Best Famous Swills Poems

Skunk Hour

(for Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son's a bishop.
 Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.


Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore
and lets them fall.


The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire
who seemed to leap from an L.
 L.
 Bean
catalogue.
 His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.


And bow our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork
orange his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work
he'd rather marry.


One dark night
my Tutor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars.
 Lights turned down
they lay together hull to hull
where the graveyard shelves on the town.
.
.
.

My mind's not right.


A car radio bleats
"Love, O careless Love.
.
.
.
" I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat.
.
.
.

I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.


I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage

pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.