Poem ( Remember Midsummer: The Fragrance Of Box )

Delmore Schwartz

Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white
    roses
And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch
Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy
—Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented
And self-delighted as any ballerina,
                just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is wholly autumn: in the late
Afternoon as I walked toward the ridge where the hills
    begin,
There is a whir, a thrashing in the bush, and a startled
    pheasant, flying out and up,
Suddenly astonished me, breaking the waking dream.

Last night
Snatches of sleep, streaked by dreams and half dreams
—So that, aloft in the dim sky, for almost an hour,
A sausage balloon—chalk-white and lifeless looking—
    floated motionless
Until, at midnight, I went to New Bedlam and saw what I
    feared
                the most—I heard nothing, but it
                had all happened several times elsewhere.

Now, in the cold glittering morning, shining at the
    window,
The pears hang, yellowed and over-ripe, sodden brown in
                erratic places, all bunched and dangling,
Like a small choir of bagpipes, silent and waiting. And I
    rise now,
Go to the window and gaze at the fallen or falling country
—And see!—the fields are pencilled light brown
                or are the dark brownness of the last autumn
—So much has shrunken to straight brown lines, thin as
    the
                bare thin trees,
Save where the cornstalks, white bones of the lost forever dead,
Shrivelled and fallen, but shrill-voiced when the wind
    whistles,
Are scattered like the long abandoned hopes and ambitions
Of an adolescence which, for a very long time, has been
    merely
A recurrent target and taunt of the inescapable mockery of
    memory.

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