Robert Lowell

 

Skunk Hour

(for Elizabeth Bishop) 

Nautilus Island's hermit 
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; 
her sheep still graze above the sea. 
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; 
she's in her dotage. 

Thirsting for 
the hierarchic privacy 
of Queen Victoria's century 
she buys up all 
the eyesores facing her shore, 
and lets them fall. 

The season's ill- 
we've lost our summer millionaire, 
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean 
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl 
was auctioned off to lobstermen. 
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. 

And now our fairy 
decorator brightens his shop for fall; 
his fishnet's filled with orange cork, 
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; 
there is no money in his work, 
he'd rather marry. 

One dark night, 
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; 
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, 
they lay together, hull to hull, 
where the graveyard shelves on the town.... 
My mind's not right. 

A car radio bleats, 
'Love, O careless Love....' I hear 
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, 
as if my hand were at its throat... 
I myself am hell; 
nobody's here-  

only skunks, that search 
in the moonlight for a bite to eat. 
They march on their solves up Main Street: 
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire 
under the chalk-dry and spar spire 
of the Trinitarian Church. 

I stand on top 
of our back steps and breathe the rich air- 
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. 
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup 
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, 
and will not scare.