I didn't know what to write to you today, so I opened a book of someone else's poems. Today it happened to be Thomas Hardy's. I've never been all that delighted by Hardy's poems. But his novels, especially Far from the Madding Crowd, are a different story . . . though perhaps, now that I think of it, that is the only Hardy novel on my shelf of obsessively reread books. Naturally, when I was young, I used to adore Tess of the d'Urbervilles; but I've had it up to here with that pious sap Angel Clare, not mention Tess expiring at Stonehenge. Enough is enough. And then Jude the Obscure is the most irritating of books. . . . Well, as you can see, I have mixed feelings about Hardy, although the painting of him in London's National Portrait Gallery makes him look shockingly like my gentle and beloved grandfather James Miller, who was a coal miner, a steelworker, a tender of cows, a walker of acres; a man to whom handwriting came hard. The discovery that he was also Thomas Hardy's doppelganger was just one of the many strange events that took place on that trip to England I made with my mother when I was five months' pregnant with the next James, and we ate an inordinate amount of cake and clotted cream, wept over the pilgrims at Canterbury, and were terrified to discover that RAF fighter planes now routinely make dreadful howling shrieking practice dives over Wordsworth's Lake District hills.

But back to Hardy. Here's a poem that is kind of like the good girl's "Frankie and Johnny." The rhythm is slightly off, however. It would be harder to sing.

A Wife Waits

Thomas Hardy

Will's at the dance in the Club-room below,

Where the tall liquor-cups foam;

I on the pavement up here by the Bow,

Wait, wait, to steady him home.

Will and his partner are treading a tune,

Loving companions they be;

Willy, before we were married in June,

Said he loved no one but me;

Said he would let his old pleasures all go

Ever to live with his Dear.

Will's at the dance in the Club-room below,

Shivering I wait for him here.