Waking in the Blue
The night attendant, a B.
U. sophomore,rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy headpropped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure daymakes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence!
My hearts grows tenseas though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,once a Harvard all-American fullback,(if such were possible!)still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,as he soaks, a ramrodwith a muscle of a sealin his long tub,vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,worn all day, all night, he thinks only of his figure,of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale—more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at
Lean's;the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"Porcellian '29,a replica of Louis
Iwithout the wig—redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suitand horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,hours and hours go by under the crew haircutsand slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkleof the Roman Catholic attendants.(There are no Mayflowerscrewballs in the Catholic Church.)After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred poundsthis morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jerseybefore the metal shaving mirrors,and see the shaky future grow familiarin the pinched, indigenous facesof these thoroughbred mental cases,twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.
Robert Lowell
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