Anne Stevenson

A
Anne Stevenson
Inheriting My Grandmother's Nightmare
Consider the adhesiveness of things
to the ghosts that prized them,
the "olden days" of birthday spoons
and silver napkin rings.
Too carelessly I opened
that velvet drawer of heirlooms.
There lay my grandmother's soul
begging under veils of tarnish to be brought back whole.

She who was always a climate in herself,
who refused to vanish
as the nineteen-hundreds grew older and louder,
and the wars worse,
and her grandchildren, bigger and ruder
in her daughter's house.
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Elegy: In Coherent Light
In memory of two English poets, Matt Simpson and Michael Murphy, d. 2009 Teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap—
Sparrows are plying their chisels in the summer ivy,
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The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves
Because hairs on their speckled daybeds baffle the little bees,
foxgloves come out to advertise for rich bumbling hummers,
who crawl into their tunnels-of-delight with drunken ease
(see Darwin’s chapters on his foxglove summers)
plunging over heckles caked with sex-appealing stuff
to sip from every hooker its intoxicating liquor
and stop it propagating in a corner with itself.

And this is how the foxflower keeps its sex life in order.
Two anthers—adolescent, in a hurry to dehisce—
let fly too soon, so pollen lies in drifts around the floor.
Along swims bumbler bee and makes an undercoat of this,
reverses, exits, lets it fall by accident next door.
So ripeness climbs the bells of Digitalis, flower by flower,
undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.
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Elegy
Whenever my father was left with nothing to do —
waiting for someone to 'get ready',
or facing the gap between graduate seminars
and dull after-suppers in his study
grading papers or writing a review —
he played the piano.

I think of him packing his lifespan
carefully, like a good leather briefcase,
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False Flowers
(for Caroline Ireland) They were to have been a love gift,
but when she slit the paper funnel,
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Forgotten of the Foot
Equisetum, horsetail, railway weed
Laid down in the unconscious of the hills;
Three hundred million years still buried

In this hair-soft surviving growth that kills
Everything in the glorious garden except itself,
That thrives on starvation, and distils

Black diamonds, the carboniferous shelf —
That was life before our animals,
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Fragments: Mrs. Reuben Chandler writes to her husband during a cholera epidemic
note: Most of this journal, written on shipboard, seems to have been destroyed, probably by fire. What remains suggests that Mrs. Chandler journeyed to New Orleans without her husband's permission, thus becoming indirectly the cause of her baby's death. August, 1849 EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO NEW ORLEANS
ABOARD THE 'GENERAL WAYNE'

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Innocence and Experience
I laid myself down as a woman
And woke as a child.
Sleep buried me up to my chin,
But my brain cut wild.

Sudden summer lay sticky as tar
Under bare white feet.
Stale, soot-spotted heapings of winter
Shrank in the street.
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Salter's Gate
There, in that lost
corner of the ordnance survey.
Drive through the vanity —
two pubs and a garage — of Satley,
then right, cross the A68
past down-at-heel farms and a quarry,

you can't miss it, a 'T' instead of a 'plus'
where the road meets a wall.
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Sonnets for Five Seasons
(i.m. Charles Leslie Stevenson, 1909-79)

This House

Which represents you, as my bones do, waits,
all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come,
as it always does, between breaths, between nights
of no wind and days of the nulled sun.
And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate
faceless fields, a white road drawn
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The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument
The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
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Swifts
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, 'The swifts are back!'

Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
Two hundred miles an hour across fullblown windfields.
Swereee swereee. Another. And another.
It's the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.
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Temporarily in Oxford
Where they will bury me
I don't know.
Many places might not be
sorry to store me.

The Midwest has right of origin.
Already it has welcomed my mother
to its flat sheets.

The English fens that bore me
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To My Daughter in a Red Coat
Late October. It is afternoon.
My daughter and I walk through the leaf-strewn
Corridors of the park
In the light and the dark
Of the elms' thin arches.

Around us brown leaves fall and spread.
Small winds stir the minor dead.
Dust powders the air.
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The Enigma
Falling to sleep last night in a deep crevasse
between one rough dream and another, I seemed,
still awake, to be stranded on a stony path,
and there the familiar enigma presented itself
in the shape of a little trembling lamb.
It was lying like a pearl in the trough between
one Welsh slab and another, and it was crying.

I looked around, as anyone would, for its mother.
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