History By Robert Lowell

History has to live with what was here,

clutching and close to fumbling all we had--

it is so dull and gruesome how we die,

unlike writing, life never finishes.

Abel was finished; death is not remote,

a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,

his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,

his baby crying all night like a new machine.

As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,

the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends--

a child could give it a face: two holes, two holes,

my eyes, my mouth, between them a skull’s no-nose--

O there’s a terrifying innocence in my face

drenched with the silver salvage of the mornfrost.

From “The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry,”

edited by Jeffery Paine (HarperCollins: 528 pp., $35)