Headpiece Filled With Straw

Autumn

The Blind Leading the Blind

By Lisel Mueller

Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave.
The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever.
The ground you walk on is rock. I have been here before.
People come here to be born, to discover, to kiss,
to dream, and to dig and to kill. Watch for the mud.
Summer blows in with scent of horses and roses;
fall with the sound of sound breaking; winter shoves
its empty sleeve down the dark of your throat.
You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from palm,
love from the sweat of love, falling from flying.
There are a thousand turnoffs. I have been here before.
Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold.
Once I stumbled on murder, the thin parts of a girl.
Walk on, keep walking, there are axes above us.
Watch for the occasional bits and bubbles of light.
Birthdays for you, recognitions: yourself, another.
Watch for the mud. Listen for bells, for beggars.
Something with wings went crazy against my chest once.
There are two of us here. Touch me.

Fun web site!
Link: Enter the Jonathan Carroll Web Site.

Rain in Summer

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain, the welcome rain!

The sick man from his chamber looks
At the twisted brooks;
He can feel the cool
Breath of each little pool;
His fevered brain
Grows calm again,
And he breathes a blessing on the rain.

From the neighboring school
Come the boys,
With more than their wonted noise
And commotion;
And down the wet streets
Sail their mimic fleets,
Till the treacherous pool
Ingulfs them in its whirling
And turbulent ocean.

In the country, on every side,
Where far and wide,
Like a leopard's tawny and spotted hide,
Stretches the plain,
To the dry grass and the drier grain
How welcome is the rain!

In the furrowed land
The toilsome and patient oxen stand;
Lifting the yoke encumbered head,
With their dilated nostrils spread,
They silently inhale
The clover-scented gale,
And the vapors that arise
From the well-watered and smoking soil.
For this rest in the furrow after toil
Their large and lustrous eyes
Seem to thank the Lord,
More than man's spoken word.

Near at hand,
From under the sheltering trees,
The farmer sees
His pastures, and his fields of grain,
As they bend their tops
To the numberless beating drops
Of the incessant rain.
He counts it as no sin
That he sees therein
Only his own thrift and gain.

These, and far more than these,
The Poet sees!
He can behold
Aquarius old
Walking the fenceless fields of air;
And from each ample fold
Of the clouds about him rolled
Scattering everywhere
The showery rain,
As the farmer scatters his grain.

He can behold
Things manifold
That have not yet been wholly told,--
Have not been wholly sung nor said.
For his thought, that never stops,
Follows the water-drops
Down to the graves of the dead,
Down through chasms and gulfs profound,
To the dreary fountain-head
Of lakes and rivers under ground;
And sees them, when the rain is done,
On the bridge of colors seven
Climbing up once more to heaven,
Opposite the setting sun.

Thus the Seer,
With vision clear,
Sees forms appear and disappear,
In the perpetual round of strange,
Mysterious change
From birth to death, from death to birth,
From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth;
Till glimpses more sublime
Of things, unseen before,
Unto his wondering eyes reveal
The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel
Turning forevermore
In the rapid and rushing river of Time.

 

The Story We Know

By Martha Collins

The way to begin is always the same. Hello,
Hello. Your hand, your name. So glad, Just fine,
And Good-bye at the end. That's every story we know,

And why pretend? But lunch tomorrow? No?
Yes? An omelette, salad, chilled white wine?
The way to begin is simple, sane, Hello,

And then it's Sunday, coffee, the Times, a slow
Day by the fire, dinner at eight or nine
And Good-bye. In the end, this is a story we know

So well we don't turn the page, or look below
The picture, or follow the words to the next line:
The way to begin is always the same Hello.

But one night, through the latticed window, snow
Begins to whiten the air, and the tall white pine.
Good-bye is the end of every story we know

That night, and when we close the curtains, oh,
We hold each other against that cold white sign
Of the way we all begin and end. Hello,
Good-bye is the only story. We know, we know.

OK, so I'm on a Ted Kooser kick...

I don't know that I'd want to only write poems like this, but they dig into me, like a contemporary "Spoon River Anthology." And I can't help it. I've always had a soft spot for "Spoon River Anthology."

These were on his Poet Laureate site out of Nebraska.

Skater

She was all in black but for a yellow pony tail
that trailed from her cap, and bright blue gloves
that she held out wide, the feathery fingers spread,
as surely she stepped, click-clack, onto the frozen
top of the world. And there, with a clatter of blades,
she began to braid a loose path that broadened
into a meadow of curls. Across the ice she swooped
and then turned back and, halfway, bent her legs
and leapt into the air the way a crane leaps, blue gloves
lifting her lightly, and turned a snappy half-turn
there in the wind before coming down, arms wide,
skating backward right out of that moment, smiling back
at the woman she'd been just an instant before.

from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004

Father

Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day—the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.

from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004

At the Cancer Clinic

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004

Carrie

"There's never an end to dust
and dusting," my aunt would say
as her rag, like a thunderhead,
scudded across the yellow oak
of her little house. There she lived
seventy years with a ball
of compulsion closed in her fist,
and an elbow that creaked and popped
like a branch in a storm. Now dust
is her hands and dust her heart.
There's never an end to it.

from Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980

 

I measure every Grief I meet

(561 in T. Johnson's system)

by Emily Dickinson

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –

I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –

Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –

The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –

There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –
A sort they call "Despair" –
There's Banishment from native Eyes –
In Sight of Native Air –

And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –

To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like My Own –

Further in Summer than the Birds

By Emily Dickinson

Further in Summer than the Birds
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive Mass.

No Ordinance be seen
So gradual the Grace
A pensive Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness.

Antiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify

Remit as yet no Grace
No Furrow on the Glow
Yet a Druidic Difference
Enhances Nature now

Ozymandias of Egypt

By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Link: Ozymandias - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A new poem from the Tenth Muse

I can't believe it took me so long to get this in here. I saw it the first day it posted, no coincidence I suppose that it was on the Solstice, but I wanted the time to read and savor it when I wasn't rushed.

Link: Weekly book reviews and literary criticism from the Times Literary Supplement.

A new Sappho poem

Martin West

21 June 2005

Since classical times, Sappho has been a source of fascination and romantic construction. The ancients, who had nine books of her poems at their disposal, were unstinting in their admiration. Some called her a tenth Muse. Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, calls her a wonder, “for in this whole span of recorded time we know of no woman to challenge her as a poet even in the slightest degree”. In modern times, with only fragments of her poetry remaining, she has remained one of the most famous and evocative names from antiquity, a figure viewed by some with narrowed, by others with widened eyes; a socio-historical enigma, a littérateurs’ Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars’ maypole.

It is difficult to judge her for ourselves when so little of her work remains. What we have
consists on the one hand of quotations and more general references in ancient authors, and on the other hand of torn scraps from ancient papyrus and parchment copies, mostly from the Roman period and, more often than not, so tattered that they yield only a few words or letters from any given line of verse. In modern editions the fragments are numbered up to 264. But many of these do not contain a single original word. Only sixty-three contain any complete lines; only twenty-one contain any complete stanzas; and only three – till now – gave us poems near enough complete to appreciate as literary structures.

A recent find enables us to raise this number to four.

[...]

We have a poem of twelve lines, made up of six two-line stanzas. The last eight lines are virtually complete. The first four are still lacking two or three words each at their beginnings. But we can make out the sentence structure and restore the sense of what is lost, if not the exact words.

Here is the poem in my own restoration and translation. The words in square brackets are supplied by conjecture.

[By Sappho]

"[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts [be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:

[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;

my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.

This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.

Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,

handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife."

The article continues here.

The Well-Adjusted Poet - New York Times

New book of Collected Poems out from Richard Wilbur. I like that. I like Richard Wilbur. So I guess I'll quote a few bits from Stephen Metcalf's New York Times review. And then after that, I'll stick in my favorite Wilbur poem. Try to guess which it will be, before you get there!

Link: The Well-Adjusted Poet - New York Times.

The Well-Adjusted Poet

By STEPHEN METCALF

Published: May 29, 2005

Richard Wilbur is living, white, male and, from all appearances, neither despondent nor mad. This is not a writer to whom glamour will attach easily. (I have cherished Wilbur's poetry for many years, but can recall only one detail from his personal life: he likes Ping-Pong.) Not coincidentally, the last decade to see him pre-eminent was the 50's, when Louise Bogan hailed him in The New Yorker as ''composed of valid ingredients,'' and T. S. Eliot told an interviewer ''I must admit to a continuing respect for Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur.'' Then public taste -- courtesy of ''Howl'' and Lowell's ''Life Studies'' and the phenomenon known as Sylvia Plath -- edged away from Wilbur, and from his dedication to urbanity and metrical poise. Wilbur, it used to be said, coasted along a little too smoothly; he wrote the poem bien fait. In our poets as in our lovers, too much technique leaves us first impressed, then cold and finally resentful, a pattern that could well describe the arc of Wilbur's critical reception over the past half-century. In the end, we would prefer to be ravaged, not finessed.

[...]

This appreciation for composure emerged under keen circumstances, when World War II took Wilbur to Anzio and the Siegfried Line. There he began to ''versify in earnest,'' as he later put it, and to recognize in poetry a means of ''organizing oneself and the world.'' Over the subsequent years, as his peers donned leather jackets or publicly fell to pieces, Wilbur maintained a courtly reticence.

[...]

In short, throughout a career that spans some of the more contentious decades in American history, Wilbur has felt no compulsion to register dissent, horror, disgust or, really, neurotic perturbation of any kind. Over so well-adjusted a poet, suspicion is bound to hover. Can you inspire something more than our admiration?

What follows, then, is Wilbur, from his wonderful ''Seed Leaves'':

Here something stubborn comes,
Dislodging the earth crumbs
And making crusty rubble.
It comes up bending double,
And looks like a green staple.
It could be seedling maple,
Or artichoke, or bean.
That remains to be seen.

Forced to make choice of ends,
The stalk in time unbends,
Shakes off the seed-case, heaves
Aloft, and spreads two leaves
Which display no sure
And special signature.

[...]

In ''Seed Leaves'' the poet recalls the struggle of the still young, against the impulse to cling to their own untested promise, to flower into open air. But the poem is also, in its buttoned-up way, a confession. In English, as in most European languages, ''leaf'' is a synonym for page; the two spreading leaves are meant to remind us of an opening book, in this instance one without any ''sure / And special signature,'' and therefore surely Wilbur's own youthful work.

[...]

In the early sonnet ''Praise in Summer'' from his first book, Wilbur had asked, ''Does sense so stale that it must needs derange / The world to know it?'' He was querying the metaphor-making power of the poet: Why reach for outlandish imagery when the brute facts of nature appear sufficiently incredible unto themselves? Wilbur's answer -- phrased as a question -- was beautifully, perfectly equivocal:

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

Only in metaphor do sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day, so the answer to the poem's question is: Well, yes and no. If properly disciplined, our powers of metaphor-making help us see how fresh and strange the natural world really is. But if we become mere virtuosos, we are left inspecting our own talents, locked once again within the confines of language and the human ego.

[...]

Wilbur had the misfortune to come of age at a time when literary criticism was receding into the academy, and simple, repeatable liturgies involving ''originality'' made the glamorously obscure poem easy to teach, especially to students with no inherited sense of poetic tradition. That era is thankfully at an end. The emergence of a poet like Wilbur as a hero to a new generation of critics is cause for hope: that readers, not gatekeepers, might rediscover poems written in the spirit of generosity and care, and disciplined by the idea of an uncaptive audience.

Sooooo, which one should I pick? "First Snow in Alsace"? Massively cool poem, but nope, the Wilbur poem that has always stuck with me is the one about the dog.

The Pardon

By Richard Wilbur (1950)

My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive

Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man. My father took the spade

And buried him. Last night I saw the grass
Slowly divide (it was the same scene
But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green)
And saw the dog emerging. I confess

I felt afraid again, but still he came
In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies,
And death was breeding in his lively eyes.
I started in to cry and call his name,

Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head.
..I dreamt the past was never past redeeming:
But whether this was false or honest dreaming
I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

The Heaven of Animals

By James Dickey

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains it is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these, it could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle's center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.