Amy Lowell

I've been reading Amy Lowell this morning, an imagist/feminist/modernist dream she is.  I didn't like her much when we were first introduced--her Garden by Moonlight and Venus Transiens didn't inspire me or show me anything new.  Maybe I was just a distracted college kid--well, not kid, exactly--hell bent on proving I had as much right to literature as the others in the room.  I felt, in that class in particular, that there was some element of danger that could shift the scales at any moment and reveal us all for the frauds we were, too scared to write our own words, but terribly critical of everyone elses.


At any rate, this morning, I ran across something of Amy's that I have read before, last year in fact I remember coming across it and being stunned.  Where much of her other work feels pulled back, hesitant, an observer on one side of the glass longing for the life on the opposite, this one feels to me like she is in it, participating in the moment she so perfectly describes.  Maybe it's my mood today, the wet grass and oppressive air, maybe it's all this damn gray that won't seem to go, but today, I am living here:

The Taxi, Amy LOWELL

When I go away from you

The world beats dead

Like a slackened drum.

I call out for you against the jutted stars   

And shout into the ridges of the wind.   

Streets coming fast,

One after the other,

Wedge you away from me,

And the lamps of the city prick my eyes

So that I can no longer see your face.

Why should I leave you,

To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?