National Poetry Month, Day 13: Robert Lowell - "Man and Wife"

Sometimes I wonder how someone with as great a talent and as privileged a life as Robert Lowell could be so unhappy. Sometimes I walk around New England on particularly bright days in February when everything is covered with sand and think about how I didn't do well in a class in college or how I'm worried about a family member or why I'm not where I want to be, sometimes, and I want to throw myself under a bus. I think if I could translate that under-the-bus feeling into words they would belong to Robert Lowell.

This merits a second paragraph, because I didn't pick this poem because the under-the-bus feeling; it's a lovely day here in New England. My loving, rapid, merciless old-fashioned tirade, and I couldn't have come up with a better way to describe the words that come out of my mouth, has gone on too long for some, and in a staggeringly boring response I've gone home to my mom's to drink gin and write stupid crap on the internet. Robert Lowell, everyone!

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye--
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet--
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade--
loving, rapid, merciless--
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.