… at the University of Windsor was, after three days, released. It was lured out with a pigeon.

Hawk, in poetry, is always so relentlessly male – always their figure for — remember the last poem UD considered on this blog — for “primitive simplicity” and “savagery” and “rage,” as set against the elaborated civilizing order of women. As in this poem, “The Untamed,” by R.S. Thomas:

My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.

But not for long, windows,
Opening in the trees
Call the mind back
To its true eyrie; I stoop
Here only in play.

The vast perilous nothingness of the world – windows, opening in the trees – calls the man back to the truth, to the mind’s true eyrie, the hawk’s roost, the savage place from which he does his serious work of predation. Here, in the pretty little garden tarted up by pigeon-woman, who seeks to seduce untrammeled man into her trap and reduce him to her condition, to the condition of the pathetic men in Nemerov’s poem – he only plays at life.

************************

A variant.

… has UD picking among poems that have something to do with the wind. There are approximately 150,000 of these. She has winnowed the number down to one, “A Day on the Big Branch,” by Howard Nemerov. Let’s take a look. You can listen to Nemerov read it, too.

It’s a pretty straightforward narrative of a midday fishing trip on a river in Vermont with friends, after a night of poker. It’s written in rough iambic pentameter, so there are nice neat chunks of poetic prose on the page. Bricks. Or, more appropriate to the poem, rocks – six stanza rocks – of roughly equal size. They move us, step by step, through the narrative of the day’s events.

Still half drunk, after a night at cards,
with the grey dawn taking us unaware
among our guilty kings and queens, we drove
far North in the morning, winners, losers,
to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place
one of us knew, with some vague view
of cutting losses or consolidating gains
by the old standard appeal to the wilderness,
the desert, the empty places of our exile,
bringing only the biblical bread and cheese
and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way,
expecting to drink only the clear cold water
among the stones, and remember, or forget.

[First part of Rock #1 is an extremely long sentence, in which we're with the guys in their car driving to the river "with a vague view" of... hills? No, the poet means the figurative, not the literal view: We had some vague idea of purging the heaviness of confusion and loss and guilt after last night's excesses by a clarifying, forgiving, return to nature. Monks now, they'll drink "only the clear cold water / among the stones," and they will meditate.]

Though no one said anything about atonement,
there was still some purgatorial idea
in all those aching heads and ageing hearts
as we climbed the giant stair of the stream,
reaching the place around noon.

[Climbing with effort to the "empty places of our exile," they replay the "old standard" of labored effort up Transcendence Mountain -- think of Mount Athos -- in order to purge themselves of last night's poisons and, while they're at it, of fallen existence.]

[Next up, the stanza that describes their destination, their having reached the natural divinity they're after:]

It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls
enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone,
or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges
the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light,
and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor,
blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam
of crystal to a calm where the waterlight
dappled the ledges as they leaned
against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered
and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again
against the low wind moving over the stream,
and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings.
This surely was it, was what we had come for,
was nature, though it looked like art with its
grey fortress walls and laminated benches
as in the waiting room of some petrified station.
But we believed; and what it was we believed
made of the place a paradise
for ruined poker players, win or lose,
who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks
like gasping trout (the water they drank
making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back
waiting for nature to say the last word
—as though the stones were Memnon stones,
which, caught in a certain light, would sing.

[This stanza is a lala rock, all liquid l's as the poet evokes the lullaby wonder of the setting, the setting that promises to lift them from their dulled fallenness and make them dragonflies with "clear wings." Four times in this stanza he uses the word "light" and he deepens it with "lit" cigarettes. The world in this "enclosed" place is alive, beautiful, it speaks to the guys, even sings to them, as did the ancient Memnon stones. So they get comfortable and "wait for nature" to tell them what they need to know to become simple clear and alive again -- to become things of nature, like the dragonflies.]

The silence (and even the noise of the waters
was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase,
grew pregnant; but nothing else did.
The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks,
unlike the ones you would expect to find
on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon,
mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em,
were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks.
Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked
on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man
thought bitterly about primitive simplicity
and decadence, and how he had been ruined
by civilization and forced by circumstances
to drink and smoke and sit up all night
inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards
until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock
and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and could no longer afford
a savagery whether noble or not; some
would never batter that battered copy of Walden
again.

[Well, it's The Ballad of the Sad Young Men, isn't it, and UD has, from the age of fifteen or so, loved Roberta Flack's drawn-out notes as she describes the sodden depressives in this poem. Having labored and set the scene and given nature every opportunity, the guys find that nature has absolutely nothing to say to them. The poignantly self-ruining limestones of Egypt might have allowed them to romanticize their decline; but here in Vermont it's just "modern American rocks, and hard as rocks." So "each man / thought bitterly about primitive simplicity / and decadence, and how he had been ruined / by civilization." Something has happened, and they're not sure what, but it's got something to do with the maturation into a civilized being... I suppose if they'd been reading Civilization and Its Discontents instead of Walden they'd have been better prepared for this bitter outcome, in which even a steep river in Vermont can't undo the cost of assimilating to culture.]

But all the same,
the water, the sunlight, and the wind
did something; even the dragonflies
did something to the minds full of telephone
numbers and flushes, to the flesh
sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other.
And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders
which formed the giant stair of the stream,
induced (again) some purgatorial ideas
concerning humility, concerning patience
and enduring what had to be endured,
winning and losing and breaking even;
ideas of weathering in whatever weather,
being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles
by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents.
But to these ideas did any purgatory
respond? Only this one: that in a world
where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap
one might at any rate wash with the soap.

[Even so, the calming effect of the wind, water, sunlight and rock is to infuse in the guys some sense of equanimity; to help them accept their own getting older and broken, the loss of youthful savagery and simplicity. The stream of life is ultimately after all a grave, and it's really accommodation to life's "necessitious... currents" they're after. (The weird word necessitous is great - it has a sort of ridiculous high dignity to it, and this poem is in part a sermon; but also the whispering incessant sss of the river's in there.)]

[In the next stanza, their tongues loosened by nature, they state their destinies, their quandaries: They will spend their lives in this sad-young-man condition, dulling with games and liquor the pain of having become civilized. And then, finally:]

Climbing downstream again, on the way home
to the lives we had left empty for a day,
we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges
not one had held the stream, which in its floods
had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled
boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble,
smashed practically back to nature,
the massive masonry of span after span
with its indifferent rage; this was a sight
that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet
both during the long drive home and after,
till it was time to deal the cards.

[Well, this is a sobering final view. One wants to think of the stream of life as reasonably gentle, of life as at least for some years a reasonably equal battle between the stream's erosive effect upon you, and your capacity to have some control over life, to impose some of your will, some of yourself, upon it before you vanish. Yet here you've had three human efforts to encompass the stream, to span it, and that stream turns out to be violently, inhumanly powerful, totally destructive of all efforts to domesticate it. No wonder the guys heard nothing from nature. Turns out it ain't your friend.]

…Andrew Hudgins, a friend of this blog.

**********************************

Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees,
that nature stuff. I’m grateful for good health,
food, air, some laughs, and all the other things
I’m grateful that I’ve never had to do
without. I have confused myself. I’m glad
there’s not a rattrap large enough for deer.
While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept
when I saw one elephant insert his trunk
into another’s ass, pull out a lump,
and whip it back and forth impatiently
to free the goodies hidden in the lump.
I could have let it mean most anything,
but I was stunned again at just how little
we ask for in our lives. Don’t look! Don’t look!
Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling
schoolkids away. Line up, they called. Let’s go
and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.
I laughed, and got a dirty look. Dear Lord,
we lurch from metaphor to metaphor,
which is—let it be so—a form of praying.

*************************************

The whole poem can be found here.

… who died last week, includes this poem.

Transgressions

He thinks about how important the sinning was,
how much his equity was in simply being alive.
Like the sloth. The days and nights wasted,
doing nothing important adding up to
the favorite years. Long hot afternoons
watching ants while the cicadas railed
in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.
Indolence so often when no one was watching.
Wasting June mornings with the earth singing
all around. Autumn afternoons doing nothing
but listening to the siren voices of streams
and clouds coaxing him into the sweet happiness
of leaving all of it alone. Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder.
Yes, and coveting his neighbors’ wives.
Their clean hair and soft voices. The seraphim
he was sure were in one of the upstairs rooms.
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in wonderful stillness. The other,
older pride. Watching the ambulance take away
the man whose throat he had crushed. Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.

Well, I wrote about a cicada poem here, and the cicadas do the same thing in John Blair’s poem that they do here in Gilbert’s. They give out, says Blair, with a “warning wail” about, Gilbert says, “the brevity of life.”

Jack Gilbert is famous (among poetry types) for having had so much “greed of time, of being” that early in his career he turned his back on America, and the poetry world (in which he had already had high-profile successes), and lived pretty much alone on Greek islands. As “Trangressions” makes clear, Gilbert’s recognition of life’s brevity catalyzed a determination to be, not so much to do. He wrote some – not many – books of poems, but mainly he placed himself, open and ecstatic, in life. He lived, as it were, a microscopically intense existential ongoingness in one of the earth’s most intense settings.

Many of his poems arise from this peculiar ontological arrangement, this hyper-focused sensitivity to passing objects, moods, weather patterns. Undistracted by work, family, and social life, untethered by ideology or faith, Gilbert produced strange poems that starkly combine the two essentials of each human being’s being in the world: the physical universe, and the mind. His poems are both sharply clarified evocations of people and things in his sun-blasted environment, and insistent conversations with himself about his own motives in moving himself away from ordinary life, and the price he’s paid for that move.

Of course Gilbert would choose Greece for his slow sweet clear declension through time. Don DeLillo chose it too, for a few years, and saw the same things Gilbert did. In his novel, The Names, DeLillo described a Greek village in language that, put into short lines rather than paragraphs, could be Gilbert’s:

Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing. It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.

Realized space – that’s what the artist is after. The world’s objects and people distributed deeply and fully and feelingly so that when you look at them you see reality, you see the actual world.
In particular, you see the earth’s empty spaces inhabited, elaborated, brought to life, realized by people through use. In Greece, even nowhere is framed.

This needs to be a domestic lived reality, not the techno-phantasmagoria of the great skyscraper city. You seek elemental truths, basic daily gatherings-up, using DeLillo’s word. You want to observe this. So you could live, for instance, on the edge of a Balinese rice paddy just as easily as in a Greek village, for both give you daily and nightly visual access to the interaction of small human communities and natural beauty and bounty. Actually, Greece is better because it’s dry, without natural bounty in the way of watery Bali — you want visual access to small human communities enacting the existential drama of drawing from the earth beauty, sustenance, and meaning.

So, you’re ecstatically, aesthetically, engaged in all of this, but your consciousness – your being a person with a past, with regrets and confusions and worldly avidities – is going to bedevil you, and from the conflict between your settled engagement in a settled world and your neurotic, restless, maybe guilty self (you’re an American behaving like this, for goodness sake) will arise a poem like “Transgressions,” in which the poet talks to himself about his passion for pure being and his sense of the sinfulness of this passion.

The sin of “sloth,” “waste” — yet those were his favorite years, when he was doing “nothing important.”

Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose.

Whitman loafs and invites his own and the universal soul; but Gilbert isn’t inviting. His “transgression” resides in his greedy taking of life for himself. Lust, pride, violence, the narcissism of “feeling himself feeling.” He concludes:

This world,
the pine woods stretching all brown or bare
on either side of the railroad tracks in the winter
twilight. Him feeling the cold, sinfully unshriven.

Nice the way the word shiver shivers through unshriven in that unredeemed cold… But he’s feeling it… Feeling himself feeling the cold, and that’s much more important to him than any reckoning in conventional terms of his transgressions. He wants the true world, all of it, including the true world of his mind and his body and his own ways of being. These may be ugly or beautiful but it is their being existent that elates him, lends him the only redemption he really cares about. Leave all of it alone, he writes – let the world be and let myself be. Let me watch as I become part of the realized space of the globe, and let me transgress and transgress against the higher waste of a labored existence until I come to an end.

… on this blog, has died.

**************************

Update: A fine account of Gilbert’s career and his last days.

… by Edmund Blunden, who fought in the First World War.

He wrote this in 1936.

*****************************

Can You Remember?

Yes, I still remember
The whole thing in a way;
Edge and exactitude
Depend on the day.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

Thanks to the substantial income that poured in over the years from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats, inspired by Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, she was able to give seven-figure donations for a new wing of the London Library (Eliot had been its president) and to Newnham College, Cambridge. She also donated £15,000 for the annual TS Eliot prize for poetry.

… I go looking for a good poem. A poem with rain in it. Here’s one, by B. Nurske. A very good one.

The Simulacra

They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,
sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail
gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.
Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,
the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,
limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing
after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,
infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

***************************

This shows the best of what a lyric poem can do, a poem concentrated in a few beautifully written lines of implication conveying truth. This is a dreamy spin into mountains, or merely into a dream, or memory. All of its images involve vagueness, disintegration: screes, clouds, shadows, veils, twilight, tinge, hiddenness, padlockedness, dimness. A flickering scene seen while sleeping, or seen at the cinema, or knitted (darned) from fragments of one’s past, or fragments of one’s fantasies.

the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it

Just married – suddenly, passionately, acutely married, they begin with a fragile but sharp clarity, those fingernails against each other’s cheeks. Driving their passionate lives forward into the heights of feeling and understanding, they hear the ecstatic radio… But it’s not music – it’s just sound, just static; and already the idea of unclarity and paralysis appears. The rest of the poem will play this out, this idea of life as at best twilight, life as having nothing to do with true light, illumination, invigoration.

More later. Must do a few errands before the rain and the darkness.

****************************

They’ve put their own static, their own barriers to clarity, in front of their own eyes: they made the raveling wind. Something in them made a world always halfway there, always speeding past in images unable to accumulate meaning. See how these great lines amass enigmas:

certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.

All these gorgeous surreal dead-ends! The way from the word certain he has us in uncertainty, each magical turn in the road a journey into clouds (the road’s hard numbering is just a directional come-on), or onto volcanic shards, or (an image out of Nabokov) toward the locked porches of shadowy inns. The liquidity of all the Ls in these lines lulls the scene to sleep: blue, enamel, led, cloud, basalt, hotels, padlocked. Lala land.

We’re not getting anywhere, in other words. We set out, suddenly married, bolt upright, ready for Event, and then before you know it life with its inchoate windy strangeness intervenes and things erode into screes before our eyes.

infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.

Crying for milk, that is – for the O thou lord of life, send my roots rain sustenance that will set them up for Life; but the old women know better, and darn gray veils to keep us from our own failure. To pull off of this mountain road and try instead truly to encounter the “steepness” that is another person’s unreachable mystery is to re-tell the old tale of a whole life lived in partial darkness (twilight) and then resolving into darkness itself.

****************************

Update: Rereading Erich Heller’s little book on Kafka (UD took all of Heller’s courses at Northwestern University when she was a college kid), UD finds this passage:

Deeply problematical though Kafka’s love [for Felice Bauer] was, it was not more so than his attitude toward his writing; and this is why the true executor of his “will” – the will that decreed the destruction of his manuscripts – would have had to be a magician, the producer of a sequence of mythical scenes where Kafka’s works, after being burned, would rise again from the ashes purified, in unheard-of beauty and perfection, consisting of nothing but “sheer light, sheer freedom, sheer power, no shadow, no barrier.” Another absolutist in the history of German literature once described in this way his highest poetic aspiration; to attain to it, Schiller said, he would gladly spend all the spiritual strength of his nature even if the effort “were to consume me entirely.” And Kafka, after completing his story “A Country Doctor” in September 1917, confided to his diary that writing such stories could still give him “passing satisfaction,” but happiness he would know only if he succeeded in “raising the world into the pure, the true, the immutable.”

… all lit up this weekend.

This poem by Jane Kenyon, titled “Alone for a Week,” demonstrates the weird, affecting, tightly-packed emotional power of the short, subtly rhymed, lyric. Read the poem intact here; I pick it apart below. (For another example of the suggestive power of the well-conceived short lyric, go here.)

I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.

[Load/clothes. Dry/day. There's a simple, almost singsongy feel to these opening lines. But the rhyme and assonance are subtle; and perhaps the almost entirely monosyllabic words have more to do with sadness and emptiness - an inability to say much under the circumstances - than with simple songs.]

The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.

[Rose/drove/clothes/ceremonious: She's working that lamenting open O. As she returns from town she looks at the clothesline on which the clothes are bouncing in the wind. The sleeve of her absent husband's shirt rises to greet her. His best shirt; he puts on his best to greet his beloved wife. At least she sees things this way - a way of conveying how strongly she misses him, her imagination and yearning animating his clothing, willing him somehow to be there. our night- / clothes twined and untwined... A passionate couple, a passionate image. She moves from his solitary ceremonious greeting to the two of them entwined.]

For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.

See the delicate scheme of almost rhymes? The way so many of these lines end on a light, tentative T? Late/not/light. Tentative T, its recurrence somehow carrying a sense of her fragility, her condition of sensitive waiting, of gingerly moving in the world, of trying to busy herself in the absence of her lover. Even the condition of being in different time zones seems to her full of pathos, mystery, and a touch of the grotesque: How can we, so close, be so astronomically apart? That full harvest moon will carry the real freight of her fright (harvest/sparse; light/quite — still working the rhyme and assonance), because here in the countryside it should cast a full rounded light, a species of reassurance, the two of them a passionate fullness. But under the clouds it’s unreliable; and so she feels uncertain in her life, separate, unsteady on her feet.

And now for her wonderful final lines, as she moves inside and tries to go to sleep.

The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical…

Allegorical! Talk about ending on a great word.

Let’s see: First off, notice all of those Ls: flat/pillow/plump/cool, and then allegorical, all plumped with Ls. The move from T to L makes all kinds of sense as she stops trying to tap out a busy moment-to-moment life and sinks into la-la land, languor, lullaby land, Lethe, the land of liquid Ls. Flat and Kansas (how long and dull the distances between us!) will do for assonance; and we have a full final rhyme, cool/allegorical. The pillow unflattened and unwarmed by his head, but so rich with his having been on it, with his not being on it, lies beside her madly transmitting meanings – madly allegorical as in say the allegory of the cave in which she subsists, darkly, her fantasy willing the cloudy inanimate world to materialize her lover…

… the American poet, has died at 89. UD recently wrote about one of his poems here. Simpson’s sensibility was odd, original; the language of his poetry is less interesting than its moods, the things his eye notices. As in his poem titled There Is.

Nice title, There Is. It strips the propositional, look at this, feel of poetry right down. The poet writes that there is this, and there is that; the poet names things… Yet in this particular poem (I’m reprinting most but not all of the stanzas), the poet can’t get it together to say there is anything. He’s in one of those moods… the city’s getting to him…

Look! From my window there’s a view
of city streets
where only lives as dry as tortoises
can crawl — the Gallapagos of desire.

Look! There is… an island of dry hardbacked tortoises crawling about. The dynamic city’s gone — at least I don’t see it. I see aridity, paralysis.

There is the day of Negroes with red hair
and the day of insane women on the subway;
there is the day of the word Trieste
and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar.

It’s a city, full of charged, fraught moments. All these there ises I need to tell you about: the red hair, the insane women, the day I encountered and was haunted by the word Trieste, and what about that blind musician… These things mean something, add up to something…

But I have no profession. Like a spy
I read the papers — Situations Wanted.
Surely there is a secret
which, if I knew it, would change everything!

A silent flaneur, the poet ranges the city, reads the paper, looking for the situation, the secret, the word (Trieste?), that will crystallize into a there is worthy of our attention – a scenery of meaning.

I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony.
I see through the illusions of the age!
The bell tolls, and the hearse advances,
and the mourners follow, for my entertainment.

The problem seems to be self-consciousness, sophistication, cynicism; even the serious essentials – death, for instance – seem mere entertainments.

I tread the burning pavement,
the streets where drunkards stretch
like photographs of civil death
and trumpets strangle in electric shelves.

The mannequins stare at me scornfully.
I know they are pretending
all day to be in earnest.
And can it be that love is an illusion?

The flaneur poet walks the arid tortoise street in search of inspiration, waiting for the real to come at him and cut through irony. But like the red-heads and the insane women and the blind man with the guitar, the surreal, poignant, belligerent city visions he now experiences (drunkards, trumpets) instantly become photographs, shelved silences. The guitar was electric; the trumpets strangle in electric shelves; actual suffering human beings on the streets are mechanical snaps — Part of the problem is the alienating and distancing technology of the modern city, and the way our embroilment in that technology makes us see things as pictures, as already-aesthetically-messed-with elements. Which leaves the poet with nothing to do.

O businessmen like ruins,
bankers who are Bastilles,
widows, sadder than the shores of lakes,
then you were happy, when you still could tremble!

All locked up now, the city dwellers, like the poet, once had an erotic past (“the air is filled with Eros” at night on the streets), an innocent and avid receptivity to the wonder of being. Out of this trembling life might come the poetic inspiration the poet – arid, ironic, disillusioned – lacks.

But all night long my window
sheds tears of light.
I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.
O syllables of light … O dark cathedral …

God knows the world still expresses itself, still beckons the poet to his window so that he can see it. This light that comes through is the sorrow of the world, a word for which he seeks. But the word is not forthcoming. Trieste is nice – so close to triste. But Trieste was another day, and he’s lost it. All he can do is listen to the syllables as they strike his window, as they murmur from the dark cathedral where irony is forever silenced.

… Journalists are punning about a long-ago-stolen and now-recovered sculpture of Robert Frost.

… is here. (Registration required.)

I now have over a thousand students.

The lecture is about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Virginia” –

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

Yesterday afternoon, I rested a pair of scissors on top of one of my split rail fence posts while I was mulching. When I reached for it later, my hand fell on a cicada shell.

The screaming coming off the trees for the last week, I now realized, was late-summer cicadas.

I looked for a cicada poem, and here it is.

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Cicada

I want to tell him what it is to crave darkness,
to want to crawl headfirst into a dirt-warm womb
to sleep, to wait seventeen years,
to emerge again.

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These are the seventeen-year ones, not this summer’s smaller emergence, and the poet uses their long underground life and the way, once they emerge, their wail can sound like a warning siren, to make a point about human life.

He begins with his memory of a younger brother who, having gestated for seventeen years, suddenly left home forever with a bang.

The “warning wail of insects” tells us that “repudiation is fast like a whirlwind.”

Meaning?

Meaning it’s pretty easy and exciting to ditch it all and with the fervor and disdain of youth do your own fine full life. When you’re that young you don’t see that “all you live is leaving.” Life is something we have to leave, and most of life – whether we dramatically repudiate or undramatically persist in it – is departure of one sort or another, the loss of this, the erosion of that.

Our experience of the passage of time deepens our tendency to be borne back ceaselessly into the past, since adult life moves toward deterioration and makes our youth seem an icon of wholeness.

The brother’s repudiation is therefore both “arrant” and “orphic” – extreme (plus, given the closeness of “errant,” in error), and mysterious, unaccountable.

Even obviously future-oriented thoughts – provoked, say, by looking at your pregnant wife – are “still so much like trying to find something / once lost.” Pregnant to bursting with his own future, the brother has broken through the door into – illusion, dissolution (things falls apart), the immutable truth of all lives. The drone of the cicada tolls this immutability: that we slow down, undone as much by the pull of mortality as by the impulse to disbelieve it.

So listen to the cicada; consider its incredibly patient rhythms, its relationship to darkness and light; hear it tell our fast fragile passage through existence. Seeing as “we are all so helpless,” adopt pity rather than disdain. Pity for everyone, including yourself.

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The poem reminds me of Philip Larkin’s Poetry of Departures.

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Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

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UD thanks John Blair for permission to reprint the poem, which appears in The Green Girls (LSU Press, 2003). His most recent book of poems is The Occasions of Paradise.

… my latest lecture for the MOOC I’m giving appears. Here it is.

It’s a reading of Charles Wright’s poem, Black Zodiac.

My MOOC on poetry is almost up to nine hundred. If you want to check it out, go here.