Rock, Poem, Photo II

Transition 2

Today feels like September, even here: hot and Indian-summery, the lowering bright crisp light, the faintly dusty smell that comes with falling leaves. From the three or four trees here that molt their leaves.

I managed a Rabbit Rabbit this morning; hopefully it will bring luck for the rest of the month, even the season. And change; somehow this feels like the right time for change. So off to the third installment of the blog: Rock, Poem, Photo III.

The Ungraceful Reminders Our Bodies Insist On

Reunion with Jake at Still Pond Creek

We are becoming martyrs to our spirits,
you and I. Every time I see you,
you are thinner, listless, eating less.
You have given up breakfast and dinner,
sometimes indulging in a lettuce leaf
at noon. I know you aim to disappear.
What we both want is sensation without
shame or fear. And now I am bored
by sex, washing my hair, my clothes,
the bathroom scarred with drying underwear.
The time a body takes. The waste. Forests
of Kleenex. Six ibis for an acre of grain.
The pull of gravity shrinking us, drying
out the tissues of the brain. Bodiless
we could go anywhere. For how could we
transgress? To fly with no fear of falling,
no planes, schedules; no one inspecting our
baggage, dirty socks spilling from plastic
sacks, condoms, Tampax, the ungraceful
reminders our bodies insist on. I'm afraid
this flesh will always be too solid for us,
Jake. Your cigarettes reveal that. I take
up smoking when we are together. We eye
each other through the clouds we make.

—from Rites of Strangers, by Phyllis Janowitz

Location

Letter

I had wanted to begin
by telling you I saw another
tanager below the pond
where I had sat for half an hour
feeding on wild berries
in the little clearing near the pines
that hide the lower field
and then looked up from red berries
to the quick red bird brilliant
in the light. I have seen
more yarrow and swaying
Queen Anne's lace around the woods
as hawkweed and nightshade
wither and drop seed. A new blue flower,
sweet, yellow-stamened, ovary inferior,
has recently sprung up.
                                           But I had the odd
feeling, walking to the house
to write this down, that I had left
the birds and the flower in the field,
rooted or feeding. They are not in my
head, are not now on this page.
It was very strange to me, but I think
their loss was your absence. I wanted
to be walking up with Leif, the sun
behind us skipping off the pond,
the windy maple sheltering the house,
and find you there and say
here! a new blue flower (ovary inferior)
and busy Leif and Kris with naming
in a world I love. You even have
my field guide. It's you I love.
I have believed so long
in the magic of names and poems.
I hadn't thought them bodiless
at all. Tall Buttercups. Wild Vetch.
"Often I am permitted to return
to a meadow." It all seemed real to me
last week. Words. You are the body
of my world, root and flower, the
brightness and surprise of birds.
I miss you, love. Tell Leif
you're the names of things.

—from Field Guide, by Robert Hass

Shh.

A Palpable Silence

What is as delightful
as a palable silence
a creamy latex of a
silence, stirrable
with a long stick. Such
a silence is particularly
thick at the bottom, a
very smooth lotion, like
good paint by the gallon.
This is a base silence,
colored only by addition,
say a small squeeze of
green when the bird sings
idly of trees he has
seen. It is a clean
silence, the kind that
does not divide us,
like dreams it is
viscous but like good dreams
where sweet things last and
last past credibility.
Even in dreams we know
it is a luxury.

—from Strangely Marked Metal, by Kay Ryan

Visions

I Saw A Peacock With a Fiery Tail

I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a pismire swallow up a whale
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of men's tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man that saw this wondrous sight.

Anonymous

It's a trick poem...insert periods or commas in the proper places, and the visionary, the monstrous, and the apocalyptic shrink to the remarkable—indeed, the banal. —Margaret Atwood

Call It Mania

Looking for an Anne Sexton line, I across this poem instead. It reminded me of when, on a walk at the Albany Bulb, I stumbled on a landfill turned art gallery, a huge, beautiful sculpture in scrap metal of Icarus at one corner, leaping from a pile of rusty junk and scrub bushes out toward the sun. The arch of the sculpture has a beautiful force to it, as though it really is ripping itself from the junk to wing out over the bay.

It's a good segue to leaving for Burning Man: the idea of sun, sky, fire, art, abandon. Crazy triumphant leaps of creative thought.

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back down to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

—from All My Pretty Ones, by Anne Sexton

Winning Is Hard

This weekend, a slew of wise words from several directions. Optimism. Perspective. Reminders to consider when resistance is useful.

I like Kay Ryan, below—not only are her poems fun puzzles, like metal tangles, but she can say one thing, and say the opposite, and both can be true, and there is some relief in that.

Force

Nothing forced works.
The Gordian knot just worsens
if it's jerked at by a person.
One of the main stations
of the cross it patience.
Another, of course, is impatience.
There is such a thing as
too much tolerance
for unpleasant situations,
a time when the gentle
teasing out of threads
ceases to be pleasing
to a woman born for conquest.
Instead she must assault
the knot or alp or everest
with something sharp,
and take upon herself
the moral warp of sudden progress.

—from Flamingo Watching, by Kay Ryan

Honey Jar

Wintering

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled my midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
And the bottles of empty glitters--
Sir So-and-so's gin.

This is a room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinee yellow on appalling objects---
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees---the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I've taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women---
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

—from Ariel, by Sylvia Plath

The story: this poem might be most famous for its placement. When Sylvia Plath killed herself, she left behind the manuscript of Ariel, with this poem placed last. Her husband rearranged the manuscript, placing another, more ominous poem last before publishing. Much has been made of the uplift at the end of Wintering because it suggests Plath believed she would come out of her depression, triggered by the terrible winter, her husband's desertion, her childrens' illnesses. In her original arrangement, I'd like to say she went down fighting, but I think it's more complicated than that. The point to me is that she could still recognize—what, hope? not so simple but I'll call it that—even in the worst of the 'winter'.

I like the spirit of the poem. It captures a black mood in a way Carter did not capture pool: it tells of it, it skirts around it, it describes everything but it, it describes its motions but not its appearance, it tells of the fierce opposites. For whatever reason, these things speak more to me than clear description. The motion of bees. The source of honey.

Sanity Check

The Madhouse

I cannot give you the squeak
Of the blue chalk on the cue tip,
The sound of the break, or the movement
About the table, like a ritual of wine;

Then I was not born. My father,
Who saw it, was still in high school;
And there are others who remember
The poolroom on the avenue.

Here lounged the former heroes
Of the high-school team, who took
The Tri-State Crown in '24, and tied
With Massillon in '25. Catholics all,

A backfield composed of Swede
Svendson at fullback, the Baxter brothers
At either half, and handsome Richard
O'Reilly at the quarter.

They had no peers, then or now.
On Saturdays regularly they stood,
Hats firmly on their heads, watching
The procession of hooded Klansmen

Coming up Anderson Street, heading
Toward the Main intersection. Always
The Klan demanded hats removed
Before the flag they carried,

Always the boys at the Madhouse refused,
And began unscrewing the weighted ends
Of their pool cues. People came to watch;
The police stood apart; the Klan

Never got past the Madhouse. That
Was years ago. They're all dead now,
Swede and the Baxter boys, and
Handsome Richard O'Reilly,

Who married the banker's daughter;
And the Klansmen too. Only the men
Who were boys then can still remember.
They talk about it, even now,

Sitting in Joe's barbershop
Watching cars go by, or sipping a beer
In Condon's tavern. It is a story
I heard when I was a boy. Lately

There's been a doughnut shop
Where the Madhouse used to stand.
Mornings when I stop for coffee
I can almost hear it: the nine ball

Dropping in the corner pocket,
The twelve rolling to within an inch
Of the side; voices in the street
Echoing along the store fronts.

—from Work, For the Night is Coming, by  Jared Carter

This is not one of my favorite Carter poems. I've never tried to write about playing pool; it would be quite a challenge. I don't think Carter does it justice. But I have unscrewed a cue and felt instinctively what a good weapon the weighted end would be, and in that sense the poem is interesting. It describes an intersection between the presence of cool violence, codes of honor, and outliers.

Cheers

The Urine Specimen

In the clinic, a sun-bleached shell of stone
on the shore of the city, you enter
the last small chamber, a little closet
chastened with pearl—cool, white, and glistening—
and over the chilly well of the toilet
you trickle your precious sum in a cup.
It's as simple as that. But the heat
of this gold your body's melted and poured out
into a form begins to enthrall you,
warming your hand with your flesh's fevers
in a terrible way. It's like holding
an organ—spleen or fatty pancreas,
a lobe from your foamy brain still steaming
with worry. You know that just outside
a nurse is waiting to cool it into a gel
and slice it onto a microscopic slide
for the doctor, who will read in it your future,
wringing his hands. You lift the chalice and toast
the long life of your friend there in the mirror,
who wanly smiles, but does not drink to you.

—from Flying at Night, by Ted Kooser

Hard to explain why I connect to this poem right now. Something about being in a dark frame of mind, having a short moment of clarity in humor. How it's good to know my brain can still entertain me, sad and sobering when the cloud is too heavy to lift.