The room a dying poet took
at nightfall in a dead hotel
had both directories—the Book
Of Heaven and the Book of Bell.
It had a mirror and a chair,
it had a window and a bed,
its ribs let in the darkness where
rain glistened and a shopsign bled.
Not tears, not terror, but a blend
of anonymity and doom,
it seemed, that room, to condescend
to imitate a normal room.
Whenever some automobile
subliminally slit the night,
the walls and ceiling would reveal
a wheeling skeleton of light.
Soon afterwards the room was mine.
A similar striped cageling, I
groped for the lamp and found the line
“Alone, unknown, unloved, I die”
in pencil, just above the bed.
It had a false quotation air.
Was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read,
or a fat man with thinning hair?
I asked a gentle Negro maid,
I asked a captain and his crew,
I asked the night clerk. Undismayed,
I asked a drunk. Nobody knew.
Perhaps when he had found the switch
he saw the picture on the wall
and cursed the red eruption which
tried to be maples in the fall?
Artistically in the style
of Mr. Churchill at his best,
those maples marched in double file
from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest.
Perhaps my text is incomplete.
A poet’s death is, after all,
a question of technique, a neat
enjambment, a melodic fall.
And here a life had come apart
in darkness, and the room had grown
a ghostly thorax, with a heart
unknown, unloved—but not alone.