nothing under my skin but light

This long weekend has been so rejuvenating in so many ways, and some of the highlights have included getting to hang out with a couple of exceptionally cool kids (ages 5 and 10) and their wonderful parents. This poem was a request, and as soon as I read it tonight I knew there was no way I was going to post anything else. Billy Collins always knocks it right out of the park.

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light—
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

—Billy Collins, "On Turning Ten," from The Art of Drowning, 1995.

running into a new year

I kind of can't believe it's already the end of April? But here we are: the last poem for this year! See y'all in Houston next year. ♥

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), "i am running into a new year," published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987).

this blessed plot

Happy Shakespeare's alleged birthday! Here is a poem that is a little bit about Shakespeare, and also about some other things.

It occurred to me
on a flight from London to Barcelona
that Shakespeare could have written
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England
with more authority had he occupied
the window seat next to me
instead of this businessman from Frankfurt.

Of course, after a couple of drinks
and me loaning him an ear bud
he might become so preoccupied
with Miles Davis at the Blackhawk
at 36,000 feet over one realm or other to write a word.

I imagine he'd enjoy playing with my wristwatch,
the one with the tartan band,
and when he wasn't looking out the window
he would study the ice cubes in his rotating glass.

And he'd take a keen interest
in the various announcements from the flight deck
and the ministrations of the bowing attendants,

all of which would be sadly lost on me
having gotten used to rushing above the clouds
even though 99% of humanity has never been there.

Yet I am still fond of the snub-nosed engines,
the straining harmony of the twin jets,
and even the sensation of turbulence,
jostled about high above some blessed plot,

with the sound of crockery shifting in the galley,
the frenzied eyes of the nervous passengers
and the Bard reaches for my hand
as we roar with trembling wings
into the towering fortress of a thunderhead.

—Billy Collins, "The Bard in Flight," from The Rain in Portugal, 2016.

look at the time

One of the poetry collections I got from my wonderful Room of One's Own poetry subscription last year was Kiki Petrosino's Witch Wife (2017), which I actually posted the title poem from a couple of years ago. There are poems in the collection that aren't villanelles, but also I fucking love villanelles. Villanelles!

We'll have to hurry if we want to get started.
It's high time to consider beginning at all.
Time, at least, to think about starting

to start. After all, we've only just gotten up
& running, but now? We're almost too late.
We'll have to hurry. If we want to get started

we'll have to start now. We'll have to work
round the clock, round the clock, round the—
Well. Let's think about starting, at least. Though

it's tougher than ever. We can't even begin
to explain what it's like. To start with, we know
we should want to hurry. At least, we're starting

to want to. That's almost too tough to say
at the start. Still, we're sure we'll begin any moment.
It's time to get started we think. Let's consider

getting up & running. By then, it'll just sort of start
& we'll have begun. Zut alors! It's a plan & a party!
It's just—we should hurry. If we want to get started
we better begin. But it's tough. Just look at the time.

—Kiki Petrosino, "Ought" from Witch Wife, 2017. Huge mood, am I right?

shadow and song

One more poem for today:

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here's the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

—Dorianne Laux, "Dark Charms," from The Book of Men, 2011. Dorianne Laux always gets me.

kiss the apocalypse goodbye

Three days late for April 26, a poem that makes me feel things about a lot of things, but maybe especially the wildness of the English language. I just really love poetry, is the thing.

Never fear. I know the difference between
arteries and ardor, arbor and treed,
my bower and a weak-kneed need, a harbor
where one might moor tonight and a port worth
the oars’ effort to come ashore for, a bit
part and the serpent’s gravid apple. I won’t
flatter myself first or lasting, or
presume to fast and feint a martyr, making
mockery of sacrifice, fatten
for some sweet slaughter. I must believe that I’m
not on your mind. On your body? Sure.
That said, your body has a few ideas
so bright that we might meet some night and render
a dark room light as the last day before
the world ends, that doom that was supposed to dawn
today, but by now, hours worn on and in,
we know there’s no such luxury as fine
as that finality for now. For now,
at least, I’ll have to kiss apocalypse
goodbye, resign myself to this more mundane
pain, the solace of the solstice, year’s
earliest sunset and its longest night.
I try to catch that fade of color with,
without a flash. Both tries prove terrible.
The horizon smudges up against the sky’s blur
like a child’s heavy-handed landscape
and inept erasure. They’ll have to do.
The pictures that I have of you will never
do you justice, either, neither a camera’s
snap nor some synaptic crackle long
elapsed can come remotely close to holding
you. How else would you have it? You need
never fear. I need you, but I only need you
where you are: there, never far, never near.

—Dora Malech, "To the You of Ten Years Ago, Now," from The New Yorker, April 29, 2013.

in love as in tourism

I spend a lot of time on Poetry Foundation during National Poetry Month, and this poem kept showing up on the front page, highlighted as one of the new poems in the most recent issue of Poetry magazine. I've been coming back to it all month, and I like it more each time.

cartography seems the strangest science today
as morning alters the fittings of the hour to form
shapes wholly new. wishing I did not know that, to leave,
it is down and right past the neighbor’s potted palm,
across the street to meet the river, then ahead until
the train station crowds into view—I search the infinity
enclosed here, for any time that the future could spare.
between the words lost and losing entire worlds change
hands. where the latter informs negation the other is
duplicitous with potentialities—becoming something
even desired. suddenly one is alert to all the colors
returned to sight by merely looking, a lack of familiarity
striking the common into curiosity, just as in the folktales
in which death plays detective, the wanderer is the one
who evades the blade. it is so wonderful to not be found
but to be finding, as I discover in tokyo—whose streets
resemble labyrinth, pierced with rhododendron in spring
and thundering gingko in autumn—and remember again
when you laugh and I do not ask why. and I do not want
to know either, to whom this room belonged to before us,
or where that smell of fruit is coming from, or why a fog
rises to challenge the knowledge of places once intimately
kept. I am grateful that within you only the unknown lives,
that even as what passes between us is frail and limited
and human, we still dream of things resembling the eternal.

—Xiao Yue Shan, "in love as in tourism," originally published in Poetry, April 2021.

though this might take me a little time

I will always be grateful to my dearly beloved Auden for being so prolific that I will never, ever run out of poems to post. This one was requested, and it is a forever favorite.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "The More Loving One," from Homage to Clio, 1960.

put your lips to the world

Sometimes I try to be strategic about when during the month I post Mary Oliver—at the end? early? right in the middle?—and then sometimes you just have to post some Mary Oliver.

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

—Mary Oliver (1935-2019), "Mornings at Blackwater," from Red Bird, 2008.

morose or kinky

I've been thinking a lot about plague years and our relationship with history, so here's Auden on the medieval poets. Look, I'm not saying the connections I draw during poetry month always make sense.

Chaucer, Langland, Douglas, Dunbar, with all your
brother Anons, how on earth did you ever manage,
     without anaesthetics or plumbing,
     in daily peril from witches, warlocks,

lepers, The Holy Office, foreign mercenaries
burning as they came, to write so cheerfully,
     with no grimaces or self-pathos?
     Long-winded you could be but not vulgar,

bawdy but not grubby, your raucous flytings
sheer high-spirited fun, whereas our makers,
     beset by every creature comfort,
     immune, they believe, to all superstitions,

even at their best are often morose or
kinky, petrified by their gorgon egos.
     We all ask, but I doubt if anyone
     can really say why all age-groups should find our

Age quite so repulsive. Without its heartless
engines, though, you could not tenant my book-shelves
     on hand to delect my ear and chuckle
     my sad flesh: I would gladly just now be

turning out verses to applaud a thundery
jovial June when the judas-tree is in blossom,
     but am forbidden by the knowledge
     that you would have wrought them so much better.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "Ode to the Medieval Poets," June 1971.

our bodies, possessed by light

I missed yesterday for migraine reasons (I am not feeling amazing today, either, but poetry month continues, and makes me feel better about most things), so here are two poems by two different poets with the same title. The second one was already on my poem schedule, but I also really love the first one, and it made sense to post them together. Both poems do kind of amazing and completely different things with poetic structure, and both, of course, are about Scheherazade, and storytelling, and love. 

Dumb was as good as dead; 

better to utter. 

Inside a bottle, a genie. 

Abracadabra. 

Words were a silver thread

stitching the night. 

The first story I said

led to the light. 

Fact was in black and white; 

fiction was colour. 

Inside a dragon, a jewel. 

Abracadabra. 

A magic carpet took flight, 

bearing a girl. 

The hand of a Queen shut tight

over a pearl. 

Imagination was world; 

clever to chatter. 

Inside a she-mule, a princess. 

Abracadabra. 

A golden sword was hurled

into a cloud. 

A dead woman unfurled

out of a shroud. 

A fable spoken aloud

kindled another. 

Inside a virgin, a lover. 

Abracadabra. 

Forty thieves in a crowd, 

bearded and bold. 

A lamp rubbed by a lad

turning to gold. 

Talking lips don't grow cold; 

babble and jabber. 

Inside a beehive, a fortune. 

Abracadabra. 

What was lost was held

inside a tale. 

The tall stories I told

utterly real. 

Inside a marriage, a gaol; 

better to vanish. 

Inside a mirror, an ogre;

better to banish. 

A thousand and one tales;

weeping and laughter. 

Only the silent fail. 

Abracadabra. 

—Carol Ann Duffy, "Scheherazade," from The Bees, 2011. 

*

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake

                                         and dress them in warm clothes again.

      How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running

until they forget that they are horses.

            It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,

      it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,

                  how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days

were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple

                                                                to slice into pieces.

Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means

      we’re inconsolable.

                        Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

These, our bodies, possessed by light.

                                            Tell me we'll never get used to it.

—Richard Siken, "Scheherazade," from Crush, 2005.

the walls remember

I've been saving this one for a long time.

I made my bed between Sappho and Catullus
watching the moon set, the sparrows fly up at dawn,
a poem burn itself out at the bottom of a yahrzeit glass.
A couple at Vulci dreamed out the underworld
on a lid of nenfro, carved to their marriage-sheets.
At Pompeii, crushed in the hollows of boiling ash.
In a thousand years, not even the walls remember
who loved, who fucked, for how much, so long ago,
not even the coins I dropped to pay for your memory,
a candle into the last of the wine.

—Sonya Taaffe, "Graffiti," in the September 2011 issue of Stone Telling.

your irreversible time

Today is "poems about grief" day, in memory of my brother. This isn't exactly a poem about grief, but I think it's the right one. Plus, I love sonnets.

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
And other men are also dreams of time,
not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust
like you; the universe is Proteus.
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,
the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.
Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), "To the One Who is Reading Me," translated by by Tony Barnstone, and in this case from Poetry magazine, March 2012. I really love Tony Barnstone's translator's notes:

Jorge Luis Borges was unapologetic about his sonnets. He liked his rhymes to be true, and he liked to create sentences the size of stanzas in order to emphasize the sonnet’s modular structure. Borges also made it clear that he expected the same dedication and craft from his translators, that he did not want his sonnets translated into loosened form or into free verse. (His comment on such translations was simple: “Try harder.”) [...] 

Of course, we can’t keep time in a box; time has a box prepared for us. Understanding this is what allows us to value what life we have. My father tells a story about Borges. One day the great man was walking down the streets of Buenos Aires when a man rushed up to him and exclaimed, “Borges, you are immortal!” Borges, with his characteristic dry wit, replied, “Don’t be so pessimistic.”

time will say nothing but I told you so

I will never run out of Auden poems. This is partly because he was incredibly prolific, and partly because I adore him. This one is a classic; it's also a villanelle, which is one of my favorite poetic forms; I love it more than I can say.

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "If I Could Tell You," October 1940.

this is the second of our reign

I was going to wait until I was home with my three different editions of Donne, but I have a few minutes now, between a full day of work and my dinner plans, so here we go. IT'S MY BIRTHDAY. IT'S A DONNE YEAR. IT'S TIME FOR THIS POEM.

All kings, and all their favourites,
    All glory of honours, beauties, wits,
The sun itself, which makes time, as they pass,
Is elder by a year now than it was
When thou and I first one another saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
    Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, nor yesterday;
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

    Two graves must hide thine and my corse;
    If one might, death were no divorce.
Alas! as well as other princes, we
—Who prince enough in one another be—
Must leave at last in death these eyes and ears,
Oft fed with true oaths, and with sweet salt tears;
    But souls where nothing dwells but love
—All other thoughts being inmates—then shall prove
This or a love increasèd there above,
When bodies to their graves, souls from their graves remove.

    And then we shall be throughly blest;
    But now no more than all the rest.
Here upon earth we're kings, and none but we
Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.
Who is so safe as we? where none can do
Treason to us, except one of us two.
    True and false fears let us refrain,
Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore; this is the second of our reign.

—John Donne (1572-1621), "The Anniversarie" or, sometimes, "The Anniversary" (not to be confused with the Anniversaries) from Songs and Sonnets, here with modernized spelling and punctuation courtesy of E. K. Chambers, I think. I mean, honestly, whatever. I could yell about editorial practices for years, but let's just let the poem be, today.

you cannot make a keepsake of this season

HELLO FRIENDS. Today is April 1, which means that it is, once again, National Poetry Month in the U.S., i.e. the best month of the year. I began posting poetry for National Poetry Month in 2007, which makes this the TENTH YEAR I have done this—not the 10-year anniversary, but the tenth year—and I still have not run out of poetry. I don’t anticipate running out of poetry any time soon. National Poetry Month has been with me through a lot of major life changes and big events, through living in two different countries and four different cities, through highs and lows and a whole lot of graduate school; it’s one of my great constants, and I’m thrilled to be doing it again this year. 

In honor of the ten years, and the changing spaces of the internet, I have made this new dedicated poetry blog, here at The Cruelest Month. I am using this blog both to archive all my years of National Poetry Month past (still a work in progress, as is the tagging system, but it will get there), and to post new poems going forward. I will be doing some cross-posting this year (it’s a hard habit to break), but mostly linking to this blog; I encourage those of you who enjoy National Poetry Month to read (and comment, if you want to) here.

To start us off, this year, a poem that is about spring, and feelings, and time: 

                  I snap the twig to try to trap

the springing and I relearn the same lesson.

You cannot make a keepsake of this season. 

Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,

lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,

though for a moment it’s your guilty fist 

that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this

extremity that points now, broken, back at

the dirt as if to ask are we there yet.

You flatter this small turn tip of a larger 

book of matches that can’t refuse its end,

re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget

again. Here’s a new green vein, another

clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.

—Dora Malech (b. 1981), "Each Year," 2010. I just discovered Dora Malech, and I kind of love her. Check out her website: here. 

to hold off chaos at arm's length

With the exception of the inestimable John Donne, W.H. Auden is my favorite poet. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that he was exceptionally prolific, and had a kind of poetic range and breadth that's hard to match—or even, sometimes, to imagine. Auden was very, very good at what he did, and he was wry and witty and sarcastic and clever and emotional and true, sometimes all at once. I post an Auden poem every year, but it's always a challenge to figure out which one it's going to be, because there are so many that I love, for so many different reasons.

But today is my birthday, and it's one of those big round number birthdays, so let's go with this one. I post it with both irony and fondness—precisely as much irony, I have no doubt, as Auden intended; late Auden is like this a lot, and I find him delightful.

Our earth in 1969
Is not the planet I call mine,
The world, I mean, that gives me strength
To hold off chaos at arm's length.

My Eden landscapes and their climes
Are constructs from Edwardian times,
When bath-rooms took up lots of space,
And, before eating, one said Grace.

The automobile, the aeroplane,
Are useful gadgets, but profane:
The enginry of which I dream
Is moved by water or by steam.

Reason requires that I approve
The light-bulb which I cannot love:
To me more reverence-commanding
A fish-tail burner on the landing.

My family ghosts I fought and routed,
Their values, though, I never doubted:
I thought the Protestant Work-Ethic
Both practical and sympathetic.

When couples played or sang duets,
It was immoral to have debts:
I shall continue till I die
To pay in cash for what I buy.

The Book of Common Prayer we knew
Was that of 1662:
Though with-it sermons may be well,
Liturgical reforms are hell.

Sex was of course—it always is—
The most enticing of mysteries,
But news-stands did not then supply
Manichaean pornography.

Then Speech was mannerly, an Art,
Like learning not to belch or fart:
I cannot settle which is worse,
The Anti-Novel or Free Verse.

Nor are those Ph.D's my kith,
Who dig the symbol and the myth:
I count myself a man of letters
Who writes, or hopes to, for his betters.

Dare any call Permissiveness
An educational success?
Saner those class-rooms which I sat in,
Compelled to study Greek and Latin.

Though I suspect the term is crap,
If there is a Generation Gap,
Who is to blame? Those, old or young,
Who will not learn their Mother-Tongue.

But Love, at least, is not a state
Either en vogue or out-of-date,
And I've true friends, I will allow,
To talk and eat with here and now.

Me alienated? Bosh! It's just
As a sworn citizen who must
Skirmish with it that I feel
Most at home with what is Real.

—W.H. Auden (1907-1973), "Doggerel by a Senior Citizen," for Robert Lederer, May 1969.

and all is always now

I'm still ill, but I'm feeling more positive about my life. I stayed home, and sniffled, and popped sudafed and drank cough syrup, and watched a lot of Buffy (Season 7, because I thought I could use the motivational speeches, and also because I wanted to watch Season 6 but it hits a little too close to home, these days), and actually did work from home. I feel like crap, still, but it was a good day.

This poem has nothing to do with either Buffy or my current state of ill health, and in fact bears little relevance to anything. I won't say it's my favorite of his (I think in all honesty I prefer the heady insanity of The Wasteland -- and it's part of a larger poem, anyway -- but I am very fond. I like the circularity, and the language.

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

~T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets, 1935

the quiet of the sky

I am feeling mellow and introspective today, and that seems to call for Wordsworth. I'm not crazy about Wordsworth, generally, but I like this poem. And sometimes, when I'm in the right mood, he really works for me. Even if he does go on rather interminably at times.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. -- Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft --
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart --
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. -- I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. -- That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, -- both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance --
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence -- wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love -- oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

~William Wordsworth, Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks of the Wye During A Tour, July 13, 1798, 1798