On Turning Ten by Billy Collins

I have been reading Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins, the Poet Laureate.  I am not taking a lot away from the book so far.  He certainly can write, but I don't feel moved by most of his poems.  Sometimes, however, I need to re-read them a couple of times.  One however, struck me immediately.  I was reminded of some conversations I have had recently with Emica about her childhood and  in thinking about my own. It is the fourth stanza that resonated with me in this poem.



On Turning Ten


The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something, 
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light - 
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of  the soul.


You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.


But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.


This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.


It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees, I bleed.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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