
Get shut of the obsessive self-regard
of the child, that temperature chart more passionate
in the terms of description than in the thing described!
What price forgetfulness? What pri ce peace?
5.
Envoi
Late in my life , I dream of us together,
clothed in the house whose peaked , protective roof
floats without burden over spacious rooms,
commodious, airy, bright as a church. Its walls
and roof, pulled out of touch by the intervention of time,
hold up a screen for love, a sleight of words.
We longed to keep a ravenous world at bay
by gazing down its glare and speaking welJ.
