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!
____________________________________________________

Traveling Through the Dark

I was going to skip a day. I've been putting up a post a day for close to a week, and I was starting to get mental blisters. I will, in time, I'm sure, have to slow things down considerably, but today won't be the day for that. Why? Because William Stafford made me feel guilty. Loyal to his gift, he wrote a poem every day for the whole of his adult life, including the day he died in 1993, when he wrote, "Just be ready / for what God sends." Honestly, he's got me beat by miles in the discipline department if I can't even write about a poem every day. I am, I know, too often disloyal to my gifts, or to my friends, or to my conscience. So at least this time, I'm going to keep up with what I think is a good thing. These are some of my favorite Stafford poems:
____________________________________________________

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightning before it says
its names--and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, and Amazon,
long aisles--you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head--
that's what the silence meant: you're not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
____________________________________________________

Yellow Cars

Some of the cars are yellow, that go
by. Those you look at, so glimmering
when light glances at their passing. Think
of that hope: "Someone will
like me, maybe." The tan ones
don't care, the blue have made
a mistake, the white haven't tried.
But the yellow--you turn your head:
hope lasts a long time if you're happy.

_____________________________________________________

Where We Are

Fog in the morning here
will make some of the world far away
and the near only a hint. But rain
will feel its blind progress along the valley,
tapping to convert one boulder at a time
into a glistening fact. Daylight will
love what came.
Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever
steps back in the fog will disappear
and hardly exist. You hear the river
saying a prayer for all that's gone.

Far over the valley there is an island
for everything left; and our own island
will drift there too, unless we hold on,
unless we tap like this: "Friend,
are you there? Will you touch when
you pass, like the rain?"
______________________________________________________

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
____________________________________________________

Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
____________________________________________________

Zbigniew Herbert

Today'll be light on ruminations and heavy on good poetry. On the slate for today is Zbigniew Herbert, a 20th-century Polish poet. First, a few strange and lovely prose poems of his:
____________________________________________________

Heart

All man's internal organs are bald and smooth. The stomach, intestines,
lungs, are bald. Only the heart has hair--reddish, thick, sometimes quite
long. This is a problem. The heart's hair inhibits the flow of blood like
water plants. The hair is often infested with worms. You have to love very
deeply to pick these quick little parasites from your beloved's cardiac hair.

____________________________________________________

A Devil

He is an utter failure as a devil. Even his tail. Not long and fleshy with
a black brush of hair at the end, but short, fluffy, and sticking out comically
like a rabbit's. His skin is pink, only under his left shoulder-blade a mark the
size of a gold ducat. But his horns are the worst. They don't grow outward
like other devils' but inward, into the brain. That's why he suffers so often
from headaches.
He is sad. He sleeps for days on end. Neither good nor evil attract him.
When he walks down the street, you see distinctly the motion of the rosy
wings of his lungs.

____________________________________________________

Hermes, Dog and Star

Hermes is going along in the world. He meets a dog.
--I'm a god--Hermes introduces himself politely.
The dog sniffs his feet.
--I feel lonely. People betray the gods. But mortal animals without self-
consciousness, that's what we want. In the evening after traveling all day
we'll sit down under an oak. Then I'll tell you I feel old and want to die. It'll
be a lie necessary to get you to lick my hands.
--Sure--the dog replies casually--I'll lick your hands. They're cold and
they smell strange.
They go along and after a while they meet a star.
--I'm Hermes--the god says--and produces one of his most handsome
faces. --Would you by any chance feel like coming with us to the end of the
world? I'll try to work it so that it's scary there and you have to lean your
head on my arm.
--OK--says the star in a glassy voice. I don't care where I go. But your
saying the end of the world is pure naivete. Sadly, there is no end of the
world.
They go along. The dog, Hermes, and the star. Holding hands. Hermes
thinks to himself: the next time he goes out looking for friends, he won't
be so sincere.
____________________________________________________

Elephant

In truth, elephants are extremely sensitive and high-strung. They have
a wild imagination which allows them sometimes to forget about their
appearance. When they go into the water, they close their eyes. At the sight
of their own legs they weep with frustration.
I knew an elephant who fell in love with a hummingbird. He lost
weight, got no sleep, and in the end died of a broken heart. Those ignorant
of the elephant's nature said: he was so overweight.

____________________________________________________

Fish

The sleep of fish is beyond imagination. Even in the darkest corner of
a pond, among the reeds, their rest is a waking: they hold the same position
for an eternity; and it is absolutely impossible to say of them: their heads
hit the pillow.
Their tears too are like a cry in the wilderness--numberless.
Fish can't express their despair with a gesture. This justifies the blunt
knife that skips along their spine ripping the sequins of scales.

____________________________________________________

(NB: I can't figure out how to make indentations. Does anyone know how to do it?) Herbert also wrote a long series of poems centered around a recurring character named Mr. Cogito. Here's my favorite of those:
____________________________________________________

Mr Cogito and a Poet of a Certain Age

1
A poet past his prime
an odd phenomenon

2
he looks in the mirror
he smashes the mirror

3
on a moonless night
he drowns his birth certificate in a black pond

4
he spies on the young
imitates the way they rock their hips

5
he chairs a meeting
of independent Trotskyites
incites them to arson

6
he writes letters
to the President of the Solar System
full of intimate confessions

7
a poet of a certain age
in the middle of an uncertain age

8
instead of cultivating
pansies and onomatopoeias
he sows spiky exclamations
invectives and treatises

9
he reads Isaiah and Das Kapital by turns
then in the frenzy of discussion
gets his quotes mixed up

10
a poet in the nebulous season
between the departure of Eros
and a Thanatos not yet risen from stone

11
he smokes hash
but doesn't see
either infinity
or flowers
or waterfalls
he sees a procession
of hooded monks
climbing a rocky mountain
carrying burned-out torches

12
the poet of a certain age
recalls warm chidhood
a wild youth
a disreputable manhood

13
he plays
at Freud
he plays
at hope
he plays
at red and black
he plays
at flesh
and blood
he plays and loses
is seized with false mirth

14
only now does he understand his father
he cannot forgive his sister
who eloped with an actor
he envies his younger brother
and bent over a picture of his mother
he tries once more
to persuade her to conceive

15
dreams
trivial pubertal
the catechism priest
protruding objects
and the unattainable Jadzia

16
at dawn he examines
his hand
astonished by skin
that looks like bark

17
against the fresh blue sky
the white tree of his veins
_____________________________________________________

Orpheus and Eurydice

As an aside before I get to the heart of the day's post, let me say that I've reflected excessively on what I want and don’t want this blog to be. In the process, I’ve come face-to-face with some unsavory and ineluctable little truths. Before starting this blog, I was wary of letting it devolve into what I’d wager eighty-percent of most blogs eventually become: self-indulgent platforms for whining or driveling, more or less in the mold of any sentence that’s emerged from the mind of Julie Powell (of "Julie and Julia" fame). In the spirit of full disclosure, let me say also that that may have been a completely unfair appraisal of the nature of most blogs, but if I’m being honest, it’s a prejudice I don't think I've completely relinquished. And when it comes to Julie Powell, it’s not that I mean to pick on someone who’s an all-too-easy target, but facts are facts, and the truth is I don't share her penchant for freelance butchering and adultery, and I'm not under the delusion that, just because I'm neurotic and insecure, my every waking thought needs to be published and preserved for posterity. That's mean, I think, so I apologize, but really, she's exactly what I don't want to become if I’m going to make the transition to blogging and take it seriously. And yet she's basically what I fear the mold for bloggers looks like. But… aha! The epiphany I've had just today is this: there's something in the underpinnings of this sad, little enterprise of blogging that's innately self-indulgent, so it’s not the fault of people like Julie Powell as much as it’s the fault of the blogs that people like Julie Powell become enslaved under. To clarify, since it’s impossible to know what kind of audience I’m writing to or for, all I can do is write for myself, about what I find interesting or compelling, what I’m experiencing and seeing and thinking. The commonality among all those things is me, me, me, me. What that means, when you get to the bottom of it, is I’m being disingenuous when I promise (as I did in the first post) that I won’t be self-important or self-indulgent as a blogger. As it turns out, to engage in the act of blogging, as far as I can tell, is to automatically succumb to those vices. There’s no getting around it. But, guess what, I’m going through with this anyway. I have for years written and read by myself, all while accepting without exception the absolutely solitary nature of both of those delightful activities. I could--don’t get me wrong--go on like that till I’m an old, broken-down man with my feet in slippers and a book on my lap. But this little adventure we’re embarking upon here marks a subtle departure from that, and if I thought it was anything other than a good departure I wouldn’t be going through with it. From now until it ceases to be worthwhile, I’ll share right here, with anyone who wants to read them, the poems that are a permanent part of my life, the poems that sustain and invigorate me, the poems I read and re-read because they express the things I can’t. As I said before, I’ve been reading forever without feeling very much inclined to share my reactions to what I’m reading with an anonymous group of readers, and I’ve traveled relatively extensively also, never with the impulse to make my personal reflections public. But right now, for whatever reason, I want to give it a shot; I want to see if this works. And just in case you’re wondering, “Does he really think there’s a demand out there for poetry-based travel blogs?” let me preempt you by saying, “No, of course I don’t.” But in the off chance that there is, I’m about to corner the market.


Now, onward and upward to subjects you’re much more likely to find interesting. I’ve received a few questions aimed at the collage of photos at the top of the page. It’s really just four photographs I put next to one another because I liked them, but I’ll go into a bit more detail if only to humor you, readers. First, and probably least interestingly, the photos on the far left and right are just stock photos taken by God-knows-who. Since I’ve yet to actually set foot in China, naturally I have no pictures of my own of any Chinese landmarks. So I just stole those. I may replace them in a few weeks with photos taken by yours truly; we’ll just have to wait and see on that one. The second photo from the left is--and yes, there’s been some confusion about this--of a book. It’s a photograph by Abelardo Morell, entitled “Dictionary.” And it just looks cool. I could say it enhances the site’s design with a kind of age-old, erudite charm, but really, it’s just a cool-looking book, so it seemed apt for a blog that’s, at least in part, about books. And finally, the third picture from the left is a painting by C.G. Kratzenstein-Stub of Orpheus and Eurydice. And it’s one of my all-time favorite paintings because the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is probably my all-time favorite myth. If you’re unfamiliar with it, sit back and let me regale you with my version of it right now. I say “my version” because I’m not an expert on any sort of mythology, and my version may very well contain inaccuracies, but I’ll shoulder the blame for them because this is the version I know and it’s the version I like. First of all, Orpheus was the world’s first poet. This is itself a contentious statement because, honestly, who really knows? But I like to think the world's first poet was Orpheus, and I'm not the only one who does. His wife, Eurydice, was walking in a field when a snake bit her ankle. It was a fatal wound, and Orpheus was so distraught in the wake of his wife’s passing that he set off to wander the earth a listless, broken man, taking solace only in the poems and dirges he sang. Now, he carried with him a lyre, and technically, I suppose he was singing, so you could be saying to yourself, “I think he sounds more like a musician than a poet, Mark.” But I don’t care; he was a poet. (If it helps think of him as this kind of poet, with musical accompaniment and people snapping their fingers instead of clapping and all that jazz.) Before too long, because Orpheus’ lamentations were so sincere and compelling, inanimate objects began stirring—rocks rumbled, trees shook—and the gods and nymphs took notice. As a digression, the term “Orphic poetry” can carry a kind of occult connotation, but I like to think of it as simply poetry with physical consequences. And in that regard, there could truly be no higher aim for a poet than to be Orphic, to literally move what's immovable with only the power of words (that's a big part of why I like Orpheus). To get back to the story, the gods encouraged Orpheus to head down to the underworld and see if his poems were powerful enough to persuade Hades to give Eurydice a new life. Hades was indeed moved, and he told Orpheus he could bring Eurydice back to earth on one condition, that he not look back at Eurydice until they'd reached the surface. Orpheus led Eurydice all the way back up to earth, but misunderstanding Hades’ caveat, he turned around to check on Eurydice as soon as he reached land. Because Eurydice, two steps behind him, had yet to reach the surface when Orpheus looked back, she fell all the way back to the underworld where she would stay for all of eternity (that’s what’s happening in the painting above). Orpheus then went on to sing more dirges until eventually someone chopped his head off for reasons I don’t remember. But naturally, all of this has been terrific fodder for all kinds of literary and artistic pursuits for centuries upon centuries. Since I feel like I’ve been writing this post for far too long, I’ll leave you for now with two of my favorite examples from the world of poetry: a poem about Orpheus (“Orpheus Alone”) by the incomparable Mark Strand and one about Eurydice (“Eurydice Reveals Her Strength”) by A.E. Stallings, who’s good, but not as good as Mark Strand:
____________________________________________________

Orpheus Alone

It was an adventure much could be made of: a walk
On the shores of the darkest known river,
Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocks
And rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;
Then to the great court with its marble yard
Whose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit there
In the sunken silence of the place and speak
Of what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,
And, then, pulling out all the stops, describing her eyes,
Her forehead where the golden light of evening spread,
The curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulders, everything
Down to her thighs and calves, letting the words come,
As if lifted from sleep, to drift upstream,
Against the water's will, where all the condemned
And pointless labor, stunned by his voice's cadence,
Would come to a halt, and even the crazed, disheveled
Furies, for the first time, would weep, and the soot-filled
Air would clear just enough for her, the lost bride,
To step through the image of herself and be seen in the light.
As everyone knows, this was the first great poem,
Which was followed by days of sitting around
In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes
Closed, trying to will her return, but finding
Only himself, again and again, trapped
In the chill of his loss, and, finally,
Without a word, taking off to wander the hills
Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken
The image of love and put in its place the world
As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure
Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed,
And trees suddenly appeared in the bare place
Where he spoke and lifted their limbs and swept
The tender grass with the gowns of their shade,
And stones, weightless for once, came and set themselves there,
And small animals lay in the miraculous fields of grain
And aisles of corn, and slept. The voice of light
Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing
Rose from its depths and shone as it never had.
And that was the second great poem,
Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest
Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable,
Invisible source of all longing to be; it came
As things come that will perish, to be seen or heard
Awhile, like the coating of frost or the movement
Of wind, and then no more; it came in the middle of sleep
Like a door to the infinite, and, circled by flame,
Came again at the moment of waking, and, sometimes,
Remote and small, it came as a vision with trees
By a weaving stream, brushing the bank
With their violet shade, with somebody’s limbs
Scattered among the matted, mildewed leaves nearby,
With his severed head rolling under the waves,
Breaking the shifting columns of light into a swirl
Of slivers and flecks; it came in a language
Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and dark,
Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift,
So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope
Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.

____________________________________________________

Eurydice Reveals Her Strength

Dying is the easy part.
As you live, my dear, why did you come?
You should learn an easing of the heart
As I have, now, for truly some

Prefer this clarity of mind, this death
Of all the body's imperious demands:
That constant interruption of the breath,
That fever-greed of eyes and hands

To digest your beauty whole.
You strike a tune upon a string:
They say that it is beautiful.
You sing to me, you sing, you sing.

I think, how do the living hear?
But I remember now, that it was just
A quiver in the membrane of the ear,
And love, a complicated lust.

And I remember now, as in a book,
How you pushed me down upon the grass and stones,
Crushed me with your kisses and your hands and took
What there is to give of emptiness, and moans.

We strained to be one strange new beast enmeshed,
And this is what we strained against, this death,
And clawed as if to peel away the flesh,
Crawled safe inside another's hollowness,

Because we feared this calm of being dead.
I say this. You abhor my logic, and you shiver,
Thinking I may as well be just some severed head
Floating down a cool, forgetful river,

Slipping down the shadows, green and black,
Singing to myself, not looking back.
____________________________________________________

Thirteen Ways of Being Hilarious

Get ready for a poetry joke! Ready?

A man, a woman, and a blackbird walk into a bar. "Table for one, please," they say.


I'll come clean and say I stole that from McSweeney's. Only because it made me laugh like a goon, so I'll give credit where credit is due. (If you have a blank look on your face right now, consulting this will get you caught up to speed.) But then I felt self-conscious because I knew laughing alone at poetry jokes had to be a sign of elitism, social impotence, or something else that would make fifth-graders call me gay. So to reassure myself that I'm still one with the common man, I knew I needed to check in with Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation:



And there you have it. To my relief, the "shitter was full" scene made me laugh just as heartily as the Wallace Stevens joke. Take that, fifth-graders.

So what, in the end, does any of this say about me? Only that I could have written the following poem about myself if I were one-twentieth as brilliant as John Ashbery:
___________________________________________________________________

A Poem of Unrest

Men duly understand the river of life,
misconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow
dark and denser, always farther away.

And of course that remote denseness suits
us, as lambs and clover might have
if things had been built to order differently.

But since I don't understand myself, only segments
of myself that misunderstand each other, there's no
reason for you to want to, no way you could

even if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?
We must look at it that way, along those lines
so the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.
___________________________________________________________________

I read an article a few months ago that claimed essentially that John Ashbery is the only great poet of the present generation. I don't know if I'd go that far, but he's pretty exquisite, and in this poem, he's uncharacteristically accessible. Indeed, like you, John, I don't understand myself, and Cousin Eddie and Wallace Stevens, these are the segments of myself which misunderstand each other. (Don't worry: I have other segments, too.)

OK, this has been a lot for one post. So in summation, I've offered up three ways of being today (not thirteen, sorry): two of being hilarious, and one of being profound. Take what you please. No need to thank me.

Lycidas

First things first: as the recipient of some much-appreciated constructive criticism, I've already made a number of substantial changes to the blog. I hope you and the rest of my imaginary throngs of readers enjoy them. If you don't, please suspend judgment--at least the cruel kind--till the final unveiling. The curtain's still up, don't forget.

I should let it be known that I want to home in on a more singular purpose for this blog. I've yet to nail down what exactly that purpose will be (beyond keeping friends and family back home abreast of what I fear will be my pretty mundane comings and goings in China), but don't be surprised if this whole project begins to develop a literary bent. That's what I'm bracing for. If you're looking for items 5-7 from the list in the first post, I'm sorry to say this might not turn out to be your blog of choice. That means no mishmash and no mingle-mangle. Music and movies might also have to fall by the wayside. These are tough decisions, mind you, but it's time to throw overboard what we can't bring ashore. Bill Cosby must've been right--you really can't please the whole crowd. He's also right about Ben's Chili Bowl, by the way. It's a taste sensation.

Now, to the real point of this my second official posting: Lycidas. If I'm going to talk literature, I'm going to talk poetry, and if I'm going to talk poetry, I'm starting with Lycidas. I'd never of my own volition single out a poem as my favorite--I could never give a clear and decisive answer to any kind of question like that. But hypothetically, if someone asked me, Lycidas would absolutely be among those in the list I rattled off. Speaking of hypothetical questions and Lycidas, if someone asked me why I'd want to be a poet (not write poetry, but be a poet), I might first half-jokingly quote Charles Simic who said, "I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me," but then I'd give my honest, earnest answer, which is that I'd like to put a poem into the world that means to someone what Lycidas means to me. Without further ado, here's John Milton's Lycidas:
____________________________________________________

Lycidas

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat'ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.
Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well,
That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse,
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favour my destined urn,
And as he passes turn
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
For we were nursed upon the selfsame hill,
Fed the same flock by fountain, shade, and rill.
Together both, ere the high lawns appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove a-field, and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the star that rose, at ev'ning, bright
Toward heav'n's descent had sloped his west'ring wheel.
Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,
Tempered to th' oaten flute;
Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long;
And old Damoetas loved to hear our song.
But O! the heavy change now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone and never must return!
Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn.
The willows, and the hazel copses green,
Shall now no more be seen
Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
As killing as the canker to the rose,
Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
Or frost to flow'rs, that their gay wardrobe wear,
When first the white-thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.
Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep
Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.
Ay me, I fondly dream!
Had ye been there, for what could that have done?
What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself for her enchanting son,
Whom universal nature did lament,
When, by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore?
Alas! what boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. "But not the praise,"
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears:
"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glist'ring foil
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in heav'n expect thy meed."
O fountain Arethuse, and thou honoured flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood;
But now my oat proceeds,
And listens to the herald of the sea
That came in Neptune's plea.
He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds,
What hard mishap hath doomed this gentle swain?
And questioned every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked promontory:
They knew not of his story,
And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon strayed;
The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope with all her sisters played.
It was that fatal and perfidious bark,
Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.
Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.
"Ah! Who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?"
Last came, and last did go,
The Pilot of the Galilean lake.
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)
He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake
"How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!
Of other care they little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least
That to the faithful herdman's art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoll'n with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more."
Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flow'rets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honeyed show'rs,
And purple all the ground with vernal flow'rs.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold.
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth;
And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor.
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,
Where, other groves and other streams along,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more;
Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals grey;
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay.
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
____________________________________________________

This is the only pre-19th century poem I still go back and read on a regular basis. At the end of it, I still get chills and want to stand up and applaud; it's like I just watched the last ten minutes of "Rudy." What's more, Milton wasn't even a nice guy. When he went blind in his old age, he forced his daughters to read to him in languages they didn't even understand. He only taught them the phonetics. He was a jerk. I have no idea how he put together a poem this beautiful, but he did. I hope you enjoyed it.

Gettin' started.

Lord knows how you got hoodwinked into reading this, but I'll assume that since you're here you have at least a half-hearted interest in knowing what I'm up to. That's great news for you! It means you're at least mildly interested in a preeminently interesting person: me. Now guess what! More great news: you just stumbled upon what will no doubt be the blog to end all blogs, your one-stop source of so much stuff I need to make a list to accommodate it all. Here we go:

1) updates on my whereabouts and daily adventures in China.
2) funny anecdotes, which, let's be honest, are basically inevitable because I'll be a 6'4" circus-freak wandering around in a country where I'm functionally illiterate.
3) incisive commentary on the human condition (who isn't looking for that???)
4) my esteemed opinions on literature (usually poetry), music, movies, etc.
5) imprompu treatises/diatribes on civics and politics (YEAH!)
6) advice on how to be a good person (which I'll readily admit I don't always follow)
7) other bits of mishmash and mingle-mangle that defy categorization.

Now, keep in mind that's not an exhaustive list. If you want something else, I can deliver! I can appeal to the most vulgar and refined sensibilities! It makes no difference, just tell me what you want! In all seriousness, though, I'm making an earnest effort here to be less self-protective and emotionally niggardly. I'm unlocking the vault. I'll try to post regularly and give you as often as I can something informative or diverting to read. I assure you I won't be self-indulgent, self-important, maudlin, fustian, or dull. I really will try hard on this, if for no other reason than because it's got my name attached to it and I'm terrified of its permanence (I don't really understand the interwebs). So in return, I just want to know who you are. Private and public comments are welcome. Don't be shy. This here's a work in progress.