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She Stands

By Mary De Rachewiltz Mary De Rachewiltz

She stands at the top of the stair

as childless Tom

saw her weep.

Fatherless in red Spyders elsewhere

rich daughters whiz through Paris

or cruise the Greek Islands as non-

daddy leaps in grasshopper fashion

on a merry-go-round. Tall and bony

they’re properly married, endowed.

Spared such a fate, the richly poor

country girl sometimes resented

her tattered state. Having to seek

treasures in a briar patch, she

found daffodils and violets

in dewy meadows mid-March.

Now late in the years, the wind lays

burnished gold leaves

on her feet.*

*“Cultivated” they called it

in the fifties—my poetry

sensing the trans-

position of

Marianne & Estlin

from the throoat to the tongue

makes a whole world

of difference

if you say

at his or on her feet.

NOTES: In “She Stand's” The figure of “childless Tom” is Eliot, whom Mary went to visit after WWII. The “red Spyders” are expensive cars of the period. “Marianne” (Moore) and “Estlin” (Cummings) were major influences on Mary as she began writing poetry in English in the fifties.—Richard Sieburth

Source: Poetry (January 2010).

Biography

Mary de Rachewiltz is the daughter of Ezra Pound. Her 1971 autobiography, Discretions, was reissued in 2005 as Ezra Pound: Father and Teacher. She is also the author of several books of poems, in Italian and English, and translator of Pound’s Cantos into Italian.

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