And it was written in England.
Churchyard.
Somerset Maugham said a professional
was someone who could do his best work when he didn't
particularly feel like it.
There was a picture of him in the paper,
a face lined deeply and morally like Auden's,
an old embittered tortoise, the corners of the mouth
turned down resolutely to express the idea
that everything in life is small change.
And what he said when he died, "I'm all through.
The clever young men don't write essays about me."
In the fleshly world, the red tulip in garden sunlight
is almost touched by shadow and begins to close up.
Someone asked me yesterday, "Are deer monogamous?"
I thought of something I had read.
When deer in the British Isles were
forced to live in the open because of heavy forest,
it stunted them.
The red deer who lived in the Scottish Highlands
1,000 years ago were a third larger than the present animal.
This morning walking into the village to pick up the car,
I thought of a roof where I have slept in the summer
in New York, pigeons in the early morning sailing up
5th Avenue, and silence in which you imagine the empty canyons
the light hasn't reached yet.
I was standing on the high street in Shelford village
outside the fussy little tea shop.
And I thought a poem with the quick lice ridden
pigeons in it might end: this is a dawn song in Manhattan.
I hurried home to write it.
And as I passed the churchyard, school was letting out.
Luke was walking toward me smiling.
He thought I'd come to meet him.
That was when I remembered the car
when he was walking toward me through the spring
flowers in the 18th century gravestones,
his arms full of school drawings he
hoped not to drop in the mud.