Memories of West Street and Lepke, Robert Lowell

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,

I hog a whole house on Boston’s

“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”

where even the man

scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,

has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,

and is a “young Republican.”

I have a nine months’ daughter,

young enough to be my granddaughter.

Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.

These are the tranquillized Fifties,

and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?   

I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,

and made my manic statement,

telling off the state and president, and then   

sat waiting sentence in the bull pen

beside a Negro boy with curlicues

of marijuana in his hair.

Given a year,

I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short   

enclosure like my school soccer court,   

and saw the Hudson River once a day   

through sooty clothesline entanglements   

and bleaching khaki tenements.

Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,

a jaundice-yellow (“it’s really tan”)   

and fly-weight pacifist,

so vegetarian,

he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.   

He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,

the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.

Hairy, muscular, suburban,

wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,

they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I’d never heard

of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Are you a C.O.?” I asked a fellow jailbird.   

“No,” he answered, “I’m a J.W.”

He taught me the “hospital tuck,”

and pointed out the T-shirted back

of Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,   

there piling towels on a rack,

or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full   

of things forbidden the common man:

a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American   

flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.   

Flabby, bald, lobotomized,

he drifted in a sheepish calm,

where no agonizing reappraisal

jarred his concentration on the electric chair—

hanging like an oasis in his air

of lost connections....