… I think that people are the sum of their illusions,
That the cares that make them difficult to see
Are eased by distance, with their errors blending
In an intricate harmony, their truths abiding
In a subtle “spark” or psyche (each incomparable,
Yet each the same as all the others) and their
Disparate careers all joined together in a tangled
Moral vision whose intense, meandering design
Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling,
As in grief, or in the pathos of a life
Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate,
Because the most important thing is human happiness –
Not in the sense of private satisfactions, but of
Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms
And with the quiet inconsistencies that make them real.
… [I]n the course of getting older,
And trying to reconstruct the paths that led me here,
I found myself pulled backwards through these old,
Uncertain passages, distracted by the details,
And meeting only barriers to understanding why the
Years unfolded as they did, and why my life
Turned out the way it has …
… Why did I think a person only distantly like me
Might finally represent my life? …
… The houses on a street, the quiet backyard shade,
The room restored to life with bric-a-brac—
I started by revisiting these things, then slowly
Reconceiving them as forms of loss made visible
That balanced sympathy and space inside an
Abstract edifice combining reaches of the past
With all these speculations, all this artful
Preening of the heart. I sit here at my desk,
Perplexed and puzzled, teasing out a tangled
Skein of years we wove together, and trying to
Combine the fragments of those years into a poem.
Who cares if life — if someone’s actual life — is
Finally insignificant and small? There’s still a
Splendor in the way it flowers once and fades
And leaves a carapace behind. There isn’t time to
Linger over why it happened, or attempt to make its
Mystery come to life again and last, like someone
Still embracing the confused perceptions of himself
Embedded in the past, as though eternity lay there —
For heaven’s a delusion, and eternity is in the details,
And this tiny, insubstantial life is all there is.
… It starts and ends
Inside an ordinary room, while in the interim
Brimming with illusions, filled with commonplace
Delights that make the days go by, with simple
Arguments and fears, and with the nervous
Inkling of some vague, utopian conceit
Transforming both the landscape and our lives,
Until we look around and find ourselves at home,
But in a wholly different world. And even those
Catastrophes that seemed to alter everything
Seem fleeting, grounded in a natural order
All of us are subject to, and ought to celebrate…
******************
From “Falling Water,” by John Koethe
November 9th, 2016 at 10:26AM
Lovely. Now that I’m learning to read again, I’ll read some of his stuff.
This all brings to mind a shorter portion of a WS poem quoted at greater length in an earlier post:
It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.
I suppose one could always construct a tolerable reality in one’s mind. Step out of a window and say that you are flying or surfing the wind. Why not, while you float? But that lasts until you land on something concrete.
November 9th, 2016 at 10:49AM
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53711
November 9th, 2016 at 11:06AM
Or, as George Starbuck once wrote,”intricate are the compoundments of despair.”
November 9th, 2016 at 11:58AM
Greg: Very nice line!
November 9th, 2016 at 12:30PM
Here is the full Starbuck poem about student spelling deficiencies and it’s a hoot:
THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck
(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)
My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.
Another student gave me a diagragm.
“The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth.”
Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.
Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can’t?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.
You won’t get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I’d sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I’m on their side. I better be, after my brush with “infinitessimal.”
There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.
And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, “George…”
I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
“Their their,” I needed to hear them say, “their their.”
You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying “tsk tsk.”
I know they’re there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast ’em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.
For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let ’em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is “Oslgmbnh.”
“Om?” they inquire. “No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you’ve only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there’s an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers’ bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that’s all the time extension you’re going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don’t be surprised if it’s the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys.”
Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini’s Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other “Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!” and tearing their hair.
Intricate are the compoundments of despair.
Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.
Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.
November 9th, 2016 at 1:25PM
What a pleasure. Thanks for pasting in the poem.