August 30, 2004
Aubade.
Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood...
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude,
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly;
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember'd not.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly;
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
-- William Shakespeare
Actually a very cool website for Martin Amis fans, Torluath. Thanks! London Fields still haunts me.
My attitude toward death has actually improved considerably since reading this quote from poet Charles Simic: "The plain truth is that we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny speck surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then---poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that's very, very funny." (found via Mimi Smartypants) Somehow, finding the humor in it helps me.
But I still love Mark Strand's "The End"
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
You don't touch each other but you walk together
Leaning against and within each other until evening
When, alone, you chase the wild night at your gate
Sweet to weep for, like a wet stray dog
You don't want to hear the crows cry
The diminishing number of lines
To be spoken on this stage, set for how long
The shadow grown, flesh hollows itself out, another
Takes your place. Step by step you leave yourself.
-- from "Every morning", by Claire Makroux, translated by Marilyn Hacker
On this day we commemorate with thanksgiving Philip Larkin who, possessing outstanding literary gifts. combined distinction with rare humility. We give thanks for his intellectual integrity which would not allow him to accept the consolations of a faith which he could not share and which would have delivered him from a fear of dying by which all his life he was haunted ..
Now we commend him to the God who is the loving Father of all, of those who cannot yet believe in Him as well as of those who do, with the assurance that, his fears dispelled, he now shares our rejoicing in eternal life, the gift of that Risen Lord whom here on earth he did not yet know.
(Prayer at the memorial service for Philip Larkin, Westminster Abbey, 14 February 1986.)
I wonder what Larkin would have made of that -- a hoot of derision, probably. But it's a wonderfully ingenious attempt to reclaim him for orthodox Christianity.
I like this one by Wendell Berry:
Leaving
Parting from you, rising
into the air, I enter again
the absence we came together in.
My ways in house and field
and woods have reached an end,
dismembered of each other
and of me. And you remain
on the earth we knew, already changing
into the earth you know.
Fire-driven through the air,
I go alone, a part
of what, together, we became.
Dude did you not read the thing about how you're gonna die?? Stop posting and get some ass or something.
Wait a minute.
In the room's corner the shadow played its little flute
It was then I remembered the cisterns and sea-nettles
And the mortal glitter of the naked beach
Night's ring was solemnly place on my finger
And the silent fleet continued its immemorial journey
-- Sophia de Mello Breyner, "The Flute", translated by Ruth Fainlight
place = placed
With my hand I gather this emptiness,
imponderable night, starry families,
a chorus quieter than silence,
a sound of the moon, some secret, a triangle,
a chalk trapezoid.
It is the oceanic night, the third solitude,
a quivering that opens doors, wings,
the profound population that isn't here
throbs overflowing the names of the estuary.
Night, name of the sea, fatherland, root, rose!
--"Serenade" by Pablo Neruda
Into the distance go the mounds of people's heads.
I am growing smaller here -- no one notices me any more,
but in caressing books and children's games
I will rise from the dead to say the sun is shining.
-- Osip Mandelstam, trasnslated by David McDuff
I must be dying, 'cause I can't stop laughing.
I who am singing these lines today
will be tomorrow the enigmatic corpse
who dwells in a realm, magical and barren,
without a before or an after or a when.
--Jorge Luis Borges,from "The Enigmas">
Ooh ooh! Play Salieri!
I would like my love to die
and the rain to be falling on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning the first and last to love me.
--Samuel Beckett
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stories
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers ruffed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked, or cresting, or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart offguard and blow it open.
-- Seamus Heaney, "Postscript"
It's Possible That While We Were Dreaming
It's possible that while we were dreaming
the hand that casts out stars like seeds
started up the ancient music once more
-- like a note from a great harp --
and the frail wave came to our lips
in the form of one or two honest words.
-- Anthony Machado, trans Tobert Bly
For the Sake of Strangers
No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another -- a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them --
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.
-- Dorianne Laux
The Discarded Horse
Hitoshi Anzai
What on earth is it, going from where to where,
that is passing around through here I wonder?
The same as a wounded god,
a single abandoned military horse.
Shining more than death,
alone more than liberty,
and at the same time like peacefulness without a helper,
is the field of snow where he temporarily wanders about
with hardly his own lean shadow to feed on.
Presently one cry is neighed-out toward the distance
and collapsing from the knees he has tumbled down.
The Asian snow, the heavenly evening!
Dover Beach
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair,
Upon the straits -- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
--Matthew Arnold, 1867
Oh bees, you're making me cry. WELCOME BACK.
What a glorious return
The bees, all forlorn!
*Passes mothninja a hankie, albeit slightly the worse for wear thanks to local ragweed season*
EdArzakh,
neither forlorn nor forsworn
nor am I
Matthew Arnold under dreary edges
I do not espy
Dancers
The bee drifts from the lily and the lily fronds
bow. Some color is involved, changeably
according to breeze and shadow.
By the lake people are doing something
with a bar-b-que or a boat
while others do something with plates.
Some of those I love have left the world.
If the sun continues and the blue sky burns
and the sea reaches into itself almost lazily
for food and the arithmetic of what looks like
grace (until it kills you), what use my grieving
hope? Something blue-black soughs in me
like a storm of ancient invitation and regard.
But some of those I love have left the world.
Any moment heralds will announce the feast
and dancers, draped in tiny bells,
will step and turn along the twilit shore
and who will hear them, and who will rise
from sleep or death to dance among them
the dance of the bee who returns alone
into his own country?
--Christopher Howell
by Cathy Park Hong
I long for harmine morn to lift me
from my rank hisshurled life but my
hellwhelmed county of harsh scruffed
crops is marooned, my plow a beached
whale’s browbone on morose miles of moor.
Heft heft. I cry to my ox
but no hint of green wort. Just midges
to torment my ox. You intone
forego lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai.
so I slaughter my ox. So hi-hi!
I am ready in my plaidwhelmed
puff puff golf hat. Ready to be
whelmed by a petstore cacophony
of crickets shirruping in their cage balls,
Juddering slam of hammering jack,
humming sussurations of catamarans,
aerosol striations of welder’s firecrack,
then a caracas of fist cracks
after workers slurp off their goggled specs
to a bassooning fog horn hooning
so spooning lovers know when to return
to their dawn shift, tuning cymbals
for toy baboons who clap clap,
Hail the Industrial Age, hail!
Dover
The cliff is white,
perpendicular to the sea,
covered with green
where the slope is kind.
I’m no farmer
but even I know
to not plant a seed
on up and down land.
So hold my hand
at the very edge
where safe becomes,
shall we say, slippery.
The cave is always near
where my monsters hide.
--Alan Fox
*Whew!*
Lately around here it's been like a poetry faceoff.
*goes off to find that Neruda pome to toss in to the fray*
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