The schoolroom that Unice guards is
part of a grand English manor house
called Sandover, which is the imaginary setting of most
of this poem.
The real settings are of course the rooms
in which the seances take place, in this case, the entrance
hall in Athens.
The Sandover schoolroom has reverted
to a nursery in the passage you'll hear next.
The central character, the occupant of the nursery,
is our friend and neighbor in Connecticut Robert
Morse, who is about to be reborn in Minnesota as a composer.
The passage begins when JM rejoins
DJ in Greece, July 1978, just a year after Robert's death.
Peter Hooten will do Unice, the four angels who
bring their gifts to the yet unborn child, and last
of all nature while I do the human voices, dead or alive.
July 1978, noon Athens, 10 months later.
JM's led in shock from jet lag to the music room
just off the hall, space named for its upright tone
deaf piano, not much used.
DJ presses a switch.
Out leaping from the gloom four cream plaster columns
catch the light, a path through olives.
There beyond the grove a little beached skiff,
an Arcadian cove, fresco.
But who painted it?
He did.
Three weeks sandpaper, just so turpentine,
and look, beneath the mildest of blue skies
this ideal world lacks only one or two dimensions
for future mornings blue in streaming alpha
wave to realize.
Yet from that house, a stone's throw distant,
years flew by and the tall shadow of.
No peep.
The manor, is it empty?
Or asleep?
Robert surely walks the rank parterres, works at the piano,
leaps the hedge on horseback.
Still, we hesitate to call.
Could we face it if we found the whole alive with voices,
or my final page, every day brought nearer, anything
but final?
Ah, these are by now the risks one
takes, remembering whose house it is, their high connections
and past kindnesses.
Before we know it, our halfhearted ring is answered.
[HURRIED FOOTSTEPS]
Sirs?
As up dear Uni frisks, followed by Robert.
He's alone.
We've come none too soon.
He leaves next week for life.
Details last summer unavailable are rapidly sketched in.
The Minnesota dairy farm.
The sister, five years old, obediently
practicing her scales.
Baby will need Divino Mozartino from very start.
Then the rich widower for grandfather,
our friend, the sole male heir.
Cushy, no.
Perfection, pure Jane Austen.
Shrewd guest, DJ, plotting just such arrangements
on Earth for lab souls is her V work here.
One shaded villa in a Bombay street
has lately brought our packed house to its feet.
Remember meeting Robert?
The question never fails to prompt a smile.
Who could forget?
That was the year our Stonington high school mistook itself
for a summer theater.
Old troopers doddering up with crutch
and creak out of the quick climb into the limelight
filled the undiscerning hall.
One night a mummy, assoluta of technique, precariously
conjured points in air, abysses yawning for the vivandière
till rataplan!
four gaily intertwined cadets provoked this murmur
from behind.
It's everything one loathes about the dance.
We look around laughing and there Robert sat with Isabel,
knowing already that here was one friendship never launched
by chance.