Rock, Poem, Photo

Conferring

Listening to that music, this morning.

 

That Music

The creek's silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air, and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
Vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

Do they confer, do the lovers' bodies
In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face,
Confer—, does the slow breeze in the pines?
If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.

—from Time and Materials, by Robert Hass

Staying Power

Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

—William James

 

A Moment of Silence

An exchange of poems, photos of graveyards. Comments on the hard, cold immigrant past, and how we are now, the present. This friend tells me he had a horse-whisperer moment: simply waiting until Rosie, uncooperative at first, felt his understanding, acknowledged it, yielded. Sends this.

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
 
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
 
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
 
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
 
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
 
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
 
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

—by Philip Larkin

Twenty Years

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody
long before they leave you.

—dedication of Sula, by Toni Morrison

Quiet

The Material

Whatever is done
leaves a hole in the
possible, a snip in
the gauze, a marble
and thimble missing
from the immaterial.
The laws are cruel
on this point. The
undone can't be
patched or stretched.
The wounds last.
The bundles of
nothing that are
our gift at birth, the
lavish trains we
trail into our span
like vans of seamless
promise, like fresh
sheets in baskets,
are our stock. We
must extract parts
to do work. As
time passes, the
promise is tattered
like a battle flag
above a war we
hope mattered.

—from The Niagara River by Kay Ryan

Passing

Maybe there is a kind of justice that says you must pay for good days with bad nights. And maybe my debt is paid now, for lately I sleep well.

It is not a terrible thing to love the world, knowing that the world is always passing and irrecoverable, to be known only in loss. To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain. 

—from Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry

Mirror

Writing, pre-dawn, this morning, watching the crows flying sideways in the wind, I remember trying on wedding dresses, years ago. I took Mom to an old-school DC wedding dress shop, with assistants who were older, well-groomed, selling wedding dresses as a vocation. Women who knew that etiquette and care in dressing was a natural priority and skill of a true lady. I knew Mom would love it, and I have a small glimpse in my memory of her sitting at attention on the round pouf in the center of the broad dressing space—a giant version of old-fashioned powder rooms I had only ever seen in old megolith buildings—her posture alert and interest in her eyes. I remember, too, the formal card of thanks I received from the assistant after we bought the dress, whose handwriting was as looped and graceful as my mother's nun-fashioned script.

I had been to the store once before, and made preliminary choices. I tried on several dresses for my mother, but, in my mind, had already narrowed them to two. I tried them on, first one, then the other. Mom watched, and said surprisingly little. These were two very expensive dresses; choosing one was a strange, new, odd cusp-sharpened decision that you were supposed to make correctly. Somewhere in the background, there was the understanding that as part of this decision, you would become a wife, and soldier your life to someone else's. The cost of making correct decisions loomed large.

The assistant watched us, watched me as I stood before the mirror and every so often changed to revisit the previous dress. We didn't say much. I changed, and changed back, as the three of us silently watched the impression of one dress, than the other.

Finally, the assistant, with her decades of experience engineering these moments, made her remark, and the decision was made.

"When she looks in the mirror in this dress, she looks at Mother. In the other one, she looks at herself."

 

Reckoning

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

—from Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman

Virtue VI: Order

The Straightener

Even as a boy, I was a straightener.
On a long table near my window
I kept a lantern, a spyglass, and my tomahawk.

Never tomahawk, lantern, and spyglass.
Always lantern, spyglass, tomahawk.

You could never tell when you would need them,
but that was the order you would need them in.

On my desk: pencils at attention in a cup,
foreign coins stacked by size,

a photograph of my parents,
and under the heavy green blotter,
a note from a girl I was fond of.

These days I like to stack in pyramids
the cans of soup in the pantry
and I keep the white candles in rows like logs of wax.

And if I can avoid doing my taxes
or phoning my talkative aunt
on her eighty-something birthday,

I will use a ruler to measure the space
between the comb and brush on the dresser,
the distance between shakers of salt and pepper.

Today, for example, I will devote my time
to lining up my shoes in the closet,
pair by pair in chronological order

and lining up my shirts on the rack by color
to put off having to tell you, dear,
what I really think and what I now am bound to do.

—from Horoscopes for the Dead, by Billy Collins

First