The Mills of the Kavanaughs

(An afternoon in the fall of 1943; a village a little north of Bath, Maine. Anne Kavanaugh is sitting in her garden playing solitaire. She pretends that the Bible she has placed in the chair opposite her is her opponent. At one end of the garden, there is a stone bedstead, in which her husband, a naval officer who has killed himself, is buried. The Kavanaughs are a Catholic family that came to Maine in the 17th Century. Their house is called KAVANAUGH; it is on a hill, and at its foot there is a mill pond, and by it a marble statue of Persephone, the Goddess who became a queen by becoming the queen of the dead. Anne comes of a poor family. She was adopted by the Kavanaughs any years before she married Harry, the last of their line. Most of the poem is a revery of her childhood and marriage, and is addressed to her dead husband.)

The Douay Bible on the garden chair
Facing the lady playing solitaire
In blue-jeans and a sealskin toque from Bath
Is Sol, her dummy. There’s a sort of path
Or rut of weeds that serpents down a hill
And graveyard to a ruined burlap mill;
There, a maternal nineteenth century
Italian statue of Persephone
Still beckons to a mob of Bacchanals
To plunge like dogs or athletes through the falls,
And fetch her the stone garland she will hurl.
The lady drops her cards. She kneels to furl
The naval ensign spread to hide a stone
Bedstead, her husband’s grave. “This is the throne,
Harry,” she says, “for children of a king.
My husband, we were children of a king.