"without a word without a breath"

All

All the beautiful women in my life

were called Sadie or Sadist I forget

the color of that flower also its name

now that you ask

where I have been these past few months

between the solstice and the total eclipse

of all that we once had known

or thought mistakenly to know.

Perhaps the snow blinded us

or we gazed too long at the startled sun

forgetting our strict instructions

like so many others

who had assembled there for the event

that came and went

without a word without a breath

while the dancers so young filled the streets

and the fields with a sort of silent song

thinking they could go on and on.

-- Michael Palmer, Little Elegies for Sister Satan

The Living Is Easy

I'd say for the last ten years my primary reading has been fiction, with some forays into history.  I'm trying to read more poetry these days though, like when I was a much younger man.  In the past year I've re-read Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, both very much worth my time.  (I'd forgotten how damn funny Plath is, biography be damned.)  I came upon this poem -- "Places with Terrible Wi-Fi" -- and had to buy the book by J. Estanislao Lopez.  Along with new stuff, I've got plans to reconnect with T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson before the summer ends.

And things are good.  I'm going down to North Carolina in August to check out houses.  I'm thinking the US men make it out of the group stage then get crushed (typical, really, and not all that bad for a Football / Basketball county).  It's hot and humid.  Ultimately, I'm just excited to be leaving Frederick.  Some charms, but mostly boring and filled with rednecks.  And while I realize I'm moving to the South, at least I'll have good beaches down there to visit.

"words that bloom forth like flowers"

"They arrive unperceived at first, and the children

 Rush toward them, but the joy is too bright, too blinding, 

And man shies away, even a demigod hardly knows

 What to call them, they who approach him with gifts.

But great is the courage they bring, their joys fill

 His heart, he hardly knows what to make of this wealth;

He fiddles around and he wastes it, almost thinking the unholy holy,

 That which he kindly and foolishly touches with his blessing hand.

The heavenly bear this as much as they can; but they

 Themselves then come in truth, and men grow accustomed to joy

And the day and beholding those manifest, the faces of those

 Who were named long ago the One and the All, and who

Filled the silent breasts deeply with contentment so free,

 And were first and alone to satisfy every desire.

Thus is man; when the wealth is there, and a god himself

 Provides him with gifts, he won't see it and remains unaware.

First he must bear it; now, though, he names what is dearest,

 Now he needs words, words that bloom forth like flowers."

Friedrich Hölderlin, Bread and Wine stanza 5, trans. Nick Hoff

"that is the last they see of one another"

Where Babies Come From

Many are from the Maldives,

southwest of India, and must begin

collecting shells almost immediately.

The larger one may prefer coconuts.

Survivors move from island to island

hopping over one another and never

looking back. After the typhoons

have had their pick, and the birds of prey

have finished with theirs, the remaining few

must build boats, and in this, of course,

they can have no experience, they build

their boat of palm leaves and vines.

Once the work is completed, they lie down,

thoroughly exhausted and confused,

and a huge wave washes them out to sea.

And that is the last they see of one another.

In their dreams Mama and Papa

are standing on the shore

for what seems like an eternity,

and it is almost always the wrong shore.

-- James Tate

Safe In Their Alabaster Shake It Offs

 Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson, BFFs:

"Dickinson and Swift are sixth cousins, three times removed. Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, is regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson lived as a recluse in her family’s home and only published anonymously while she was alive."

This is fine.  Charming, really.

Larkin and the Animal Shelter

 Talking In Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest

Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why

At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find

Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind.

-- Philip Larkin

I like to get to work a little early and read some poetry before I go in, at least when it isn't 90 degrees outside.  Call it my "centering" practice.  So it was nice to spend some time with one of my favorite, delightfully grim poets over the past few months with a used copy of his Collected Poems.  (A prolific poet he was not, which I also count as a bonus.  Take him or leave him.  No sticky editorial issues.  It's all there in about 200 pages.  Was he a horrible racist?  Yes, probably.)

Working at the animal shelter since last fall, maybe the choice was subconscious.  Some of Larkin's best and most famous poems are, in fact, about animals -- "The Mower" (about killing a hedgehog accidentally), "Myxomatosis" (about killing a rabbit on purpose), "Toads" (about people, really).

I'll always tell people, if they ask, my favorite poem remains "This Be The Verse."  But I was less familiar with "Talking In Bed," and I'd have to say it's my favorite utterly unromantic love poem of all time.  Which is to say, it's beautiful and true.  A response to Sonnet #130, I think.

"the inertia of blind wanderings"

"Think of our own life-lines or life-times as being such a vegetable thing, abundantly flowering and putting forth seedpods of what we are, so that moments ripen and fall to earth, bursting with new plantings of ourselves in us -- and these, subject to mutations, radioactive alterations and misunderstandings of our original form, puns, cross-messages of the first code we come from -- and so we go to birth, to the leaping aliveness of a new beginning from the inertia of the blind wanderings of the plant we are in our going to seed."

-- Robert Duncan, "The Pod of Adam"

"the reality of ghosts"

     Life and Death

are attributes of the Soul

not of things.  The Ego

is costumed as the road manager

of the soul, every time

the soul plays a date in another town

I goes ahead to set up

the bleechers, or book the hall

as they now have it,

the phenomenon is reported by the phrase

I got there ahead of myself

I got there ahead of my I

is the fact

which not a few anxious mortals

misread as intuition.  The Tibetans

have a treatise on that subjection.

Yet the sad fact is I is

part of the thing

and can never leave it.

This alone constitutes

the reality of ghosts.

Therefore I is not dead.

-- Edward Dorn, Gunslinger

"but we didn't care"

Isle of Dogs

On the Isle of Dogs we barked.

We had our say

from day till dark.

A chorus we were

of piebald hounds.

Our howling spiraled out

across the downs.

We howled at the redness of light,

bayed at the rising waters

and approaching night --

we lived on an island of sounds.

None listened, none heard,

the sounds were entirely ours

None listened, none heard

but we didn't care

as long as our howls

shaped the still air --

we lived on the Isle of Sounds.

-- Michael Palmer

"in a dense fog / still playing"

Rest in peace Lawrence Ferlinghetti, having reached the age of 101 (!).  Due to the talent and kindness of two teachers in high school, you were the first poet I ever took seriously, whose words I tried to inhabit.  (If he'd never written a word and only published Howl we'd still owe him a lot.)

From "Autobiography":

"I am a bank of song.

I am a playerpiano

in an abandoned casino

on a seaside esplanade

in a dense fog

still playing.

I see a similarity

between the Laughing Woman

and myself.

I have heard the sound of summer

in the rain.

I have seen girls on boardwalks

have complicated sensations.

I understand their hesitations.

I am a gatherer of fruit.

I have seen how kisses

cause euphoria.

I have risked enchantment.

I have seen the Virgin

in an appletree at Chartres

and Saint Joan burn

at the Bella Union.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims

their necks like love

wound around the iron circumstances

of the world."