… with my interruptions. To see it in its pristine state, go to the post directly below this one.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

[Title’s clever, and makes an English major think of How to Do Things With Words, the philosopher J.L Austin’s book about how language performs. So a sensibility here of someone literate, playful…]

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

[Hm. Already much to note! Tone’s all over the place. It’s madness. Starts all formal and religious, invoking Zion as some essential body of water – a spring from which spring certain operations of the poet’s mind — operations he compares to water wheels. Bit confusing. But fun. Difficult, but seductive. We want to figure this out.

But, you know, when I say sensibility I have in mind this rather weird, violent, disjunctive writing Grossman hits us up with right off. Now if it were just weird, it would be trifling; but in fact Grossman’s going to capture the complex truth of complex consciousness, as it moves from ancient pious formulations to Batman language and back…]

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

[Notice the control that the poem’s about to manifest. Having chosen an image – the water wheel – the poet will play that through to the end of the poem. But he has chosen another image for consciousness as well, that of a wandering traveler reckoning always with, fighting always against, the absolutely immutable movement of time toward the traveler’s death. And that image will also play itself out with careful thoroughness through the poem.]

Walking backwards all night long, underground;

[A wonderful image for morbid dreams or morbid night thoughts. Reviewing your life as you age toward death.]

So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns.

[At some point those morbid thoughts become spiritual, and we’re searching for God.]

Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

[The poet imagines his oncoming death, the shutting down of consciousness.]

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled.

[That Old Ship of Zion. The reader may well at this point think of this great spiritual, in which the ship of God arrives at your death to take you home.]

And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus

[Here death’s imagined without spirituality, without transcendence, in the body alone. This is truly hell, the haunt of Erebus, where one is cast away rather than taken into the arms of God. Maybe this, the poet laments, is the truth of our end.]

—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

[The ships a mess. Everything’s come undone. Its loose ropes – halliards – are knocking against it. Great word, halliard. Probably had to look it up, no? Learning. Learned. We like that. Anyway, here the poet finds a brilliant figure for the failure of religious consolation, the mind unmoored.]

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun.

[Light fails in the long school room of the setting sun. We learn a great deal as we age, but what we learn is that the light fails.]

What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?

[All sorts of wonderful plays on “mind” here. What is left to take heed of. To beware. To take care of. To remember. And literally, what is left – as a sort of final gift – to the fading mind as it ages? Memories. As the old are notorious for being lost in memories. And yet again: We are earthly creatures. When we live and when we die we have only the earth. So when we begin to disappear, when, “on that green evening … our death begins,” it will be our love of the earth that we remember.]

The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

[The poet imagines his funeral.]

The mill sits in the springs.

[Back to the mill. A formally clear and satisfying poem.]

Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.

[After his lyrical journey round his morbid mind, the poet sinks again into the sardonic nihilism of that grinding mill: Old age as a painful assault by one meaningless moment after another, ending in nothingness.]

How, then, to do things with tears?

[Can I make something of my sorrow? My sadness for myself, for the world untranscended?]

— Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

[Yes, I can do something. I can rage against death in life. I can rage against blindness…

You’re right. We’re landing somewhere in the vicinity of Dylan Thomas here. But Grossman’s better than Thomas, because he’s not a sentimentalist. His consciousness is more interesting, more challenging, more strange. Both poems want you to die, as you have tried to live, in full possession of your faculties. They want you to die in the truth. Never to lie to yourself in order to console yourself. But for me at least Grossman captures the battle as it rages far better than Thomas. Thomas merely exhorts his poor father to keep fighting as he lies on his deathbed; he rather mindlessly assumes the absolute value of life over death. Grossman ain’t so sure — that’s what the water wheel’s doing in the poem.]