Found | Memento Mori
for Lura Beam & Louise Stevens Bryant
Where friends
noticed only
blossoms, Louise
used the whole
flower cycle,
from the green
spear to the seeding,
her philosophic
mountain ranges—
the living as she
liked—
starlight
seemed to go right
through her.
Her hand
on other
people was light,
light.—–There
are states
of mind so
delicate that to
be questioned
or brought too
objectively into
the foreground,
———-to the deep
———-voiceless
———-foundation
———-of our more
surface consciousness
seems almost
to kill them.
I guess this is
somewhere
near the sin
against the
Holy Ghost.
Found | The Lovely End of the Steeplebush
for Lura Beam & Louise Stevens Bryant
When the Red Emperor
Tulip turned itself
inside out, she kept
the inverted shape
until the six fallen
petals shriveled to
black. Her drying
rose petals grew
to a mound
every June. Her
fading amaryllis
produced
seeds like slivers
of black tissue
and these she
planted again.
Nothing died
to her, she could
always see a
transfiguration.
She was easily
possessed. A
flower, a shell,
a book, a child,
a sick person,
at once became
a cosmos.
Found | Louise, As Ekphrasis, II
for Lura Beam & Louise Stevens Bryant
Poking around Fourth Avenue
bookshops in the evening,
she never could resist a Pilgrim’s
Progress or Mme. De Sevigné.
She said on occasions
she tried to say what most
she desired—an absolute
calmness of mind, canoeing
by moonlight, sweetness
and steadiness of vision,
kindly light. Once driving
past Kensico Reservoir
she said, “You will have to
dispose of my bits and pieces.”
Cut from the stars, this elfin
part of her personality, both
her nature and nature itself,
structural, solid. She was
severely mathematical in
tastes, preferring the velvet
glove, a bowl of bright yellow
lemons set on the breakfast
table for later. If a critic said
only that a play was “Wholesome,”
she knew what he meant
and would not go. She believed
in work as an answer to the riddle
of living, money as distillation
of life, herself only its steward,
and love. Her style had the
restraint of the city. She looked
like a New Yorker. The first
book she ever gave me was
The Education of Henry
Adams with William Morris’
The Dream of John Ball
accompanying it like a posy.
Her body became easily expressive
in any art—once at Montauk
I watched her with such feelings.
I stood at the edge of the water
while below me the wild creature
in the emerald bathing suit
dived head on into the combers.
The sea was her element. When
I see her she walks swiftly
toward me in a smoky tweed
suit, her eyes flecked
with grey and violet. When
the leopard escaped from the
Oklahoma City Zoo, Louise said
he would die from his over-
exertions, and he did.
Anne Halsey is a feminist poet and memoirist. She received her education at Macalester College and New York University and currently lives with her family in Central Texas, where she writes about art, history, and culture. Her work has recently appeared in POETRY and JSTOR Daily.