As Should We All

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

To whomever of whatever one gives thanks and praise, be it the earth, random chemistry, or a named or unnamed deity, dappled things merit gratitude. Hey, we're not perfect.

The Japanese (I remark upon this from time to time, hoping to attract the word back to my brain) have a phrase for that which is beautiful precisely because it is transient. All that talk about butterflies and autumn leaves. Of course, I'm inviting a Jesuit -- Gerard Manley Hopkins -- to expand and expound upon this theme.

Hopkins, of course, gave his thanks to a Catholic God --

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-- but that does not mean that those who are not Christians should dismiss him. Like Ackerman and Eiseley, both scientists, like Andy Goldsworthy, like children as yet unschooled to sophistication (not yet taught that patterns of shade on grass hold less beauty than mosiacs, bias-cut fabric or a carefully composed painting), Hopkins saw wonder in the mundane --

Repeat that, repeat

Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.

-- as should we all.

Always Coming Home

Returning from Tibet

1.

One wrong turn on a highway
as slippery as ours, and I skid
through the guardrail and plunge
over a cliff, falling like snow.
Since I’m the first at the crash scene
and a doctor, I try to operate
on my wounds in the body of this poem.
Scalpel. Forceps. Clamps. Pen.

This is only exploratory verse.
With no obvious contusions,
fractures, or cuts, I hurt all over,
but in no place I can point to.
I don’t know what to operate on.

2.

Maybe a fleck of memory,
sharp as a glass splinter too fine
to see, was large enough to feel.
Maybe land mines litter the mind
with hidden trip wires.
Maybe I swerved to miss hitting
a dead self in the road.
Maybe I scraped myself
paddling into the vortex of a flashback.

3.

At last I’ve found the node of pain,
a small point lodged deep
where attachment flows.
But the tongs of metaphor
are useless there. Extraction calls
for interplay, contact, reply.

We don’t speak very often.
A week will crawl by,
and then so much depends
on a few slender minutes
which cascade like droplets
in a waterfall: slowly when you
follow one’s arc and fate,
swiftly if you view them all.

4.

Yes, in dreamtime I want you
to pour into the seams of my life,
fill all the vacancies, lay down
a map of song lines. But, confess,
and I awaken the sleeping wildcat,
rejection, because you will not,
cannot comply. Your silence
takes shape as leavings inside,

while it may be only the scent
of shame and embarrassment.
Rebuff weighs more then favour
on the periodic table,
and this pain is pure unattanium,
heavy enough to send fissures
through a platinum heart.

A week ago we seemed close
as a binary star, twin lights circling
without tumbling in or away.
Today you sparkle
with the cold brilliance of rime
in another universe far off
near the beginning of time.

§

In a blog devoted to poetry, please allow me the digression of recommending to you Diane Ackerman's nonfiction books. Like Loren Eiseley (to whom I promise you I shall return, if only as a topic), Ackerman writes about the sciences with the skill of a poet, the critical mind of a philosopher, the profound wonder of a child and the grace of the living dance.

Attending to the triads, I offer you three tastes of Ackerman in poetic form. One down . . .

Filling in the spaces

You have a wife
with a pretty name
I learned glancing
at the dedication
in your new book,
while a small ingot
of jealousy fell
through my chest.

But then reason flared:
self said to self:
You want him happy,
in a well-furnished life
quilted with love.
He exists out of context
only at work –
a floating now/here world
minus past, future, yens,
quirks, sorrows, and family.

He divests himself
of self’s trappings for your sake,
Bearing everything,
he bares nothing.
It’s a sleight of mind.
You weave his tapestry
from the minute threads
of talk, manner, and mien.

The Acknowledgments page:
many friends, your wife again,
several gents with whom
you share a close camaraderie:
a circle richly fastened. Envy burned
a single match briefly inside.

The Introduction:
when I found you
began at the beginning,
with your personality as a child,
I stopped mid-sentence
and closed the book like a handclap.

I’m not ready for your diary,
lest I fabricate what’s missing;
from vellum and a few hints,
create a portrait in mind-ochre,
a pigment of my imagination.

Remember Pandora?
When all the evils had flown,
the box wasn’t empty.
What remained was something
crueller still: hope.
A hope that persists and kills.

§

Holding Radium

1.

You handle me
as if composing a haiku –
a few pithy strokes
with an effect
that’s pure lightning.

What does it feel like
gathering a wild, dark,
iridescent thing in your hands,
tight enough to shelter it
and even calm its trembling,
yet loose enough
not to fright or imprison it?

Sometimes how we are
is the most beautiful thing
I know – an invisible gift
I’ve craved since I was little.
But there’s no word for it
in my heart’s vocabulary.

2.

Truth is so precious
I hate parting with it.
Yes, lately, when we speak,
I open the summer house
of my sensibility to you,
and air out the private rooms
where dreams and sagas
scatter like quilts on a bed.

Still, I do not tell you
everything I imagine.
There are places I’m afraid
you may not wish to go,
say my juicy, carnal, physical
mind-play. For instance,
when you joked about
not wanting to squash a plan
of mine with your ‘big feet,’
I paused, before asking: How big are they?

A tall man, you have large hands.
I wondered if all your limbs
were tall. At once I pictured you
lying naked on a summer lawn.
Succulence ensued.
All this happened in a flash,
between tock and tick.

3.

What freedom: playing with feelings
of pure experiment and risk,
knowing they’ll be patrolled
by the border guards of one’s will –
instead of being kidnapped
by those feelings, terrorised,
oppressed, hauled away.

I presume windswept borders
thrill you, even walking them
obliquely, without fall or mishap.
Mastering that equilibrium
must feel like holding radium.
It’s a skill I long to refine,
and another new word for you
to teach me in time. Spell it slowly,
so that I can read between the lines.

Basho x 8 x 3

Basho translated by Peter Beilenson

Moonlight slanting
through all this long bamboo grove
and nightingale song.

Here where a thousand
captains swore grand conquest
Tall grasses their monument.

By lonely roads
this lonely poet marches
into autumn dusk.

Glorious the moon
therefore our thanks, dark clouds
come to rest our necks.

Lady butterfly
perfumes wings by floating
over the orchid.

Spring morning marvel
lovely nameless little hill
on a sea of mist

In my dark winter
lying ill, at last I ask
how fares my neighbor

Old dark sleepy pool
quick unexpected frog
goes plop! Watersplash.

Basho translated by Lucien Stryck

From moon wreathed
bamboo grove,
cuckoo song.

Summer grasses
all that remains
of soldiers dreams.

Not one traveller
braves this road-
autumn night.

Clouds-
a chance to dodge
moonviewing.

Orchid breathing
incense into
butterfly wings.

Spring- through
morning mist
what mountains there?

Autumns end
how does my
neighbour live?

Old pond
leap- splash
a frog.


Basho translated by R H Blyth

Moonlight slants through
The vast bamboo grove:
A cuckoo cries

Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors dreams.

Along this road
Goes no one;
This autumn evening.

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders..

The butterfly is perfuming
Its wings in the scent
Of the orchid.

Yes, spring has come
This morning a nameless hill
Is shrouded in mist.

It is deep autumn
My neighbor
How does he live, I wonder.

The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water.

Eldritch

The Elves
by Denise Levertov, who merits revisitation

Elves are no smaller
than men, and walk
as men do, in this world,
but with more grace than most,
and are not immortal.

Their beauty sets them aside
from other men and from women
unless a woman has that cold fire in her
called poet: with that

she may see them and by its light
they know her and are not afraid
and silver tongues of love
flicker between them.

Beowulf, in triads

Beowulf

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

Afterwards a boy-child was born to Shield,
a cub in the yard, a comfort sent
by God to that nation. He knew what they had tholed,
the long times and troubles they'd come through
without a leader; so the Lord of Life,
the glorious Almighty, made this man renowned.
Shield had fathered a famous son:
Beow's name was known through the north.
And a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving freely while his father lives
so that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast companions will stand by him
and hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is the path to power among people everywhere.

Shield was still thriving when his time came
and he crossed over into the Lord's keeping.
His warrior band did what he bade them
when he laid down the law among the Danes:
they shouldered him out to the sea's flood,
the chief they revered who had long ruled them.
A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,
ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.
They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,
laid out by the mast, amidships,
the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures
were piled upon him, and precious gear.
I never heard before of a ship so well furbished
with battle tackle, bladed weapons
and coats of mail. The massed treasure
was loaded on top of him: it would travel far
on out into the ocean's sway.
They decked his body no less bountifully
with offerings than those first ones did
who cast him away when he was a child
and launched him alone out over the waves.
And they set a gold standard up
high above his head and let him drift
to wind and tide, bewailing him
and mourning their loss. No man can tell,
no wise man in hall or weathered veteran
knows for certain who salvaged that load.
Then it fell to Beow to keep the forts.

He was well regarded and ruled the Danes
for a long time after his father took leave
of his life on earth. And then his heir,
the great Halfdane, held sway
for as long as he lived, their elder and warlord.
He was four times a father, this fighter prince:
one by one they entered the world,
Heorogar, Hrothgar, the good Halga
and a daughter, I have heard, who was Onela's queen,
a balm in bed to the battle-scarred Swede.
The fortunes of war favoured Hrothgar.
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks,
young followers, a force that grew
to be a mighty army. So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense
his God-given goods to young and old—
but not the common land or people's lives.
Far and wide through the world, I have heard,
orders for work to adorn that wallstead
were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there,
finished and ready, in full view,
the hall of halls. Heorot was the name
he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings
and torques at the table. The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning. That doom abided,
but in time it would come: the killer instinct
unleashed among in-laws, the blood-lust rampant.
Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet
telling with mastery of man's beginnings,
how the Almighty had made the earth
a gleaming plain girdled with waters;
in His splendour He set the sun and the moon
to be earth's lamplight, lanterns for men,
and filled the broad lap of the world
with branches and leaves; and quickened life
in every other thing that moved.

So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain's clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until He gave them their reward.

To round out my days of lazy collection-gathering, a little Old English translated into new. Hardly three delicate roses or the start of a daisy chain, but meatier stuff. Above, Seamus Heaney's translation. Burton Raffel leads us differently:

In his far-off home Beowulf, Higlac's
Follower and the strongest of the Geats -- greater
And stronger than anyone anywhere in this world --
Heard how Grendel filled nights with horror
And quickly commanded a boat fitted out,
Proclaiming that he'd go to that famous king,
Would sail across the sea to Hrothgar,
Now when help was needed. None
Of the wise ones regretted his going, much
As he was loved by the Geats: the omens were good,
And they urged the adventure on. So Beowulf
Chose the mightiest men he could find,
The bravest and best of the Geats, fourteen
In all, and led them down to their boat;
He knew the sea, would point the prow
Straight to that distant Danish shore.
Then they sailed, set their ship
Out on the waves, under the cliffs.
Ready for what came they wound through the currents,
The seas beating at the sand, and were borne
In the lap of their shining ship, lined
With gleaming armor, going safely
In that oak-hard boat to where their hearts took them.
The wind hurried them over the waves,
The ship foamed through the sea like a bird
Until, in the time they had known it would take,
Standing in the round-curled prow they could see
Sparkling hills, high and green,
Jutting up over the shore, and rejoicing
In those rock-steep cliffs they quietly ended
Their voyage.


Another passage by Raffel, just because:

That mighty protector of men
Meant to hold the monster till its life
Leaped out, knowing the fiend was no use
To anyone in Denmark. All of Beowulf's
Band had jumped from their beds, ancestral
Swords raised and ready, determined
To protect their prince if they could. Their courage
Was great but all wasted: they could hack at Grendel
From every side, trying to open
A path for his evil soul, but their points
Could not hurt him, the sharpest and hardest iron
Could not scratch at his skin, for that sin-stained demon
Had bewitched all men's weapons, laid spells
That blunted every mortal man's blade.
And yet his time had come, his days
Were over, his death near; down
To hell he would go, swept groaning and helpless
To the waiting hands of still worse fiends.
Now he discovered - once the afflictor
Of men, tormentor of their days - what it meant
To feud with Almighy God: Grendel
Saw that his strength was deserting him, his claws
Bound fast, Higlac's brave follower tearing at
His hands. The monster's hatred rose higher,
But his power had gone. He twisted in pain,
And the bleeding sinews deep in his shoulder
Snapped, muscle and bone split
And broke.


As I'm promising threesomes, let me deliver so, a third of Raffel:


Waves of fire swept at his shield
And the edge began to burn. His mail shirt
Could not help him, but before his hands dropped
The blazing wood Wiglaf jumped
Behind Beowulf's shield; his own was burned
To ashes. The the famous old hero, remembering
Days of glory, lifted what was left
Of Nagling, his ancient sword, and swung it
With all his strength, smashed the gray
Blade into the beast's head. But then Nagling
Broke to pieces, as iron always
Had in Beowulf's hands. His arms
Were too strong, the hardest blade could not help him,
The most wonderfully worked. He carried them to war
But fate had decreed that the Geats' great king
Would be no better for any weapon.
Then the monster charged again, vomiting
Fire, wild with pain, rushed out
Fierce and dreadful, its fear forgotten.
Watching for its chance it drove its tusks
Into Beowulf's neck; he staggered, the blood
Came flooding forth, fell like rain.

And then when Beowulf needed him most
Wiglaf showed his courage, his strength
And skill, and the boldness he was born with.
Ignoring the dragon's head, he helped his lord
By striking lower down. The sword
Sank in; his hand was burned, but the shining
Blade had done its work, the dragon's
Belching flames began to flicker
And die away. And Beowulf drew
His battle-sharp dagger: the blood-stained old king
Still knew what he was doing. Quickly, he cut
The beast in half, slit it apart.
It fell, their courage had killed it, two noble
Cousins had joined in the dragon's death.


Ending the translator triad on a female (if hardly feminine) note, a section translated by Edwin Morgan.


Grendel's Mother

To Heorot then she came, where the Danes
Slept within the hall. Fate for those men
Swept on its wheel when Grendel’s mother
Got into the building. The panic was the less
By just as much as the strength of woman-sex,
Amazon battle-fury, is less than a man’s
When the band-adorned sword, hammer-hardened,
The bloodstained blade unyielding of edge
Bites on the boar-image of a hostile head.
Then in the hall the tough-tempered sword
Was drawn above the benches, and many a broad shield
By firm hand lifted; when that horror clutched,
Who thought of helmet or of great chain-mail?
She was off in haste, anxious to leave there,
To escape with her life, when men discovered her;
She had fastened in a flash on one of the heroes
With heavy grasp, and gone to her fen.
He whom she tore from sleep to death
Was held by Hrothgar as the dearest of men
Raised among retainers from sea to sea,
Fine shield-fighter, soldier of good name.
Beowulf was absent, for a separate lodging
Had earlier been prepared, after the treasure-giving,
For the illustrious Geat. Clamour in Heorot!
She had taken that sight, the bloodied hand;
Care came again, fell on those dwellings.
Evil the barter where both sides must tender
The lives of their friends!

Home (Again)

I Come Home Wanting to Touch Everyone

Stephen Dunn

The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we'd just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we're all saying
each other's names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I've come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they're all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
Everytime the kids turn their backs
I touch my wife's breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin--
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.

Triad the First

(for surely more will follow)

A trio of love poems, for no better reason that that I feel like having a triad. It's a pleasure to promise to revisit each poet.


When You are Old
William Butler Yeats

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


Letter Home
Stephen Dunn

Last night during a thunderstorm,
awakened and half-awake,
I wanted to climb into be
on my mother's side, be told
everything's all right --
the mother-lie which gives us power
to make it true.
Then I realised she was dead,
that you're the one I sleep with
and rely on, and I wanted you.
The thunder brought what thunder brings.
I lay there, trembling,
thinking what perfect sense we make
of each other when we're afraid
or half-asleep or alone.


A Birthday
Christina Georgina Rossetti

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

Make Mine a Double

Long-short-short, long-short-short
Dactyls in dimeter,
Verse form with choriambs
(Masculine rhyme):

One sentence (two stanzas)
Hexasyllabically
Challenges poets who
Don't have the time.

It's been serious around here. Had you noticed? It's time to lighten things and Roger L. Robison's is an excellent introduction to the shape of my mood. I'm feeling dactylic and no properly improper dactyl goes about as a singleton. I realise that this lapse into sillitude may offend some. For those who need things sombre, please return tomorrow, when I am almost certain to be bleak (or serious) again. In the meantime, in the Dactyl Room (unlike the Haiku Studio), the door is the thing with hinges. Please open it slowly. When sped, it squeaks.

Blame Paul Pascal and (Pulitzer Prize winner) Anthony Hecht for the invention of this higgledy piggledy form. In 1961, presumably having nothing better to do with a patch of goofy time, they constructed the double dactyl.

As you're here, have a few. They're served both on the rocks and neat. You may determine which is which.

Point of View
by Anthony Hecht

Higgledy-piggledy,
Marcus Aurelius,
Guiding his life by a
Stark rule of thumb,

Garnered the nickname of
"Impermeabile"--
Meaning both "Stoic," and,
Possibly, "dumb."


No Foundation
by John Hollander

Higgledy-piggledy
John Simon Guggenheim,
Honored wherever the
Muses collect,

Save in the studies (like
Mine) which have suffered his
Unjustifiable,
Shocking neglect.


Another Hollander and further neglect:

Appearance & Reality

Higgledy-piggledy
Josephine Bonaparte,
Painted by Prud'hon with
Serious mien:

Sorrow? Oh, hardly. Just
Cosmetological
Prudence (her teeth were a
Carious green.)


The Supernatural
Anonymous

Spookety Flookety
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Spoke to some spirits
And wrote what they said.

Some cynics I have known
Think he should write his own
Autobiography
Now that he’s dead.


(Grab a dictionary.)


Iliad
Diane Svarlien

Higgledy-Piggledy
Peleus' progeny
Filled up with Rage at his
Army and king;
Now of his canine- and
Aviannutritive
Multihellenicide
Please, goddess, sing.


(You now may shelve the book.)

What Svarlian began, let Anthony Hackard end:

Graciously, Greciously
Thetis's Peliad
Got Hector's Trojan face
Caught on a wheel;
Later he quietly
Antiheroic'lly
Suffered a fate most be-
Fitting a heel.



Rough Weather
Kevin Durkin

Higgledy-piggledy
Charles A. Lindbergh flew
over the ocean as
fast as he could,

pelted by rain, sleet, snow
head winds and winds below.
Meteorology
did him no good.

As you're still here, you might as well consider the McWhirtle, concocted in 1989 by Bruce Newling. (The silliness stream floods widely.) Here's a sample by the Kenn Nesbitt. Before you read it, get the dactyl stress pattern out of your head -- if you can.

Fernando the Fearless

We're truly in awe of
Fernando the Fearless
who needed no net
for the flying trapeze.

Alas, what a shame
it's surprisingly difficult
catching a bar
in the midst of a sneeze.

Not Waving

Not Waving, But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

§

In compiling this blog, I have paid inadequate attention to my sex, and women are heard little enough in this world that there's no need for me, through action or inaction, to contribute to the muffling. Stevie Smith serves as an excellent turning point. A childhood spent, in part, in a TB sanatorium gave Smith an early and intimate awareness of death and separation. Her mother died when Smith was sixteen, and Smith's Aunt Madge assumed the role of mother to the girl.

Smith died in one of the worst ways: piecemeal, words first. Brain cancer deprived her, first of language, then of life. Fortunately for us, she was prolific and well-published, so we have what she lost at the end: her words.

The Frog Prince

I am a frog
I live under a spell
I live at the bottom
Of a green well

And here I must wait
Until a maiden places me
On her royal pillow
And kisses me
In her father's palace.

The story is familiar
Everybody knows it well
But do other enchanted people feel as nervous
As I do? The stories do not tell,

Ask if they will be happier
When the changes come
As already they are fairly happy
In a frog's doom?

I have been a frog now
For a hundred years
And in all this time
I have not shed many tears,

I am happy, I like the life,
Can swim for many a mile
(When I have hopped to the river)
And am for ever agile.

And the quietness,
Yes, I like to be quiet
I am habituated
To a quiet life,

But always when I think these thoughts
As I sit in my well
Another thought comes to me and says:
It is part of the spell

To be happy
To work up contentment
TO make much of being a frog
To fear disenchantment

Says, it will be heavenly
To be set free,
Cries, Heavenly the girl who disenchants
And the royal times, heavenly,
And I think it will be.

Come then, royal girl and royal times,
Come quickly,
I can be happy until you come
But I cannot be heavenly,
Only disenchanted people
Can be heavenly.



Scorpion

'This night shall thy soul be required of thee'
My Soul is never required of me
It always has to be somebody else of course
Will my soul be required of me tonight perhaps?

(I often wonder what it will be like
To have one's soul required of one
But all I can think of is the Out-Patients' Department -
'Are you Mrs. Briggs, dear?'
No, I am Scorpion.)

I should like my soul to be required of me, so as
To waft over grass till it comes to the blue sea
I am very fond of grass, I always have been, but there must
Be no cow, person or house to be seen.

Sea and grass must be quite empty
Other souls can find somewhere else.

O Lord God please come
And require the soul of thy Scorpion

Scorpion so wishes to be gone.



Away, Melancholy

Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

Are not the trees green,
The earth as green?
Does not the wind blow,
Fire leap and the rivers flow?
Away melancholy.

The ant is busy
He carrieth his meat,
All things hurry
To be eaten or eat.
Away, melancholy.

Man, too, hurries,
Eats, couples, buries,
He is an animal also
With a hey ho melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

Man of all creatures
Is superlative
(Away melancholy)
He of all creatures alone
Raiseth a stone
(Away melancholy)
Into the stone, the god
Pours what he knows of good
Calling, good, God.
Away melancholy, let it go.

Speak not to me of tears,
Tyranny, pox, wars,
Saying, Can God
Stone of man's thoughts, be good?
Say rather it is enough
That the stuffed
Stone of man's good, growing,
By man's called God.
Away, melancholy, let it go.

Man aspires
To good,
To love
Sighs;

Beaten, corrupted, dying
In his own blood lying
Yet heaves up an eye above
Cries, Love, love.
It is his virtue needs explaining,
Not his failing.

Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

In These Dark Hours

Objector

In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoon
to ward off complicity — the ordered life
our leaders have offered us. Thin as a knife,
our chance to live depends on such a sign
while others talk and the Pentagon from the
moon
is bouncing exact commands: "Forget your faith;
be ready for whatever it takes to win: we face
annihilation unless all citizens get in line."

I bow and cross my fork and spoon: somewhere
other citizens more fearfully bow
in a place terrorized by their kind of oppressive
state.
Our signs both mean, "You hostages over there
will never be slaughtered by my act." Our vows
cross: never to kill and call it fate.

§

This blog was born in a coffee house in Kansas and it seems only right to visit, from time to time, one or another Kansan poet. As peace is a thing for which we should all, when we know it, be truly thankful, and as today is a day when Kansans and other Americans engage -- or try to engage, or should try to engage -- fully with thanks, I'm starting with William Stafford, who was a pacifist. (Yes, Virginia, Kansas has pacifists. This one's dead, but there are some living, as well.)

Stafford's poems reflect not only politics, but also the prairie and the towns he loved.

Prairie Town

There was a river under First and Main,
the salt mines honeycombed farther down.
A wealth of sun and wind ever so strong
converged on that home town, long gone.

At the north edge there were the sand hills.
I used to stare for hours at prairie dogs,
which had their town, and folded their little
paws
to stare beyond their fence where I was.

River rolling in secret, salt mines with care
holding your crystals and stillness, north prairie
what kind of trip can I make, with what old friend,
ever to find a town so widely rich again?

Pioneers, for whom history was walking through
dead grass,
I and the main things that happened were miles
and the time of day-
you built that town, and I have let it pass.
Little folded paws, judge me: I came away.


Level Light

Sometimes the light when evening fails
stains all haystacked country and hills,
runs the cornrows and clasps the barn
with that kind of color escaped from corn
that brings to autumn the winter word —
a level shaft that tells the world:

It is too late now for earlier ways;
now there are only some other ways,
and only one way to find them — fail.

In one stride night then takes the hill.


Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason —
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all — my only swerving —
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

§

Stafford was, in the best sense, a romantic. Remember that a novel is also called a romance. William Stafford was a man who could tell a tale.

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by —
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
'Who are you really, wanderer?'
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
'Maybe I'm a king.'

§

Stafford's poems show their author's desire to live his life fully -- not in an indulgent, but in a spiritual and depth-of-emotion sense. He wanted of himself nothing less than complete honesty. He recognised and loved humanity, and knew how easy it was for past scars to affect present acts and responses.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not to recognise the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider --
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep,
the signals we give -- yes or no, or maybe --
should be clear; the darkness around us is deep.


Waking at 3 a.m.

Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn't matter—even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep.


For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That's the world, and we all live there.

§

There is a taste of Rumi, wakeful as springtime, in 'A Ritual to Read to Each Other'. Rumi's muse was to be worshipped and adored. Stafford's was both earthy and powerful.

When I Met My Muse

I glanced at her and took my glasses
off—they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

§

Lastly, because this is (after all) midnight's anchorage:


How These Words Happened

In winter, in the dark hours, when others
were asleep, I found these words and put them
together by their appetites and respect for
each other. In stillness, they jostled. They traded
meanings while pretending to have only one.

Monstrous alliances never dreamed of before
began. Sometimes they lost. Never again
do they separate in this world They are
together. They have a fidelity that no
purpose of pretense can ever break.

And all of this happens like magic to the words
in those dark hours when others sleep.

And Now Someone From the Southern Hemisphere

Standardisation

When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;

When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the "Standardization of the Race";

I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.

For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.

She does not tire of the pattern of a rose.
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise.
She cannot recall how long ago she chose
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes,

Love, which still pours into its ancient mould
The lashing seed that grows to a man again,
From whom by the same processes unfold
Unending generations of living men.

She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains.
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains,
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin.

And beauty standing motionless before
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile,
A long queue in an unknown corridor,
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.

It occurred to me that this blog was shy of rhyme (and, perhaps, of reason, but I, in my state, can do less to rectify that), so I'm taking a turn into Hope -- A D Hope, an Australian poet. He was also a critic, which may in part explain his slant on a journalist's Sunday prose.

Hope almost made a century: 1907 to 2000. The man saw changes in the world. He liked -- I think -- his tongue firmly wagging in his cheek. He lived, as do we all, in interesting times, and he lived in unusual perspectives.

Commination

He that is filthy let him be filthy still.
Rev. 22.11

Like John on Patmos, brooding on the Four
Last Things, I meditate the ruin of friends
Whose loss, Lord, brings this grand new curse to mind
Now send me foes worth cursing, or send more
- Since means should be proportionate to ends -
For mine are few and of the piddling kind:

Drivellers, snivellers, writers of bad verse,
Backbiting bitches, snipers from a pew,
Small turds from the great arse of self-esteem;
On such as these I would not waste my curse.
God send me soon the enemy or two
Fit for the wrath of God, of whom I dream:

Some Caliban of Culture, some absurd
Messiah of the Paranoiac State,
Some Educator wallowing in his slime,
Some Prophet of the Uncreating Word
Monsters a man might reasonably hate,
Masters of Progress, Leaders of our Time;

But chiefly the Suborners: Common Tout
And Punk, the Advertiser, him I mean
And his smooth hatchet-man, the Technocrat.
Them let my malediction single out,
These modern Dives with their talking screen
Who lick the sores of Lazarus and grow fat,

Licensed to pimp, solicit and procure
Here in my house, to foul my feast, to bawl
Their wares while I am talking with my friend,
To pour into my ears a public sewer
Of all the Strumpet Muses sell and all
That prostituted science has to vend.

In this great Sodom of a world, which turns
The treasure of the Intellect to dust
And every gift to some perverted use,
What wonder if the human spirit learns
Recourses of despair or of disgust,
Abortion, suicide and self-abuse.

But let me laugh, Lord; let me crack and strain
The belly of this derision till it burst;
For I have seen too much, have lived too long
A citizen of Sodom to refrain,
And in the stye of Science, from the first,
Have watched the pearls of Circe drop on dung.

Let me not curse my children, nor in rage
Mock at the just, the helpless and the poor,
Foot-fast in Sodom's rat-trap; make me bold
To turn on the Despoilers all their age
Invents: damnations never felt before
And hells more horrible than hot and cold.

And, since in Heaven creatures purified
Rational, free, perfected in their kinds
Contemplate God and see Him face to face
In Hell, for sure, spirits transmogrified,
Paralysed wills and parasitic minds
Mirror their own corruption and disgrace.

Now let this curse fall on my enemies
My enemies, Lord, but all mankind's as well
Prophets and panders of their golden calf;
Let Justice fit them all in their degrees;
Let them, still living, know that state of hell,
And let me see them perish, Lord, and laugh.

Let them be glued to television screens
Till their minds fester and the trash they see
Worm their dry hearts away to crackling shells;
Let ends be so revenged upon their means
That all that once was human grows to be
A flaccid mass of phototropic cells;

Let the dog love his vomit still, the swine
Squelch in the slough; and let their only speech
Be Babel; let the specious lies they bred
Taste on their tongues like intellectual wine
Let sung commercials surfeit them, till each
Goggles with nausea in his nauseous bed.

And, lest with them I learn to gibber and gloat,
Lead me, for Sodom is my city still,
To seek those hills in which the heart finds ease;
Give Lot his leave; let Noah build his boat,
And me and mine, when each has laughed his fill,
View thy damnation and depart in peace.

§

The Wandering Islands

You cannot build bridges between the wandering islands;
The Mind has no neighbours, and the unteachable heart
Announces its armistice time after time, but spends
Its love to draw them closer and closer apart.

They are not on the chart; they turn indifferent shoulders
On the island-hunters; they are not afraid
Of Cook or De Quiros, nor of empire-builders;
By missionary bishops and the tourist trade

They are not annexed; they claim no fixed position;
They take no pride in a favoured latitude;
The committee of atolls inspires in them no devotion
And the earthquake belt no special attitude.

A refuge only for the shipwrecked sailor;
He sits on the shore and sullenly masturbates,
Dreaming of rescue, the pubs in the ports of call or
The big-hipped harlots at the dockyard gates.

But the wandering islands drift on their own business,
Incurious whether the whales swim round or under,
Investing no fear in ultimate forgiveness.
If they clap together, it’s only casual thunder

And yet they are hurt – for the social polyps never
Girdle their bare shores with a moral reef;
When the icebergs grind them they know both beauty and terror;
They are not exempt from ordinary grief;

And the sudden ravages of love surprise
Them like acts of God – its irresistible function
They have never treated with convenient lies
As a part of geography or an institution.

An instant of fury, a bursting mountain of spray,
They rush together, their promontories lock,
An instant the castaway hails the castaway,
But the sounds perish in that earthquake shock.

And then, in the crash of ruined cliffs, the smother
And swirl of foam, the wandering islands part.
But all that one mind ever knows of another,
Or breaks the long isolation of the heart,

Was in that instant. The shipwrecked sailor senses
His own despair in a retreating face.
Around him he hears in the huge monotonous voices
Of wave and wind: ‘The Rescue will not take place.’

§


The Return of Persephone

Gliding through the still air, he made no sound;
Wing-shod and deft, dropped almost at her feet,
And searched the ghostly regiments and found
The living eyes, the tremor of breath, the beat
Of blood in all that bodiless underground.

She left her majesty; she loosed the zone
Of darkness and put by the rod of dread.
Standing, she turned her back upon the throne
Where, well she knew, the Ruler of the Dead,
Lord of her body and being, sat like stone;

Stared with his ravenous eyes to see her shake
The midnight drifting from her loosened hair,
The girl once more in all her actions wake,
The blush of colour in her cheeks appear
Lost with her flowers that day beside the lake.

The summer flowers scattering, the shout,
The black manes plunging down to the black pit --
Memory or dream? She stood awhile in doubt,
Then touched the Traveller God's brown arm and met
His cool, bright glance and heard his words ring out:

"Queen of the Dead and Mistress of the Year!"
-- His voice was the ripe ripple of the corn;
The touch of dew, the rush of morning air --
"Remember now the world where you were born;
The month of your return at last is here."

And still she did not speak, but turned again
Looking for answer, for anger, for command:
The eyes of Dis were shut upon their pain;
Calm as his marble brow, the marble hand
Slept on his knee. Insuperable disdain

Foreknowing all bounds of passion, of power, of art,
Mastered but could not mask his deep despair.
Even as she turned with Hermes to depart,
Looking her last on her grim ravisher
For the first time she loved him from her heart.

Leaving You With Wishes

Along the Grand Canal

Hoar frost has congealed
On the deck
Of my little boat.
The water
Is clear and still.
Cold stars beyond counting
Swim alongside.
Thick reeds hide the shore.
You'd think you'd left the earth.
Suddenly there breaks in
Laughter and song.

That, written by Ch'in Kuan (1849 - 1101), was translated from the Chinese by the prolific Kenneth Rexroth.

Today, I have not a little boat but one large airplane. I leave you with wishes for laughter and song.

Finding

Night Music

She sits on the mountain that is her home
and the landscapes slide away. One goes down
and then up to the monastery. One drops away
to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl
and her mother are hanging the laundry.
There's a tiny port in the distance where
the shore marries the water. She is numb
and clear and sodden with grieving.
She thinks of the bandits and soldiers who
return to the worlds they have destroyed.
Who plant trees and build walls and play music
in the village square evening after evening,
believing the mothers of the boys they killed
and the women they raped will eventually come
out of the white houses in their black dresses
to sit with their children and the old.
Will listen to the music with unreadable eyes.

It would be nice to live in a time when Linda Gregg paean had no pertinence. According to Gregg, 'poetry at its best is found rather than written.' Acknowledging that, I'm going to leave -- but not abandon -- you to find some.

Word Bolts

A Girl in a Library

An object among dreams, you sit here with your shoes off
And curl your legs up under you; your eyes
Close for a moment, your face moves toward sleep . . .
You are very human.
But my mind, gone out in tenderness,
Shrinks from its object with a thoughtful sigh.
This is a waist the spirit breaks its arm on.
The gods themselves, against you, struggle in vain.
This broad low strong-boned brow; these heavy eyes;
These calves, grown muscular with certainties;
This nose, three medium-sized pink strawberries
---But I exaggerate. In a little you will leave:
I'll hear, half squeal, half shriek, your laugh of greeting---
Then, decrescendo, bars of that strange speech
In which each sound sets out to seek each other,
Murders its own father, marries its own mother,
And ends as one grand transcendental vowel.

(Yet for all I know, the Egyptian Helen spoke so.)
As I look, the world contracts around you:
I see Brünnhilde had brown braids and glasses
She used for studying; Salome straight brown bangs,
A calf's brown eyes, and sturdy light-brown limbs
Dusted with cinnamon, an apple-dumpling's . . .
Many a beast has gnawn a leg off and got free,
Many a dolphin curved up from Necessity---
The trap has closed about you, and you sleep.
If someone questioned you, What doest thou here?
You'd knit your brows like an orangoutang
(But not so sadly; not so thoughtfully)
And answer with a pure heart, guilelessly:
I'm studying. . . .
If only you were not!
Assignments,
recipes,
the Official Rulebook
Of Basketball -- ah, let them go; you needn't mind.
The soul has no assignments, neither cooks
Nor referees: it wastes its time.
It wastes its time.
Here in this enclave there are centuries
For you to waste: the short and narrow stream
Of life meanders into a thousand valleys
Of all that was, or might have been, or is to be.
The books, just leafed through, whisper endlessly . . .
Yet it is hard. One sees in your blurred eyes
The "uneasy half-soul" Kipling saw in dogs'.
One sees it, in the glass, in one's own eyes.
In rooms alone, in galleries, in libraries,
In tears, in searchings of the heart, in staggering joys
We memorize once more our old creation,
Humanity: with what yawns the unwilling
Flesh puts on its spirit, O my sister!

So many dreams! And not one troubles
Your sleep of life? no self stares shadowily
From these worn hexahedrons, beckoning
With false smiles, tears? . . .
Meanwhile Tatyana
Larina (gray eyes nickel with the moonlight
That falls through the willows onto Lensky's tomb;
Now young and shy, now old and cold and sure)
Asks, smiling: "But what is she dreaming of, fat thing?"
I answer: She's not fat. She isn't dreaming.
Believe, awake, that she is beautiful;
She never dreams.
Those sunrise-colored clouds
Around man's head -- that inconceivable enchantment
From which, at sunset, we come back to life
To find our graves dug, families dead, selves dying:
Of all this, Tanya, she is innocent.
For nineteen years she's faced reality:
They look alike already.
They say, man wouldn't be
The best thing in this world---and isn't he?---
If he were not too good for it. But she
---She's good enough for it.
And yet sometimes
Her sturdy form, in its pink strapless formal,
Is as if bathed in moonlight---modulated
Into a form of joy, a Lydian mode;
This Wooden Mean's a kind, furred animal
That speaks, in the Wild of things, delighting riddles
To the soul that listens, trusting . . .
Poor senseless Life:
When, in the last light sleep of dawn, the messenger
Comes with his message, you will not awake.
He'll give his feathery whistle, shake you hard,
You'll look with wide eyes at the dewy yard
And dream, with calm slow factuality:
"Today's Commencement. My bachelor's degree
In Home Ec., my doctorate of philosophy
In Phys. Ed.
[Tanya, they won't even scan]
Are waiting for me. . . ."
Oh, Tatyana,
The Angel comes: better to squawk like a chicken
Than to say with truth, "But I'm a good girl,"
And Meet his Challenge with a last firm strange
Uncomprehending smile; and---then, then!---see
The blind date that has stood you up: your life.
(For all this, if it isn't, perhaps, life,
Has yet, at least, a language of its own
Different from the books'; worse than the books'.)
And yet, the ways we miss our lives are life.
Yet . . . yet . . .
to have one's life add up to yet!

You sigh a shuddering sigh. Tatyana murmurs,
"Don't cry, little peasant"; leaves us with a swift
"Good-bye, good-bye . . . Ah, don't think ill of me . . ."
Your eyes open: you sit here thoughtlessly.

I love you---and yet---and yet---I love you.

Don't cry, little peasant. Sit and dream.
One comes, a finger's width beneath your skin,
To the braided maidens singing as they spin;
There sound the shepherd's pipe, the watchman's rattle
Across the short dark distance of the years.
I am a thought of yours: and yet, you do not think . . .
The firelight of a long, blind, dreaming story
Lingers upon your lips; and I have seen
Firm, fixed forever in your closing eyes,
The Corn King beckoning to his Spring Queen.

Randall Jarrell's poem, "A Girl in the Library", is thick with references to mythology, Wordsworth, Kipling, Schiller -- It's thick. This one's leaner:

Next Day

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I've become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish;
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
The eyes of stranger!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water---
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work---I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.


Sometimes, here, I let poems speak for poets. Sometimes, I go on and on about the poets. This time, I'd like (and who's to stop me?) to end with a few quotations from Jarrell:

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is to be a child.

But be, as you have been, my happiness . . .

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

It is better to entertain an idea than to take it home to live with you for the rest of your life.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

§

May we all know the kiss of inspirational lightning -- having had the wisdom to stand in a creative storm.

Bridges, Voyages and Forgetting

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

This, by the autodidactic Hart Crane, I unabashedly chose in celebration of a friend's new love affair with New York City. Judging by events and appearances, the passion is requited.

Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, Crane moved to New York City, and so I believe he might understand my friend's attachment. Crane was unstable and a drinker; whilst he met many literary figureheads, he was unable to form long-term friendships with them. Hart Crane committed suicide, jumping from a steamship (travelling from Mexico to New York) at the age of thirty-three. (I wish all and each of you lives of greater joy, health and duration.) He was unwell before coming to New York, so please resist all urges to set the city's table with the blame for Crane's ill health.

As I am being bashless (as against bashful which, in this instance, I am not), I plan to openly spend many nonconsecutive days plucking poets from John Lithgow's book, Poet's Corner: The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family. Whilst I might argue with the 'The One-and-Only' portion of the claim, there being worthy contenders for that claim, this book and its editor captivate my attention -- and so, arguably, I have no choice but to purloin pages from the book, a copy of which I (oddly) co-own. (Granted, Mr Lithgow's interest in storytelling is of particular interest to me, but that's only an aside.)

I am sitting beside a window in the winter in an unheated New York City apartment and so am going to abandon you for hot tea (sorry, lovelies), but shall leave you with a few more Cranes. I recommend you try reading them aloud. Like (and unlike) those of Cummings, these poems lend themselves to oral pleasures . . . before retreating to the printed page.

Voyages II

--And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,--
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,--
Hasten, while they are true,--sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal's wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.


Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.


Interior

It sheds a shy solemnity,
This lamp in our poor room.
O grey and gold amenity, --
Silence and gentle gloom!

Wide from the world, a stolen hour
We claim, and none may know
How love blooms like a tardy flower
Here in the day's after-glow.

And even should the world break in
With jealous threat and guile,
The world, at last, must bow and win
Our pity and a smile.


The Great Western Plains

The little voices of the prairie dogs
Are tireless . . .
They will give three hurrahs
Alike to stage, equestrian, and pullman,
And all unstingingly as to the moon.

And Fifi's bows and poodle ease
Whirl by them centred on the lap
Of Lottie Honeydew, movie queen,
Toward lawyers and Nevada.

And how much more they cannot see!
Alas, there is so little time,
The world moves by so fast these days!
Burrowing in silk is not their way --
And yet they know the tomahawk.

Indeed, old memories come back to life;
Pathetic yelps have sometimes greeted
Noses pressed against the glass.


Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

Thrice Thoreau

Men say they know many things

Men say they know many things;
But lo! they have taken wings --
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances;
The wind that blows
Is all that anybody knows.

Things, as you may come to know, happen to me in threes. In recognition, celebration and acknowledgment of that fact, here are three poems by Henry David Thoreau -- one down and two to go.

Love

Let such pure hate still underprop
Our love, that we may be
Each other’s conscience,
And have our sympathy
Mainly from thence.

We’ll one another treat like gods,
And all the faith we have
In virtue and in truth, bestow
On either, and suspicion leave
To gods below.

Two solitary stars_
Unmeasured systems far
Between us roll,
But by our conscious light we are
Determined to one pole.

What need confound the sphere_
Love can afford to wait,
For it no hour’s too late
That witnesseth one duty’s end,
Or to another doth beginning lend.


The Moon
(First appeared in The Dial III, Oct. 1842)

Time wears her not; she doth his chariot guide;
Mortality below her orb is placed.
—Raleigh

The full-orbed moon with unchanged ray
Mounts up the eastern sky,
Not doomed to these short nights for aye,
But shining steadily.

She does not wane, but my fortune,
Which her rays do not bless,
My wayward path declineth soon,
But she shines not the less.

And if she faintly glimmers here,
And paled is her light,
Yet alway in her proper sphere
She's mistress of the night.

Be Sure to Remember

Manners

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
"Be sure to remember to always
speak to everyone you meet."

We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather's whip tapped his hat.
"Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day."
And I said it and bowed where I sat.

Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
"Always offer everyone a ride;
don't forget that when you get older,"

my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a "Caw!" and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go?

But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled he answered.
"A fine bird," my grandfather said,

"and he's well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he's spoken to.
Man or beast, that's good manners.
Be sure that you both always do."

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people's faces,
but we shouted, "Good day! Good day!
Fine day!" at the top of our voices.

When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.

I have been wandering, in a worldly sense, with somebody who remarks with surprise that people in New York City say, 'Hello,' to one another. Given this framework, it is anything but surprising that this poem by Elizabeth Bishop caught my mind. I post it tonight thinking of him and of all people who, in our small and boundless world, greet each other as equals and as possible, if passing, friends.

Singing the City Electric

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry


1

FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
2

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day;
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme:
The similitudes of the past, and those of the future;
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;
The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.

I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head in the sun-lit water,
Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,
Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,
Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships,
Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses,
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set,
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and glistening,
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks,
On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter,
On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,
Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.

4

These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you;
I project myself a moment to tell you—also I return.

I loved well those cities;
I loved well the stately and rapid river;
The men and women I saw were all near to me;
Others the same—others who look back on me, because I look’d forward to them;
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

5

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

6

I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution;
I too had receiv’d identity by my Body;
That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.

7

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?

It is not you alone who know what it is to be evil;
I am he who knew what it was to be evil;
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant;
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting.

8

But I was Manhattanese, friendly and proud!
I was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street, or ferry-boat, or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

9

Closer yet I approach you;
What thought you have of me, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance; 90
I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?
Who knows but I am enjoying this?
Who knows but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

It is not you alone, nor I alone;
Not a few races, nor a few generations, nor a few centuries;
It is that each came, or comes, or shall come, from its due emission,
From the general centre of all, and forming a part of all:
Everything indicates—the smallest does, and the largest does;
A necessary film envelopes all, and envelopes the Soul for a proper time.

10

Now I am curious what sight can ever be more stately and admirable to me than my mast-hemm’d Manhattan,
My river and sun-set, and my scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide,
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter;
Curious what Gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach;
Curious what is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face, 105
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you.

We understand, then, do we not?
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish, is accomplish’d, is it not?
What the push of reading could not start, is started by me personally, is it not?

11

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta!—stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house, or street, or public assembly!
Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!
Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress! 120
Play the old role, the role that is great or small, according as one makes it!

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;
Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;
Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;
Receive the summer sky, you water! and faithfully hold it, till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you;
Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sun-lit water;
Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!
Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset;
Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses;
Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are;
You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul;
About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas;
Thrive, cities! bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers;
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual;
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

12

We descend upon you and all things—we arrest you all;
We realize the soul only by you, you faithful solids and fluids;
Through you color, form, location, sublimity, ideality;
Through you every proof, comparison, and all the suggestions and determinations of ourselves.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers! you novices!
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward;
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us;
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us;
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also;
You furnish your parts toward eternity;
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

A sixth-generation -- maybe a seventh -- New Yorker, I have spent the past few days watching one of my close circle fall in love with my city. If I'm to dedicate any verse to his new affection, then it must be one of Walt Whitman's. Whitman in his day, like my friend on this exceptionally warm November evening, knew how to sing this city, and how to sing it well enough that the city, almost surely, deep in her dark bowels, must stir and hear the song.