The Milk of Paradise

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves
                    ST Coleridge, Kubla Khan

One of my clearest memories of you
comes from the years when I was living at home,
attending college at the University of Colorado, Denver Branch,
after crashing and burning at Boulder.
I remember our guess-the-poet game
using the Untermeyer Treasury book
that we played during drinks before dinner.
Often now when I read a poem I like
I instinctively think of you
and feel a lack because you are no longer here
to share it with me.

You and my father had similar views on poets.
Oddly, you both disliked Elizabeth Bishop.
You must have read “The Fish” and “Roosters”
in the late ‘40’s when North and South made its splash
and decided you didn’t like them for some reason.
I wish I could read you “Crusoe in England” now
(as you read me an abridged Robinson Crusoe when I was a child,
along with The Odyssey for Young People
and so many other works
that became the basis of my literary education),
and see you purse your lips and crinkle your eyes
at the turtles hissing like teakettles.

These days, I like to imagine you
aspiring to be like Elizabeth Bishop –
an alcoholic lesbian living with Lota
de Macedo Soares in the Imperial City of Brazil,
writing a few perfect poems and making
translations from Portuguese
(you yourself taught romance languages and later had a job
translating Portuguese union correspondence) –
instead of living a thwarted life
with a narcissistic husband for whom you had no respect,
and to whose career needs you subordinated your own.
No wonder you terrified me repeatedly when I was eight
by storming out of the house
and disappearing for a day or more,
always returning, to my great relief,
chastened and resigned.

Although my father finally became an English professor,
it was really you who fostered my poetic interests.
You gave me my Signet Keats,
it was your collected Yeats
that I appropriated when I was in high school,
and you were the one,
when I once showed you my self-preoccupied poems,
who gave me the best advice I ever received:
“You should write about human relationships,” you said.

Another poet with whom I try
to identify you is Stevie Smith,
living with her Aunt Lion most of her life
in their House of Mercy,
their house of female habitation,
working as executive secretary for a publishing firm,
and investing her money very wisely.
I especially wish you could share with me her poem,
“The Person from Porlock”:

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse.
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge, in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think that he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

I’m sure you would have appreciated
the rapier justice of these verses
slashing through the Great Man’s shabby pretension.
I can see you pursing your lips and crinkling your eyes
as you lie on your couch at cocktail time
in one of those loose-fitting muumuu smocks  you liked to wear,
legs crossed, right big toe pointing forward and then back,
your martini and chesterfields on the
round wooden coffee table beside you . . .

the way I remember you.

December, 2012