This poem is taken from Poetry Nation 1 Number 1, 1973.
A Lost Woman
A LOST WOMAN
An old man wrote this, during the last days
of his life, in a summer of the 1920s
Fog-fauntleroys at dawn, and deft
Hallucinations that a governess
In Henry James would know, when she was left
Alone, the children gone with their
Most absent father to a beach or fair -
The garden mists, those ghosts of happiness.
Dead life, so much proportion, so
Much growth is no preventer; you persist
Like amaranth. You are what some must know,
To whom, though fogs evaporate
Their fluid symmetry, the sun comes late,
And moral parents wreck the furtive tryst.
Little deaths, over and over
...
An old man wrote this, during the last days
of his life, in a summer of the 1920s
Fog-fauntleroys at dawn, and deft
Hallucinations that a governess
In Henry James would know, when she was left
Alone, the children gone with their
Most absent father to a beach or fair -
The garden mists, those ghosts of happiness.
Dead life, so much proportion, so
Much growth is no preventer; you persist
Like amaranth. You are what some must know,
To whom, though fogs evaporate
Their fluid symmetry, the sun comes late,
And moral parents wreck the furtive tryst.
Little deaths, over and over
...
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