[February 1954] <br />Your nurse could only speak Italian, <br />but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, <br />and tears ran down my cheeks.... <br /> <br />When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body, <br />the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova <br />was breaking into fiery flower. <br />The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds <br />blasting like jack-hammers across <br />the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, <br />recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. <br />Mother traveled first-class in the hold; <br />her Risorgimento black and gold casket <br />was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.... <br /> <br /> <br />While the passengers were tanning <br />on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, <br />our family cemetery in Dunbarton <br />lay under the White Mountains <br />in the sub-zero weather. <br />The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone— <br />so many of its deaths had been midwinter. <br />Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, <br />its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. <br />A fence of iron spear-hafts <br />black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. <br />The only “unhistoric” soul to come here <br />was Father, now buried beneath his recent <br />unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. <br />Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: <br />Occasionem cognosce, <br />seemed too businesslike and pushing here, <br />where the burning cold illuminated <br />the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives: <br />twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. <br />Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... <br /> <br /> <br />In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, <br />Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. <br />The corpse <br />was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.<br /><br />Robert Lowell<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sailing-home-from-rapallo/
