In Me as the Swans

Not embittered   

even while freezing   

to the ice of their own lakes.   

The night I was leaving for Madrid   

into the noisy party a dazzling   

friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much   

(as a couple of kids on the dance floor want)   

to slow the tempo, hold there longer,   

to feel that seedly longing   

to be pressed into the soil,   

or that little lift the mothers get   

when stocking larders, even now,   

vestige of the primitive urge   

to be provided for and to provide.   

          I went alone to see that balcony   

in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries   

above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant   

footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver   

tray and all but smoked them for you;   

after your towels had warmed in London’s best   

hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad,   

glad now for the rest of empty August and   

the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew,   

glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners   

that I have stood alone   

wondering at illuminated books,   

looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass   

or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider   

at the Tate—at times the best kept universe   

was my own, no interceding docents   

or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous   

wandering—waif, naïf.

                   I liked the light enormously so why   

did I obey the bell that called me in?