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Oxford Commination
Rising from the pale valley, the rivers unseen from here, Shwangun Range is all apple light and dappled definition, with sky clear between final spring and summer. Round that bend (where five townies in a dirty coon-tailed Ford always seem to be doing eighty) lies Lake Minnewaska-pretty and phoney as Switzerland- one has to be both old and rich to hire a glimpse of it. I look down now, over past ugly Kerhonkson sunken into rolling depth by height and green distance and say to you: this is the last poem of mine, curse or tribute, you will walk through. This is my world not yours. Get out of my hair and my system, out of my head. It was never your poems, bad or brilliant, that obsessed me but your world, the childhood I lived through without knowing it and, grown and knowing it through you, could not grow out of. You were the shadow my father laughed at that frightened me, the Faith and Freud to which my mother lit her lean candles. My Oxford was not your Oxford, but you turned up, flapping incredible mukluks down the Corn and St. Aldates, your famous hair in famous disarray, your belt hanging loose like a lariat. Owning a mutual religion we shared a mass in Christ Church, and you said your Sanctus with belief only the gross or cruel could impugn. I poured your wine, a face among literary faces, and you talked about nothing of interest or importance, though still a past I was too shy to come to terms with. But it was my Oxford not yours. I dined that last term with names and opinions and drank sparkling hock in Wadham and suffered a delicious season of Roman fever at St. Mary Mag's and wrote tough elegant bitchy poems. The days turned occasionally towards this or that war but there was no tension between style and belief, no silly high resolutions about freedom,- only sensible window-glass sent to gunned Budapest. What were you doing in my Oxford, dispersing ease like conscience or a cop, reminding me in Hilary air that betrayal lays in me and everyone like a smart whore? You belonged in a strictly legendary Oxford with the legendary names and the cautionary verses. Now get out of the Hudson Valley and my heart. Your acts and reasons are hidden in poems I do not read. And there is a black-haired girl who has been shot down and a boy stricken with Keats, and a green promised road winding down along the Wallkill to a winery and a day now, all of whom must be attended to.