by hilzoy
It’s National Poetry Month! So for the two minutes that are left of today:
ALL are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.
Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.
For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.
Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.
In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.
Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.
Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.
Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.
Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nice. Thanks.
Having been lucky enough to see the “Monet in Normandy” exhibition at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh – it also was in SF and Cleveland, I believe – I was delighted to encounter this poem in Anne Lamott’s book of essays, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, which I also recommend highly:
Lisel Mueller – Monet Refuses The Operation (from her Second Language, 1986; also in Alive Together, 1996).
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
Thank you, dr ngo, that’s wonderful.
Remembered Columns
The solid letters of the world grew airy.
The marble serifs, the clearly blocked uprights
built upon rocks and set upon the heights
rose like remembered columns in a story
about the Virgin’s house that rose and flew
and landed on the hilltop at Loreto.
I lift my eyes in a light-headed credo,
discovering what survives translation true.
Seamus Heaney
Thank you, Hilzoy.
The Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found
Marilyn Hacker,
Where are the women who, entre deux guerres
came out on college-graduation trips,
came to New York on football scholarships,
came to town meeting in a decorous pair?
Where are the expatriate salonnières,
the gym teacher, the math-department head?
Do nieces follow where their odd aunts led?
The elephants die off in Cagnes-sur-Mer.
H.D., whose “nature was bisexual,”
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Where are the single-combat champions:
the Chevalier d’Eon with curled peruke,
Big Sweet who ran with Zora in the jook,
open-handed Winifred Ellerman,
Colette, who hedged her bets and always won?
Sojourner’s sojourned where she need not pack
decades of whitegirl conscience on her back.
The spirit gave up Zora; she lay down
under a weed field miles from Eatonville,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Where’s Stevie, with her pleated schoolgirl dresses,
and Rosa, with her permit to wear pants?
Who snuffed Clara’s mestiza flamboyance
and bled Frida onto her canvases?
Where are the Niggerati hostesses,
the kohl-eyed ivory poets with severe
chignons, the rebels who grew out their hair,
the bulldaggers with marceled processes?
Conglomerates co-opted Sugar Hill,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Anne Hutchinson, called witch, termagent, whore,
fell to the long knives, having tricked the noose.
Carolina María de Jesús’
tale from the slag heaps of the landless poor
ended on a straw mat on a dirt floor.
In action thirteen years after fifteen
in prison, Eleanor of Aquitaine
accomplished half of Europe and fourscore
anniversaries for good or ill,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Has Ida B. persuaded Susan B.
to pool resources for a joint campaign?
(Two Harriets act a pageant by Lorraine,
cheered by the butch drunk on the IRT
who used to watch me watch her watching me.)
We’ve notes by Angelina Grimké Weld
for choral settings drawn from the Compiled
Poems of Angelina Weld Grimké.
There’s no such tense as Past Conditional,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Who was Sappho’s protégée, and when did
we lose Hrotsvitha, dramaturge and nun?
What did bibulous Suzanne Valadon
think about Artemesia, who tended
to make a life-size murderess look splendid?
Where’s Aphra, fond of dalliance and the pun?
Where’s Jane, who didn’t indulge in either one?
Whoever knows how Ende, Pintrix, ended
is not teaching Art History at Yale,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Is Beruliah upstairs behind the curtain
debating Juana Inés de la Cruz?
Where’s savante Anabella, Augusta-Goose,
Fanny, Maude, Lidian, Freda, and Caitlin,
“without whom this could never have been written”?
Louisa who wrote, scrimped, saved, sewed, and nursed,
Malinche, who’s, like all translators, cursed,
Bessie, whose voice was hemp and steel and satin,
outside a segregated hospital,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Where’s Amy, who kept Ada in cigars
and love, requited, both country and courtly,
although quinquagenerian and portly?
Where’s Emily? It’s very still upstairs.
Where’s Billie, whose strange fruit ripened in bars?
Where’s the street-scavenging Little Sparrow?
Too poor, too mean, too weird, too wide, too narrow:
Marie Curie, examining her scars,
was not particularly beautiful;
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Who was the grandmother of Frankenstein?
The Vindicatrix of the Rights of Woman.
Madame de Sévigné said prayers to summon
the postman just as eloquent as mine,
though my Madame de Grignan’s only nine.
But Mary Wollstonecraft had never known
that daughter, nor did Paula Modersohn.
The three-day infants blinked in the sunshine.
The mothers turned their faces to the wall;
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Tomorrow night the harvest moon will wane
that’s floodlighting the silhouetted wood.
Make your own footnotes; it will do you good.
Emeritae have nothing to explain.
She wasn’t very old, or really plain–
my age exactly, volumes incomplete.
“The life, the life, will it never be so sweet?”
She wrote it once; I quote it once again
midlife at midnight when the moon is full
and I can almost hear the warning bell
offshore, sounding through starlight like a stain
on waves that heaved over what she began
and truncated a woman’s chronicle,
and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
bob wants to be a kite
and the wind to blow constantly
because as a kite he’d be happy
on a string in the sky
pulling against the ground forever
he’d be the only one happy
“why does the wind blow so much?
only good for kites and sailboats
and damned if i got a sailboat.”
beef jerky is
leather
soaked in salty beef soup
for a hundred years
is what bob wishes
he could have for dinner
every night for a week
…and pepsi
what if one day the sun didn’t set
but stayed out all night
like a lost cat
that found it’s way home
late the next day
but scared everyone silly
the whole night long
we’d remember that night
for a long time
that’s what bob wants
for the day when he dies
that the sun will stay out
all night long
and everyone will say
“remember when bob died?
the sun didn’t set
but stayed out all night
like a lost cat…
”
when the sun went down
the cat stayed out
all night, bob found out
by waiting sadly on the steps till daylight
but later after a bit
the cat came back
and meowed at bob
scolding him
for not letting her have her freedom
she felt trapped lately
and needed some time to herself
now bob sulks on tiptoes
to give the cat space
while the cat looks at him
and shakes her head
men
bob’s brother says “Bob,
when i was a kid
i had this girl
and how
and she dumped me
and i thought about killing myself
i thought she was something special, then
but i never quite did
and now that i’m older i’m glad
i never quite did it
cause since then
i’ve got to dump plenty of chicks
and i never talk to them again
so i don’t know but
but, i kinda hope
that they felt like killing themselves
cause that’s what it’s all about
you know?
that’s how it always ends up
but you gotta be the one dumping
cause feeling like you want to kill yourself
over losing someone
that’s the worst
worse than anything
cause dead seems like the only place where she isn’t
but it’s too scary to go there.
so Bob,
don’t worry about the cat
there are other cats. God.”
Wonderful, they’re all wonderful. Thanks for brightening my morning. In return may I offer a poem or two that fit my mood.
pete the parrot and shakespeare
by archy
i got acquainted with
a parrot named pete recently
who is an interesting bird
pete says he used
to belong to the fellow
that ran the mermaid tavern
in london then i said
you must have known
shakespeare know him said pete
poor mutt i knew him well
he called me pete and i called him
bill but why do you say poor mutt
well said pete bill was a
disappointed man and was always
boring his friends about what
he might have been and done
if he only had a fair break
two or three pints of sack
and sherris and the tears
would trickle down into his
beard and his beard would get
soppy and wilt his collar
i remember one night when
bill and ben johnson and
frankie beaumont
were sopping it up
here i am ben says bill
nothing but a lousy playwright
and with anything like luck
in the breaks i might have been
a fairly decent sonnet writer
i might have been a poet
if i had kept away from the theatre
yes says ben i ve often
thought of that bill
but one consolation is
you are making pretty good money
out of the theatre
money money says bill what the hell
is money what i want is to be
a poet not a business man
these damned cheap shows
i turn out to keep the
theatre running break my heart
slap stick comedies and
blood and thunder tragedies
and melodramas say i wonder
if that boy heard you order
another bottle frankie
the only compensation is that i get
a chance now and then
to stick in a little poetry
when nobody is looking
but hells bells that isn t
what i want to do
i want to write sonnets and
songs and spenserian stanzas
and i might have done it too
if i hadn t got
into this frightful show game
business business business
grind grind grind
what a life for a man
that might have been a poet
well says frankie beaumont
why don t you cut it bill
i can t says bill
i need the money i ve got
a family to support down in
the country well says frankie
anyhow you write pretty good
plays bill any mutt can write
plays for this london public
says bill if he puts enough
murder in them what they want
is kings talking like kings
never had sense enough to talk
and stabbings and stranglings
and fat men making love
and clown basting each
other with clubs and cheap puns
and off color allusions to all
the smut of the day oh i know
what the low brows want
and i give it to them
well says ben johnson
don t blubber into the drink
brace up like a man
and quit the rotten business
i can t i can t says bill
i ve been at it too long i ve got to
the place now where i can t
write anything else
but this cheap stuff
i m ashamed to look an honest
young sonneteer in the face
i live a hell of a life i do
the manager hands me some mouldy old
manuscript and says
bill here s a plot for you
this is the third of the month
by the tenth i want a good
script out this that we
can start rehearsals on
not too big a cast
and not too much of your
damned poetry either
you know your old
familiar line of hokum
they eat up that falstaff stuff
of yours ring him in again
and give them a good ghost
or two and remember we gotta
have something dick burbage can get
his teeth into and be sure
and stick in a speech
somewhere the queen will take
for a personal compliment and if
you get in a line or two somewhere
about the honest english yeoman
it s always good stuff
and it s a pretty good stunt
bill to have the heavy villain
a moor or a dago or a jew
or something like that and say
i want another
comic welshman in this
but i don t need to tell
you bill you know this game
just some of your ordinary
hokum and maybe you could
kill a little kid or two a prince
or something they like
a little pathos along with
the dirt now you better see burbage
tonight and see what he wants
in that part oh says bill
to think i am
debasing my talents with junk
like that oh god what i wanted
was to be a poet
and write sonnet serials
like a gentleman should
well says i pete
bill s plays are highly
esteemed to this day
is that so says pete
poor mutt little he would
care what poor bill wanted
was to be a poet
archy
And of course:
archy interviews a pharaoh
boss i went
and interviewed the mummy
of the egyptian pharaoh
in the metropolitan museum
as you bade me to do
what ho
my regal leatherface
says i
greetings
little scatter footed
scarab
says he
kingly has been
says i
what was your ambition
when you had any
insignificant
and journalistic insect
says the royal crackling
in my tender prime
i was too dignified
to have anything as vulgar
as ambition
the ra ra boys
in the seti set
were too haughty
to be ambitious
we used to spend our time
feeding the ibises
and ordering
pyramids sent home to try on
but if i had my life
to live over again
i would give dignity
the regal razz
and hire myself out
to work in a brewery
old tan and tarry
says i
i detect in your speech
the overtones
of melancholy
yes i am sad
says the majestic mackerel
i am as sad
as the song
of a soudanese jackal
who is wailing for the blood red
moon he cannot reach and rip
on what are you brooding
with such a wistful
wishfulness
there in the silences
confide in me
my perial pretzel
says i
i brood on beer
my scampering whiffle snoot
on beer says he
my sympathies
are with your royal
dryness says i
my little pest
says he
you must be respectful
in the presence
of a mighty desolation
little archy
forty centuries of thirst
look down upon you
oh by isis
and by osiris
says the princely raisin
and by pish and phthush and phthah
by the sacred book perembru
and all the gods
that rule from the upper
cataract of the nile
to the delta of the duodenum
i am dry
i am as dry
as the next morning mouth
of a dissipated desert
as dry as the hoofs
of the camels of timbuctoo
little fussy face
i am as dry as the heart
of a sand storm
at high noon in hell
i have been lying here
and there
for four thousand years
with silicon in my esophagus
as gravel in my gizzard
thinking
thinking
thinking
of beer
divine drouth
says i
imperial fritter
continue to think
there is no law against
that in this country
old salt codfish
if you keep quiet about it
not yet
what country is this
asks the poor prune
my reverend juicelessness
this is a beerless country
says i
well well said the royal
desiccation
my political opponents back home
always maintained
that i would wind up in hell
and it seems they had the right dope
and with these hopeless words
the unfortunate residuum
gave a great cough of despair
and turned to dust and debris
right in my face
it being the only time
i ever actually saw anybody
put the cough
into sarcophagus
dear boss as i scurry about
i hear of a great many
tragedies in our midsts
personally i yearn
for some dear friend to pass over
and leave to me
a boot legacy
yours for the second coming
of gambrinus
archy
Archy is my favorite cockroach poet, discovered by Don Marquis.
My current favorite – it seems long but “reads” quickly – and watch in awe as it goes from the mundane to the sublime without a single misstep.
***
Galway Kinnell – “Oatmeal (When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone)”
I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to disintegrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the “Ode to a Nightingale.”
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words “Oi ‘ad a ‘eck of a toime,” he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket, but when he got home he couldn’t figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn’t sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited “To Autumn.”
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn,” I doubt if there is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started on it, and two of the lines, “For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells” and “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,” came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion’s tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I’m going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.
Shoot. Rereading, I see that I missed a couple of line breaks, but that doesn’t affect the meaning.
Great poems, y’all! I love Seamus Heaney. Here’s the poem he wrote in memory of his mother – so simple and so perfect:
In Memoriam M. K. H., 1911–1984
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
cleek, who wrote the poem in your post?
i did. many years ago (1994, according to Google). back when i had a real name.
Cleek: i did. many years ago (1994, according to Google). back when i had a real name.
It’s a brilliant poem, too. Thanks for sharing!
thanks!
The following was written by my FiL, Maurice Noyce, who died of cancer from a tumor behind his ear in 1997:
Is he still there, my enemy?
When I was a tiny child, crying in the night, was he
daubing my fragile ear with savage anger?
When I strode confidently out
Into the dusty London world of striving and endeavour,
Was it he who stifled my ambition with a twisted sheet
Of agony and disfigurement?
And did he lie there laughing
While the ancient doctor showered him with fireworks?
Now he is strong. Hiding in the delicate machinery
Of sound and taste and smell, so that the surgeon’s knife
Sweeps by, leaving him wounded, but alive.
A new limb grows. A focussed beam lights up the darkness,
But does not vary to follow his manoeuvres. Obstacles collapse.
He hides and sleeps. Attacks are over, and his space
Now unencumbered, affords a little room for tentative experiment.
A chamber opens and is filled with blood.
A needle enters and he swims fluently around it.
His festering trail betrays his presence,
Poison induces weakness but in return
Flashes of agony course down unfamiliar pathways.
His weight? His rotting flesh? His frantic struggles to escape?
Is He still there my enemy?
Jesu:
“The Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found” is wonderful, but I think I need an annotated version. Most of the names are familiar but quite a few are not.
For pete the parrot:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.