Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, ALBERTINE ASKS FOR A POEM, by JAMES MONAHAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

ALBERTINE ASKS FOR A POEM, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I dig good graves. No other spade
Last Line: Graves I may dig, but not this one.
Subject(s): Cemeteries; Death; Flowers; Graves; Memory; Graveyards; Dead, The; Tombs; Tombstones


I DIG good graves. No other spade
has more meticulously laid
conclusive turf. None took more care
that roses be perpetual there.

And would you elegantly lie
in six neat feet of memory?
Would you, for marble at your head,
trail your bright hair among the dead
in my green cemetery — full
with the fastidious burial
of those who, loved for a little time,
ended in careful mounds of rhyme?

It was a desert noon outside;
tarred roads of London liquefied.
Your curtains closed a foliaged pool
of lace and twilight. There it was cool
and there — oh! like a blade unsheathed,
so straight and taut you lay, yet breathed
in utter, sleeping easiness,
while shadows came, voluble, to stress
the wealth of a curve, a painter's line.
Shadows soft-blurred in the design
your cheek, its tilt more guessed than shown —
but not your hair, a fabulous foam
splashed on the background of the sheet.

I have another favourite:
the frantic-fingered disarray
when tradesmen ring and you must pay —
time is the young, unpowdered morning,
solemnities of self-adorning
or broken off or not begun;
one comb in a disobedient bun
of flagrant gold — ah! there is the grace,
the royal, bewitching, private face,
allowed for nobody to see
except the errand-boys and me.

And once ...
But, stranger, look, my stranger,
the manacled, soft-spoken danger
has broken its cage. The rhymes here weaving
would weave the recurrent ropes of grieving,
would pull her to that nostalgic row
where cemetery roses grow.
See, then, my treachery is done,
long ropes of its rhyming still unspun.
Graves I may dig, but not this one.





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