and let me love

It's still April on the East Coast for another half hour, and so, my last poem of the month. What a fucking month. There's been a lot of bad, but there's been some good, too; the poetry made it a lot better than it could have been, especially this year. I wish I'd been able to keep up with other people's poetry posts more regularly, but I look forward to back-reading them, when I can. I'm not sad to see April go, and I'm looking forward to May, even though looking forward to things catches me up, sometimes, and the fact that time is moving forward just like normal still seems a little strange.

I've been circling around John Donne all month long, and I thought I would end with this one. It's a famous one, and I love it -- but then, there's not a lot of Donne that I don't love.

For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsie, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with Arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the King's real, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injur'd by my love?
What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd?
Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguie Bill?
Soldiers find wars, and Lawyers find out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, wee are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We'are Tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And wee in us find the'Eagle and the dove,
The Phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit,
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of Chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us Canoniz'd for Love.

And thus invoke us; You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
Who did the whole worlds soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above
A pattern of our love.

—John Donne (1572-1631), 'The Canonization'.

I have three editions of Donne's poetry on my desk right now, and I typed this up from one of them and modernized the spelling to my own liking, because while I am just the sort of person who would actually go to the library and check out the Donne Variorum -- actually while typing this I have learned that there is an online version of the Donne Variorum, oh my god I love academics with internet -- I am also lazy, and this poem is this poem, gorgeous and heady and wild and lovely, whatever the spelling and punctuation.

get with the music

So I was thinking about the Harlem Renaissance (my spreadsheet says Night Funeral in Harlem for today, but first I got distracted by other Hughes poems, and then I got distracted by other poets, and I like to break my own rules), and then I watched the first episode of the new season of Treme (still love it, still heartbreaking), and then I thought -- well. Maybe this one.

1. OVERTURE

“Obviously there is much to be said for the
conscious cultivation and extension of taste, but
there is also something to be said for the
functional reaction to artistic design (and
honeysuckles) as normal elements of human
existence.”
—Albert Murray

(three four)    The ancestors are humming: Write a poem, girl.
Turn the volume up, they say. Loud-talking. Talking loud.
On piano someone plays a boogie-woogie run:
Omni—Albert Murray     Omni Omni     Albert Murray.

In my mind and in his I think a painting is a poem.
A tambourine’s a hip shake and train whistle a guitar.
Trains run North/South home their whistles howling
    Afro . . . . Am.
Black and blue Blue Afro-blue blue-black and blue blew
   blew.

I can picture Bearden with his magazines and scissors.
I can see guitar shapes, curves like watermelon rinds.
Will I find names like Trueblood and the shapes for my collage?
Omni—Albert Murray     Omni Omni     Albert Murray.


2. ELLINGTONIA

“So much goes on in a Harlem airshaft. You
hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people
making love. . . . You see your neighbor’s
laundry. You hear the janitor’s dogs. . . . One
guy is cooking dried fish and rice and another
guy’s got a great big turkey. . . . Jitterbugs are
jumping up and down always over you, never
below you.”
—Duke Ellington

I might have jitterbugged at the Renaissance ‘room,
thrown upside down by some zoot-suited don
in a vicuna coat, smell of Barbasol—
I might have been a barfly with her wig turned ‘round.

I conjure smoke-blue clubs from family tales,
names, like “Do Nothing ‘til You Hear from Me.”
Duke’s square-toed leather shoes, his droop-lid eyes,
his—This is a black and tan fantasy.

Not shoes, not conjure, shaving cream, cologne.
“Tootie for Cootie” unafraid of rhyme.
Bold music, bold as sunflowers. Rhyme is real.
Blow smoke rings when you say “Mood Indigo.”


3. INTERLUDE

Albert Murray do they call you Al
or Bert or Murray or “Tuskeegee Boy”?
Who are the Omni-ones who help me feel?
I’m born after so much. Nostalgia hurts.


4. STELLA BY STARLIGHT

(after the tune, played by Monty Alexander on
piano and Othello Molyneaux on steel drum)

Red hair in summertime,
ashy toes, dust-knuckled,
the slim curve of autumn
in sight. In summertime
rhiney, shedding burnt skin,
petticoats, pantaloons.
I’m a rusty-butt sun-
baby, summer is gone.

No more corn and no blue-
berries. Sweet tomatoes
overripe. No more ice
blocks with tamarindo,
sweaty love in damp white
sheets, sunflowers, poppies,
salt in summertime,
sun-stoked bones. Summer jones.

Starlight cools as the edge
of fall. “Stella by Star-
light” steals stars for letters.
Each l and each t pricks
the sky like a star or
a steel drum quiver on
a note ‘til it shimmer.
Who is Stella? Summer’s


5. BEARDEN AT WORK

”Regardless of how good you might be at
whatever else you did, you also had to get with
the music.”
—Romare Bearden

Paper-cutting rhythm, snips of blue foil
falling onto water-colored paper,
colored people into place. Eye divines
arrangement, hands slide shifting paper shapes.
Panes of color learned from stained-glass windows,
pauses     spacing     rests     from Fatha Hines.

Odysseus is blue. He can’t get home.
In Bearden’s planes: collage on board, shellac.
Watch Dorothy, children, enter Oz.
Look, Daddy, color! No more white and black.
This is the year of the color TV.
Odysseus is blue and now is black.

New York City at Christmastime. Christmas
tree—shapes like Bearden in a Bearden blue.
Tin stars falling on a yellow paper
trumpet. Blue sucked in, blues blown back out.
Black folks on ice skates shine like Christmas trees.
New York glitters like a new idea.


6. CODA

Omni: having unrestricted, universal range.
Coda: a concluding passage, well-proportioned clause.
On piano someone plays a boogie-woogie run:
Omni—Albert Murray     Omni Omni     Albert Murray.

—Elizabeth Alexander, “Omni—Albert Murray” from The Venus Hottentot (Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota), 2004.

another kind of peace

Adrienne Rich, always and forever.

I write you this out of another province
That you may never see:
Country of rivers, its topography
Mutable in detail, yet always one,
Blasted in certain places, here by glaciers,
There by the work of man.

The fishes by the water have no boast
Save of their freedom; here
A man may cast a dozen kinds of lure
And think his days rewarded if he sight
Now and again the prize, unnetted, flicking
Its prism-gleams of light.

The old lord lives secluded in his park
Until the hall was burned
Years ago, by his tenants; both have learned
Better since then, and now our children run
To greet him. Quail and hunter have forgotten
The echo of a gun.

I said there are blasted places: we have kept
Their nakedness intact—
No marble to commemorate an act
Superhuman or merely rash; we know
Why they are there and why the seed that falls there
Is certain not to grow.

We keep these places as we keep the time
Scarred on our recollection
When some we loved broke from us in defection,
Or we ourselves harried to death too soon
What we could least forgo. Our memories
Recur like the old moon.

But we have made another kind of peace,
And walk where boughs are green,
Forgiven by the selves that we have been,
And learning to forgive. Our apples taste
Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,
And need not be replaced.

—Adrienne Rich, 'Letter from the Land of Sinners' from The Diamond Cutters, 1955.

weather'd every rack

Making up for an unforgivable lack -- really, Olivia, it took you five years to post Whitman? -- with a classic. (We probably should not actually talk about how much of an impact Dead Poets Society had on my formative years.)

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

—Walt Whitman (1819–1892), "O Captain! My Captain!" from Leaves of Grass, 1900. First published in "When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d," 1865–66.

long light

It is a completely gorgeous day. After my theory class we went out to lunch, and then Jason and I took our reading to Riverside Park. He has a camp chair, which is clearly a worthwhile investment for reading outside. I sat on the ground with my back to a tree, getting mud all over my feet, and read Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House, which is crazy and glorious and a little like an acid trip through a seventeenth-century country house landscape, complete with evil lesbian nuns and tree bondage, floods and flowers and military gardens and agriculture and family history. Metaphysical poetry is kind of the greatest, and reading it outside on a day like today was almost unfairly perfect.

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on ...

—Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), 'You, Andrew Marvell', from Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952).

you need to love the thing you do

Another one I got from wintercreek tonight. Her taste in poetry is exceptional, and I'm trying to live this one, this week. One thing at a time.

The thing gets made, gets built, and you’re the slave
who rolls the log beneath the block, then another,
then pushes the block, then pulls a log
from the rear back to the front
again and then again it goes beneath the block,
and so on. It’s how a thing gets made – not
because you’re sensitive, or you get genetic-lucky,
or God says: Here’s a nice family,
seven children, let’s see: this one in charge
of the village dunghill, these two die of buboes, this one
Kierkegaard, this one a drooling

nincompoop, this one clerk, this one cooper.
You need to love the thing you do – birdhouse building,
painting tulips exclusively, whatever – and then
you do it
so consciously driven
by your unconscious
that the thing becomes a wedge
that splits a stone and between the halves
the wedge then grows, i.e., the thing
is solid but with a soul,
a life of its own. Inspiration, the donnée,

the gift, the bolt of fire
down the arm that makes the art?
Grow up! Give me, please, a break!
You make the thing because you love the thing
and you love the thing because someone else loved it
enough to make you love it.
And with that your heart like a tent peg pounded
toward the earth’s core.
And with that your heart on a beam burns
through the ionosphere.
And with that you go to work.

—Thomas Lux, 'An Horatian Notion', from Split Horizon, 1994.

haply I think on thee

I am BREAKING WITH TRADITION, Y'ALL. For four years I have posted Ben Jonson's eulogy to Shakespeare, To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us in honour of Shakespeare's alleged birthday. I love it, I highly recommend it, and I'll wait, while you go and read it -- especially if you haven't, and you love Shakespeare. But I thought I might shake things up a little, this year. I recommend reading this poem more than once.

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

—James Richardson, 'In Shakespeare', first published in The New Yorker, February 12, 2007.

And a sonnet:

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

—William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sonnet XXIX. (Dialogue in my apartment just now: OLIVIA: You know what I love about Shakespeare's sonnets? They're basically all about Will's poly angst. EVE: I love you.)

what will survive of us

Side by side, their faces blurred, 
The earl and countess lie in stone, 
Their proper habits vaguely shown 
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, 
And that faint hint of the absurd— 
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque  
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still 
Clasped empty in the other; and 
One sees, with a sharp tender shock, 
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long. 
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace 
Thrown off in helping to prolong 
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage, 
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths 
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright 
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths 
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity. 
Now, helpless in the hollow of 
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins 
Above their scrap of history, 
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into 
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be 
Their final blazon, and to prove 
Our almost-instinct almost true: 
What will survive of us is love.

—Philip Larkin (1922-1985), 'An Arundel Tomb'.

words are fools

I missed two days of poetry this week -- as you may have noticed -- because it has not been a good week. Going to class this morning helped; at least for that hour and a half I was focused on something outside my own head. But it's hard to concentrate, and, worse than that, it's hard to make myself care about anything. At lunch today I said to Jason that I can lay all the shittiness of how I'm feeling at the feet of grief, but that doesn't quite cut it, moment to moment, because moment to moment the most shattering thing is not caring about the things that I love the most. Knowing why I feel that way, knowing that eventually it will probably get better -- that helps, but it doesn't make it any less shattering.

There's still poetry, though, and sometimes I can even remember why I love it so much.

If you could crowd them into forty lines!
Yes; you can do it, once you get a start;
All that you want is waiting in your head,
For long-ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.
. . . .

Begin: your mind’s the room where you have slept,
(Don’t pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early.
The window stands wide-open, as it stood
When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child
Hearing the dawn’s first thrushes through the wood
Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild.

You’ve said it all before: you dreamed of Death,
A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze
That drifts across the morning veiled with showers,
While golden weather shines among dark trees.

You’ve got your limitations; let them sing,
And all your life will waken with a cry:
Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing
And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?...

But some chap shouts, ‘Here, stop it; that’s been done!’—
As God might holloa to the rising sun,
And then relent, because the glorying rays
Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days,
And Adam’s trustful eyes as he looks up
From carving eagles on his beechwood cup.

Young Adam knew his job; he could condense
Life to an eagle from the unknown immense....
Go on, whoever you are; your lines can be
A whisper in the music from the weirs
Of song that plunge and tumble toward the sea
That is the uncharted mercy of our tears.
. . . .

I told you it was easy! ... Words are fools
Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.
But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools
Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need
Is just that flash of joy above your dream.
So, when those forty platitudes are done,
You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream
That wandered through your childhood; and the sun
Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters....
And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun.

—Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), 'Limitations', from Picture-Show, 1920.

walked those streets a thousand times

I definitely got this one from Marina.

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

—Dorianne Laux, "Antilamentation".

o raise us up

I didn't want to work, tonight. I'm not feeling so great, and I'm tired and a little grumpy, and I want to go to bed early. But my seminar tomorrow is on Milton's Areopagitica -- his treatise on censorship -- which is comparatively light reading for that class, and I've been significantly under-prepared too many times already this semester, so I dragged out my battered Riverside Milton and put on pajamas and lay on my bed to read. And after a few pages I had to put down my pen just so I would stop drawing hearts in all the margins. I just -- oh, Milton. Milton, and his brilliant, cutting sarcasm, and his faith, and his metaphors, and his sentences:

Till then Books were ever as freely admitted into the World as any other birth; the issue of the brain was no more stifl'd then the issue of the womb: no envious Juno sate cros-leg'd over the nativity of any mans intellectuall off-spring; but if it prov'd a Monster, who denies, but that it was justly burnt, or sunk into the Sea. But that a Book in wors condition then a peccant soul, should be to stand before a Jury ere it be borne to the World, and undergo yet in darknesse the judgement of Radamanth and his Collegues, ere it can pass the ferry backward into light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity, provokt and troubl'd at the first entrance of Reformation, sought out new limbo's and new hells wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned.

I am not the only person who has felt this way:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

—William Wordsworth (1770-1850), 'England, 1802', 1802 (printed 1807).

I think the sonnet ends weakly -- endings are not really Wordsworth's strength -- but on the other hand, I love it, and I know exactly what he means. (That's a truth about Wordsworth, actually: his poetry is not that difficult, and sometimes a little boring, and there remains a lot I dislike about the Romantics, but he does capture true things, moments and feelings, and they resonate.) Oh, Milton.

stormy weather

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XIX from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, 1923.

This isn't really my favorite of hers, nor even my favorite of the sonnets in Harp-Weaver and Other Poems -- of which I inexplicably own a first edition picked up in a used bookstore during some poetry month past -- but I do love sonnets, and I love hers.

armed robbery boots

I almost posted Edna St. Vincent Millay today, but then I decided to post this one, instead. It's sort of startling that I've never posted this poem before.

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves

so you don't set fire to something?
he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I'd like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I'm wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don't get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

—Denver Butson, "What She Was Wearing," from Illegible Address, 2004.

l-o-v-e

It's my birthday, y'all! Have some Auden.

In an upper room at midnight
See us gathered on behalf
Of love according to the gospel
Of the radio-phonograph.

Lou is telling Anne what Molly
Said to Mark behind her back;
Jack likes Jill who worships George
Who has the hots for Jack.

Catechumens make their entrance;
Steep enthusiastic eyes
Flicker after tits and baskets;
Someone vomits; someone cries.

Willy cannot bear his father,
Lilian is afraid of kids;
The Love that rules the sun and stars
Permits what He forbids.

Adrian's pleasure-loving dachshund
In a sinner's lap lies curled;
Drunken absent-minded fingers
Pat a sinless world.

Who is Jenny lying to
In her call, Collect, to Rome?
The Love that made her out of nothing
Tells me to go home.

But that Miss Number in the corner
Playing hard to get. . . .
I am sorry I'm not sorry . . .
Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), 'The Love Feast', May 1948.

Oh, Wystan.

three words or less

I really, really love Rita Dove, and I identify with this poem so, so much.

I'm not the kind of person who praises
openly, or for profit; I'm not the kind
who will steal a scene unless
I've designed it. I'm not a kind at all,
in fact: I'm itchy and pug-willed,
gnarled and wrong-headed,
never amorous but possessing
a wild, thatched soul.

Each night I set my boats to sea
and leave them to their bawdy business.
Whether they drift off
maddened, moon-rinsed,
or dock in the morning
scuffed and chastened—
is simply how it is, and I gather them in.

You are mine, I say to the twice-dunked cruller
before I eat it. Then I sing
to the bright-beaked bird outside,
then to the manicured spider
between window and screen;
then I will stop, and forget the singing.
(See? I have already forgotten you.)

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Describe Yourself in Three Words or Less" from American Smooth, 2004.

salt sand-wave

Pete Wentz was odd and oblique on twitter today, so I went home and read Keats.

Additional contributing factors: it is raining. I spent the afternoon on the sixth floor of the library with John Donne, and consequently my immediate, unthinking response to Molly asking, "but what is being lovers a metaphor for?" was "obviously your relationship with God" (truth: it is all metaphysicals all the time, around here). All afternoon, iTunes Oracle bombarded me with catharsis. Working is good, but it feels weird; moment to moment, I'm not quite sure if this is my real life.

1

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

2

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

3

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

—John Keats (1795-1821), "Ode on Melancholy," 1819.

replica of the multiplying universe

A love sonnet, today. You may not see it in my Donne selection, this year, because I am trying to keep the Donne obsession under control -- circling around Donne the way my Donne class circled around 'The Canonization' -- but I have a thing about bodies and planets.

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres,
porque de las praderas planetarias
otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites
la multiplicación del universo.

Tus anchos ojos son la luz que tengo
de las constelaciones derrotadas,
tu piel palpita como los caminos
que recorre en la lluvia el meteoro.

De tanta luna fueron para mí tus caderas,
de todo el sol tu boca profunda y su delicia,
de tanta luz ardiente como miel en la sombra

tu corazón quemado por largos rayos rojos,
y así recorro el fuego de tu forma besándote,
pequeña y planetaria, paloma y geografía.


I love the handful of earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you—compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XVI from Cien sonetos de amor or One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1959, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

listen for the sound of your heart

I got this one from wintercreek, who has superb taste in poetry. She may (although maybe not) have gotten it from Garrison Keillor. Garrison Keillor also has pretty great taste in poetry.

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

—Dan Albergotti, "Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale," from The Boatloads, 2008.

ocean-furious, nettle-streaked

Posting Anne Carson for National Poetry Month is a daunting prospect. She is almost impossible to excerpt, and her books are gorgeous, complicated, baffling, referential, stunning collections of poetry and novel and essay, opera and screenplay, script and critical discourse -- sometimes (frequently) all at once. This is why I haven't posted Carson since I posted an excerpt of Autobiography of Red two years ago. I may post more of her Sappho translations, and some year I may say, "fuck it," and post at least part of The Glass Essay, but for now all I will say is that I really recommend her, because she is extraordinary. Here is a little one.

Searching for things sublime I walked up into the muddy windy big hills
behind the town where trees riot according to their own laws and

one may

observe so many methods of moving green—under, over, around, across,
up the back, higher, fanning, condensing, rifled, flat in the eyes, as if

pacing a

cell, like a litter of grand objects, minutely, absorbed, one leaf at a time,
ocean-furious, nettle-streaked, roping along, unmowed, fresh out of pools,

clear as Babel,

such a tower! scattered through the heart, green in the strong sense, dart-shook,
crownly, carrying the secrets of its own heightening on

up, juster than a shot, gloomier than Milton or even his king of terrors, idol in
its dark parts, as a word coined to mean "storm (of love)" or

"waving lines"

(architectural), scorned, clean, with blazing nostrils, not a
servant, not rapid, rapid.

—Anne Carson, 'And Reason Remains Undaunted' in "Sublimes" from Decreation, 2005.

shake the mountains

For Molly, because she is obsessed with the Hush Sound song that is based on this poem. I always end up talking about the song and the poem together -- including today, clearly -- because what I like most about the song is that it's a transformative work. Although I have always been sort of sad that Greta took out the bit about masturbating with dynamite.

the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance

—e.e. cummings (1894-1962), 'the boys i mean are not refined'

soul in paraphrase

My favorite thing about this poem is that it has no verbs. I also really love sonnets, and, after four weeks of him, I can even admit a fairly substantial affection (only slightly grudging) for Mr. Herbert. I thought it was probably past time to spend at least a little time -- fourteen lines or so -- in my own literary period.

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almightie, sinners towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), 'Prayer', from The Temple, 1633. Or, slightly more accurately: 'Prayer (I)', from The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations by Mr. George Herbert, edited by Nicholas Ferrar (1593-1637) (Cambridge: Printed by Thom. Buck, and Roger Daniel, printers to the Universitie, 1633).

there is no caring less

I was indirectly introduced to this poem by newredshoes. She recced a short, perfect, and utterly lovely West Wing story: The cosmos owns our luck. The story, I learned from the author's notes, was based on a poem: Fix by Alice Fulton. I loved the story -- and I wholeheartedly rec it, especially if you love The West Wing, and even if you don't -- but I loved the poem even more.

There is no caring less
for you. I fix on music in the weeds,
count cricket beats to tell the temp, count
my breaths from here to Zen.
September does its best.
The Alaskan pipeline lacks integrity,
mineral fibers are making people dizzy,
we're waiting for a major quake. Ultra-
violet intensity is gaining,
the ozone's full of holes and

I can find no shade.
There is no caring less.
Without the moon the earth
would whirl us three times faster, gale-force
winds would push us down. Say
earth lost mass, a neighbor
star exploded -- it's if

and and and
but. The cosmos owns our luck.
Say under right and rare conditions,
space and time could oscillate.
I know what conditions
those would be for me.
I'd like to keep my distance,
my others, keep my rights reserved.
Yet look at you, intreasured,

where resolutions end.
No matter how we breathe
or count our breaths,
there is no caring less
for you for me. I have to stop myself

from writing "sovereign," praising
with the glory words I know.
Glaciologists say changes
in the mantle, the planet's vast
cold sheets could melt. Catastrophe
is everywhere, my presence
here is extra -- yet --
there is no caring less.

—Alice Fulton (b. 1952), "Fix", from The Atlantic, April 29, 2010.

atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale

The last time I posted Chesterton, I said:

I've always had a soft spot for Gilbert. I rather blame Neil Gaiman for that, though I suppose I could easily have come to it on my own. And I like this poem; I like the way Chesterton talks about the world: it's dark and imperfect and hard to live in, but maybe it is worth living in, after all.

This is more of a poem about love than it is a poem about death -- in fact, it may not be about death at all. But it is about life, and about living life to its fullest, even after the ends of things.

It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched when all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun.

It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
It is something to have hungered once as those
Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.

To have seen you and your unforgotten face,
Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,
Pure as white lilies in a watery space,
It were something, though you went from me today.

To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky.

In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.

Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.

—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), 'The Great Minimum'.

patience exquisite

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), "Peace" or "Peace: Oxford, 1879," 1879. In my case, taken from the 1918 edition: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918).

where reason obtains no quarter

So I'm going to be posting a lot of poems about death. Somewhat unusually for me, many of them will be relatively modern poems about death. (The other option was a whole month of John Donne. I'm trying for variety.) Tomorrow, or next week, I may post some elegies, but I don't want to start with elegies. I thought I might start with Marilyn Hacker, instead.

James has cancer. Catherine has cancer.
Melvin has AIDS.
Whom will I call, and get no answer?
My old friends, my new friends who are old,
or older, sixty, seventy, take pills
before or after dinner. Arthritis
scourges them. But irremediable night is
farther away from them; they seem to hold
it at bay better than the young-middle-aged
whom something, or another something, kills
before the chapter's finished, the play staged.
The curtains stay down when the light fades.

Morose, unanswerable, the list
of thirty- and forty-year-old suicides
(friends' lovers, friends' daughters) insists
in its lengthening: something's wrong.
The sixty-five-year-olds are splendid, vying
with each other in work-hours and wit.
They bring their generosity along,
setting the tone, or not giving a shit.
How well, or how eccentrically, they dress!
Their anecdotes are to the point, or wide
enough to make room for discrepancies.
But their children are dying.

Natalie died by gas in Montpeyroux.
In San Francisco, Ralph died
of lung cancer, AIDS years later, Lew
wrote to me. Lew, who at forty-five,
expected to be dead of drink, who, ten
years on, wasn't, instead survived
a gentle, bright, impatient younger man.
(Cliché: he falls in love with younger men.)
Natalie's father came, and Natalie,
as if she never had been there, was gone.
Michèle closed up their house (where she
was born). She shrouded every glass inside

— mirrors, photographs — with sheets, as Jews
do, though she's not a Jew.
James knows, he thinks, as much as he wants to.
He's been working half-time since November.
They made the diagnosis in July.
Catherine is back in radiotherapy.
Her schoolboy haircut, prematurely grey,
now frames a face aging with other numbers:
"stage two," "stage three" mean more than "fifty-one"
and mean, precisely, nothing, which is why
she stares at nothing: lawn chair, stone,
bird, leaf; brusquely turns off the news.

I hope they will be sixty in ten years
and know I used their names
as flares in a polluted atmosphere,
as private reasons where reason obtains
no quarter. Children in the streets
still die in grandfathers' good wars.
Pregnant women with AIDS, schoolgirls, crack whores,
die faster than men do, in more pain,
are more likely than men to die alone.
What are our statistics, when I meet
the lump in my breast, you phone
the doctor to see if your test results came?

The earth-black woman in the bed beside
Lidia on the AIDS floor — deaf and blind:
I want to know if, no, how, she died.
The husband, who'd stopped visiting, returned?
He brought the little boy, those nursery-
school smiles taped on the walls? She traced
her name on Lidia's face
when one of them needed something. She learned
some Braille that week. Most of the time, she slept.
Nobody knew the baby's HIV
status. Sleeping, awake, she wept.
And I left her name behind.

And Lidia, where's she
who got her act so clean
of rum and Salem Filters and cocaine
after her passing husband passed it on?
As soon as she knew
she phoned and told her mother she had AIDS
but no, she wouldn't come back to San Juan.
Sipping café con leche with dessert,
in a blue robe, thick hair in braids,
she beamed: her life was on the right
track, now. But the cysts hurt
too much to sleep through the night.

No one was promised a shapely life
ending in a tutelary vision.
No one was promised: if
you're a genuinely irreplaceable
grandmother or editor
you will not need to be replaced.
When I die, the death I face
will more than likely be illogical:
Alzheimer's or a milk truck: the absurd.
The Talmud teaches we become impure
when we die, profane dirt, once the word
that spoke this life in us has been withdrawn,

the letter taken from the envelope.
If we believe the letter will be read,
some curiosity, some hope
come with knowing that we die.
But this was another century
in which we made death humanly obscene:
Soweto El Salvador Kurdistan
Armenia Shatila Baghdad Hanoi
Auschwitz Each one, unique as our lives are,
taints what's left with complicity,
makes everyone living a survivor
who will, or won't, bear witness for the dead.

I can only bear witness for my own
dead and dying, whom I've often failed:
unanswered letters, unattempted phone
calls, against these fictions. A fiction winds
her watch in sunlight, cancer ticking bone
to shards. A fiction looks
at proofs of a too-hastily finished book
that may be published before he goes blind.
The old, who tell good stories, half expect
that what's written in their chromosomes
will come true, that history won't interject
a virus or a siren or a sealed

train to where age is irrelevant.
The old rebbetzen at Ravensbruck
died in the most wrong place, at the wrong time.
What do the young know different?
No partisans are waiting in the woods
to welcome them. Siblings who stayed home
count down doom. Revolution became
a dinner party in a fast-food chain,
a vendetta for an abscessed crime,
a hard-on market for consumer goods.
A living man reads a dead woman's book.
She wrote it; then, he knows, she was turned in.

For every partisan
there are a million gratuitous
deaths from hunger, all-American
mass murders, small wars,
the old diseases and the new.
Who dies well? The privilege
of asking doesn't have to do with age.
For most of us
no question what our deaths, our lives, mean.
At the end, Catherine will know what she knew,
and James will, and Melvin,
and I, in no one's stories, as we are.

—Marilyn Hacker (b. 1942), "Against Elegies," from Winter Numbers, 1994.

before we lose the words

One of my favorite things about National Poetry Month is the serendipity factor. I have a spreadsheet, and several different lists, and I save poems all year; there are certain, definite things I am going to post. But I also spend a lot of time waiting for the day to tell me what the poem should be, and I wander into libraries, and into bookstores, and browse the stacks, and sometimes—more often in April than any other time of the year—there is magic.

My mom got to San Francisco this evening, and came and picked me up from my first dinner with friends, and took me away to my second dinner, at a delicious vegetarian Indian restaurant in Berkeley. After dinner we drove around Berkeley and Oakland in search of a bookstore my mom thought she remembered, and eventually wound up on Piedmont, where we found both a book shop and a tea shop. The book shop was one of those magical used bookstores with endless interconnecting rooms and all the books you didn't know you were looking for. Mom found a book she desperately needed for a paper, and I, sitting on the ground in front of the bottom shelf of the poetry section, was suddenly confronted with a book by a former professor—her second book, in fact, which fell open to this poem. Obviously, I bought the book.

Williston Memorial Library,
Mount Holyoke College

The chapter ends. And when I look up
from a sunken pose in an easy chair
(half, or more than half, asleep?)
the height and heft of the room come back;
darkly, the pitched ceiling falls
forward like a book.
Even those mock-Tudor stripes
have come to seem like unread lines.
Oh, what I haven't read!

—and how the room, importunate
as a church, leans as if reading me:
the three high windows in the shape
of a bishop's cap, and twenty girls
jutting from the walls like gargoyles
or (more kindly) guardian angels
that peer over the shoulder, straight
into the heart. Wooden girls who exist
only above the waist—

whose wings fuse thickly into poles
behind them—they hold against their breasts,
alternately, books or scrolls
turned outward, as if they mean to ask:
Have you done your Rhetoric today?
Your passage of Scripture? Your Natural
Philosophy? In their arch, archaic
silence, one can't help but hear a
mandate from another era,

and all too easy to discount
for sounding quaint. Poor
Emily Dickinson, when she was here,
had to report on the progress of
her soul toward Christ. (She said: No hope.)
Just as well no one demands
to know that any more... Yet
one attends, as to a lecture,
to this stern-faced architecture—

Duty is Truth, Truth Duty—as one
doesn't to the whitewashed, low
ceilings of our own. Despite
the air these angels have of being
knowing (which mainly comes by virtue
of there being less to know back then),
there's modesty in how they flank
the room like twenty figureheads;
they won't, or can't, reveal who leads

the ship you need to board. Beneath
lamps dangled from the angels' hands—
stars to steer us who knows where—
thousands of periodicals
unfurl their thin, long-winded sails;
back there, in the unlovely stacks,
the books sleep cramped as sailors.
So little time to learn what's worth
our time! No one to climb that stair

and stop there, on the balcony
walled like a pulpit or a king's
outlook in a fairy tale,
to set three tasks, to pledge rewards.
Even the angels, after all,
whose burning lamps invoke a quest
further into the future, drive
us back to assimilate the past
before we lose the words.

No, nobody in the pulpit
but for the built-in, oaken face
of a timepiece that—I check my watch—
still works. As roundly useful as
the four-armed ceiling fans that keep
even the air in circulation,
it plays by turns with hope and doubt;
hard not to read here, in the clock's
crossed hands, the paradox

of Time that is forever running out.

—Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954, Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College 1984–2007), "Reading Room" from Unfinished Painting, 1989.

winter kept us warm

The first year I did National Poetry Month, I didn't prepare in advance. I learned on April 2nd that April was National Poetry Month, and then I randomly started posting poetry every day until the month was over. It became one of my favorite things, something I look forward to every year; but on that first day, I posted the beginning of Eliot's The Waste Land. I posted it because I didn't know what else to post, yet, and a little facetiously, and because it is -- in all its gorgeous footnoted overwrought glory -- one of my favorites, and the first thing I always think of, when I think "poetry" and "April". It seemed like the right thing to start with, this year, with a little more intentionality.

This year there are going to be a lot of sonnets, and a lot of elegies; poems about death, poems about life, and maybe a poem or two about love. There will almost certainly be inappropriately morbid humor. I try not to repeat poets within the course of the month, or to repeat poems I have posted in previous years, but I don't promise not to break my own rules.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

~ T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), "The Burial of the Dead," from The Waste Land, 1922.

In keeping with this post, I should mention that my brother's memorial will be next Tuesday, April 5, at 6:30 pm at the Piedmont Community Hall in Oakland. Please don't hesitate to contact me for additional details.