Look, Stranger at this Island Now by W.H. Auden

Reading this poem last night in bed, I was on the verge of tears.  Why, I wonder?  Is the clue in the poem or in the reader's mind?  I must have read it a dozen times.  I still wonder.

Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.


Here at the small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
and the shingle scrambles after the suck-
ing surf, and the gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.


Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands;
And the full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
that pass the harbour mirror
and all the summer through the water saunter.
                                                                        November 1935

A Refusal to Mourn

It is October and traditionally as the days grow crisper,  I exchange my gin for scotch (or Canadian whiskey).  It is the time when I dig out my broken-backed copy of the Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems.  The two are inter-related, of course.  Thomas is meant to be read out loud with the book in one hand and a drink in the other.  The birthday poems, "Poem in October" or "poem on his birthday' are my favorites and I have quoted them before in this blog. To be shouted to the heavens in defiance! Yes!

But today's poem is a good closure in my mind to the last few posts on Morgan.  You can read a poem over and over again and then, one day, it finally clicks and you understand exactly what the poet meant.  Why?  Is it that the puzzle of the words is solved? Or is because of the experiences you bring to a poem unlock its secrets?  Is the poem an empty vessel for our emotional experiences, or a source and repository of images and ciphers that explain and illuminate?

A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Father and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Image Source

Last Day of Indian Summer

Monday October 22, 1979

Dearest Child,

It is 12:50 now and we know that you have died in the womb.  Why or how, we cannot say.

Where was God?
dancing in your heart
my little unborn babe,
my little wave.

Now Dawn and I must birth your dead body out.  This is a testing time for us, and would have been for you as well, but you are dead.

Such a simple thing - death.  For one like yourself, warm and hidden in Dawn's womb I am sure it was an easy death, a happy death.  But Dead you are, and we . . . we must bear the pain.

1/3/80

Morgan

Tonight I found your picture

neatly folded, hidden in my wallet.

I remember that light filled Summer day

alive with the sound of crickets in the new-mown hay.

In the cool darkness of the hospital room they 

attached the equipment to Dawn's belly and 

opened a window on your place.

We watched you wriggle your toes with 

the careless abandon of a child.

Tiny elfling in your mama's belly

floating, gurgling in an amniotic world.

(The picture shows you smiling, I swear,

through your fluid playground.)

Strange isn't it? In a single moment I

saw your birth, your first steps, splashing baths,

fearful first days of school, dates, love, education,

beauty, work - in your wiggling toes I witnessed

the entirety of your existence.

II

The night before you died

Dawn and I lay like spoons

and I felt your nudging insistence

against my arm as I enfolded you both.

You still strove toward the light

toward freedom from your fluid world.

(Hadn't you listened to your mother

weeping in the darkness, whispering for you

to stay inside . . . where love was as real

as the blood that passed between you?)

III

As you crouched dying , slipping away

in silence, aware only of your mother's heartbeat

quietly booming in your ears,

What did you recall?

Did you hear again my muffled voice

call to you through Dawn's belly?

Purring cats kneading their paws against you?

Car rides with the sound of laughing friends?

The pull of the tide on your fluid world

when Dawn and I walked beside the sea?

In the brief span of your life

what treasures lay in the halls of your mind?

What primal impulses quicken your breast?

What did you dream as you crouched, dying?

IV

In the warm fluid darkness of the womb

what is death like?

How differs the fetal sleep from that of the dead?

Did you die in your sleep as we lay sleeping?

Death knows only questions - never answers, never answers.

When you were born you were as warm as life.

You lacked nothing save a little breath,

save God's anointing spirit.

Was death easy for you?  Letting go so painless?

I wondered how long your spirit lingered.

Did you stay by to ease our pain?

V

I recall when I was very young my

grandmother bathing me, choosing clothes

for me to wear, laying me on the kitchen

table of the farm house which haunts my dreams 

even now.

My Grandmother, my Nana, 

who herself once bore a girlchild with dark hair 

and round cheeks like your own.

Into her hands I commend your infant spirit

for safe keeping until I myself can come 

to you and hold you 

again

to my heart.

Image Source

The Final Grains Run Down

                                                            October 10, '79

Dear Boy-Child

Today Dawn and I began to try to find a name for you.  So far we have yet to come together on anything. so you remain the "wee baabie". But know that we are working hard.

Yesterday we calculated that you had come full term. Now it is up to you to leap out of the womb.  Surely that must be a frightening thing, but it will be the first strong act of your life and we are all here struggling to catch you as we ourselves fall (that is a pun on Heidegger which I hope you will one day understand, if not today).

Dawn and I are very happy now, much more than when you were conceived.  Those were dark times, times of desperate running, of searching for the love promised before in August.  I think now we have learned to find a balance between space and together, or at least we are more sensitive, more tolerant of the other's ways.

But all of this you know, you eavesdropper on our every conversation.  More, you know the silent thoughts of your mother that even I do not.  If you are indeed a boy-child I hope you always keep that bond for I have and it is a good thing. Speaking of bonds, this too you must know, in my mother's family, from her mother and her mother's mother has come the gift - reading cards, premonitions, "seeing".  I feel a sense of it in myself. Perhaps you too will share in this family gift.  The stars are right for it.

(I wish I could explain the Heidegger reference today.)  I do remember my Nana telling fortunes with ordinary playing cards.  My mother has always been interested in astrology and I have been interested in the Tarot and its relationship to the unconscious.     

Nothing prepared me, however, for the changes about to happen; changes what would effect my life to this day.  For now, let's just leave the image I had when I wrote this, of a brave little child  preparing to face the world.  Unimagined, time was slowly ticking away and the hourglass was nearly empty.

Image Source

My Dearest Son

Sunday, September 16, 1979

My Dearest Child,
On the opposite page, I have taped a picture of myself taken not long after you were conceived.  You will have seen many pictures of Dawn and I by now, but I think this is by far the best likeness of me I have ever had taken, so I include it here. I wore glasses then, too, but as I often took them off to do important work - write, read, talk, so I didn't include them here.

 We all have a mental picture of ourselves, no matter what our actual age.  Our own mental image - who we expect to see in the mirrored surface of a window as we walk down the street.  This picture represents how I imagined myself for years.  I would have been 21 at the time, I think.

Thursday, Sept. 28
My Dearest Son, if that be so,
Today I am frantically working to find you a name.  In less than two weeks, I am told, you will be born.  Are you feeling confined in the womb that has nurtured you for so long? This, my baby, is not the last of these wombs, from which you must birth out.
As to your name  - I am trying to find a name that will convey all the hopes and dreams I have of and for you, yet still give you the freedom to be who you want to be.  Right now I am taken by the name Deror - it is Hebrew for freedom, or free flowing.  Freedom is the most important thing or state of mind we can have and my hope is that freedom will always be paramount among your concerns.
Besides, having a name like Deror will set you apart, your name will have a magic which none of your peers can take from you.  this being apart is a good thing, I think.  It is in this loneliness that creative ability and art comes.
I hope that is not to heavy a burden for you to carry - such a name and such a setting apart.  I think it will be a good one - for we all carry burdens, the rocks we push up hills only to see them fall again and again.  Let us at least be happy in the struggle.  You know that I love you and apropos that is a quote from Rilke:

"All we can offer where we love is this: to love each other; for to hold each other comes easy to us and requires no learning."
                                                                         Requiem

But for now, my love must be nurturing and holding.  And preparing.

The first thing that surprises me is that two weeks before she was due, we did not know Morgan's gender.  How innocent compared to the other pregnancies, miscarriages and births, that we should know so little about what was going on in the womb.  We did have a sonogram, but it apparently showed nothing conclusive.  We still have it, in the fireproof box of course, with the birth certificates and other important papers.  Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like . . . to have a son instead of daughters.  Would I have been a better father, or worse?  A better man?  What would have been my expectation for my son?  It seems like I was already freighting his life with my expectations.  What if he had grown up to be a jock?  or a stock broker?  This short journal is a treasure of what ifs and the gender of my children is certainly an interesting hypothetical topic;  as it was, three for three.  I can only hope that if Morgan, Emica or Breanne had been a boy that I would have striven to give him the same nurture and caring; the same generosity and discipline; the same love, in other words, that I have tried to give to my daughters. . .  and received in return.

A Bourgeois Beginning

Recently I discovered some pages from a journal I intended to keep for my first child.  On the one hand, knowing now what was to come, they seem sad.  But on the other hand, they are an honest reflection of what I was feeling those last heady weeks before Morgan was born.  And, perhaps, there is message for my other daughters. . . or not.  Who knows.

September 7, 1979

My Dear Child,
I am endeavoring to keep this journal for you, that someday you may read it and experience your youth from my perspective as your father.  As much of our childhood as is retained (albeit in our unconscious, very often) just as much is lost from us.  Of my own past I know not as much as I would like.  About my parents, your Grandparents, there are mysteries only hinted at and never made clear to me.
But this is a book for you, not necessarily for me, yet I must begin with our past - yours and mine.  Our name is French and in the form BOUTILLIER was granted to our family in 1593, in Lorraine.  Tradition has it that our family were Huguenots - French Protestants and were expelled from France for that belief. However, another story claims we were given land in New France for helping Napoleon, the latter is rather suspect, as Canada was controlled by Great Britain at the time.  In any case, the family settled in the St. John valley and adjacent Aroostook county - as did the Bakers and Lovelys, your Grandmother's family.
The significance of all this lies in our bourgeois background.  Huguenots were traders and merchants - entrepreneurs who built and strengthened the capitalist system.  There lie our roots in a revolutionary class and we must be proud of that.  We are and always have been of the middle class and can do not otherwise, I fear.  

What makes me sad about this passage is the comment about not knowing, or better - remembering, my own past.  This is true.  It is amazing to me when I get with my sisters and they remember so much about our growing up. . . . I remember very little.  What amuses me is the statement about being of a 'revolutionary class'.  I was being very specific concerning that reference and it demonstrates, I think, an understanding of the role of classes in history beyond the typical characterization of 'bourgeois' as stupid or boring, or anti-revolutionary.  However, it may also have been a recognition that we are what we are and that I was always going to be the middle class son of middle class parents.  We were not going to ever be proletarian, working class in the revolutionary sense that the bourgeois were revolutionary in contrast to feudalism.  But then again, neither was Lenin or Marx.

And now the rallying cry is not "Workers of the World Unite", it is "Save the Middle Class".  What we took for granted 30 years ago seems like a dream today; that an education and hard work could create a secure world to live in.  At the time, I assumed we had a choice which side of history we would fall on, I am not so sure my children feel that freedom to chose between being middle class and working class.  One small step, one missed payment, one lay off and they are in danger of tumbling down into the pit from which it takes generations to claw your way out of.

Image Credit

When a French Name is Not French.

After doing some antiquing in Boutiliers Point, we were on our way West along the southern coast of Nova Scotia.  The weather turned very rainy that day and we weren't stopping long anywhere.  One of the locations Dawn wanted to visit was Lunenburg, since her family is German and we thought the weather might clear and give us a chance to walk around this UNESCO World Historic site.  No such luck.  It was pouring rain when we arrived and we were both too discouraged to get out.  However, this town with its historic downtown and waterfront (which we drove through) and Bluenose Schooner make this place at the top of our list of places to visit on our next trip to NS (and oh, yes, we definitely want to come back.)  On our way out of town, however, we stopped at the tourist center and made this discovery, the Monument to settlers from Montebelaird.  The original Boutiliers, came from this French speaking, but independent, Protestant principality along the French/Swiss border in 1752, at the invitation of the British government.  They were part of a group of German, Swiss and Montebelairdian settlers meant to act as a counterbalance to the Acadian population in Nova Scotia.  The Acadians, celebrated in Longfellow's poem Evangeline,were descendants of the original French settlers.    As such, their loyalty was often in question in British eyes.  The French in the early part of the 18th century still controlled a significant part of the Maritimes from their fortress in Louisburg.  Although the Acadians requested that they play a neutral role in the British-controlled Nova Scotia, eventually, in conjunction with the French and Indian War, as it is known in US History,they were deported from the province in what was known as the Great Expulsion. This photo is of a monument on the waterfront in Halifax that shows the forced migrations of the Acadians.

In 1752, Bouteillers (Boutiliers) arrived from Montebelaird region to settle in Lunenburg and surrounding areas.  They were meant to replace the Acadians and support the British Crown. Hence, in my opinion, the reduced importance of speaking French in the family.  I knew of no relative in our family that spoke French, going back to my great grand parents.  The strong ties that bind French Canadians - language, history, and Catholicism have always been missing from our family heritage.  Now I better understand why. These were folk who were looking to adopt the language and customs of their new Mother country - Britain.  There would have been no harkening back to the good old days in France or Montebelaird.  They would not have been leaving their homeland to extend their country via her colonies but to create a new life in a new land, to create a nation that would become Canada.

So at least now, I have a place to start and a confirmation that our family came to Nova Scotia, not from France (although Montebelaird would be incorporated in 1793 into France), but from an independent nation. And that they were, as always maintained, huguenots- French Protestants.  Now to start making the connections between those settlers and the family branch that wandered into Aroostook County, Maine and became my ancestors.

What's in Name Part Two

In my last post, we were on our way to Boutiliers Point in Nova Scotia.  When we arrived, the first stop was the St. James Anglican Church graveyard.

It was kind of creepy, as Dawn pointed out, that the graveyard was virtually filled with Boutiliers.  There were monuments to veterans and victims of the Halifax Explosion of 1917. One of the most moving and mysterious was this one that listed an entire family of various ages.

Of course, it would only be a matter of time until . . . .

The freakish thing, of course, was he died just a year after I was born.
Here are a couple more views of the outside of the church (that is Dawn in the foreground) and what we took to be the Point opposite the church.

In my next post, I will reveal the truth about why we don't speak French anymore in our family.

What's in a Name

Boy, I didn't realize what a hiatus I had taken from this blog until I opened up today! Almost two months of no postings is not good! However, we have just returned from our Summer vacation and I am full of enthusiasm for doing the things I enjoy like this blog. For our vacation this year, we spent two weeks touring Nova Scotia.  In part we went because we haven't been there and I was particularly interested since my family originally came to the Americas from there. With some superb hasty coordination from Dawn, we were able to get to Moncton NB in one day and be on the peninsula of Nova Scotia the next.  We drove around about two thirds of the perimeter of the province, including Cape Breton Island, in a clockwise rotation.  Most of the time we had good weather, with a few spectacular days, a few very rainy days and most days very good. We had considered camping, but decided at the last minute to leave early and Breanne and Evan had the equipment so we stayed in a combination of settings from a hotel one night, hostels, two college dormitories and the remainder of the stay in B&Bs.

As I said, I was interested in finding my family roots.  I knew there was a Boutilier's Point northwest of Halifax, but was surprised when our drive took us past a location called Boutiliers Cove as well.

In the nearby graveyard attached to the Anglican church, we began our search for relatives.  I do not know of any specific names to look for, but we found several Boutiliers in the graveyard, often the graves of infants or children.  One of the oldest stones in the yard also gave us an important clue to look for.

This stone was interesting on two counts, the alternative spelling of LeBoutillier and the fact that Susan was married to the son of Loyalist parents.  I knew from family tradition that Boutiliers were Huguenot, that is French Protestants, and that this spelling had been used in the past.  There has also been a tradition of Loyalists in the family (those who remained loyal to the British Crown during the American War of Independence).  If the family arrived in Nova Scotia in the 1750s or 1760's as tradition always had it, Susan would most likely have been a daughter or perhaps granddaughter of an original Boutilier settler, having been born in 1784.

Another interesting stone related a twin tragedy of a brother an sister, both of whom died at age 19.  the young man in on the battlefields of France in 1918.

We got back on the road again toward Boutilier's Point, but before arriving, I noticed a monument in front of a Royal Canadian Legion Hall. It confirmed that Robert was not the only Boutilier to have died in World War I and II from the area.

Eventually, we reached Boutilier's Point, where a few surprises awaited us. I will relate them in my next post.  Be sure to check out the Location marker for a street view of St. Peter's Anglican Church yard and Boutiliers Cove.

The Horse Show by William Carlos Williams

My mother is in the hospital today recovering from knee surgery.  However, she suffers from some mild dementia and is having a very hard time understanding why she has to be in the hospital and why she can't come home.  When I first read this poem, I thought it was about Flossie, WCW's long suffering wife, but, of course, on re-reading I understand now that he is talking about a conversation with his mother and she is confined to home or hospital. The poem  is in the form of those conversations about nothing . . . . and everything  . . . that characterize hospital discussions.  We try to act like there is nothing unusual about one person being in a bed and surrounded by family, catered to by strangers.  And it is unusual to actually talk to someone without them doing something else - watching TV or preparing a meal. . . just to talk.  About what? I think those hospital conversations share something with poetry as well. While consciously mundane and ordinary, they have hidden in them the kernels of  much more profound and serious matters . . . matters of life and death.


The Horse Show


Constantly near you, I never in my entire
sixty-four years knew you so well as yesterday
or half so well.  We talked.  You were never
so lucid, so disengaged from all exigencies
of place and time.  We talked of ourselves,
intimately, a thing never heard of between us.
How long have we waited? almost a hundred years.


You said, Unless there is some spark, some
spirit we keep within ourselves, life, a
continuing life's impossible-and it is all
we have.  There is no other life, only the one.
The world of the spirits that comes afterward
is the same as our own, just like you sitting
there they come and talk to me, just the same.


They come to bother us.  Why? I said.  I don't 
know.  Perhaps to find out what we are doing.
Jealous, do you think?  I don't know.  I 
don't know why they should want to come back.
I was reading about some men who had been
buried under a mountain, I said to her, and
one of them come back after two months,


digging himself out.  It was in Switzerland,
you remember?  Of course I remember.  The
villagers tho't it was a ghost coming down
to complain.   They were frightened.  They
do come, she said, what you call
my "visions."  I talk to them just as I
am talking to you.  I see them plainly.


Oh if I could only read!  You don't know
what adjustments I have made.  All
I can do is to try to live over again
what I knew when your brother and you
were children- but I can't always succeed.
Tell me about the horse show.  I have 
been waiting all week to hear about it.


Mother darling, I wasn't able to get away.
Oh that's too bad.  It was just a show;
they make the horses walk up and down
to judge them by their form.  Oh is that
all? I tho't it was something else. Oh
they jump and run too.  I wish you had been
there, I was so interested to hear about it.

The New Trampoline

This poem was written in April, 1996 when the girls were little. I wanted to relate their joy and exuberance on the trampoline with the journey they were about to take.  It is also a reflection of differences between them.  Recently, I was touched by something Breanne told me about how magical her childhood had been; how she imagined a world of secret places around our backyard.  I always imagined our home to be too small and dull, but I should have trusted in the powers of a child's imagination to transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary.


The New Trampoline


Early Spring, between snows, we set up.
Stretched black skin between silver springs
Round eye to heaven, door and navel.
The elders hold the blanket corners.


The youngest daughter and her friend are first.
Tentative steps around the edges, then a timid bounce.
Giggling they gambol like newborn kids, hand in hand.
Each leaps higher, nearly airborne.


But the eldest daughter will lie spread eagle, alone,
Counting clouds in a cloudless sky.
Expanding upward to the edge of the earth
And beyond that blue bowl to the stars above.


I might give her a compass for that airy journey
I think, but remember, alas,
She must find her own way 
Beyond this gripping earth.
My silent task, at last, to break her falls
Again and again.








Image Source

In Flanders Field

Family lore is that one of our great aunts was married to John McCrae, the author of In Flanders Fields.  In fact, McCrae was never married, but was in love as a young man with an unnamed woman who died and left him heartbroken.   My grandfather did serve in US Expeditionary Forces and we still have the dented helmet to prove it. Since the last veteran of the Great War died recently, I have been thinking and reading about the "War to End Wars".  I have always been fascinated by it. We cannot image the futility and carnage of that conflict and it is now slipping beneath the tides of history with the Civil War and the 19th Century generally.  But I knew someone who actually stood in those trenches and suffered in those battles.  How amazing! To begin then, McCrae's In Flanders Fields. (Poem Source)  Image Source

In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

A few weeks ago, I watched the Canadian file Passendale The graphic above depicts the actual site in 1917. The battle was a turning point in the war and a high (or low, depending on your point of view) watermark for Canadian participation.  Dr. McCrae treated his fellow Canadians during and after the battle, so there is a link there. What got me started with this wonderful (if somewhat improbable) movie was a search for trench warfare on YouTube.  (With respect to the film, the end is just too coincidental to be believed, I am sorry.  But otherwise a great and romantic film, with graphic portrayals of the casual violence of war and of the hatred that German-Canadians as well as German-Americans experienced.)   Here is part of the penultimate battle scene from the movie.  This has to rank very close to the "ambush scene" in Last of the Mohegans for exciting hand to hand combat.



Here is Siegfried Sassoon in 1918. Close you eyes and imagine you have been fighting over the same ground for four years.  Hundreds of thousands of casualties and hardly a mile of ground has been gained.  What was a lark that was supposed to "end by Christmas" has become a bitter, unending way of life.

And some have maintained that this was a war that did not end, finally, until a pistol shot in a bunker in Berlin in 1945.

THE REAR-GUARD

Groping along the tunnel, step by step,
He winked his prying torch with patching glare
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.
Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
the rosy gloom of battle overhead.
Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.
"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply.
"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.)
"Get up and guide me through this stinking place."
Savage, he kicked the soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.
Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,
Unloading hell behind him step by step.

The Ivy Crown

Today is Dawn's birthday.  How lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful person!  This bit of poem is from The Ivy Crown, by William Carlos Williams.





The whole process is a lie,
                unless,
                              crowned by excess,
it breaks forcefully,
                      one way or another,
                                          from its confinement-
or find a deeper well.
                    Anthony and Cleopatra
                                          were right,
They have shown
                   the way.  I love you
                                      or I do not live
at all.

The maze of mind unravels where we act

Religion and Faith are complex for me.  At one time, I thought that I might be able to deliver a message of hope and salvation in the role of a pastor.  But I think I always knew that my own path would not be a path that others ought to follow.  I was more spiritual than religious and ultimately more carnal than spiritual.  This book, The Saviors of God shaped and changed my way of looking at myself and my spiritual journey. When Kazantzakis wrote in the chapter First Step, the Ego, " I am not good, I am not innocent, I am not serene. My happiness and unhappiness are both unbearable; I am full of inarticulate voices and darknesses; I wallow, all blood and tears, in this warm trough of my flesh." , I knew I had found a voice who knew me. I am not an ascetic, as Kazantzakis strove to be,  but his insights have inspired me.  They also inspired this poem.  In my handwritten notes are two quotes from The Saviors of God, although they are not quoted in the final typewritten version of the poem.  Nor does the poem have a title or date.

"The ultimate most holy form of theory is action" p.99

"It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit." p. 106 

I also have a note of my own: "To fear and in that fear to weep for God for hope for love. Death"


The maze of mind unravels where we act,
Pursue our thoughts to logic's ending place,
Where dreams like mist drift off the cliff of fact;


Where theory arms us, praxis sets the pace.
To act can answer queries of the heart;
To win the prize we must endure the race.


The die is cast when we decide to start,
Bolt out from logic, theory's starting block
To merge with racers who seek their part,


Like you, to act to break in God's deadlock.
God runs, He falls, we carry on to make
A place for God where with us he may walk.


The road of action God commands we take
So He we save in our warm body's meat.
We burn an arc across the sky for sake
of God's salvation . . . and our moment, fleet.

No Pure Air

My original plan for this Easter post was to quote Anne Sexton's 'Rowing' from "The Awful Rowing Toward God", a book of hers I was given a long time ago.  While traveling this week, I picked up The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, but in rereading it this morning, I decided not to quote it today.  I thought it might echo my own ambivalent feelings about God and to some extent it does, but it just didn't feel right to me today, just a little too despairing.  So I went to my folder and this is the next poem that came up.  It started as a sort of Beat, 'stream of consciousness' poem that got morphed and clean up to this final version.  It is not a pretty poem, that is for sure.  I am sure that I must have been feeling lost and in despair that I could write anything at all.  The funny thing is over the six months or so I worked on the poem (six drafts, no less) from July 31, 1979 to March 25, 1980, the title changed with each draft.  So here are the title changes, a little bit of verse in itself.

Untitled

Crack!

Conversation with Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversation with Luther in exile in 1902 

Conversations with Luther and Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

No Pure Air

Does that help explain the theme at all?  Maybe. I will admit that the end is full of pretensions and give that up to youth.  There are a few interesting images, perhaps, that make up for the rest. Glad at least to say that I seldom feel this kind of despair.


No Pure Air


Crack! split back spine
paunched fish guts
red glistening organs so
perfect and glossy   burst
spilt bile all over
snow white beaches already
so soaked as to be 
                              full.
Gross putrid failures
befoul us   bring us down
down into the sulphurous
depths   into the chamber pot
old fart hell of
                       failure.


No pure air
only gagging doubts like mustard
gas floating over barbed
wire   muckholes   agent orange
dead   rotting   leaves   babies   women
(how little war has changed)


Drunken piss covered pants   men wander
the streets   panhandling   scaring
the bourgeois hell out
of us in our patrician
                                 complacency.


Striving to give . . . .what?
there is no reality
only images we feel
                               make
                                          die for.

Peter Quince at the Clavier by Wallace Stevens

"Susanna and the Elders" . . . wow, google that for a history of porn in the arts!  Two thousand years of naked chicks by every master imaginable.

Critics have lots to say about this poem.  When I read it in 2003, I was struck by the fourth part -
"Beauty is momentary in the mind - 
the fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives on." 
It turns on its head the Platonic notion of the ideal of Beauty.  It means (I think) that beauty is in the thing.  Beauty is - literally- incarnate. And the beauty that has gone into the dust of Israel? Like music played or words spoken?  We think we can capture and imprison beauty in an .MP3 or a .JPG or even on a written page.  But I don't think we can.  The experience of beauty is in the mind's reaction to music or words or images. We 'see' Susanna in her green evening, or the woman of the first stanza in her blue-shadowed silk in our minds, we re-create.  That is what poetry does, I think, takes rich, meaningful language and uses it to sketch an emotion or experience for the writer and the reader together.  Or maybe poetry is just an excuse to think naughty thoughts. Who can say?

Peter Quince at the Clavier


I

 Just as my fingers on these keys
 Make music, so the self-same sounds
 On my spirit make a music, too.

 Music is feeling, then, not sound;
 And thus it is that what I feel,
 Here in this room, desiring you,

 Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
 Is music. It is like the strain
 Waked in the elders by Susanna:

 Of a green evening, clear and warm,
 She bathed in her still garden, while
 The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

 The basses of their beings throb
 In witching chords, and their thin blood
 Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

 In the green water, clear and warm,
 Susanna lay.
 She searched
 The touch of springs,
 And found
 Concealed imaginings.
 She sighed,
 For so much melody.

 Upon the bank, she stood
 In the cool
 Of spent emotions.
 She felt, among the leaves,
 The dew
 Of old devotions.

 She walked upon the grass,
 Still quavering.
 The winds were like her maids,
 On timid feet,
 Fetching her woven scarves,
 Yet wavering.

 A breath upon her hand
 Muted the night.
 She turned--
 A cymbal crashed,
 And roaring horns.

III

 Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
 Came her attendant Byzantines.

 They wondered why Susanna cried
 Against the elders by her side;

 And as they whispered, the refrain
 Was like a willow swept by rain.

 Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
 Revealed Susanna and her shame.

 And then, the simpering Byzantines,
 Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

 Beauty is momentary in the mind --
 The fitful tracing of a portal;
 But in the flesh it is immortal.

 The body dies; the body's beauty lives,
 So evenings die, in their green going,
 A wave, interminably flowing.
 So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
 The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
 So maidens die, to the auroral
 Celebration of a maiden's choral.

 Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
 Of those white elders; but, escaping,
 Left only Death's ironic scrapings.

 Now, in its immortality, it plays
 On the clear viol of her memory,
 And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

1915.

Hear the poem read out loud courtesy of wikipedia.org

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I dreamt of Perm

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patient's conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled "rights' and the significance of these feelings for the patient's personality.  They tend to exploit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals

Description of characteristics of 'sluggish schizophrenia' displayed by dissidents committed to psikhushkas during the Soviet period in Russia.  Quoted in Gulag: a history by Anne Applebaum.

I am not sure I entirely understood the details of the political situation when I wrote this poem on April 7, 1980.  I had certainly read my Solzhenitsyn and harbored no illusions concerning the Soviet Union, in spite of my leftist leanings.  More to the point, in this poem, I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a country where you were declared mentally ill because you disagreed with the government. . . . hmm . . . . yeah, about that.  I also tried to consider what it would be like to be under systematic torture, the agony of waiting your turn and knowing it was coming.  The first part is the prisoner, obviously, the second part is me. Vladimir Borisov was, I believe, an electrician.  Hardly a literary figure or intelligentsia.  The final line? Oh please, do you not know me at all? Irony and an ice pick in Mexico City.


I dreamt of Perm
                              for Vladimir Borisov

1.
I swear I will not piss my pants 
again, no matter how scared or blind.
I wait and wait and wait; building castles
room by room inside my mind. Surely
I am still sane, still whole, still in control?
I wait here in this psikhushka
until the clicking steps stop before my door.
Then, with tremors in my bowels and ice knives 
in my heart, quivering, I am led below.


I still remember flowers and Spring
and laughing children and long, slow walks
along the river at dusk.  I remember
sunny rooms, hot tea and the steamy smell
of food, long ago eaten and gone.  I remember
love and softness and tender words and 
whispers and giggles.  I remember living.


Shocks run through me-
seared flesh and frozen heart-
tearless weeping desperation
melts into a jerking mass
Final saving lapse -
                              unconscious weight.


2.
I dreamt of Perm last night, of labor camps,
of last pleading goodbyes
in stinking, smoky railway stations;
Waiting and shuffling in the snow
or rain
or sleet
or beneath the muddy sky.


Remember
and do not lose faith in the future,
For truth, not lies,
is the motor force of progress.

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Underground System by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Underground System, by Edna St. Vincent Millay was originally published in 1939 in Huntsman, What Quarry?. Millay republished it in 1940, in her book urging action by America to enter the war in the fight against European Fascism.  I have copies of both books and have taken my reproduction from the original.  Why are we reading it today, after over 70 years?  Really? Read on and find out.  It certainly echoes my thoughts and keep in mind that ESVM wrote this poem while America was still in the throes of the Depression.  The threats to the Republic were as great then, or greater, and I think ESVM and I would probably agree on who the 'moles' are.  Whether the Fascists triumphed or not, I will let you be the judge. I hoped to have more information about this poem and I just tried to find my copy of her biography, Savage Beauty, in the slag heap that is my basement and former library, but of course, could not.  Well, carry on, right?

Underground System

Set the foot down with distrust upon the crust of
    the world - it is thin.
Moles are at work beneath us; they have tunnelled
    the sub-soil
With separate chambers; which at an appointed
    knock
Could be as one, could intersect and interlock.  We
    walk on the skin
Of life.  No toil
Of rake or hoe, no lime, no phosphate, no rotation
    of crops, no irrigation of the land,
Will coax the limp and flattened grain to stand
On that bad day, or feed to strength the nibbled
    roots of our nation.


Ease has demoralized us, nearly so; we know
Nothing of the rigours of winter: the house has a 
    roof against - the car a top against - the snow.
All will be well, we say; it is a habit, like the rising
    of the sun,
For our country to prosper; who can prevail against
    us? No one.


The house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are
    rotting, and hall upon hall
The moles have built their palace beneath us: we
    have not far to fall.



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Circle Dance

This poem was part of my work for an English class and was written May 5, 1980.  I have several rough drafts and modifications.  When I wrote about stone flutes and stingless lyre, I was thinking of an ecstatic dance where only God could hear the music and I think there was a bit of Lord Dunsany there as well.  I think I had in mind as well the juxtaposition of corporate worship - literally, ecstatic worship like I experienced among the Catholic charismatics - and individual devotion. I might also have had in mind, William Carlos William's Danse Russe, which I love.  The image of the man dancing naked in the attic, asserting (quietly, so as not to awaken anyone)  'I am an artist!' is very powerful.  No measured days in coffee spoons. In looking for images, I found this site, which has some pretty cool images of Tantric and ecstatic dancing. The quote from Eliade, whom I studied, appears at the beginning of the poem

". . . a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment.  In a word, it is a representation, and consequently a reactualization, of illud tempus, 'those days'."
                                       Myth of the Eternal Return, M. Eliade

Our hearts, they leap up high beyond the fire
to seek the circle dance of God sublime;
To dance, to dance to music out of Time,
played on flutes of stone and stringless lyre.
But dust and clay against the heart conspire;
Seduced, minds weep their tiny china tears.
Will hearts repent their quest and bow to fears,
Will they forget the naming and retire?
Some wait at night the call of flutes of stone
and cast aside the waves of earth's advance.
The clay lies cold and we rejoice alone;
our solitary lives, we dance before the throne.
In higher places seek the circle dance,
the perfect dance, the dance for God alone.

 Image Credit

A Sonnet to the Men in Bunkers Under Washington

This poem was written April 28, 1980 for a poetry class I took with Constance Hunting at the University of Maine.  Now that I think about it, most of the men I was thinking about are all dead and gone, but 30 years later, we are still a nation at war.  Perhaps not the nuclear destruction I envisioned them fleeing, but a conflict no less devastating to the national conscience as we make the slow, steady transition from republic to empire.  I can only wonder in re-reading this how naive this young man was.  Well, Conny seemed to like it, by the grade, I guess, and I hued to the format. That can be said for it, at least.

To the fragile bloom of life we cling,
When war around our lives has pitched its tent.
Lamenting songs of Babylon we sing,
Yet onward press the soldiers, none repent.
We hope, we pray, that all will soon be done;
That peace and truth will guide the ship of state,
But light and justice oft the generals shun,
For darkness is the breeding ground of hate.
Yet hope we still that war will not consume
The hearts and souls of our people fair;
That no one will be taken to presume
We will not seek, for judgement, our betrayer.
Think not this fragile bloom we will let die,
Life's valued more than glory gone awry.


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