At 26
In a dog-infested suburb at the end of Van Cortlandt Park,
My wife, my child and I have a clean little second-floor flat in the house of a Scandinavian carpenter …
It is the first time my wife and I have lived alone together …
I miss the busy city: I hate the spineless, dull, unthinking suburb …
The only escapes are the trolley cars and the woods …
It is autumn: a grey glisten, a wildness of asters and goldenrod, a stir of dust,
And leaves falling in the forest, and the Earth returning into itself …
All afternoon I read Meredith's Modern Love …
And my heart is terrified … line by terrible line I see the truth about my wife and me …
The tragic poem strikes open my soul, and I look in,
And see that my own darkness has become articulate,
And my marriage is ended …
O, for death to end it all … how can I go and play with the baby,
How greet my wife?
She knocks: the woods are wonderful with autumn: we must take a walk …
In the grey air we walk, in the glisten of the dying year,
And my soul goes down to roots, and the roots like a tree's are deep in the Earth,
And I know the Earth is deep, and breathes from the dark Mother's heart,
Breathes ages of heartbreak, and men and women destroying each other,
And enfolds them, destroyed, in her bosom …
I am like a weeping woman grown big with child,
And in pain, but unable to give birth …
Evening comes: I lock myself in my study …
I agonize … I think of rain, rain at twilight, and electric arc-lights, and toilers coming out of a factory …
And I begin, and I write a story …
A man has beaten his wife, beaten her even the night their child was born,
And he has been jailed and has threatened to kill her when he is free …
On the night of rain he returns … she is half-fear, half-love …
Shall she keep her child in freedom or take up the dreadful marriage again?
He enters—the child ties them together … in woman's weakness she surrenders …
He, too, is a child and she is incapable of freedom when a child calls her …
It is so that I determine that not even the truth that I know
Shall break up my marriage … I give in to my mother-weakness of very pity for wife, child and myself …
This is my renunciation …
My wife, in bed, reads the story, and it seems so vivid she believes that rain is dashing against the windows:
I am happy and peaceful with her … I am content …
Some years must pass before the truth, revealed so cruelly,
Shall break open upon us like a long hidden wound,
And destroy our marriage before our eyes, as we stand like helpless victims looking on.
My wife, my child and I have a clean little second-floor flat in the house of a Scandinavian carpenter …
It is the first time my wife and I have lived alone together …
I miss the busy city: I hate the spineless, dull, unthinking suburb …
The only escapes are the trolley cars and the woods …
It is autumn: a grey glisten, a wildness of asters and goldenrod, a stir of dust,
And leaves falling in the forest, and the Earth returning into itself …
All afternoon I read Meredith's Modern Love …
And my heart is terrified … line by terrible line I see the truth about my wife and me …
The tragic poem strikes open my soul, and I look in,
And see that my own darkness has become articulate,
And my marriage is ended …
O, for death to end it all … how can I go and play with the baby,
How greet my wife?
She knocks: the woods are wonderful with autumn: we must take a walk …
In the grey air we walk, in the glisten of the dying year,
And my soul goes down to roots, and the roots like a tree's are deep in the Earth,
And I know the Earth is deep, and breathes from the dark Mother's heart,
Breathes ages of heartbreak, and men and women destroying each other,
And enfolds them, destroyed, in her bosom …
I am like a weeping woman grown big with child,
And in pain, but unable to give birth …
Evening comes: I lock myself in my study …
I agonize … I think of rain, rain at twilight, and electric arc-lights, and toilers coming out of a factory …
And I begin, and I write a story …
A man has beaten his wife, beaten her even the night their child was born,
And he has been jailed and has threatened to kill her when he is free …
On the night of rain he returns … she is half-fear, half-love …
Shall she keep her child in freedom or take up the dreadful marriage again?
He enters—the child ties them together … in woman's weakness she surrenders …
He, too, is a child and she is incapable of freedom when a child calls her …
It is so that I determine that not even the truth that I know
Shall break up my marriage … I give in to my mother-weakness of very pity for wife, child and myself …
This is my renunciation …
My wife, in bed, reads the story, and it seems so vivid she believes that rain is dashing against the windows:
I am happy and peaceful with her … I am content …
Some years must pass before the truth, revealed so cruelly,
Shall break open upon us like a long hidden wound,
And destroy our marriage before our eyes, as we stand like helpless victims looking on.
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