Poetry Archives

I want to bowl with Robert Lowell.
I want Cal to be my pal,
to be my buddy in Life Studies,
wearing identical team jackets
with our names sewed on the sleeve.
Oh ‘Bobbie’ it’s good to be alive
and not institutionalized at McLean’s,
free to mill about the Kavanaughs
in multi-colored bowling shoes
trying to decide what lane to use.
Three marriages gone down the tubes.
They hospitalized you for yelling at the
top of your lungs, “Here’s to the best
second-rate poet in Boston!”
But if you were never kind to the poem,
you were kind to the poet.
You with your affected Southern accent,
slouched in your leather chair,
chain-smoking, shoulders hunched, hair in an uproar,
a penny loafer dangling off one foot,
black-rimmed glasses slipping down your nose.
You outlived Schwartz and Berryman
with your obsession for confession.
Sexton, Plath, took the gas,
Delmore found dead outside a cheap New York City flat.
And Berryman jumped off a bridge and splashed
into the Mississippi, waving as he passed.
I hear America bowling, Cal.
I hear the great thunder of balls careening down waxed alleys,
the crash and smash and toppling of hard wood pins.
Though Love ignites, roll a strike!
Let the Muse despair, throw a spare!
And though Madness calls, don’t lay down a gutter ball.
It’s no sin to knock down pins and be like everybody else.
And he like everybody else.
Did death come ‘out of the blue’ for you
in the back seat of that New York City cab,
on your way back to Lizzie?
And were your last thoughts there
of poems you had not begun,
or of the bowling trophy you almost won,
had you only been spared?