the terrifying form of monstrosity

He placed a jar upon a hill, and that placement created a center, around which all the wilderness of Tennessee was ordered. Quite an artificial and arbitrary center, wouldn't you agree? Setting down the jar set forth the landscape, no longer wild, freeplay locked out; the jar is within Tennessee and yet also outside it.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was grey and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

            — Wallace Stevens

poplar of water

Here, short sentences bequeath a universe. Roethke conjures for us the anticipation; the act; the recollection. Everything is simple, brief. But not so simple is the coiled meaning we might find 'neath the meandering leaves of his mild willow tree.

THE VISITANT

                                     I
A cloud moved close. The bulk of the wind shifted.
A tree swayed overwater.
A voice said:
Stay. Stay by the slip-ooze. Stay.

Dearest tree, I said, may I rest here?
A ripple made a soft reply.
I waited, alert as a dog.
The leech clinging to a stone waited;
And the crab, the quiet breather.

                                    II
Slow, slow as a fish she came,
Slow as a fish in coming forward,
Swaying in a long wave;
Her skirts not touching a leaf,
Her white arms reaching towards me.

She came without a sound,
Without brushing the wet stones,
In the soft dark of early evening,
She came,
The wind in her hair,
The moon beginning.

                                    III
I woke in the first of morning.
Staring at a tree, I felt the pulse of a stone.
Where’s she now, I kept saying,
Where’s she now, the mountain’s downy girl?

But the bright day had no answer.
A wind stirred in a web of appleworms;
The tree, the close willow, swayed.

            — Theodore Roethke

till the sun breaks down

A homeless man on the street walked up to me and recited...

AFTER THE FUNERAL
(IN MEMORY OF ANN JONES)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
Morning smack of a spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout,
After the feast of the tear-stuffed time and thistles,
In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern.
I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone
In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann
Whose hooded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid of her broken body).
But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculpted Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm
Storm me forever over her grave until
The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

             — Dylan Thomas

hope deferred no more

It is a poem saturated with allusion, the most immediate being Aeschylus: the epigraph is Agamemnon's line "Alas, I am struck deep with a mortal blow." Is T. S. Eliot trying to say we too deserve that fate, slippery silver bathtub walls our final bed? The prevalent animals are also a curious feature: ape, zebra, giraffe, dog, nightingale, and murderous paws.

SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES

ώμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πληγήν έσω.

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog,
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney's knees

Slips and pulls the table-cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;

The silent vertebrae in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovich
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

            — T. S. Eliot

the hyperreal itself

Is this the time, this generation, when simulation overtakes everything, when, as in the Borges fable, the map supersedes the empire? Zelda's poetry, often spiritual, asks questions of the will that moves these stars, points of light projected on the dome of a planetarium. No matter how we may try to become used to it, this new reality is strange, and amid the torpor of our will the precession of simulacra continues.

A DRUNK, EMBROILED WILL

A drunk, embroiled, bleeding will
that imposed itself on constellations,
on the world's secret,
is blazing in my generation's heart.
Fettering the free, festive air,
with a strict hand.
The sun and the deeps are wheel horses
on its farm.

It is strange to be a woman,
simple, domestic, feeble,
in an insolent, violent generation,
to be shy, weary,
in a cold generation, a generation of wheelers and dealers,
for whom Orion, Pleiades, and moon
are advertisement lights, golden marks, army badges.
To march in a shaded street
reflecting, slowly, slowly,
to taste China
in a perfumed peach,
to look at Paris
in a cold movie theater,
while they fly
around the world,
while they fly in space.
To be among conquerors
and conquered,
while every creature is ashamed, afraid,
alone.

It is strange to wither before clouds of enmity,
while the heart is drawn
to a myriad of worlds.

           — Zelda Mishkovsky, translated from the Hebrew by Marcia Falk

this altar of certitude

It would be amiss to not list the poem from which this blog's title springs. Of all his dictums, MacLeish's truest surely is that a poem should be equal to: not true. For of this melancholy demeanor a poem well stands, outside of fear and favor, the proper art of poetry.

ARS POETICA

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds


A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs


A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be

            — Archibald MacLeish

up to the sphere of fire

Sound of a name on the tongue, this man’s madeleine, the trappings of taste, snatch him away like Dante’s eagle to a deep recollection next the shores of the deep. A word a woman a spoken a stroke of the tide, seasrun past Odysseus and Penelope...very much a call, Caribbeans wake. Walcott’s language throughout Omeros is truly extraordinary, and this scene is but one example.

from OMEROS, Book I, Ch. II

“O-meros,” she laughed. “That’s what we call him in Greek,”
stroking the small bust with its boxer’s broken nose,
and I thought of Seven Seas sitting near the reek

of drying fishnets, listening to the shallows’ noise.
I said “Homer and Virg are New England farmers,
and the winged horse guards their gas-station, you’re right.”

I felt the foam head watching as I stroked an arm, as
cold as its marble, then the shoulders in winter light
in the studio attic. I said, “Omeros,”

and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes

and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.

The name stayed in my mouth. I saw how light was webbed
on her Asian cheeks, defined her eyes with a black
almond's outline, as Antigone turned and said:

“I’m tired of America, it’s time for me to go back
to Greece. I miss my islands.” I write, it returns—
the way she turned and shook out the black gust of hair.

I saw how the surf printed its lace in patterns
on the shore of her neck, then the lowering shallows
of silk swirled at her ankles, like surf without noise,

and felt that another cold bust, not hers, but yours
saw this with stone almonds for eyes, its broken nose
turning away, as the rustling silk agrees.

But if it could read between the lines of her floor
like a white-hot deck uncaulked by Antillean heat,
to the shadows in its hold, its nostrils might flare

at the stench from manacled ankles, the coffled feet
scraping like leaves, and perhaps the inculpable marble
would have turned its white seeds away, to widen

the bow of its mouth at the horror under her table,
from the lyre of her armchair draped with its white chiton,
to do what the past always does: suffer, and stare.

She lay calm as a port, and a cloud covered her
with my shadow; then a prow with painted eyes
slowly emerged from the fragrant rain of black hair.

And I heard a hollow moan exhaled from a vase,
not for kings floundering in lances of rain; the prose
of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes.

            — Derek Walcott