full of grace

HOUSE SPARROWS

for Joe and U. T. Summers

Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class
Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket,
These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts
Under our eaves,
nesting in withered grass,
Wormless but hopeful,
and now their voice enacts
Forsythian spring with primavernal racket.

Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray
Of doggedness, of mist, magnolia bark.
Salt of the earth, they are;
the common clay;
Meek emigres come over on the Ark
In steerage from the
Old Country of the Drowned
To settle down along Long Island Sound,

Flatbush, Weehawken,
our brownstone tenements,
Wherever the local idiom is Cheep.
Savers of string, meticulous and mild,
They are given to nervous flight,
the troubled sleep
Of those who remember terrible events,
The wide-eyed, anxious haste
of the exiled.

Like all the poor, their safety
lies in numbers
And hardihood and anonymity
In a world of dripping browns and
duns and umbers.
They have inherited the lower sky,
Their Lake of Constants,
their blue modality
That they are borne upon
and battered by.

Those little shin-bones,
hollow at the core,
Emaciate finger-joints,
those fleshless wrists,
Wrapped in a wrinkled, loose, rice-paper skin,
As though the harvests of earth had never been,
Where have we seen such
frailty before?
In pictures of Biafra and Auschwitz.

Yet here they are,
these chipper stratoliners,
Unsullen, unresentful,
full of the grace
Of cheerfulness,
who seem to greet all comers
With the wild confidence
of Forty-Niners,
And, to the lively honor of their race,
Rude canticles of "Summers, Summers, Summers."

Anthony Hecht

Copyright © Anthony Hecht

Copyright © 2009 Ploughshares

we were a passionate couple

[This was Lawrence's first book, a first edition with 1910 date on the copyright page. It was quickly changed to 1911. Apparently only a handful of copies in the first issue state are known to exist.

The United States' first appearance was significant since it contained sexually explicit passages considered too suggestive for the time and were taken out and/or revised for the first British edition, which didn't appear until later.

The original had pages 227 and 230 revised for the British issue, including
p. 230 originally as: "God! – we were a passionate couple – and she would have me in her bedroom while she drew Greek statues of me…"; and was changed to: "Lord! – we were an infatuated couple – and she would choose to view me in an aesthetic light…."] 1

from
THE WHITE PEACOCK

We got married. She gave me a living she had in her parsonage, and we went to live at her Hall. She wouldn't let me out of her sight. God! -- we were a passionate couple -- and she would have me in her bedroom while she drew Greek statues of me -- her Croton, her Hercules! I never saw her drawings. She had her own way too much -- I let her do as she liked with me.

Then gradually she got tired -- it took her three years to have a real bellyful of me. I had a physique then -- for that matter I have now."

He held out his arm to me, and bade me try his muscle. I was startled. The hard flesh almost filled his sleeve.

"Ah," he continued, "You don't know what it is to have the pride of a body like mine. But she wouldn't have children -- no, she wouldn't -- said she daren't. That was the root of the difference at first But she cooled down, and if you don't know the pride of my body you'd never know my humiliation. I tried to remonstrate -- and she looked simply astounded at my cheek. I never got over that amazement.

She began to get souly. A poet got hold of her, and she began to affect Burne-Jones -- or Waterhouse -- it was Waterhouse -- she was a lot like one of his women -- Lady of Shalott, I believe. At any rate, she got souly, and I was her animal -- son animal-son boeuf. I put up with that for above a year. Then I got some servants' clothes and went.

I was seen in France -- then in Australia -- though I never left England. I was supposed to have died in the bush. She married a young fellow. Then I was proved to have died, and I read a little obituarynotice on myself in a woman's paper she subscribed to. She wrote it herself -- as a warning to other young ladies of position not to be seduced by plausible "Poor Young Men."

Now she's dead. They've got the paper -- her paper -- in the kitchen down there, and it's full of photographs, even an old photo of me --" an unfortunate misalliance." I feel, somehow, as if I were at an end too. I thought I'd grown a solid, middle-aged- man, and here I feel sore as I did at twenty-six, and I talk as I used to.

One thing -- I have got some children, and they're of a breed as you'd not meet anywhere. I was a good animal before everything, and I've got some children."

He sat looking up where the big moon swam through the black branches of the yew.

"So she's dead -- your poor peacock!" I murmured.

He got up, looking always at the sky, and stretched himself again. He was an impressive figure massed in blackness against the moonlight, with his arms outspread.

"I suppose," he said, "it wasn't all her fault."
"A white peacock, we will say," I suggested.

D. H. Lawrence