From James H. Knight-Adkin’s “No Man’s Land”:
What are the bounds of No Man’s Land?
You can see them clearly on either hand,
A mound of rag-bags gray in the sun,
Or a furrow of brown where the earthworks run
From the eastern hills to the western sea,
Through field or forest o’er river and lea;
No man may pass them, but aim you well
And Death rides across on the bullet or shell.
I don’t know that I agree with Thomas Lynch’s claim, but I did enjoy “Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets” nonetheless.
So, my home phone/internet’s been out of commission since Friday, and there was an airline clusterfuck on Sunday that ended up costing me two cab fares, 50% of my too-late-to-cancel guest-house reservation for yesterday night, and several hours of my life that I don’t get back. Grr, grr, grr.
That said, I was glad to end up with more time to herd a few more things into order… including completing the “Wishes At Time of Death” form my pastor keeps on file, which includes specifying any readings desired. For what it’s worth, I want Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment” and Jane Hirshfield’s “The Heart’s Counting Knows Only One” either in the program or read aloud. I’m betting there will be an Emily Dickinson in there as well – though how I will collect if the reader in question chooses as expected, I haven’t quite worked out. (Maybe a dram of Edradour poured over my ashes? But that would be a waste of good whisky…)
I also treated myself to a glass of Canton ginger liqueur , a long hot soak in the tub, and some visiting with my poetry books. Of particular note:
…real love, I’ve decided, is when
you see your lover at their most
awkward, wretched moments
and still want to fuck them later.
There are a couple upcoming deadlines I’ve been working toward, and I’m hopeful about meeting them, albeit not at the expense of time with friends and improving my Hebrew and other being-here-in-the-present priorities. That said, there’s a part of my brain that’s ruthless about testing words with and against each other until they fit just so, and when it’s in gear, there’s no getting any sleep until it’s gotten its due. (In other words, this is why I spent a good chunk of early Monday morning working on two new cinquains instead of sinking back into sleep. At this point, it shouldn’t surprise that me that putting together forty-four syllables = as complicated as shaping water. (Think of fountains. Think of ice. Think of how some faucets gurgle and some whine like tired teakettles. Some poems are downpours that clog up gutters and destroy posters; others strike as lightly as a flutter of drops on a lemon tree. And I seem to be writing a poem in spite of myself, so I’d best wrap this up and pour the rest of my words into something eventually submittable (it’s 1:15 am here, and where I’m staying, the only creatures still awake besides me are a cat in heat and the occasional palmetto bug scuttling across the stones).
Go read Joanne’s “Thirteen Scifaiku for Blackbirds” because it is lovely and haunting and now is the time when autumn lasts all year.
Marymary’s sonnet (which you should read, the better to admire the (dis)appearance both of “ocean’s negligee” and “bathymetry”) drew my eyes to The Flea, where there is also Ann Drysdale’s “Said Yeats’ Bones to Hardy’s Heart,” which delights me both in rhythm and wit.
I have been bitten by Marissa’s meme (even if I have just now had time to copy):
Give me the title of a poem I’ve never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first line, the last line, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got offered to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I’d been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.
Also, like Marissa, I ask that you don’t comment with stuff you wouldn’t want me to run with. Because I will run.
Ready? Set?
The to-read stack currently includes the July/August issue of Star*Line and Carolyn Miller’s Light, Moving. The Star*Line has Duane Ackerson’s “The Bermuda Triangle,” which had me grinning with glee both because of the conceit (“…Having sucked nourishment from WWII aircraft / down to the bones, / it leaves the warm waters of the Gulf…”) and because I’m a sucker for allusions to Galileo’s E puor si muove, which, yes, here, perfect. It’s going on my Rhysling short-list.
The Miller: the subject line’s from her poem “Christmas Day” (and isn’t that a choice juxtaposition? – as is the line “the bitter perfume of the Christmas tree”) (for the non-carolers reading this: the third king sings about the Crucifixion as he offers myrrh to the newborn Christ). There’s another poem titled “To Dr. Williams” that opens with
This is just to say
I never understood
why the plums were inthe icebox. Although
I like to think
of biting into chilled…
The poem I lingered over today was “Note to the New World,” which is making me want to reread Alison Luterman‘s “Morning in the Mission: Grandpop Comes to Visit” (my copy of The Largest Possible Life is at home, where I am not) – both poems are set in San Francisco’s Mission District; both celebrate the vibrant beauty of this here world in tandem with memories of a beloved man who “would have loved the day, filled as it was / with the fumes of poppies, smells of Mexican food…”
I have also been listening a lot to the first two songs on an EP by a Brooklyn group called The Paper Raincoat (Alex Wong was in Nashville last month as the drummer in the Vienna Teng Trio – a terrific show I happened to catch with Joanne). Both songs (“Sympathetic Vibrations” and “Brooklyn Blurs”) are on the group’s MySpace jukebox; musical goodness aside (I really like the bridge in “Vibrations,” there’s a goofy quote from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” in the mix, and some brilliant arranging in “Blurs”), the lyrics are spot-on. And they’re relevant to this post because they share with Miller and Luterman that sense of being ambushed by the beauty of everyday life.
…Which is my core sensibility as well, although it has just occurred to me that that shows up much more in my letters than in my poems. Must reflect on that some other time. For now, I’m also haunted by “Brooklyn Blurs”‘s refrain of “… I can’t believe that I’m still standing here / I am a ghost to everyone I know.” (And as much as I know that that isn’t remotely true in the slightest, at the moment I can’t let go of how true it feels. Which means I’m due for a long swim, a bottle of Gewurtztraminer, and a full night of self-medicating word-slamming.)
Here’s your Poetry Friday, in some other time zone, or worldview: a beautiful poem by Judith Wright.
In Praise of Marriage
Not till life halved, and parted
one from the other,
did time begin, and knowledge;
sorrow, delight.
Terror of being apart, being lost,
made real the night.
Seeking and finding made
yesterday, now, and tomorrow;
and love was realized first
when those two came together.So, perilously joined,
lighted in one small room,
we have made all things true.
Out of the I and the you
spreads this field of power,
that all that waits may come,
all possibles be known—
all futures step from their stone
and pasts come into flower.
(I do confess that I think this beauty can happen without marriage and without duality but that does not detract from Wright’s beauty.)
Also, for those of us who insist that poetry is not dead, Wright writes in her foreword to A Human Pattern:
For many years, a notion has been around that poetry is dying, if not dead. It hasn’t died, and unless a dislike generated in school and university days prevails, it won’t die.
But it is certainly in danger, just as the earth itself is in danger, from the philosophies generated by greed. Materialism, positivism, and behaviourism are foes of both poetry and the survival of the earth. They have ruled during my lifetime; but I think they are on the way out.”
Julie Kane’s “Particle Physics” at Poetry Daily invokes both baseball and eternity.
(As does Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See, which I’ve given as a “you must read this” gift at least twice. And which in turn reminds me of Steve Kluger’s Last Days of Summer, which I once loaned to a baseball-loving minister who told me later she’d enjoyed it enough to give a copy to another friend as a present, and yes, knowing that pleases me mightily.)
Because today ripened and bloom autumnal chill, and because it is September 11th and I cannot help but think of war, although I do not wish to, I turn to Nancy Willard‘s poem “Night Light”.
This poem appeared in her book Household Tales of Moon and Water. When I was privileged to hear Willard read at the West Chester Poetry Conference a few years ago I forgot to bring along my copy. Instead, I brought her (then) new book up and explained that I had intended to have her sign Household Tales; she generously inscribed her new book thus:
This poem is in quatrains, except for the exceptional ending; I return to it for the repetition and for the thoughts, not the least of which is “its one trick: / it turns into a banana.”
Night Light
The moon is not green cheese.
It is china and stands in this room.
It has a ten-watt bulb and a motto:
Made in Japan.Whey-faced, doll-faced,
it’s closed as a tooth
and cold as the dead are cold
till I touch the switch.Then the moon performs
its one trick:
it turns into a banana.
It warms to its subjects,it draws us into its light,
just as I knew it would
when I gave ten dollars
to the pale clerkin the store that sold
everything.
She asked, did I have a car?
She shrouded the moon in tissueand laid it to rest in a box.
The box did not say Moon.
It said This side up.
I tucked my moon into my basketand bicycled into the world.
By the light of the sun
I could not see the
moon under my sack of apples,moon under slab of salmon,
moon under clean laundry,
under milk its sister
and bread its brother,moon under meat.
Now supper is eaten.
Now laundry is folded away.
I shake out the old comforters.My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.