A Poetry Reading in Connecticut

Originally published in the Spring 1998 issue

for Charlotte Mew
1867–1928

Eeling in the back of R. J. Julia’s Booksellers because my socks
don’t match, I head for the cushioned seat under the bay window
so I can tuck my feet up. It’s August, my face is pale as a tulip

bulb, but next week, I’ll stalk, Alida Monroe’s word for your
entry to her Poetry Bookshop. Voice narrowing to a wire when
asked if, in fact, you were Charlotte Mew, you answered, I am

sorry to say I am. My signature’s not painted on R. J. Julia’s
wood floors like other poets; I mutter your line: To the larks that
cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do. Helmeted

in a hard felt pork-pie hat, your head cocked, you would unfurl
the horn-handled umbrella under your arm, not to ward off
rain congealing to pudding in Bloomsbury but to defy Volvos,

BMWs curbed here in Madison. A shard rough-edged in dust,
not smooth as sea glass or the tans at the Surf Club, you had no
enclave like Emily Dickinson or A Room of One’s Own upstairs

in R. J. Julia’s. No retreat from caring, a sick mother making you
maintain appearances at all costs, no white dresses, you had coal
to haul, floors and clothes to scrub. A younger sister and brother

asylumed for life were reason enough to vow chastity, not to
pass on your tainted line. I picture you writing novels, cursive,
heartfelt but stilted, seen only by your sister Anne, so hungry she

thumbs motes of cracker into her mouth. Life should not be
a test of what can be endured, what can be survived. In coves
of Long Island Sound, who can say why a place resists freezing.

Undercurrents, perhaps, like those in Fame: A blot upon
the night, / The moon’s dropped child!, short lines acting as small
islands like the Thimbles down the coast. Almost fifty before

you published The Farmer’s Bride in 1916, your first book with
lines in the sweet-briar air that lift me like wings of a monarch,
your words pollen gilding my fingers. You cut off hope of love

though not the ache. Did Thomas Hardy copy Fin de Fête in
his own hand on a British Museum Reading Room slip because
the poem was for him? At the burial of his ashes in Westminster

Abbey, surely you whispered, Sweetheart, for such a day / One
mustn’t grudge the score; / Here, then, it’s all to pay, / It’s Good-
night at the door. Woven or caught in a braid of love, darkness

grew like a cataract filming your eyes. A life you could not shed
like skin: a nursing home in Beaumont Street with no outlook,
the room in back, a high gray brick wall blocking sunlight, stars.

With only occasional pigeons as company, you longed for a visit
from anyone even the man who emptied trash. Lost, useless
as nets beaten into a frazzle, frayed by mussel shells and clogged

with seaweed, through a gauze of seventy years, Charlotte, your
life looks softer removed from the mesh of a real body. Even ink
has faded on the death certificate that says you died by your own

hand while of unsound mind on March 23, 1928. So many years
of cleaning, your hands were numb but not your throat when
Lysol, a comet shooting through you, left a tail of pain curling

like a tongue, licking at what would soon no longer be there.
Outside Alida Monroe’s bookstore, the thud, thud of gold
beaters hammering rang in your ears. The sixty poems you

left keep their rhythm in my heart, keep it beating steady
as oars rowing near a glacier with waves breaking on its flanks,
the deceiving sound of shoreline where there was no shore.