23 posts tagged “poetry”

Cranford by Elizabeth Glaskell is not a movie for men who enjoy watching the Superbowl I am afraid. There are no swordfights. Based on Glaskell’s 1851 novel of the same name, its principle focus is the internal daily lives of the women in an English village soon to receive its first taste of modernity as the train companies plan to connect it to the world.

In short, it is about Victorian society before it changes, as it is about to change, changing, and after it changes. I suppose you could say that it is about our own times as well in that regard. In one scene of the movie, one of the characters reads a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson as she bemoans the loss of a true love that she might have had as a young woman. A love she lost by being overly concerned with the influence of her sister. The poem is entitled Locksley Hall  and is fairly lengthy but I thought I might quote some of it here.

It is a poem about a young soldier who is traveling with his unit past his childhood home, Locksley Hall. He pauses, like Robert Frost pauses by the dark woods on a snowy evening in Stopping By the Woods On a Snowy Evening to spend a moment in reflection upon the fond memories of his youth – memories of nature, of the ocean, of the night skies, and memories of his dreams for the future.  

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time;

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed:
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.—

But within these memories lies a trap that has been set for him. He begins to think of Spring . . . and then soon, of a youthful love he bbore for his cousin, Amy.

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

He remembers how he found her and how she responded to his affection.

Then her cheek was pale and thinner than should be for one so young,
And her eyes on all my motions with a mute observance hung.
And I said, "My cousin Amy, speak, and speak the truth to me,
Trust me, cousin, all the current of my being sets to thee."

On her pallid cheek and forehead came a colour and a light,
As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night.
And she turn'd--her bosom shaken with a sudden storm of sighs--
All the spirit deeply dawning in the dark of hazel eyes--

Saying, "I have hid my feelings, fearing they should do me wrong";
Saying, "Dost thou love me, cousin?" weeping, "I have loved thee long."

I suppose we can all remember some point in time when the heaven of our happiness opened up upon us to find that the one we fancied, fancied us. He speaks of the joyful memories that ensued.

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in his glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.

Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,
And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fullness of the Spring.
Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,
And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips.

Everything beautiful. Everything as it should be. Everything unspoiled. And then this poem turns on a dime, from the glow of nostalgic bliss to the fiery bitterness of his broken heart. Alas, with a ferocity of one of England’s greatest Romantics, Tennyson storms against the social conventions that shipwrecked his life.

O my cousin, shallow-hearted! O my Amy, mine no more!
O the dreary, dreary moorland! O the barren, barren shore!
Falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung,
Puppet to a father's threat, and servile to a shrewish tongue!
Is it well to wish thee happy?--having known me--to decline
On a range of lower feelings and a narrower heart than mine!

She marries another. Its an old story. Its been told before. It will be told again. Can he wish her happiness with this man that he thinks such ill thoughts of? He pictures her in all her perfections having to daily dose herself with his imperfections.

Yet it shall be; thou shalt lower to his level day by day,
What is fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with clay.
As the husband is, the wife is: thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee down.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.
What is this? his eyes are heavy; think not they are glazed with wine.
Go to him, it is thy duty, kiss him, take his hand in thine.

It may be my lord is weary, that his brain is overwrought:
Soothe him with thy finer fancies, touch him with thy lighter thought.
He will answer to the purpose, easy things to understand--
Better thou wert dead before me, tho' I slew thee with my hand!
Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart's disgrace,
Roll'd in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.

He personally thinks she would be better off dead than with him. And he rages against the forces of society that have conspired against them. (Remember that for all we know, she could be much happier with her husband than she would have been with her former hearthrob but this is the broken hearted lover’s poem. Not hers.)  

Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the fool!

He hates the conventions of Victorian Society that give the power of breaking up what he believes love and nature joined together. This is the heart of the Romantic Movement’s dissent from the societies they lived in. They railed against social structures that defied nature and ignored the emotional self.

Well--'t is well that I should bluster!--Hadst thou less unworthy proved--
Would to God--for I had loved thee more than ever wife was loved.

“You messed up!” he wants to yell at her. “You messed up!” You caved in to some sort of pressure instead of following your heart and now look at me! I am a mess!” In the next lines, he tries to figure out how to contain the painfulness of his grief. Alas, if he pulls out the pain, he pulls out his heart. He speculates whether it is possible to isolate and quarantine memories of her betrayal so that he is left only with his memories of her affection. Can he somehow pretend that she was not one and the same but two people? One that loved him. One that left him?   

Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?
I will pluck it from my bosom, tho' my heart be at the root.
Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should come
As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?
I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move;
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.
Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?

And here we come upon another turning point. One that I suppose all unrequited lovers have to navigate. Can they continue to love that which has chosen not to love them in return? Can they keep a memory of affection and seal off the memory of rejection? Tennyson determines that he –for one – cannot. She must be regarded as one person and that one person is the woman who left and therefore could never have loved him in the first place. Her later self annihilates the former.

No--she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore.
Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

I suspect that a line like that last one is what makes a poet like Tennyson great. It says it all. The pain of lost love is in this. That the mind WANTS to remember happy times and thus will it always take one to the memories of a person who crushed them later. And here, I suppose is where his angry vengeful spirit overflows with spiteful bitterness. She wishes upon her the misery of a lifelong regret.

Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof,
In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.
Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall,
Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.
Then a hand shall pass before thee, pointing to his drunken sleep,
To thy widow'd marriage-pillows, to the tears that thou wilt weep.
Thou shalt hear the "Never, never," whisper'd by the phantom years,
And a song from out the distance in the ringing of thine ears;
And an eye shall vex thee, looking ancient kindness on thy pain.
Turn thee, turn thee on thy pillow; get thee to thy rest again.

I can just here the Toby Keith Singing that song “How Do You Like Me Now”

His moment of vengefulness is then interrupted by the thought that in the midst of her loneliness, she will most likely have children to comfort her and console her.

Nay, but Nature brings thee solace; for a tender voice will cry.
'T is a purer life than thine, a lip to drain thy trouble dry.
Baby lips will laugh me down; my latest rival brings thee rest.
Baby fingers, waxen touches, press me from the mother's breast.

“Damn!” HE says … “the love of children will console you and you will thereby forget me.” And even that seems unfair. Everything is unfair so long as he gets his love and he does not.  

O, the child too clothes the father with a dearness not his due.
Half is thine and half is his: it will be worthy of the two.

He next pictures her doing to her daughters what she allowed her parents to do to her, denying love its rightful place with “petty maxims” of Victorian repressiveness.

 

O, I see thee old and formal, fitted to thy petty part,
With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.
"They were dangerous guides the feelings--she herself was not exempt--
Truly, she herself had suffer'd"--Perish in thy self-contempt!

He hopes that she will come eventually to deny and repress everything beautiful and everything alive. And here he reaches another turning point in dealing with his grief. He determines that he will pursue a life of action and adventure. He knows he has no money. All the golden gates are barred to him and he has no golden key with which to unlock them. There are no women whose gates are not “clogged with suitors” And thus he plans to head to the Orient as a soldier, to take advantage of the fact that there are wars to be fought abroad where he will perhaps die in battle or perhaps make his fortune and find himself a wife among the natives. His broken heart will not bode well for the people of India one is tempted to surmise.

Overlive it--lower yet--be happy! wherefore should I care?
I myself must mix with action, lest I wither by despair.
What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barr'd with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
Every gate is throng'd with suitors, all the markets overflow.
I have but an angry fancy; what is that which I should do?

[A good deal of the poem passed over here]

Out of his vision of British empire and the march of civilization, his unit’s bugler calls him out of his meditations.

“Hark, my merry comrades call me, sounding on the bugle-horn,
They to whom my foolish passion were a target for their scorn:
Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a moulder'd string?
I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so slight a thing.
Weakness to be wroth with weakness! woman's pleasure, woman's pain--
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:
Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine”

Tenyson’s soldier’s poisoned hearts bears the mark of a newfound mysogeny. From the hurt of one woman’s rejection is grown a crop of disdain for women in general. He considers the possibilities of removing himself to some far off tropical paradise where, beyond the bonds of Victorian conventions altogether, he will take himself “some savage woman” where “the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space”.

Here at least, where nature sickens, nothing. Ah, for some retreat
Deep in yonder shining Orient, where my life began to beat;
Where in wild Mahratta-battle fell my father evil-starr'd,--
I was left a trampled orphan, and a selfish uncle's ward.

Or to burst all links of habit--there to wander far away,
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.
Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, swings the trailer from the crag;
Droops the heavy-blossom'd bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree--
Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.
There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind,
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.
There the passions cramp'd no longer shall have scope and breathing space;
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
Iron-jointed, supple-sinew'd, they shall dive, and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun;
Whistle back the parrot's call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks,
Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books--

He fantasizes finding a place where HE makes the rules and where children are not “civilized” by book learning, morality, and Victorian social conventions.

[part of the poem passed over here]

In the last stanza, he bids his farewell to Locksley Hall and all it represents, heading for the boats that will take him to some place in the British empire. He seems to have turned his vital emotional energy and converted it from grief to anger and from anger to imperialism.

O, I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set.
Ancient founts of inspiration well thro' all my fancy yet.
Howsoever these things be, a long farewell to Locksley Hall!
Now for me the woods may wither, now for me the roof-tree fall.

Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

Elizabeth Glaskell was married to a Unitarian minister it appears and for all intents and purposes, she was happy with her life as a mother and as a writer, but you can see that in her writing she treats the characters of Cranford as “endearing” and “charming” but in need of change. Her women all seem to be on a trajectory of softening, evolving. They fear the changes that the railroad will bring to Cranford and perhaps for good reason. But they each come to understand that change must come.

On this, the Romantics are right. When we are out of sync with nature. When our rules negate our realities, we perish in some way. It all goes back to Jesus’ parable of the wine and wineskins. Life – the heart – they cannot be contained in the confines of convention.

Today, I finished what I confess turned out to be a rather difficult labor of love for me, The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. I usually enjoy literature particularly when it helps me to better understand a historical era or when my knowledge of the historical era gives me greater insights into the literature. But this was not easy stuff. I confess, my heartstrings do not generally find themselves resonating to Victorian era poetry it seems.

But nevertheless, a few poems presented themselves as something worth remembering for future History class use. Here is Letitia Landon's The Marriage Vow, a rather gloomy look at the tragedy of Victorian era marriages where women with creative minds and wanderlusts might regard their conjugal commitments as a sort of death itself. The poem speak of a marriage that a young woman is not ready for and not really interested in. Something entered into in spite of her will rather than because of it.

The Marriage Vow

The altar, "tis of death! for their are laid
The sacrifice of all youths sweetest hopes.
It is a dreadful thing for women’s lip
To swear the heart away; yet know that heart
Annuls the vow while speaking, and shrinks back
From the dark future that it dare not face.
The service read above the open grave
Is far less terrible than that which seals
The vow that binds the victim, not the will:
For in the grave is rest.

Three months after her own marriage apparently, Letitia Landon died of poisoning (whether accidentally or as a result of suicide, no one knows.)

This anthology also gave me the opportunity to read Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese and there were portions of that that I could find myself enjoying. Sonnet 21 in particular where we are reminded that we long for expressions of love, not merely memories of such. We can never hear that we are loved enough.

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love Though the word repeated
Should seem a “cuckoo-song,” as thou dost treat it.
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Belovèd, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, “Speak once more—thou lovest!” Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll
The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

Later Browning asks the questions we all ask about those who have loved us in the past - “Were you real or did I just imagine that?”

 

Belovèd, dost thou love? or did I see all

The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when

Too vehement light dilated my ideal,

For my soul's eyes? Will that light come again,

As now these tears come--falling hot and real?

 

I also caught a glimpse of this same longing, loss, and sorrow from Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H.

 

But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

 

The poem laments the loss of Tennyson's best friend and his sister's fiancé' the 22 year old Arthur Henry Hallum. The above lines are easy for me to relate to. Often the only comfort in a time of loss is a pre-emptive attempt to gain some joy from the gain we try to imagine gaining from the loss. To see some way in which the sorrow will benefit some day and to derive some happiness from that benefit before it arrives. But in the poem, Tennyson simply cannot see how he can possibly recover anything of good from the loss ever.

 

O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

There was a line from Robert Browning's poem Two in the Campagna that I liked (Robert Browning will never be one of my favorite poets)

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

To me, this is an interesting question I guess. Can people help it if they love someone or don't? If they can't, should they pretend they don't, as though they chose to?

I also ran across a poem by Thomas Hardy that explains his loss of faith in the age of Biblical criticism in which he lived. You can see this transformation from faith in revelation to faith in reason in many of Thomas Hardy's novels. His poem The Respectable Burgher: On the Higher Criticism simply illustrates it.

 

Since Reverend Doctors now declare

That clerks and people must prepare

To doubt if Adam ever were;

To hold the flood a local scare;

To argue, though the stolid stare,

That everything had happened ere

The prophets to its happening sware;

That David was no giant-slayer,

Nor one to call a God-obeyer

In certain details we could spare,

But rather was a debonair

Shrewd bandit, skilled as banjo-player:

That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair,

And gave the Church no thought whate'er;

That Esther with her royal wear,

And Mordecai, the son of Jair,

And Joshua's triumphs, Job's despair,

And Balaam's ass's bitter blare;

Nebuchadnezzar's furnace-flare,

And Daniel and the den affair,

And other stories rich and rare,

Were writ to make old doctrine wear

Something of a romantic air:

That the Nain widow's only heir,

And Lazarus with cadaverous glare

(As done in oils by Piombo's care)

Did not return from Sheol's lair:

That Jael set a fiendish snare,

That Pontius Pilate acted square,

That never a sword cut Malchus' ear

And (but for shame I must forbear)

That -- -- did not reappear! . . .

- Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair,

All churchgoing will I forswear,

And sit on Sundays in my chair,

And read that moderate man Voltaire.

Philip Marston's poem After speaks to me …

A little time for laughter,
A little time to sing,
A little time to kiss and cling,
And no more kissing after.
A little while for scheming
Love's unperfected schemes;
A little time for golden dreams,
Then no more any dreaming.
A little while 'twas given
To me to have thy love;
Now, like a ghost, alone I move
About a ruined heaven.
A little time for speaking
Things sweet to say and hear;
A time to seek, and find thee near,
Then no more any seeking.
A little time for saying
Words the heart breaks to say;
A short, sharp time wherein to pray,
Then no more need for praying;
But long, long years to weep in,
And comprehend the whole
Great grief that desolates the soul,
And eternity to sleep in.

There seems to have been a lot of this heartache in Victorian era poetry it seems. You also see it in A.E. Houseman's poem When I Was One and Twenty

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
'Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
'The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.'
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

And in W.B Yeats, I think he speaks of a “beautiful friend” who he hoped would someday be more. But, she apparently used some sort of feminine intuition and saw that some other woman (the woman Yeats writes the poem to) was still burning away in his heart and she left.

Aedh Laments the Loss of Love.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,

I had a beautiful friend

And dreamed that the old despair

Would end in love in the end:

She looked in my heart one day

And saw your image was there;

She has gone weeping away.

I find it interesting that the Victorian era was an age of expansion in England, an age of ever growing prosperity and greater rights and increased security. In other words, it was a time when it was a winning lottery ticket to be born English. And there is a good deal of celebrating of England and English life in Victorian verse. But one is reminded that all the growing prosperity did not solve the fundamental needs of human beings who, from the looks of it, could not coin lasting satisfactory relationships from the increase in GDP and Income per-capita that the era provided.

Question for Comment: As you look back on your life, which times have been more difficult for you? Times of relational shortages or financial?

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to her,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
She said it for herself. I see her there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
She moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
She will not go behind his father's saying,
And she likes having thought of it so well
she says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

What I like about the author’s point of view in this poem is the way that he determines to help build the wall of protection that his neighbor thinks she needs. Rather than demand the wall be removed, or sneaking out at night to take it down, or protesting that no wall is really necessary, or insisting that no wall should have ever been built, he kindly, gently, cheerfully, and calmly says, “let me help you. We can build this wall together.” Somehow on an intuitive level, he understands that if he takes the wall down unilaterally, he will only increase the sort of fear that has caused her to want to put it up in the first place. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” he tells himself over and over as if in antiphonal response to what his neighbor keeps saying to herself “Good fences make good neighbors”.

It is as though two doctrines of reality are at war. Frost can afford to help build the wall between he and his neighbor because he feels confident that she will eventually succumb to what he regards as truth. No one ultimately wants to be separated forever even if they believe it to be in their best interest right now to be separated forever.”I will help construct it,” says Frost, “but I will never expect it to last as I do.”

 “Boundaries?" he says gently. "Alright. How high?”

Begin Again: Collected Poems Grace Paley This Life by Vermont Poet, Grace Paley My friend tells me a man in my house jumped off the roof the roof is the eighth floor of this building the roof door was locked how did he manage? his girlfriend had said goodbye I'm leaving he was 22 his mother and father were hurrying at that very moment from upstate to help him move out of Brooklyn they had heard about the girl the people who usually look up and call jump jump did not see him the life savers who creep around the back staircases and reach the roof's edge just in time never got their chance he meant it he wanted only one person to know did he imagine that she would grieve all her young life away tell everyone this boy I kind of lived with last year he died on account of me my friend was not interested he said you're always inventing stuff what I want to know how could he throw his life away how do these guys do it just like that and here I am fighting this ferocious insane vindictive virus day and night day and night and for what? for only one thing this life this life Here by Grace Paley Here I am in the garden laughing an old woman with heavy breasts and a nicely mapped face how did this happen well that's who I wanted to be at last a woman in the old style sitting stout thighs apart under a big skirt grandchild sliding on off my lap a pleasant summer perspiration that's my old man across the yard he's talking to the meter reader he's telling him the world's sad story how electricity is oil or uranium and so forth I tell my grandson run over to your grandpa ask him to sit beside me for a minute I am suddenly exhausted by my desire to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

"What troubles me is that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of whats to come." Vermont poet, Galway Kinnell

Sometimes poems are my only answer to the truth. As if to say to my friend, I know what you say is true. But this is true too."

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone by Galway Kinnell

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Why Regret? by Galway Kinnell

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster's New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid's ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat."
As a child, didn't you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring's offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19553

Kissing the Toad by Galway Kinnell

Somewhere this dusk
a girl puckers her mouth
and considers kissing
the toad a boy has plucked
from the cornfield and hands
her with both hands;
rough and lichenous
but for the immense ivory belly,
like those old entrepreneurs
sprawling on Mediterranean beaches,
with popped eyes,
it watches the girl who might kiss it,
pisses, quakes, tries
to make its smile wider:
to love on, oh yes, to love on.

"OK," I ask myself, "Be honest. To what extent does my blog tell anyone who I am." What is being left out? Do I ever say mean things here? Do I ever say things that get stuck under the skin and hurt? Do I ever supply evidence to hang me? Or do I protect my cards from your prying unknown public eyes?

Question for Comment: What would you like to know that my blog does not tell you?

Adam’s Game

Now I know how Adam felt
Walking woods alone
Naming pairs that
Always came in sets
Until he began missing . . .
Or was it, brother Adam, aching
For the counterpart he’d never seen.
Indeed who was not even there yet.
I have to think that the task
Began as such a blast.

“Sun” God had said pointing at the round thing in the sky.
“Moon” God had said, pointing at another round thing later.
“Sky” God had said, pointing at the blue heavens.
“Land” God had said, pointing at the ground.
“Sea” God had said, pointing at the water.
“Ish” God said pointing at Adam

“Now you try” God must have said to his bright-eyed pupil.
“Worm” said Adam, pointing to the ground.
“Oh Good,” said God. “Jolly Good! We’ll call that little thing a worm. Do it again.”
“Zebra” Adam must have exclaimed all proud of himself.
“Zebra it is,” God laughed. “Excellent”
And then he would have pointed to a female Zebra and named that too,
Adding the feminine suffix.
“Ez” [goat] said Adam. “and ezah” God responded.
“Nesher” [eagle] said Adam. “and Nesherah” said God.
“ahh,” Adam would have noted after working through the process for several animals.
“How cool is that!” Everything has a counterpart.”
“Shual . . . and shualah” he would have said looking at a pair of foxes.
“Dob . . .” said Adam, looking at the brown furry thing in the brush.
“. . .  and dobbah” he chuckled a moment later when he caught a flash of
the same brown fur on the other side of the clearing.
“Dob and Dobba it is then,” said God laughing, “Brilliant. Exactly. Can you find another pair?”

And so the game went for the rest of the afternoon.
Oh Brother Adam, brother Adam!
When did the game stop being fun for you?
How many of those animals did you name before
The game became a search for isha?
The bone of your bone.
The flesh of your flesh.

Counterpart.

Eyes peeled, brother Adam.
Don’t settle for a barnacle.

----snip----

What if I AM the barnacle?

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit's gaze.

But who walks with Him?--dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps--who knows?--He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.

Question for Comment: Some would regard the notion of God being lonely ... or of just wanting to enjoy a beer with buddies as suspect if not sacrilegious. can you conceive of God in these terms? Why or why not?

Simple Song by Marge Piercy

When we are going towards someone we say
you are just like me
your thoughts are my brothers
word matches word
how easy to be together

when we are leaving someone we say
how strange you are
we cannot communicate
we can never agree
how hard, hard and weary to be together.

we are not different nor alike
But each strange in his leather body
sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
and loving as an act
that cannot outlive
the open hand
the open eye
the door in the chest standing open.

The Story by Lisel Mueller

You are telling a story;
How Fire Took Water to Wife
 its always like this you say
opposites attract
They want to enter each other,
be one,
so he burns her as hard as he can
and she tries to drown him
its called love at first sight
and it doesn't hurt.
but after a while she weeps
and says he is killing her
he shouts that he cannot breath
underwater.

"The poet sheds his blood in the ring and calls the pools poems." George Barker

"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the readers recognize as their own" Salvatore Quasimodo

"Poems are like dreams. In them you put what you do not know that you know.'"Adrienne Rich

Question for Comment: Are you going towards someone or leaving someone right now? Are you finding this first poem to be true? What causes people to  close that "door in the chest" the poet speaks of?