Hugo Schwyzer

I wouldn’t normally pick a poem published in last week’s New Yorker for the Thursday Short Poem, but this W.S. Merwin piece is too good not to move to the front of the line. It is not an easy poem in any sense of the word. Read it aloud. No one breaks your heart while breaking the rules of punctuation better than Merwin.

A Message to Po Chui-I

In that tenth winter of your exile
the cold never letting go of you
and your hunger aching inside you
day and night while you heard the voices
out of the starving mouths around you
old ones and infants and animals
those curtains of bones swaying on stilts
and you heard the faint cries of the birds
searching in the frozen mud for something
to swallow and you watched the migrants
trapped in the cold the great geese growing
weaker by the day until their wings
could barely lift them above the ground
so that a gang of boys could catch one
in a net and drag him to market
to be cooked and it was then that you
saw him in his own exile and you
paid for him and kept him until he
could fly again and you let him go
but then where could he go in the world
of your time with its wars everywhere
and the soldiers hungry the fires lit
the knives out twelve hundred years ago

I have been wanting to let you know
the goose is well he is here with me
you would recognize the old migrant
he has been with me for a long time
and is in no hurry to leave here
the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me

Time perhaps for a more famous — and long poem. This Richard Wilbur piece is on its way to being much anthologized and much-praised. Wilbur, my second-favorite-living American poet, dazzles and moves and amuses all at once here. It’s longer, so it’s below the fold. It ought to be read aloud rather than scanned. And how I love this Audenesque line:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light…

Yup. Continue reading ‘Thursday Short Poem: Wilbur’s “Lying”’

David Whyte gives us some encouragement in this week’s Thursday Short Poem. As one who has talked to inanimate objects for longer than he can remember, who still murmurs apologies to door frames kicked and cups let slip, I find considerable comfort in this offering.

Whyte’s website is here.

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Jendi Reiter sent me a link to last month’s Disquieting Muses Quarterly, and pointed out these two poems by Chella Courington, who teaches writing in the city of my birth. Jendi knows my taste, and though these are indeed disquieting, they are very fine.

To My Father’s Right

stands the body. Dad is left-handed. When he stretches his hand, the
body jumps. I used to stay in the body. We would ask Why can’t I have
the drumstick? Why? Why? Then the questions stopped. We were nine and
eating peach ice cream. Condensed milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, fresh
Clanton peaches. Butt numb from sitting on the churn as Daddy cranked,
fingers handle-thick. No seconds little fatty. We reached for the ladle.
The next thing I saw was the body on the floor. Its cheek red and dry.

The Body in Ninth Grade

Diet tricks—red and yellow missiles the body steals and carries to
school. The body blasts off before algebra and Mrs. Burgoyne, braced in
support hose. Glaring at thighs, she writes the body up for a dress code
violation. Three to four, the clock hand circles in the cafeteria. The
body does time. Afterwards, an offensive guard bangs it blue under the
gym bleachers. The short skirt bunches about the body’s waist.

Rachel Wetzsteon (pronounced “wet stone”) was a celebrated New York poet who took her life this past Christmas day. I hadn’t known much of her poetry, but did admire her very interesting book on Auden’s dazzling variety of sources, which I confess I never finished and now really must. Wetzsteon is now part of the growing number of famous and talented folks born the year I was — 1967 — to meet a much-too-early end.

I like this offering because it reminds me of the magic of writing — and how, when after lots of exasperation and struggle the muse has come to guide my fingers on the keyboard — it seems as if the world itself has changed.

Gold Leaves

Someone ought to write about (I thought
and therefore do) stage three of alchemy:
not inauspicious metal turned into
a gilded page, but that same page turned back
to basics when you step outside for air
and feel a radiance that was not there
the day before, your sidewalks lined with gold.

Patrick Kavanagh was a great Irish poet of the sort whose work can only be understood when read aloud. What seems perplexing and merely clever in print becomes dazzling when spoken. This, one of his more famous seasonally appropriate pieces, is no exception.

Advent

We have tested and tasted too much, lover -
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we’ll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.

A dark poem with a familiar theme from David Wagoner.

Night Song from the Apartment Below

The argument begins. One voice is overcoming
another because it’s had it, it’s had enough
of all this shit and, unaccompanied, rises
to the edge of screaming and past it
till the column of air in that throat has nearly abandoned
everything under it. Only the vault of the forehead
and the bridge of the nose are left to resonate.

In the following silence, the long silence,
those of us already lying down
in our own forms of darkness are listening
in the name of mercy for the next wrong note.