An Offering for Patricia

The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before.

– From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome.

Hardly enough for me that the pail of water

              Alive with the wrinkling light

              Brings clearness home and whiter

Than mind conceives the walls mature to white,

Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given

              To love fulfill their bowl

              And the Roman sea is woven

Together by threading fish and made most whole.

I delight in each of these, delight moreover

              In the dark skill of those hands

              Closer to wise than clever

Of our blind Italian landlady who stands

Her shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit

              Lightly dispatched and dressed

              Fixing it to the gibbet

Of the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest.

These textures solicit of us our instant homage

              But are disparate senseless things

              Unless a reigning image

Bring them to purpose as your presence brings

The world in offering, like a chaplet worn

              In Aphrodite’s name,

              The furious unicorn

Come to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame.

And thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows

              Where ancient chamber pots

              Are grown to little meadows

Of mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknots

The winds for Ulysses and recalls to man

              A summer without cease;

              Sprung from the same dishpan

Onion and lily work their primal peace.