Jane Kenyon

The others bent their heads and started in. Confused, I asked my neighbor to explain—a sturdy, bright-cheeked girl who brought raw milk to school from her family’s herd of Holsteins. Ann had a blue bookmark, and on it Christ revealed his beating heart, holding the flesh back with His wounded hand. Ann understood division. . . . Miss Moran sprang from her monumental desk and led me roughly through the class without a word. My shame was radical as she propelled me past the cloakroom to the furnace closet, where only the boys were put, only the older ones at that. The door swung briskly shut. The warmth, the gloom, the smell of sweeping compound clinging to the broom soothed me. I found a bucket, turned it upside down, and sat, hugging my knees. I hummed a theme from Haydn that I knew from my piano lessons. . . . and hardened my heart against authority. And then I heard her steps, her fingers on the latch. She led me, blinking and changed, back to the class.

A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk, and like midwives and undertakers possess a weird authority. Crickets leap from the stubble, parting before me like the Red Sea. The garden sprawls and spoils. Across the lake the campers have learned to water ski. They have, or they haven’t. Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!” Cloud shadows rush over drying hay, fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine. The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod brighten the margins of the woods. Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; water, silver-still, and a vee of geese. * The cicada’s dry monotony breaks over me. The days are bright and free, bright and free. Then why did I cry today for an hour, with my whole body, the way babies cry? * A white, indifferent morning sky, and a crow, hectoring from its nest high in the hemlock, a nest as big as a laundry basket ... In my childhood I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet, waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away. The damp dirt road gave off this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps. Spruce, inadequate, and alien I stood at the side of the road. It was the only life I had.

The first hot April day the granite step was warm. Flies droned in the grass. When a car went past they rose in unison, then dropped back down. . . . I saw that a yellow crocus bud had pierced a dead oak leaf, then opened wide. How strong its appetite for the luxury of the sun! Everyone longs for love’s tense joy and red delights. And then I spied an ant dragging a ragged, disembodied wing up the warm brick walk. It must have been the Methodist in me that leaned forward, preceded by my shadow, to put a twig just where the ant was struggling with its own desire.

"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's uncle midway through the murder of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering courtesans. Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with only half a heart. The ornaments go down into the box: the silver spaniel,My Darling on its collar, from Mother's childhood in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack my brother and I fought over, pulling limb from limb. Mother drew it together again with thread while I watched, feeling depraved at the age of ten. With something more than caution I handle them, and the lights, with their tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along from house to house, their pasteboard toy suitcases increasingly flimsy. Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop. By suppertime all that remains is the scent of balsam fir. If it's darkness we're having, let it be extravagant.

For Donald Clark Drugged and drowsy but not asleep I heard my blind roommate's daughter helping her with her meal: “What's that? Squash?” “No. It's spinach.” Back from a brain-scan, she dozed to the sound of the Soaps: adultery, amnesia, shady business deals, and long, white hospital halls.... No separation between life and art. I heard two nurses whispering: Mr. Malcomson had died. An hour later one of them came to say that a private room was free. A chill spring breeze perturbed the plastic drape. I lay back on the new bed, and had a vision of souls stacked up like pelts under my soul, which was ill— so heavy with grief it kept the others from rising. No varicolored tubes serpentined beneath the covers; I had the vital signs of a healthy, early-middle-aged woman. There was nothing to cut or dress, remove or replace. A week of stupor. Sun and moon rose and set over the small enclosed court, the trees.... The doctor’s face appeared and disappeared over the foot of the bed. By slow degrees the outlandish sadness waned. Restored to my living room I looked at the tables, chairs, and pictures with something like delight, only pale, faint—as from a great height. I let the phone ring; the mail accrued unopened on the table in the hall.

The shirt touches his neck and smooths over his back. It slides down his sides. It even goes down below his belt— down into his pants. Lucky shirt.

It is always the dispossessed— someone driving a huge rusted Dodge that’s burning oil, and must cost twenty-five dollars to fill. Today before seven I saw, through the morning fog, his car leave the road, turning into the field. It must be his day off, I thought, or he’s out of work and drinking, or getting stoned. Or maybe as much as anything he wanted to see where the lane through the hay goes. It goes to the bluff overlooking the lake, where we’ve cleared brush, swept the slippery oak leaves from the path, and tried to destroy the poison ivy that runs over the scrubby, sandy knolls. Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car needing a new muffler backs out to the road, headlights withdrawing from the lowest branches of the pines. Next day I find beer cans, crushed; sometimes a few fish too small to bother cleaning and left on the moss to die; or the leaking latex trace of outdoor love.... Once I found the canvas sling chairs broken up and burned. Whoever laid the fire gathered stones to contain it, like a boy pursuing a merit badge, who has a dream of work, and proper reward for work.

Rebuked, she turned and ran uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner arsonist, held a match to her brain. She observed her life: against her will it survived the unwavering flame. The barn was empty of animals. Only a swallow tilted near the beams, and bats hung from the rafters the roof sagged between. Her breath became steady where, years past, the farmer cooled the big tin amphoræ of milk. The stone trough was still filled with water: she watched it and received its calm. So it is when we retreat in anger: we think we burn alone and there is no balm. Then water enters, though it makes no sound.

A fly wounds the water but the wound soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter overhead, dropping now and then toward the outward-radiating evidence of food. The green haze on the trees changes into leaves, and what looks like smoke floating over the neighbor’s barn is only apple blossoms. But sometimes what looks like disaster is disaster: the day comes at last, and the men struggle with the casket just clearing the pews.

Searching for pillowcases trimmed with lace that my mother-in-law once made, I open the chest of drawers upstairs to find that mice have chewed the blue and white linen dishtowels to make their nest, and bedded themselves among embroidered dresser scarves and fingertip towels. Tufts of fibers, droppings like black caraway seeds, and the stains of birth and afterbirth give off the strong unforgettable attar of mouse that permeates an old farmhouse on humid summer days. A couple of hickory nuts roll around as I lift out the linens, while a hail of black sunflower shells falls on the pillowcases, yellow with age, but intact. I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun to dry. There’s almost no one left who knows how to crochet lace.... The bright-eyed squatters are not here. They’ve scuttled out to the fields for summer, as they scuttled in for winter—along the wall, from chair to skirted chair, making themselves flat and scarce while the cat dozed with her paws in the air, and we read the mail or evening paper, unaware.