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.

Little Gidding

Anna Larmoliuk

from Little Gidding

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.




T.S. Eliot

 

I seem to be drawn by this beginning/ending or tail-in-mouth theme - (Fox Sleep by W.S. Merwin, Swimmer by Robert Francis), and anything to do with Beginning - (The Round by Stanley Kunitz, Begin by Brendan Kennelly, The Trees by Philip Larkin), so it shouldn't be any surprise that Little Gidding appeals as well. 

I can't get over it - "What we call the beginning is often the end..." - really, what an amazing thought. 

Is this a version of what is now called "reframing"? (All these ideas that are as old as the hills. We think we're coming up with something new, and look! there's the ghost of Great-Grandma rolling her eyes at us.) It's a good question - what is the difference between a beginning and an ending?

 "Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph." Every poem an epitaph?!! Any action a step to the block?!! I have to think about that for a few more years. 

And then there's those remarkable lines, "We die with the dying: See, they depart and we go with them." (I can see that all right, but then he goes on -) "We are born with the dead: See they return, and bring us with them."  Okay. Are we really? It's true in nature,sure, a fallen tree is host to a million lives, but to say that of humans is more difficult. Do I benefit from the dead who have gone before? Well, yes. Do they feed me with their experiences, do they nurture me? Yes, they do. Do they return through me? I suppose they do. 

Is that what he means? That we are linked, we are a cycle, we live within "a pattern of timeless moments"?

 I had thought of myself as more separate, more islanded in time than what Eliot is intimating. I had thought of the past as far away, as gone. But if every ending is a beginning and every beginning also an end, what is time? Certainly not the barrier it appears. Maybe it's more like a veil? 

"History is now.", says Eliot. That's heavy. It gives a rather uncomfortable weight to my actions.

 

 Thank goodness I can begin again. 

And again...


"This is where we start." 





 

Of Moulds and Mushrooms

Jan Voerman Jr. Russulas

Of Moulds and Mushrooms

Agrippina, well aware of Claudius' greed
For Caesar's mushrooms, knew also that it looked
Like death-cap or destroying angel, so a god
Made room on earth for Nero, whose joke,
'Food of the gods', allowed for deadly poison.

Some still, with unreasoning fear, disgust,
Kick or switch down the mushrooms by their path.
Leaving the amanita rudely shattered, gills
Like fallen feathers scattered, veil and volva
Broken, and all this symmetry destroyed.

The lack of chlorophyll suggests the parasite
Which guilty man so readily despises.
These are strange fruit of the thin mycellium,
That webs this world beneath the surface,
And which can persist in its invisibility

Breaking down discard of leaves and timber,
Which otherwise would overtop the wood
Extinguishing everything, so that the seed
May sprout to nourishment, and the cycle
Of death, decay and rebirth still go on.

And I, aesthetic and somewhat botanical,
Would note and praise the diversity
Of shapes, variety of colours of the fungi,
Ball, club, shelf, parasol, cup and horn,
And the suave velvet of different moulds.

I would recall the fungi in their settings:
Fly-agaric, scarlet with wrinkled creamy warts,
In birch woods of Dumbartonshire, but lemon-
Yellow in New England, toxic they said to flies,
But intoxicant for the Kamchatka tribesman.

Near Selkirk once I found a monstrous puff ball,
Far bigger than my younger brother's head,
A gleaming baldpate beckoning me across the field
To find and greet poor Yorick's vegetable skull,
Solitary underneath the well-clipped hazel hedge.

Where once the monks had had their abbey,
Beside my Essex farmhouse, clustered blewits
Were palely violet below the dark-fruited sloes,
And the old gnarled oaks within the woods
Were sometimes richly shelved with beefsteaks:

And I, in a strictly rationed world,
Welcomed and ate these, and others that I found,
Spongy crepe, chanterelle and honeycombed morel,
Grey oyster-mushroom and tall dignified parasol,
Which I again met later on a Chilmark lawn.

Brown-purple trumpets of the cornucopia
Stand clear against the brilliance of the moss
Under a clump of beech-trees at Gay Head,
While vast fairy-rings, some centuires of age,
Manacle the cropped grass of the South Downs.

The wooden ships of England knew dry-rot,
Pepys gathering toadstools bigger than his fists,
So that ten oaks were cut for each one used,
And the white-rimmed tawniness rioted again
Among the bombed buildings that I sometime knew.

Fungi have made their share of history:
St. Antony's fire, from ergot in the rye,
Swept savagely through medieval France,
Rotting potatoes drove the Irishman abroad,
And French grapes grown on North American stock.

A mouldering cantaloup from a Peoria supermarket
Supplanted the culture Fleming kept for years,
And others now sample soil, remove and scan
The moulds that, in their destructiveness,
Aid ailing man by driving out his enemies.

But I, walking in fields or through the woods,
Welcome the vermilion russula, the sulphur
Polyporus, or inky shaggy-cap upon a heap of dung,
Without questioning their usefulness to me.
The ecology of my appreciation seems to need

Clavaria's coral branches on a damp dark bank,
Odorous stink-horns prodding through the grass,
And petalled dry geasters studding a sandy road.
These many-fangled fruits make bright
My sundry places where no flowers bloom.

Ruthven Todd

“These are strange fruit.” It's mushroom season again, and again I am amazed by the variety and oddness to be found right underfoot. In "sundry places where no flowers bloom." That line especially draws me. The natural world is speaking, do we hear it?