Personal Choice Volume 2 No.1

 Song for the Last Act

Now that I have your face by heart, I look  

Less at its features than its darkening frame  

Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,  

Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.  

Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease

The lead and marble figures watch the show  

Of yet another summer loath to go

Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read  

In the black chords upon a dulling page  

Music that is not meant for music’s cage,

Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.  

The staves are shuttled over with a stark  

Unprinted silence. In a double dream  

I must spell out the storm, the running stream.  

The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see

The wharves with their great ships and architraves;  

The rigging and the cargo and the slaves

On a strange beach under a broken sky.

O not departure, but a voyage done!

The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps

Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps  

Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

Louise Bogan

Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945 and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism, and became the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.

Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier described her as "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced." He said, "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending."

Copyright Credit: Louise Bogan, “Song for the Last Act” from The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. Copyright © 1968 by Louise Bogan. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, All rights reserved.

Source: The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1968)