Harmless Days and Mornings

Bangers and Mash

We flew the Atlantic all night, your headwith its first streak of gray leaningagainst my shoulder, and took a cabto our bed-and-breakfast. We napped,woke up at noon, and rode the tubefrom Russell Square to Piccadilly Circus,where we asked a stranger to takea photograph of us standing together,then walked for lunch to the Salisburywhere in bomb-site London I drankpints of Younger's before you were born.Back at the hotel we made loveas late light slipped through a gapin the curtains onto your cheekbones,your nose, your outstanding chin,and your eyes—dazed like a baby'ssleepy surfeited eyes—that closedas you said in my ear, "I will lose you."

What We Did

Early each morning I rose to bring you coffee in bed.You kindled a woodfire in your workroom above the kitchen,then walked Gus up-mountain for half an hour.When you returned, you climbed upstairs to a warm desk

at the house's southeast corner. I sat below and away,on the ground floor, and we wrote poems together.If we met in the kitchen, pouring another cup of coffee,we never broke silence. We patted blue-jeaned bottoms.

For lunch we made sandwiches and chatted lightly.We lay down for a twenty-minute nap, and woke to love,dallying twisted together. Then I read aloud for an hourfrom a writer we loved—Henry James, Keats, Bishop …

You cooked dinner, sipping from a glass of white wine.I drank my beer looking at the latest New Yorker.We ate by candlelight at the table, then read togetherin our armchairs in silence under separate cones of light.

Pieces

Now I am eighty years old, content to sit in my chairwatching unpainted boards of the barnturn amber when late autumn sun rubs against them.

It is the same barn I ran to as a ten-year-oldto sit on a three-legged stool beside my grandfatherwhile he milked his seven Holsteins and spokepieces he learned for school: "Lawyer Blue,""The Bearded Hen," "An Orphan Lad from Boston."He recited a version of "Casey at the Bat"where Casey hits a home run, because my grandfathercouldn't bear to say that Casey had struck out.

If he saw me now, would he need to turn away?Or would he laugh, and remember another piece,"The Sly Old Farmer Outsmarts the Drummer"?

The Morris Chair

I sit to pick at lines which try to become a poemin the Morris chair my mother and father gave mewhen I wrote after school with my bedroom door shut.At sixteen I resolved to become an immortal poet.

In middle age I won poetry prizes. I read my poemsfrom college platforms at least a thousand times.Then everything stopped. In old age I write each morningin the blond maple chair, crossing out and scribbling,

consulting a thesaurus, trying to find the words—and make a doddery language with no poetry in it.If no one ever reads my poems again, how bettermight I have used my harmless days and mornings?