Bad Sheep

Hendrik Kerstens

Bad Sheep

Midnight’s merely blue,

but me, me, me, I’m

through

and through

sloe, cracked soot-

on-a-boot,

nicotine spat, licorice whip.

You can scratch, scratch, scratch

but I stay underskin true

to ebony, ink, crowberry, pitch;

hoist me up by my hooves

and shake till I’m shook, I’m still

chock full of coke, fuliginous

murk.

O there’s swart in my soul,

coal by the bag,

cinders and slag,

scoriac grit, so please

come, comb

through my fleece with hands pallid

as snow and watch

how they grow tarry, raven,

stygian, ashed—

or, if you wish, clean me with bleach

I won’t

flinch, just char

down to a core of caliginous

marrow,

pure carbon, atramentous,

utterly piceous,

shadowed, and starless,

each clumpity clump

and eclipse of my heart raptly

re-burnishing

a woolgather dark.

Hailey Leithauser


"Fuliginous murk"! That's fantastic. If you're going to take a look at the dark side (seeing as it's Halloween), then this is the way to do it - witty wordplay. Leithauser certainly brings out the joy in words. It's hard to be depressed when you are so intricately gothic and picturesque about your evil self. This seems like it might be a good way to crawl out of the hole, in fact. Maybe that's what writers do, keep themselves afloat on a raft of words. 



 

Encounter

Maggie Vandewalle

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

 Czeslaw Milosz

Oh this poem - this poem captures the shocked incredulity we feel that a moment and movement and person so alive, so vivid in memory could be gone. Where are they? Where do they go? How could they simply "not be"? It is beyond comprehension. A mystery we go over and over.

 

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Emile Claus “Poultry in a Wood”

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Oh the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,

Lamps in a wash of rain!

Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard,

Oh tears on the window pane!

Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples,

Full of disappointment and of rain,

Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples

Of autumn tell the withered tale again.

All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen,

Cluck, and the rain-wet wings,

Cluck, my marigold bird, and again

Cluck for your yellow darlings.

For the grey rat found the gold thirteen

Huddled away in the dark,

Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and keen,

Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark.

Once I had a lover bright like running water,

Once his face was laughing like the sky;

Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter

On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I.

What, then, is there hidden in the skirts of all the blossom?

What is peeping from your wings, oh mother hen?

’Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste for wisdom;

What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men!

Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom,

And her shift is lying white upon the floor,

That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a rain-storm,

Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store.

Oh the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples,

Oh the golden sparkles laid extinct!

And oh, behind the cloud-sheaves, like yellow autumn dapples,

Did you see the wicked sun that winked!

D.H. Lawrence

I've been wanting to add this poem for a while. But it's completely mad. Of course it is. Ophelia was mad. But who is this "other" Ophelia? It's a complete mystery to me. Why is it that I have no idea what is being said and still I like it? It's as if we can see through the eyes of a person who translates everything - apples, brown hen, rain, yellow bird, blossom, sun - into a strange paranoid sense of impending doom. I like that. It reminds me that my thoughts are often wildly inaccurate, coloured by emotion, and they close in on me. A poem like this reminds me that I can crawl out of the rabbit hole. 




  

when unto nights of autumn

Konstantin Kalynovych

when unto nights of autumn do complain

earth's ghastlier trees by whom Time measured is

when frost to dance maketh the sagest pane

of littler huts with peerless fantasies

or the unlovely longness of the year

droops with things dead athwart the narrowing hours

and hope (by cold espoused unto fear)

in dreadful corners hideously cowers -

i do excuse me, love, to Death and Time

storms and rough cold, winds menace and leaf's grieving:

from the impressed fingers of sublime

Memory, of that loveliness receiving

the image my proud heart cherished as fair.

(The child-head poised with the serious hair)

e.e. cummings

Cummings is funny, genuinely funny. I smile through that first stanza every time. Edward Estlin, were you like this in real time too? Did you wear your shirts inside-out and backwards, did you eat dessert for breakfast, did you ask your girlfriend to unsingle you?! You maddening, maddening  man. And yet, you were right. You are still right. This is how I experience life. Inside-out, backwards, frustratingly unreasonably difficult for no apparent reason, and at the same time heart-piercingly sweet. Which is all just to say that the meaning is not just in the things (words), but in the rhythm and order. Cummings wanted to stop us, make our brains stutter and hear things we had forgotten how to hear. One day I'll put a poem of his in "order", and show you how it pales and "droops with things dead" by comparison.






 

Reginald Gibbons

Wood

for Maxine Kumin

A cylinder of maple

set in place, feet spread apart—

and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer

but honed like an axe, draws

a semicircle overhead and strikes

through the two new halves

to leave the steel head sunk

a half-inch in the block and the ash

handle rigid in the air.

A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits

the butt end, and the blade

rolls out of the cut. The half-logs

are still rocking on the flagstones.

So much less than what we have been

persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood

might have sufficed, but it is what

we have been taught to disown and forget.

Yet just such hardship is what saves.

For if the stacked cords

speak of felled trees, of countless

five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill

till the blood is wrung from your back

and snowbound warmth must seem

so far off you would rather freeze,

yet each thin tongue torn from the grain

when log-halves were sundered at one stroke

will sing in the stove.

To remind you of hands. Of how

mere touch is song in the silence

where hands live—the song of muddy bark,

the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down,

and the song of one hand over another,

two of us holding the last length of the log

in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw

keeps ripping through hickory.

Reginald Gibbons

The hardship that saves. Interesting. We endure the cold and work so we enjoy the warmth (and the singing). I like how Gibbons describes the woodsplitter in action, there is something so innate about getting wood together for winter. That line "to remind you of hands" is so true. Just as a meal reminds you of the hands that planted, that gathered, that prepared - the woodpile and the woodbox, and the fire itself, always leads back to hands. "Mere touch is song in the silence where hands live", how wonderful - the logs singing in the stove, and touch as song in silence. Gibbons has brought together so many things together and joined them in this poem - work, wood, cold, preparation for hardship, warmth, singing, silence, hands, touch - it's lovely. The kind of poem that grows each time I read it. "The song of one hand over another."


    

Song for Autumn

Mark Berens

Song for Autumn

In the deep fall

don’t you imagine the leaves think how

comfortable it will be to touch

the earth instead of the

nothingness of air and the endless

freshets of wind? And don’t you think

the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,

warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep

inside their bodies? And don’t you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,

the everlasting being crowned with the first

tuffets of snow? The pond

vanishes, and the white field over which

the fox runs so quickly brings out

its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its

bellows. And at evening especially,

the piled firewood shifts a little,

longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver 


Yes, let's try to imagine what a leaf thinks.(!) It takes a certain kind of individual to anthropomorphize at this level. Scientists seem to find it repugnant, innacurate, childish. But to unscientific me, it shows someone who feels they are in a relationship with the world around them. A person who feels this is trusting that life is meaningful.  And so should we. How does it feel to be a tree? Or the skeleton of a wildflower? And why does it matter? Because everything matters, every single thing. And so we live thoughtfully, thoroughly, deliberately, not taking our place in the world for granted, because everything we do has meaning too.


 

Now

Eric de Vree

Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate'er befall.

Walter de la Mare

For my son, who taught me this truth - Now is the time to love. To love in the imperfect now is an honour, for love is an immortal and all-surpassing art. Poems, paintings, songs, all these fade away - love cannot die.

 

Parting

Theodor Kittelsen

Parting 

 

Parting, I take with me completed June,
My treasury of time, hoarded intact;
Eventual winds will not dissolve a tune
Of solid air, the body of this fact.
Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, I
Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall
Refuse to let one startled swallow die,
Or, from the copper beeches, one leaf fall. 

Here, vagrant from confusion, I shall greet
My youth immaculate in memory's urn;
This is my country, where the tireless feet
Of my adventure, homing, will return.
Each day will end in this day; every ship
Will bring me back, bright lip on lonely lip. 

Stanley Kunitz 

I was hoping I could get another "Green" poem in - and here it is! It was a wonderful summer, and I don't want to let it go, so I love how Kunitz talks about storing time up in a treasury. "Mind's acres are forever green...I shall keep perpetual summer here..." Yes, I can do that, I can keep it with me, in my mind. Or, in turn, I can go there, to "my country", "every ship will bring me back." I also am struck by that word "homing". I've never seen it used quite this way. Is that it - is it that we are all "homing" - looking for that green place and time we once were (or that we never have been but have always longed for), that essential place of life and growth and balance - that Eden Country we all belong to? How wonderful.

Stanley Kunitz writes exceptionally well about these in-between moments, looking back while committing to go on. I posted his poem "The Layers" on January 16, 2017, worth a re-read, if you ask me.





 

The Haymakers

Myles Birket Foster

Haymaking

After night’s thunder far away had rolled

The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,

And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,

Like the first gods before they made the world

And misery, swimming the stormless sea

In beauty and in divine gaiety.

The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn

With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—

And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.

The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit

With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd

Of children pouring out of school aloud.

And in the little thickets where a sleeper

For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper

And garden warbler sang unceasingly;

While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee

The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow

As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.

Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown

Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,

Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,

Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook

Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood

Without its team, it seemed it never would

Move from the shadow of that single yew.

The team, as still, until their task was due,

Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade

That three squat oaks mid-field together made

Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,

And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but

Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.

The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,

But still. And all were silent. All was old,

This morning time, with a great age untold,

Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,

Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,

A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.

Under the heavens that know not what years be

The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements

Uttered even what they will in times far hence—

All of us gone out of the reach of change—

Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

Edward Thomas

 I love the little details: the clouds, the empty road, the water going over the mill-wheel, the birds, the scent of hay. And that moment of stillness. "The men lean on their rakes." That moment where the details become bigger than themselves. "All of us gone out of the reach of change..." Interesting. Here is the moment where time melts into eternity, and we find ourselves "under the heavens that know not what years be."



 

Losers

Mike Worrall," Forest Terminal"

Losers

If I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.

If I pass the burial spot of Nero
I shall say to the wind, 'Well, well!'-
I who have fiddled in a world on fire,
I who have done so many stunts not worth doing.

I am looking for the grave of Sinbad too.
I want to shake his ghost-hand and say,
'Neither of us died very early, did we?'

And the last sleeping-place of Nebuchadnezzar-
When I arrive there I shall tell the wind:
'You ate grass; I have eaten crow-
Who is better off now or next year?'

Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James,
There too I could sit down and stop for awhile.
I think I could tell their headstones:
'God, let me remember all good losers.'

I could ask people to throw ashes on their heads
In the name of that sergeant at Belleau Woods,
Walking into the drumfires, calling his men,
'Come on, you ... Do you want to live forever?' 

Carl Sandburg

Defeat, failure, foolishness - but bravado nonetheless? What is it that I love so much about it? I think it's the power of negative thinking. I mean, to identify with losers is a convincing realism. Being down gives perspective. We have all lost, we have all failed, we have all acted the fool. Coming to grips with that can give us compassion. - I think that's what I appreciate about this poem, it's about compassion and finding the grit to go on. Even if all the options look like they'll end in failure. The reference to Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph Daly and the battle at Belleau Woods especially gets to me. That call to a losing battle - I've heard it before, and I don't know if I can bear losing again, but this poem helps. I'm in this fight whether I like it or not. If living means losing, let's do it. Let's lose big.