a funny thing happened on the way to decorum

Welcome back to Poem-a-day April.

Maybe T. S. Eliot is a bit of an easy choice? Oh well. Enjoy. And read out loud if at all possible.

V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID (from ‘The Waste Land’) by T. S. Eliot

After the torch-light red on sweaty faces     
After the frosty silence in the gardens     
After the agony in stony places     
The shouting and the crying    
Prison and place and reverberation     
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains     
He who was living is now dead     
We who were living are now dying     
With a little patience    
 
Here is no water but only rock     
Rock and no water and the sandy road     
The road winding above among the mountains     
Which are mountains of rock without water     
If there were water we should stop and drink    
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think     
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand     
If there were only water amongst the rock     
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit     
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit    
There is not even silence in the mountains     
But dry sterile thunder without rain     
There is not even solitude in the mountains     
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl     
From doors of mud-cracked houses
                                If there were water    
And no rock     
If there were rock     
And also water     
And water     
A spring    
A pool among the rock     
If there were the sound of water only     
Not the cicada     
And dry grass singing     
But sound of water over a rock    
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees     
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop     
But there is no water     
 
Who is the third who walks always beside you?     
When I count, there are only you and I together    
But when I look ahead up the white road     
There is always another one walking beside you     
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded     
I do not know whether a man or a woman     
—But who is that on the other side of you?    
 
What is that sound high in the air     
Murmur of maternal lamentation     
Who are those hooded hordes swarming     
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth     
Ringed by the flat horizon only    
What is the city over the mountains     
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air     
Falling towers     
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria     
Vienna London    
Unreal     
 
A woman drew her long black hair out tight     
And fiddled whisper music on those strings     
And bats with baby faces in the violet light     
Whistled, and beat their wings   
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall     
And upside down in air were towers     
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours     
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.     
 
In this decayed hole among the mountains   
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing     
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel     
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.     
It has no windows, and the door swings,     
Dry bones can harm no one.    
Only a cock stood on the roof-tree     
Co co rico co co rico     
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust     
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves    
Waited for rain, while the black clouds     
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.     
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.     
Then spoke the thunder     
DA    
Datta: what have we given?     
My friend, blood shaking my heart     
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender     
Which an age of prudence can never retract     
By this, and this only, we have existed    
Which is not to be found in our obituaries     
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider     
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor     
In our empty rooms     
DA   
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key     
Turn in the door once and turn once only     
We think of the key, each in his prison     
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison     
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours    
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus     
DA     
Damyata: The boat responded     
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar     
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded    
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient     
To controlling hands     
 
                      I sat upon the shore     
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me     
Shall I at least set my lands in order?    
 
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down     
 
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina     
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow     
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie     
These fragments I have shored against my ruins    
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.     
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

From Sabbath Poems

1983, II

The year relents, and free
Of work, I climb again
To where the old trees wait,
Time out of mind. I hear
Traffic down on the road,
Engines high overhead.
And then a quiet comes,
A cleft in time, silence
Of metal moved by fire;
The air holds little voices,
Titmice and chickadees,
Feeding through the treetops
Among the new small leaves,
Calling again to mind
The grace of circumstance,
Sabbath economy
In which all thought is song,
All labor is a dance.
The world is made at rest,
In ease of gravity.
I hear the ancient theme
In low world-shaping song
Sung by the falling stream.
Here where a rotting log
Has slowed the flow: a shelf
Of dark soil, level laid
Above the tumbled stone.
Roots fasten it in place.
It will be here a while;
What holds it here decays.
A richness from above,
Brought down, is held, and holds
A little while in flow.
Stem and leaf grow from it.
At cost of death, it has
A life. Thus falling founds,
Unmaking makes the world.

What a wonderful little gem of a poem.

The Man Who’s Easy On The Eye Is On The Beach, from ‘YELP’

His wife has little plaits, crow’s feet. She teaches
him to unlearn Albanian, adopt demotic Greek
in which he learns to curse and swear,

to flit, sweet-talk, cook the boss’s books,
how to flatter, sell and never tear
well-sealed envelopes containing words

like ‘circumspect’, ‘discretion’.
Don’t talk to her, she’s on her own
You don’t know what she’s looking for,

if anything. She might be on the rebound
or fond of solitude, or full of grief,
she could be on the look-out

for someone with whom to correspond.
The man who’s easy on the eye
has surface shimmer like gold leaf

and if it’s stripped away you find
a swamp of dead brothers
the sister who jumped,

his mother’s burnt bread, smouldering,
his father’s broken shoulder
in its dirty sling.

This is the sealed envelope
even his mother-wife
can’t prise open.

Pantoums are one of those poetic forms that, when done well, look deceptively easy to write. They are NOT easy to write.

This poem’s knocking around at Christ Church this evening for Maundy Thursday. I discovered it in a recent issue of Image.

Pantoum for Seven Words | Amy Newman

Forgive them, for they don’t know what they do.
Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words
in metaphor: the whole story rises dark blue
in the trees’ green burdens, drenched with voice.

Blood, veins, infinity, the garden, your words
all dissolve, like the story itself, to myth
in the trees. Green burdens drenched with voice
blur the stories, insist and transform, bright leaves.

All dissolve, like the story itself, to myth.
A million habits arrange and rearrange
blur. The stories insist and transform bright leaves
beneath which, birds preening: forlorn, lost shapes.

A million habits arrange and rearrange,
provide: to shift, adjust, put right, perfect.
Beneath which birds, preening forlorn lost shapes,
is the first tree, the dark encroachment and the rest?

Provide: to shift, adjust, put right, perfect.
In metaphor the whole story rises dark blue.
Is the first tree the dark encroachment? And the rest?
Forgive them, for they don’t know what they do.

Thompson is another poet about whom I heard through the Image Journal. You can read an editorial about him here. Before I get to his poem, though, a thought for the day.

Today during the ‘Last hour by the cross’ at Christ Church, I kept returning to the question “how can we live our faith bodily?” How can we live the cross bodily? Any of you reading from a Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or even just a high Anglican background will be shaking your heads at how long it took me to figure out the most obvious, basic way: to make the sign of the cross. In this action, we physically do what wordsmiths call ‘verbing a noun.’ We cross (noun > verb) ourselves. It’s utterly of-the-body, and in one sense is the precursor to all cross-shaped living which can flow out of it.

Recently, in a discussion about faith and science, a uni mate and I shared an eye-roll at those who will point out “evidence of Christianity” every time a cross-like shape is found in science, be it at the molecular level it in the shape of a protein, or in the division of cells, or the symmetry of galactic bodies. Let’s be frank: that sort of shape-happy ‘proofing’ is superstition. It does not prove beyond a doubt that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.

Neither does making the sign of the cross prove someone to be Christian. But is it one way to start doing this bodily faith thing? I certainly find it less than comfortable! What if people see me and think I’m trying to be holier-than-thou? What if I’m doing it wrong? Will I be judged for saying In the name of our loving Parent, or Creator, or Mother, instead of Father from time to time? What if this is just another way of putting up an in-group/out-group boundary instead of creating unity among people of faith?

All those uncomfortable anxieties aside: something about this is also deeply comfortable in the sense that I feel I am giving a natural, physical assent to something: not a certain doctrine of the atonement, not the patriarchy of the church, not the superiority of uber-liturgical traditions…none of that. I am giving a natural, physical assent to Yeshua, a carpenter from Nazareth, God in the fullness of history bringing wholeness back to humanity. I am subverting the symbol a Roman instrument of torture and claiming it for the other side.  I am observing Good Friday as Dunstan Thompson observes it in his poem ‘On a Crucifix:’

      See

Here at last

       is

     Love

Grenier’s “Sentences” is literally a box of notecards with sentences on them, read in a different order at every reading.

Take a glance at some here: http://www.whalecloth.org/grenier/sentences_.htm.

Poems or not?

Dear old Wendell knew a thing or two about Sundays being good for poem-ing. I offer a bit of ramble & scramble from my notepad. Regular programming of published poets will resume tomorrow.

‘Hiatuses in the habit of writing are difficult to break’

Now, suddenly, this need to make.
Have I been so long absent from
the wheel of a narrow sea vessel
accustomed to leaving things in its wake?
A verse, a ramble, a scribbled room
of a drafty castle:

the graphite-encumbered visions
I never can quite capture accurately,
though God knows I try. All trail behind
my making-ship as it sails incisions
in the gauzy surface of the sea,
miles from land,

on which somehow I have been marooned.
Here where I need no special set of legs
and where my made things follow logic,
argument and policy attuned
to the frequency of order. My hands beg,
though, for magic:

the chemistry of a whole, new thing
with a spine and story heretofore untold
and a tongue willing to use such phrases
without concern for their archaic twang.
But I have been landlocked here, ensnared
by the phases

of an unkind moon who has seen best
only to tide my ship beyond my reach.
Obscured by thick and busy fog, she might
still trail inspiration like precious ballast
but I cannot know from this distant beach,
out of sight.

(photo © betty wills)

Where does the time get to? As an apology for missing the last two days of poem-a-day April, here’s a poem that is three poems and also one poem.  (here as a jpg to deal with formatting woes)

Triptych

And another big fail in the PADA effort. I am resolving to be much more organised this week. In the meantime, here are oodles of goodies to make up for the past few days’ lamentable lacks of lyrics.

An interview with Marie Howe on NPR.

Andrew Bird in concert at SxSW 2012 (again, from NPR). 

Eavan Boland’s An Elegy For My Mother In Which She Scarcely Appears.

Micheal O’Siadhail reading ‘Between’ and ‘Home’.

Naomi Shihab Nye and ‘Streets.’ Incidentally, her YA novel Habibi was a fave of mine in early middle school. 

Brainpickings.org celebrates National Poetry Month here.

And F Scott Fitzgerald’s  ”On A Play Twice Seen”

Here in the figured dark I watch once more;

There with the curtain rolls a year away,

A year of years — There was an idle day

Of ours, when happy endings didn’t bore

Our unfermented souls, and rocks held ore:

Your little face beside me, wide-eyed, gay,

Smiled its own repertoire, while the poor play

Reached me as a faint ripple reaches shore.

Yawning and wondering an evening through

I watch alone — and chatterings of course

Spoil the one scene which somehow did have charms;

You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you

Right there, where Mr. X defends divorce

And What’s-Her-Name falls fainting in his arms.