Entirely

Mary Fedden

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
and falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else's arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city's
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in the brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

Louis MacNeice



MacNeice’s  poem suits my current train of thought well. We want answers. We want to know why and how and who. We think this plus that equals such-and-such.Everything must or should be knowable, understandable, comprehensible. We think the "information" we have is correct, we believe if we know the "facts" we will be strong, we will be better, we can be prepared for things to come. But all that is illusion. We are truly in "a mad weir of tigerish waters, a prism of delight and pain". And it's okay. It is wildly reductive to think that we know much of anything, or understand what the "facts" mean. Learning to ask questions, new questions, recurring questions, questions within questions - this is the way to live. There is grace in exploration, in searching, in waiting for things to become clearer, clear enough for deeper quests. MacNeice writes so eloquently of learning to accept the partiality of our existence. It's a relinquishment of ego, it seems to me, a recognition of aweful compexities that are yet and may always be beyond us. Knowing we don't know is a good thing, it is much easier to learn from that position than from the position of believing we have the answers.

The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy

Yelena Bryksenkova, "Breakdown"

The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy

16
The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy. I'm thinking
how precise people are when they describe their pain in a doctor's office.
Even those who haven't learned to read and write are precise:
"This one's a throbbing pain, that one's a wrenching pain,
this one gnaws, that one burns, this is a sharp pain
and that––a dull one. Right here. Precisely here,
yes, yes." Joy blurs everything, I've heard people say
after night of love and feasting, "It was great,
I was in seventh heaven." Even the spaceman who floated
in outer space, tethered to a spaceship, could say only, "Great,
wonderful, I have no words."
The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain––
I want to describe, with a sharp pain's precision, happiness
and blurry joy. I learned to speak among the pains.

Yehuda  Amichai


“Joy blurs everything.” I remember as a teen talking to a friend going to college, we were discussing poetry, and he told me something that I’ve thought about ever since – “Everyone writes about love. Love is easy to write about. Hate and pain are much more difficult.” My own thoughts are muddy on that point. On the one hand, love (and joy) is more pleasant, but I do think this makes for a lot of glib sloppiness. Pain, by contrast, demands accuracy of a writer. With love we are generous, with pain, exacting. Pain asks a question, pain isolates, and the one who speaks of it has to make her position absolutely clear in order to be understood. The one who speaks of love, however, assumes comprehension. Everyone knows what love is. It’s a uniting, bonding experience, a commonplace. But that’s where we make a mistake. That’s where this poem gets me. “ I learned to speak among the pains.” To use what one has learned in and from pain to speak clearly and accurately of love? Amen to that. May that be what we learn to do with pain. Because we only think we know what love is.