Links
Archives
Saturday, December 30, 2006
|
And, now that we're home... ...yet another literary association on the Cape, whose source I've just found. As we passed the sign for Nauset, a line of poetry came to me: "The waters off beautiful Nauset." A lovely line, the waters off beautiful Nauset... but where had I learned it? From Ted Hughes, I realized a moment later; his last book of poems, Birthday Letters, which chronicles his life with Sylvia Plath. They'd gone to the Cape, where she was happy: I still have it. I hold it - 'The waters off beautiful Nauset.' Your intact childhood, your Paradise With its pre-Adamite horse-shoe crab in the shallows As a guarantee, God's own trademark. I turn it, a prism, this way and that. That way I see the filmy surf-wind flicker Of your ecstasies, your visions in the crystal. This way the irreparably-crushed lamp In my crypt of dream, totally dark, Under your gravestone. |