Poetry

Robert Lowell

by Joseph Bathanti

I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair.
— Robert Lowell, “Memories of West Street and Lepke”

Mind-blown from maximum jolts
at Central Prison and outlying county gun camps,

shackled State felons, in felon brown,
huddle in the bullpen,

a caged room of church pews, awaiting process
into Honor Grade units across North Carolina.

Among them lounges the shade of Robert Lowell –
foggy, white as the Mayflower, goggled

in heavy black spectacles, snowy hair
spiriting about him like “curlicues

of marijuana.” At the sound
of his blue-blooded Boston name –

Robert Traill Spence Lowell II – he rises
fettered with the patrician air of Caligula

tripping in his chains as if to his writing chair
to be mug-shot against the red felt

convict backdrop, a cameo
of numbers sprayed across his breast.

Waving a smoking Lucky,
dark eyes mirroring the manic glitter

of vermouth, he invokes
the Holy Ghost, blesses his fellow yard-birds

in a flaming hail of Gatling couplets.
They merely glance at him –

another Jailhouse poet, drafting
one more season of the manacle,

his final sentence on the State: Parnassus,
a road camp down-east, bedded

in the Green Swamp, where lurk
bear and panther. The last red wolf,

scribbles stealthily in his brack and fen,
never consenting to be seen again.

Joseph Bathanti is former Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2012-14) and recipient of the 2016 North Carolina Award for Literature. He is the author of seventeen books, including The 13th Sunday after Pentecost, a volume of poems, released by LSU Press in late 2016; and the novel, The Life of the World to Come, from University of South Carolina Press in 2014. Bathanti is Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University.

FROM Volume 61, Number 2

Related