writing poetry is not a real skill applicable post-apocalypse

This poem is courtesy of wintercreek, who has a habit of introducing me to stunning poetry I have never heard of:

I am writing you from an eight foot snow drift
somewhere south of somewhere.
I would call, but I lost my phone two days ago
at the ice rink pity party that was really just me,
a frozen lake, some cheap Russian vodka and
a depressed polar bear. (Those guys are dark.)
I still have six waterproof matches
and what Vogue Magazine assures me
is twenty extra pounds of body fat.
No, I am not proud of myself.
No, I am not "done with my obsession with Survivalism."
But I am sorry, I am sorry we fought.
You were right when you said writing poetry is not a real skill
applicable post-apocalypse, and I said but who will tell the good stories,
and you said guys who can fish with their bare hands.
It turns out that's really hard.
Trout are ticklish,
and my hands do not have to do what I tell them to,
some sort of freezing cold water clause.
I have nothing but the time and space I've been pining for now,
and I am using this opportunity to try and remember
why I thought this was a good idea.
I think it had something to do with Escape,
which has permanent offices in the romance division of my brain
and ground troops in my solar plexus.
The flight instinct comes on quicksand,
muscles out all rational thought,
starts Morse coding my limbic system with
complex dots and dashes for strange verbs that mean,
roughly translated: "joyous chewing your leash off,"
and "fire without readiness or aim."
It always feels so right to go,
like it's the only story my body knows by heart:
the creation myth of Alaskan shorebirds,
the bedtime story highways whisper to dirt roads,
the real reason horses sometimes obey.
You really wanted to marry me didn't you?
My eyelashes are soaked now.
I'm beginning to think I will never see you again,
that I will never see anything again
but the twenty yards or so of visibility
in stark panorama around my broken sled.
I feel like an idiot, but I'm not scared.
You'd think I would be scared.
These are the soft frozen fields tundra vacations to,
the great white quiet.
No one to distrust.
I deserve this.
You would be amazed how much light there is.
The stars stay out all night.
Each snow flake is a mirror.

—Mindy Nettifee, "To The Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me"

for every year of peace

It is possible that we may be entering a week of war poetry, but I make no firm promises. Thanks to Marina for this one.

Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of sensible cut
and unalarming shades of beige,
I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:
no prophetess mane of mine,
complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If my eyes roll and I mutter,
if my arms are gloved in blood right up to the elbow,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.

In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to inspire bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.

That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is in courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.

In my dreams there is glamour.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendor.

The Arabs ride against Crusaders
with scimitars that could sever
silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse’s neck
and a hunk of armor crashes down
like a tower. Fire against metal.
A poet might say: romance against banality.
When awake I know better.

Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.

Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.

True, sometimes valor counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right,
though ultimate virtue by agreed tradition
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes
or the absence of them.
It’s no use pinning all those medals
across the chests of the dead.
Impressive, but I know too much.
Grand exploits merely depress me.

In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with burst
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar,
or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)
The word glory figures a lot on gateways.
Of course I pick a flower or two
from each, and press it in the hotel
Bible, for a souvenir.
I’m just as human as you.

But it’s no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.

—Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), "The Loneliness of the Military Historian" from Morning in the Burned House, 1995.

april's green endures

I am off to brunch, but before I go:

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

V

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

—Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), "Sunday Morning," from Harmonium, 1923. As is often the case with Stevens, I cannot say that I entirely agree with the message, but the poem is beautiful; and anyway I think Stevens is a little conflicted about his own message, and there are parts of it that I really love. You guys can decide whether this is better or worse than that time I posted "The Second Coming" on Easter.

as well a well-wrought urn becomes

It is genuinely baffling that I have never posted this poem.

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

—Marge Piercy (b. 1936), "To Be of Use"

I am having one of those beautiful Saturdays of grocery shopping and apartment cleaning, cooking and laundry and household productivity and organization. Admittedly I am a little haunted by all of the other work I have to do; on the other hand, there's a kind of peace in the household work that makes me feel a whole lot better about everything else. Calmer, more focused, more able to take on the world.

Meanwhile: Chag Sameach. Happy Easter. Happy spring. Happy weekend.

and I have come upon this place by lost ways

For reasons passing understand (but about which I cannot really complain), I sometimes get this poem stuck in my head. Thanks, as is often the case with my poetry selections, to Polaris.

And I have come upon this place
By lost ways, by a nod, by words,
By faces, by an old man's face
At Morlaix lifted to the birds,

By hands upon the tablecloth
At Aldebori's, by the thin
Child's hands that opened to the moth
And let the flutter of the moonlight in,

By hands, by voices, by the voice
Of Mrs. Whitman on the stair,
By Margaret's 'If we had the choice
To choose or not - 'through her thick hair,

By voices, by the creak and fall
Of footsteps on the upper floor,
By silence waiting in the hall
Between the doorbell and the door,

By words, by voices, a lost way - ,
And here above the chimney stack
The unknown constellations sway -
And by what way shall I go back?

—Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), "L'An Trentiesme de Mon Eage".

in perpetuum

My brother's memorial service was a year ago today. I thought, at the time, about posting the speech I gave, and then I thought about posting that speech today, a year later in memorium; but I actually don't really want to reread that speech, even though it was a good one and I meant everything I said. Let's go with this instead, shall we? Last year it was a little too immediately topical, but this year it feels just about right.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
Nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Transported through many peoples and many seas,
I have come, O my brother, for these wretched offerings,
So that I might honor the dead with final gifts
and speak pointlessly to your silent ashes,
Because Fate stole you yourself away from me,
Oh, my wretched brother, taken from me undeservedly.
Yet now in these circumstances, these offerings
handed down from our ancestors, ancient custom and sad duty --
Accept them dripping with tears from your brother,
and for eternity, O my brother: "hail and farewell."

—Gaius Valerius Catullus, Carmina 101. The translation is starlady's. She posted it last year, and I quoted it in the speech I gave at the memorial; there are thousands of different translations of Carmina 101 -- it's one of Catullus's most famous poems, and most quoted -- but I like this one.

like a flaring thing

Sometimes I have this problem with National Poetry Month. The problem goes like this: I know today is a Herbert day -- for about ten different reasons, starting with drinking champagne and reading Erasmus on the lawn in the sunshine instead of eating lunch, and ending with my friend who just passed her oral exams drunkenly folding $20 bills into frogs -- but then after a very long day of excellent classes and glorious weather and good friends, I get lost rereading The Temple; and then it is half past 11, and somewhere in this book is the right poem for the day, but the thing is that once you cross that threshold, The Temple is a whole lot bigger on the inside, and choosing the right poem becomes weighted, complicated, more than just a choice. A heart in a building in a heart that is a building. The TARDIS effect of Metaphysical Poetry. Your relationship with God.

Herbert is not always wonderful, and in any case I think he may be an acquired taste, but I love him. Feel free to speculate about what my selection of this poem says about me. Alternatively, go read the rest of The Temple. You might hate it, especially if you're not into devotional poetry; on the other hand, you'll get to enjoy the dubious pleasure of the Anamarygram.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word?
   He is a brittle crazie glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
   This glorious and transcendent place,
   To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy story,
   Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glorie
   More rev'rend grows, & more doth win;
   Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
   When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
   Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
   And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "The Windows" from The Temple, 1633.

city of hurried and sparkling waters

Today was not a good day. I didn't get enough sleep last night, and then I got some bad news, and I was (am) anxious and depressed and exhausted and hormonal, and worryingly full, this week, of recriminations and self-doubt.

On the other hand, all the trees in New York City are blooming, and today was a perfect spring day, all flowers and clear blue skies. My afternoon class up at Fordham was unusually excellent, and on the drive back we took the northern route, picking up the Hudson Parkway in the Bronx and crossing into Manhattan at the very top, and the drive along the Hudson in the evening light, watching the sun just start to set over the river, was almost unbearably beautiful. There are days when I love this city passionately; and you know, nobody loves this city quite so much as Walt Whitman.

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;
I see that the word of my city is that word up there,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb, with tall and wonderful spires,
Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships—an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets—high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies;
Tide swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,
The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-model’d;
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business—the houses of business of the ship-merchants, and money-brokers—the river-streets;
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week;
The carts hauling goods—the manly race of drivers of horses—the brown-faced sailors;
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft;
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells—the broken ice in the river, passing along, up or down, with the flood tide or ebb-tide;
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes;
Trottoirs throng’d—vehicles—Broadway—the women—the shops and shows,
The parades, processions, bugles playing, flags flying, drums beating;
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men;
The free city! no slaves! no owners of slaves!
The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!
The city nested in bays! my city!
The city of such women, I am mad to be with them! I will return after death to be with them!
The city of such young men, I swear I cannot live happy, without I often go talk, walk, eat, drink, sleep, with them!

—Walt Whitman (1819–1892), "Mannahatta" from Leaves of Grass, 1900; first published in 1860.

You sleep with those young men, Uncle Walt! In all honesty this is not really my favorite Walt Whitman poem -- although in general, and somewhat to my own shame, I run a little hot and cold on Whitman -- but I did not really get to sing the praises of Manhattan in poetry, last year, and I wanted to make up for that lack this time around.

leave comfort root-room

I am overplaying my hand, a bit, posting Hopkins this early in the month. It was that kind of day, though; maybe one of these years I will post a Hopkins poem that isn't a sonnet. MAYBE SOMEDAY I WILL POST THE EPITHALAMION. Anyway, not today.

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.

I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size

At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
'S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "My own heart"

Oh gosh, the things he does with language. It cannot have been easy to live in your head, GMH, but I remain extraordinarily glad that you wrote it all down.

weather in the heart

Hello everyone! Here we go: year six of National Poetry Month at Casa Olivia. There will be something approximating a poem a day from today until the end of the month. I am both eclectic and predictable. I try not to repeat poets within the course of the month, and I try not to repeat poems I have posted in previous years, but I don't promise not to break my own rules.

This last week has been very bad, in both expected and unexpected ways; and it has been good, from time to time -- at least, having my parents here was good, even if I was not in any kind of emotional state to really enjoy their company. (I also really appreciate all the text messages and twitter hearts and emails and long distance hugs; you guys are very, very wonderful, as I hope you know. ♥) But it was a bad week, and so I want to start this April as I mean to go on: with better things. I am drinking very good coffee out of a mug my roommate bought me that reads, "anyone can be cool, but awesome takes practice," and I cleaned the kitchen while I made coffee; I have poetry books on most available surfaces and a whole damn lot of work to do; and I have Adrienne Rich.

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

—Adrienne Rich, "Storm Warnings," from A Change of World, 1951.

Adrienne Rich died last Tuesday, a year and a day after my brother. I continue to think that he keeps rather good company. I thought about posting several different Adrienne Rich poems for today, including a few I have posted in previous years, and some that are happier than this one, and some that were more recent; but I love this one, rather in the same way that I love thunderstorms.