After the final and all-
But-unnecessary bell, most everyone
Already gone, might come a few last wheeling
Cries, goodbyes, sometimes a brief
Stab of laughter, the last light sliding
Footfalls of this year’s children, or
The so much weightier, wider striding
Of one of her colleagues, sweeping the hall
Of its echoes, and then, wider yet, a feeling
Of feeling the building itself being done
For the day—as if it, too, waited for
This moment, and met it with relief.

So she would sit. The room was hers. Late
Afterschool sun climbed the legs
Of the pine desk turned out, years ago,
From the town’s own mill. From here: a view
Of Stoner’s Hardware, the billiard hall,
And past the tracks, and drearier
Still, the shacklike houses where the town dregs
Lived out their shackled lives, and lastly, below
The town, and also well above it all—
Gray as steel sometimes, sometimes a blue
Earth’s freshest eye could but approximate—
The Lake, the only one, her Superior.

So she would sit, and smoke. Her reign here,
In this very room, was now closing upon
Three decades, but always she’d felt bound,
At least until this, her fifty-seventh year,
Never to light up inside it.
Before, she’d shut herself up in what
Was grandly called The Faculty Salon—
That dark and dreary hole. But
No more, no more attempting to hide it . . .
She’d watch the Lake and light up openly—
For anyone and everyone to see—
Had there been, at this hour, someone still around.

Once this same lake was sailed by a giant
Soul, Henry Longfellow, who drifted
On purest tides of inspiration—
This the shining Big-Sea-Water
Of the Arrow Maker’s Daughter,
The belov’d of Hiawatha. Oh,
Poetry! On the walls it was Keats, Blake—
Both lamb and tiger—Lanier and Bryant,
And Longfellow over the window, so
The right imagination might be ever lifted
At having read, early on, lines and lake
Together. But where was that imagination?

So she would sit, doubting and smoking freely,
In this her fifty-seventh year. She knew she’d
Scared them all, from the children on up, really:
Parents, teachers—and that squirming sinner
Of a superintendent, too. And she didn’t need
Her height to work this on them, though
As for that, proudly six feet tall she stood. No,
This was the fear that those that have no inner
Elevation always feel for those that do.
She knew her poetry. And by God she knew
There wasn’t a soul in this sawdust town
Who could, when she felt rightful, stare her down.

(What a scowl that woman had!. . . And by
Such phrases, a few thin anecdotes, and one brown
Photograph, this woman, Lucinda Stitt, came down
To me. That’s her younger brother, my
Great-uncle Chuck beside her, his cane
The hook to a youthful mishap at the mill.
They lived together. He grins, but she—it’s plain—
Distrusts the photographer, whose portrait, cracked
As it is, bears all her rightfulness intact.
She’s in her prime, clearly, with some time still
Before cracks of another sort would appear—
In that, her fifty-seventh year.)

What queerish notions, at day’s end, brooding
Brings to mind! Sitting, smoking, in a gray-
Golden cloud, she’d wind up recalling
A chant—the boys—so many years ago—and how
Angry it once made her—how angry even now!
. . . She would be newly burning at the way
They had gone on, the boys, including
That jug-eared Gus Gustafsson, bawling
Lucinda, Lucinda, she fell out of the winda.
This was for them the height of wit!
Poetry’s paragon! She heard them, chanting it
Stupidly still: Lucinda, Lucinda . . .

What was the use of home at night,
His slap of fork and spoon, the lounging phlegm
In his throat, the clearing of that throat
To usher in the utterance of one more gem
Of wisdom? What earthly use? Better to float
Bight here, on tides of smoke, still in sight
Of the Lake—gray as steel, blue as flame—
And turn on not one light, but let the room
Go gold, go gray, knowing that of course
He would come, for there was no force
Under heaven to keep him back, come on the same
Cane-clatter, to coax her down from the gloom.

(Well, she was an odd one, that one, Brad,
My grandpa once told me, with a curved
Nudge to the glance maybe meant to suggest,
Man-to-future-man, that she was one who’d had
No use for men. And yet, on a raw,
Rain-paned fall afternoon, Grandma imparted
A counter impression, when she observed,
What a man never seems to realize
Is that even the stoniest
Looking woman may be broken hearted,
And for the first and only time I saw
A sort of soupy look come into her eyes.)

In winter, ice worked its way outwards from
The shore, outreaching just as if, at last,
About to hazard an actual crossing,
But always followed days of accounting
When, loud as riflefire, it shattered to show
The bright blue burning down below.
No log burned blue as that tossing
Water burned . . . Whyever did it call her so
Fiercely, that blue out of blue, as if some
Answer were wanted she could not give it, no,
It wasn’t inside her, no, as the days passed,
Summer coming on, the sun remounting

The legs of her desk, as she waited for the light
To fade, for the ever later dark to come,
For an escape from that man, her clown-
Like caller, looking for all the world like some
Laughably miscast swain in one of the absurd
Town theatricals, mooning out there
On the playground, school being locked up tight,
His round face trained on her upper
Row of windows, baying Come on down,
And scratching his ear, wondering if she’d heard,
Then baying, sweetly, Come down,
Come down, Lucinda, I’ve made you supper.

Dark would go the walls, rhyme on rhyme,
Now bringing unavoidably to mind
How these were nothing but words in the failing
Glow, one with the down-slipping dust-
Motes, streaks on the glass, red, threadbare
Carpet on the creaking bottom stair
Of home, some other home, and sooner, later,
The Lake must swallow them all, just
As it swallowed, now and then, a skater,
A sailor, whose bodies are flailing
All on the Lakefloor together, blind
As life, as light, as Time;

And colder than ice, somehow, that shattering
Water, and always him coming, clattering
His stick, calling Come down, as if some use
To that, but oh, let him wait, and wait for
The match to bite and the letting loose
Of another ghost of smoke, him calling at the winda,
The window, her name, that man, who won’t go ’way,
Shattering the peace, your peace, calling Lucinda,
But he can wait for you, you needn’t—no—
Answer, not until you’ve lit one more
Of the cigarettes that, with each passing day,
Prove harder to light your hands are shaking so.