I'm going to skip now to the third book in this Collected,
Thomas and Beulah.
And I'll read only one poem, because it is a double sequence
and that Stanley's class really stuck with me.
I kept writing sequences, I never stopped.
But I'm going to read one from Beulah's point of view.
In this poem, just to give you a little bit of context,
Beulah is doing something that Rilke used to say--
he used to talk about this activity, something
that his mother let him do.
She would put gloves on him and let him go into the parlor
and dust, and he said he would wipe
his hand across the surface and it would shine up at him clean.
And that-- he compared that to recollection and recovering
memory.
And I kept thinking, that's not the kind of dusting
I ever did, or my mother ever did, or her mother's mother.
And so in a kind of a fit of pique,
I decided that I was going to write a dusty poem,
as it really was.
"Dusting."
"Every day a wilderness.
No shade in sight.
Beulah patient among knickknacks, the solarium
a rage of light, a grain storm as her gray cloth
brings dark wood to life.
Under her hand, scrolls and crests gleam darker still.
What was his name, that silly boy
at the fair with the rifle booth?
And his kiss, and the clear bowl with one bright fish,
rippling wound.
Not Michael.
Something finer.
Each dust stroke a deep breath, and the canary in bloom.
Wavering memory, home from a dance, the front door
blown open in the parlor in snow.
She rushed the bowl to the stove,
watched as the locket of ice dissolved and he swam free.
That was years before father gave her up with her name,
years before her name grew to mean promise, then desert
and peace.
Long before the shadow and son's accomplice, the tree, Maurice."