I'm doing what I did last year:
Standing on a cold Venetian balcony, listening.
The others have gone off to the canal
To see the fireworks. For me, enough to hear
The crack and blast of the show from a distance.
Under the stars, the sky flashes pink and green
With each explosion. The balcony rattles a bit
And, from dark corners of the city, unseen
Voices shout that a new year begins.
Strange to be here again for this strange
Light show, a sort of conceptual art,
Postmodern version of pitched battle,
Gunfight, terror, striking the heart
But sparing the body. Some of it
Sounds like gunshots, and then my frame,
Like the balcony, rattles a bit.
Absurd. But who can blame
Me for going there? The only bombing campaign
I'll ever know simply smokes up the air
And leaves me standing there
Wondering about skirmish scrimmage and war.
Take a loose rein and a deep seat,
John, my father-in-law, would say
To someone starting out on a long journey, meaning, take it easy,
Relax, let what’s taking you take you.
A dinner-as-marathon joint where zillions of never before imagined dishes/drinks are whisked about you.
...here day after tomorrow. Will blog about it.
**********************
Also in the ordine del giorno – A second round of warhorses at La Fenice. Far as UD can tell, it’s exactly the same concert we went to in Venice last year: First half, rousing orchestral warhorses. Second, rousing vocal. Loved all of it – the best part was watching the local audience loving it.
We all rise for Libiamo at the end. SUPER rousing. This year, I’ll remember to bring the lyrics, so I can sing along.
... with words taken from an article.
Traffic Control
A tragedy of the uncommon in
Low-earth orbit impends. Some old craft can't
Even move on command; spaceship can burn
Their engines to put off junk at a slant
But the daemons of dead satellites and
Rocket bodies, fairings, wrenches, and gloves
Make a hazard zone for explosive wrecks.
A hypervelocity culture loves
And fears its hypervelocity tech.
On festive and non-festive days, old UD loves to read the poems of James Merrill. In the last weeks of his life, he wrote Christmas Tree, in which his wasting body is compared to a holiday tree taken in and decorated by a celebrating family — he is made to feel loved and cared for and even prettied up, shined up, in his last days, although the poet/tree knows that, having been cut down, his/its days are very much numbered. The hospital was the tree farm, where the poet has been “looked after, kept still,” but now it’s clear “there [is] nothing more to do,” and the poet will have to leave the hospital and go home to die.
Yet it’s Merrill, the poet, who inexhaustibly, to the end, elaborates, accessorizes, decorates, warms, and bejewels life — as I said in my last post about him, he’s no discouraged Prufrock. He keeps going, keeps embellishing. He’s an artist, mes petites. We can’t rescue the family jewels from the fire, but he can. Even as he’s dying, he can. Surrounded by loved ones in his warm home, covered in thick “sables,” nonetheless jewels from life continue to “flash forth” around him from these coverings. He’s not buried yet. Propitiating miracle-makers (amulets, milagros) hang from his body and a song plays and replays – brilliant, magical life continues to be wound about him.
And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going.
The holiday and the primitive at-home IV/ivy. To keep the blood going. Heart-stopping poetry if you ask me.
Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No bullshit about it, I’m all lit up and about to die; my festive duties done, my poems written, I’m about to be stripped of my jewels, with my poor naked trunk about to be revealed for the rail-thin thing it is. I’m about to be buried, pine/IV “needles and bone.” And I’m ready to go.
Last image from last moments – a world in dusk, to be sure, but dusk “aglow,” with candlelight, loving faces, gifts brought to the tree, brought by the tree.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.
The last lines of the last poem echo Merrill’s endless reverberating theme, as in his great poem “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” where he insists on walking the volcanic, gorgeous island, staying poised and balanced and upright, despite serious pain from ailments in his feet. The imperative always is to stay in the game, to remain receptive to all of life, to call and recall, and above all to lyrically praise.
Christmas Tree
⭐
To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.
Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s
Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.
Sometimes you wanna shoot
Where everybody else is gonna shoot
And they’re always glad you’re armed
You wanna be where you can see
The folks you shoot hey one two three
You wanna be where everybody knows you’re armed
Take these verses, call them today’s flower,
Cluster a rained‐in pupil might have scissored.
They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.
Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.
**********************************************
The sad random childish awkward scissoring together of metaphor and sentiment makes of a poem a gift to the world, a gift to the lover.
This is clearly a pathetic gift, one of the sorry things all... The cluster the pupil makes means to be beautiful, a flower; but the pupil’s crude and cutting instrument of art – the scissors – guarantees a sorry thing, a thing unavoidably emerging from/entering into the realm of hazard, from our messy thrownness into being.
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
Prufrock knows the lover will not accept his poem, his gift, his hazarded random thing that carries his love and his hoped-for transcendent meaning. She, pillowed in contingency, had not meant to excite that sentiment, that meaning, at all, and she shatters him and breaks his heart refusing it. She will shatter him – so he will withhold the gift out of self-protection. He won’t even try.
Merrill the poet tries and tries in every poem; and for him, rather than withdrawing from the field of love and meaning and beauty and gift-giving, we must simply keep trying. The art that matters is the art of accepting what gifts there are – the hopeless lover’s overtures indeed, but more importantly the conditions of existence themselves: dailiness, balanced meals (see the post below) and all. Therein lies the true art – not the always-inept creation of a poem, but an open forgiving ever-reanimated ever-hopeful embrace of the sad contingency even in the most achieved Shakespeare sonnet.
Thus in his great poem “After Greece,” when a depressed Merrill returns home from the exuberant liberating glories of Athens to the crimped waspy realities of his American upbringing – that particular existence into which he was thrown – he ends with a kind of prayer:
May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.
Best is to have the fortitude to take on the burden of your own sad contingencies — not head-on, because that would be ungeneratively painful (one of Merrill’s best-known collections is titled The Fire-Screen), as well as the sad contingencies of loved others. One will always be a clumsy “pupil” of life, expressively ‘reined in’ (Merrill loves to pun) by the repressive fire-screening in which all sane people must engage. The highest art is accepting those sorry things all — even as you forgive yourself for – speaking poetically, quoting Wallace Stevens – the intricate evasions of as.
The first I found in a review of James Merrill’s poetry; the second is from Nabokov’s Pnin. They attracted me because I’m starting my traditional end of/beginning of the year Life Wisdom blog post, and the sentiment seemed a good place to start.
But for now, just having arrived in Boston for Christmas, I’m going to take a nap.
[T]oddler fatally shoots mother with gun in Fresno
… Musselman admitted to shooting the victim’s truck but said he was aiming at a groundhog. Musselman told officers he used an AR-15 …
