From Word To Word

I have been gardening most of the past few days, so I have had little time to write anything, but the gist of this came to me as I was working, and I thought I would share it.

Like Nothing that Can Be

There is no truer thing
Than leaf occluded light,
Shivering, speckled, gold,
Like living, liquid stars,
Like weightless, green-gold waves,
Like ever-waking dreams,
Like nothing that can be.

I know that this poem is hardly appropriate given the season, but I sometimes come across old things in my notebooks and have the urge to finish them, and so here it is, whether you like it or not: a poem about a warm, summer rain posted in the middle of December.

The Finest of Rains

The breeze is stumbling and unsteady,
drunken, pleasantly drunken,
and it carries the lightest and finest of rains,
pin-pricks of coolness in the warm evening,
not enough, even, to quiet the crickets.

The Gulls

The ragged clouds of gulls come over the trees,
frayed and straggling, black against a grey sky,
chasing the last fragments of the sun,
and each is tethered to the next by stray wings,
in two or threes, clutches, small sprays of shadow
that spring from the occluding forest,
that are swallowed by the indefinite brightness of the horizon,
like bits of ash returning to the fire that first flung them
into the high and cooling air of a still un-starred sky.

The poems that I most need to be poems are always the ones that disappoint me most, and I very much need this poem to be a poem, not for myself but for another, and I only hope that he is less dissatisfied with it than I am.

The Tree Trembles

The tree trembles beneath the axe’s blow,
But its strength is sound, and its roots are deep,
And its heartwood is true, and it stands firm,
Stands a moment more proudly than it did,
Because it soon must fall, because the bright axe
Has whispered to it from the whetstone’s edge
That its time approaches, but still it stands,
Not to defy, but to fall from its height.

These True Things

Of these true things God made the North:
Of rock and water, trees and sky;
All else comes falsely, even earth,
And like the earth we thinly lie
Upon its face, constrained by birth
To cling in wonder til we die.

I am on Manitoulin island for Easter weekend, and I have been spending some time in the woods down at what our family calls “the camp” on Carter Bay.  This poem was written there.

A Vertical Sky

The trees make the sky stand vertical,
the birches,
the cedars,
the spruces,
the balsams,
vertical and reaching.
They rupture its vastness,
and trouble its expanse,
and urge it still higher
to the terror of its beyond.

This poem is for my wife, because I do not write her nearly enough poetry, and because she deserves poetry if anyone does.

First Sky of August

I have always thought you loveliest
When I catch you unaware, and you stand,
Half-turned and still, your eyes on something else,
Something quite apart from me, some bright thing,
Like the book on the thrift store shelf that day
When you, for me, were first transfigured;
Like the apples, red and gold in the light
Of a morning dimmed market, halo lit;
And like the sun, redder and golder still,
And sinking through our first sky of August.

My friend Lauren Anderson has just posted about finding an old binder full of her juvenile writing, some of which she was brave enough to share, and it made me reflect on how much of this kind of writing there must be, lying in the neglected folders and binders and boxes of even the most accomplished writers.  I found myself wondering what might happen if everyone were brave enough to share this kind of thing with each other, whether this might not encourage people to see writing and writers a little differently, a little more accurately, a little more humanly,  and so I thought that I might also share some of my own highschool writing as a beginning to that end.

Now, my juvenile writing is certainly as horrible as Lauren’s, but it is horrible for all different reasons.  Mine is horrible because I was reading far too much Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Shakespearean romance, and because I desperately wanted to be a Romantic poet, more than anything, which produced poetry of only the most painfully maudlin sort.  Let me give an example from a poem called “The Prayer of Sir Gawain”.  I am particularly fond of the affected archaisms and the constantly inverted, yoda-like, sentence structure:

A solemn vow to Knight of Green
I made before my King and Queen
That, if my stroke did fail to part
His mighty head and stop his heart,
Then when a year and day had gone
Should I my fullest armor don
And ride from Camelot away
To where that Knight doth hold his sway.
So reaching that unwelcome place
There give myself unto his grace.

So now I kneel ‘neath awesome fear
As quick the payment stroke draws near.
My mind does see the chapel there
That fearsome Knight’s most dreadful lair.
And in his hands an axe of steel
which on my neck I soon shall feel.
I see that helmless head before
My eyes, and here his roar
Forever ringing in my ears,
Forever playing on my fears.

Unfortunately, the melodrama of Sir Gawain seems almost restrained in comparison to these lines from the fabulously titled “I Hamlet Unto Thee Ophelia”:

These tears, great sobbing tears, adorn my cheeks.
Why did I stay away so long a time?
For Fate did take within those absent weeks
Your mind, soul, heart and very life betime,
Forever stole from me, your grace sublime.

Now my lament must seek to cleanse my soul
Of grief, deep seeded guilt which rends it now.
My inaction, only mine, made this bell toll
Which now decries dread Death upon your brow,
The icy grip of hell I did allow.

Now Death alone can give me my desire.
This life can never show to me your grace.
Right gladly will I face Death’s fearful fire,
For only in that dark and unknown place
May I look once again upon your face.

I could go on, but you get the point, or I hope you do, because I would be very pleased to have people share their own such youthful secrets with me in turn.

For Alina Carere

That They Should Grieve

The crabapples,
so red today,
candied by the sun,
but cool still,
and firm on the branch,
and crisp on the teeth,
and sharp on the tongue,
and full of joy:
They have not yet learned
that they should grieve.

I have written this poem for Dr. Kenneth Graham, my first university English professor and perhaps the only professor who actually taught me English Literature rather than Literary Theory or Literary Criticism.  He is now retired, but I see him at the market not infrequently, and he wrote me recently with a request that I attempt again one of the more formal sonnets that I used to write for his class.  So, though I have chosen a rhyme scheme that is, as far as I know, of my own devising, I have otherwise tried to keep the sonnet form as traditional as possible, without much enjambment and without punctuation in the lines, but with a clearly distinguished octave and sestet and with a mostly regular iambic line.  I hope he enjoys it.

The Prayers that All Things Pray

These moments drifting on the edge of day
Lose time itself and make its time delay,
Like dreams that see what only dreams can see
And let their seeing draw all dreams astray,
Or prayers that find no prayer to make them free
But pray that praying might yet come to be,
Or words that wait for words until they die
And fall unworded into memory.
Here mysteries in their mystery humbly lie,
And visions grant their vision to the eye,
And earthly things their earthly selves betray,
And suns reflecting suns wait in the sky.
Here silence says what silence comes to say,
And nothing speaks the prayers that all things pray.