Li Young Lee came to my college. I was 17 and not ready to pay attention to much of anything but a wasteful first world kind of survival.

Arise, Go Down

By Li-Young Lee
It wasn’t the bright hems of the Lord’s skirts
that brushed my face and I opened my eyes
to see from a cleft in rock His backside;

it’s a wasp perched on my left cheek. I keep
my eyes closed and stand perfectly still
in the garden till it leaves me alone,

not to contemplate how this century
ends and the next begins with no one
I know having seen God, but to wonder

why I get through most days unscathed, though I
live in a time when it might be otherwise,
and I grow more fatherless each day.

For years now I have come to conclusions
without my father’s help, discovering
on my own what I know, what I don’t know,

and seeing how one cancels the other.
I’ve become a scholar of cancellations.
Here, I stand among my father’s roses

and see that what punctures outnumbers what
consoles, the cruel and the tender never
make peace, though one climbs, though one descends

petal by petal to the hidden ground
no one owns. I see that which is taken
away by violence or persuasion.

The rose announces on earth the kingdom
of gravity. A bird cancels it.
My eyelids cancel the bird. Anything

might cancel my eyes: distance, time, war.
My father said, Never take your both eyes
off of the world, before he rocked me.

All night we waited for the knock
that would have signalled, All clear, come now;
it would have meant escape; it never came.

I didn’t make the world I leave you with,
he said, and then, being poor, he left me
only this world, in which there is always

a family waiting in terror
before they’re rended, this world wherein a man
might arise, go down, and walk along a path

and pause and bow to roses, roses
his father raised, and admire them, for one moment
unable, thank God, to see in each and
every flower the world cancelling itself.

A Certain Kind of Eden
By Kay Ryan
It seems like you could, but
you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

Mirror

I can get pretty excited about the feel of paper, the smell of the page, embossed bindings, although lately I find the dusty scents more in wine tannins than books.

I can also get pretty excited about an iPhone app that means thousands of poems that only weigh 135 grams to pack around. I especially love the spinner that combines a top theme, say Insecurity with a second theme, say, Religion.

It turned up poets I don’t already know.

Equations of the Light
By Dana Gioia
Turning the corner, we discovered it
just as the old wrought-iron lamps went on—
a quiet, tree-lined street, only one block long
resting between the noisy avenues.

The streetlamps splashed the shadows of the leaves
across the whitewashed brick, and each tall window
glowing through the ivy-decked facade
promised lives as perfect as the light.

Walking beneath the trees, we counted all
the high black doors of houses bolted shut.
And yet we could have opened any door,
entered any room the evening offered.

Or were we deluded by the strange
equations of the light, the vagrant wind
searching the trees, that we believed this brief
conjunction of our separate lives was real?

It seemed that moment lingered like a ghost,
a flicker in the air, smaller than a moth,
a curl of smoke flaring from a match,
haunting a world it could not touch or hear.

There should have been a greeting or a sign,
the smile of a stranger, something beyond
the soft refusals of the summer air
and children trading secrets on the steps.

Traffic bellowed from the avenue.
Our shadows moved across the street’s long wall,
and at the end what else could I have done
but turn the corner back into my life?

I guess this is an After poem then, located on the iPhone, read on the Max, and its delicate questioning destroyed as I walked into the classroom to train Drupal. The training was great, though, so yeah, what else could I do?

It bounces into before, to The Unbearable Lightness of Being (book and movie), the moment when Thomas says, “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

___

I ran across this quote today: During the past five years, I’ve learned that time flies faster than you think, and because you only live once, you have to learn from your mistakes, live your dreams and be accountable.” Made me think of  the above, and appreciate the honesty of not being able to know.

to Before:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
W.B. Yeats

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

I always thought, after the first line, that this was kind of dorky. Pastoral imagery is like that. But over the years, it’s stuck around, especially the rhythm of the first sentence which delights me much the same way the opening of Ginsburg’s “A Supermarket in California”

After:

The poem comes back, twisted in my head into the phrase bee-glad rather than bee-loud. I live in a neighborhood with several California lilacs (which aren’t much like lilacs). When they’re flowering they’re thick with bees, maybe a one to ten bee:blossom ratio.

I love to stick my head as close as possible (or even into) the bush and listen. That very particular scent, temperature, sound combination makes me bee-glad (a bee-loud shrubbery rather than a bee-loud glade). It’s my version of stopping to smell the roses.

Before:

Randall Jarrell
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

After:

CLEVELAND (AP) – An Ohio third-grader weighing more than 200 pounds has been taken from his family and placed into foster care when county social workers said his mother wasn’t doing enough to control his weight.

The Plain Dealer reports that the 8-year-old is considered severely obese and at risk for diseases such as diabetes and hypertension.

The Ohio Health Department estimates more than 12 percent of third-graders statewide are severely obese. The removal of the Cleveland child is the first state officials can recall of a child being put in foster care for a strictly weight-related issue.

Lawyers for the mother say the county is overreaching in taking the child. They say the medical problems the boy is at risk for do not yet pose an imminent danger to his health.

Before …

He is more than a hero
by Sappho

He is more than a hero
he is a god in my eyes–
the man who is allowed
to sit beside you — he

who listens intimately
to the sweet murmur of
your voice, the enticing

laughter that makes my own
heart beat fast. If I meet
you suddenly, I can’t

speak — my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,

hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body

and I turn paler than
dry grass. At such times
death isn’t far from me

After …

Before:
My friend in grad school loved Wallace Stevens. I do enjoy the way the words feel, and it was a memory of concupiscent curds that brought it to mind for today, but, really. Emperor of Ice Cream = Death, check. Sex is a pale innuendo, faint antidote, check. Still missing something critical.

The Emperor of Ice Cream
Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

After: Git
I’ve spent much more of my life with Git than Wallace Stevens. I’m okay with this, but given how much of it I don’t understand, it feels like an equivalent.

Is it? The truth? The single body alone in the universe against its own best time?

Sex without Love
Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

“I am not your lover, I’m the map you use to find her … ”

http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=15859906&ac=now

It happens, usually after I’ve been working with great focus and much too hard on the details of a project that I know, like most of the work I do, has no great purpose. I pause, look around, and feel just too tired, adrift.

Warming up for the month of December, in which I’ve promised myself that I will reflect on a poem a day, I started reading. I’ve decided I will alternate: one from my go-to list of favorites and something new that strikes my fancy.

Today, I started with a favorite Mary Oliver poem and bumped into The Summer Day:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean–
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=315

The things is, I still don’t know.