NOT FOR WAR
(For Robert Lowell
in memory)

Not for the armies of war
after being in a mental hospital
confined in arrested positions
for his humanity's protest
and for liberty of his vocation
a poet with personality swirls
this Thursday spring morning
having a series
of balmy hallucinations
like a gallery of mating birds
visiting an Evergreen tree
on Cambridge Common
he dreams of a memory
wrestling for inner peace
or a drink of wine
and not dreading to think
in a college class concentration
waiting in the faculty
with an intimacy of a bard
racked from distress
which he faces at college daily,
his mind constantly races
on this Charles River bed
as chased honey bees in a yard
not forgetting his medication
over a hedge at Harvard
he immediately chases
for cultural knowledge
of his old French quatrain
not to live on a ledge
like Socrates dismissively
as students rally around
his outside bench
but that every word be read
as he paces the lecture room
in a breathless chagrin
from so many panic attacks
hoping the gloom of medicine
will bring words to a stop
and set him on track
forgetting the offended pain
of his breathless god on the rack
now still in a black valley
of melancholy reigning doom
settling for a close friend
like Elizabeth Bishop instead
now in Brazil, to be back soon.