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Robert Lowell - Skunk Hour
Work rating: Low

(for Elizabeth Bishop)

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, O 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 solves 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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