Skunk Hour

Life Studies (1959)

Nautilus Island’s1 hermitheiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;her sheep still graze above the sea.Her sons a bishop. Her farmeris first selectman in our village;she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting forthe hierarchic privacyof Queen Victoria’s century,she buys up allthe 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. Bean2catalogue. His nine-knot yawl3was auctioned off to lobstermen.A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairydecorator 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 Tudor 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 hearmy 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 searchin the moonlight for a bite to eat.They march on their soles up Main Street:white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fireunder the chalk-dry and spar spireof the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on topof 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 cupof sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,and will not scare.

Life Studies, 1959

Audio de Sunk Hour

1An island facing Castine’s coast in Maine, where Lowell used to spend the summer.

2An outstanding company in Maine, specialized in sport products which were sold by mail according to a catalogue.

3The “nine-knot yawl” is a possible means by which one might negotiate an inter-course between the mainland and the island. A yawl is a two masted boat that has the Mizzen mast and sail, the aft mast towards the back of the boat, behind the rudder.