For William Cowper, and: Blueprint

FOR WILLIAM COWPER / Robert Farnsworth All evening I'd been turning pages, plodding through the verse your century left behind. I was after something symptomatic, something in couplets, buffed, complacent, mythy for display—to suggest Wordsworth was right: too often you all mistook the charming surfaces of language for the heart that lay refracted on the bottom, untouched. It was arrogant, self-serving, but I wanted to make a point, and it's easy being unfair to the dead. You were different, of course, appealing in your madness to us who see in madness the authentic. You thought you were damned, and so spent twenty years under a preacher's spell, a widow's companion, writing odes to furniture at the whim of her haughty friends. Slight, placid stuff, but occasionally moving. The plein air portions of "The Task" had tuned the Aeolian Harp. That much I knew, but when I saw your "Epitaph On A Hare," I thought I'd found the mock-heroic meringue that I'd been hunting. Instead I learned again the folly of whittling love's long labors down to disputations of taste. Your poem gave back April twilight, after rain. On a Persian carpet the hare comes to suppressed pause before the terrace doors. It seemed laughable at first, reading this rabbit's requiem exactly two centuries later, noting his taste for pippins, milk, and thistles. But then the parlor began to furnish itself with dusk, darkening like conscience, and when my eyes adjusted I could see you there, motionless, consigned. Damned. By the shadows your sympathies resonate to, damned because you know what's meant by 'no health in us/ You've less than the hare's eight brief years left, and you know it. I sat a long while, humbled by the thought of your hands shredding bread, 250 · The Missouri Review as you were by the preacher's tenderness, gravely turning the deckled pages of his book. Robert Farnsworth THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 252 BLUEPRINT / Robert Farnsworth Cornflowers have invested the burned out lot behind our house. The realtor's fallen marquee wastes a number on cirrus that speed across the moon. The night we sat up sweating out the blaze that made this meadow is long gone by, but I can still hear the sealed windows bursting, the firemen shouting in that blind back hall. Emerging later like divers from a hulk, they said that she and her dog suffocated quickly in their sleep. One pipe twists out of the weeds. The driveway leads in and ends. Fast clouds keep coming tonight, a ceiling through which moonlight quavers, turning everything it touches abstract. We have finished packing our belongings, ready to move into morning. In our old rooms a cool geometry measures the vacant corners, but in this plot of tall blue flowers, I find a poise, a perfected tense, a place to be left behind. Beyond those trees, in the house where we have lived, a light burns in my landlady's kitchen. The utility drawer is open in there, a musty box of string, tools, glue, and useless bolts. I was looking for a length of wire. I was going to bind things up. But already these vast clouds are bearing east, smudging the hillsides with shadow. Somewhere over the North Atlantic, whole counties of steam begin melting beneath the sun. 252 · The Missouri Review ...