Rukeyser by Gerald Stern

Rukeyser

A visit with Muriel in her New York apartment,

helping her in the kitchen, making her tea,

freeing her from a statement but she knew it

by heart and wouldn’t listen though there was a

rupture somewhere in the second sentence,

and we were alone for an hour until her nurse

came back and scolded her for leaving her bed

and sitting with only a loosely knitted shawl

over her shoulders and only a thin slip

to cover her, a silk or rayon; and when

the subject was murder or lying, there was a look of

abandonment to her as it was when she let

her poems fall on the floor in Philadelphia

in the long narrow theater on Walnut Street

but I never finished my tea and I escaped

before the nurse could get to me and I

turned west, for the record, near Lexington, I think,

against the sun, for it was March already.