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.

One Art

Charles Hardaker

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

Losing as an art. Of course this is an ironic poem, making light of something which is quite painful, but I’ve been thinking about it. It goes well with "Losers" by Carl Sandburg (posted Oct. 3, 2017). That was about being a failure, while this is about losing things, memories, places and people. But the idea is similar. The power of inside-out or reverse thinking. We don't think of losing things as good, but in fact, it's essential. There are several instances in nature that illustrate this: snakes shedding their skins, birds moulting their feathers, chicks breaking out of their shells, and yes, I'll even add the cliched-but-still-fantastic butterfly leaving behind its cocoon. In all these, losing is a sign of growth. Could losing things be a sign of growth for us, too? Is leaving a place behind us a way of spreading outward? Maybe, maybe we could see that - but people? How is losing people an indication of enlargement? There are so many ways to lose someone! And what about forgetting? How is losing our minds, our memories, that thing we call "ourselves" - growth? It looks disastrous. She's right about that. But what if this place, this form, aren't our finished place and form. What if, like a hermit crab, what we are here and now is too small for what we're meant to be and where we're meant to fit. (There's a Jim Elliot quote I heard when I was young that comes to mind: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.") What if losing bits of what we imagine is ourselves, leaving our coat of self-stories and our carefully constructed carapaces of identity is the only way to open, to unfold, to bloom?