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. . . .
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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!
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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:
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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.
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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.

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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.

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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.
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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.

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(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:
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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
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