Dolphin By Robert Lowell
Dolphin By Robert Lowell My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing […]
To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage By Robert Lowell
To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage By Robert Lowell “It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours.” —Schopenhauer “The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open. Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen. My hopped up husband drops […]
To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage By Robert Lowell
To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage By Robert Lowell “The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open. Our magnolia blossoms.Life begins to happen. My hopped up husband drops his home disputes, and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes, free-lancing out along the razor’s edge. This screwball might kill his wife, […]
Man And Wife By Robert Lowell
Man And Wife By Robert Lowell Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian. At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five days’ white. […]
Skunk Hour By Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour By Robert Lowell Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores […]
For The Union Dead By Robert Lowell
For The Union Dead By Robert Lowell The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles […]
History By Robert Lowell
History By Robert Lowell History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had– it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes. Abel was finished; death is not remote, a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic, his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire, his […]
Waking In The Blue By Robert Lowell
Waking In The Blue By Robert Lowell The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of 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 as though a harpoon […]
