throbbing light machine

Suzanne
William Carlos Williams

Brother Paul! look!
—but he rushes to a different
window.
The moon!

I heard shrieks and thought:
What's that?

That's just Suzanne
talking to the moon!
Pounding on the window
with both fists:

Paul! Paul!

—and talking to the moon.
Shrieking
and pounding the glass
with both fists!

Brother Paul! the moon!

(a story to go with the poem: I had this wild anthology of poems, ostensibly "for children," that was the gruesomest, wrenchingest, weirdest, most intense thing ever, and I pored over it like a postulate with her sacred text as a wee thing. Bits of poems from this anthology are lodged all the way back at my backbrain. Just now, I remembered pounding at the window and brother Paul and the moon, and lo and behold of course the poem is by William Carlos Williams. Besos, baby!)

MY own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

You made the world a more beautiful, truer, better place - thank you for leaving your words & your knowledge for all of us who came after.



Snaptshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Adrienne Rich

1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin prelude
called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
float like perfume through the memory."

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter
wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.
Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm,
a match burn to her thumbnail,

or held her hand above the kettle's snout
right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,
since nothing hurts her anymore, except
each morning's grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewd orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,
each proud. acute, subtle, I hear scream
across the cut glass and majolica
like Furies cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam, all the old knives
that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours
ma semblable, ma soeur!

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:
their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,
the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .
Reading while waiting
for the iron to heat,
writing, My Life had stood---a Loaded Gun---
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum
or, more often,
iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,
dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

5.

Dulce ridens, dulce loguens,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings
neither words nor music are her own;
only the long hair dripping
over her cheek, only the song
of silk against her knees
and thesea
djusted in reflection of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine---
is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down
by love, for you the only natural action,
are you edged more keen
to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?

7.

"To have in this uncertain world some stay
which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence."
Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed window blankening with steam.
Deliciously, all that we might have been,
all that we were---fire, tears,
wit, taste, martyred ambition---
stirs like the memory of refused adultery
the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all? Yes, think
of the odds! or shrug them off forever.
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time's precious chronic invalid,---
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us---
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.
Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,
tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.

10.

Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince
but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.





Adrienne Rich
(1929 - 2012)

From "Sonnets From an Ungrafted Tree," Edna St. Vincent Millay:

IX.

Not over-kind nor over-quick in study
Nor skilled in sports nor beautiful was he,
Who had come into her life when anybody
Would have been welcome, so in need was she.
They had become acquainted in this way:
He flashed a mirror in her eyes at school;
By which he was distinguished; from that day
They went about together, as a rule.
She told, in secret and with whispering,
How he had flashed a mirror in her eyes;
And as she told, it struck her with surprise
That this was not so wonderful a thing.
But what's the odds? — It's pretty nice to know
You've got a friend to keep you company everywhere you go.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."

-Thoreau

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Somewhere on my dwircle last night there was a Billy Collins video, which reminded me of this thing I saw over the weekend that utterly broke me with adorable: a YouTube vid of a really absurdly cute 3-year-old reciting "Litany."

I mean - yes please?

notebook poem*

standardization, homogenization,
hygiene, urbanization

lack of anxiety about the
sybilline leaves

the stuff of ordinary being

but also orgasm denial

give me
a definition of summary

sexual love can be both embrace
and punishment

okay, I know this -

compassion requires violence: love
and conquest jammed together

the sadness of the story

I see a lot of chances to succeed
with this one


*all words taken from my notebook for this semester, ie the one that I started a month ago. Contains notes, drafts, lesson plans, and other unattached thoughts.

Thank you so much, everyone, for the birthday wishes; you guys made my day. I've been surviving, I guess, in my Texas exile. Job training is too boring to be believed, but not particularly painful, and at any rate I'm halfway done now, and I've only got three more days until I'm home again.

I've been reading Adrienne Rich and watching Battlestar Galactica Classic and crying over the little girl from Detroit who was murdered by the cops and swallowing down sinking feelings over the Texas School Board's decision that slavery ought to be referred to as the Atlantic Triangle Trade, and I just. I'm having one of those evenings when the world is simultaneously too filled with good emotions and too jam-packed with horror.

Tomorrow will be another new day. Have a poem to end this one:

( Cartographies of Silence (Adrienne Rich) )