The Long Marriage

by Kumin, Maxine

• ISBN13: 9780393043518
• ISBN10: 0393043517
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

This luminous collection is Maxine Kumin's twelfth volume of poetry, the first since her remarkable memoir, Inside the Halo. Themes of loyalty, longevity, and recovery appear here, along with poems addressing the eminent dead: Wordsworth, Gorki, Rukeyser, and others. "Inescapably, many poems come up out of the earth I live on and tend to."

Author Biography

Maxine Kumin lives on a horse farm in central New Hampshire. She has published twelve volumes of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, and collections of essays. Her Selected Poems: 1960-1990 was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973, she has been Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. Her most recent awards are the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Robert Frost Contemporary American Award

Table of Contents

I
Skinnydipping with William Wordsworth	15	(2)
Thinking of Gorki While Clearing a Trail	17	(2)
Imagining Marianne Moore in the Butterfly Garden	19	(2)
The Greenhouse Effect	21	(2)
Mother of Everyone	23	(2)
Rilke Revisited	25	(2)
Pantoum, with Swan	27	(4)
II
Hard Frost: On a Line by Hopkins	31	(1)
Why There Will Always Be Thistle	32	(2)
The Politics of Bindweed	34	(1)
The Brown Mountain	35	(2)
The Potato Sermon	37	(2)
The Exchange	39	(2)
Highway Hypothesis	41	(4)
III
Calling Out of Grays Point	45	(3)
Opening the Doors of Perception in Grays Point	48	(2)
8 A.M. in Grays Point	50	(2)
Afoot in Grays Point	52	(2)
My Life	54	(5)
IV
Ghazal: On the Table	59	(1)
Wagons	60	(1)
The Woman Who Moans	61	(2)
Grady, Who Lost a Leg in Korea, Addresses Me in the Rehab Gym	63	(2)
Grand Canyon	65	(6)
V
William Remembers the Outbreak of Civil War	71	(3)
Identifying the Disappeared	74	(2)
Bringing Down the Birds	76	(2)
Soldiers	78	(2)
Capital Punishment	80	(2)
Want	82	(3)
VI
The Long Marriage	85	(2)
Keeping in Touch	87	(2)
Hark, Hark	89	(1)
The Joy of Cooking, 1931	90	(3)
Wood	93	(1)
Domesticity	94	(1)
John Green Takes His Warner, New Hampshire, Neighbor to a Red Sox Game	95	(2)
Lying in Bed Away from Home	97	(1)
A Place by the Sea	98	(1)
Flying	99	(2)
Giving Birth	101	(3)
A Game of Nettles	104	(1)
The Collection	105	(2)
The Angel	107	(4)
VII
The Ancient Lady Poets	111	(2)
Three Dreams After a Suicide	113	(2)
Oblivion	115	(2)
Acknowledgments	117

Excerpts

Chapter One

Skinnydipping with William Wordsworth

I lie by the pond in utter nakedness

thinking of you, Will, your epiphanies

of woodcock, raven, rills, and craggy steeps,

the solace that seductive nature bore,

and how in my late teens I came to you

with other Radcliffe pagans suckled in

a creed outworn, declaiming whole swatches

of "Intimations" to each other.

Moist-eyed with reverence, lying about

the common room, rising to recite

Great God! I'd rather be ... How else

redeem the first flush of experience?

How else create it again and again? Not in

entire forgetfulnessI raise up my boyfriend,

a Harvard man who could outquote me

in his Groton elocutionary style.

Groping to unhook my bra he swore

poetry could change the world for the better.

The War was on. Was I to let him die

unfulfilled? Soon afterward we parted.

Years later, he a decorated vet,

I a part-time professor, signed the same

guest book in the Lake District. Stunned

by coincidence we gingerly shared a room.

Ah, Will, high summer now; how many more

of these? Fair seed-time had my soul ,

you sang; what seed-times still to come?

How I mistrust them, cheaters that will flame,

gutter and go out, like the scarlet tanager

who lights in the apple tree but will not stay.

Here at the pond, your meadow, grove, and stream

lodged in my head as tight as lily buds,

sun slants through translucent minnows, dragonflies

in paintbox colors couple in midair.

The fickle tanager flies over the tasseled field.

I lay my "Prelude" down under the willow.

My old gnarled body prepares to swim

to the other side.

                    Come with me, Will.

Let us cross over sleek as otters,

each of us bobbing in the old-fashioned breaststroke,

each of us centered in our beloved Vales.

Thinking of Gorki While Clearing a Trail

It wasn't exactly raining but

a little wetness still dribbled down.

I had been reading and sorrowing

and set out with the dogs as an antidote.

They went ahead snuffling in the leaf plaster.

Despite the steady snick of my clippers

boletus mushrooms kept popping soundlessly

out of the ground. How else account for

the ones with mouse-bites out of the caps

when I doubled back on my tracks?

The animals have different enzymes

from us. They can eat amanitas

we die of. The woodpeckers' fledglings

clack like a rattle of drumsticks each time

crumpled dragonflies arrive and are thrust

into the bud vases of their gullets.

The chipmunk crosses in front of me

tail held up like a banner. Who knows

what he has in his cheeks? Beechnuts

would be good, or a morsel of amanita.

Gorki disliked his face with its high

Mongol cheekbones. It would be good to be

a bandit, he said, to rob rich misers

and give their money to the poor. Saturnine

Gorki, at the 1929 International Congress

of Atheists. By then he was famous, but

twice, in his teens, he tried to kill

himself. Called before an ecclesiastical

tribunal and excommunicated, he declared

God is the name of my desire .

The animals have no Holy Synod to

answer to. They simply pursue their vocations.

In general, I desire to see God lifting

the needy up out of their dung heap,

as it is written. I did not seek this

ancient porcupine curled in the hollow

of a dead ash tree, delicately encoded

on top of a mountain of his own dung,

pale buff-colored pellets that must have

taken several seasons to accumulate.

At this moment, I desire the dogs, oblivious

so far, not to catch sight or scent of him.

I am the rightful master of my soul

Gorki said, and is this not true of the porcupine?

Born Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov

he chose his own name-- gorki --bitter

and a century later I carry him

like a pocket guide on this secret trail

clearing and wool-gathering as we go.

Imagining Marianne Moore

in the Butterfly Garden

Surrounded, blundered into by

these gorgeous tropical ephemerae,

we watch their pinwheel colors compose

an arcane calligraphy on air

under a quarter-acre of fine mesh.

I almost step on a slender young botanist

in a shocking-pink smock, lying flat

to pollinate certain recalcitrant flowers

with a single-haired paintbrush.

You bend to inspect her handiwork

your twice-wound braids frizzing red against

the sun to form a sort of web.

Marianne, I was appalled you dared

to chloroform a cat and then

dissect it at Bryn Mawr. Was it

the miniaturist impulse even then,

a schoolgirl's red desire

to see fine things in place?

When our guide uses her second and third

fingers to clasp a palm-sized Heliconid

by one wing, you murmur approvingly,

Predsionist . We peer at the owl eye it wears

as a scare tactic. I see a frisson pierce you

just as the peacocks on the grass at Oxford

once made your hair stand on end, the eyes

of their tail feathers holding you fast.

Worlds apart we are undergraduates

again. Letting the brilliant mimicry

shiver through us.

We are the beasts , you whisper

and I nod, releasing you.

The noiseless Heliconid

soars to another silent flower.

The Greenhouse Effect

Again, look overhead

How air is azurèd....

--THE WORKS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

The paper in this book was

produced from pure wood pulp without

the use of chlorine or any other

substance harmful to the environment.

I bore it to the indifferent cashier

who could not know that according

to Robert Bridges' introduction

although touchy and arrogant, you

had great sweetness, nor how sweet

it is to replace my lost edition

loaned to a student forty years ago

with this paperback wearing your portrait

as a rosy-lipped boy on the cover.

Dear Gerard, how gentle, how British

the rest of the disclaimer, which ends:

thereby conserving fossil fuels and

contributing little to the greenhouse effect.

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,

Grass and greenworld all together....

In your lifetime and most of mine, greenhouse

suggested roses out of season,

fleshy gladiolas, even European

cucumbers trained to trellises:

in short, the kind of fervor

that made you burn those early poems for

the love of God, you would have said,

on becoming a Jesuit. For the love

of posterity Bridges saved

most of them, and for the love

of the environment, Wordsworth Editions

reprinted you with ah! bright wings.

Copyright © 2002 Maxine Kumin. All rights reserved.