Passengers by Billy Collins

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Traveling to Chicago this week, this poem concerning flying struck me.  I am sure Breanne knows what I mean, although I am sure she doesn't feel like jubilizing . . . . .

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats

with the possible company of my death,

this sprawling miscellany of people---

carry-on bags and paperbacks---

that could be gathered in a flash

into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.

Not that I think

if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,

holding hands like a ring of sky divers,

into a sudden gasp of brightness,

or that there would be some common spot

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,

some spaceless, pillarless Greece

where we could, at the count of three,

toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It's just that the way that man has his briefcase

so carefully arranged,

the way that girl is cooling her tea,

and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter's hair . . . 

and when you consider the altitude,

the secret parts of the engines,

and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . . .

well, I think it would be good if one of us

maybe stood up and said a few words,

or, so as not to involve the police,

at least quietly wrote something down.

Roots: Epigrams

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These epigrams are pretty good pointers to the influences and reading I did in the past that led me to write and be a thinking person.  Sorry I don't have more specific references, other than the book titles.

"To write poetry means to exist in that joy which preserves in words the mystery of proximity to the Most Joyous.  Joy is the joy of the poet."

"Remembrances of the Poet", Martin Heidegger 

"The Chinese poet relates that men did not want to hear the song that he was playing on his flute of jade; then he played it to the gods, and they inclined their ears; and ever since, men, too have listened to the song . . . "  And thus he went from the gods to those whom the image cannot dispense.

I and Thou , Martin Buber

" . . . 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, Mircea Eliade

"Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."

T.S. Eliot

 "Ignorant people use the most idiotic words sometimes with a dignity, a force of feeling that makes them glow and flare.  I listen in profound silence . . . later I try to imitate. I almost always fail."

William Carlos Williams

I am soft sift
In the hourglass - at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
  And it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
  Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift.

"The Wreck of the Deutschland", Gerard Manley Hopkins

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:
-- A day of dappled seaborne clouds --
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord.  Words.  Was it their colours?  He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue; sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds.  No, it was not their colours; it was the poise and balance of the period itself.  Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour?  Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure form the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man, James Joyce

" . . .On the other hand there is Flossie, my wife, who is the rock on which I have built.  But as far as my wish is concerned, I could not be satisfied by five hundred women.  As I said at the beginning, I was always an innocent child . . . Men have given direction to my life and women have always supplied the energy."

William Carlos Williams

Talking with Lover

These poems were written after meeting Dawn's grandmother who the family called Lover.  She was colorful, to say the least.  She lived to attend our marriage, but these poems were written after that , probably in the early 1980' and , based on a night of conversation with her at her apartment in Southhampton.  I distinctly remember coming into her apartment in the middle afternoon and her first suggestion was that I 'make myself a highball', totally baffling to a recent college grad in the '80s.  I found her charming and hilarious, as I did my own grandmother, but I heard that she was a force of nature in her day.  As a child, she was bilingual in German and had visited her family in Northern German with her mother.  Her father worked at the Arion Club in New York and they lived in apartment there for a time. I tried to capture her voice and cadence in these poems.

i
I remember very clearly,
very clearly,
the kitchen, lace curtains and
the little garden
outside the door and the long window

like this, you see.

They had a bowl of cherries on the table
- always adults around me then - and
they told me not to eat anymore.
But when they left,
I did,
pits and all.

Yes, that must have been in
nineteen and four

or five.

ii
This is my father.
(The proud
moustachoed
German,
stout as a puppy,
on his horse in Central Park.)

He died of heart failure
at the age of thirty.
Mother believed it was
because of the five flights he had to walk up
to where we lived above the Arion Club.
When Mother told me - I was six -, I said
"Aber Mutter, musst du wieder trauen."

I accepted it.

iii
(She glows like sixty years ago,
dusky hair in a thick braid next to
her dark eyes and girlish smile.)

We walked arm in arm along the beach
but the next day her brother came and told us
that she had died.  Of polio, the night before.
Her mother never recovered from her grief.

We had walked arm in arm - that day!

So you see, there have been sorrows
like your own

great sorrows.