My mother had given up teaching when she married and moved for the first time, that trek from Massachusetts to Connecticut. She paid surprisingly little attention to her husband’s outbursts, even when he called her names, not because she was inured to them but because she paid little attention to anything outside her “work.” You had to ask her questions twice and still she’d look at you with the glazed fixity of a sleepwalker. She wrote poetry constantly; that was her “work.” She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. Or she’d shape her stanzas to form a geometrical design on the page. Her favorites were wings, stars, and shields.

She was a handsome woman, my mother. If you like largeness, you’d call her statuesque. She looked like Amy Lowell, but there the comparison ended; unlike Lowell my mother was silent (although she sighed loudly and often), she never swore, she did not smoke cigars, and she could not write her way out of a net brassiere. But she did pack a lot of brisket.

My mother’s output, starred and pseudonymous, appeared regularly in one of those little, irregular periodicals so limited in readership that they might be called incestuous. Subscription was by invitation only, and contributors would go into a rage over a misplaced comma and brood for days if their poems were understood. All this called for constant and voluminous correspondence between my mother and the editor, about what I never knew, because the whole system was built along the lines of a secret society whose secrets were kept from everybody, including the membership.

There was one time of the year, however, when my mother could not ignore the rages of my father. It was when his name came up for tenure, and for weeks the poet and I would scarcely breathe, would speak in whispers, and only if spoken to. She continued to write, of course; to her the production of poetry was like a ravaging disease, but she didn’t put her usual body English into it. She’d walk the house day and night, but carefully, not bumping into chairs, and with her head bowed as if she were balancing something, a bottle or a cane, on the back of her skull. For my part, I shunned all contact with my tuba as if it were the carrier of some dreadful virus.