ROBERT LOWELL AT 100

This Autumn you would be
one hundred years young
of waiting to celebrate
your September birthday
in a Beacon Hill dorm
if you are able to make it
through your mental storm
wondering if anyone
will remember you
as the first confessional poet
with the words of form;
now that you are translated
your spirit still calls out to us
in the warm hallways
when a poet
like Elizabeth Bishop
would visit
who could alter your mood
more than any medicine
or confession of sin
to make you feel free
facing up to your loss
with her cross reference
as a Sapphic wordsmith of poetry
in a landscape boundary
as a bailiwick of nature
reaching your mature mind
shaping words of the centuries
from a resolution's activity
in her own skills at colloquy
taking after Wordsworth
as the Romantics will
by adjusting eidetic memory
speaking of your loan of grief
who alone understood you
when she subtly returned
your belief into tell us
a good report of her lover
that made you jealous,
reporting of her recent visit
to Nova Scotia and Brazil
you discussed bas reliefs
and the petunia paintings
of Georgia O'Keeffe,
as guys still play soccer
or ice hockey
here along the Widener library wall
nearby the fireplace,
Lowell still sits with his pipe
(we still witness your face)
making us thrilled
to be warmed by your ripe verse
at the August rain
and sustained
by disarmed grace
in Robert's innovation
of history's charmed
epigrammatic individuality
that will not conform or swipe
at art in a hurting gesture
of dramatic intimacy
with a grotesque
critic's stripe
from the abyss
of his epiphanies
from a narrative's metamorphosis
in an innovation of a new age
of hip and hype
surviving from past words
and his third wife's last kiss.