At 96. Here’s one of his best poems. It’s nice and seasonal.

In the Elegy Season

Longs for the brush of the freighted air, for smells
Of grass and cordial lilac, for the sight
Of green leaves building into the light
And azure water hoisting out of wells.

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UD‘s Wilbur posts. (Scroll down.)

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?]

Charles Wright, a UD fave (see her analysis of Black Zodiac here), is the new US poet laureate.

If you read through some of the poems on this page, you’ll see one strongly recurrent theme, and one strongly characteristic technique. Like Don DeLillo – he’s about DeLillo’s age, looks quite a lot like him, and presents to the world a very similar laconic diffident serious and almost shy demeanor – Wright is a lapsed but still gasping (grasping?) metaphysician. Both were raised Christian; both have long since ceased to believe. But both retain, in a visionary way, “the glowing shards of things which have continued to dazzle at me,” as Wright puts it. DeLillo notes the retention within his atheist self of eschatological seriousness:

[One of my characters] needs to know that people out there believe in all the old verities, the old gods. These things keep the planet warm. But she herself is not a believer. I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood. For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he’s raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn’t live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain. This removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he’s approaching important subjects, eternal subjects. I think for a Catholic these things are part of ordinary life.

Both writers see a planet warmed by a glow from somewhere, warmed by a transmission from a force that feels like an ultimacy. They’re always sticking their speakers or characters in metaphysically charged settings – the desert in novels like The Names and Point Omega (the latter novel features a main character who “sit[s] and reflect[s] on grand subjects such as time, extinction and the attainment of what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point: a zen-like state of relinquished consciousness.”), and, in Wright, the foothills of the Appalachians at dusk, with the natural world pouring down its dazzle and the poet conscious of the pathetic nothingness, in this rich and self-sufficient context, of the human. Here’s a short, echt-Wright poem, Vesper Journal. Note the teasingly prayerful title, plus the contrast between non-human living things, which lyrically accept the “tiny,” “half-grain” nature of the earth, and restless miserable metaphysically-grasping humans who can only, poem after poem after poem, lament that “language, always, is just language.”

Wright’s technique, a long free-verse line that weaves about from slangy prosaic chat to intensely Romantic nature description to baldly metaphysical reflection, captures modern consciousness as it registers both its capacity to feel awe and its inability to make awe meaningful. Wright is unlike the steadily Episcopalian Richard Wilbur, who tells an interviewer

I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that is my attitude. My feeling is that when you discover order and goodness in the world, it is not something you are imposing — it is something that is likely really to be there, whatever crumminess and evil and disorder there may also be. I don’t take disorder or meaninglessness to be the basic character of things. I don’t know where I get my information, but that is how I feel.

For Wright, we can’t even impose it anymore; we can only mull over earlier poetic (and theological) efforts to impose it. All of Black Zodiac (note the title – the blacked-out heavens) is a backward glance at the poet’s precursor cosmologists – Dante, Milton – and an insistence that these “masters” leave the poet alone in his “dwarf orchard” to work out his shrunken relationship to the cosmos. Language isn’t a medium anymore, a way through to hidden cosmic truths; it’s “an element, like air or water.” (Wright takes this last phrase from Wallace Stevens.) The human voice, our words, our poetry – these aren’t vehicles toward something metaphysical. They are simply the material, life-sustaining environment in which we move every moment of our lives. We are condemned to live out our lives trying to get the better of words (that latter phrase is from T.S. Eliot’s East Coker), knowing that we never will, but knowing also that they are all we have.

For a warm, musing, quiet time, a time when things slow down or stop, a poem by Stanley Kunitz, full of quiet musing. UD stops the poem when she feels like it, thinking aloud about its form and its meanings.

The Abduction

Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.

[This is a wispy, thin-lined, first-person account – directed to a man’s lover – of a memory involving her that continues to baffle and unnerve him. The thinness of his poetic line, and his opening admission of his inadequacy, create a mood of lassitude, vagueness, half-thereness. The poem will be a narrative – the story of the lover’s abduction – but it will be told in the sketchy thin-lined manner of a man in fact defended against the story’s meanings.

We are in a fog, in short, of the sort one knows from Kafka stories, or from novels like The Good Soldier. It’s the condition – the pathology – of not knowing that interests writers like these.

That summer day on which the abduction took place was “timeless,” which is to say it has made on the speaker (and presumably his lover) a permanent mark; they both return to it again and again in memory and in desire. Timeless too in the sense that the events the poet is about to recount seem mythic, unreal, out of time altogether, some miraculous break in the fabric of time. Think here of that unnerving Australian film, Picnic at Hanging Rock which also features virginal women in white dresses “taken” by an alien force, taken out of time.

Here the lover returns from her abduction, spilled sexual blood on her whiteness…]

“Do you believe?” you asked.

[Do you believe the transformation that has happened to me? Do you love me enough to believe the bizarre tale I’m about to unfold? To believe my way of knowing/not knowing what has happened to transform me from white to red? To love is to enter into the deepest, most wounded, most obscure mental world of the loved one, as in this poem, by Stephen Spender. Or this one, by Richard Wilbur. Are you willing to do that?]

Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:

[This is love: That together you give life and even plausibility to… hell, you honor the particular myths, repetition compulsions, odd ways of making sense of one’s destiny, that the loved one has generated out of her experience, her imagination, her – to anticipate the end of this poem – rapture and dread.]

how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.

[So here’s the medieval myth itself, the way-weird account of her torn and bloodied self she offers the lover. The hunting dogs first appear, and then what sounds like flagellants, and they all lead her to a major stag who stretches her on his “budding horn.” Here is her dream of her triumphant sex, her initiation into the power (“kneeled… before you”) of her own body.]

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.

[Same thing Spender and Wilbur wonder, gazing at their lovers. If these men are going to get anywhere near where these women are, they will indeed have to “believe,” have to enter lovingly into the far country that is the soul of any other human being. The poet feels his inability/unwillingness to enter the deepest, strangest, sources of this woman’s being; yet, loving her, he wonders.]

Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

[There is a world inside the world, as Don DeLillo has Lee Harvey Oswald repeat to himself throughout Libra; there is that realm of power, of being, that thrums through our existence, a constant dark engine pulsing through us, making us and making our lives, generating our stories. You can be upbeat about this, and suggest that eventually we can have access to these deep sources of ourselves and even others:

… then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.

Or you can be far less upbeat:

…in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.]

You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

[A hint of transport hovering — always an allusion, in her repose, to that transformative mythic moment of transport which has nothing to do with her lover.]

indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

[Always, ecstatically, she returns to her primal triumph, and this in some sense protects her from the harsh temporal material world that seeks her out, seeks to awaken her to the end of power, eros, solace.]

Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

[Outside their bedroom rages a world of monsters out of childhood; outside their haven of life intensified lies death (bleached faces… with coals for eyes), and even as she circles endlessly into her glorious scene of transformation, she – and he – are being otherwise transformed, spun out from the world of life into the world of death.

So this is where we are; this is all we know — the rapture of our death-defying embrace of existence, and the dread of our knowing/not wanting to know how this compulsively reiterated erotic fable will end.]

A former student of his asks a question.

I was lucky enough to be at a dinner for [Bellah] after a talk he gave at Yale, and a former student of his asked him about his experience of graduate school. “I really enjoyed it,” he said. What about being a junior professor? “I enjoyed that too!” he said, smiling. The former student asked him, “Was there ever a period of life you didn’t enjoy?” He smiled and paused thoughtfully. “Well, my wife died recently, and that was simply a fact I had to endure. But, basically, I enjoy life.”

I wanna be like these long-lived Episcopalian guys – like Bellah, and like Richard Wilbur, who’s 92 and still at it.

“I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy,” [Wilbur] explained in an interview with Peter Stitt in the Paris Review, “that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.”

You don’t have to be Episcopalian.

Then he ended with a question to the Dalai Lama: “Your Holiness, can you tell us what was the happiest moment of your life? “ A silence full of expectation fell in the room, composed of a dozen scientists, some Buddhist scholars and meditators, and a hundred guests. The Dalai Lama paused for a while, looked up in space, as if seeking an answer deep within himself, then suddenly, he leaned forward and said to the Japanese scholar in a resounding voice, “I think …. Now !”

Maybe you don’t even have to be religious.

Beethoven said a thing as rash and noble as the best of his work. By my memory, he said: ‘He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.’

… because we’ve lately been told that the Mediterranean diet is the only way to go, let us note that poets have long been swigging olives and their oil and the trees that hold the olives, and there must be a reason for this olive-love on the part of so many poets. The most recent of poetic olivephiles, A.E. Stallings (read UD‘s appreciation of a poem of hers here), has just been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle prize, and the name of the nominated book is … Olives.

A quick read of a bunch of poems featuring things olive confirms that poets like the olivesque because… Well, let’s go to the tape! Let’s do five olive poems! I bet we’ll discover that all poets – at least all the poets on our list — i.e., Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Karl Shapiro, Rachel Hadas, A.E. Stallings — like the same stuff about olives.

Pour la première, M. Wilbur, “Grasse: The Olive Trees.” (Go here for the complete poem.) So the poet’s in the south of France, marveling at the incredible lushness – almost to excess – of natural bounty there:

… the grass
Mashes under the foot, and all is full
Of heat and juice and a heavy jammed excess.

… The whole South swells
To a soft rigor, a rich and crowded calm.

But no – not everything around the poet is like that:

… olives lie
Like clouds of doubt against the earth’s array.

And why? Well, they look different, for one thing, all gray and gnarly and oldish and “anxious,” says the poet, in their thin arthritic presence.

What’s their problem? Their problem is that they’re at odds with their lush relaxed just let the rain drip all over me and the sun warm me up setting; they don’t trust the natural generosity of the cosmos; or, rather, they – like Kafka’s Hunger Artist – know that no matter how generous the universe, the lives it gives us are finite and difficult, and we will always be hungry and thirsty, wanting more joy, and more life. The olive is

a tree which grows
Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
Teaches the South it is not paradise.

So the olive is there to remind us that even in our most famous paradises – here, the south of France – the reality of life and death pertains: Our lives are treacherous, we’re barely getting by, and we grow unearthly pale, asking of existence compensations and fulfillments that will never occur. This is earth, not paradise, says the olive tree, and this is an important message, worth the poet’s notice…

Just so in James Merrill, the olive features in a poem about the frustration of being mortal, of having too little time to overcome one’s convoluted beginnings and break through to the elemental paradisal person one wishes to be (see Philip Larkin’s Aubade: “An only life can take so long to climb / Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never…”). In “After Greece,” Merrill describes coming back to the States, back to his personal history, back to the story that made him and that he’ll never – however many times he leaves for Greece – escape. It’s an earnest New Englandy sort of inheritance – Christian, or maybe if not Christian at least animated by “Art, Public Spirit…” But Merrill wants neither of these – neither the moral piety of the religious life, nor the moral piety of the post-religious public spirited life. He wants essentials:

how I want
Essentials: salt, wine, olive, the light…

The poet is – in Wilbur’s words about the olive tree – “rooted hunger wrung.” His hunger for essentials has him calling out to the olives, begging their sun-laden natural fulfillment for himself; but “I have scarcely named you” when instead of that idealized earthy plentitude, what materializes is the gradually killing radiance of the Greek sun, turning things “unearthly pale.”

Shapiro? Same old same old.

The fruit is hard,
Multitudinous, acid, tight on the stem;
The leaves ride boat-like in the brimming sun,
Going nowhere and scooping up the light.
It is the silver tree, the holy tree,
Tree of all attributes.

Now on the lawn
The olives fall by thousands, and I delight
To shed my tennis shoes and walk on them,
Pressing them coldly into the deep grass,
In love and reverence for the total loss.

All attributes, multitudinous, holding on to life tightly; and yet the olive is going to fall to the ground, pregnant with nothing, and the poet celebrates this reverent opportunity the fall gives him to press his feet into the “cold pastoral” grave of his own abundant nothingness.

Next up, Rachel Hadas, who just says it:

Ideas of the eternal,

once molten, harden; cool.
Oil, oil in the lock.

The door to her country house gets old and stiff and hard to open, so she softens it with olive oil to make it young again. But as she gets older ideas of infinitely available regeneration “harden; cool.”

oil in the lock; the key
dipped in lubricity
the boychild’s shining skin
me tired to the bone

And finally Stallings herself – perhaps the most evolved of the poets – finds in the olive a rich equivalent to her acceptance of limitation, her understanding that to be always hungry is not the ideal human outcome. Of the poets, she’s the only one who claims the olive:

These fruits are mine –
Small bitter drupes
Full of the golden past and cured in brine.

That is, Stallings seems to have arrived at the proper attitude to take toward the olive. Not morbid, like Shapiro, or somewhat puling like Merrill. Not somewhat hectoring or lecturing, like Wilbur, who concludes a bit too authoritatively with his reminder to us; and not meanderingly wistful like Hadas (I mean, they’re all fine poems; I just think Stallings is the best). But rather with a toughed-up wisdom, and even a joy based on that difficult knowledge.

Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet…

for the truth, the bitter truth, that is, and the olive contains it. Its gradually darkening skin “charts the slow chromatics of a bruise,” the gradual process, also chronicled in the Hadas poem, of one’s recognition of mortality. The olive is

Daylight packed in treasuries of oil

Paradigmatic summers that decline
Like singular archaic nouns, the troops
Of hours in retreat.

So learn to love that fact of decline and retreat, that singular fast-becoming-archaic thing which is you, packed tightly with your daylight memories into the skin of an indehiscent mind, a mind strong enough not to split when it arrives at maturity.

… made a whirling world around our house this afternoon; and if the sky stays this clear, UD might be able to see an excellent meteor shower around three AM.

Longtime readers know that UD goes to her upstate New York house every August hoping to lie on the front field and see the perseid shower. She has seen a few of these, but sometimes the moon’s too full, the sky’s too cloudy, whatever.

Now here’s another shower – the Quads – due to appear in ‘thesda, and UD will be ready.

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

Meteors tend to do what you’d think they’d do in poetry: They represent short bursts of brilliant life (as in, say, an elegy for Keats), or, more consolingly, they suggest a living universe of which we are somehow eternally a part. Even in way slangy pomo poetry – the contemporary form derived from modern poets like Frank O’Hara, the form UD calls the meta-maunder – you see the same symbolic value the Romantics gave the meteor.

Here, for instance, is a pomo maunder.

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

Death, Is All

Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.

… writes Richard Wilbur in the poem Year’s End; and let’s consider the point he’s making in his stately, nicely rhymed stanzas as we stare December 31 in the face.

At the very end of Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens describes us – well, describes “casual flocks of pigeons” symbolically us – flying in a downward direction at night:

And in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Down we go to death; but on the other hand our wings are “extended” — our arms open out to “More time, more time,” Wilbur writes.

And: As we sink down, we create beautiful, complex “undulations.” Formal grace, and mystery, express themselves in the patterns of our existences.

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

Evening’s one thing; evening on December 31 packs mortality-intimation awfully tightly. Stevens’ poem after all is about morning, Sunday morning, the way Sunday morning can be dreadful if you’re suspended somewhere between secularity and belief, if you’d like to believe in some form of soulful immortality. Wilbur has us at night, and the night of December 31 at that; so questions of our mortal fragility and the shape – make it the undulating shapeliness – of our lives – are perhaps even more urgent.

Both poets in any case want to capture the peculiar tenterhooks we’re on – brightly appareled in our lives, we stretch our wings. Yet our true condition is, writes Wilbur, like that of leaves trapped in ice: “Graved on the dark in gestures of descent.” We’re “flutter[ing]” still, but down under the ice. We’re gesturing still, but always in postures of descent. Downward to darkness on extended wings.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

The patterns, if patterns there are, in our frayed lives, express themselves only after we’re dead. Or maybe something of a pattern occurs to us while we sit, in the isolation of the evening sky, prodded into contemplation by a sudden end of time.

… the poet and translator Richard Wilbur, who’s chugging along nicely at 89, with Anterooms, a new book of poems and translations. The Amherst Bulletin has a terrific article about him; it includes this poem, from the new collection, written in memory of Wilbur’s wife.

The House

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.

What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.

Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.

There’s something about these poems of the long-married… Like this similar one by Stephen Spender... These poems can feature a peculiar intimacy with the unconscious of the much-loved, much-lived-with person. The lover intuits the loved-one’s dreams from what the beloved speaks in sleep; or from what she tells him about her dreams on waking.

And these dreams clearly represent a profoundly privileged territory, a deep-lying region of the truest personal truths, the purest contingencies of one particular person. It’s no surprise that Wilbur, seeking a sort of contact with his dead wife, will go here, to the realm he alone was able to perceive while she lived, that he would constantly “put to sea” in search of the most rooted place her mind inhabited, her islanded house inside life’s flow.

Think of Matthew Arnold’s To Marguerite: Continued, in which another separated pair of lovers laments their separation:

For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!

Meanwhile, there’s “the unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea,” the same sea Wilbur sails over night after night, his own dreams trying to become hers, trying to be her dreaming mind, in order to find her, transcended, finally at home.

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

Widow’s walk. Salt. There’s no idealizing here; it is the grave, the salt salt sea, the white hotel of D.M. Thomas’s novel, the strange infinity of our ceasing, whose reality we allow ourselves to feel in dream-image.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

This is the conclusion of Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens. This is the way you make love when the person you love has died: you set out as wisely and foolishly as you can on that wide water, and keep looking.

… for $500,000 (and the price keeps dropping). It’s a couple of blocks away from UD‘s place, and it’s part of a small hidden compound where Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Ralph Ellison also lived.

Scroll down to 719 Windsor Lane.

… Key West, though of course I won’t be here long enough to understand much.

But today, for instance, reading through The Secret of Salt while eating a spinach salad at Kelly’s, I discovered that in fact Richard Wilbur no longer lives here, having decided a couple of years ago that he and his wife were too old to manage two houses. His upstairs study in Key West, he recalls, was “full of airiness and swaying leaves.”

“It was marvelous to go every winter to a place where there’d be plenty of old and lively friends … It was quite a world of writers and artists with whom to enjoy oneself in the evenings. … I’m going to miss it a great deal, not just for its temperature… It’s a place that makes me feel youthful.”

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Tonight, UD‘s going to the Waterfront Playhouse to see BITCHSLAP.

… 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.