The Winter Palace

jennifer irvine

The Winter Palace

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,

And am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

Philip Larkin

 

Forgetting. 

It seems like a good way to end the year.

Let's give endings their due.

Let's give the covering over, the forgiving, the yes, forgetting, it's place.

A time for everything, right?

And this is the time for an end.

 

Let it go.

Let it be.

Forget it.

 

A Christmas Childhood

Morgan Weistling

A Christmas Childhood

1.

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw –
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

2.

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

And old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk –
The melodion.’ I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh

"And I was six Christmases of age."

Isn't that the truth of it - for a child to measure life by wonder?

Snow

 

Lucy Almy-Bird

 

 Snow

 

What is it to talk about silence?

When I look up from my table

it will still be there

where it fell in the night,

 

hurrying to congregate

in the cone cast by the streetlamp,

 

and in the darkness, the others,

unseen but legion.

 

How bruise-blue the shadows

on the garden

 

and the frozen cobwebs 

snapped beneath their weight.

In the park we blundered 

across it, the quiet,

in spite of its exclamatory outline

on bare trees,

down great hushed halls of white

and the white lake picked out in kanji

by the moorhen's feet.

Are there words for what I felt

in the faceted garden?

Motes, corpuscles, animalcules.

 

And it is a relief to feel it touch me

with its meaning,

it's vast multitudinous silence,

again and again.

Catriona O'Reilly

Geis (2015)

 

I love that, "in the darkness, the others, unseen but legion" - 

or - "down great hushed halls of white".

 

"Are there words for what I felt?"

 

That truly is the question. 

In the mutitudinous presence of such artistry, 

what response can there be, but silence?

Silence and wonder.

 

Autumn Song

Unknown

Autumn Song

 

Autumn has emptied heaven of it's birds

And stretched a silence on the loud sea.

Gone is the last leaf and the last flower,

And all the gauds of summer are undone.

 

          Winter cuts off our feet. But we must dance

          In Spring's conspiracy of circumstance:

          Swallows sickling air's invisible grass

          Sketch hieroglyphs that translate at a glance

          To greenest meaning.

                                               The sun, love's looking glass,

           Summer, that stokes the furnace of the bee,

           Honey all nature in one grand romance --

           The ambience of consanguinity

           Hurls its huge myth around the world at me.

 

But now the sports and sunny shows are done.

A deadflower clock ticks out a year of seed.

The season's losses hide the summer road,

And crows talk hoarsely in the frozen wood.

 

Thomas McGrath 

 

"The season's losses hide the summer road..."

That strikes me. 

If I'm reading right, Summer is the enduring season. Summer the constant.

Maybe I'm not reading right, but if I am - 

there's pause for thought.

Our losses only briefly fill our view. Leaves are light, they blow away.

Are losses impermanent like leaves?

 

 

  

 

Rain In the Hills

       

Rich Bowman

Rain In the Hills

The dead stay with you always
taking house-room, finding in you
their haven and harbour, and this happens
even though you know their going sealed off
for you a segment of the whole circle
of things and now wherever you walk there is
some part of the hills and sky
you do not see, though it is not
obscured by the seasons or weather:

but where you are, in this impaired place,
they also remain and are necessary
and beautiful as the thundery light
over the black spurs on an evening
of spring rain; and being there
they will change, not as images
of yourself but in their own way,
allowing you to perceive them

Even the terrible deaths you believed
would shrink your heart forever
do not come to an end or leave you,
for you cannot repudiate your suffering
- it is in you, it is what you have become:
the limited world of loss is still
your support, your delight, and as real
as this hill angled with black stone
and the violet clouds above it -

they are yours, stately and strange
as they are, holding your defeat
and your knowledge of defeat, which is also
entirely at home in you, in how you
watch and speak, in your composition,
your nerve pathways, your membranes
and cells. This is the chemistry of pain.

Lauris Edmond

 

I can attest to the truth of this poem. 

Is it possible that death adds subtraction to us, that loss or absence takes on shape and mass in us?

 

 I don't understand it, but there it is.

Zinc Lid

Unknown

Zinc Lid

It’s the gray of canning season rain,

neither cool nor warm, and mottled

with feeble light. There’s a moony

milk-glass insert ringed by rubber

and a dent where somebody rapped it

to break the seal. But its cucumber

summers, dill and brine, are over.

No more green Mason jars cooling,

no generations of dust beneath

the cellar stairs, the ancient quarts

of tomatoes like balls of wax,

the pickles slowly going gray

as kidneys, pale applesauce settling

out of its syrup. Today, on a bench

in a dark garage it’s upside down,

a miniature galvanized tub adrift

on time, and in it two survivors,

a bolt that once held everything

together, season in and season out,

and a wing nut resting its wings.

Ted Kooser 

 

 

"...Two survivors."

 

The contrast between the purpose - that of storing abundance for future food, and the grayness, the reduced and dusty "survivors" of that hopeful outlook, grips me with its grimness. 

 

This has been a theme in my life, that of standing in the ruins of a once-established dream - a house or a garden or a person - and being asked to work with the things that remain.

 

 

And the things that remain?

 

 

In Kooser's poem, I see hope.

Two survivors.

Not much, but having lived and re-lived this particular, I understand that this is all that's needed.

 

 

"Season in and season out..." 

There is something (or someOne) who holds everything together.

And because of Him the future is stored with abundance and fullness and life.  

 

 

I rest in the shadow of His wings. 

                                  

 

 

Julia Loken

 

Ode To an Artichoke

The artichoke
With a tender heart
Dressed up like a warrior,
Standing at attention, it built
A small helmet
Under its scales
It remained
Unshakeable,
By its side
The crazy vegetables
Uncurled
Their tendrills and leaf-crowns,
Throbbing bulbs,
In the sub-soil
The carrot
With its red mustaches
Was sleeping,
The grapevine
Hung out to dry its branches
Through which the wine will rise,
The cabbage
Dedicated itself
To trying on skirts,
The oregano
To perfuming the world,
And the sweet
Artichoke
There in the garden,
Dressed like a warrior,
Burnished
Like a proud
Pomegrante.
And one day
Side by side
In big wicker baskets
Walking through the market
To realize their dream
The artichoke army
In formation.
Never was it so military
Like on parade.
The men
In their white shirts
Among the vegetables
Were
The Marshals
Of the artichokes
Lines in close order
Command voices,
And the bang
Of a falling box.

But
Then
Maria
Comes
With her basket
She chooses
An artichoke,
She's not afraid of it.
She examines it, she observes it
Up against the light like it was an egg,
She buys it,
She mixes it up
In her handbag
With a pair of shoes
With a cabbage head and a
Bottle
Of vinegar
Until
She enters the kitchen
And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends
In peace
This career
Of the armed vegetable
Which is called an artichoke,
Then
Scale by scale,
We strip off
The delicacy
And eat
The peaceful mush
Of its green heart.

 

Pablo Neruda  

 

"In the subsoil/The carrot/With its red mustaches/Was sleeping..." 

 

Each vegetable/fruit/food poem by Neruda I have read has changed how I think. 

Somehow, ordinary objects become magnets to which history and art and life rush toward as if toward their true home. 

I'm not describing it well, but what I mean to say is that this is the magic of words, and especially poetry.

It unveils. It removes the dingy surface, and what it shows has almost endless possibilities.

The new question is - 

is anything ordinary?

conversation, elevated

 

Victor Delhez

dante, i said

the haze has lifted

everything is coming

into focus

 

i can't say how 

but this tower overlooks

 scenes of my life

i recognize

these passages

 

as leaves from my life

 

how different they look

when seen from above

when seen from this perspective

 

e.p. 

 

 

Perspective, retrospective - hindsight, insight -

if only I had a vantage point from which there was clarity!  

 

 

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.

Nocturne

Alphonse Mucha

Nocturne

Now through night's caressing grip

Earth and all her oceans slip,

Capes of China slide away

From her fingers into day

And th'Americas incline

Coasts towards her shadow line.

Now the ragged vagrants creep

Into crooked holes to sleep:

Just and unjust, worst and best,

Change their places as they rest:

Awkward lovers like in fields

Where disdainful beauty yields:

While the splendid and the proud

Naked stand before the crowd

And the losing gambler gains

And the beggar entertains:

May sleep's healing power extend

Through these hours to our friend.

Unpursued by hostile force,

Traction engine, bull or horse

Or revolting succubus;

Calmly till the morning break

Let him lie, then gently wake.

 

W. H. Auden

That sensation of the turning earth - my favourite part of this poem, distinctly felt although never directly mentioned.