Robert Lowell: Of Two Minds

(The fish-eye view, inflamed, corrupted, is a favorite figure with Lowell.) There are park-bound mallards circling, searching for something in the muck; there's the Scottie pup, paralyzed from gobbling toads; and elsewhere the poet himself, presented as a young newt (which, when captured, loses its leopard spots and lies grounded and numb, like the grown-up husband and wife tamed by Miltown on the family bed). In Munich the zoo's rubble fumed with cats, hoydens with air-guns prowl the Koenigsplatz, and pink the pigeons on the mustard spire- (That is, kill the doves at the cathedral.) Zoos and rubble, cats and air-guns, pigeons and splatz-the mix of animate and inanimate, of predatory oppositions and proximities, makes for a very high-octane verbal swirl. all through Lowell's work you can find such mechanized animae: giant cars like finned fish, a "savage servility" that slides by on grease; fancy minnows, "slaves of habit," who "shoot like starlight through their air-conditioned bowl," uncle's duck-blind sharpened by "double-barreled shotguns" that stick out "like bundles of baby crow-bars." 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." "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.