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Robert Lowell - Sailing Home From Rapallo
Work rating: Medium

[February 1954]
Your nurse could only speak Italian, 
but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, 
and tears ran down my cheeks.... 

When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body, 
the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova 
was breaking into fiery flower. 
The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds 
blasting like jack-hammers across 
the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, 
recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. 
Mother traveled first-class in the hold; 
her Risorgimento black and gold casket 
was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.... 


While the passengers were tanning 
on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, 
our family cemetery in Dunbarton 
lay under the White Mountains 
in the sub-zero weather. 
The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone— 
so many of its deaths had been midwinter. 
Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, 
its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. 
A fence of iron spear-hafts 
black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. 
The only “unhistoric” soul to come here 
was Father, now buried beneath his recent 
unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. 
Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: 
Occasionem cognosce, 
seemed too businesslike and pushing here, 
where the burning cold illuminated 
the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives: 
twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. 
Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... 


In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, 
Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. 
The corpse 
was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.
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