Poem of the Day

I remember this one being read aloud at the last two Thanksgivings. It’s wonderful!

The Waking
By Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Here’s another one I snaked from American Life in Poetry.

My Son the Man
By Sharon Olds

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

Thanks to Katie for introducing me to Federico García Lorca, with whom I was previously unfamiliar. I’m posting an English translation of this poem, but you may read the original Spanish if you’d prefer.

Ode to Salvador Dali
By Federico García Lorca

A rose in the high garden you desire.
A wheel in the pure syntax of steel.
The mountain stripped bare of Impressionist fog,
The grays watching over the last balustrades.

The modern painters in their white ateliers
clip the square root’s sterilized flower.
In the waters of the Seine a marble iceberg
chills the windows and scatters the ivy.

Man treads firmly on the cobbled streets.
Crystals hide from the magic of reflections.
The Government has closed the perfume stores.
The machine perpetuates its binary beat.

An absence of forests and screens and brows
roams across the roofs of the old houses.
The air polishes its prism on the sea
and the horizon rises like a great aqueduct.

Soldiers who know no wine and no penumbra
behead the sirens on the seas of lead.
Night, black statue of prudence, holds
the moon’s round mirror in her hand.

A desire for forms and limits overwhelms us.
Here comes the man who sees with a yellow ruler.
Venus is a white still life
and the butterfly collectors run away.

*

Cadaqués, at the fulcrum of water and hill,
lifts flights of stairs and hides seashells.
Wooden flutes pacify the air.
An ancient woodland god gives the children fruit.

Her fishermen sleep dreamless on the sand.
On the high sea a rose is their compass.
The horizon, virgin of wounded handkerchiefs,
links the great crystals of fish and moon.

A hard diadem of white brigantines
encircles bitter foreheads and hair of sand.
The sirens convince, but they don’t beguile,
and they come if we show a glass of fresh water.

*

Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-colored voice!
I do not praise your halting adolescent brush
or your pigments that flirt with the pigment of your times,
but I laud your longing for eternity with limits.

Sanitary soul, you live upon new marble.
You run from the dark jungle of improbable forms.
Your fancy reaches only as far as your hands,
and you enjoy the sonnet of the sea in your window.

The world is dull penumbra and disorder
in the foreground where man is found.
But now the stars, concealing landscapes,
reveal the perfect schema of their courses.

The current of time pools and gains order
in the numbered forms of century after century.
And conquered Death takes refuge trembling
in the tight circle of the present instant.

When you take up your palette, a bullet hole in its wing,
you call on the light that brings the olive tree to life.
The broad light of Minerva, builder of scaffolds,
where there is no room for dream or its hazy flower.

You call on the old light that stays on the brow,
not descending to the mouth or the heart of man.
A light feared by the loving vines of Bacchus
and the chaotic force of curving water.

You do well when you post warning flags
along the dark limit that shines in the night.
As a painter, you refuse to have your forms softened
by the shifting cotton of an unexpected cloud.

The fish in the fishbowl and the bird in the cage.
You refuse to invent them in the sea or the air.
You stylize or copy once you have seen
their small, agile bodies with your honest eyes.

You love a matter definite and exact,
where the toadstool cannot pitch its camp.
You love the architecture that builds on the absent
and admit the flag simply as a joke.

The steel compass tells its short, elastic verse.
Unknown clouds rise to deny the sphere exists.
The straight line tells of its upward struggle
and the learned crystals sing their geometries.

*

But also the rose of the garden where you live.
Always the rose, always, our north and south!
Calm and ingathered like an eyeless statue,
not knowing the buried struggle it provokes.

Pure rose, clean of artifice and rough sketches,
opening for us the slender wings of the smile.
(Pinned butterfly that ponders its flight.)
Rose of balance, with no self-inflicted pains.
Always the rose!

*

Oh Salvador Dali, of the olive-colored voice!
I speak of what your person and your paintings tell me.
I do not praise your halting adolescent brush,
but I sing the steady aim of your arrows.

I sing your fair struggle of Catalan lights,
your love of what might be made clear.
I sing your astronomical and tender heart,
a never-wounded deck of French cards.

I sing your restless longing for the statue,
your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.
I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,
riding her bicycle of corals and conches.

But above all I sing a common thought
that joins us in the dark and golden hours.
The light that blinds our eyes is not art.
Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.

Not the picture you patiently trace,
but the breast of Theresa, she of sleepless skin,
the tight-wound curls of Mathilde the ungrateful,
our friendship, painted bright as a game board.

May fingerprints of blood on gold
streak the heart of eternal Catalunya.
May stars like falconless fists shine on you,
while your painting and your life break into flower.

Don’t watch the water clock with its membraned wings
or the hard scythe of the allegory.
Always in the air, dress and undress your brush
before the sea peopled with sailors and ships.

We read this one over Thanksgiving. I think the lines And the golden bees / were making white combs / and sweet honey / from my old failures are absolutely lovely.

Last Night As I Was Sleeping
By Antonio Machado (translated by Robert Bly)

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

I’d never really delved into the world of prose poems. In fact, I wasn’t really clear on what a prose poem actually was. Over Thanksgiving, I was introduced to this book and this particular poem by Margaret Atwood was read aloud. I liked it so much that I got the book from the library when I got back to Austin. We shall see if any of the other prose poems appeal to me as this one did.

Women’s Novels
FOR LENORE
By Margaret Atwood

1. Men’s novels are about men. Women’s novels are about men too but from a different point of view. You can have a men’s novel with no women in it except possibly the landlady or the horse, but you can’t have a women’s novel with no men in it. Sometimes men put women in men’s novels but they leave out some of the parts: the heads, for instance, or the hands. Women’s novels leave out parts of the men as well. Sometimes it’s the stretch between the belly button and the knees, sometimes it’s the sense of humor. It’s hard to have a sense of humor in a cloak, in a high wind, on a moor.
      Women do not usually write novels of the type favored by men but men are known to write novels of the type favored by women. Some people find this odd.


2. I like to read novels in which the heroine has a costume rustling discreetly over her breasts, or discreet breasts rustling under her costume; in any case there must be a costume, some breasts, some rustling, and, over all, discretion. Discretion over all, like a fog, a miasma through which the outlines of things appear only vaguely. A glimpse of pink through the gloom, the sound of breathing, satin slithering to the floor, revealing what? Never mind, I say. Never never mind.


3. Men favor heroes who are tough and hard: tough with men, hard with women. Sometimes the hero goes soft on a woman but this is always a mistake. Women do not favor heroines who are tough and hard. Instead they have to be tough and soft. This leads to linguistic difficulties. Last time we looked, monosyllables were male, still dominant but sinking fast, wrapped in the octopoid arms of labial polysyllables, whispering to them with arachnoid grace: darling, darling.


4. Men’s novels are about how to get power. Killing and so on, or winning and so on. So are women’s novels, though the method is different. In men’s novels, getting the woman or women goes along with getting the power. It’s a perk, not a means. In women’s novels you get the power by getting the man. The man is the power. But sex won’t do, he has to love you. What do you think all that kneeling’s about, down among the crinolines, on the Persian carpet? Or at least say it. When all else is lacking, verbalization can be enough. Love. There, you can stand up now, it didn’t kill you. Did it?


5. I no longer want to read about anything sad. Anything violent, anything disturbing, anything like that. No funerals at the end, though there can be some in the middle. If there must be deaths, let there be resurrections, or at least a Heaven so we know where we are. Depression and squalor are for those under twenty-five, they can take it, they even like it, they still have enough time left. But real life is bad for you, hold it in your hand long enough and you’ll get pimples and become feeble-minded. You’ll go blind.
      I want happiness, guaranteed, joy all round, covers with nurses on them or brides, intelligent girls but not too intelligent, with regular teeth and pluck and both breasts the same size and no excess facial hair, someone you can depend on to know where the bandages are and to turn the hero, that potential rake and killer, into a well-groomed country gentleman with clean fingernails and the right vocabulary. Always, he has to say, Forever. I no longer want to read books that don’t end with the word forever. I want to be stroked between the eyes, one way only.


6. Some people think a woman’s novel is anything without politics in it. Some think it’s anything about relationships. Some think it’s anything with a lot of operations in it, medical ones I mean. Some think it’s anything that doesn’t give you a broad panoramic view of our exciting times. Me, well, I just want something you can leave on the coffee table and not be too worried if the kids get into it. You think that’s not a real consideration? You’re wrong.


7. She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. This is the kind of sentence I go mad for. I would like to be able to write such sentences, without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them without embarrassment. If I could only do these two simple things, I feel, I would be able to pass my allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet.
      She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a cuckoo? It does make a difference. We do not need more literalists of the imagination. They cannot read a body like a gazelle’s without thinking of intestinal parasites, zoos, and smells.
      She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal, I read. Reluctantly I put down the book, thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. He’s about to crush her in his arms, pressing his hot, devouring, hard, demanding mouth to hers as her breasts squish out the top of her dress, but I can’t concentrate. Metaphor leads me by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before me. Porcupines, weasels, warthogs, and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy and sly. Agony, to see the romantic frission quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck to an overripe peach, and not be able to swallow, or wallow. Which one? I murmur to the unresponding air. Which one?

I hope everyone (who celebrates it) had a nice Thanksgiving. I spent mine with several poetry enthusiasts and as a result have some goodies to share. This is probably my favorite of the ones we read over the holiday. It really makes me laugh!

Permanently
By Kenneth Koch

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing—for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when
   the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face
   until the day I perish from the green, effective earth.”
Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”
Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color
   recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

I’m headed to the wilds of West Texas today so the PotD will be on hiatus until after Thanksgiving. Have a lovely holiday!

Sunset
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Seriously, Adrienne Rich is amazing.

The Tree
By Adrienne Rich

Long ago I found a seed,
And kept it in a glass of water,
And half forgot my dim intent
Until I saw it start to reach
For life with one blind, fragile root.
And then I pressed it into earth
And saw its tendrils seek the air,
So slowly that I hardly knew
Of any change till it had grown
A stalk, a leaf; and seemed to be
No more a thing in need of me,
But living by some sapience
I had not given, could not withdraw.
So it grew on, and days went by,
And seasons with their common gifts,
Till at the leafage of the year
I felt the sun cut off from me
By something thick outside my room—
Not yet a tree grown to the full,
Yet so endowed with need and will
It took the warmth and left me cold.
And first I climbed with hook and shears
To prune the boughs that darkened me,
But the tree was stubborner than I,
And where I clipped it grew again,
Brutal in purpose as a weed.
Nor did it give of fruit or flower,
Though seasons brought their common gifts,
And years went by. It only grew
Darker and denser to my view,
Taking whatever I would yield—
The homage of a troubled mind—
Requiring nothing, yet accepting
My willingness to guard its life
By the endurance of my own.
It gives me nothing; yet I see
Sometimes in dreams my enemy
Hanged by the hair upon that tree.

I was reminiscing about O Cheese with my aunt yesterday so I thought I’d post another poem by Donald Hall.

Waters
By Donald Hall

A rock drops in a bucket;
quick fierce
waves exhaust themselves
against the tin circle.

A rock in a pool;
a fast
splash, and ripples move out
interrupted by weeds.

The lake enormous and calm;
a stone falls;
for an hour the surface
moves, holding to itself the frail

shudders of its skin. Stones
on the dark bottom
make the lake calm,
the life worth living.

This is from Sandburg’s Honey and Salt. I really like it, especially given how underused language is in everyday life. I often find myself having the same conversations with the same people. Perhaps I should post a “Word of the Day” instead of a PotD, but I think I’ll stick with the poems… P.S. If you haven’t read Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable by Mark Dunn, you should!

Is Wisdom a Lot of Language?
By Carl Sandburg

Apes, may I speak to you a moment?
Chimpanzees, come hither for words.
Orangoutangs, let’s get into a huddle.
Baboons, lemme whisper in your ears.
Gorillas, do yuh hear me hollerin’ to yuh?
And monkeys! monkeys! get this chatter—

   For a long time men have plucked letters
   Out of the air and shaped syllables.
   And out of the syllables came words
   And from the words came phrases, clauses.
   Sentences were born—and languages.
   (The Tower of Babel didn’t work out—
   it came down quicker than it went up.)
   Misunderstandings followed the languages,
   Arguments, epithets, maledictions, curses,
   Gossip, backbiting, the buzz of the bazoo,
   Chit chat, blah blah, talk just to be talking,
   Monologues or members telling other members
   How good they are now and were yesterday,
   Conversations missing the point,
   Dialogues seldom as beautiful as soliloquies,
   Seldom as fine as a man alone, a woman by herself
   Telling a clock, “I’m a plain damn fool.”

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today.
Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction.
See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

This is quite a depressing poem, but I do like my poetry dark.

Darkness
By George Gordon, Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twin’d themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer’d not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak’d up,
And shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

Here’s another one by Adrienne Jones, from Written in Stone.

Thanks to a reader for the suggestion.

A Style of Loving
By Vikram Seth

Light now restricts itself
To the top half of trees;
The angled sun
Slants honey-coloured rays
That lessen to the ground
As we bike through
The corridor of Palm Drive.
We two

Have reached a safety the years
Can claim to have created:
Unconsummated, therefore
Unjaded, unsated.
Picnic, movie, ice-cream;
Talk; to clear my head
Hot buttered rum—coffee for you;
And so not to bed.

And so we have set the question
Aside, gently.
Were we to become lovers
Where would our best friends be?
You do not wish, nor I
To risk again
This savoured light for noon’s
High joy or pain.

Since you can never have too much ESVM and since it’s my wonderful fellow ESVM-lover Jennifer’s birthday, here’s another sonnet from our favorite poet.

I pray you if you love me, bear my joy
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I pray you if you love me, bear my joy
A little while, or let me weep your tears;
I, too, have seen the quavering Fate destroy
Your destiny’s bright spinning—the dull shears
Meeting not neatly, chewing at the thread,—
Nor can you well be less aware how fine,
How staunch as wire, and how unwarrented
Endures the golden fortune that is mine.
I pray you for this day at least, my dear,
Fare by my side, that journey in the sun;
Else must I turn me from the blossoming year
And walk in grief the way that you have gone.
Let us go forth together to the spring:
Love must be this, if it be anything.

After the stress and triumph of the recent election, this poem jumped out at me from americanpoems.com.

Let America be America Again
By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?

Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

I found this at Poetry Daily and I think it’s a great glimpse of one person’s struggle with the “What do I want to be when I grow up?” question. The lines We like to think they’re up to us, our lives, but by the time we/Glimpse the possibility of changing it’s already happened especially jumped out at me. I don’t think I’ll ever have it all figured out, and I’m glad to see that not everyone else will either.

Hamlet
By John Koethe

…a divinity that shapes our ends.

It was math and physics all the way,
The subjects of the life that I’d designed
In high school, that carried me away,
A callow California youth with Eastern dreams,
From home. The thought of something abstract
And aloof, penetrating to the heart of the unknown
And consigning everything else to the realm of unreality—
I didn’t believe it then and don’t believe it now,
Yet something in the fantasy felt so complete,
So like the lyrics of a song that spoke to me alone,
I bought it. How quaint that vision seems now
And mundane the truth: instead of paradox and mystery
And heroic flights of speculation that came true,
You had to start with classical mechanics and a lab;
Instead of number theory and the satisfactions
Of the private proof, a class of prodigies manquéé
Made jokes in mathematics that I didn’t get.
And there were problems with the style,
The attitudes, the clothes, for this was 1963,
The future waiting in the wings and practically on stage—
The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Ali, né Cassius Clay,
Who from the distance of today look like clichés of history,
But at the time seemed more like strangers in the
Opening pages of a story I was learning how to write.
The new year brought Ed Sullivan and track,
But what with winter and the little indoor track
My times were never close to what I’d run in high school.
I started hanging out across the hall—they seemed, I guess,
More “Eastern” than my roommates, closer to the picture of myself
That called me in the first place: Norwich, Vermont,
The Main Line and St. George’s, and (I guess it figured)
A prospective civil engineer. And then there was New York:
I’d been in once or twice, though not for dinner,
So when James suggested Richard Burton’s Hamlet
At the Lunt-Fontanne I fell right in. We went to dinner
At a place on Forty-sixth Street called Del Pezzo,
Up some steps and with bay windows and a chandelier.
We ordered saltimbocca and drank Soave Bolla
As I listened, Ripley-like, to recollections of three-hour
Lunches at a restaurant on a beach somewhere near Rome.
And then the lights went down, and when at last
The ghost had vanished, Burton strode upon the stage.
It was, I think, the first “bare” Hamlet—Hamlet
In a turtleneck, the rest in street clothes, virtually no scenery—
Leaving nothing but the structure of the play, and voices,
Burton’s resonant and strong yet trembling on the brink of
Breaking, as for hours, from the first I know not seems until
The rest is silence, he compelled the stage. And then,
The bodies everywhere, the theater went black and we went
Somewhere for a drink and took the last bus home—

For by then I’d come to think of it as home.
By next fall everything had changed. My roommates
Were the former guys across the hall, sans engineer.
In San Diego Mr. Weisbrod from the science fair
Was appalled, as math and physics disappeared,
Supplanted by philosophy. A letter from the track coach
Lay unanswered by an ashtray, and I took a course
From Carlos Baker, Hemingway’s biographer, in which I
First read modern poetry—The Waste Land, Moore, The Cantos,
Frost and Yeats—and dreamed that I might do that too.
I wish I knew what happened. Was the change
The outward resolution of some inner struggle
Going on since childhood, or just a symptom of the times?
So much of what we’re pleased to call our lives
Is random, yet we take them at face value,
Linking up the dots. Feeling out of it one evening,
Staring at our Trenton junk store chandelier,
I started a pastiche of Frost (”In the mists of the fall…”)
And even tried to write a play about a deadly clock
Styled on Edward Albee’s now (alas) forgotten Tiny Alice,
The object of another Broadway interlude, this time a matinee.
Hamlet was forgotten. Pound and Eliot gave way
To Charles Olson and the dogmas of projective verse,
To Robert Duncan and the egotistical sublime,
And finally to “the Poets of the New York School,”
Whose easy freedom and deflationary seriousness combined
To generate what seemed to me a tangible and abstract beauty
As meanwhile, in parallel, my picture of myself evolved
From California science whiz into impeccable habitué
Of a Fitzgerald fantasy. It became a kind of hobby:
Self-invention, the attempt to realize some juvenile ideal
I cringe to think of now, playing back and forth
Between the guise of the artiste and of the silly little snob,
A pose I like to think of as redeemed (just barely) by a
Certain underlying earnestness. Perhaps I’m being too harsh—
I was serious about the path I’d chosen, one I’ve
Followed now for forty years. What life worth living
Isn’t shaky at the outset, given to exaggerations and false starts
Before it finds its way? Those ludicrous personae were
A passing phase, and by my senior year whatever they’d concealed
Had finally settled into second nature. I’d go on,
But let me leave it there for now. My life after college
(Cf. “16A:” and “Falling Water”) more or less continued on the
Course I’d set there, mixing poetry and philosophy
In roughly equal parts, vocation and career. My days
Are all about the same: some language, thought and feeling
And the boredom of the nearly empty day, calling on my
Memory and imagination to compel the hours, from morning
Through the doldrums of the afternoon and into early
Evening, sitting here alone and staring at a page.

You’re probably wondering what provoked all this.
For years I’d heard they’d filmed a performance of the play,
To be shown just once and then (supposedly) destroyed.
Browsing on the Web about a month ago I entered,
Out of curiosity, “Richard Burton’s Hamlet” into Google.
Up it came, available from Amazon on DVD (apparently
Two copies had survived). I ordered it immediately,
Went out and bought a player (plus a new TV) and watched it
Friday evening, calling up the ghosts of forty years ago.
I’d misremembered one or two details—it was a V-neck,
Not a turtleneck, at least that night—but Burton was
As I’d remembered him, incredible, his powers at their peak,
Just after Antony and Arthur and before the roles
Of Beckett, Reverend Shannon, Alec Lemas, George;
Before the dissolution and decline and early death.
Some nights I feel haunted by the ghost of mathematics,
Wondering what killed it off. I think my life began to change
Just after that performance in New York. Could that have been the
Catalyst—a life of words created by a play about a character
Whose whole reality is words? It’s nice to speculate,
And yet it’s just too facile, for the truth was much more
Gradual and difficult to see, if there to see at all.
We like to think they’re up to us, our lives, but by the time we
Glimpse the possibility of changing it’s already happened,
Governed by, in Larkin’s phrase, what something hidden from us chose
And which, for all we know, might just as well have been the stars.
That adolescent image of myself dissolved, to be replaced by—
By what? I doubt those pictures we create are ever true—
Isn’t that the moral to be drawn from this most human of the plays?
It isn’t merely the ability to choose, but agency itself—
The thought that we’re in charge, and that tomorrow mirrors our
Designs—that lies in ruins on the stage. It isn’t just the
Life of a particular young man, but something like the very
Image of the human that dissolves into a mindless anonymity,
Dick Diver disappearing at the end of Tender Is the Night
Into the little towns of upper New York State.
I know of course I’m overacting. Burton did it too,
Yet left a residue of truth, and watching him last Friday
I began to realize there’d been no real change,
But just a surface alteration. Sometimes I wonder if this
Isn’t just my high-school vision in disguise, a naive
Fantasy of knowledge that survived instead as art—
Aloof, couched in the language of abstraction, flirting
Now and then with the unknown, pushing everything else aside.
This place that I’ve created has the weight and feel of home,
And yet there’s nothing tangible to see. And so I
Bide my time, living in a poem whose backdrop
Is the wilderness of science, an impersonal universe
Where no one’s waiting and our aspirations end.
Take up the bodies, for the rest is silence.

One of my favorite poems is Friendship by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, so when I found some of her sonnets at Sonnet Central, I had to share one.

Sunday Morning Bells
By Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

From the near city comes the clang of bells:
Their hundred jarring diverse tones combine
In one faint misty harmony, as fine
As the soft note yon winter robin swells.—
What if to Thee in Thine Infinity
These multiform and many-colored creeds
Seem but the robe man wraps as masquers’ weeds
Round the one living truth Thou givest him—Thee?
What if these varied forms that worship prove,
Being heart-worship, reach Thy perfect ear
But as a monotone, complete and clear,
Of which the music is, through Christ’s name, Love?
Forever rising in sublime increase
To “Glory in the Highest,—on earth peace?”

My dear sister and brother-in-law are visiting (hence my failure to post yesterday).

The Days When We Were Young
By Henry Clay Work

Sister! Sister! don’t you remember
The days when we were young?
The long, long days, with a light and a shade
Like the pearls of a necklace strung,
Like the pearls of a necklace strung?
They are gone, with all our yesterdays—
We seek their like in vain;
But we will shed no tears for them
While the bright todays remain,
While the bright todays remain.

Sister! Sister! don’t you remember
The days when we were young?
The homely house in the far, far away,
Where the love of our childhood clung,
Where the love of our childhood clung?
There is naught to mark that sacred spot,
Save now the beaten loam;
Yet distant altars have we rear’d
In the bless-ed name of home,
In the bless-ed name of home.

Sister! Sister! don’t you remember
The days when we were young?
The mates of childhood—the friend of our youth—
We companion’d and lov’d among,
We companion’d and lov’d among?
Some are wand’ring far, and some in death
Have closed their weary eyes;
But we rejoice in new found friends,
While we weep for broken ties,
While we weep for broken ties.

Keats has been mentioned a couple times in Main Street so here’s a selection by him.

Fancy
By John Keats

   Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home:
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;
Then let winged Fancy wander
Through the thought still spread beyond her:
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
O sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Summer’s joys are spoilt by use,
And the enjoying of the Spring
Fades as does its blossoming;
Autumn’s red-lipp’d fruitage too,
Blushing through the mist and dew,
Cloys with tasting: What do then?
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter’s night;
When the soundless earth is muffled,
And the caked snow is shuffled
From the ploughboy’s heavy shoon;
When the Night doth meet the Noon
In a dark conspiracy
To banish Even from her sky.
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw’d,
Fancy, high-commission’d:—send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn’s wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it:—thou shalt hear
Distant harvest-carols clear;
Rustle of the reaped corn;
Sweet birds antheming the morn:
And, in the same moment, hark!
‘Tis the early April lark,
Or the rooks, with busy caw,
Foraging for sticks and straw.
Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plum’d lillies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst;
Shaded hyacinth, alway
Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
And every leaf, and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its celled sleep;
And the snake all winter-thin
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
   Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,
When the hen-bird’s wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry and alarm
When the bee-hive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering,
While the autumn breezes sing.

   Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Every thing is spoilt by use:
Where’s the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gaz’d at? Where’s the maid
Whose lip mature is ever new?
Where’s the eye, however blue,
Doth not weary? Where’s the face
One would meet in every place?
Where’s the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?
At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth
Like to bubbles when rain pelteth.
Let, then, winged Fancy find
Thee a mistress to thy mind:
Dulcet-ey’d as Ceres’ daughter,
Ere the God of Torment taught her
How to frown and how to chide;
With a waist and with a side
White as Hebe’s, when her zone
Slipt its golden clasp, and down
Fell her kirtle to her feet,
While she held the goblet sweet
And Jove grew languid.—Break the mesh
Of the Fancy’s silken leash;
Quickly break her prison-string
And such joys as these she’ll bring.—
Let the winged Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.

How about another from Langston Hughes?

As Befits a Man
By Langston Hughes

I don’t mind dying—
But I’d hate to die all alone!
I want a dozen pretty women
To holler, cry, and moan.

I don’t mind dying
But I want my funeral to be fine:
A row of long tall mamas
Fainting, Fanning, and crying.

I want a fish-tail hearse
And sixteen fish-tail cars,
A big brass band
And a whole truck load of flowers.

When they let me down,
Down into the clay,
I want the women to holler:
Please don’t take him away!
Ow-ooo-oo-o!
Please don’t take daddy away!

I’m reading Main Street by Sinclair Lewis and there are many mentions of poets, though apparently the only important facts about them are birth and death dates, as well as how immoral they were. (ha ha ha)

Tears, Idle Tears
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

   Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

   Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

   Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

   Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Thanks to a reader for recommending Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

The Companion
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko

She was sitting on the rough embankment,
her cape too big for her tied on slapdash
over an odd little hat with a bobble on it,
her eyes brimming with tears of hopelessness.
An occasional butterfly floated down
fluttering warm wings onto the rails.
The clinkers underfoot were deep lilac.
We got cut off from our grandmothers
while the Germans were dive-bombing the train.
Katya was her name. She was nine.
I’d no idea what I could do about her,
but doubt quickly dissolved to certainty:
I’d have to take this thing under my wing;
—girls were in some sense of the word human,
a human being couldn’t just be left.
The droning in the air and the explosions
receded farther into the distance,
I touched the little girl on her elbow.
‘Come on. Do you hear? What are you waiting for?’
The world was big and we were not big,
and it was tough for us to walk across it.
She had galoshes on and felt boots,
I had a pair of second-hand boots.
We forded streams and tramped across the forest;
each of my feet at every step it took
taking a smaller step inside the boot.
The child was feeble, I was certain of it.
‘Boo-hoo,’ she’d say. ‘I’m tired,’ she’d say.
She’d tire in no time I was certain of it,
but as things turned out it was me who tired.
I growled I wasn’t going any further
and sat down suddenly beside the fence.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said.
‘Don’t be so stupid! Put grass in your boots.
Do you want to eat something? Why won’t you talk?
Hold this tin, this is crab.
We’ll have refreshments. You small boys,
you’re always pretending to be brave.’
Then out I went across the prickly stubble
marching beside her in a few minutes.
Masculine pride was muttering in my mind:
I scraped together strength and I held out
for fear of what she’d say. I even whistled.
Grass was sticking out from my tattered boots.
So on and on
we walked without thinking of rest
passing craters, passing fire,
under the rocking sky of ‘41
tottering crazy on its smoking columns.

I think it’s high time for another one from Mary Oliver.

Luna
By Mary Oliver

In the early curtains
   of the dusk
      it flew,
         a slow galloping

this way and that way
   through the trees
      and under the trees.
         I live

in the open mindedness
   of not knowing enough
      about anything.
         It was beautiful.

It was silent.
   It didn’t even have a mouth.
      But it wanted something,
         it had a purpose

and a few precious hours
   to find it,
      and I suppose it did.
         The next evening

it lay on the ground
   like a broken leaf
      and didn’t move,
         which hurt my heart

which is another small thing
   that doesn’t know much.
      When this happened it was about
         the middle of summer,

which also has its purposes
   and only so many precious hours.
      How quietly,
         and not with any assignment from us,

or even a small hint
   of understanding,
      everything that needs to be done
         is done.

You may have heard that a previously unpublished poem by Sylvia Plath has been discovered. Today it was published in VCU’s Blackbird. You can find the text, images of the original drafts, and commentary here.

Ennui
By Sylvia Plath

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.