love wide open

All I have to say about this poem is that it is a fucking incredible poem for so, so many OTPs. (I actually went to Marge Piercy thinking about Passover poems, but then I got sidetracked because, like, yeah. Yeah.)

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say it's killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor's button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

—Marge Piercy, "To have without holding" from The Moon is Always Female, 1980.

only your savage heart

This poem is also for Lan Wangji, and for Wei Wuxian, and for my extraordinarily talented friend helcinda, who just posted her phenomenal vid album, The Black Parade: an Untamed Vid Album. It's a masterpiece, and I honestly don't have words for how good it is, or for how many times it has made me cry and clutch my heart with feelings. So, in honor of those feelings, here's some Pablo Neruda. I post a lot of Neruda, but let's be honest: he wrote some of the very best love poetry in any language, and I always spend at least a couple of hours narrowing down my choices. This seemed like the right one, today. ♥

De las estrellas que admiré, mojadas
por ríos y rocíos diferentes,
yo no escogí sino la que yo amaba
y desde entonces duermo con la noche.

De la ola, una ola y otra ola,
verde mar, verde frío, rama verde,
yo no escogí sino una sola ola:
la ola indivisible de tu cuerpo.

Todos las gotas, todas las raíces,
todos los hilos de la luz vinieron,
me vinieron a ver tarde o temprano.

Yo quise para mí tu cabellera.
Y de todos los dones de mi patria
sólo escogí tu corazón salvaje.


Of all the stars I admired, drenched
in various rivers and mists,
I chose only the one I love.
Since then I sleep with the night.

Of all the waves, one wave and another wave,
green sea, green chill, branchings of green,
I chose only the one wave,
the indivisible wave of your body.

All the waterdrops, all the roots,
all the threads of light gathered to me here;
they came to me sooner or later.

I wanted your hair, all for myself.
From all the graces my homeland offered
I chose only your savage heart.

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

in the yearning

This poem is for Lan Wangji.

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

—Jack Gilbert (1925-2012), "After Love" from The Dance Most of All, 2009. This poem was also—I believe originally, although I couldn't swear to it—published in The New Yorker on June 30, 2008.

breath-in-me

I went looking for Passover poems and got stuck on this one, which is not actually a Passover poem. It feels applicable, though—Passover, like all Jewish holidays, is always at least a little about finding faith and hope (and community, and God) in dark places. This poem also gave me many unexpected feelings about poetry in Muslim Spain, vis a vis The Lions of Al-Rassan, so it's a little bit for mistresscurvy.

I look for you early,
my rock and my refuge,
         offering you worship
    morning and night;
before your vastness
I come confused
         and afraid, for you see
    the thoughts of my heart.

What could the heart
and tongue compose,
         or spirit's strength
    within me to suit you?
But song soothes you
and so I'll give praise
          to your being as long
    as your breath-in-me moves.

—Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1022 to 1058-70), "I Look for You," translated by Peter Cole, from The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492 (Princeton University Press, 2007). According to the Poetry Foundation bio, Solomon Ibn Gabriel (Shelomoh ben Yehudah Ibn Gabirol in Hebrew and Abu Ayyub Sulaiman ibn Yahya Ibn Jubayrol in Arabic) was a poet and philosopher who lived in Spain in the middle of the 11th century, and was part of the Jewish intellectual culture in Saragossa. Says the bio: "His Hebrew poetry draws from Arabic verse traditions, borrowing metrics, rhyme schemes, and imagery." Gosh.

that would be enough

I got to this poem via poets.org's Shelter in Poems. It made me feel some feelings, and not just because I started singing Hamilton to myself and then maybe cried a little.

Say tomorrow doesn't come.

Say the moon becomes an icy pit.

Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.

Say the sun's a foul black tire fire.

Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks.

Say the raccoon's a hot tar stain.

Say the shirt's plastic ditch-litter.

Say the kitchen's a cow's corpse.

Say we never get to see it: bright

future, stuck like a bum star, never

coming close, never dazzling.

Say we never meet her. Never him.

Say we spend our last moments staring

at each other, hands knotted together,

clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.

Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be

enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive,

right here, feeling lucky.

—Ada Limón (b. 1976), "The Conditional," 2013.

but the line goes on

For yuletide this year, I wrote a story based on this poem, which is one of my favorite poems in the world. I thought it was probably time to post it, this year, even though April isn't quite the right season. 

Camelot is served

By a sixteen-track stub terminal done in High Gothick Style,

The tracks covered by a single great barrel-vaulted glass roof framed upon iron,

At once looking back to the Romans and ahead to the Brunels.

Beneath its rotunda, just to the left of the ticket windows,

Is a mosaic floor depicting the Round Table

(Where all knights, regardless of their station of origin

Or class of accommodation, are equal),

And around it murals of knightly deeds in action

(Slaying dragons, righting wrongs, rescuing maidens tied to the tracks).

It is the only terminal, other than Gare d'Avalon in Paris,

To be hung with original tapestries,

And its lavatories rival those at the Great Gate of Kiev Central.

During a peak season such as this, some eighty trains a day pass through,

Five times the frequency at the old Londinium Terminus,

Ten times the number the Druid towermen knew.

(The Official Court Christmas Card this year displays

A crisp black-and-white Charles Clegg photograph from the King's own collection.

Showing a woad-blued hogger at the throttle of "Old XCVII,"

The Fast Mail overnight to Eboracum. Those were the days.)

The first of a line of wagons have arrived,

Spilling footmen and pages in Court livery,

And old thick Kay, stepping down from his Range Rover,

Tricked out in a bush coat from Swaine, Adeney, Brigg,

Leaning on his shooting stick as he marshalls his company,

Instructing the youngest how to behave in the station,

To help mature women that they may encounter,

Report pickpockets, gather up litter,

And of course no true Knight of the Table Round (even in training)

Would do a station porter out of Christmas tips.

He checks his list of arrival times, then his watch

(A moon-phase Breguet, gift from Merlin):

The seneschal is a practical man, who knows trains do run late,

And a stolid one, who sees no reason to be glad about it.

He dispatches pages to posts at the tracks,

Doling out pennies for platform tickets,

Then walks past the station buffet with a dyspeptic snort,

Goes into the bar, checks the time again, orders a pint.

The patrons half turn—it's the fella from Camelot, innit?

And Kay chuckles soft to himself, and the Court buys a round.

He's barely halfway when a page tumbles in,

Seems the knights are arriving, on time after all,

So he tips the glass back (people stare as he guzzles),

Then plonks it down hard with five quid for the barman,

And strides for the doorway (half Falstaff, half Hotspur)

To summon his liveried army of lads.

* * *

Bors arrives behind steam, riding the cab of a heavy Mikado.

He shakes the driver's hand, swings down from the footplate,

And is like a locomotive himself, his breath clouding white,

Dark oil sheen on his black iron mail,

Sword on his hip swinging like siderods at speed.

He stamps back to the baggage car, slams mailed fist on steel door

With a clang like jousters colliding.

The handler opens up and goes to rouse another knight.

Old Pellinore has been dozing with his back against a crate,

A cubical, chain-bound thing with FRAGILE tags and air holes,

BEAST says the label, QUESTING, 1 the bill of lading.

The porters look doubtful but ease the thing down.

It grumbles. It shifts. Someone shouts, and they drop it.

It cracks like an egg. There is nothing within.

Elayne embraces Bors on the platform, a pelican on a rock,

Silently they watch as Pelly shifts the splinters,

Supposing aloud that Gutman and Cairo have swindled him.

A high-drivered engine in Northern Lines green

Draws in with a string of side-corridor coaches,

All honey-toned wood with stained glass on their windows.

Gareth steps down from a compartment, then Gaheris and Aggravaine,

All warmly tucked up in Orkney sweaters;

Gawaine comes after in Shetland tweed.

Their Gladstones and steamers are neatly arranged,

With never a worry—their Mum does the packing.

A redcap brings forth a curious bundle, a rude shape in red paper--

The boys did that one themselves, you see, and how does one wrap a unicorn's head?

They bustle down the platform, past a chap all in green.

He hasn't the look of a trainman, but only Gawaine turns to look at his eyes,

And sees written there Sir, I shall speak with you later.

Over on the first track, surrounded by reporters,

All glossy dark iron and brass-bound mystery,

The Direct-Orient Express, ferried in from Calais and Points East.

Palomides appears. Smelling of patchouli and Russian leather,

Dripping Soubranie ash on his astrakhan collar,

Worry darkening his dark face, though his damascene armor shows no tarnish,

He pushes past the press like a broad-hulled icebreaker.

Flashbulbs pop. Heads turn. There's a woman in Chanel black,

A glint of diamonds, liquid movements, liquid eyes.

The newshawks converge, but suddenly there appears

A sharp young man in a crisp blue suit

From the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits,

That elegant, comfortable, decorous, close-mouthed firm;

He's good at his job, and they get not so much as a snapshot.

Tomorrow's editions will ask who she was, and whom with...

Now here's a silver train, stainless steel, Vista-Domed,

White-lighted grails on the engine (running no extra sections)

The Logres Limited, extra fare, extra fine,

(Stops on signal at Carbonek to receive passengers only).

She glides to a Timkin-borne halt (even her grease is clean),

Galahad already on the steps, flashing that winning smile,

Breeze mussing his golden hair, but not his Armani tailoring,

Just the sort of man you'd want finding your chalice.

He signs an autograph, he strikes a pose.

Someone says, loudly, "Gal! Who serves the Grail?"

He looks—no one he knows—and there's a silence,

A space in which he shifts like sun on water;

Look quick and you may see a different knight,

A knight who knows that meanings can be lies,

That things are done not knowing why they're done,

That bearings fail, and stainless steel corrodes.

A whistle blows. Snow shifts on the glass shed roof. That knight is gone.

This one remaining tosses his briefcase to one of Kay's pages,

And, golden, silken, careless, exits left.

Behind the carsheds, on the business-car track, alongside the private varnish

Of dukes and smallholders, Persian potentates and Cathay princes

(James J. Hill is here, invited to bid on a tunnel through the Pennines),

Waits a sleek car in royal blue, ex-B&O, its trucks and fittings chromed,

A black-gloved hand gripping its silver platform rail;

Mordred and his car are both upholstered in blue velvet and black leather.

He prefers to fly, but the weather was against it.

His DC-9, with its video system and Quotron and waterbed, sits grounded at Gatwick.

The premature lines in his face are a map of a hostile country,

The redness in his eyes a reminder that hollyberries are poison.

He goes inside to put on a look acceptable for Christmas Court;

As he slams the door it rattles like strafing jets.

Outside the Station proper, in the snow,

On a through track that's used for milk and mail,

A wheezing saddle-tanker stops for breath;

A way-freight mixed, eight freight cars and caboose,

Two great ugly men on the back platform, talking with a third on the ballast.

One, the conductor, parcels out the last of the coffee;

They drink. A joke about grails. They laugh.

When it's gone, the trainman pretends to kick the big hobo off,

But the farewell hug spoils the act.

Now two men stand on the dirty snow,

The conductor waves a lantern and the train grinds on.

The ugly men start walking, the new arrival behind,

Singing "Wenceslas" off-key till the other says stop.

There are two horses waiting for them. Rather plain horses,

Considering. The men mount up.

By the roundhouse they pause,

And look at the locos, the water, the sand, and the coal,

The look for a long time at the turntable,

Until the one who is King says "It all seemed so simple, once,"

And the best knight in the world says "It is. We make it hard."

They ride on, toward Camelot by the service road.

The sun is winter-low. Kay's caravan is rolling.

He may not run a railroad, but he runs a tight ship;

By the time they unload in the Camelot courtyard,

The wassail will be hot and the goose will be crackling,

Banners snapping from their towers, fir logs on the fire, drawbridge down,

And all that sackbut and psaltery stuff.

Blanchefleur is taking the children caroling tonight,

Percivale will lose to Merlin at chess,

The young knights will dally and the damsels dally back,

The old knights will play poker at a smaller Table Round.

And at the great glass station, motion goes on,

The extras, the milk trains, the varnish, the limiteds,

The Pindar of Wakefield, the Lady of the Lake,

The Broceliande Local, the Fast Flying Briton,

The nerves of the kingdom, the lines of exchange,

Running to a schedule as the world ought,

Ticking like a hot-fired hand-stoked heart,

The metal expression of the breaking of boundaries,

The boilers that turn raw fire into power,

The driving rods that put the power to use,

The turning wheels that make all places equal,

The knowledge that the train may stop but the line goes on;

The train may stop

But the line goes on.

—John M. Ford (1957-2006), "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station" (1988). The poem is online in a couple of places, and printed in Heat of Fusion and Other Stories (2004).

flux

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924), "Monet Refuses the Operation" from Second Language (Louisiana State University Press, 1996). This is another poem I definitely got from the wonderful wintercreek, and, yeah, I love the Impressionists. I also love this gorgeous, gorgeous poem.

one love

An extra poem for today (or for April 16), only a little bit because I was talking with a friend about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead the other day, and that play always makes me think of tennis. Tennis, and death possibly being a boat.

tennis players
and poets
talk to themselves
one complaining
of unforced errors
the other lamenting
lovers
not here

poets find wonderful
witty repartee
to captivate
the imagination
of the beloved
tennis players curse
in languages we don't
understand
explaining the loss
of points

poets understand loss
old age marriage
fatigue and well
just not going to
make any sense
to this person
     this time
game point
set point
match point
     no love

—Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943), "The International Open (Tennis Players vs. Poets)," from Chasing Utopia, 2013.

sailed calmly on

It's my birthday! I am still in Venice, which is great, except that I woke up this morning with a head cold and feel pretty crappy. We've been taking it easy today, shopping and packing and eating more good food, and tomorrow we fly back to New York. It's been an amazing trip, but I'm ready to go home.

This poem is not really a birthday poem, but it is Auden, and I love it, and I've never posted it before, which is sort of shocking (although I did post the William Carlos Williams companion poem back in 2010).

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

—W. H. Auden (1907-1973), "Musée des Beaux Arts" from Another Time, 1940. Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

one of many circles

I've always had really mixed feelings about Wallace Stevens, in part because of this poem. I can never decide how I feel about this poem. I might hate it? I might not hate it? Lately, however, I keep thinking that somebody should apply it to The Raven Cycle. LIKE. I MEAN. JUST THINK ABOUT IT: BLACKBIRDS. UNKNOWABILITY. TIME LAPSES. TREES. Okay, whatever, I am going to go finish reading Blue Lily, Lily Blue and think about all of the OT5 fic I should probably write. Please carry on.

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,  
The only moving thing  
Was the eye of the blackbird.  

II
I was of three minds,  
Like a tree  
In which there are three blackbirds.  

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.  
It was a small part of the pantomime.  

IV
A man and a woman  
Are one.  
A man and a woman and a blackbird  
Are one.  

V
I do not know which to prefer,  
The beauty of inflections  
Or the beauty of innuendoes,  
The blackbird whistling  
Or just after.  

VI
Icicles filled the long window  
With barbaric glass.  
The shadow of the blackbird  
Crossed it, to and fro.  
The mood  
Traced in the shadow  
An indecipherable cause.  

VII
O thin men of Haddam,  
Why do you imagine golden birds?  
Do you not see how the blackbird  
Walks around the feet  
Of the women about you?  

VIII
I know noble accents  
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;  
But I know, too,  
That the blackbird is involved  
In what I know.  

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,  
It marked the edge  
Of one of many circles.  

X
At the sight of blackbirds  
Flying in a green light,  
Even the bawds of euphony  
Would cry out sharply.  

XI
He rode over Connecticut  
In a glass coach.  
Once, a fear pierced him,  
In that he mistook  
The shadow of his equipage  
For blackbirds.  

XII
The river is moving.  
The blackbird must be flying.  

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.  
It was snowing  
And it was going to snow.  
The blackbird sat  
In the cedar-limbs.

—Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," in this case from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954, but originally published in Harmonium, 1923.

hands on the openable book

A couple of weeks ago I was having a really extraordinarily bad day, and Molly sent me this poem. Sending me this poem was a really good call.

Just days ago we sat upon this rock
Watching the ignorant armies marching past
With the scholar's sense of knowing more than they.
Now you are in England
And the soldiers somewhere as grave,
And I seem to know nothing at all.
Oh, I can name you stones, planets, stars,
By Agricola, Linnaeus, and Tycho;
Words I know, objects, machineries, but mechanism
Has ceased to be sufficient for events.
I still do not believe in ghosts, say I.
A lamp burns blue from gasses in the flame,
Light blooms in unstruck conduits of the eye
And the shape-seeking mind gives it shadow substance:
I saw a phosphene with a silvered beard.
It was easier for the others: they believed.
Unpolished by the wheels of Wittenberg
They roughly knew that death sleeps not
When trouble wakes it. We were so very cold.
What did you see by darkness, then? Your mind
Had always a good eye, and your soul
Always a muted voice. Some recollection
Was it, some fatherly advice
On power, trust, and counsels in the court
Rose up to haunt you, and you called it Father.
Why there I have deduced it, QED.
I will believe that men are stricken mad
When I can think naught else, as I believe
That they are dead when I do see a corpse.
Recall that night in the days of our study
We went up to the tower in Wittenberg
Because the old professor, Johann Faust
The wondersmith, the one who could not choose
If God had mercy, promised us a wonder.
Shortly he gave it, with his body and crossed timbers
And a thunderclap. Demons, you said,
Had rent him. I never thought you
More than metaphorical. Surely
Something in an alembic had gone wrong,
A spark touched to a firework, perhaps
Those strange heavy metals he said were Philosopher's Stone.
He swore he could wall Germany with brass
And all knew he meant cannon: Gustavus Aldophus
Taught the world that trick. You and Rosencrantz and I
Looked on Faustus in pieces among his instruments:
Thence Ros went off to form that fond attachment
To Guildenstern with his horrid clarinet,
Flowering Narcissus. You said demons,
Meaning more I think now than I thought then.
I confess to this air that I saw first and mainly
Anatomized Man, in exploded view,
And wondered which of all those riven vessels,
Those open hollow parts, had spilled his soul.
There's a mystery wants answering.
You did not stab Polonius in the brains,
Nor heart, nor anything particularly.
(The doctors never thought to open him;
A lung, the liver portal veins, I'd guess.)
You did not stay to see the transference
Of wounds. Your thrust went further than you know.
Here is where we define Horatio's courage.
If I put this message to paper and ink
Instead of casting it on water after you
Would I tell you, reasonable friend,
How Ophelia's reason cries out in its sleep?
They gave me charge of the distracted maiden,
Thinking her safe thus, I suppose;
How flattering to my mind. Though safe she was,
Not just because she was, in my faith, yours,
But out of simple fear. Not simple. Mine.
I think she knew it. It was she who kissed
My palms as if they smoked, then ran, light-foot,
Trailing blossoms, laughing. Laughing, laughing,
There was never such laughter at Wittenberg,
Nor demons either. And now the girl is tended
By some old hen who fears to go near water.
Does any of this matter to you, damn it,
Who turned her aside for reasons I trust are good
Who'd have her without taking her? At school
You thought on sex. I heard you through the walls.
Of course it's not a cloud of autumn light;
It's awkward and it's noisy and it's humid
And leaves you feeling half like Jupiter
And one third set to vomit. Do I shock you?
Oh yes, friend, women have delighted me,
As, I should hope, I them. Consider it
Research, hands on the openable book,
Affording here and there to the caring student
A subtle glimpse of Time and God.
No. No. It is my faith to understand,
Not to disprove, your motives. I would know,
And now that I am here, I think I do.
My parents' house had walls and doors and roof,
Elsinore none of these. The place is open
As diagram in a book; here read the legend:
A represents a whispering-gallery,
B indicating a confessor's alcove,
C shows a hollow underneath the stairs.
This is no house, it is a theatre,
A cockpit in continuous performance,
All actors, all audience, no interval.
You hurt me when you would not take my oath
Of silence, but you did not mean to do:
You only knew your ground, the listeners' kingdom,
Where intimacy's the rarest paradox.
I wonder if this place does wound the mind,
Echoing nights with auditors and ghosts
(Memories I mean, the ghosts I will acknowledge)
Toxic with stone-dust, lead in wine and paint,
The moldy wheat that dements villages?
It is the time, near war, too near to death,
The witchfinder's needle bearing down,
Demanding, scream or be burned alive?
I learned in Wittenberg, I learn here
To watch men die and women suffer
With the same Apollonian detachment I kept
For the droppings of unidentified wildlife
And tumors in jars, driven by the passion
Of glands undiscoverable by knife, and the thought
That the world might not be left
So bad as when one entered;
If demonless Wittenberg and haunted Elsinore
Were brought together in some essential coitus
Would the child be good?
Gone friend, what do you dream
What my philosophy dreams of?
Words fall in water, and the world shall end
No different for Horatio's tenancy.
Down yonder hill two clowns are digging holes
For dead men. Every doctor knows
Whence comes his study-matter; I'll go there
And see if spades have brought up interest.
There's motion, out to sea. A pirate sail,
Black sheet on silver water. That's a legend:
Of grief and trouble come to royal fathers,
Trouble and grief come unto princely sons.

—John M. Ford (1957-2006), "Letter from Elsinore," 1993. (In this case, from Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, 2004).

I love so many things about this poem. I love how it positions Hamlet in history, how the play exists (as it really must) in the same world as Faustus; I love Horatio, and I love that we know what comes after this -- a pirate sail -- and Horatio sort of does, too, but not quite, because he's in the middle of the story; I love that the poem is both about renaissance education and lives in a world of renaissance education, as a letter, and as a fictional letter imagined from one fictional character to another (cf. Ovid's Heroides); and of course, I love that it's a transformative work.

Happy birthday, Mike.

follow, poet, follow right

There are some things about poetry month that are really inevitable: like, at some point I am going to post some Auden. The end of this month has actually been inscribed in my spreadsheet since sometime in March; but picking which Auden poem to post can be a challenge. This one is more well-known than some of my usual selections, and it is an elegy to another poet, which is a kind of poetry to which I am particularly attached. I really, really love this poem.

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939)," February 1939, from Another Time, 1940.

The things I love about this poem are legion, but here are a few of them: I love that it is exemplary of Auden's extraordinary poetic competence (pace Christopher Isherwood), and that it is both very Auden and very Yeats -- and that Auden, in tribute to Yeats, writes like both of them; I love that it is about Yeats, on the eve of WWII; I love that it's an elegy, but also very ironic; I love that even though it's ironic, it also means what it says; I love that, like Yeats and sometimes -- although not always -- like Wystan, it believes in the power of poetry to stand tall in the face of darkness.

after nine hundred years of failure

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. "In the cities,"
he said, "there are places walled off where color
and decorum are magnified into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman," he said. How like
a woman, they asked. He remembered their wives
and said garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around. Two rounds later
he was crying. Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn't read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped and he fell.
"White stone in the white sunlight," he said
as they picked him up. "Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world." His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. "Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all."

—Jack Gilbert (b. 1925), "Ovid in Tears," from The Dance Most of All, 2009.

In all honesty, the poem I wanted to post today was Derek Walcott's Sea Grapes, which is a poem that sometimes haunts me by virtue of being absolutely stunning, and that I kind of want to post every year because I love it so much; but I posted "Sea Grapes" in 2009, and I try not to repeat myself. This is a very different poem, but, well. Jack Gilbert on Ovid is very relevant to my interests.

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.

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'

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.

that song and sugar and fire

I have been reading Auden, today.

The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there were no death
Or hope of falling down;
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning, and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and lovely
Lady is sawn in half.

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains.

Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion's mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?

Well, who in his backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of face we love
Is unsubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

~W.H. Auden, "Preface (The STAGE MANAGER to the Critics)" from The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest, August 1942-February 1944. I adore The Sea and the Mirror, and highly encourage you all to read the rest of it, even (especially) the pages and pages of Caliban prose-poetry.

While I am here, have a few of my favorite bits of Academic Graffiti, which is really too long and too ridiculous to post all of, but occasionally full of extraordinary hilarity and brilliance:

For example:

No one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Into offering the slightest apology
For his Phenomenology.

Or, my very, very favorite:

Thomas the Rhymer
Was probably a social climber:
He should have known Fairy Queens
Were beyond his means.

And then of course, no academic graffiti is complete without:

Oscar Wilde
Was greatly beguiled
When into the Cafe Royal walked Bosie
Wearing a tea-cosy.

Or, indeed without a Limerick:

To get the Last Poems of Yeats,
You need not mug up on dates;
All a reader requires
Is some knowledge of gyres
And the sort of people he hates.

Auden is frequently sublime, and I love him for it, but anyone who can rhyme Thackeray and daiquiri gets points for sheer style.

In other news, it was a good birthday. Quiet and mostly cake-free (although I ate a lot of yesterday's chocolate chip muffins and took myself out to lunch), but it also involved going to see "17 Again" with Bex (whose birthday it was also), and Melanie and Terri, and can I just say, that was the BEST RIDICULOUS ZAC EFRON MOVIE TO SEE ON MY BIRTHDAY EVER. Seriously, it had me from the basketball dance routine. We think basketball dance routines may actually be in Zefron's contract. Immortal moments also include: "Bedazzled with RHINESTONES" and "You can plunder my dungeon anytime."

diffugere nives

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of our little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
Oh ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

~A.E. Housman, "The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux", or IX from Last Poems, 1922.

I am unwell, which is unfortunate given my to-do list, and also the fact that I meant to go to the National Archives today, but fortunate (every cloud, silver lining, etc.) in that I spent the day in bed, ate soup, and watched The History Boys, which I loved. I am now going to go read all the History Boys fic in the Yuletide archive. Is it any wonder that I am thinking of Housman? In a strange sequence of conflating events, I also finished re-reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog today, and have, just now, read my favorite bits of Stoppard's The Invention of Love, which is, as always, the play of my heart.

teach me to hear the mermaids singing

I went to Borough Market this morning, which was utterly wonderful, although I think in future I need to be out of there by noon, because the last hour was kind of miserably crowded. I bought many delicious things, however, including strawberries and cream and fancy mushrooms and focaccia and pesto and eggplants and sage. I think I will eat very well, this week. As a consequence of Borough Market, I considered posting Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, but the truth is, I don't really like it all that much. I also thought about posting Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, for similar dangerously delectable fruit-imagery reasons, but many of the same principles apply. So, circuitously:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

~John Donne (1572-1631), Song: Go and catch a falling star.

Poll: Did you first encounter this poem in a) Neil Gaiman's Stardust, b) Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, c) school, d) here, or e) somewhere else entirely? It was Howl's Moving Castle, for me, and I've loved it since. Maybe I can thank Sophie - though probably not Howl - for letting me overlook the misogyny for a while.