The Road and the End

Unknown

The Road and the End

I shall foot it

Down the roadway in the dusk,

Where shapes of hunger wander

And the fugitives of pain go by.

I shall foot it

In the silence of the morning,

See the night slur into dawn,

Hear the slow great winds arise

Where tall trees flank the way

And shoulder toward the sky.

The broken boulders by the road

Shall not commemorate my ruin.

Regret shall be the gravel under foot.

I shall watch for

Slim birds swift of wing

That go where wind and ranks of thunder

Drive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the traveled road

Shall touch my hands and face.

Carl Sandburg
  
 I've had this poem tucked away in my binders for so many years, and it has only gained strength in that time. It grips me even more today. I love the resolve within the "I shalls". And those lines, "The broken boulders by the road/Shall not commemorate my ruin./Regret shall be the gravel underfoot." This particular theme of facing what needs to be faced, determined to go on in spite of difficulty and pain is one of my favorites ("The Seafarer", Ezra Pound, "The Conflict", C.Day-Lewis, "Like Barley Bending", Sara Teasdale, "The Layers", Stanley Kunitz, "Thalassa", Louis MacNeice, etc.). Sandburg makes every word feel inevitable, meant to be. It takes conviction to carry that off. I paired his poem with the image of the old woman because I hope I will be able to read this when I am old and feel the same resolve, still. 

Bella Gingell

Immortal Autumn

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice   

In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. 

I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall   

Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. 

I praise the fall: it is the human season. 

                                                                  Now 

No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,   

Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,   

Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough, 

But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows   

Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:   

There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn   

Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes. 

Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves   

And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow   

We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know   

The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves. 

It is the human season. On this sterile air 

Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.   

I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone. 

I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

Archibald MacLeish

Atmospheric, melodramatic - this poem has all the spectral qualities of late Autumn. It amazes me - I mean, here I am, perusing a grouping of black squiggles on a white page - that's all these are, right? And yet a lifetime of Autumns spring up in my mind's eye.I see fields, empty tree branches, bleached grasses with the sky wide and the wind making me pull my coat closer around me. It's all here. I can't get over it. It's magic. And I love those lines "I praise the fall: it is the human season" - isn't that true, the nakedness, the vulnerability, the starkly frail beauty - that's humanity. "Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves/And winter's covering of our hearts with his deep snow/We are alone..." Beautiful. Lonely. Haunting. Like a loon's cry, it stays with you. 

  

Tools

Tanya Bone

Tools 


Wheels sigh with longing for the horizon.
Hunger moans in the spoon’s hollow belly.
Tools recount the needs from which they arose
and so comprise a history of human desire.


The match recalls fear in the fireless night,
the saw’s oiled teeth plead for perfect order,
the pen cannot imagine life without ink.


Even that technology employed by the soul
in its perilous escape from the prison of the body
is exhibited here, in these letters, in words.

Campbell McGrath

"Tools recount the needs from which they arose." Interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. Each tool representing a need or fear. Hunger, order, shelter, thirst... And the last one strikes me most of all - escape! I hadn't thought of it that way before. Poetry, leading us out through this maze of thoughts. I cannot imagine life without it.

 

The Signpost

Annie Soudain

The Signpost

The dim sea glints chill.  The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign.  Which way shall I go?
A voice says:  You would not have doubted so
At twenty.  Another voice gentle with scorn
Says:  At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post.  'You shall see,'
He laughed -- and I had to join his laughter --
'You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, --
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, --
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?'

Edward Thomas

A little back story about this poem. Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were friends. They would walk and talk. Thomas had critiqued Frost's poetry and brought him more recognition, Frost had read Thomas's writing about nature and encouraged him to try turning that into poetry. They saw a lot of things in the same way. In their walks, Frost discovered his friends' struggle with indecision, and remarked, "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another." Which might remind you of Frosts' "The Road Not Taken"? Anyway, this is Thomas's take on the difficulty of making choices. The first stanza is my favorite of all of them. What a genius he was at describing nature! And that question, "Which way shall I go?"  - we aren't human if we aren't wrestling with that one.



 

Sabbaths

Kurt Jackson, "Fungi Hunter"

Sabbaths 1999

Again I resume the long

lesson: how small a thing

can be pleasing, how little

in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind

and bring it to its rest.

With the ongoing havoc

the woods this morning is

almost unnaturally still.

Through stalled air, unshadowed

light, a few leaves fall

of their own weight.

The sky

is gray. It begins in mist

almost at the ground

and rises forever. The trees

rise in silence almost

natural, but not quite,

almost eternal, but

not quite.

What more did I

think I wanted? Here is

what has always been.

Here is what will always

be. Even in me,

the Maker of all this

returns in rest, even

to the slightest of His works,

a yellow leaf slowly

falling, and is pleased.

Wendell Berry 

Wendell Berry writes on this theme so well, so 'satisfyingly', in my opinion. "How small a thing", "how little in this hard world" - can fill us and lift us and be enough. How the trees and mist rise in a stillness that is almost eternal. The landscape is itself just a place and a moment, but it evokes so much more. I mean, here's a man on a walk in the woods, and it's good, it's - that old word we don't use much anymore -  meet. It recalls him to that moment after God created the world, when He looked at it all, and said, "It's good", and then he rested. Wendell seems to have that sense within himself of God resting. What a cheering thought. That God would find pleasure in a man walking in the woods, and in a single falling leaf, well, it says a lot about him.

 

Music

Carl Vilhelm Holsoe

Music

Move on, light hands, so strongly tenderly,
Now with dropped calm and yearning undersong,
Now swift and loud, tumultuously strong,
And I in darkness, sitting near to thee,
Shall not only hear, and feel, but shall not see,
One hour made passionately bright with dreams,
Keen glimpses of life's splendour, dashing gleams
Of what we would, and what we cannot be.

Surely not painful ever, yet not glad,
Shall such hours be to me, but blindly sweet,
Sharp with all yearning and all fact at strife,
Dreams that shine by with unremembered feet,
And tones that like far distance make this life
Spectral and wonderful and strangely sad. 


Archibald Lampman

"Spectral and wonderful and strangely sad", each one of those words is true of my experience of listening to music. There's nothing like it, is there? I like the image of someone listening to music in the dark. We've all done this, we know what it's like to be in that liquid flow, to have it draw up memories, emotions, colours, scenes. Lampman wrote this before stereos and ipods, so it was more than sound, it was human touch, a moment never to be repeated. How wonderful it is, to experience that. 

 

Beholding the Hare

Yvonne Carroll

Beholding the Hare

In the gale that's trying to take the roof off this small house,
shaking it to it's rocky foundations, the hare is making
his rounds of the garden. Wet morning light shows me his ears
hemmed in white, their black points, how they flatten
when the wind roars, rise and swivel when he hunkers under
the shelter of hedges or against the drenched stones of the wall.

All he knows is the way the weather is, how it wraps him up
in its fits and starts, a sort of swirling whirligod whose breath
he must, turn and turn about, huddle from or bask in. Now
he stretches to get at a dark green left-over bramble leaf, all else
bare as sea-beaten stone and showing to the wind and rain
its skin and bone -- tree-bark bright as those black-currant eyes

that read the world like a book, each page changing the story
no matter what we or the hare or that one ruffled chaffinch
balancing between red and yellow pegs on the clothesline
can make of it. Right now what I'm struck by is the creature's 
articulate singularity, the way he is all of a piece, every particle
precisely in the present moment, from the inked tip of each ear

to the chalk-tuft under his raised tail, from the fur-coated ripple
that is his muscle when he tenses a haunch, to the delicate tremor
his nose makes as it fetches the rest of the world into the realm
of his understanding, that many-scented evanescence in the wind
of things, what his eye can't find, nor his tongue touch, nor the
soft fingers of his fur make any sense of, nor his quick ears

swivelling to every whisper -- but which the snub shiverbutton
of his nose (colour of tree-bark) finds, filling out his feeling
for the world, any minute of which would take me an age of
translation to carry over even a glimmer, knowing no words
for his wholeness, for all the stuff of sense registering at once
on the shell of him, how he's the kernel of its kinetic wheeling

by just being there, free of memory and forecast, being at one
with possibility like that, and not at odds, not split in the middle
and out of focus, not feeling the very ground itself veined
with turbulence, fault lines branching every which way from
the lost centre, the heart itself out of tune, unable to contain it-
self. Not, that is, one of us: soul-searching in our skin of reason.

Eamon Grennan

(The wind really is trying to take the roof off the house, as it happens.) After Dylan Thomas's sweeping love and death lyric, we need a change, something individual and specific. Pablo Neruda and his Odes have given me a taste for the Spotlight Poem, the poem with one focus. It amazes me how honing in inevitably leads outward. This poem does that in a sort of regretful way, the speaker seeming to envy the "wholeness" of the hare in comparison to our human condition of split-awareness and inner imbalance. And his description of the hare - "all of a piece, every particle precisely in the present moment" - doesn't that line capture exactly how a small animal freezes in mid-action when it senses danger? And - "the snub shiverbutton of his nose" - the perfect words to bring the hare wholly alive before our eyes. 




 

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Unknown

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead man naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon; 

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot; 

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; 

Though lovers be lost love shall not; 

And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

This is one stanza of a longer poem, but enough for today. (Thomas's images often baffle me, and I wish I had on hand my trusty guidebook to all things Thomas - "Where Have All the Old Words Got Me?" by Ralph Maud, who is wonderful at unraveling his poetry.) Last night, a dear family member of mine passed away. To know that love does not die, that death does not rule - matters a great deal.

 

Sometimes

Cecile Veilhan

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

I have this thought-habit of preparing for the worst case scenario. Sometimes (!) it helps. I sort out in my head what I will do if things go wrong, then I go ahead and jump in. But sometimes...it's a trap. Manytimes without knowing it, I simply anticipate that everything will fall apart. And frankly, because of what has happened in the past, I have been anticipating this for my family. I have been living in fear and dread. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to anticipate good. I want to hold up my hope-light and live in its warmth. (Hence this painting and poem.) One thing I know - love repels fear. I need to go to the source and fill myself so everlastingly full of it that it spills over. I need to get into the current of love and allow it to carry me through. This poem reminds me that I truly do believe God is good. I can expect good things from him. I can remember the battle is won. Love wins. Everytime.



   

Landscape

Tom Perkinson

from "Landscape"


"I want to watch the blue mist of the night come on,
The windows and the stars illumined, one by one,
The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily,
And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see
The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass;
And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight."


Charles Baudelaire, trans. George Dillon

I like the way this poem moves from outside, watching the night come on and the colours change, to inside, and watching the candle's flicker. That retreat from Winter is like a kind of hibernation. I imagine someone reading by candlelight, with stories and characters coming to life out of thin air. It's magical, when you think about it - blue mist and silver moons rising outside, and whole worlds within our heads. What fortunate beings we are. Beauty everywhere.



  

Lights Out

Helene Schjerfbeck

Lights Out

I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.

 

Many a road and track

That, since the dawn’s first crack,

Up to the forest brink,

Deceived the travellers,

Suddenly now blurs,

And in they sink.

 

Here love ends,

Despair, ambition ends;

All pleasure and all trouble,

Although most sweet or bitter,

Here ends in sleep that is sweeter

Than tasks most noble.

 

There is not any book

Or face of dearest look

That I would not turn from now

To go into the unknown

I must enter, and leave, alone,

I know not how.

 

The tall forest towers;

Its cloudy foliage lowers

Ahead, shelf above shelf;

Its silence I hear and obey

That I may lose my way

And myself.

Edward Thomas 

 

"There is not any book/Or face of dearest look/That I would not turn from now..." That line jumps out at me. It's true, there comes a point where we all do this, no matter how much we don't want to. How strange. How very strange sleep is, when you think about it. This poem reminds us of that. Every night we go on a journey and lose ourselves. I love how this poem with it's short lines and tight rhymes emphasizes the rhythmic inevitability of sleep. I read an African folk tale once, about a boy who goes hunting for sleep, and how his family warns him that sleep will creep up and catch him before he knows what is happening. Interesting, that idea of Sleep as a predator and we its prey.