nineteen?
A poet I'm not, but I love where some poetry takes me, and I do read some of the Poem A Day offerings that every morning arrive in my email. Read some, scan most, let some slip through and accumulate with the 12,016 other emails in my in-box.
Honestly can't say what kind of poems I like best, Holmes, obviously,
Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it -- ah, but stay,
I'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, --
Have you ever heard of that, I say?
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
Georgius Secundus was then alive, —
but even poems I like I forget the poem and poet even faster than I forget good jokes that people tell. Some classics, Poe, "The Raven" Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Frost, several of his classics, Tomas Transtromer, do you know this one - - one English translation of his Swedish poem. At the phrase "Then up" another translator says "Then, a rising"
The Couple
They switch off the light and its white shade
glimmers for a moment before dissolving
like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up.
The hotel walls rise into the black sky.
The movements of love have settled, and they sleep
but their most secret thoughts meet as when
two colours meet and flow into each other
on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
They stand close up in a throng, waiting,
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.
Whittier Still sits the schoolhouse by the road, a ragged beggar sleeping, Kipling If you can keep your head when all about you are losing their and blaming it on you ... then you will be a man, my son. Thomas Hardy*. Longfellow The day is cold, and dark, and dreary It rains, and the wind is never weary; The vine still clings to the mouldering wall, But at every gust the dead leaves fall, And the day is dark and dreary. My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; It rains, and the wind is never weary; My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past, But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast, And the days are dark and dreary. Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.
Some poems that I appreciate may disclose more about me than I want anyone outside of my own mind to know.
In Friday's email came a poem by Jim Moore, who is coming up on eighty years old, that I liked, especially for the last day of the year,
Sometimes I just sit like this at the window and watch
the darkness come. If I’m smart, I’ll put on Bach.
I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.
Maybe it is too easy that I speak so often
of late last light on a December day,
of that stubborn grass that somehow still remains green
behind the broken chain link fence on the corner.
But the need is so great for the way light looks
as it takes its leave of us. We say
what we can to each other of these things,
we who are such thieves, stealing first
one breath and then the next. Bach, keep going
just this slowly, show me the way to believe
that what matters in this world has already happened
and will go on happening forever.
The way light falls on the last
of the stricken leaves of the copper beech
at the end of the block is something to behold.
.
the notion "that what matters in this world has already happened" - - catches my eye and may be apt for my life, but surely not globally unless Mother Nature targets us with an Act of God, or we really mess up - -
When I like a poem that comes up, I usually scroll down and read more of the poet's work, and maybe related themed poems of other poets. Jim Moore again, a poem he wrote in 2012, Twenty Questions:
Did I forget to look at the sky this morning
when I first woke up? Did I miss the willow tree?
The white gravel road that goes up from the cemetery,
but to where? And the abandoned house on the hill, did it get
even a moment? Did I notice the small clouds so slowly
moving away? And did I think of the right hand
of God? What if it is a slow cloud descending
on earth as rain? As snow? As shade? Don't you think
I should move on to the mop? How it just sits there, too often
unused? And the stolen rose on its stem?
Why would I write a poem without one?
Wouldn't it be wrong not to mention joy? Sadness,
its sleepy-eyed twin? If I'd caught the boat
to Mykonos that time when I was nineteen
would the moon have risen out of the sea
and shone on my life so clearly
I would have loved it
just as it was? Is the boat
still in the harbor, pointing
in the direction of the open sea? Am I
still nineteen? Going in or going out,
can I let the tide make of me
what it must? Did I already ask that?
asking himself questions but also ruefully recalling something he Might Have Done But Didn't when he was nineteen and asking himself if he's still nineteen - - comes straight home to me hearing Frank Sinatra singing "When I was seventeen, it was a very good year" and remembering my own fifteen and sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and wondering why I'm still that age deep inside, but have to take all these heart pills, and see a nineteen year old boy in the photo in Linda's closet, but while shaving this morning saw a very old man carefully minding a searing bout of sciatica and wonder WTH, I never visualized this on that September morning in 1941 at Cove School when I looked around and Mama was gone.
Yet, all in all, if you are so fortunate as to get here, you will be thankful for so many and so much.
Wishing you long years!
T
