by Anne Stevenson
(i.m. Frances Horovitz)
We were the wrecked elect,
the ruined few. Youth,
youth, the Café Iruña
and the bullfight set,
looped on Lepanto brandy
but talking ‘truth’.
Hem, the 4 a.m. wisecrack,
the hard way in,
that story we were all at the end of
and couldn’t begin –
we thought we were living now
but we were living then.
Sanctified Pound, a knot
of nerves in his fist,
squeezing the Goddamn iamb
out of our verse,
making it new in his
archaeological plot –
to maintain ‘the sublime’
in the factive? Couldn’t be done.
Something went wrong
with ‘new’ in the Pisan pen;
he thought he was making now,
but he was making then.
Virginia, Vanessa,
a teapot, a Fitzroy fuss,
‘Semen?’ asks Lytton,
eyeing a smudge on a dress.
How to educate England
and keep a correct address
on the path to the river through
Auschwitz? Belsen?
Auden and Isherwood
stalking glad boys in Berlin –
they thought they were suffering now
but they were suffering then.
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