Bright Lights, Big City

Warm greetings from snowy Tianjin! All is well; I’m safe, healthy, alive, etc. All of my needs have been tended to, and most of my expectations have been exceeded. Really, I’m a little embarrassed by the expectations I had for this country and for this city. This is modern China. If reading the NY Times every day for the last three years has taught me anything, it’s that this is the future of our world. I still can’t tell you if that’s a good or a bad thing; no one can, I don’t think. But it’s fascinating walking around in a place like this, where the oncoming millennium seems to be converging (or colliding, I suppose) with an ancient world. A subway that feels like an Epcot ride, an airport that looks like the set in Synecdoche, New York, and an ocean of history just below the surface, bubbling up in small, strange, unexpected ways that I might be cognizant of only because I'm new to it all and always vigilant. To be sure, Tianjin isn’t Shanghai, or Tokyo, or Seoul, but it’s huge. It’s immense, almost overpowering; so much so that I can’t imagine living in a city bigger than this one (how could one of those super-cities not be overpowering?). 10 million. That’s how many people live here. I’ve heard 8, 10, and 12 from various anecdotal sources, so I’m averaging them when I say 10. But I’ve heard, also, that no one knows how many people live here, that no one can know because so many new residents are unregistered. The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China—and this is one of them. It’s alive and chaotic like no other city I’ve ever seen.

I’m ashamed of how nice my apartment is. It’s nicer than anything I need, and better than what I’m conditioned to think a teacher should have the means to attain. I can get lost in the view from the 20th floor—the neon cityscape at night, the sea of skyscrapers that goes on for miles—and I do, often. There’s no such thing as a “downtown” here; skyscrapers are built wherever they’re needed, wherever they’re wanted, and the effect this has on pedestrians, I can tell you, is disorienting. Getting my bearings will take time. So far, my approach has been to walk in one direction till I’m out of the forest, so to speak, till the buildings shrink down to normal size—and I can’t do it. You can walk for miles (or km, here) and a ways off in the distance, behind the haze, wherever you go, there are invariably more buildings looming, silver and gray and forbidding.

None of this is bad news in the least, mind you. The sooner I begin to understand this place, the sooner it will no doubt start to bore me. For now, it’s bewildering and magnificent and only slightly oppressive. From my window, the flashing lights, the ceaseless din of car horns, the fireworks at night all call out like a harsh challenge from a bully: dig deep, adapt, show me what you’re made of, there’s nowhere to run, you’re a part of all this now. Testing my mettle, both in the classroom and every day in the streets, for right now at least feels really, really good.

There’s been snow on the ground here since before I arrived, and tonight it’s snowing again, so in honor of that, here’s a poem called “The Snowbound City” by a poet who survived on his own on the Alaskan frontier for decades, sort of like a less tragic, less puerile version of the kid from Into the Wild. I like it and hope, as always, that you do too.
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The Snowbound City

by John Haines

I believe in this stalled magnificence,
this churning chaos of traffic,
a beast with broken spine,
its hoarse voice hooded in feathers
and mist; the baffled eyes
wink amber and slowly darken.

Of men and women suddenly walking,
stumbling with little sleighs
in search of Tibetan houses —
dust from a far-off mountain
already whitens their shoulders.

When evening falls in blurred heaps,
a man losing his way among churches
and schoolyards feels under his cold hand
the stone thoughts of that city,

impassable to all but a few children
who went on into the hidden life
of caves and winter fires,
their faces glowing with disaster.
_________________________________________________________

Goodbye, Occident

The long and arduous process of packing has commenced. Tomorrow morning I depart, and Thursday afternoon I arrive in Tianjin. Today, while out and about running errands I went to mass at the old parish where I went to elementary school. Attending mass on a Tuesday is atypical for me, but I wanted this morning to sit for awhile and think about my next transition in the company of the nice, old people who go to mass every day. But to my surprise, I found the church filled to the brim with students when I stepped inside. So I sat in the back and observed, and listened to a homily about childhood and adulthood, about the struggles of growing up, and the things a person needs to have in good supply to become a happy and effectual grown-up. It was poignant and a little surreal; I felt like a character in crisis in a movie, returning to his roots for wisdom on how to live and live well. Had it been a movie, I probably would have teared up and emerged resolute and certain of how to make the most of the next phase of my life; instead, the principal scolded the whole congregation for not singing loud enough and none of the students' mothers in the back would give me the sign of peace, presumably because I either look like I have a cold or they suspected I had dubious motives for attending children's mass. I feel better, nonetheless. I have a long afternoon ahead of me, trying to cram more into suitcases than I can probably get away with at the airport, so let me leave you with a small litany of poems that have been on my mind, for various reasons I really just don't have time fully flesh out right now. Trust me though, they're worth a read-through. I'll see you again on the other side.
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Poem at Thirty
by Michael Ryan

The rich little kids across the street
twist their swings in knots. Near me,
on the porch, wasps jazz old nesting tunes
and don't get wild over human sweat.
This is the first summer of my middle life.
I ought to be content. The mindless harsh
process of history; with its diverse murders
and starvations, its whippings, humiliations,
child-tyrants, and beasts, I don't care for
or understand. Nor do I understand
restlessness that sometimes stops my sleep.

Waking, those mornings, is like being thrown from a train.
All you know comes to falling:
the body, in its witless crooning for solidity,
keeps heading for the ground.
There is no air, no sound, nothing
but dumb insistence of body weight
coming down, and there is no thought of love,
or passing time, or don't want to be alone.
Probably one hundred thousand impressions
wrinkle the brain in a moment like this,
but if you could think about it
you'd admit the world goes on in any case,
roars on, in fact, without you, on its endless iron track.



But most mornings I ease awake:
also a falling,
but delicate as an agile wing
no one may touch with hands,
a transparent wing like a distant moan
arriving disembodied of pleasure or pain,
a wing that dissolves on the tongue,
a wing that has never flown.

Because I've awakened like this,
I think I could love myself quietly
and let the world go on.

So today I watched a pudgy neighbor
edge her lawn, and heard the small blade whine;
I saw her husband, the briefcase man,
whiz off in his Mercedes without a glance.
I believe I'm beginning to understand
that I don't know what such things mean:
stupid pain or pure tranquillity,
desire's dull ache or conquering the body,
the need to say we and be known to someone
or what I see in myself as I sit here alone.

The sun glares most mornings
like an executive's thick pinky diamond,
and slowly the dark backs off
This is one reason this morning I awakened.



No one can tell you how to be alone.
Some fine people I've known swirl to me
in airy forms like just so much hot dust.
They have all moved through in dreams.
A lover's smell, the gut laugh of a friend,
become hard to recall as a particular wind.

No one can tell you how to be alone.
Like the deep vacuum in sleep, nothing
holds you up or knocks you down, only
it doesn't end in waking but goes on and on.
The tangles of place, the floating in time,
you must accept gently like a favorite dream.

If you can't, and you don't, the mind
unlocks the mind. Madness, with his lewd grin,
always waits outside the window, always
wanting to come in. I've gone out before,
both to slit his throat and to kiss his hand.
No one can tell you how to be alone:

Watch tiny explosions as flowers break ground;
hear the children giggle, rapid and clean.
It's hard to care about ordinary things.
Doesn't pain expand from lack of change?
I can't grasp exactly the feelings of anyone.
No one can tell you how to be alone.



At thirty the body begins to slow down.
Does that make for the quiet on this porch,
a chemical ability to relax and watch?
If a kid bounces her pelvis against a chain-link fence,
bounces so metal sings
and it seems she must be hurting herself
how old must I get before I tell her to stop?

Right now, I let her do it.
She's so beautiful in her filthy T-shirt
and gym shorts, her hair swings with each clang,
and she can do no wrong.
I let her do it as background music
to storm clouds moving in like a dark army.
I let her do it as a fond wish for myself
I feel the vibration of the fence
as a wasp feels voices on a pane of glass.
The song in it I can't make out.

This day, then, ends in rain
but almost everyone will live through it.
Tomorrow's thousands losing their loved ones
have not yet stepped into never being the same again.
Maybe the sun's first light will hit me
in those moments, but I'd gladly wake to feel it:
the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart.

_____________________________________________________

Ray
by Hayden Carruth

How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

("Ray" refers here to Raymond Carver, whose own genius is most clearly illustrated here.)
_____________________________________________________

Three Truths, One Story
by Maurice Manning


In faith, dear friend, I can't make up
a name like Turnipseed, or that

I knew a man who went by such
a goodly name. Now, everything

I'm telling you is true. This man
had come from people who knew what they

were doing once, and why it mattered.
Do you know what you're doing? Do you

know something old? A turnipseed
is tiny, it's a little bit

of hardly anything. I guess
that's something old to know: you could hold

an itty bit of almost nothing
and know it's something still, and know

it's always been that way. Do you
like knowing things like that? I knew

a bunch of folks some years ago
whose name was Stonecypher, I kid

you not, and some of them were still
engaged with stones and had the hands

to prove it. They lived way out. Speaking
of out there places, my father told

me just the other day a tale
about his mother: Mama came

from Leatherwood, he said, Lord knows
what they were doing there, back then.

And that is true for sure; there's not
a living person left to say

what they were doing there. They had
a stripey mule, as Mama said—

the stripes run crossed the ginny's flank—
she told me once, but she is gone,

and missing her has gotten old.
There are words and there are deeds, and both

are dying out, dying away
from where they were and what they meant.

God save the man who has the heart
to think of anything more sad.

______________________________________________________

The Lost Pilot
by James Tate


for my father, 1922-1944

Your face did not rot
like the others--the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others--it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,

with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger's life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

_____________________________________________________

Next Day
by Randall Jarrell

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I've become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I'd wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I'm old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn't see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water--
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don't know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work--I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: "You're old." That's all, I'm old.

And yet I'm afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend's cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I'm anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

_____________________________________________________

Birthday
by Henri Cole

When I was a boy, we called it punishment
to be locked up in a room. God's apparent
abdication from the affairs of the world
seemed unforgivable. This morning,
climbing five stories to my apartment,
I remember my father's angry voice
mixed up with anxiety & love. As always,
the possibility of home—at best an ideal—
remains illusory, so I read Plato, for whom love
has not been punctured. I sprawl on the carpet,
like a worm composting, understanding things
about which I have no empirical knowledge.
Though the door is locked, I am free.
Like an outdated map, my borders are changing.

_____________________________________________________

Questions of Travel
by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

_____________________________________________________

This Is Just To Say

I have had
a wonderful
Christmas

and I hope
yours
was lovely too

white Christmases
so sweet
and so cold




P.S. I also ate all your plums.

Merry Christmas! Go laugh till your jawbone stings.

This is probably unfair to Auden (whose own work is superior by most measures), but I can't think of him without remembering the poem that William Matthews wrote in his honor. It's a taut, expertly-crafted poem from the first line ("His heart made a last fist") to the last ("The sure hand is cruel"). And the rest of the poems that follow it below are just as magnificent. Matthews himself is a criminally underrated American treasure as a poet. Am I overstating my case? Probably, but I'm biased; Matthews is one of just a handful of writers I read as a teenager that I still enjoy, without guilt, today. I don't know why I started reading him so early. I just found his book in a library serendipitously. That was, if I remember correctly, a very good day.

____________________________________________________

In Memory of W. H. Auden

1.

His heart made a last fist.
The language has used him
well and passed him through.
We get what he collected.
The magpie shines, burns
in the face of the polished stone.

2.

His was a mind alive by a pure greed
for reading, for the book
which "is a mirror,"
as Lichtenberg said: "if an ass
peers into it, you can't expect
an apostle to look out."

It was a mediating mind.
There were the crowds like fields of waving wheat
and there was the Rilkean fire
he didn't like
at the bottom of the night.
He loomed back and forth.
The space shrank.
The dogs of Europe wolved
about the house,
darks defining a campfire.

3.

My friend said Auden died
because his face
invaded his body.
Under the joke is a myth --
we invent our faces:
the best suffer most and it shows.
But what about the face
crumpled by a drunk's Buick?
Or Auden's
face in its fugue of photographs
so suddenly resolved?
It isn't suffering that eats us.

4.

They were not painting about suffering,
the Old Masters. Not the human heart but
Brueghel turns the plowman away
for compositional reasons
and smooths the waters for a ship he made
expensive and delicate.
The sun is implied by how
the sure hand makes the light fall
as long as we watch the painting.
The sure hand is cruel.
_____________________________________________________

The Party

I don't care if nobody
under forty can hang a door
properly. I'm six and I'm bored.
In the kitchen Lavada
is plucking a turkey
who looks crumpled
and turned inside out.
He's full of holes.
I throw my skinny arms in the air
as far as my bones will let them go
and giggle. It's ten years to Lavada's heart
attack and sixty to mine.
Black, overweight Lavada tucks
a feather in her hair
and we dance, her triceps
wobbling like charred wattles. We laugh
until our jawbones sting
as if we'd drunk mossy
cold, rust-flecked water
from the bottom of the well.
_____________________________________________________

Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens,
Professional Basketball, 1959

The less we paid, the more we climbed. Tendrils
of smoke lazed just as high and hung there, blue,
particulate, the opposite of dew.
We saw the whole court from up there. Few girls
had come, few wives, numerous boys in molt
like me. Our heroes leapt and surged and looped
and two nights out of three, like us, they'd lose.
But "like us" is wrong: we had no result
three nights out of three: so we had heroes.
And "we" is wrong, for I knew none by name
among that hazy company unless
I brought her with me. This was loneliness
with noise, unlike the kind I had at home
with no clock running down, and mirrors.
_____________________________________________________

Misgivings

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab,
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may augur we're on our own

for good reasons. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door, "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.
_____________________________________________________

Bedtime

Usually I stay up late, my time
alone. Tonight at 9:oo I can tell
I'm only awake long enough
to put my sons to bed.
When I start to turn off lights
the boys are puzzled. They're used
to entering sleep by ceding to me
their hum and fizz, the way they give me
50¢ to hold so they can play
without money. I'm their night-light.
I'm the bread baked while they sleep.
And I can scarcely stand up, dry
in the mouth and dizzied
by fatigue. From our rooms
we call back and forth the worn
magic of our passwords and let one
another go. In the morning Sebastian
asks who was the last to fall
asleep and none of us cares or knows.
____________________________________________________

Money

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely: the cucumbers,
and the melons, and the leeks, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried
away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.
-Numbers 11:4

"Honey, I don't want to shock you,
but white people aren't white,
they're pink," a rich man's cook
told me when I was six. She was beating
egg whites for lemon meringue pie,
which the boss loved. Well then,
I thought, I'll sing for my supper,
and it worked then, though later
I got Jell-O often, and for so
little grew rancid with charm.

I rode the bike and flung the daily
paper from it. I got the grades
and brought them home. I caught
the ball and threw it back and fed
the dog while the ball was in flight,
and didn't ask, "Have I got this right?"
There were those who were good
for nothing and I set myself apart
from them. I'd make myself at home
here, like a weevil in the flour,

or like a mouse behind the stove.
The cat that killed that mouse was so
lazy and fat that it lay before
its bowl to eat and lived to be sixteen.
I remember my first raise. I smoldered
with a stupid, durable pleasure for weeks:
this stuff is powerful, like alcohol,
I thought, but it wasn't stuff, it was numbers,
nothing more than squiggles of dried ink,
though they were like new muscles

(from the Latin musculus, "little
mouse," for the ripple under the skin).
There were people said to be smart about
money because they had a good supply,
like those who were known to have good taste
since they shared the taste of those who said so.
I didn't want smart, though knowledge sticks
to me like dust to a dog--I'm a kind
of intellectual Velcro. Still, I do
sniff around, because that's what I wanted,

my snout to the confounded, uric ground.
"Led by the nose," even your friends will say
if you can't, or won't, describe what you want.
Or "driven," it doesn't seem to matter
which, so long as the engine isn't you.
"A simple farmboy with a smattering
of Latin, my ass," Friend B tells Friend A.
"Did you notice the shoes on that peacock?"
Friendship, too, is a species of money.
You get what you need by never knowing

what you want; you ramble like a sentence
growing ever longer and carefully
avoiding verbs, so if you imagine
the exact verb you've got a space for it,
and the fit's so tight you'd not know
there'd ever been a gap but for the ache,
which is yours always, like a phantom limb.
If you're rich enough you can be haunted
by all the dross you ever wanted,
and if you're poor enough you itch
for money all the time and scratch yourself
with anger, or, worse, hope. These thoughts
aren't dark; they're garishly well lit. Let's see
what's on TV. The news--murder and floods
and something heartwarming about a dog--
and then a commercial, but for what?
A woman in a blue silk dress eases
into a gray sedan and swirls it through turn
after turn alongside the Pacific.
She drives it right onto the beach

while the sun subsides and the ocean laces
and unlaces at her feet. She walks and pouts,
hooking her slate-colored pumps on her
left index finger. She'll ruin her new
hose and doesn't care. She purses her bruised-fruit
lips, and the sea, like a dull dog,
brings back what we throw out. What do
we want, and how much will we pay
to find out, and how much never to know?
What's wrong with money is what's wrong with love:

it spurns those who need it most for someone
already rolling in it. But only
the idea of justice is about
being just, and it's only an idea.
Money's not an abstraction; it's math
with consequences, and if it's a kind
of poetry, it's another inexact way,
like time, to measure some sorrow we can't
name. The longer you think about
either, the stupider you get,

while dinner grows tepid and stale.
The dogs have come in like a draft
to beg for scraps and nobody's
at the table. The father works on tax forms.
The mother folds laundry and hums
something old and sweetly melancholy.
The children drift glumly towards fracas.
None of these usual doldrums will lift
for long if they sit down to dinner, but
there's hunger to mollify, and the dogs.
____________________________________________________

But to-day the struggle.

I'll admit I've had an ulterior motive in adding so much poetry over the course of the past week. It's true that I want to share these poems with you guys, my anonymous readers, but I'm also posting them so that I personally will have them readily available while I'm traveling. The sad reality is I own too many books, and I won't be able to bring all of them with me to China. So posting all these poems here makes it a little bit easier to pack a little bit lighter.

With that in my mind, here's today's poem. Yeah, just one poem today. It's Auden's "Spain," a peculiar choice, perhaps. It's a war poem that Auden himself disliked in the later years of his life, one he eschewed and apologized for. It's the sweet-and-fitting-to-die-for-one's-country kind of war poem, but I like to read it independent of its historical context, knowing full well I shouldn't do that. To be fair, it's not like I would ever write a paper defending this strategy of deliberate ignorance; I know it's no way to competently tackle a great poem like this, but when I read the poem critically, it seems less great. Funny how that works. As it is, I prefer to pretend the Spanish Civil War never happened, and pretend the lines that refer to war are more inscrutable than they actually are. The truth is I find certain lines here lovely enough (e.g., "To-morrow the bicycle races / through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.") to warrant turning a blind eye to the lines which are, when fully understood, indefensible (e.g., "The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder"). And most importantly, this is a poem that gets me through hard days (and I have no way of knowing now what kinds of days I'll run into in China). The lesson I derive here is a simple one: good fortune comes always as a consequence of struggles; it falls upon the shoulders of those who sacrifice enough to make room for it. After long days, when the struggle feels interminable and the sacrifices severe, there's real comfort to be found in a lesson like that. Great things will ensue. They always do, and they always have, and all the great things we possess already are proof of that. And I don't care, I stand by my reading: there's no harm in reading a poem like this with one eye closed if that's what it takes to make a bad day better.

____________________________________________________

Spain

Yesterday all the past. The language of size
spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion
of the counting-frame and the cromlech;
yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates.

Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards,
the divination of water; yesterday the invention
of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of
horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators.

Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley,
the chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles;

the trial of heretics among the columns of stone;
yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns
and the miraculous cure at the fountain;
yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines,
the construction of railways in the colonial desert;
yesterday the classic lecture
on the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle.

Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek,
the fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero;
yesterday the prayer to the sunset
and the adoration of madmen. But to-day the struggle.

As the poet whispers, startled among the pines,
or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright
on the crag by the leaning tower:
"O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor."

And the investigator peers through his instruments
at the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus
or enormous Jupiter finished:
"But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire."

And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us
history the operator, the
organiser. Time the refreshing river."

And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
that shapes the individual belly and orders
the private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city-state of the sponge,

"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
and the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. O descend as a dove or
a furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."

And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart
and the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city
"O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

"What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain."

Many have heard it on remote peninsulas,
on sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands
or the corrupt heart of the city.
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.

They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
they floated over the oceans;
they walked the passes. All presented their lives.

On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot
Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe;
on that tableland scored by rivers,
our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever

are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond
to the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises
have become invading battalions;
and our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin

are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb.
Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom
as the ambulance and the sandbag;
our hours of friendship into a people's army.

To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue
and the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the
octaves of radiation;
to-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing.

To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
the photographing of ravens; all the fun under
liberty's masterful shadow;
to-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,

the beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
to-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
the eager election of chairmen
by the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.

To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
the walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
to-morrow the bicycle races
through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle.

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
to-day the expending of powers
on the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette,
the cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert,
the masculine jokes; to-day the
fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and
history to the defeated
may say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
____________________________________________________

Two Trains Running

I'm not as big a fan of Tony Hoagland as are a number of people I know (I'm not sure, incidentally, whether Hoagland is pronounced with a long or short o--I've been told both). At his worst, I think he's a little bit smug. But when he's at his best, as he is in the poems below, he makes it all look easy: seamlessly blending tender emotion with a kind of wit that really is uniquely his. The poem I especially wanted to share is "Windchime," which I think is wonderful, and which entered my mind for no real reason at all today while I was outside. Sorry if my posts seem to be getting shorter, but in my defense, so are the days.
____________________________________________________

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

and as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
he says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
of the thick satin quilt of America

and I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

and then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
it was not blood but money

that gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

he gasped, “Thank God—those Ben Franklins were
clogging up my heart—

and so I perish happily,
freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
would never speak in rhymed couplets,

and I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
and I think, “I am asleep in America too,

and I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
and I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
when I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
or what kind of nightmare it might be

when each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
and you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

even while others are drowning underneath you
and you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

and yet it seems to be your own hand
which turns the volume higher?
____________________________________________________

Two Trains

Then there was that song called “Two Trains Running,”
a Mississippi blues they play on late-night radio,
that program after midnight called FM In The AM,
--well, I always thought it was about trains.

Then somebody told me it was about what a man and woman do
under the covers of their bed, moving back and forth
like slow pistons in a shiny black locomotive,
the rods and valves trying to stay coordinated

long enough that they will "get to the station"
at the same time. And one of the trains
goes out of sight into the mountain tunnel,
but when they break back into the light

the other train has somehow pulled ahead,
the two trains running like that, side by side,
first one and then the other, with the fierce white
bursts of smoke puffing from their stacks,
into a sky so sharp and blue you want to die.

So then for a long time I thought the song was about sex.

But then Mack told me that all train songs
are really about Jesus, about how the second train
is shadowing the first, so He walks in your footsteps
and He watches you from behind, He is running with you,

He is your brakeman and your engineer,
your coolant and your coal,
and He will catch you when you fall,
and when you stall He will push you through
the darkest mountain valley, up the steepest hill,

and the rough chuff chuff of His fingers on the washboard
and the harmonica woo woo is the long soul cry by which He
pulls you through the bloody tunnel of the world.
So then I thought the two trains song was a gospel song.

Then I quit my job in Santa Fe and Sharon drove
her spike heel through my heart
and I got twelve years older and Dean moved away,
and now I think the song might be about good-byes--

because we are not even in the same time zone,
or moving at the same speed, or perhaps even
headed toward the same destination--
forgodsakes, we are not even trains!

What grief it is to love some people like your own
blood and then to see them simply disappear;
to feel time bearing us away
one boxcar at a time.

And sometimes, sitting in my chair
I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions--
like the deaf, defoliated silence
just after a train has thundered past the platform,

just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again
--and the wildflowers that grow along the tracks
wobble wildly on their little stems,
then gradually grow still and stand

motherless and vertical in the middle of everything.
____________________________________________________

Hard Rain

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a T-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time—

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood--
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.
_____________________________________________________

Windchime

She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand,
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she’s trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it—the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn’t making
because it wasn’t there.

No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it.
____________________________________________________

My place where I must stand and fail

In church today, I thought of the A.R. Ammons poem, "Easter Morning." Wrong holiday, I know, but it's a poem I'll occasionally remember when I'm home, no matter the season, no matter the circumstances. It's precisely the kind of poem I promised I'd share here: the kind that's ingrained in me, the kind I'll remember as long I remember my own name. I'll let it speak for itself because I don't doubt it does. And I'll also include some other poems of his, all of which are stirring or penetrating in one way or another. Like Stafford, Ammons had a knack for writing poems that swelled with candor, empathy, and earnestness. Sometimes a good poem really needs no more than that.
____________________________________________________

Easter Morning

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow or grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, it's convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how he's shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles who
were the rumored fathers of cousins
who whispered of them as of great, if
troubled, presences, and school
teachers, just about everybody older
(and some younger) collected in one place
waiting, particularly, but not for
me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in, gone

the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
can't get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry, now it can't come
back with help or helpful asides, now
we all buy the bitter
incompletions, pick up the knots of
horror, silently raving, and go on
crashing into empty ends not
completions, not rondures the fullness
has come into and spent itself from

I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail,
calling attention with tears
to the branches not lofting
boughs into space, to the barren
air that holds the world that was my world

though the incompletions
(& completions) burn out
standing in the flash high-burn
momentary structure of ash, still it
is a picture-book, letter-perfect
Easter morning: I have been for a
walk: the wind is tranquil: the brook
works without flashing in an abundant
tranquility: the birds are lively with
voice: I saw something I had
never seen before: two great birds,
maybe eagles, blackwinged, whitenecked
and -headed, came from the south oaring
the great wings steadily; they went
directly over me, high up, and kept on
due north: but then one bird,
the one behind, veered a little to the
left and the other bird kept on seeming
not to notice for a minute: the first
began to circle as if looking for
something, coasting, resting its wings
on the down side of some of the circles:
the other bird came back and they both
circled, looking perhaps for a draft;
they turned a few more times, possibly
rising--at least, clearly resting--,
then flew on falling into distance till
they broke across the local bush and
trees: it was a sight of bountiful
majesty and integrity: the having
patterns and routes, breaking
from them to explore other patterns or
better ways to routes, and then the
return: a dance sacred as the sap in
the trees, permanent in its descriptions
as the ripples round the brook's
ripplestone: fresh as this particular
flood of burn breaking across us now
from the sun.
____________________________________________________

Reflective

I found a
weed
that had a

mirror in it
and that
mirror

looked in at
a mirror
in

me that
had a
weed in it
____________________________________________________

Mountain Talk

I was going along a dusty highroad
when the mountain
across the way
turned me to its silence:
oh I said how come
I don't know your
massive symmetry and rest:
nevertheless, said the mountain,
would you want
to be
lodged here
with a changeless prospect, risen
to an unalterable view:
so I went on
counting my numberless fingers.
____________________________________________________

In View of the Fact

The people of my time are passing away: my
wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: well, we never

thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know
what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like
to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many,
brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so
many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the
congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

the nice old men left in empty houses or on
the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll
drink wine together and think of what used to

be: until we die we will remember every
single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to
others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper till the very end, gaining strength
and getting more precious all the way. . . .
____________________________________________________

Still

I said I will find what is lowly
and put the roots of my identity
down there:
each day I'll wake up
and find the lowly nearby,
a handy focus and reminder,
a ready measure of my significance,
the voice by which I would be heard,
the wills, the kinds of selfishness
I could
freely adopt as my own:

but though I have looked everywhere,
I can find nothing
to give myself to:
everything is

magnificent with existence, is in
surfeit of glory:
nothing is diminished,
nothing has been diminished for me:

I said what is more lowly than the grass:
ah, underneath,
a ground-crust of dry-burnt moss:
I looked at it closely
and said this can be my habitat: but
nestling in I
found
below the brown exterior
green mechanisms beyond the intellect
awaiting resurrection in rain: so I got up

and ran saying there is nothing lowly in the universe:
I found a beggar:
he had stumps for legs: nobody was paying
him any attention: everybody went on by:
I nestled in and found his life:
there, love shook his body like a devastation:
I said
though I have looked everywhere
I can find nothing lowly
in the universe:

I whirled through transfigurations up and down,
transfigurations of size and shape and place:

at one sudden point came still,
stood in wonder:
moss, beggar, weed, tick, pine, self, magnificent
with being!
____________________________________________________