Stanley Kunitz

That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I slept in a chair, by the flagstone hearth, fighting my sleep, and one night saw a Hessian soldier stand at attention there in full regalia, till his head broke into flames. My only other callers were the FBI sent to investigate me as a Russian spy by patriotic neighbors on the river road; and flying squirrels parachuting from the elms who squeaked in rodent heat between the walls and upstairs rumbled at their nutty games. I never dared open the attic door. Even my nervous Leghorns joined the act, indulging their taste for chicken from behind. A glazed look swam into the survivors’ eyes; they caught a sort of dancing-sickness, a variation of the blind staggers, that hunched their narrow backs and struck a stiffened wing akimbo, as round and round the poultry yard they flapped and dropped and flapped again. The county agent shook his head: not one of them was spared the cyanide. That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I paced up and down the bottom-fields, tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in with a sharp blow of the heel timed to the chop-chop of the hoe: red pine and white, larch, balsam fir, one stride apart, two hundred to the row, until I heard from Rossiter’s woods the downward spiral of a veery’s song unwinding on the eve of war. Lord! Lord! who has lived so long? Count it ten thousand trees ago, five houses and ten thousand trees, since the swallows exploded from Bowman Tower over the place where the hermit sang, while I held a fantail of squirming roots that kissed the palm of my dirty hand, as if in reply to a bird. The stranger who hammers No Trespass signs to the staghorn sumac along the road must think he owns this property. I park my car below the curve and climbing over the tumbled stones where the wild foxgrape perseveres, I walk into the woods I made, my dark and resinous, blistered land, through the deep litter of the years.

—on my seventy-ninth birthday Nobody in the widow’s household ever celebrated anniversaries. In the secrecy of my room I would not admit I cared that my friends were given parties. Before I left town for school my birthday went up in smoke in a fire at City Hall that gutted the Department of Vital Statistics. If it weren’t for a census report of a five-year-old White Male sharing my mother’s address at the Green Street tenement in Worcester I’d have no documentary proof that I exist. You are the first, my dear, to bully me into these festive occasions. Sometimes, you say, I wear an abstracted look that drives you up the wall, as though it signified distress or disaffection. Don’t take it so to heart. Maybe I enjoy not-being as much as being who I am. Maybe it’s time for me to practice growing old. The way I look at it, I’m passing through a phase: gradually I’m changing to a word. Whatever you choose to claim of me is always yours; nothing is truly mine except my name. I only borrowed this dust.

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension Fallen from my prime, when company Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention, Before time took my leafy hours away. My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found Itself tart recompense for what was lost In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground Has no apocalypse or pentecost. I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought, And cozy women dead that by my side Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not Remembering how in my youth I cried.

An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night. I stood in the disenchanted field Amid the stubble and the stones, Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me The song of my marrow-bones. Blue poured into summer blue, A hawk broke from his cloudless tower, The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew That part of my life was over. Already the iron door of the north Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows Order their populations forth, And a cruel wind blows.

God banish from your house The fly, the roach, the mouse That riots in the walls Until the plaster falls; Admonish from your door The hypocrite and liar; No shy, soft, tigrish fear Permit upon your stair, Nor agents of your doubt. God drive them whistling out. Let nothing touched with evil, Let nothing that can shrivel Heart's tenderest frond, intrude Upon your still, deep blood. Against the drip of night God keep all windows tight, Protect your mirrors from Surprise, delirium, Admit no trailing wind Into your shuttered mind To plume the lake of sleep With dreams. If you must weep God give you tears, but leave You secrecy to grieve, And islands for your pride, And love to nest in your side.