Anne Stevenson

Late October. It is afternoon. My daughter and I walk through the leaf-strewn Corridors of the park In the light and the dark Of the elms' thin arches. Around us brown leaves fall and spread. Small winds stir the minor dead. Dust powders the air. Those shrivelled women stare. At us from their cold benches. Child, your mittens tug your sleeves. They lick your drumming feet, the leaves. You come so fast, so fast. You violate the past, My daughter, as your coat dances.

Where they will bury me I don't know. Many places might not be sorry to store me. The Midwest has right of origin. Already it has welcomed my mother to its flat sheets. The English fens that bore me have been close curiously often. It seems I can't get away from dampness and learning. If I stay where I am I could sleep in this educated earth. But if they are kind, they'll burn me and send me to Vermont. I'd be an education for the trees and would relish, really, flaring into maple each October— my scarlet letter to you. Your stormy north is possible. You will be there, engrossed in its peat. It would be handy not to have to cross the whole Atlantic each time I wanted to lift up the turf and slip in beside you.

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains. The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads. But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child You shout, 'The swifts are back!' Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields. Swereee swereee. Another. And another. It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs. The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether. These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers. But a shift of wing, and they're earth-skimmers, daggers Skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves. Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them, All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms, They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains. Here is a legend of swifts, a parable — When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds, The swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things Like shoes, with long legs and short wings, So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk. And they stayed there. 'Well,' said the Raven, after years of this, 'I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky On condition that you give up rest.' 'Yes, yes,' screamed the swifts, 'We abhor rest. We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep, Soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms. Let us be free, be air!' So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies. He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives. He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet. Then he released them,Never to Return Inscribed on their feet and wings. And so We have swifts, though in reality, not parables but Bolts in the world's need: swift Swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply Sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world's breathing. The grace to say they live in another firmament. A way to say the miracle will not occur, And watch the miracle.

The spirit is too blunt an instrument to have made this baby. Nothing so unskilful as human passions could have managed the intricate exacting particulars: the tiny blind bones with their manipulating tendons, the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae, the chain of the difficult spine. Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent fingernails, the shell-like complexity of the ear, with its firm involutions concentric in miniature to minute ossicles. Imagine the infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments through which the completed body already answers to the brain. Then name any passion or sentiment possessed of the simplest accuracy. No, no desire or affection could have done with practice what habit has done perfectly, indifferently, through the body's ignorant precision. It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent love and despair and anxiety and their pain.

(i.m. Charles Leslie Stevenson, 1909-79) This House Which represents you, as my bones do, waits, all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come, as it always does, between breaths, between nights of no wind and days of the nulled sun. And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate faceless fields, a white road drawn through dependent firs, the soldered glare of lakes. Is it wanting you here to want the winter in? I breathe you back into your square house and begin to live here roundly. This year will be between, not in, four seasons. Do you hear already the wet rumble of thaw? Stones. Sky. Streams. Sun. Those might be swallows at the edge of sight returning to last year's nest in the crook of the porchlight. Complaint 'Dear God,' they write, 'that was a selfish winter to lean so long, unfairly on the spring!' And now — this too much greed of seedy summer. Mouths of the flowers unstick themselves and sting the bees with irresistible dust. Iris allow undignified inspection. Plain waste weeds dress up in Queen Anne's lace. Our mist- blue sky clouds heavily with clematis. 'Too much,' they cry, 'too much. Begin again.' The Lord, himself a casualty of weather falls to earth in large hot drops of rain. The dry loam rouses in his scent, and under him — moist, sweet, discriminate — the spring. Thunder. Lightning. He can do anything. Between The wet and weight of this half-born English winter is not the weather of those fragmentary half-true willows that break in the glass of the canal behind our rudder as water arrives in our wake — a travelling arrow of now, of now, of now. Leaves of the water furl back from our prow, and as the pinnate narrow seam of where we are drives through the mirror of where we have to be, alder and willow double crookedly, reverse, assume a power to bud out tentatively in gold and yellow, so it looks as if what should be end of summer — seeds, dead nettles, berries, naked boughs — is really the anxious clouding of first spring. ...'Real' is what water is imagining. Stasis Before the leaves change, light transforms these lucid speaking trees. The heavy drench of August alters, things; its rich and sappy blood relaxes where a thirst ago, no rest released the roots' wet greed or stemmed their mad need to be more. September is the wisest time — neither the unbearable burning word nor the form of it, cooped in its cold ghost. How are they sombre — that unpicked apple, red, undisturbed by its fall; calm of those wasp-bored amethyst plums on the polished table? Body and head easy in amity, a beam between that must, unbalanced, quicken or kill, make new or dead whatever these voices are that hate the dust. The Circle It is imagination's white face remembers snow, its shape, a fluted shell on shoot or flower, its weight, the permanence of winter pitched against the sun's absolute root. All March is shambles, shards. Yet no amber chestnut, Indian, burnished by its tent cuts to a cleaner centre or keeps summer safer in its sleep. Ghost be content. You died in March when white air hurt the maples. Birches knelt under ice. Roads forgot their ways in aisles of frost. There were no petals. Face, white face, you are snow in the green hills. High stones complete your circle where trees start. Granite and ice are colours of the heart.

There, in that lost corner of the ordnance survey. Drive through the vanity — two pubs and a garage — of Satley, then right, cross the A68 past down-at-heel farms and a quarry, you can't miss it, a 'T' instead of a 'plus' where the road meets a wall. If it's a usual day there'll be freezing wind, and you'll stumble climbing the stile (a ladder, really) as you pull your hat down and zip up your jacket. Out on the moor, thin air may be strong enough to knock you over, but if you head into it downhill, you can shelter in the wide, cindery trench of an old leadmine-to-Consett railway. You may have to share it with a crowd of dirty supercilious-looking ewes, who will baaa and cut jerkily away after posting you blank stares from their foreign eyes. One winter we came across five steaming, icicle-hung cows. But in summer, when the heather's full of nests, you'll hear curlews following you, raking your memory, maybe, with their cries; or, right under you nose, a grouse will whirr up surprised, like a poet startled by a line when it comes to her sideways. No protection is offered by trees — Hawthorn the English call May, a few struggling birches. But of wagtails and yellowhammers, plenty, and peewits who never say peewit, more a minor,go'way, go'way. Who was he, Salter? Why was this his gate? A pedlars' way, they carried salt to meat. The place gives tang to survival, its unstoppable view, a reservoir, ruins of the lead mines, new forestry pushing from the right, the curlew.

Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees, foxgloves come out to advertise for rich bumbling hummers, who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease (see Darwin’s chapters on his foxglove summers) plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff to sip from every hooker its intoxicating liquor and stop it propagating in a corner with itself. And this is how the foxflower keeps its sex life in order. Two anthers—adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce— let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts around the floor. Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this, reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door. So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis, flower by flower, undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.

I laid myself down as a woman And woke as a child. Sleep buried me up to my chin, But my brain cut wild. Sudden summer lay sticky as tar Under bare white feet. Stale, soot-spotted heapings of winter Shrank in the street. Black headlines, infolded like napkins, Crashed like grenades As war beat its way porch by porch Up New Haven's façades. Europe: a brown hive of noises, Hitler inside. On the sunny shelf by the stairs My tadpoles died. Big boys had already decided Who'd lose and who'd score, Singing one potato, two potato, Three potato, four. Singing sticks and stones May break my bones (but names hurt more). Singing step on a crack Break your mother's back (her platinum-ringed finger). Singing who got up your mother When your daddy wasn't there? Singing allee allee in free! You're Dead, you're dead, wherever you are!

Consider the adhesiveness of things to the ghosts that prized them, the "olden days" of birthday spoons and silver napkin rings. Too carelessly I opened that velvet drawer of heirlooms. There lay my grandmother's soul begging under veils of tarnish to be brought back whole. She who was always a climate in herself, who refused to vanish as the nineteen-hundreds grew older and louder, and the wars worse, and her grandchildren, bigger and ruder in her daughter's house. How completely turned around her lavender world became, how upside down. And how much, under her "flyaway" hair, she must have suffered, sitting there ignored by the dinner guests hour after candlelit hour, rubbed out, like her initials on the silverware, eating little, passing bread, until the wine's flood, the smoke's blast, the thunderous guffaws at last roared her to bed. In her tiny garden of confidence, wasted she felt, and furious. She fled to church, but Baby Jesus had grown out of his manger. She read of Jews in the New Haven Register gassed or buried alive. Every night, at the wheel of an ambulance, she drove and drove, not knowing how to drive. She died in '55, paralyzed, helpless. Her no man's land survived. I light my own age with a spill from her distress. And there it is, her dream, my heirloom, my drive downhill at the wheel of the last bus, the siren's wail, the smoke, the sickly smell. The drawer won't shut again. It never will.

note: Most of this journal, written on shipboard, seems to have been destroyed, probably by fire. What remains suggests that Mrs. Chandler journeyed to New Orleans without her husband's permission, thus becoming indirectly the cause of her baby's death. August, 1849                      EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO NEW ORLEANS ABOARD THE 'GENERAL WAYNE' Two weeks aboard the 'General Wayne' is little more than a floating hospital vomiting spells. I attribute them to is truly ill. For two days he has in his bunk. Belle seems to recover. At least fretful which indicates improvement. struck by a nervous disorder. I sleep very little and take no solid food. (page torn) (Second page) Yesterday evening poor little Cookie died. She was seized suddenly with spasms, poor thing, and died in an hour. You will accuse me of but it was truly frightful. I have not slept for weeping. only a dog! (page torn) (Third page) arrived safely in New Orleans but embark. We are all in quarantine might be better, but Belle is all day by her bedside. Doctor plague and gives me no hope pray for survival. (page torn) (Fourth page) have not been able to put pen to all over. Our dear little girl among the blessed, my beautiful authorities let no one near. darkies. I am full of one who was without fault and so, lies shrouded in my sister's blame God and myself, dear why you have left me without support? (page torn)