Bring out your dead; poets #20 Skunk Hour by Robert Lowell

Skunk Hour

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and let's them fall.

The season's ill-
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town...
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love..." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here-

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air-
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail'
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

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[SpokenVerse]

You did a good job there. It's a pleasing reading and you sound a lot like Robert Lowell.

If you want to hear my reading substitute watch?v=FoXUCAf288Q in the command line. My policy is not to listen to anybody else read it first, hoping to sound original. That's not always a good thing, though..