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To Frank Parker

By Robert Lowell 1917–1977 Robert Lowell

Forty years ago we were here

where we are now,

the same erotic May-wind blew

the trees from there to here—

the same tang of metal in the mouth,

the dirt-pierced wood of Cambridge.

Sometimes

you are so much younger than your face,

I know I am seeing your old face—

the hampered Henry James

mockery of your stutter,

your daily fear of choking, dying—

in school, loudness not words

gave character to the popular boy's voice.

We looked in the face of the other

for what we were.

Once in the common record heat

of June in Massachusetts,

we sat by the school pool

talking out the soul-lit night

and listened to the annual

unsuffering voice of the tree frogs,

green, aimless and wakened:

“I want to write.” “I want to paint.”

Was it I wanted you to paint? . . .

Age is another species,

the nothing-voiced. The very old

made grandfather look vulgarly young,

when he drove me to feed them at their home.

We will have their thoughtful look,

as if uncertain

who had led our lives.

The past changes more than the present.

Wherever there's grass, there is pollen,

the asthma of high summer—

the inclination to drink, not eat . . .

“Let us go into the garden,

or shall I say the yard?”

Why have you said this twice, Frank?

The garden has no flowers,

or choice of color,

the thick wet clump of grass

thins to red clay,

like an Indian's shaved and tufted head,

or yours—

we once claimed alliance with the Redskin.

What is won by surviving,

if two glasses of red wine are poison?

Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003)

Biography

Robert Lowell is best known for his volume Life Studies, but his true greatness as an American poet lies in the astonishing variety of his work. In the 1940s he wrote intricate and tightly patterned poems that incorporated traditional meter and rhyme; in the late 1950s when he published Life Studies, he began to write startlingly original personal or "confessional" poetry in much looser forms and meters; in the 1960s he wrote . . .

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