Robert Duncan

Structure of Rime XXVIII: In Memoirium Wallace Stevens

“That God is colouring Newton doth shew”—William Blake

          Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence.  I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence  as if there could stand some solidity  most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space.  The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne.

          It is an angel then, weeping and yet ever attending the betrayal of the Word I mean to come to in the end.  For my sake, the blood must be somewhere in time and in its own naming of place actual, and death must be  as my own awaits me  immediate to undo from its reality the physical body, all there is of the matter of me that is mine from me.  The would-be dialecticians—Inquisitors of the New Dispensation in Poetry and Historians of Opprobrium, the Realists and Materialists—come forward to hold the party line against his ideality.  There are too many listeners.  There are too many voices in the one line.  They must enter the Ideal to do so, for he has changed his mind, as if the Eternal existed only momentarily and went out with him.  The Chairman of the Politbureau gets his number  and moves to isolate his heresy.  The number is no longer the same.  He has gone back into the exchange of numbers.  The phone continues ringing in the pattern of the message they strive to listen  to report to the Bureau of Poetic Numbers and Approved Measures.

          This is to say to the month of April and the rainbow dancer, I am with you.  I belong to the company without number.  I shall live one hundred years and then be gone.  Here and now  only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here.  His, the horizon.  His, the perspectives and outlines.  His, the regulation of the relevant.  I will willingly assume his numbers among my own.

          The rest is all Asia, the astral miasma, the Undoing we came from, my version of Who-He-Is-In-Reality, the domain of colouring invading the Responsible.

Wallace Stevens

with Robert Frost, Key West, ca. 1940>

 Invective Against Swans

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks

And far beyond the discords of the wind.

 

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks

The death of summer, which that time endures

 

Like one who scrawls a listless testament

Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

 

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon

And giving your bland motions to the air.

 

Behold, already on the long parades

The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

 

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies

Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

 

Wallace Stevens

 

Depression Before Spring

The cock crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.

Stanley Kunitz

Halley's Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk 
across the board and told us 
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course 
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills 
with a wild look in his eyes 
stood in the public square 
at the playground's edge 
proclaiming he was sent by God 
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted, 
waving his hand-lettered sign. 
At supper I felt sad to think 
that it was probably 
the last meal I'd share 
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate. 
So mother scolded me 
and sent me early to my room. 
The whole family's asleep 
except for me. They never heard me steal 
into the stairwell hall and climb 
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof 
of the red brick building 
at the foot of Green Street --
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky, 
waiting for the world to end.

Paul Muldoon

 

Monarch and Milkweed

As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
the taste of dill, or tarragon-
he could barely tell one from the other-
filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.
Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother and father,
but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

and why should he now savour
the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?
He looked about. He remembered her palaver
on how both earth and sky would darken-
‘You could barely tell one from the other’-

while the Monarch butterflies passed over
in their milkweed-hunger: ‘A wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and father
of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher
with the force of a hurricane.’
Then: ‘Milkweed and Monarch ‘invented’ each other.’

He looked about. Cow’s-parsley
in a samovar.
He’d mistaken his mother’s name, ‘Regan, ‘ for Anger’;
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

Paul Muldoon

 Cows 

Even as we speak, there’s a smoker’s cough 
from behind the whitethorn hedge: we stop dead in our tracks; 
a distant tingle of water into a trough.

In the past half-hour—since a cattle truck 
all but sent us shuffling off this mortal coil— 
we’ve consoled ourselves with the dregs

of a bottle of Redbreast. Had Hawthorne been a Gael, 
I insist, the scarlet A on Hester Prynne 
would have stood for “Alcohol.”

This must be the same truck whose taillights burn 
so dimly, as if caked with dirt, 
three or four hundred yards along the boreen

(a diminutive form of the Gaelic bóthar, “a road,” 
from bó, “a cow,” and thar 
meaning, in this case, something like “athwart,”

“boreen” has entered English “through the air” 
despite the protestations of the O.E.D.): 
why, though, should one taillight flash and flare

then flicker-fade 
to an afterimage of tourmaline 
set in a dark part-jet, part-jasper or -jade?

That smoker’s cough again: it triggers off from drumlin
to drumlin an emphysemantiphon 
of cows. They hoist themselves onto their trampoline

and steady themselves and straight away divine 
water in some far-flung spot 
to which they then gravely incline. This is no Devon

cow-coterie, by the way, whey-faced, with Spode 
hooves and horns: nor are they the metaphysicattle of Japan 
that have merely to anticipate

scoring a bull’s-eye and, lo, it happens; 
these are earth-flesh, earth-blood, salt of the earth, 
whose talismans are their own jawbones

buried under threshold and hearth. 
For though they trace themselves to the kith and kine 
that presided over the birth

of Christ (so carry their calves a full nine 
months and boast liquorice 
cachous on their tongues), they belong more to the line

that’s tramped these cwms and corries 
since Cuchulainn tramped Aoife. 
Again the flash. Again the fade. However I might allegorize

some oscaraboscarabinary bevy 
of cattle there’s no getting round this cattle truck, 
one light on the blink, laden with what? Microwaves? Hi-fis?

Oscaraboscarabinary: a twin, entwined, a tree, a Tuareg; 
a double dung-beetle; a plain 
and simple hi-firing party; an off-the-back-of-a-lorry drogue?

Enough of Colette and Céline, Céline and Paul Celan: 
enough of whether Nabokov 
taught at Wellesley or Wesleyan.

Now let us talk of slaughter and the slain, 
the helicopter gunship, the mighty Kalashnikov: 
let’s rest for a while in a place where a cow has lain.

------------------- 

Stanley Kunitz

 

After The Last Dynasty

Reading in Li Po
how "the peach blossom follows the water"
I keep thinking of you
because you were so much like
Chairman Mao,
naturally with the sex 
transposed
and the figure slighter.
Loving you was a kind
of Chinese guerilla war.
Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage
so nibbled the advantage.
Even with your small bad heart
you made a dance of departures.
In the cold spring rains
when last you failed me
I had nothing left to spend
but a red crayon language
on the character of the enemy
to break appointments,
to fight us not
with his strength
but with his weakness,
to kill us
not with his health
but with his sickness.
Pet, spitfire, blue-eyed pony,
here is a new note
I want to pin on your door,
though I am ten years late
and you are nowhere:
Tell me,
are you stillmistress of the valley,
what trophies drift downriver,
why did you keep me waiting?

Sylvia Plath

Mad Girl's Love Song 

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Louise Bogan

 

A Letter

 I came here, being stricken, stumbling out

At last from streets; the sun, decreasing, took me

For days, the time being the last of autumn,

The thickets not yet stark, but quivering

With tiny colors, like some brush strokes in

The manner of the pointillists; small yellows

Dart shaped, little reds in different pattern,

Clicks and notches of color on threaded bushes,

A cracked and fluent heaven, and a brown earth.

I had these, and my food and sleep—enough.

 

This is a countryside of roofless houses,—

Taverns to rain,—doorsteps of millstones, lintels

Leaning and delicate, foundations sprung to lilacs.

Orchards where boughs like roots strike into the sky.

Here I could well devise the journey to nothing,

At night getting down from the wagon by the black barns,

The zenith a point of darkness, breaking to bits,

Showering motionless stars over the houses.

Scenes relentless—the black and white grooves of a woodcut.

 

But why the journey to nothing or any desire?

Why the heart taken by even senseless adventure,

The goal a coffer of dust?    Give my mouth to the air,

Let arrogant pain lick my flesh with a tongue

Rough as a cat’s; remember the smell of cold mornings,

The dried beauty of women, the exquisite skin

Under the chins of young girls, young men’s rough beards,—

The cringing promise of this one, that one’s apology

For the knife struck down to the bone, gladioli in sick rooms,

Asters and dahlias, flowers like ruches, rosettes. . .

 

Forever enough to part grass over the stones

By some brook or well, the lovely seed-shedding stalks;

To hear in the single wind diverse branches

Repeating their sounds to the sky—that sky like scaled mackerel,

Fleeing the fields—to be defended from silence,

To feel my body as arid, as safe as a twig

Broken away from whatever growth could snare it

Up to a spring, or hold it softly in summer

Or beat it under in snow.

 

                                                       I must get well.

Walk on strong legs, leap the hurdles of sense,  

Reason again, come back to my old patchwork logic,

Addition, subtraction, money, clothes, clocks,

Memories (freesias, smelling slightly of snow and of flesh

In a room with blue curtains) ambition, despair.

I must feel again who had given feeling over,

Challenge laughter, take tears, play the piano,

Form judgments, blame a crude world for disaster.

 

To escape is nothing.    Not to escape is nothing.

The farmer’s wife stands with a halo of darkness

Rounding her head.    Water drips in the kitchen

Tapping the sink.    To-day the maples have split

Limb from the trunk with the ice, a fresh wooden wound.

The vines are distorted with ice, ice burdens the breaking

Roofs I have told you of.

Jorie Graham

 

Salmon

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,in our motel room half-way throughNebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, pastthe importance of beauty,archaic,not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeperinto less. They leapt up falls, ladders,and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,and a blue river travelingin opposite directions.They would not stop, resolution of willand helplessness, as the eyeis helplesswhen the image forms itself, upside-down, backward,driving up intothe mind, and the worldunfastens itselffrom the deep ocean of the given. . . . Justice, aspenleaves, mother attemptingsuicide, the white night-flying moththe ants dismantled bit by bit and carried inright through the crackin my wall. . . . How helplessthe still pool is,upstream,awaiting the gold bladeof their hurry. Once, indoors, a child,I watched, at noon, through slatted wooden blinds,a man and woman, naked, eyes closed,climb onto each other,on the terrace floor,and ride—two gold currentswrapping round and round each other, fastening,unfastening. I hardly knewwhat I saw. Whatever shadow there was in that worldit was the one each castonto the other,the thin black seamthey seemed to be trying to work awaybetween them. I held my breath.As far as I could tell, the work they didwith sweat and lightwas good. I'd saythey traveled far in oppositedirections. What is the lightat the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls,the corridors, light that is no longer light, no longer clarifies,illuminates, antique, freed from the body ofthe air that carries it. What is itfor the space of timewhere it is useless, merelybeautiful? When they were done, they made a distanceone from the otherand slept, outstretched,on the warm tileof the terrace floor,smiling, faces pressed against the stone.

John Cheever

 

lines from Falconer

pg. 38 "Loneliness taught the intransigent to love their cats as loneliness can change anything on earth."

pg. 51 Farragut, lying on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent on chance smells-grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and indisposed. Waling in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant him bearing...

pg. 80 "It was a very heavy and beautiful snow that, like some juxtaposition of gravity, seemed to set the mountain range free of the planet."

pg. 188 "I wouldn't be able to speak to you softly and with patience at this point if I did not believe that mathematics and geometry are a lying and a faulty analogy for the human disposition. When one finds in men's nature, as I do in yours, some convexity, it is a mistake to expect a corresponding concavity. Thiere is no such thing as an iscosceles man."

pg. 200 "...so I figure I must come into this life with the memries of some other life and so it stands taht I'll be going into something else and, you know what, Zeke, you know what, I can hadly wait to see what it's going to be like..."

pg. 207 "Had he raised his head, he would have seen a good deal of velocity and confusion as the clouds hurried past the face of a nearly full moon.."

pg. 208 "I got plenty of money. I been evicted because I'm a human being, that's why.

Susan Cheever on her father

 

----from The Fix 3 22 2011

My father had finally gotten sober in his sixties after years of medical emergencies and social embarrassments, “controlled” drinking that never lasted, appointments with psychiatrists, drugs to make him less anxious, and doctors’ warnings about the dire effects of too much whiskey and gin. In the decade before he went to rehab, my brothers and I got so used to visiting him in the intensive care unit of the local hospital that we made a point of stealing a “No Parking” sign from the hospital lot every time he was discharged. When he died, we joked, we would take the big “One Way” sign at the entrance.

But he surprised us, and perhaps himself. He spent 28 days in a rehab that he said he hated: Smithers, in the old Billy Rose mansion on East 93rd Street, in New York City. He threatened to walk out almost every day. Yet he emerged—it sounds dramatic, I know—a different man. He had always been a slob in the kitchen; now he asked me to show him how to work the dishwasher. He learned how to cook; he especially enjoyed the textures of the pastry and meat in Beef Wellington. He listened. He asked questions. He was kind. It was like having a wonderful father whom I barely remembered return from the dead miraculously restored. He went to a lot of AA meetings, and I often went with him for companionship.

In the years when he was sober, my father followed the teachings of AA to the letter—we should carry the message of sobriety through attraction rather than promotion, cofounder Bill Wilson wrote. Wilson was a salesman, but he knew that alcoholics can’t be told what to do. For an alcoholic, proselytizing often activates defiance. My father was very active in trying to help people he knew who had problems with alcohol. He sponsored some of my childhood friends. Yet he never mentioned to me that he thought I might have a drinking problem. Instead he showed me what the rewards of sobriety might be—largely thanks to the joy he seemed to finally find during his own storybook sobriety.

Within two years of leaving Smithers he had written his most powerful novel, Falconer, which reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. He appeared on the cover of Newsweek. In 1979 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collected short stories. 

Franz Wright

[Poem] Intake Interview

What is today’s date?

Who is the President?

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

Name five rivers.

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him?

What should you do if I fall asleep?

Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps?

What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”?

What about his Everest shadow?

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations?

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

What would you have done differently?

Why are you here?

Franz Wright

Entry in an Unknown Hand

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.   

By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this   

room. I am not asked to explain my presence   

anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and   

are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking   

certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank——

You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-

chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere——

they think they are going to surprise me: I,   

who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up——

very clever.

They think that they can scare me.   

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the   

morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates   

you!

At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and   

refuse to go on, it’s not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white

laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at   

by the retired and their aged attack-dogs—

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,   

the scalpel on the napkin.

Franz Wright

 

Learning To Read

If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word,
so what. I looked them up.
I had nowhere important to be.

My father was unavailable, and my mother
looked like she was about to break,
and not into blossom, every time I spoke.

My favorite was the Iliad. True,
I had trouble pronouncing the names,
but when was I going to pronounce them, and

to whom?
My stepfather maybe?
Number one, he could barely speak English;

two, he had sufficient intent
to smirk or knock me down
without any prompting from me.

Loneliness, boredom and terror
my motivation
fiercely fuelled.

I get down on my knees and thank God for them.

Du Fu, the Psalms, Whitman, Rilke.
Life has taught me
to understand books.