House On a Cliff

House On a Cliff

Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors
The winking signal on the waste of sea.
Indoors the sound of the wind, outdoors the wind.
Indoors the locked heart and the lost key.

Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors
The strong man pained to find his red blood cools,
While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors
The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules.

Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors
The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep.
Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross
Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep.

Louis MacNeice

 

What is this drama?

"Indoors the locked heart and the lost key."

 

I seem to have lost the ability to comment.

I'm at sea. Thinking, wondering, and no words come. 

On a Boat

Barry Moser

On a Boat, Awake at Night

Faint wind rustles reeds and cattails;

I open the hatch, expecting rain -- moon floods the lake.

Boatmen and water birds dream the same dream;

a big fish splashes off like a frightened fox.

It's late -- men and creatures forget each other

while my shadow and I amuse ourselves alone.

Dark tides creep over the flats -- I pity the cold mud-worms;

the setting moon, caught in a willow, lights a dangling spider.

Life passes swiftly, hedged by sorrow;

how long before you've lost it -- a scene like this?

Cocks crow, bells ring, a hundred birds scatter;

drums pound from the bow, shout answers shout.

Su Tung-p'o (1037-1101) (translated by Burton Watson)

 

 

 

This scene, described in such specific detail, comes alive. I am there, seeing and hearing these things, thinking these thoughts. 

 

It's magic. 

 

And then I look at the dates! Really? 

 

1037-1101? 

 

It could be this minute! 

 

What is the name for this? Time travel + mind meld + the ability to repeat this experience every time we want?

 

If you know of a word for it, tell me please!

 

all nearness pauses

Maxfield Parrish

all nearness pauses, while a star can grow
all distance breathes a final dream of bells;
perfectly outlined against afterglow
are all amazing and the peaceful hills
(not where not here but neither’s blue most both)

and history immeasurably is
wealthier by a single sweet day’s death:
as not imagined secrecies comprise

goldenly huge whole the upfloating moon.

Times a strange fellow;
more he gives than takes
(and he takes all)nor any marvel finds
quite disappearance but some keener makes
losing, gaining
—love! if a world ends
more than all worlds begin to(see?) begin

e.e. cummings 

 

Cummings' poems are so compact, how does a person begin to take them in? He sets out the opposites - "nearness", "farness" and then melds them together, he divides and then makes whole. He says, " not this, not that, but both", he is an "All" poet, a grand swirler and mixer of Everythings. And though stammered and ungrammered, utterly clear and true. 

That golden line:

 

"...and history immeasurably is

sweeter by a single sweet day's death"

 

I mean, who makes you think of the fine details of a minute within the breadth of all time quite as instantaneously as this?

Or:

 

"Time's a strange fellow;

More he gives than takes."

The briefest summation of the greatest complication!

I sit back and chew, just chew on his words.

In a Dark Time

 

Yaroslav Gerzhedovich

 

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   

And in broad day the midnight come again!   

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke

This poem has been on my mind a long time. Most of us are put off by poems we don't understand. It feels like failure to not grasp what's being said. And yet, I wonder if good poems (it doesn't do to respect a poem too much, like anything, there are differences in quality) aren't purposely intended to be wrestled with. Aren't they a questioning, a puzzling-out-loud? It seems to me that I can enter a poem and walk around, look through its rooms, pick up an object here, wonder why it's there, try sitting in a chair - no, it doesn't quite suit, look out the window at the view from here. The poem seems to be a living contender, an arrangement of ideas I talk to, and who talk back. A construction that either stands when shaken, or falls flat.

 

So I wrestle with the poem. That first line "In a dark time, the eye begins to see" gets me immediately. Isn't that just how our eyes adjust to darkness? It takes time, but slowly, we begin to make out the edges of things, the shapes of familiar objects - that's the garage, there's the fence-line, oh, the pine tree and the gate-latch. At this moment in life, that line alone (never mind the rest of the poem) captures my experience. I am trying to make out familiar shapes in the darkness. I'm fumbling around, not sure what I bumped into, but, oh yes, I see now - that was here before, but I didn't recognize it. 

 

"What's madness but nobility of soul/ At odds with circumstance?" I'm chewing on that one. 

 

"I know the purity of pure despair/ My shadow pinned against a sweating wall." Isn't it remarkable how an image can perfectly embody a feeling? It's as if there is another language out there, or an incarnation for each thought and state of mind. Maybe that's what poets are doing - fumbling through a dark alphabet- forest, searching for a familiar shape to bring back with them into the light? 

 

What does "the mind enters itself" mean?

 

And isn't it so true, "A man goes far to find out what he is."?

 

And then, even though I can't explain why, "the edge is what I have" is dead-on accurate. Maybe it's that I am finally making out the lines of certain objects in the darkness - not the entirety, certainly not the whole.No, the edge is what I have.

Well, it's a beginning.

 

 

 

Shadows

Linda Bennett

Shadows

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding,
folding around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

 

D.H. Lawrence

 

 "...then I shall know that I am walking still/ with God we are close together now.."

There are so many distractions and stresses, there always have been - coming in from in so many directions. These days I look for the constants, the things that don't change. I find so much comfort there. Like the speaker in this poem, I go to sleep at night committing my existence into the hands of the God I trust with everything. The God who remains Himself no matter what dark cloud I find myself under, no matter what I don't know and can't control. The God who knows me fully and loves me entirely and who is able (and willing) to re-create me, transform me, lift me up beyond cloud or circumstance. The God with whom all good things are possible. "

"New blossoms of me." for instance, 

"strange flowers such as my life has not brought forth before."

 

 

Rise

Unknown

Rise

One thing happens, then another.

In the long slow rise, so many hands

reach out and lift us

over fallen branches, hidden drops,

old crops of stone. The moon

tilts up its yellow chin. The clouds

disperse. We grow into a face

our mothers recognize as someone else:

a father's father, sister's sister.

Nobody is single in this world,

that's all we know, will ever know,

about the way we come and go.

We're pulled to presence by a doctor's

urgent, gentle hands; we're laid

to sleep and covered over. Nobody's

alone. I'm here with you. Here

reaching for your fingers, holding on.

Jay Parini

“Nobody is single in this world.” That line is worth some thought. It's not confined to genetics or proximity or time. We are connected, a "we" - past, present, and future. Which means, hard as it might be to accept, that how we think of and treat ourselves is as crucial as how we think of and treat others. The important things that we can't seem to do for ourselves should perhaps then be done for the sake of others. We are more than merely ourselves. We are links, we are layers, shelters, balms, we are threads in the web that holds us all up, that supports us. "Nobody is single in this world." Everyone is necessary. So if you're sinking, reach out your hand. It matters to us all. 

 

Nocturne Cabbage

Susannah Blaxill

Nocturne Cabbage

Cabbages catch at the moon.
It is late summer, no rain, the pack of the soil
cracks open, it is a hard summer.
In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the
leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are
series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.

Carl Sandburg

from "Rainbows are Made"

Cabbages in the moonlight. That’s right. If you don’t think such a thing can be beautiful, you’d be amazed. Cabbages leaves have a strange surface – water droplets bead together on them like translucent pearls, and the feel of them at times is close to that of human skin. And as Carl Sandburg shows us, in certain light they have an unearthly sheen. I love this poem for the way it takes the veil from the commonplace. Cabbages, of all things, beautiful? Oh yes. More than that. Magic.