I’ve been mulling over our conversation. I suppose for a young person today there is a lot of pressure to be successful. You’re ambitious and that’s good. The allure of worldly riches is strong: money, cars, private jets— even islands and countries can be bought. Don’t confuse ambition and happiness. They masquerade for each other and you might not see the difference for a long time. I’m glad though that you can talk to me, that part of you has sympathy for an ageing, not very successful poet. Something tells me you knew I’d say stay in school, finish your degree, don’t sellout your intelligence for mammon. I’ve also met business people with lakefront condos, expensive cars and boats… Their dialogue is all negotiation and their presence half facade. Not one of them could count among their riches the many gifts you already possess. Some of us were chosen for higher things. Love dad.
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High Winds
Many broken branches, heavens eroded,
Trees uprooted, the heartwood with rot.
Roof shingles raised, power lines down.
I’ve never seen such wind-blasted light,
Blue diffused into dark, transparent night.
In my mind distance travels like the wind.
Outside our losses, the road of the wind.
State Mental Hospital
A sound structure in architectural
beauty and ruin,
Lovely grounds overrun by weeds,
Narrowing trails through forest,
The farm now fallow and wild.
Ghosts of place move on,
Legends vandalize experience,
Peace remedies chaos,
Kindness cures brutality
Bound to no restraints.
If facts are fake poetry proves true,
Patients shine with health,
Society suffers lunacy,
Institution disperses,
Madness finds proportion.
Homemade Wine
The best thing about homemade wine,
Drinking it at the right time,
When the grape is in Madre Vino
And the moon in its libration;
When the chimes are bleeding
And barrels breathe into ullage,
The finish in the beginning—
The beginning in its prime,
The sunset of your labor
Steeped in field grape red–
Nights of happiest dreams,
Warmest tones, touch and taste;
When the body of the wine
Fills spirit to the rim, it is ageless;
When wine spirits the air
Like spring mornings, it is ageless;
When drinking from the barrel
Inspirits time with roundness, it is ageless.
The best thing about homemade wine,
Drinking it at the right time.
Pavlov’s People
Pavlov’s people eat the world
Bark like dogs
Trained conditional reflex
To salivate and attack
But who can blame them
We’re all Pavlov’s people
Watch us gather at the bell
Caesar
The pack turns on you
Temple of Concord (What Immigrants Bring to a Country)
I dreamt I saw the Temple of Concord
Outside a rural Canadian town.
Farmers stood round the temple
Wondering what to make of this…
Naturally the farmer was compensated
For the foreign structure on his land.
The temple, enclosed in clapboard,
A country church and farmers’ market.
But when I drive near that alien corn
I see the Temple of Concord glowing
Against the green, beautiful in snow,
Though no one else can seem to see it.
Snowglobe
The poems of the old century hold their magic. “Cemetery in Snow” by Xavier Villaurrutia is such a poem. You can think about the poem several ways but because the subject is so singular it is trapped in the glass of its making. Shake it and the letters will settle back in some insensible way, burying the cemetery just so. The poem was probably not so much a matter of writing as of polishing glass, clarifying silence, making each different letter fall the same way.
Pictures at an Excavation
Bright figures swim in a Roman bath
Sunk in shadows of an underworld
Neptune and seahorses mid ocean
A boy on a dolphin leaps into light
Mosaic land of impossible stone
Beings trapped in dimensionality
Beings detached from stone
Gods on the surface of a dream
Supine and recumbent statues
Extruded from swampland
Buried like mystery religion
And backward flowing skies
Tessellated spiral lines
Like nets between stars
Multitudinous motionlessness
Oceans of unweighted time
Clearing the silt of words
From the mirror of mind
Eroding the same earth
A mosaic of merchant civilization
Fish and sails wine and grain
Amphorae amphora repair
Open to the mouth of the Tiber
Fishhead man gulping the sea
Salvatore Ala’s fervent grace
Poet and translator George Szirtes said this:
“It is not the catharsis but the grace. The grace of the writing is the triumph of the imagination….”
So much poetry these days is lacking in gracefulness. I like to think of a poem as a sort of language ballet, a lithe duration of supple and subtle written gestures. Overture, theme, digression, return, apotheosis. But wouldn’t an insistence on gracefulness limit a poet’s compositional repertoire, her expressive discretion? Yes, and the sooner the better! Poetry is an aesthetic medium. It’s high time it got back to the Orphic mysteries, to a contemplative wrestling with the dark angel of hope and beauty (that elusive symbol of meaning).
Stravinsky wrote music for a graceful ballet – The Firebird.
The story of The Firebird is about Prince Ivan and his complex struggle with Kashchei the Immortal. Inside Kashchei’s magical kingdom, the prince falls in…
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The Poet as a Tacit Being
As a reader, my imagination is stirred when a poem is written toward the Out There. When a poem is unburdened by the poet’s ego, trauma, diary, and blather, I’m granted possible entry to a peculiar mode of appreciation, of aesthetic impression. If the egoless poem happens to be written by a poet of subtle artistic consciousness, something special occurs: a conjuring of images both equivocal and ecstatic from the half-dreaming world. The world Out There — the stuff of worldly phenomena — takes on an unusual, quivering quality. What had been until the poem merely usual appearance and regular happening is now conjured into a sudden and glowing written thereness.
As a reader, my imagination is further stirred when a poem is written in such a manner that I’m allowed to make deep guesses about the poet. The poet in such poems is almost not there. His or…
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