As always, I’ll first give it to you straight. Then I’ll present it again, with my comments.

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My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

by Mark Strand

1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures —
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

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This is a classic lyric. First-person. A private poignant moment evoked through many metaphors.

Yet despite its almost over-rich metaphorical content, the poem feels minimalist, its thin fraught lines conveying the poet’s impulse to say many things even as something holds him back.

The first stanza is one long sentence. It begins:

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,

The title tells us we’re in late summer, and the first lines tell us we’re in a beautiful rural setting in the evening. Already the feel is decidedly elegiac – end of the brilliant season (autumn approaching), end of the long summer day… Stricken inaugurates the parade of metaphors that stride this poem.

Indeed the poem, from the title on, is painterly, descriptive. Like many poems, it is essentially a list of physical features which, as the poem progresses, take on metaphysical implication. Elizabeth Bishop, UD thinks, does this sort of poem better than anyone else.

In this particular case, stricken (and similar words that succeed it) brings us to think about the mother’s increasing physical frailty, her growing proximity to death.

A note on style: There are few end rhymes in this poem (We do see hills and filled in this stanza.), but it’s nonetheless musical, lilting, a sort of chant, by virtue of assonance (moon, few), an almost constant recourse to monosyllabic words, and alliteration (few, filled, floats, fields).

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I’ll post this much. More on its way.

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Okay, I’m back. Those few stricken barns standing out amid the low-domed hills — This, let’s say, is his fragile mother standing out amid the world on this particular night, shining forth in her singularity to her son.

Yet her shine has dulled – veiled, dust-filled, floating already seem not merely words descriptive of the hazy summer night, but also figures for the mother’s indistinctness, her loss of firmness, as she ages.

my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

Notice, first of all, how the poet has buried his mother in the middle of the stanza. This isn’t Poe, beginning his poem, “To Helen”

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea…

Yadda yadda. The first word of the poem is Helen; it’s all about Helen. Mark Strand doesn’t even address his mother — the poem’s really, after all, about the poet’s distress at his sudden realization of her perishability — and he certainly doesn’t put her at the beginning of his lyric. She’s half-hidden in the middle of the first stanza, as if to acknowledge from the outset her low-domed, dust-filled, dimming existence.

And the rest of this stanza merely intensifies the theme of her dwindling, all shadow and smoke and faintness and seepage. The gray island of his mother will be taken from his view in the “seepage of last light.”

Although a summer poem, this writing is dominated by the gray moon, a lifeless pallid light.

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.

Carpets, finials, graze – light and trees take on modest domestic and agrarian values in this poem about a plain country woman. The haze remains in this stanza, but now there’s a shift to images of nature’s power – the loud heaving of the bay, and the pines so lifted up as to reach the stars.

That loud heaving intimates the suffering of the mother, to which the poet will now turn.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,

Starlanes is a neat neologism, sharing with finials and carpets the poet’s trick of almost comically domesticating the vast, powerful, and mysterious natural world. But there’s nothing funny about what comes next: the endless tunnels of nothing. Oldest poetic theme in the book, of course — grappling with your transience and insignificance in the cosmic scheme — but what matters is what poets bring to it. Strand, I think, brings something new.

she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

It’s not merely the nothingness into which we disappear that the mother contemplates; it’s the idea of life itself as silent ongoing physical decay.

Worst of all is the not knowing — living out an entire life in ignorance of its meaning; and aware of having been trapped into a certain sort of existence, but not understanding how that entrapment took place. Maybe all we can say is that we’re here because our parents “clasped and sundered, did the couplers’ will.”

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Final stanza tomorrow morning.

Woke frightened at five this morning from the loudest crash I’ve ever heard. Shook the house. Seemed inches away, somewhere on our property.

Mr UD slept through it, natch.

I glanced at my laptop on the bedside table. Its lights blinked off, one after another — green, red, gold, white. Out.

Tripping over the dog, I went to the living room and looked out of the big windows at the back woods, expecting to see an enormous, semi-dead tree on the ground, blanketing the ground cover with leaves and broken limbs. Nothing there.

I checked the front windows for a tree on the lawn. No.

Back in bed, I woke up Mr UD. Was it some chemical explosion on the train tracks? An airborne toxic event?

He dressed and walked up Rokeby Avenue. A few feet away from our yard, one of our neighbor’s enormous, semi-dead trees had crashed into the street, taking all the electrical wires with it. “They’re hot, the wires,” said Mr UD. “They’re sparking.”

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Asplundh trucks appeared, as did Garrett Park’s mayor (he strode up and down in front of our house, talking into his cell phone) plus the town administrator, who sat in one of the town’s adorable white trucks with Garrett Park written in green on each door, and somberly watched as the Asplundh guys set up orange cones and took out electric saws.

By eight o’clock they’d cleared Rokeby, on either side of which lay stacks of thick wood. Regular readers know that UD‘s property already has plenty of stacks of wood along its forested sides, left over from earlier tree removals. Now there are many, many more, just adjacent.

The town a few years ago planted a delicate magnolia in front of my neighbor’s house. That seems to have been wiped out.

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So again we’re dark. We lose electricity in the winter, we lose it in the spring.

I told Mr UD I was writing a post about what it’s like, losing light and heat and electricity all the time.

“You’re calling it ‘The Ontology of the Outage’? Don’t you mean the metaphysics of the outage?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. And I originally went with that title. But consider the alliteration you get with ontology… I’ve spent the morning going back and forth between the values of style and content…”

“And you’ve chosen – of course – style. You always care more about stylish writing than about accuracy.”

“Right. What are you gonna do about it?”

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The art of losing isn’t hard to master, says Elizabeth Bishop. But she’s kidding. Read the poem. She’s being ironic.

Losing light and heat all the time is actually pretty easy to master. Almost getting killed by trees is more difficult, but let’s put aside, for the moment, that problem.

I remember when my Uncle Mario, a wealthy developer, came to visit us just after we bought our Garrett Park house. “You don’t have grounded wires?” He was appalled. “You’re gonna lose electricity every time the wind blows. And look at these enormous, semi-dead trees.”

Oh. Pishposh. UD, an old hippie, is heavily invested in not living like a wealthy developer. If the price of her maintaining a mental self-image of debonair freedom is constant darkness, it’s a price she’s willing to pay.

Once she got her mask properly tightened, UD began the calm slow kick and arms-to-the-body stillness of snorkeling around The Danger. These weren’t the massive rounded coral reefs of Cozumel, teeming with fish, but they had their moments, and UD encountered a flock of cuttlefish.  She’d have called them elephant fish, because when they stare right in your face, the way these stared in UD‘s face, they look like flimsy little elephants.

PBS did a special about them because they’re “one of the brainiest, most bizarre animals in the ocean.”

The water was warm and shallow (pretty warm; UD wore a wetsuit), and the views, when you lifted your head from the water, were all light green waves and light green islands.  She could see around her because for the first time she had on a prescription mask.

Later, when she, as feared, lowered herself into a bobbing kayak with her partner already in it, UD handily slipped into her seat in the back, where she took charge of steering.

She steered pretty well, only once drifting into mangrove roots.

And she saw many varieties of that shag, or cormorant, that Elizabeth Bishop described in Cape Breton.

It was so quiet where they paddled.  The quiet, and the prehistoric pelicans, made you feel as though you’d fallen out of time into some antechamber of existence.

Back on board, we gathered to watch the famous Key West sunset, just the opposite of the soft ponderous Rehoboth dusk.  Here, the sun, a trembling bronze, all but hurled itself down into the horizon.

end of part three

Something indefinable – a balance of exotic remoteness, cultural marginality, and artistic intellect – beckons many to Key West, where, until recently, the Sunday New York Times often arrived on Monday and local phone numbers contained only five digits.

This begins to get at it…

It’s similar to what I wrote about Bali. Key West isn’t the coldly enigmatic world Elizabeth Bishop describes when she’s in Canada. Up there she shivers on frigid and foggy northern islands whose people live hidden away, and where we can’t see anything. “An ancient chill,” she writes, “is rippling the dark brooks.”

Down here in Key West, where Bishop also lived, the world doesn’t disdain the transient warm fragility of you. It doesn’t dismiss you as a mere human being in the glacial scheme of things.

Because there’s nothing glacial about it. All’s in motion, and all’s clear here: A fresh breeze is rippling the light fronds.

A fully visible world where people are out and about, living their lives in the sun, makes people part of nature, and makes the world, therefore, unenigmatic. In some senses, at least. We are, when we’re here, so obviously part of the scheme of things.

… writes Richard Wilbur, in one of his best-known poems.

He lives here, on Key West.

UD‘s eyes open to a cry of roosters, a swish of palms, and church bells. A breeze from her screened window, and a ceiling fan, cool her. Water trickles off the hot tub in the pool, and a small jet crosses a sky already bright blue.

What’ s the other animal? Querulous, jabbering.

And another bird, a parrot? Whistling.

The big red heart-shaped leaves from the whatever tree that shades the pool have fallen down. They make scratching sounds on the balcony. A man in a blue bandana stands by the side of the pool scooping out the leaves that fell overnight.

The church bells repeat the two notes that begin Goin’ Home. Go – in’. Go-in.’

After the frenzy of yesterday, the eyes open to a slow consideration of the world we’ve flown ourselves into. Questions of travel? That’s Elizabeth Bishop, another lover of Key West.

What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

It is childishness, the rush to this bright blue miniature world; blue and gold as the sun climbs over the island and lights up the palms. “All your life you’ve been bursting through doors,” said UD‘s sister to her at Mie n Yu two days ago. At this table, in fact.

The white one, in the foreground. “At Suburban, and at Washington Hospital Center, when Mom was sick, you just pushed your way in to see her. People were always shooing you out.”

Pushy. Yes. And here’s another door.

The idea of great American poetry on inauguration day’s a good one. UD thought she’d share a great American poem — one that says things about the sea she’s been trying to say in her own writing. It’s The Slow Pacific Swell, by Yvor Winters.

Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.

Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.

A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

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Any reader can sense, even on a first reading, the writer’s effort to convey something about how the mind works. Maybe the way awareness comes and goes. Sometimes we experience very sharp precision of thought, and sometimes we float into vagueness; sometimes we’re mentally agitated, and sometimes we’re very calm — pacific, if you like. Sometimes we drift very close to the truth; sometimes we’re kept infinitely far away from it.

More interestingly, sometimes consciousness feels like both of these states at once. Like the seawater that washes up on the poet’s ship, consciousness can be a “loose weight” — which sounds like an oxymoron, but water is very heavy, and at the same time without structure. Our thoughts have weight, perhaps, but they are after all merely thoughts.

So, to wade through the poem…

Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.

[Note the last phrase of the poem: “Ebbing out of mind.” The land is where we walk through our lives, grounded, in a familiar world. The sea remains, in its vastness, looseness, and distance, ungraspable, incomprehensible, to us. So say it conveys here the realm of intellectual and spiritual mystery — all that we’ll never understand, however advanced we become. We gaze at it and listen to it because we’re enchanted and intrigued by what we don’t know.]

When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.

[Everything here goes to precision, clarity, the ability to hold something steady in order to see it, analyze it. No dust in the eye; a clear April day; the sky’s unbroken by cloud. Dark and precise the little steamers ply – / Firm in direction they seem not to stir. Glorious poetic concision here, stating something I’ve thought too, gazing through my binoculars at cargo ships in the afternoon, so geometrically clear, heading somewhere full of goods… And yet – he’s right – they don’t seem to be moving. They’re so far away. Sometimes I’ll stare them a long time just to measure their forward progress from place to place; but it’s so hard to see them actually moving as they get somewhere! So another paradox beloved of poets — firm in direction but not stirring.]

Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.

[Cape Flattery’s “the farthest northwest point of the contiguous United States.” Here all the clarity, precision, and stillness dissolves as the poet’s thrown to the deck by the force of the waves. He’s lost consciousness, briefly, and lies dreaming.]

Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.

[The slow pacific swell. So much of our lives we spend dreaming, half-conscious; and then the slow pacific swell of thought and feeling overwhelms us, rouses us to awareness. I came / Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. Yet the act of awareness — the formation, the swell, of thought — will be maddeningly slow.  We’ll be getting somewhere, perhaps — like those steamers — but it’s going to feel as though we’re stuck.]

That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.

[The poet’s skull; and now the whale’s head: The theme of awareness, of consciousness itself as it tries to understand and act upon the world, seems dominant to me in this poem. The whale is a kind of perfection of consciousness; it can lift itself clean above the wave.]

And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.

[Same paradox of consciousness: A shining moment of clarity, triumph over the ungraspable infinite; and then it sinks in spray, back to the deeps.]

A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.

[I prefer to live on land, where I can feel somewhat secure in my world, though I know that by keeping a distance from the rushing of the deep I remain only half-awake. I don’t confront, or try to take into account, that deeper enigmatic realm that undoes our sense of precision.]

By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.

[There’s something frightening – and hence evaded – about the powerful realm of chaos the sea expresses to us constantly.]

The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,

[This line wins the alliteration award.]

Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,

[Here again things feel pretty ominous. The sea doesn’t merely remind us of the erosion of our certainties; it withdraws land… It actively undermines our sense of solidity.]

Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;

[Heaving – like the poet himself heaving on the deck under the water’s influence; and – blind. The poem ends with that ultimate image of darkness… And the sea is under the influence, after all, of the moon; and so it is passive, and unable, like the little steamers, to set its own direction. You might have at some point in reading this poem been reminded of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which has a similar theme — the sea in its circular powerful chaos is both a figure for our own sense of spiritual and intellectual futility, and a challenge to us to struggle toward greater clarity.]

Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.

[The poem concludes with the final escape of the sea and all its philosophical challenge; or, rather, with our banishment of the sea, our insisting that it ebb out of our minds so that we can regain a sense of uprightness on solid ground.]

[Maybe you didn’t think of Arnold.  Maybe you thought of Elizabeth Bishop – At the Fishhouses.  This is how that poem ends.]

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

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Cape Flattery

But Elizabeth Kimmel, whose endless criminal prevarication has ruined her life and the lives of her children, merits it. The latest Varsity Blues parent to go to jail, Kimmel knew no bounds when it came to rigging bogus admission to hot schools for her dumb rich kids.

Or are they dumb? Her insane machinations condemn them to this judgment; and yet in the case of her daughter at least, a letter has surfaced that suggests otherwise. Kimmel’s lawyers of course described her throughout as motivated by pure philanthropy as she handed hundreds of thousands of dollars to corrupt, now also imprisoned, college coaches; but prosecutors had other ideas about her character.

‘In their pre-sentence memo, federal prosecutors disputed the Kimmel camp’s sunny view of the wealthy La Jollan’s charitable disposition, citing an e-mail authored by an unnamed Bishop’s faculty member. [Bishop is the high school the daughter attended.]

Days after [Kimmel’s] arrest in this case, a teacher at her children’s high school, unprompted, sent [Kimmel] the following e-mail:

“Attached is the college letter of recommendation I wrote for [your daughter] six years ago.

“‘Without a single reservation, I believed in her qualifications— her powerful intellect, her uncompromising sportsmanship, her sterling character — when you did not.

“‘Many of the faculty at Bishop’s — I could list ten off the top of my head — remember you as boorish, your treatment of us demeaning, insulting, unprincipled.

“‘But we loved your children and, in spite of their parents, always had their best interests at heart.

“’To that end, please forward my letter to [your daughter].”‘

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And, sad as it is to say this, given that letter about her, UD will add that Georgetown should rescind her degree.