Three of a Kind
Three of a Kind
For Caroline (Kay) Levy and Elizabeth Bishop
I could take certain scenes from your life,
a week in Paris, a fishing boat beyond the kelp,
cigarettes and booze and love of books
and swap them with the poet’s
but I won’t. They don’t match up precisely.
You loved men, didn’t go on binges
and possessed a decorum at odds with art.
Yet the similarities are there:
born three years apart, almost orphans,
her father died and left her helpless
when she was less than one,
yours soon disappeared and was
a subject that was never talked about.
You both survived bleak childhoods
being brave, and became young women,
smart, demure and shy, often sad,
and sometimes impudent and cagy.
(Did you really say that there
can never be enough defenses?)
She fell down in the gutter, drunk,
you merely slurred your words and bumped the table.
But both of you read widely and loved language,
words as words, on the page
or on the Scrabble board:
vernissage, frottage, montage.
You were women of a certain time,
of a certain kind, in tweeds and a fedora,
but with differing persuasions.
You succumbed to safety in an arid marriage
and she rose to the occasion to create
an art of formal and exquisite beauty.
She was Elizabeth. You were Kay.
Came the final years, dowdy, disillusioned,
your youthful manners turned to wit and scorn
and freshness to a weary flesh.
At this late date I confuse the two
of you with me and love with pity,
but pity isn’t love.
While I live the life you wanted,
I try to imitate her art but fail.
And yet like her I won’t fall silent, to the end.
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