70spoems/polly

POLLY PEABODY

Pretty Polly Peabody
matron and mother,
gone off to skip on the sun,
this death dance you’ve practiced
so long, rehearsing your steps
to precision.

Thirteen years too long to wait,
while you had tea with his mother,
your lover husband
called in your understudy,
blew out her brains
instead of yours.

No flights to the sun, Pretty Polly,
no long leaps through the Boston sky.
Poets and zealots an unreliable lot,
you’re left with old contracts
and the haunting smell
of gardenias.

6/77

(Polly, as she nicknamed herself, was the first to patent the brassiere. The daughter of a prominent New England family and wife of a Peabody with two children, when she met Harry Crosby in the 1920s their affair was scandalous. He threatened suicide if she wouldn’t marry him, eventually she did. Their lavish expatriate lifestyle included drugs, alcohol, open marriage, and a suicide pact. As founders of Black Sun Press they published Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound . Harry had numerous affairs before ending his life in a murder suicide with another woman.)

7/11/77