January-June 1960

Walter and I spend our last summer in Vermont
before the barge of eternity. We choose a high plateau
for our home. Visitors drop by like foxes. We feed them
as Tang dynasty Wang Wei feeds roaming scholar monks
in Deep South Mountain till they tramp off at daybreak.

We are forever honeymooners. Walter is prince
of savoir faire. I just bought the old clapboard house
and now our big mailbox reads, Walter B. Stone.
Vacation time I meticulously rework lines
of nostalgia and dancing hills for Iridescence.

Walter sends my book to Harcourt Brace;
the editor says he loves it, but NOT FOR US.
Walter explodes, ‘How dare you love Ruth’s poems
and not publish her?’ The editor surrenders.
Soon we sail to London town, After a weekend

wandering Cambridge, comes horror. The bell rings.
The gendarme came to tell me you had hanged yourself
on the door of a rented room. You hung like a bathrobe in Soho.
I am alone in London town with three young daughters.
Walter’s salary at Vassar is frozen. I must survive.

Would The New Yorker publish a story again?
I write my confidant Richard Wilbur, who finds me
a job at Wesleyan University Press, and I join the avant-garde.
One snowed-in evening John Cage plays us 4 minutes
and thirty-five seconds of Alpine silence, loose waters in Wilbur's

baroque wall-fountain collapse, Lillian Hellman’s red hat floats
like a turtledove over the steeple where Lowell and Frost
play dominoes, and James Wright reads his first poems
to rumbling applause. Though Walter and I have never read
together, for our grand debut we’ll choose another galaxy.