Читать книгу Doubtful Harbor - Idris Anderson - Страница 11

Swan-Boat Ride

from a fragmented draft of an Elizabeth Bishop poem

never completed

In the Boston Public Gardens

when I was three, a live swan paddled

among artificial birds, pontoons fitted

with tall wood wings and yellow pedals.

The white paint peeled like feathers.

As our boat drifted in the dead water,

my mother’s hand meddled idle

in the wet—dirty, cold, and black,

then proffered a peanut from a sack.

A thing to do to amuse a daughter.

Ungracious, terrifying bird!

Apparently it had not heard

that it’s unkind, cruel to attack

a woman dressed in blackest black,

as widows do; she was my mother too.

“See,” she said to me (it’s all she said),

her black kid glove split and red.

I saw the hole, the drop of blood,

the hissing beak, the mark of teeth,

the finger’s flesh, the amniotic flood.

Afloat, afloat, atilt the boat,

the whole pond swayed—

breath suspends and death descends

and madness comes

to flower beds so bright and trim,

to the State of Massachusetts seal,

the State House Dome, its thinly crusted sun.

In that dream I dream again,

my mother lifts her veil

to kiss me, a patterned lace I memorized—

her fading face and fragile eyes—

fine and dark and real.