Some deaths are well-dressed
Butterflies neatly folded
Some have banners
One ragged wing banging in the wind
One by one the petals bowed
Such polite timing
We gave each its due
Now uncapped
The smiling pod seedy teeth
The old bitter-gourd
Shaking to be a rainstick
On the contrary when
You are dying you change
To prose
The family finds out who gets what
You are finally understood
At the party the husband tried to defeat
his young son.
At croquet, perhaps. Or table tennis.
The wife at the party watched the husband
leaning over the game
or leaning into talk, setting his jaw, winning.
She turned to a listener. Dusk chilled her.
Breezes dragged
her hair across her face. She said,
“My husband is very competitive.”
The listener watched
a highway of loss and fatigue
form in her mind, stretch for miles.
All the women
in that neighborhood are deciduous wives
married to evergreen husbands.
If you’re his wife, you’ve quit
asking why it all piles up out there
in the yard for everyone to see
from the highway. Hubcaps from ghostly coupes.
Beer signs in neon cursive. Coke machines,
cars, cars, cars. You keep the house
and the backyard according to your principles.
You hate the mechanism in men
that drives them to love machinery.
If you're his dog, you
urinate on tires encircling weeds.
You sniff varieties of rust,
chase squirrels until they disappear,
until you ram your hot wet nose
into angle iron; it all
makes the yard difficult.
We sat in front of the fire;
Grandmother was in the rocking chair doing her knitting
And Little Brother and I were lying down flat.
“Please tell us a story, Grandmother,” we said.
But she put her head on one side and began counting the stitches,
“Suppose you tell me one instead.”
I made up one about a spotted tiger
That had a knot in his tail;
But though I liked this about the knot,
I did not know why it was put there.
So I said: “Little Brother’s turn.”
“I know a perfect story,” he cried, waving his hands.
Grandmother laid down her knitting.
“Do tell us, dear.”
“Once upon a time there was a bad little girl
And her Mummy gave her the slipper, and that’s all.”
One rainy winter dusk
Mending a parted cable,
Sudden I saw so clear
Home and the tea-table.
So clear it was, so sweet,
I did not start, but drew
The breath of deep content
Some minutes ere I knew
My Mother’s face that’s soother
Than autumn half-lights kind,
My softly smiling sisters
Who keep me still in mind,
Were but a dream, a vision--
That faded. And I knew
The smell of trench, trench-feeling--
And turned to work anew.
When Grandmother comes to our house,
She sits in the chair and sews away.
She cuts some pieces just alike
And makes a quilt all day.
I watch her bite the little thread,
Or stick the needle in and out,
And then she remembers her grandmother's house,
And what her grandmother told about,
And how a very long ago--
She tells it while she cuts and strips--
We used to live in Mary-land,
And there was a water with ships.
But that was long before her day,
She says, and so I like to stand
Beside her chair, and then I ask,
"Please tell about in Mary-land."
Doc Meyers said I had satyriasis,
And Doc Hill called it leucæmia—
But I know what brought me here:
I was sixty-four but strong as a man
Of thirty-five or forty.
And it wasn’t writing a letter a day,
And it wasn’t late hours seven nights a week,
And it wasn’t the strain of thinking of Minnie,
And it wasn’t fear or a jealous dread,
Or the endless task of trying to fathom
Her wonderful mind, or sympathy
For the wretched life she led
With her first and second husband—
It was none of these that laid me low—
But the clamor of daughters and threats of sons,
And the sneers and curses of all my kin
I have two monuments besides this granite obelisk:
One, the house I built on the hill,
With its spires, bay windows, and roof of slate.
The other, the lake-front in Chicago,
Where the railroad keeps a switching yard,
With whistling engines and crunching wheels
And smoke and soot thrown over the city,
And the crash of cars along the boulevard,—
A blot like a hog-pen on the harbor
Of a great metropolis, foul as a sty.
I helped to give this heritage
To generations yet unborn, with my vote
In the House of Representatives,
And the lure of the thing was to be at rest
From the never—ending fright of need,
And to give my daughters gentle breeding,
I was well known and much beloved
And rich, as fortunes are reckoned
In Spoon River, where I had lived and worked.
That was the home for me,
Though all my children had flown afar—
Which is the way of Nature—all but one.
The boy, who was the baby, stayed at home,
To be my help in my failing years
And the solace of his mother.
But I grew weaker, as he grew stronger,
And he quarreled with me about the business,
And his wife said I was a hindrance to it;
And he won his mother to see as he did,
Till they tore me up to be transplanted
With them to her girlhood home in Missouri.
And so much of my fortune was gone at last,
When I get a child,
I get him with fixed intent;
I don't get him by accident.
I get him because I am content with life,
Satisfied with myself,
And because I love my wife.
When the child is born,
I am full of scorn
At thought of other children.
By instinct I divine
There never was so fine a boy as mine.
I think this, because I am satisfied with life,
Conceited with myself,
And because I love my wife.
And I want to keep my son,
I want to finish what I have begun.
Kenton and Deborah, Michael and Rose,
These are fine children as all the world knows ;
But into my arms in my dreams every night
Come Peter and Christopher, Faith and Delight.
Kenton is tropical, Rose is pure white,
Deborah shines like a star in the night;
Michael's round eyes are as blue as the sea,
And nothing on earth could be dearer to me.
But where is the baby with Faith can compare?
What is the colour of Peterkin's hair?
Who can make Christopher clear to my sight,
Or show me the eyes of my daughter Delight?
When people inquire I always just state:
"I have four nice children and hope to have eight.
Though the first four are pretty and certain to please,
Who knows but the rest may be nicer than these?"