Tuesday, 14 January 2025

from Contradictions: Tracking Poems

Gwen Raverat


from Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1.

Look:        this is January      the worst onslaught
is ahead of us         Don't be lured
by these soft grey afternoons      these sunsets cut
from pink and violet tissue-paper      by the thought
the days are lengthening
Don't let the solstice fool you;
our lives will always be
a stew of contradictions
the worst moments of winter can come in April
when the peepers are stubbornly still      and our bodies
plod on without conviction
and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer
arsenal of everything that tries us:
this battering, blunt-edged life.


18.
The problem, unstated till now, is how
to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncured      un-grieved over      The problem is
to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one's body with the pain of the body's world
For it is the body's world
filled with creatures      filled with dread
mishapen so      yet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I long to live on this earth
walking her boundaries      never counting the cost


Adrienne Rich

 

"This battering, blunt-edged life."

That phrase certainly feels true today.

And how do I live it? How reconcile my struggle and the struggle of others, how "connect" even to broken things and selves?

And that last line --

"Never counting the cost"

That's what I really want.

To live full-out, in spite of all the beat-downs.




 

 

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Spider

 

 


Spider


Teacher of Swedenborg and St. John of the Cross,

First anchorite, mysterious builder --

From the dark corner of my room

His destination

The distant northern star. . .


As he weaves, as he spreads his webs,

He is singing.

I'm certain of it,

He is singing.


Charles Simic


I can't say more about this than it already says - 

Singing



 



Tuesday, 24 December 2024

The Composer's Winter Dream





The Composer's Winter Dream


Vivid and heavy, he strolls through dark brick kitchens
Within the great house of Esterhazy:
A deaf servant’s candle
Is tipped toward bakers who are quarreling about
The green kindling! The wassail is
Being made by pouring beer and sherry from dusty bottles

Over thirty baked apples in a large bowl: into
The wassail, young girls empty their aprons of
Cinnamon, ground mace, and allspice berries. A cook adds
Egg whites and brandy. The giant glass snifters
On a silver tray are taken from the kitchen by two maids.
The anxious pianist eats the edges of a fig

Stuffed with Devonshire cream. In the sinks the gallbladders
Of geese are soaking in cold salted water.
Walking in the storm, this evening, he passed
Children in rags, singing carols; they were roped together
In the drifting snow outside the palace gate.
He knew he would remember those boys’ faces. . .

There’s a procession into the kitchens: larger boys, each
With a heavy shoe of coal. The pianist sits and looks
Hard at a long black sausage. He will not eat

Before playing the new sonata. Beside him
The table sags with hams, kidney pies, and two shoulders
Of lamb. A hand rings a bell in the parlor!

No longer able to hide, he walks
Straight into the large room that blinds him with light.
He sits before the piano still thinking of hulled berries. . .
The simple sonata which

He is playing has little
To do with what he’s feeling: something larger
Where a viola builds, in air, an infinite staircase.
An oboe joins the viola, they struggle
For a more florid harmony.   
But the silent violins now emerge

And, like the big wing of a bird, smother everything
In a darkness from which only a single horn escapes—
That feels effaced by the composer’s dream. . .
But he is not dreaming,
The composer is finishing two performances simultaneously!

He is back in the dark kitchens, sulking and counting
His few florins—they have paid him
With a snuffbox that was pressed
With two diamonds, in Holland!
This century discovers quinine.
And the sketchbooks of a mad, sad musician

Who threw a lantern at his landlord who was standing beside
A critic. He screamed: Here, take the snuffbox, I’ve filled
It with the dander of dragons! He apologizes
The next morning, instructing the landlord to take
This stuff (Da Ist Der Wisch) to a publisher,
And sell it! You'll have your velvet garters, Pig!

The composer is deaf, loud, and feverish. . . he went
To the countryside in a wet sedan chair.
He said to himself: for the piper, seventy ducats! He’d curse
While running his fingers through his tousled hair, he made
The poor viola climb the stairs.
He desired loquats, loquats with small pears!   

Ludwig, there are Spring bears under the pepper trees!
The picnic by the stone house. . . the minnows
Could have been sunlight striking fissures
In the stream; Ludwig, where your feet are
In the cold stream
Everything is horizontal like the land and living.

The stream saying, “In the beginning was the word
And without the word
Was not anything made that was made. . .
But let us believe in the word, Ludwig,
For it is like the sea grasses
Off which with giant snails eat, at twilight!” But then

The dream turns to autumn; the tinctures he
Swallows are doing nothing for him, and he shows
The physicians his spoon which has dissolved
In the mixtures the chemist has given him!
After the sonata was heard: the standing for applause
Over, he walked out where it was snowing.

It had been dark early that evening. It’s here that the
Dream becomes shocking: he sees a doctor
In white sleeves
Who is sawing at the temporal bones of his ears. There is
A bag of dampened plaster for the death mask. And
Though he is dead, a pool of urine runs to the

Middle of the sickroom. A brass urinal is on the floor, it is
The shape of his ears rusting on gauze. The doctors

Drink stale wassail. They frown over the dead Beethoven. Outside,
The same March storm that swept through Vienna an hour before
Has turned in its tracks like the black, caged panther
On exhibit in the Esterhazys’ candlelit ballroom. The storm crosses
Over Vienna once more: lightning strikes the Opera House, its eaves
And awnings filled with hailstones,

Flames leaping to the adjacent stables! Someone had known,
As thunder dropped flower boxes off windowsills,
Someone must have known
That, at this moment, the violins would emerge
In a struggle with the loud, combatant horns.

Norman Dubie
 
 
In all this fantastical compilation, this word-story, with image after image, scene after scene coming in waves, exactly as surrealistic as a dream - it is this line that stays with me -
 
"But he is not dreaming,
The composer is finishing two performances simultaneously!"
 
He is not dreaming?

What is dream and what is awake?
 

A wonderful question, don't you think?



 

Tuesday, 17 December 2024

Poem of Hope

 

Maxfield Parrish

 
  Poem of Hope


A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—

and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.


He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;

but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.


He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. 

Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.


The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy

on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

 

Isaiah 11:1-9


Here I am in the Poem of Hope.

Here, where a dry root begins to grow, where a tree that has been cut down sprouts a new branch -  here where Hope crawls up from the ground and begins to fill the earth.

Thursday, 21 November 2024

Goldwing Moth

 


   


 

Goldwing Moth

 

A goldwing moth is between the scissors and the ink bottle 

on the desk.

Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb

and a flame wire.

The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated

initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks.

 

Carl Sandburg 

 

I puzzle over this. 

 

The scissors and the ink bottle,

that circling a thing of light, an incandescence -

is this showing us the writer at his work?


Is the goldwing moth made holy by its object, 

by the light which compels it?


I go back over the poem, which only seems simple.









Sunday, 29 September 2024

'As Imperceptibly as Grief'

 

 

 

Larry Welo

 


 As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy—
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—
The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful. 

 

Emily Dickinson 

 


Dickinson has a way of putting everything in a poem

 without making it heavy.

A sadness without wallowing. A lightness without taking lightly.

And that "our Summer" - I see how one word changes everything.

Are the passing seasons of my life an "escape into the Beautiful"?

Or do I look back with regret at what is gone?

Into the Beautiful - !

That's where I want to go.

                                                          

 

 

 

Friday, 26 April 2024

Woods

 

 

 

Gina Signore

Woods
 
I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me. 
 
Wendell Berry 

Silence, darkness, heaviness.
Singing, vision, flight. 
There is an exchange here that is extraordinary.
 
How much does nature influence our being?
The movement and sound and light - these change us.
I don't know how, but they do.