Arcana of Grief

After last week, I was ready to plunge into that period of my life from 1977 to 1980 that represented my interest in politics and religion.  My desire at the time was to understand and articulate a Christian Socialism that would be radical and yet still steeped in the mythic and mystical traditions of my faith. I dug out my political books and began to review a few poems, but paused. I need to think about this before I go further.  Writing poems about nature or my feelings as a writer or about my lover is one thing - politics? something else. First, I am just not sure how good these poems are.  They were written with specific events in the forefront of my mind at the time.  And unlike most of the other items I have put in this blog so far, they weren't organized to be published.  So in the meantime, I am going to work backwards chronologically and hopefully be able to discern the line between good work and juvenalia.

Today's poem was written for my sister, Kate, on June 24, 1989 on the death of a beloved cat of hers.  Since we are going to be celebrating Christmas at Kate's lake house and she is cooking, I have also included a short poem quoted in Observations on Popular Antiquities by John Brand, London 1913, from the section Yule Doughs, Mince Pies, etc. (Oddly, I just noticed it mentions rosemary as well. hmmm.)


ARCANA OF GRIEF


This is for Hank.


Pillowcase,  rosemary for remembrance.
Put this into the earth
Cold fur    dry eyes    stiff limbs
Decompose into Earth, Water
Fire and Air.


Say the words of ritual.


Already your thoughts are cleansed
In the pool of memory and 
You seek about for a new
Repository of care;


The delicacy of drink and 
Sleep curled bed,
The face at the window and
Voice of insistence.
You seek a living companion.


His loss twist and changes everything
In the retort of death.


"Even in the mostcoming wind, we breathe parting."


Say the word


                       Say it.


And the ritual will be complete.

 

They are likewise indicated in King's Art of Cookery - 


"At Christmas time --
Then if you wou'd send up the Brawner's Head,
Sweet Rosemary and Bays around it spread;
His foaming tusks let some large Pippin grace,
Or 'midst these thundring spears an Orange place;
Sauce, like himself, offensive to its foes,
The roguish Mustard, dang'rous to the nose,
Sack, and well spic'd Hippocras the wine
Wassail the bowl with antient ribbands fine,
Porridge with Plumbs and Turkeys with the chine.

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Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin

To my knowledge, no picture exists of me during my last years of college.  Therefore, you must imagine me and my friend, Gary Borders, trudging through the snow in Orono in our long black wool coats.  Gary's hat was classic proletarian, mine was a black Greek fisherman's cap;  our beards the pure righteous darkness of youth.  In our bags were Gramsci and Lenin and Mao; and articles for the Maine Peace Action Committee newsletter. We saw ourselves (sometimes, anyway) as the rearguard of a revolutionary vanguard.  After Vietnam . . . before anti-nukes . . .Nicaragua was a chance be on the right side for a change . .  lost Lefties, really. Who knew what lay before us in the coming decades?  Certainly we didn't.  We imagined a revolution of some kind . . . listened to our Holly Near and looked back on the pure politics of the 60's.  We knew that it was up to us, up to the 'New Intellectuals' to define the cause, to understand and articulate what was the motor force of History.  Who knew?

Reading Trotsky and Listening to Borodin


We sit huddled in our dingy kitchen
over a pot of chicken soup.
Bleary-eyed and tired,
I think of
Russian peasant suppers,
of heavy boots on earthen floors
thick-bearded men and broad shouldered
women in scarves.
I think of
kulaks, purges, police;
of knocks on doors,
laughing apparatchiks,           of Stalin.
Of huddled men in the arctic night.
I think 
and am reminded that 
the struggle goes on
                               and on
                                           and on.




February, 1980

Ouroboros, For Breanne

 A short poem for Breanne on her birthday. Written December 13, 1988.

                                                                  OURBOROS
You gather her into your arms
And instantly she drops away into the deep.  
Tiny body, warm
 Against your hips: conforms
As one flesh, again complete.
The mind falls like a stone into sleep.

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The Full Moon

I woke up this morning thinking about the first lines of an old poem, one of my favorites.  The Harvest Moon shines tonight.  I wonder what we shall each reap?




The Full Moon
                           for BB


Bright white china face
Hanging over every tree
Crystalline and full of grace . . .


No wait.


So, I have a question.           Full stop.


Why does this stillborn corpse
Of unspeakable violence past,
This lost and ungrown twin,
Still circle us night after night?
Why does he try to steal the oceans
With every revolution?
Even in the daytime, he won't go away,
Skulks on the horizon, barely visible.

Pockmarked by insult and asteroid's crash,
The worst hidden from view, but still.
A dusty rock  . . . .a chunk of us, broken
Away but remaining in our path
Threatening to trip us in our grander
Flights around the Sun.


Purposeless and yet,
We would not be the same without him.







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My Affair with Ayn Rand

I know some of my friends will be shocked, but I have been flirting with Ayn Rand lately.  It started with a training I attended in which the presenter expressed his admiration for Objectivist economics and, of course, Adam Curry has been raving about Rand for years on No Agenda. . While I was in Texas, I picked up Atlas Shrugged and read about a hundred pages.  I stopped to listen to an unabridged reading of Ayn Rand and the World She Created and this weekend, I watched the movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand with Helen Mirren in the title role.  So now I am poised to listen to the unabridged reading of Atlas Shrugged which looks like it will take me months of commutes to work, based on the number of hours.

I am sure that I had heard of Ayn Rand when I was in school, but naturally I was travelling in other circles at the time.  I have friends (and relatives, I learned last weekend) who felt moved by her books and philosophy, as many do now, I think.  With the resurgence of Right-wing, Nativist, Free Market Capitalists in the form of the Tea Party, the notion of going to the roots is intriguing.  I wonder, however, if her philosophy will have the same effect on me now as it might have had when I was twenty?  O how the notion of the misunderstood genius, persecuted for his virtues, rings so true when you are young!  Whether on the left or the right, being misunderstood seems to be the norm for young people.  What about a person in middle age, jaded by a lifetime of real world experiences? Will I be moved in the same way?   I'll let you know.

Part of John Galt's speech, from Atlas Shrugged

In the name of the best within you.
do not sacrifice this world
                                            to those who are its worst.

In the name of values
                                           that keep you alive,
do not let your vision of man
be distorted by the ugly,
                                         the cowardly,
                                                     the mindless
in those who have never achieved
his title.

Do not lose your knowledge
that man's proper estate
                                          is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind and
                                                        a step that travels
unlimited roads.

Do not let your fire go out,
                                                           spark by irreplacable spark,
in hopeless swamps of the approximate,
  the not-quite,
                            the not-yet,
                                                  the not-at all.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish,
in lonely frustration for the life you
deserved,
but have never been able to reach.

Check your road
                and the nature
of your battle.

The world you desired can be won,
it exists,
it is real,
it is possible,

it's yours.

The Poet is a Seashore Dweller

Tidal Pool, Innishmore

Rachel Carson once wrote: "To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of year, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be."
Today's poem was the last one in the Charles Street Manuscript and was meant to express all I felt about what it meant to write and be a writer.  It owed a dept to Rich, of course and perhaps a bit to Eliot, but mostly I wanted to take something I knew well - the experience of ocean's edge - and imbue it with what I thought was a deeper, more symbolic meaning.  Every image here is symbolic, and the experience of the poet as standing on the edge was meant to be as well.  To write poetry is to stand on the shore between the symbolic, the magical, the sacred on the one hand and the mundane, the earthly , the profane on the other.  It is the poet's job to point out that sacred quality in everything they observe.  In that way, poetry differs from prose.  Good prose makes us think " Yes, I know that.  I understand that, I have experienced that."  Good poetry makes us feel " I have felt that way, I remember that experience, I have lived that."  I submitted this poem to the only writing course I have ever taken, an introduction to poetry with Constance Hunting.  Her comment was "Big stuff indeed".  Well, a good effort, I guess. My apprentice work, if not my masterpiece.

Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells.
To one side rolls and swells the grey
green back of the ocean depths, of icy murk.
Hidden there beneath the waves
the predatory sharks of guilt,
the sounding whales of wisdom deep,
the moving schools of caprice and quirk.
Mysteries glowing far below -
glowing, even deeper places showing;
lost to all but the the strongest swimmer
who dares to dive below, desires
to plumb the depths of his soul.


The other side is light and land
of reason and of everyday demands.
The beaches, in their season, filled
with youngsters, dogs and radios.  Tanning
faces turned to the sun; coconut and sand.
Young men run to fetch light cans
from their treasure chests of ice.
Yet even here the sea intrudes,
not obvious, the waves allude
to deeper places further off.
But the sea remains confined
in basins, algae lined, rocky places
where sun-warmed water small life breeds,
snails, crabs, bright glinting seaweeds.


Neither sea nor solid land,
the place wherein the poet dwells,
Neither the ocean of Being, holy space
and time; deepest feelings from whence
all living symbols come;
Nor beaches, dunes and land
of everyday and ordinary.  Not the 
sun-warmed rocks and sand, the solid 
experience of living here.


The poet is a seashore dweller
between the ocean and the land
seeking the experience
of the fuller life between;
so that both worlds 
he may command.

Voices

Well, time to take a breather after all the content last week.  This week I am returning to the Charles Street manuscript.  This poem is about writing, and the content and context of writing.  I think what I was getting at was the content of my writing is my own experiences and thoughts and those closest to me.  There is / was an element of voyeurism being a writer, you listen in and steal the thoughts and feelings of others to make your own work.
The only major edit I have done is to leave off the last four lines of the original poem because, frankly, I can't puzzle out what they had to do with the rest of the poem. They were:

It is the constant
oscillation
between hope and dis-
couragement.

Words, rhythm, triggering phrases
 voices in the wilderness
make straight the path of God   or
voices in the bed at night
   whispering.
Thoughts punishable if spoken
  or read
  or felt
said here in secret language.
The replies not made   the pleas
made in silence
  or not made at all.
The strengthened voices
coming out of despair
  or sorrow
    or ecstatic joy.
Such is what we do at night
at our clacking typewriters
  or at lunch on napkins   or envelopes.
Hurried scribbles while we listen,
souls vivisected.

October - The Great Hunger

What is October if not the turning of the seasons to sleep? Trees shed their leaves; the harvest is in; the days grow suddenly shorter and colder.  You realize that all the promise of Spring and the lazy horizon of Summer have compressed into the darkening days and the cold sea of Autumn. Donald Hall starts his poem "New Hampshire" with the line "A bear sleeps in a cellarhole . . ." and I am put to mind of the sow finding her nesting place in the abandon farm foundations I used to visit with my grandfather in South Oakfield. Forgotten farms and villages in Aroostook abandoned to the bear, the deer and the woodchuck.  We would go and watch the bears at the dump in the dusk, fattening on human leftovers, pushing their snouts into mayonnaise jars and eating butter wrappers in an embarrassing search for fat to sustain them and their cubs through the long winter to come. Using their great claws to grope through dirty diapers and empty beer bottles; seeking a cast off peel or a smudge of jelly.

So there are lots of poems about Fall.  One of my own I posted in in 2008, "Ice Storm and Getting in Wood" having to do with the closing in of the season after the last of the Summer fairs.  But as I went searching for poems that take place in October, I decided to quote the first part of Patrick Kavanaugh's poem, The Great Hunger.  As I mentioned in a post last year, I first read Patrick Kavanaugh in a collection, Irish Poetry After Yeats edited by Maurice Harmon.  Seamus Heaney says of The Great Hunger in his essay "From Monighan to the Grand Canal" collected in Preoccupations Selected Prose 1968-1978:

"The Great Hunger, first published in 1942 and collected in A Soul for Sale, is Kavanaugh's rage against the dying of the light, a kind of elegy in a country farmyard, informed not by heraldic notions of seasonal decline and mortal dust but by an intimacy with actual clay and a desperate sense that life in the secluded spot is no book of pastoral hours but an enervating round of labor and lethargy . . . . It is not about growing up and away but about growing down and in.  Its symbol is the potato rather than the potato blossom, its elements are water and earth rather than fire and air, its theme is consciousness moulded in and to the dark rather than opening to the light."

To me, the poem evokes rural Maine and the people who live there.  Not in the way that so often Maine is portrayed as some utopia for those seeking a simpler life ("The Way Life Should Be."), but a little like Ireland, a post-colonial land where poverty and desperation stand side by side with the homes of the wealthy.  And it evokes the location of beauty and the sacred, at our feet - even if we don't or can't see it.

The last stanza of Part 1:

The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh,tree sough, duck quack.


For the second and third parts check this Youtube video.  The full first part is printed below.

I
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill - Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.
Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering?
Which of these men
Loved the light and the queen
Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer.  Who was it promised marriage to himself
Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe'en?
We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,
Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.
A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,
A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing
A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart legs.
October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.
Maguire watches the drills flattened out
And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar
Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by
And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world's halter,
And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland
When he laughed over pints of porter
Of how he came free from every net spread
In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head
And pretended to his soul
That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April
Where men are spanning across wide furrows.
Lost in the passion that never needs a wife
The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.
Children scream so loud that the crows could bring
The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.
Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air
And hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.
Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.
What is he looking for there?
He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.
'Move forward the basket and balance it steady
In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,
And straddle the horse,' Maguire calls.
'The wind's over Brannagan's, now that means rain.
Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls
Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass -
And that's a job we'll have to do in December,
Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy's ass
Out in my clover? Curse o' God
Where is that dog?.
Never where he's wanted' Maguire grunts and spits
Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.
His dream changes like the cloud-swung wind
And he is not so sure now if his mother was right
When she praised the man who made a field his bride.
Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.
He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ's Name.
He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
      'O God if I had been wiser!'
That was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.
He looks, towards his house and haggard. 'O God if I had been wiser!'
But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar
God's truth is life - even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire.
The horse lifts its head and cranes
Through the whins and stones
To lip late passion in the crawling clover.
In the gap there's a bush weighted with boulders like morality,
The fools of life bleed if they climb over.
The wind leans from Brady's, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant's left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.

Imperatrix Mundi

Recently, I was down in the basement trying to save what is left of my library from the rot and spiders and I brought upstairs a copy of Modern British Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, 1958. I had carried this book with me when I traveled in 2003 and had highlighted several poems I liked (and will share here later).  Imagine my surprise, however, when on the back flyleaf I found the following poem. It touches on the ultimate mystery (for me anyway) which is the nature of women.  Originally the poem wasn't a 'shape poem', but as I crafted the line breaks, I saw the diminishment and when I put it into center justification . . . well, how could I resist?  As soon as I found it I began to think about what art to include and supporting materials.  I love Klimt (what man wouldn't?);  I love the colors and the women he portrays.  But you know what? This image scares the bejesus out of me. Zoom in on those pitiless eyes.
The second item is the quote from "Carmina Burana" and is where the title of the poem came from, obviously.  I know everybody knows the music from Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi because it is used every time guys are doing something 'manly' (check out the YouTube entries for Carl Orff or Carmina Burana if you have any doubt.) One exception on YouTube is a series that portrays the story of the lyrics themselves which were purported to have been Medieval student drinking songs.  However, I don't think a lot of people have listened to the entire piece (I have owned it on vinyl for years), or every read the lyrics.  Below is the second half of the Fortuna section, "Fortune plango vulnera (I bemoan the wounds of Fortune)" Fits in very nicely with my poem, I think.  (Always a danger when quoting poetry that is better than yours in the same post - but what the hell.)  You can read the full lyrics at http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/works/orff-cb/carmlyr.php . Check out the Image source link for some very interesting background on the Klimt image of Pallas Athene and his use of mythological symbols in his work.  Good stuff.


"You didn't seem to be aware I was even there . . .", she said.

Put on your leafy crown of gold and line your eyes with kohl.

Set aside your garments and stand above me, fierce

And terrible.  Your every gesture, curve of hand, 

Reflects control. You madden in your mystery, 

Reveal every curve, but I can't pierce the

Deeper Core - it lies beyond, though I 

Will give my soul for an instant in

Your Man-consuming furnace.

Fortune plango vulnera (I bemoan the wounds of Fortune)

Fortune plango vulnera	I bemoan the wounds of Fortune
stillantibus ocellis	with weeping eyes,
quod sua michi munera	for the gifts she made me
subtrahit rebellis.	she perversely takes away.
Verum est, quod legitur,	It is written in truth,
fronte capillata,	that she has a fine head of hair,
sed plerumque sequitur	but, when it comes to seizing an opportunity
Occasio calvata.	she is bald.
In Fortune solio	On Fortune's throne
sederam elatus,	I used to sit raised up,
prosperitatis vario	crowned with
flore coronatus;	the many-coloured flowers of prosperity;
quicquid enim florui	though I may have flourished
felix et beatus,	happy and blessed,
nunc a summo corrui	now I fall from the peak
gloria privatus.	deprived of glory.
Fortune rota volvitur:	The wheel of Fortune turns;
descendo minoratus;	I go down, demeaned;
alter in altum tollitur;	another is raised up;
nimis exaltatus	far too high up
rex sedet in vertice	sits the king at the summit -
caveat ruinam!	let him fear ruin!
nam sub axe legimus	for under the axis is written
Hecubam reginam.	Queen Hecuba.

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Sojourners

When I first came to college I was in the midst of a religious episode in my life.  I felt very strongly moved by presence of God in an extraordinary way.  Later, and by the time this poem was written, circumstances had changed and with them an estrangement.  This poem was an attempt at the time to deal with the feelings I had that somehow I had lost touch with experience of the numinous, that Holy Spirit that had led me to study Scripture and prepare for a life in service to God.  I knew something had changed, but I wasn't sure what. This poem was a struggle to find out why I felt the way I did. Sometimes, the girls will ask if I believe in God.  My answer is in those last two lines.

Too long have we reclined with them, asleep.
In Egypt's halls we drank away the nights.
We praised their templed plains so fair, their works
Of art so awed our hearts we wept for love.
We lust for fragrant flesh, for golden coin;
We take on vices not our own, but theirs.
Forgotten now is promise made, our bid
For freedom lost.  Hope slips, is gone away.
God turns aside and hides Her face, her child
forgets Her name, too long sojourned with them.

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Number Thirteen

Today's image is of a full size model of a molar that my father carved over 50 years ago as a test in dental school.  A couple of years ago, after he had closed his office, we were going through some of his stuff and I asked him if I could have it.  It is carved in wax and, I am told, lifelike in every detail.  I can imagine him as a young man, laboring over this carving as his children whooped in the background in the tiny trailer in Rockland.  This poem is new.  Recently I had to have one of my teeth extracted, the first. The title refers to the number of the tooth I lost, upper left side.

There it is again, that damned gap.
The tongue just can't resist exploring 
The ghost of the guard for fifty years, 
More or less.


Your permanent record, a permanent job
Permanent teeth, yeah, well, so much for that.
Cells die every day and are reborn again,
Except this can't be replaced, I am no shark.


This is how it goes he says,
"Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.";
The clever bastard.


The broken crown is cast away,
New bone building for a robot molar
Of titanium and God knows what.
The balance tips 
A little bit more 
Toward the end.

The Pull of Blood

Sometimes poems come from a single idea and have to be built and rebuilt around that idea.  Sometimes they come 'whole cloth' and this poem today is one of those.  I was cleaning out a drawer last weekend and found it tucked in with some other papers.  I don't know when it was written, but I have a single copy without changes, exactly as it appears below.  I don't remember what the circumstances were when it was written.  But I have read and re-read it several times and I think, hey this is not bad.

The pull of blood is weak betimes.
When wind blows snowflakes upward
We drift, we pitch, we roll away
As easily as the Sun will hide itself
At the edge of night.  This close. So you
Are called to go alone but here
The genes drift closer in the air then
The dust of love and I am called
To make amends beside the ones
I spawned, with joy to share their light.




Image Source

Endings and Conclusions

This week I experienced two endings that I wanted to share with you.  The first is an unabridged reading of The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison.  I read this novel of High Fantasy when I was a teenager, along with Eddison's other novels, The Zimiamvian Trilogy. I have always imagined a conversation with Peter Jackson.  "Hey, Peter, yeah Lord of the Rings, do-able movie.  Let's see you film the Worm!"  Even the third leg of my personal fantasy triumvirate, Gormenghast, was made into a passable series.  I just don't see The Worm being made into a film.  For one thing the language is Tudor/Jacobean archaic English.  (Imagine Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe writing The Lord of the Rings and you get the idea.)  Secondly, it is so detailed a vision of a world that beggars the mind.  Here is a typical description from The Worm, the first two paragraphs, actually:

The good news is that there are a couple of good unabridged readings of the book and I just finished listening to one by Maureen O'Brien as part of her Maria Lectrix podcast  You can find all 53 MP3s for download at http://www.archive.org/details/WormOuroboros .

The second ending I experienced last week was the final episode of Babylon Five. I originally caught part of the first season on cable years ago and after it's original debut, I think, in 1994.  However, over the last two years, I have been slowly making my way thru the five years of episodes via Netflix.  The final disk and episode had me in tears for the entire time (OK, maybe the bottle of wine I drank magnified the effect just a little).  Unlike other series that I watched and loved (like the Star Trek series) at least the B5 ending tied things up in a nice satisfying package. To watch all 110 episodes, along with the commentary and related materials, has been a commitment and I am glad I did it.  I know that there are other series that have a similar loyalty (Battlestar Galactica springs to mind) and B5 was not perfect. However, like reading Lord of the Rings, or the Harry Potter series, I think you are changed always by the experience and by the characters you meet and care about.  So here is a little fan created video taste and an invitation to go check it out.  All of Babylon Five is out there on Hulu.com, free for the asking.

The Armful by Robert Frost

Last week I published a poem that I had carried with me in my wallet.  This poem is another one that I carried for quite a while.  I had hoped to memorize it, and at one point I could get most of it from memory, but that is gone now.  It is a funny thing, when I was young, I was in plays in school and could memorize large amounts of dialog, but as I have gotten older, my ability to memorize has been diminished.

"The Armful" isn't about shopping, obviously.  But when Frost wrote the poem, I don't think he could possibly have imagined the 'parcels' each of us in the 21st Century would carry.  And yet, wasn't life just as hard?  Just as complex?  Was it easier to farm in the early part of the 20th Century than to write I-phone apps for a living in the 21st?  I doubt it.  I think the key line is ' . . . I will do my best to keep their building balanced at my breast.'  It is the commitment to balancing all that life throws at us, even as we realize we drop the whole thing from time to time, that to me is the key to the poem.

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
 I lose some other off my arms and knees,
 And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns
 Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
 Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
 With all I have to hold with hand and mind
 And heart, if need be, I will do my best
 To keep their building balanced at my breast.
 I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
 Then sit down in the middle of them all.
 I had to drop the armful in the road
 And try to stack them in a better load.

Image source

Not One More Time

Every myth is a poem and every poem is a myth that points beyond itself.  Each symbol I use in my poems is personal and (occasionally) universal. That is the function of poetry, I think, to take personal experiences, personal myths and symbols and discover their universality, their springing from the collective. In this poem, which is about loneliness while away and loneliness within a relationship, I used a specific personal symbol.  Three months after Dawn and I started dating, during Christmas vacation, she sent me a picture of herself standing in front of the living room fireplace of their home in Westport.  She is deadly serious in the photo, unsmiling, silent, yet vulnerable. On her finger, she is wearing a gold ring I had given her that had belonged to my father.  It was the promise of that photo that I reflected on in this poem, written 26 years and a marriage later.
I wrote this poem on the night of June 5, 2001 while sitting at a bar in the Vinoy in St. Petersburg, Florida. I wrote it out, more or less as it appears here.   For many years I carried this poem in my wallet and recently found the folded paper from which I take the poem while doing some cleaning.  At the time, I felt a deep sadness and loneliness and tried to express it in the image of the halyard striking the mast of the empty boat, in the receding train and in the windswept pine.  I carried this poem with me and re-read it often.  I don't carry it now. Things change.

Not One More Time


The wind-bent pine,
A boat knocking at its moorings.


Sitting in an empty bar,
"Do you miss her?" no longer
counted in hours or days.
Years sweep away to that young girl
with the long auburn hair and the 
serious gaze.  Those hips that
promised such pleasure.


No last look at the train
pulling out into the rain,
Just a death and life commingled
until one predominates
and it is finished.

Except there is no resurrection
this time.  
                     Only a boat
knocking at its moorings,
    the windswept pine.


Image source

Eel Grass by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sunday afternoon, last day of my vacation.  This has been a great two weeks, even if I haven't quite been able to produce any writing from it yet.  Did some reading and relaxing and except for a bout of food poisoning at the end, was in every way a perfect vacation.  However, every good thing comes to an end, I suppose.  I know I am not looking forward to going back to work, but who ever is?  Anyway, this poem from Second April, by ESVM pretty much expresses how I will be feeling at this time tomorrow.

No matter what I say,
   All that I really love
Is the rain the flattens on the bay,
   And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
   At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach;
   Nothing in this place.




Image Credit

Pictures from Aquinnah and Gay Head Lighthouse

Fragments of a Poem

Hancock Beach, Martha's Vineyard

These fragments are an appropriate entry for this week.  I am working on a new poem to capture my experiences this past week on Martha's Vineyard. I am trying to focus on positive images and themes and as you can see up 'til now, most of my poems are emotional responses to situations.  What I am working on now are poems that reflect my everyday experiences, including my vacation.  I hope to have something more next week, but in the meantime, this poem describes my attempts to get 'behind' the meaning of the poem to get closer to the unreflected experience that was the genesis of the poem. That is Dawn and her brother in the photo on the best beach on MV.  In the original, the word 'empty' in line 13 was 'Algerian' - homage to Camus and his essays on growing up on the beach under the blazing North African sun.


        i
The poem  pure and simple
Unadorned   like Sunday afternoons
old wall clocks   tick tock tick tock
the day moves slowly.
I long this Sunday afternoon
to write a single verse
uncluttered  empty vessel
into which is poured
the reader's secret longings.


       ii
The sterile line  unclouded
unblemished verse   like an
empty beach     like . . . .


       iii
The pure  word   wherein
all holy beings lie
in repose, from which is
poured
the reader's secret longings.

Reward in Proportion

There are probably too many images going on in this poem.  I realize that now, but I tried to tie them all together at the end.  They all came to me together,as far as I can tell.  Although the topic is still love and relationships, this is the first of the 'big poems'; filled with image and metaphor at every turn.  They owe a debt to Rich, but also, obviously, to Eliot.  The three footnotes were especially significant to me, as they quoted three of my most important inspirations: the Bible, Adrienne Rich and Albert Camus.  Re-reading this poem now, it is as mysterious to me as it was when I wrote it.  We'll see what your think, Reader. Since I will be away next weekend, at least it is long enough to satisfy until I get back.

The reward is in proportion
to the nature of the quest;
We seek the mark, the place, the pole
where all polar force, all magnetism
is subsumed - is unified.


               i
The Arctic plain before us -
the jagged ice teeth hum
with cold; the snow beneath
the runners of this sled like
brittle sweets - like rock candy in our
                                                         young mouths.
The wind sucks the breath from our lungs,
transmutes into cold like ice itself
before it leaves our mouths.
Dazzling sunlight bores deep inside
our head, illuminates our brains like
the surgeon's piercing instruments (scalpel,
laser beams, various saws and rasps).
Over this wasteland we labor, toward
no particular landmark or camp.  The
compass useless, our heads bowed 
against the wind, we concentrate on
the push and lunge of the sled in
its winding path.  There 
are no warming places ahead.  (No summer days
of lazy susans beside the road - no dust,
no heat.)
This alone - this sterile frozen land -
abides now, for us.  If we are to
survive, we must learn to build
our house, our city, out of ice.
We must begin by hacking out this
crust, or perish.
We must create our  igloos out of snow,
make them 'til the crust cuts our wrists
above our mittens.  Cuts us, and our blood
mingles - pink snow on crystal ground.
It is here in this wilderness
where we have come, by our own
choice or cowardice;
It is here we must now make our camp - pitch our tent*
against the glacial winds.


          ii
You jerk against the harness,
  you proud workhorse,
                                    but not I.
Then I pull and fling myself -
                                           but not you.
The stone boat rests solid on the earth
unmoved by our struggle.
At last, by gees and haws, we
both are brought into line (the
traces jingle, hang lax for a moment.)
Then with snorts of steamy breath in the 
sparkling air, we lean and heave against the yoke.
Urged on by unseen drivers, beyond our blinders,
we strain our deep chest muscles, scrape the
frozen mud with our proud hooves.
The cleats bite against the ice,
force overcomes frozen gravity -
the stone boat jolts free of its trap
  of ice and muck.
We begin the slow pull across the 
field.  Memories of our prancing morning,
unhindered by this load,
curl away like our breath
dancing in the frost air above us.


         iii
"but a spirit can be stunned,
          a battery felt going dead
before the light flickers . . . ." she said**
and you agreed.
I have tried so long to energize
that battery, that cell.  but always
for my own use - "It's in the nature of the
battery to conserve energy for the 
  light.", I thought.
(No, it was neither so trite, nor as complex.)
I am simply the man I am.  A black
hole, yes; drawing (even) light energy
 to my depths.
But also the crackling nebula in your 
quiet space.  I illuminate in my
consumption, create and dissipate my energy
like solar flares, surging radio-magnetism.


          iv
Which leaves the cold and darkness between
the galaxies of light.  The infinite spaces
between the crystal beach of space 
                                                      of night.


"One always finds one's burden again."***


The crunch of ice beneath the explorer's boots
who seek the place where polarity gives 
way to one unifying energy.
The crunch of snow beneath the hooves,
horses drawing endless boats across the sky,
each piled high with lunar nodes.


The unity of image draws its force
  from its source.
The reward is in proportion
to the nature of the quest.

*Allusion to the Gospel of John, 1:14: "And the Word was made flesh, and pitched His tent among us."
** from "The Key", A. Rich 1967
***"The Myth of Sisyphus", A Camus, 1942



Image Credit

Mountain Pools Like These

The week, another poem about love and difficulty therein.  In preparation for this, I pulled down my slim volume, Letters to a Yong Poet by Rainer Marie Rilke which was my watchword and guide to love and art in those days.  To my surprise, written in the back fly leaf were the words 'desultory fragmentation'!  So maybe this is also a reflection on last week as well?  For this poem, however, I was for looking what Rilke had to say about conventional behavior.  In the Seventh Letter are the key thoughts of Rilke on love and relationships of all the letters.  At one point he talks about how little some people understand love and the importance, literally for the universe of love and relationship. When the going gets tough, we react and every reaction is the same -
" . . . Convention; where people act out of a prematurely fused, turbid communion, every move is convention: every relation to which such entanglement leads has its convention, be it ever so unusual( that is, in the ordinary sense immoral); why, even separation would here be a conventional step, an impersonal chance decision without strength and without fruit."
That idea, and the idea that I could create a better and stronger relationship if I gave myself over to the task, would help determine the decisions that ultimately would change my life.  In the same letter, Rilke would conclude: "And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other."


Mountain Pools Like These


It is in the nature of love, I think,
to flow like rivers - quiet and deep
as Venetian canals slip past baroque cathedrals-
or to crash over boulders like the Colorado,
down gullys and gorges carved of ledge.
(Mountain water takes the breath away.)


If, then, I don't write to you
it is because amid this, our tributary,
there are caresses like streams over stone
and silt, like gurgling brooks.
And there are passions' deep undertow
that lift and move like plates of glass
over your belly
                            and
                                       down your thighs.
And there are icy pools, such as this.

Where mountains in their splendor are moved
by your tear after tear.  I, too, am
shaken by your beauty; these
mountain pools take my breath away.


Day to day - 
                    this day -
metaphor will not contain the poetry
of your kiss and the line of your body
spooned next to mine in bed at night.
There is poetry I cannot write-
joy I feel and take like air and food.
But in these mountain pools,
                                                     my lover,
this heart aches with the cold.
  


Photo Credit

Still Life

Resiliency is the power of a relationship to be broken over and over again and to be remade anew.  How is that possible? Why is it that the alchemy of
some relationships allows the same ingredients to remixed into something new and stronger and some to to dissolve into nothingness?  This poem was written out of fear and despair; fear that I was losing someone and something ineffable but required.  Despair that the loss was of my own doing.  I struck out the last line, wisely, I think. "Your misfortune to have married a wayward poet."  That would have justified behavior that was not art at all, merely base and self-indulgent.

The key phrase that was the genesis of the poem was 'desultory fragmentation' - separation that was random, unplanned, stupid, without focus or purpose.  Like a child dropping a Christmas ball . . . symballein . . .a symbol . . .thrown down together to reveal . . . what?


poetic still live
  desultory
                        fragmentation,
a shattered lump of glass.
No unifying vision of love -
         just your delicate presence
in scattered books    clothes on the floor
in little piles     newspaper clippings       old
birthday cards and letters tied in ribbons.
mutely I stare
      but see only fragments
                                  shards of glass
perilously catching the sunlight
   holding to that which is good
                                              (barely)

Pemaquid Point And After

Be forewarned, parts of this poem are not kid-friendly.  I struggled with including this poem because of its intimate nature. But if I am going to be true to this project, I realize I have to be true to all of my writings that are important to me.  Now is not the time for censorship.  Hopefully no one will be offended, least of all the (it-should-be-obvious) subject. This poem was written on December 27, 1980.  The previous Summer (I think), Dawn, her mother and I had gone down to Pemaquid
overnight and I had wandered off after dinner to the sea edge. 

In the original poem, I dove off the cliffs into the sea, but I have changed it.  I think it is more telling that the character isn't brave, or foolish, enough to risk his life;  that he pulls back from the temptation of that phenomena and his own desire to submerge himself in it. I also edited out a totally superfluous and cloying stanza that adds nothing to the poem.  I found a copy of the poem with the following notes added in red fountain pen.  The original name was Lights at Sea which was crossed out and replaced with That Night. My additional notes say: "That Night" was at Pemaquid, "the quicksilver sea" an old recurring dream. The afternoon . . . like so many.  I have in mind the glimmer of the night sea/of Impressionism/ of the afternoon/of love.  The 'diving' and the 'rose cave' - stolen conceits!"


The last comment sent me to the basement for my copies of Adrienne Rich. Her book, The Dream of a Common Language, had a profound effect on me as a poet and her influences will show up again and again. "Natural Resources" was the first poem of hers I read, from a magazine article, I think.  The diving conceit might have come from there, or from her poem, 'Diving into the Wreck'.  The 'rose cave'  comes from a line from her poem, (THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED) from the Dream of a Common Language, Twenty One Love Poems
        . . . your strong tongue and slender fingers
        reaching where I had been waiting years for you
        in my rose-wet cave - whatever happens, this is.

(You might wonder why I am not quoting the whole poem?  Well, these poems are so massively powerful that I would be ashamed to follow it with my own effort.  Rich's poems just make you feel the ache of love between two people that I would kill to be able to even come close to expressing.  Maybe later . . . .)

That night I picked my way out
over storm-worn ledges beyond the
windswept pines to watch the sea.
Below, the phosphorescent water
rose and lifted, misty in the rain;
rose and lifted, flowing over the unseen shore below.
Into that sea I would have plunged
drawn downward by its luminescence
as if by tidal force;
Submerged by current's pull
beneath the moving water's surface.


I remembered that night as we lay
in afternoon's fading luminosity.
Your flesh as warm and bare as
that sea's waves were cold and deep;
our love as mysterious and as fecund.
I moved down across your belly
to drink deeply of your rose cave's
sea-salt nectar on scrub pine's edge;
pressed kisses to your thighs.
I was submerged beneath that 
phosphorescent tide as you rose and lifted,
flowed and plunged over unseen shores
                                                             below.

Down to the Creamery

This poem is about my father.  Or rather it is about my relationship with him; and it is about our history.  It is also a portrait of the Sherman farm in Island Falls where my grandmother grew up. There are still Shermans living on the  farm, which was for a time a commercial dairy, but now the great barn and outbuildings stand empty, as they did when I wrote this poem.  Although I never worked on this farm, nor did my Dad, to my knowledge, the opening description is paradigmatic of my own youth.  Growing up on the farm meant that every weekend belonged to my father and his 'hobby'.  One of the reasons I went to work at 15 was to get off that farm and to exercise some control over my time.  And to this day, I feel uneasy just 'sitting around' on the weekend - reading a book or watching a movie.  My experience as a child and a teenager colored , naturally, my own experience as a father.  In particular, I seldom if ever have asked my children to help me.  They grew up free to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.  They never had to know the dread I felt on Saturday mornings, waiting to be called to work. Would we have been closer if they had had to help me fix fences or get in hay?  I'll never know.  I suspect they would have harbored the same resentment I felt, so I think I made the right choice. Even so, of course, by the time I was in college (when this poem was written), I was already nostalgic for rural life. Or was it a nostalgia for all things forgotten and left unattended?

I wish I could tell you where the quote in the final stanza comes from, but I can't find it in my notes. And again with the banging door. . . .

                                                i
Behind my father, I skipped and pranced,
Following his patient, rumpled bulk,
His great-bear, lumbering gait;
Down that narrow way we went - 
                                 Down to the creamery.


Clean winds, keen and swift,
Over rain-washed oat fields rushed
To push the bright grass down.
Into the mud-slick path beside the barn
Our splattered boots pressed
Leaf and stalk into the sodden earth.
Against the grey morning, 
Blustery clouds rolling on across the sky, 
Stood,
               White and fresh,
                                            The creamery.


Inside: white walls, white floor, and stainless
Steel; glistening mechanisms churned and throbbed,
                              Oblivious to our coming.
Empty bottles for milk and,
Smaller, cream, waited to be filled . . . . .


                                         ii
I believe they wait there still,
As cobwebs weave the corners tight.
The abandon separator rusts in silence,
While sunbeams flow in through
Dusty window panes.
Loose doors bang in the breeze now,
Left forgotten an age ago.
"And my child heart is dancing
with a ghost on the narrow path."
Down beside the barn
                        Down to the creamery.