Saturday, April 2, 2005

OREMUS So long, Lolek. Deo adjuvante, non timendum. Karol Jozef Wojtyla, kalokagathia, has passed over. 1:36:11 PM    comment []

2:30 a.m. I wake up in my usual sweat. Throw open the window and sit cross-legged on the bed in the dark staring out at the sky. It's clear at last, with its great screaming chorus of stars. The edge-on Milky Way. I think that's Scorpio going past down there in the south. Soon enough I am shivering again. Close the window and crawl back into the blankets. And after a while I switch on the lamp and go downstairs. Hard thudding noises all around me, from the loft upstairs, from the kitchen, entryway: surprised, delighted cats leave their sleeping places one by one to gather at my ankles. I feel like the old woman who feeds the birds in Mary Poppins, only I'm the woman who feeds the cats. I wade through the purring, gyrating mass of feline affection to the bathroom. On my way back I grab a bottle of Pellegrino water from the kitchen--I'm thirsty--and invite Greta to come upstairs with me. She follows and I shut the door behind her. The moon is up now, its bright horns pointing the way forward in its arc through the southern sky. Trying to sleep gets me nowhere. I make a cup of tea in my room, using my plug-in teakettle and the bottled spring water I brought from town. Lay down some Tarot cards. Glance over them. Pick them up again. I can't afford to absorb any discouraging messages just now. Apple sleeps coiled tight, a dappled basketball, on my left, her breathing deep and regular. After several leaning passes across my writing tablet, Greta settles purring to my right, legs tucked neatly under. Sally sighs and stretches on her blanket in the doorway. She is the threshold sentry. I primed the pump again three times today--once midmorning and then twice again following our return from Lakeview at 4 p.m. There seems to be no water. I managed to wash a few dishes, flush and clean the toilet during the brief intervals when water came through. I wonder whether it was the frozen ground that kept us in water all winter: there must be a leak somewhere. It looks like we're actually going to have to start making weekly trips to the laundromat. And relearn the art of hobo showers. At least I've stored up enough water in the greenhouse bottles to keep the herbs in there alive until... whatever happens next. Limbo can be exhausting. I can hardly stay awake to read at bedtime these days, no matter how early I go up. But I've begun an essay by Jack Gilbert in a 1966 anthology called Poets on Poetry (ed. Howard Nemerov, Basic Books). Here's an excerpt from the promising beginning: Poetry, for me, is a witnessing to magnitude. It is the art of making urgent values manifest and of imposing them on the reader. It is the housing of these values in poems, so they will exist with maximum pressure and for the longest time. It is the craft of doing so in structures that are a delight in themselves. And it is the mystery of fashioning poems in such a way that the form and the content are one. What poetry is not for me is an entertainment. I recognize that there are other ways than mine to approach poetry: that for many it is an aesthetic recreation, the making of beautiful objects; or it is the congenial play of imagination over a subject; or it is an exercise in expertise. It is not so for me. There is a voice in me that stubbornly sings of a largeness beyond formal considerations; sings of love and death, god and evil, lust, honor, and the other major business of life. I believe these can be considered with profit. I am convinced that poetry is the best way to do so. I believe that poetry does make things happen--finally. I believe poetry deals with life--with my life. That it gives me my life more fully, and that it helps me in that direction in which I must proceed. Poetry is not, for me, a beautiful alternative to living. ("The Landscape of American Poetry in 1964") [Photo by Jon Crispin, from Poets & Writers magazine.] There was a nice piece on Gilbert in the last Poets and Writers, and I was delighted to rediscover his work out of that. He has a book coming out this year, his fourth in 45 years. Publishing was never a goal for him; his friends have to force it on him.   And I switch off to William Carlos Williams reminiscing about his beginnings in I Wanted to Write a Poem (New Directions, 1958). "Pound met my mother and father. ... I remember Ezra reading one of his poems about a collection of jewels. 'That's all right,' my father said, 'but what does it mean?' Ezra explained that the jewels were the backs of the books in his bookcase. Pop said, 'If you mean that, why don't you say it?' I had a funny feeling about Pound; didn't know what kind of animal he was. I liked him but I didn't want to be like him." I find myself re-studying, rereading all the books I first took in during the '70s and early '80s, when I was raging to write, wasn't all plugged up with little dreads. I should have stuck with that. I find I'm raging again--a sort of creative second wind after leaving behind a former life--but I'm not sure how far that energy can carry me now. And I've forgotten so much. A mouse family has taken up residence in the little pump house. Every time I open the door to prime the pump, a little tan shape scurries from under the machinery and disappears into the wall. She's built a compact, lovely cauliflower of a nest in a depression next to the pump. I was surprised to see she's made it, not from wall insulation, but from llama wool--clean white-and-caramel-colored Fernando curls packed into a dome, within which surely a little fist of mouse babies--pups? kits?--slumbers minutely. I left a crust of whole grain bread there when I went out in the morning. It was gone by evening. It was a mystery to me how the mother mouse came by llama wool some 50 feet the other side of a creek from the pasture. But walking back up to the house I found a soggy wad of it stuck to a clump of grass and realized the wind had been mixing shed bits with snow all winter and carrying it around for mouse babies to sleep in. It's 5:30 now. The eastern sky was a translucent amethyst as I sat down to keyboard this; now it's bright and pale. The stars have retreated. When I look for it, I find the moon high and vivid in the west. Mallards begin their morning complaints. From the willows the chilly frogs bleat feebly once, twice more and give up for the night. Greta paces at my elbow, impatient for breakfast. *** The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart by Jack Gilbert   How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds. 6:30:51 AM    comment []