Nautilus Island’s hermit
Heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
Is first selectman in our village;
She’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
The hierarchic privacy
Of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all
The eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.
The season’s ill —
We’ve lost our summer millionaire,
Who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
Was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
Decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl; there is no money in his work,
He’d rather marry.
One dark night,
My Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull,
Where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, 0 careless Love. . . .” I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat.
I myself am hell;
Nobody’s here—
Only skunks, that search
In the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire
Of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
Of our back steps and breathe the rich air
A mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
Of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
And will not scare.
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