He’s still writing poetry. We’ve already considered a couple of his poems on this blog, but let’s go ahead and do yet another to mark the big day.

JUNE LIGHT

Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

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

Your voice, with clear location of June days,

[Like James Merrill, Wilbur’s good at finding words that hint at other words, words that don’t so much radiate out with meaning, as generate an inner, meaning-mingled heat. So take location. He’s setting the poem’s place in time – afternoon, June – so location has that straightforward meaning. But he begins with a reference to his lover’s voice, so part of our mind may well be registering, say, locution – especially with that word “clear” in front of it.

The setting is about clarity, with objects bright and clear in the summer light; but it’s also about the clear locution of the lover’s voice as she calls the poet, who’s inside, to come outside to be with her.]

Called me outside the window. You were there,

[You were there. The poem’s already beginning to build the idea of the brilliant, enthralling, absolute thereness of the loved one, her glorious radiant presence, her intense and delighting being in the world. This is a love poem — to the loved one, and to the loved world, and to the way the loved one’s charismatic and adored way of being, her intensified self-ness, her sheer miraculous outrageously exceptional placement on the earth, astounds and delights the poet, lifting him to positively religious heights of ecstasy.]

Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

[The poem’s called June Light, so on one level this reference to light intends to describe the peculiarly intense and at the same time tranquil nature of early summer light. This isn’t oppressive light that bleaches out the visible world; on the contrary, it’s light that’s composed – calm, but also ordered, yielding a beautifully clear and fitting world whose objects – like the lover – burst out of the dull background world with hyper-dramatic being.

The lover too has this combination of brilliance and calm, radiance and soundness. She’s both exciting and pacifying.

The soft stare of summer is “just” – right, appropriate, undeniable (uncontested) – which is to say that – let’s put it the way Gertrude Stein might – there’s a there there. The world obviously and incontrovertibly exists.

Does this seem trite? The world exists. My lover exists. Big deal. These things are obvious.

But they’re so not obvious. The narrator of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is sitting in Paris, on a gorgeous June day, on the balcony of a grand hotel, with a view of the most stunning part of the city, and he thinks:

The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

I mean here he is, having el major peak experience, and he despairs! He despairs because he doesn’t have whatever inside of himself to be adequate to it — yet the world is trying so hard to give him his Wordsworthian spot of time, his Sartreian perfect moment! What is the matter with him?

But everyone knows what the narrator means. “Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy,” writes the narrator of Don DeLillo’s The Names. Vastly? Unhappy? It’s a brilliant Athens day, and they’re going to see the effing Acropolis! The American narrator refuses to visit the Acropolis at all, even though he lives in Athens. Something about how the place is “daunting.”

Okay so Wilbur is simply saying that the life force of the loved one represents a brilliance he can approach, a world-intensifying, clarifying force that doesn’t daunt. As a result, instead of joining the depressives in Bellow and DeLillo, for whom the sheer force of the physical and metaphysical world in its most beautiful, meaningful, and intense realizations is just too much, the poet revels in his access to that force. It is all thanks to the lover.

Seeming and seamless are nice too, eh? The quality of the light transforms the seeming, difficult to grasp world we live in most of the time, to a seamless, composed, real world.]

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,

[She wanted him to come outside because she wanted to toss him a pear she just picked. It’s beautiful, ripe, she wants him to see it and feel it. At this amazing moment of earthly and human clarity, when the world under its June light, and the lover under the influence of the June light, suddenly both take on absolute irrefutable acute being, what shines out most clearly is the fact of the lover’s love for the poet. The well-wrought, perfect ripeness and particularity of the pearfruit is the lover, in her fully manifest (legible) being, a higher being, if you will, brought into existence by virtue of her love for the poet.

In short, she’s happy to see him.

He can read who she is, what she’s feeling, from the lines of joy on her face, just as we can trace natural images on pearskin.

Sometimes the world, and the people we love, shine forth with entire vivacity and truth. As in the moment that ends Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a memory of his brother fishing that “remains in my mind as if fixed by some chemical bath.”

He never stopped to shake himself. He came charging up the bank, showering molecules of water and images of himself to show what was sticking out of his basket, and he dripped all over us … Large drops of water ran from under his hat onto his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

I can never get to the word lips in these lines without feeling the almost unbearable intensity of Maclean’s love for his brother.]

Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

[I’m not sure what these lines mean. I think they mean something like this: The gorgeous flesh of the pear will become pear wine; or will be burned away in order for the pearfruit to become pear wine. The pear is even more vulnerable to the processes of time and transformation than we (more fatal fleshed); but although we have a longer earthly run (human grace), the pear certainly reminds us of our vulnerability toward death, the shutting down of all this being.]

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

[Yes, blessed, and the first great gift of all, and grace — You can read religion into this poem if you’d like, though frankly it seems more on the pagan side to me … Maybe that’s just me…

But anyway. 99.9% of poems these days are falling over themselves to capture these moments, and you can get knockoffs quick and cheap from a poet like Ted Kooser. But why not get the real thing?]