Delia Rexroth

By Kenneth Rexroth 1905–1982 Kenneth Rexroth

died June 1916

Under your illkempt yellow roses,

Delia, today you are younger

Than your son. Two and a half decades –

The family monument sagged askew,

And he overtook you for half-a-life.

On the other side of the country,

Near the willows by the slow river,

Deep in the earth, the white ribs retain

The curve of your fervent, careful breast;

The fine skull, the ardor of your brain.

And in the fingers the memory

Of Chopin études, and in the feet

Slow waltzes and champagne twosteps sleep.

And the white full moon of midsummer,

That you watched awake all that last night,

Watches history fill the deserts

And oceans with corpses once again;

And looks in the east window at me,

As I move past you to middle age

And knowledge past your agony and waste.

Kenneth Rexroth, "Delia Rexroth (died June 1916)" from The Collected Shorter Poems. Copyright © 1944 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: The Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2003)

Biography

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana and frequently moved around the Midwest during his childhood. He led a tumultuous life that included being orphaned at 14, constant traveling both in the US and abroad, intense political activism, and four marriages. Largely self-educated, he is one of the most well-read poets of the twentieth century. His poems, which influenced Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence . . .

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