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THEIR POETICS
They remind me
of all sorts of things
I’ve pitched into the weathered world,
the endless habitats of meaning.
What furies, and who slams rutted desk
and rides out
animate impressions of the world
in justified emblems,
as though tradition
was indeed a beggary of sense
or at least fought
against the settled weather of the usual,
and like one’s loves,
kept themselves alive
by constant surprise of endlessness.
FINISHING WORK
before each word,
the breath—
exhale the sense of form
is lost
as one’s sensibility
grows soon
the audience
is part of talk
stops being
audience
political thought
mounted
on word, as rider
on horse
but first intensity:
“the grammar of survival
requires personal pronouns”
poetry has no laboratories
but the self
forget your fear of the personal “I”
fear is market strategy
but also poetry
IAN’S PICTURE
puts a house in the center of a field
plants it in an expanse of scattered stones
a thin tower, thoroughly out of place,
stands off to the left, almost marring
the composition is it lighthouse,
steeple, an illusory beacon
warding tractors off a rocky shoal?
to the right, a pedestal,
minor monument,
commemorating what?
or disused fountain,
air (heir?) of de Chirico,
a horizon starts from the left,
a line of distant trees,
halfway across
the top of the composition,
then terminates abruptly,
a warning—
one’s thought,
eye brought
to a wild luxuriant foreground,
tree branches, aggressive, leafy
ORION IN DECEMBER
Charles Burchfield’s painting and note
“tortured by a multitude of thoughts,”
he lay awake, looking at luminous sky
“black studded caves” of night
first two emerging stars
then a third, Orion’s belt
“peace and comfort”
came with recognition,
with resolution and familiarity,
“some Being saying ‘All is well’”
*
This night, Orion
enormous in the East
—tremulous sky
pines dark
against star light
—the constellations
no longer testify
even as they offer
“diadems”
the word cries out
thrall of space
but legatee to emptiness
learning
that brought us close
companionate
with loneliness
even as we pointed
to clustered stars
in those dark nights,
soulless nights
of stellar distances
CLOSE READING
As though a primitive image spoke forthrightly.
No, it was not political, but that one made a turn
to embrace the sweet valor of the Russian
Grossman, drawing close to that part
of the self that seeks for the good. To identify
with his Ivan Gregoryevich, old man, ex-gulag zek
of Everything Flows.
Not much of a hero for a novel,
but he has the courage to recount the evil utopian fantasy
he helped create, and wants now that fantasy’s reversal.
His mind wanders back in time to the moment
the impulse came to him on a stony hillside of his youth,
the wind that brought the smell of trees and dank earth,
aware now of the arc that leads from promise to terror.
And he proclaims, in the shock of finding his boyhood self:
“I am unchanged!”
Among our poets, I find such hope
in Whitman yet am chastened by the insightful caution
of George Oppen who also rejected his old gods
to find renewal in the light of our thin American dawn,
seeking out words both given and dialectical, over-mastered
orders of truth, the inescapable, it was not political.
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