Robert Lowell

 

Randall Jarrell

The dream went like a rake of sliced bamboo,

slats of dust distracted by a downdraw;

I woke and knew I held a cigarette;

I looked, there was none, could have been none;

I slept off years before I woke again,

palming the floor, shaking the sheets. I saw

nothing was burning. I awoke, I saw

I was holding two lighted cigarettes. . . .

They come this path, old friends, old buffs of death.

Tonight it’s Randall, his spark still fire though humble,

his gnawed wrist cradled like Kitten. “What kept you so long,

racing the cooling grindstone of your ambition?

You didn’t write, you rewrote.... But tell me,

Cal, why did we live? Why do we die?”