Holly, you were never able to slip the noose of your name,
your father, Wallace Stevens. You may have dared to
mouth his universal intercourse, but there was no circling
Hartford, Connecticut smashed together with local boys
in the back seat of a Chevy, saying fuck this, fuck that.
A genius at seventeen, your father wrote to his mother
from Ivyland on July 31, 1896: The piping of flamboyant
flutes, the wriggling of shrieking fifes with rasping
dagger-voices, the sighing of bass-viols. Your voice silent,
editing his poems and letters became a constant sacrament
of praise.Even though you had a son, your first husband
like the second was a comma in your life. If there had
been another Spencer Tracy, you might have become
a Katharine Hepburn down from the Fenwick section
of Old Saybrook, but your back and waist relaxed
only under your father’s hands. Holly, when I first moved
to Joshua’s Cove in Guilford’s Great Harbor, you told
me the same story again, again—the time your father
gathered beach roses, a bouquet for you to hold while
he waltzed you, how he arced you into air, how it was
the only time he wrapped you in his arms, how he comes
to you in dreams: Harvard crimson stripes in his shirt,
the mole on his cheek. When you woke up crying, he
was never there to comfort you; your hand was clutching
the bed post not his arm. Knowing what I was in for,
I would invite you to our parties anyway. Veined ankles
thickened with pain, your feet swollen, flip flopping
in chenille slippers, we ferried you over to Horse Island
in our Boston Whaler. Wedged in between the caterer’s
foiled trays, you couldn’t believe Allyn, my husband,
had never heard of your father. Trying to be polite,
you substituted the word sailor inThe soldier is poor
without the poet’s lines. Our other guests, expecting
impersonal conversations of the usual Yacht Club sort
leaned on deck railing, but Holly, you would not let go
of your father, how he looked on a Sunday morning
in a Pendleton bathrobe and slippers, how Eternity
was his hand scurrying across a sheet of paper. Dilled
salmon got cold; still you’d go on sharing your fantasy:
your father would nibble first your left then right ear,
whispering you were his darling, music in your eyes,
rhythm in folds of your dress. You weresure his lines,
The two are one. / They are a plural, a right and left,
a pair were for you. No poetry of your own, you spoke
his words from Notes toward a Supreme Fiction as if
they were in a grammar known exclusively to you.
Dinner was served, oblivious to the food, you kept
trying to entertain my friends by quoting With six meats
and twelve wines. Touching dents in my pewter bowl
as if fingering scars, irritated because no one listened,
you snapped your father would have said my guests were
well-stuffed,/ Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade.
I crossed you off my list. Noon light unmitigated by cloud,
shadow would shift, then not. Long Island Sound became
slate, concentrated as emotion in your father’s poems. Holly,
I wondered if you studied the plane of water so long because
it held back what was beneath surface just as your father did.
No hat or boots in winter, a coat in summer, you were out
of season, prowling the beach. The moon pulling, a leash
of foam at your heels,to create your myth, a face for morning,
you pretended to be Rita Hayworth with flaming hair
in Gilda.Skyy blue vodka bottle in hand, empty, you’d fling
it onto the rocks. Neighbors complained; you lectured about
blue sea glass, how it was rare, rare as your father, an insect
trapped in amber who held your gaze but never satisfied need
for touch, how it was blue as the blue guitar: Things as they
are / Are changed upon the blue guitar. Anchoring our dock,
perfect in its roundness, there was a boulder of granite as big
as the water tank. You saw it move on the average of two
or three times a week. Usually, you would phone, but if chop
from Long Island Sound was stilled, you’d holler across
Joshua’s Cove, swearing the boulder had rolled four,
maybe five feet toward the water. I would run to see,
but it had always rolled back. No matter, your father had
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds.
–from All of Your Messages Have Been Erased© 2010
Vivian Shipley 