Chassagne-Montrachet Cailleret, Louis Latour.
Â
Five years later I married Jane, then a poetry student, who by the time of her death in 1995 had published four books and earned a Guggenheim. It was exhilarating to live with her as her work became better and better. The more successful her poetry became, the more she permitted herself to be pretty. Late photographs of Jane reveal two sides, both beautiful. In one she is utterly spiritual, almost ready to turn bodiless; in another she is horny. Her poetry combined the two Janes, which is exactly what poems must do. When we married I was clean-shaven. She looked at old photographs and decided that I should grow a beard again. She observed my itchy agony. She wrote a poem called âThe First Eight Days of the Beard.â
A page of exclamation points.
A class of cadets at attention.
A school of eels.
Standing commuters.
A bed of nails for the swami.
Flagpoles of unknown countries.
Centipedes resting on their laurels.
The toenails of the face.
After a few weeks my facial hair looked like a beard, not like carelessness, and after two months it flourished. I wished it would hang straight down and cover my belly, but it always grew tightly curled, as pubic as Santa Claus.
For three years we stayed in Ann Arbor. We loved the house we lived in, old-fashioned with many bedrooms, but it rose in a crowded part of town, and we did not like living among people. Once a year we visited the farmhouse in New Hampshire, where my grandmother Kate survived in her nineties, and where I had spent childhood summers. We could see from the porch a cottage down the road, built for a farmhand in the 1890s, and nothing else that resembled a house. Jane fell in love with this 1803 solitary clapboard structure with its 1865 barn and collapsing sugarhouse. It backed up to Ragged Mountain, which had provided pasturage for my grandfatherâs cattle. Mount Kearsarge was five miles south. Fields of grass filled the narrow valleys. She loved Thornleyâs Store down the streetâwine and stovepipe, roast beef and souvenir ashtraysâwhere in the morning the neighborhood gathered to joke and gossip. We drove gawking on dirt roads around Eagle Pond, through a pig farm, and up New Canada Road past Freemanâs collapsed shack. During one visit on a Sunday we attended the South Danbury Christian Church, where my grandmother played the organ for eighty years. My cousins called me âDonnieâ and the preacher quoted âRilke the German poet.â
After my grandmother entered the Peabody Home, we agreed with my mother and her sisters that we would buy the farmhouse when my grandmother died. In 1975 I quit my tenure and we moved to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writingâbut it worked and I loved doing it. Our move made for the best years of our existence. My poems improved, and I wrote magazine pieces about baseball and New Hampshire. Year after year Jane committed to the life of poetry and we thrived in double solitude. (The New Hampshire Constitution prohibits dinner parties.) One day followed another, a bliss of samenessâand I plotted a distraction.
After sporting my beard for thirteen years, I would shave it off in secret on Christmas Day. I bought a can of Barbasol shaving cream and a packet of disposable razors, which I hid in the bathroom with a sharp pair of scissors. That Christmas we had a houseful. My mother Lucy came, Janeâs mother Polly, and my college-age children Andrew and Philippa. Christmas morning we had breakfast followed by the opening of presents. Then came the sleepy interlude while the turkey cooked. I waited until it seemed that everyone had used the bathroom. I sneaked in, closed the door, and unpacked my tools. I picked up the shears and looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. I hesitated. Did I really want to do this? My qualms disappeared when I thought of the family dozing in the
Â
Five years later I married Jane, then a poetry student, who by the time of her death in 1995 had published four books and earned a Guggenheim. It was exhilarating to live with her as her work became better and better. The more successful her poetry became, the more she permitted herself to be pretty. Late photographs of Jane reveal two sides, both beautiful. In one she is utterly spiritual, almost ready to turn bodiless; in another she is horny. Her poetry combined the two Janes, which is exactly what poems must do. When we married I was clean-shaven. She looked at old photographs and decided that I should grow a beard again. She observed my itchy agony. She wrote a poem called âThe First Eight Days of the Beard.â
A page of exclamation points.
A class of cadets at attention.
A school of eels.
Standing commuters.
A bed of nails for the swami.
Flagpoles of unknown countries.
Centipedes resting on their laurels.
The toenails of the face.
After a few weeks my facial hair looked like a beard, not like carelessness, and after two months it flourished. I wished it would hang straight down and cover my belly, but it always grew tightly curled, as pubic as Santa Claus.
For three years we stayed in Ann Arbor. We loved the house we lived in, old-fashioned with many bedrooms, but it rose in a crowded part of town, and we did not like living among people. Once a year we visited the farmhouse in New Hampshire, where my grandmother Kate survived in her nineties, and where I had spent childhood summers. We could see from the porch a cottage down the road, built for a farmhand in the 1890s, and nothing else that resembled a house. Jane fell in love with this 1803 solitary clapboard structure with its 1865 barn and collapsing sugarhouse. It backed up to Ragged Mountain, which had provided pasturage for my grandfatherâs cattle. Mount Kearsarge was five miles south. Fields of grass filled the narrow valleys. She loved Thornleyâs Store down the streetâwine and stovepipe, roast beef and souvenir ashtraysâwhere in the morning the neighborhood gathered to joke and gossip. We drove gawking on dirt roads around Eagle Pond, through a pig farm, and up New Canada Road past Freemanâs collapsed shack. During one visit on a Sunday we attended the South Danbury Christian Church, where my grandmother played the organ for eighty years. My cousins called me âDonnieâ and the preacher quoted âRilke the German poet.â
After my grandmother entered the Peabody Home, we agreed with my mother and her sisters that we would buy the farmhouse when my grandmother died. In 1975 I quit my tenure and we moved to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writingâbut it worked and I loved doing it. Our move made for the best years of our existence. My poems improved, and I wrote magazine pieces about baseball and New Hampshire. Year after year Jane committed to the life of poetry and we thrived in double solitude. (The New Hampshire Constitution prohibits dinner parties.) One day followed another, a bliss of samenessâand I plotted a distraction.
After sporting my beard for thirteen years, I would shave it off in secret on Christmas Day. I bought a can of Barbasol shaving cream and a packet of disposable razors, which I hid in the bathroom with a sharp pair of scissors. That Christmas we had a houseful. My mother Lucy came, Janeâs mother Polly, and my college-age children Andrew and Philippa. Christmas morning we had breakfast followed by the opening of presents. Then came the sleepy interlude while the turkey cooked. I waited until it seemed that everyone had used the bathroom. I sneaked in, closed the door, and unpacked my tools. I picked up the shears and looked at my face in the mirror over the sink. I hesitated. Did I really want to do this? My qualms disappeared when I thought of the family dozing in the
Similar Books
