a distraction, not a prayer

It’s been some time since I’ve posted a poem, so here goes one.  maybe since it’s titled “The Elephant,” Emily will hate it less?  Probably not.  It’s by Dan Chiasson.

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy.

Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion, once I was not the elephant I find I am.

My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was

somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me

to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind

I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers

breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments with balance, the high-wire act and cones.

We elephants are images of humility, as when we undertake our melancholy migrations to die.

Did you know, though, that elephants were taught to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves?

Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven—as a distraction, not a prayer.

That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys: it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

a day to be remembered

here is another poem from W. S. Merwin, titled “The Anniversary of My Death.”

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

I need to get my hands on a book of his work.

I sit beside the fire and think

this is for Hilary: it’s a song in The Fellowship of the Ring that Bilbo sings in Rivendell.

I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

with lips but half regretful

today I read an essay written by Richard Rorty in the last year of his life, in which he regrets not having spent more of that life with verse.  he discusses a few bits of poetry that had meant a great deal to him in his life, the sorts of things he turned to — not religion or philosophy — when nearing his end.  he turned to these not because they contain truths that cannot be expressed in prose, or truths that cannot be found elsewhere; indeed, he writes,

There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

he speaks, instead, of the effect verse had on him, namely, the imagery, rhythm, and rhyme, all of which

conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of  impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.

anyway, one “old chestnut” he quotes comes from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Prosperine,” which I then read and was very impressed by.  so I reproduce here a few of the opening and closing verses:

Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.

…

We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
Today will die tomorrow;
Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.

great thoughts

another poem by Kay Ryan:

Great thoughts

do not nourish

small thoughts

as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,

they make the soil

beneath them barren.

Standing in a

grove of them

is hideous.

and I suppose a symphony of the loudest instruments would be a bit off-putting.

a refusal to mourn

another Dylan Thomas poem that works for me, titled “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”  death not to be trivialized and made into propaganda, death not to be brushed away, but death not to be feared, not because of anything that follows (or doesn’t), but because of how it unites us with everything else.  can’t say I wouldn’t mourn this death, though…

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering 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 let 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.

a praise song

here is Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for President Obama’s inauguration, “Praise Song for the Day.”  I remember being impressed by a few lines in particular, mostly those dealing with language (how I love it) and playful bindings of verb phrases as nouns, as in “the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.”  I’m still a fan of certain elements of formal, structured poetry, but I am beginning to appreciate more modern poetry as I grow to love great writing.  whether poetry or prose, what matters is an unconventional or simply unusual lyrical capturing of ideas or feelings, a modern spell, if you will.

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

before He knocked

I picked up a book of Dylan Thomas’ poetry a few weeks ago, and I’ve slowly been sounding it out and seeing how I like it.  so far, so OK.  often I don’t think I really grasp what he’s trying to convey.  but then again, I don’t think that’s entirely my fault; I just don’t think he’s always that clear.  lots of ornate imagery that, at least I think, deliberately create discords in meaning.  so I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to really understand, as opposed to what is supposed to just impress (on) me.

some of the poems I do “get” are ones involving Christ imagery, esp. the Incarnation narrative, and the overall Christian “myth” (not used pejoratively).  my favorite so far may be the pattern poem “Vision and Prayer,” but that’s way too long to reproduce here.  but this one, “Before I Knocked,” was the first one that allowed me to understand Thomas better.  there’s a bit of pagan mythology thrown in here, which he apparently loved just as much, but it’s mostly Christian, though not necessarily orthodox…

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha’s daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh’s armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.

quite lovely.  even we AASHs (atheist/agnostic secular humanists — fyi, I just made that up) can appreciate myths now and then (again, as in “sacred narrative,” not necessarily “false story”), esp. ones we are familiar with, and ones that are so heavy with images and symbols ripe to be reworked and reinterpreted. I sort of wish I belonged to a culture with a more mixed mythic background, maybe indigenous American or Nordic, so that there would be more out there as cultural capital.  not to mention holiday carols!

a coming extinction

a poem (sorry, Emily), “For a Coming Extinction,”  by W. S. Merwin, the twice-Pulitzer’d American poet.

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

lure of the fallen seraphim

here is the villanelle poem that Stephen writes as he wakes up one morning in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man’s heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.