modesty

How strange that where you read a thing so often ends up attached to it thereafter. Here we have a  feeling of not-quite-fitting-in that slowly settles in the chest.

TO A FRENCH STRUCTURALIST

There’s no modesty, Todorov,
in the park where I read:
the young mothers and working girls
raise their skirts and open their blouses
to the sun while the children play,
the old men doze, and I wrestle
with your Poetics. When I look again,
perhaps they’ll all be naked;
they’ll make for the seesaw and jungle gym,
bosoms swinging and long legs flashing
in the midday light. Ah, that clerk
at the Préfecture de Police
looked at me with such disdain
when he asked what I was doing in Paris!
It was a lie, Todorov,
when I shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

           — DAVID KIRBY

(not) Proserpine's

Are we simply like Apollo or Pan of Greek myth, vainly seeking after Daphne and Syrinx but only to be rewarded with the narrow verged shade? Nature nurtures in us knowledge, and that we eat of, as of pleasure. Marvell here manages to elicit the very taste of solitude.

THE GARDEN

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays;
And their uncessant labors see
Crowned from some single herb or tree,
Whose short and narrow-vergèd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all the flowers and trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men:
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So amorous as this lovely green;
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress' name.
Little, alas, they know or heed,
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees! wheresoe'er your barks I wound
No name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our passion's heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat:
The gods who mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets and combs its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

Such was that happy garden-state,
While man there walked without a mate:
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet!
But 'twas beyond a mortal's share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises 'twere in one
To live in Paradise alone.

How well the skillful gard'ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new;
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And, as it works, th' industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers!

            — Andrew Marvell

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