The Round

Ivan Kulikov, "Evgeny Chirikov"

 

The Round

Light splashed this morning

on the shell-pink anenomes

swaying on their tall stems

down blue-spiked veronica

light flowed in rivulets

over the humps of the honeybees;

this morning I saw light kiss

the silk of the roses

in their second flowering,

my late bloomers,

flushed with their brandy.

A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,

so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,

so I am sitting in semi-dark

hunched over my desk

with nothing for a view

to tempt me

but a bloated compost-heap,

steamy old stink-pile ,

under my window;

and I pick my notebook up

and I start to read aloud

the still-wet words I scribbled

on the blotted page:

"Light splashed..."

I can scarcely wait for tomorrow

when a new life begins for me,

as it does each day,

as it does each day.

Stanley Kunitz

from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected

This poem shows us the double life of the writer. In order to do his work he has to leave the beauty of the garden and enclose himself in a “cell”, that is, cut himself off from life in order to re-create or capture it. It’s a divided existence. The translation of thought to page requires concentration, isolation, and yet he needs that vital connection to the world. It’s a very individual back-and-forth struggle. I say struggle because being pulled between two worlds is not easy. But Kunitz, acknowledging this, is nonetheless full of anticipation. His time away, like his time with the flowers, has infused him with “a curious gladness”, a sense of there being more, of things being new every day. New light, new colours, new flowers. May his anticipation for beginning again be ours as well.