Carl Christian Constantin Hansen, Girl with Fruit in a Basket (The painting is found in many places on the web.)

The second poem in Rilke’s sequence “Trois Porteuses” is a bit of puzzle. Here I will be working out an understanding of the poem.

La Porteuse de Fruits
Voici ce que c’est que l’année.
Si ronds que vous soyez, vous n’êtes pas les têtes:
on vous a pensés là-bas, o fruits achevés,
les hivers ont imaginés, calculés,
dans les racines et sous l’écorce des troncs
(à la lampe).
Mais sans doute êtes-vous plus beaux
que tous ces projets, o vous, les œuvres aimées.
Et moi, je vous porte. Votre poids
me rend plus sérieuses que je ne suis.
J’exprime malgré moi je ne sais quel regret
semblable à celui de la fiancée étonnée
lorsqu’elle s’en va embrasser,
une à une, ses pales amies d’enfance.
  
The Fruit Carrier
This is what the year is all about.
Though round you may be, you are not heads:
we thought of you there, o ripe fruits,
the winters imagined you, calculated you,
in the roots and under the bark of the trunks
(by lamplight).
But you are probably more beautiful
than all those plans, o you, the beloved works.
And it’s I who carries you. Your weight
makes me more serious than I am.
Despite myself, I express some regret
like that of the astonished fiancée
when she goes to kiss,
one by one, her pale childhood friends. 

Like “The Flower Carrier,” this poem is a dramatic monologue. The speaker’s first, challenging line—“This is what the year is all about”—is key to understanding all that follows, including the next, puzzling line: “Though round you may be, you are not heads,” a line we come to understand as addressing the fruit she’s carrying. Here my knowledge of idiomatic French may fail me; as in English, lettuce is described as a head (tête de laitue), but fruit isn’t, so far as I know. But whatever wordplay Rilke may be using here, the point becomes clear in the next four lines: in the winter, we used our heads—“we thought of you,” “the winters imagined you, calculated you” by lamplight—to make plans (projets) for the coming harvest. The passage from winter to summer, from hope to reality, is the year.

The plans of winter are “probably” (sans doute) less beautiful than the picked fruit in the carrier's basket. The works of summer--les œuvres aimées—are beloved in a way mere plans and projects, the immediate results of thinking and calculation, cannot be.

“The Flower Carrier” ends with the speaker imagining that her beloved calls her light (Légère). In “The Fruit Carrier,” the weight of the fruit she carries makes the speaker both heavy and serious, in both English and French the opposite of light / légère: Votre poids / me rend plus sérieuses que je ne suis (Your weight / makes me more serious than I am).

The surprising simile at the end of the poem reminds us of “The Flower Carrier” who sits obediently beside the man to whom she’s given her hands. Bearing the weight of the fruit gives the fruit carrier a sense of regret, like that of a fiancée bidding farewell to her childhood as she kisses her childhood friends.  

Fruit is considered a human endeavor—the object of plans and calculations, realized in works (œuvres) that induce emotions resembling those accompanying a change in social status, from unmarried to married. What remains of nature is perhaps the vague regret felt by the speaker. But nature is contained within human categories and concerns. I am reminded of those formal Renaissance gardens, where well-pruned orange trees grew in round pots held by horizontal balustrades in a walled garden that served as another room in the house. (I’m paraphrasing Ruth Wedgewood Kennedy, The Renaissance Painter’s Garden (Oxford, 1948), 4.)

Posted 23 January 2025 in Nashville, TN. Send comments to [email protected]

​Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2014

v.
frigid tomorrow
upright pine
bristles with light

The Perils and Pleasures of Prediction
 
"[T]he inability of predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history (xxiv)….What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it….
     Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naively try to predict them). There are many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them. .... [A]lmost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning--they were just Black Swans."--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: Second Edition, xxv

“When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural. It’s the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when—and where—it matters. That’s what music is telling you, too, when you’re listening—even more, perhaps, when you’re dancing—when its harmonious layered patterns of predictability and unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your Being.” Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (pp. 42-43). Random House of Canada. Kindle Edition.

“Clarity and concision hamper the storyteller, for he makes his living from unpredictable leaps of transformation and an inexhaustible supply of breath.”—Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies, 1992, 63.

Our Own Unpredictable Song
 
“In a powerful meditation, the nineteenth-century Hasidic commentary Shem Mi-Shmuel asks how Moses and the Israelites managed spontaneously and simultaneously to sing the same words and melody. All sing Zeh Keli—'This is my God’—though the words are, in a sense, Moses’ singular idiom. In general, zeh—this—is considered his personal idiom, expressing the clarity of vision that characterizes him: ‘God’s presence speaks from out of his [Moses’] throat.’ But at this moment, all Israel shared his immediacy of vision—God within their vocal chords; even embryos in their mothers’ womb, says the Talmud, sing in the Sea—although, Shem Mi-Shmuel notes, their vocal chords were not yet developed! That is, the experience was of the song arising from deep within them, from some internal otherness. Essentially, it is the Shechinah—God’s presence—that sings. The song is theirs only in the sense that they intend, like Moses, to sing. But their song is not theirs, in the sense that some voice beyond the personal sings through them: It sings.
     This Hasidic teaching conveys a sense of the personal-impersonal sources of song. Unconscious desires and fears vibrate within the singing voice. A whole people here open themselves to the deep experience of an elsewhere. In a sense, they are not responsible for their own song. In that sense, it sings.” [emphases added]
     The psychoanalyst Donnel B. Stern writes: ‘The more fully an experience is our own—the more it comes from what we like to call “deep down within us”—the more it usually feels, oddly enough, as if it comes from elsewhere.’ Many poets and composers have described the experience of inspiration in similar terms: Coleridge, Blake, Mozart (‘Where and how they come I know not’), Keats (‘The poet does not know what he has to say till he has said it’), Rilke (‘Let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion quite in itself … beyond reach of one’s own understanding’), Valéry (‘A poem is a discourse that requires and sustains continuous connection between the voice that is and the voice that is coming and must come’), Tsvetaeva (‘The poet’s hand does not belong to her but to that which waits to exist through her’).
     ‘And He placed in my mouth a new song,’ the Psalmist writes (Ps. 40:4); and the midrash adds, ‘This refers to the Song of the Sea.’ Between the miry clay of Egypt and the firm foothold in the midst of the Sea, a new song is formed. Something unpredictable sings from Moses’ throat. What then can we say about Miriam’s song?”— Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments (p. 101-103). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

​Charles Dana Gibson, “A Love Long,” Sketches and Cartoons (1900). Public domain.

​Three Hands, Vincent van Gogh, c.1884; Nunen / Nuenen, Netherlands. Public domain

The Flower Carrier
They no longer belong to me, my hands,
they belong to the flowers I’ve just gathered;
may these flowers, with an imagination so pure,
invent another being for these hands
that are no longer mine. Then,
obedient, I will set myself beside him,
beside that being. Curious about my old hands,
I will leave him no more, listening to him
with all my heart, before he says to me:
O Light One.
  
La Porteuse de Fleurs
Elles ne sont plus à moi, mes mains,
elles sont à ces fleurs que je viens de cueillir ;
puissent-elles, ces fleurs à l'imagination si pure,
inventer un autre être à ces mains
qui ne sont plus miennes. Alors,
obéissante, je me mettrai à côté de lui,
à côté de cet être, curieuse de mes mains anciennes
et je ne le quitterai plus l'écoutant
de tout mon cœur, avant qu'il ne me dise :
ô Légère.
 
I’ve been thinking about a trio of Rilke’s French poems for awhile—« La Porteuse de Fleurs » (the flower carrier), « La Porteuse de Fruits » (the fruit carrier), and « La Porteuse de L’Eau » (the water carrier). Each represents an interesting point of view based on imaginative mental and emotional experiences.

« La Porteuse de Fleurs » attracted my interest because of the odd conceit it’s built around, the flower carrier’s fantasy that her hands can be reimagined by the flowers they carry as belonging to a being the flowers invent. She will place herself by his side, obey him, stick with him, all because her old hands on his arms attract her curiosity. And she will listen to him (silently, I imagine) until he says, “O Light One.” What he means by that, whether it is the consummation of their relationship or its breaking point, I do not know. Perhaps Rilke is playing with the expression, found in English and French, “to give one’s hand in marriage.”

As I read poems, I often ponder the experiences that give rise to them. Imagining someone else in possession of your hands—is that a whimsical flight or verbal wit (literalizing the giving of hands in marriage) or is it based on some experience or perception?

​On several occasions a year or so ago, as I was falling asleep, I experienced the sensation of losing connection with my hands: they drifted away from my wrists and floated in the air an inch or two away.

The Separate Life of Hands
 Sometimes the hands
detaching from my wrists
float free as I am falling
asleep--
           Thumbs relaxed
unopposing
fingers half curled

drift out of the world
empty of desire
                       ungrasping
pencil or key
                       untasked
hovering in place, aimless
thick-veined idling hands
taking their rest

weightless in the air
unfolding in prayer
 
 
The poem's title is from Hermann Broch, Death of Virgil.


Posted 15 Jan 2025. Please send comments to [email protected].

​Cynthia Reeves, “Untitled,” 1970s

iv
record lows
earth fills its pockets
with frozen pebbles

cold days, colder nights
who can explain
suffering to a stone?

How simply the feelings flow this afternoon
Over the simplest words:
It is too cold for work, now, in the fields.
—Wallace Stevens

​Casting the First Stone

“In a fascinating interview with Michel Treguer …, [René] Girard elucidates how Jesus deals with the murderous mob, as related in the Gospel of John, that wishes to stone the adulterous woman. Jesus, he suggests, bends down and writes in the dirt to avoid setting off the angry crowd by looking directly in their eyes and thus provoking them. Then, by asking who will throw the first stone, he makes clear how different it is to initiate a violent act than to imitate it. He is challenging the individuals in the mob to self-examination. Christianity, Girard argues, defends victims by taking aim at the ‘automatism’ of violent mimetic desire and contagion. It proclaims truth amid a plethora of lies.”—Daniel J. Mahoney, “Mimetic Musings,” review of René Girard, All Desire Is a Desire for Being,” New Criterion, Sept 2024, 61

Winter of 1915-1916 in Vienna
 
“In the winter of 1915-16, the effects of the war could be felt in everyday life. The time of the enthusiastically singing recruits in Prinzenallee was gone. When small groups of them now trudged past us on our way home from school, they didn’t look at us as cheerful as before. They still sang ‘In the homeland, in the homeland we’ll meet again!’, but home didn’t seem so close to them. They were no longer so certain that they’d be coming back. They sang ‘I had a comrade,’ but as though they themselves were the fallen comrade they sang about.…
     Once, walking along the Schüttel, we came near the railroad bridge that spanned the Danube Canal. A train was standing there, it was stuffed with people. Freight cars were joined to passenger cars; they were all jammed with people staring down at us, mutely, but questioningly. ‘Those are Galician – ‘ Schiebl [his friend] said, holding back the word ‘Jews’ and replacing it with ‘refugees.’ Leopoldstadt was full of Galician Jews who had fled from the Russians. Their black kaftans, their earlocks, and their special hats made them stand out conspicuously. Now they were in Vienna, where could they go? They had to eat too, and things didn’t look so good for food in Vienna.
     I had never seen so many of them penned together in railroad cars. It was a dreadful sight because the train was standing. All the time we kept staring, it never moved from the spot. ‘Like cattle,’ I said, ‘that’s how they’re squeezed together, and there are also cattle cars.’
     ‘Well, there are so many of them,’ said Schiebl, tempering his disgust at them for my sake; he would never have uttered anything that could offend me. But I stood transfixed, and he, standing with me, felt my horror. No one waved at us, no one called, they knew how unwelcome they were and they expected no word of welcome. They were all men and a lot were old and bearded. ‘You know,’ said Schiebl, ‘our soldiers are sent to the war in such freight cars. War is war, my father says.’ Those were the only words of his father’s that he ever quoted to me, and I realized he was doing it to wrench me out of my terror. But it didn’t help, I stared and stared, and nothing happened. I wanted the train to start moving, the most horrible thing of all was that the train still stood on the bridge.”—Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free (FSG, 1979), 109-111

“       … the tea steam hangs
Phantom chrysanthemums on long, evaporating stems
In the air of the winter apartment.”
—Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Kremlin of Smoke, I. The Salon,” in The Lamplit Answer (FSG, 1985), 3

Posted 12 January 2025. Send comments to [email protected]

​Cynthia Reeves, “Floating Form,” 1978. Like the dreams of a baby in the womb.

iii

rain now, snow later
the house curls around itself
dreaming of fire

If there were dreams to sell
What would you buy?
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Here we are all, by day; by night we are hurled
By dreames, each one, into a sev'rall world.
—Robert Herrick

serenity
the shadow in the light
like blue smoke
—Philippe Jaccottet

winter dawn
the cold car
idles in its smoke

winter morning
by the road
the dead possum smokes

Stand in the fire of the present moment, just as you are, receiving it just as it is, as whatever kind of grace it may...be.—Adam S. Miller

Fire ... links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world.—Gaston Bachelard

in love at last
she throws a pine knot
into the fire

Winter is a simplifier.
Cold and dark
do the work of fire.

 
Tell Me Where All Past Years Are
 
She had a broad lap, a feed sack apron.
We sat warming on the stoop,
and everything around falling
fell onto her sack, golden
catkins, chinquapin burs, pods
of locust sticky with their honey,
dust of stars, the dust of furrows.
She hummed; I translate:

When will the time come back to me
when hours were in my pocket
as many and heavy as loose pennies, 
when days oozed slow and thick
as end-of-summer honey, when happiness
formed in my hands like butter from the churn
to squeeze and pat into a cake
and print with a petal crown of daisies?

Now we both are humming, sixty or more
years between renditions, and while
we sing the sun clocks out and the moon
on the ridgetop stands and shakes out its lap,
a glowing radium dial.
     Visions International, 2022


The Day

The little room’s only window looked out
towards the ridgetop, the Dunkard church in the curve
of the two-lane, and, just beyond, the graveyard.

The morning sun sidled in past the half-closed
slats and resolved into rays and flecks
burning in the light—dust motes, I know,

and likely knew then, too, but still entranced
I watched one morning after our breakfast.
On this day I’d have otherwise forgotten,

probably my grannies were in the kitchen--
Emma with arms stretched out to read who’d died
(she’d be in the Dunkard cemetery soon),

half-crippled Sallie stringing the green beans
(years of suffering and strokes lay just ahead)--
while I stood quietly in the little room to see

random sparks caught in the sunbeam’s glow,
worlds I could move with a single breath
of poem or prayer, but could not control.
      Skating Rough Ground, 2022

Out of Selection Come Painful Cattle

The present is a cow grazing
the meadow—a fawn-colored Jersey,
from muzzle to switch absorbed
in filling her rumen. Many cattle,
many presents, moving together
across the meadow, up
the hill into a stand of locusts.
They graze and chew, passing
the world through four stomachs
beautifully named—omasum
that some call manyplies,
abomasum, the honey-combed
reticulum, the paunch. 
The cattle leave their pasts
behind, in dark green puddles. 

Let the future come to you. 
It will swell like a freshening udder,
it will break into dark bloom
like the flower of afterbirth,
it will be rough tongues licking
breath into your lungs, throatfuls
of milk sucked greedily
from the teat, a season of frolic,
a day of weaning and bawling,
the moment when ownership
cuts into your ear, the months’ long
dark of mire and muck
when the dog-foot and clover hay
bursts with summer’s fragrance. 
It will be the cold shock
of the salt-block on your tongue,
the heat of the chemical dehorning,
the days fattening in the feedlot,
the rebirth in the chute, the ride,
the unnamed place you go to.

To lard its secret flesh
with purpose, the future will feast
on lespedeza and wind-punched
apples, on corn shocks and silage
sweet with that year’s molasses. 
Let it go slow, placing its feet only
where you have stepped, seeing
only what you have seen, trees
herded into evening shade. 
May it come up behind you
like a man with a halter
to lead you back to the barn. 
     A different, later version appeared in Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022)

NOTE: The title is from Gertrude Stein, “A Box,” in Tender Buttons, 1912

 
The Presentness of the Past and Future
 “For Augustine, the past and the future are present to the reflecting mind in the present, and that mutual co-presence is exemplified in the ontological involvements of actions and their larger temporal contexts. The past and the future are ontologically present in the present, not just objects of thought for the mind. Things in the present are related to their being to the past and the future. In his way, Augustine belabored these puzzles, and those who have followed him (notably Heidegger) are indebted to the breakthrough that he opened up.... Augustine certainly sees the past no longer existent and the future not yet existent, but he also sees them as simultaneously existent and present in the present to the relating and involved soul or mind. In his language, the soul is 'distended'; he speaks of a 'distentio animi,' some of those meaning is present already in ‘intentio.’ The word intentio in Latin has meanings a lot broader than its English cognate (‘to put in tension’ is only one, and distento in some ways merely selects and emphasizes the meanings that English has lost."—Andrew P Porter, Living in Spin: Narrative as a Distributed Ontology of Human Action (AuthorHouse, 2011), 117-8.
 
*****
 
“The first [the naturalistic] concept of time cuts up time into accurately limited single sections and into single facts standing in those sections, which is finally possible only by reducing time to spatial happenings. Historical time, on the other hand, means a stream in which nothing is limited and isolated, but where all things flow into each other, where past and future are put into each other, where each present time carries, in a productive manner, at once past and future, where a measuring is not possible but only caesuras, which are more or less arbitrarily put in according to connections of meaning and great changes of meaning. The chronological reduction of those proceedings to spatial solar time is only a very crude and superficial means of orientation, which has nothing to do with the inner division, with the inner slowness or rapidity.”—Andrew P Porter, Living in Spin, 92-3, summarizing Ernst Troeltsch's formal logic of history in Der Historismus und seine Probleme.
 
 
Memory and History
 “[W]hat happens is inseparable from what people think happens. Inseparable; but not identical, and not enduring.... when it comes to a human event, a later realization that what happened was not what we/thought happened usually involves an increase in the quality of our knowledge, together with a decrease in the quantity in our memory.—John Lukacs, “The Presence of Historical Thinking,” in Remembered Past, 6-7.

ii

only the tree
downed by ice
will keep its leaves

*****

cold afternoon
ducks paddle in circles
to break up the ice

the final selfie--
a head of ice-white hair
bright clouds crumbling into snow

waiting for spring
three ducks
asleep on the ice

in the cloverleaf
circled by cars
geese break
the ice with their bills

Posted: 29 December 2024

Artists: Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi (ca. 1440 – 1460). Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art. Downloaded December 2024.

The Occasion: August 2012
 
One month before the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, my son and I happened to visit the Antietam battlefield in Maryland. We began at the Dunker Church and then, on foot and by car, followed the battle as it spread across the landscape. 

Photo and text: downloaded December 2024

The Painting
 
Later that day, or possibly the next, we went to the National Gallery of Art. As usual, we separated: John likes to take in as much as possible; I tend to find a handful of paintings to contemplate at leisure. The tondo by Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi caught my attention, and I lingered. I caught the eye of a docent walking by, and she stopped.

​“Do you see the man who sees the star?” she asked.

“No, please show me.” 

This led to a conversation in which she explained the symbolism—the iconography—of the painting. It was one of those rare moments when the need-to-know encounters a willing guide.

The Man Who Sees the Star

​The docent was tiny, with short, gray hair, and she talked with quiet authority; she reminded me of the actor Linda Hunt. She confessed to not knowing the precise meaning of the figures among the ruins—poor and outcast, obviously; possibly lepers. Whoever they are, they are invisible to the crowd pushing downhill.

That day they were for me the dead of Antietam waiting for God to restore them to life and to bring them into the fellowship of the Kingdom and the communion of the saints.
 
The Pomegranate

The docent asked me if I understood the meaning of the pomegranate on the Christ Child’s thigh. I had not noticed it. Its red flesh is (she said) a symbol for the crucifixion, its many seeds an emblem of the resurrection. The pomegranate was thought to be the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, the fruit of the tree of knowledge—good and evil, happiness and pain, trauma and joy: the burden we are born to carry, for ourselves and others; the infinite burden the Lord took upon himself in Gethsemane and Golgotha.
 
 
Star and Pomegranate
 
Do you see the man in the painting--
the one in the procession
who alone has seen it
shining directly overhead?
Hands raised, fingers spread,
half in surprise, half in worship,
he’d like to stop and ponder
but is jostled by the crowd,
all of them pushing
downhill towards what they
are able to imagine—a father,
a mother, an infant on
her lap—and what they cannot:
on the child’s thigh, the red-fleshed
fruit, half-peeled and bloody.
     Agape Review, 8 Dec 2021
 
The Peacock and the Cow
​

A peacock, symbol of immortality. roosts on the roof of the stable, an apt symbol of our everyday world—folks at work, the horses being fed and shod in the rich smell of manure and hay, the stolid horned cow, with the pretty fringe hanging between her horns, all oblivious to the scene in the drama of redemption playing before us. 

​Christmas 2021
 
Months fly by, the older you become--
the day of thanks gives way to boisterous Christmas,
the turkey drumstick then the Christmas drum.

Years fly by, the older you become.
Healthy today, tomorrow a fatal symptom,
a gasp for breath, a fall. Enjoy the rush

as life flies by. The older you become,
each day of thanks is a joyous Christmas.

******

Below is a depiction of the painter in threadbare clothing, humbly worshipping the Savior. This figure also represents us as our contemplation of the painting becomes an act of worship.

i.
cold wind
leaf over leaf
will scrape across the snow

*****

In my posts for each of the thirteen weeks of winter, I imagine colder days than we consistently get in my part of North Carolina. But over the years we have experienced winter weather—sleet that knocked out the power for several very cold days, knee-high snow (it usually melted quickly), rivers frozen so hard a few hardy souls dared to step out on the ice. Late fall here has been unusually cold this year, perhaps portending an icy winter. I am writing on Wednesday 18 December. The high today will be 70, but a low of 19 degrees is forecast for Sunday, the planned date for this post. We may remember this as a cold winter.

Most of my memories of cold weather in the South come from two winters. First was the winter of 1959-1960 in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia: unusually heavy snow fell on four consecutive Wednesdays and remained on the ground through an unusually long cold snap; in some places it was blown into drifts over 20 feet high. On our farm in Southwest Virginia, we could walk on the drifts over fences; the tops of the fence posts protruded only an inch or two above the snow. The storms and persistent snow cover caused major disruptions and hardships for many, though not for my family. In remote areas, food was helicoptered in for people and livestock. In North Carolina, children missed so much school, a special act of the legislature was required to allow them to advance to the next grade.

The second landmark winter was January 1994, when an unusual cold snap in the Raleigh-Durham area caused rivers to freeze over. My son and I walked out on ice over shallow spots on the Eno. Falling through would only have wetted our boots, but we didn’t fall through. The ice cracked but did not bend or break.

Eno Winter 1994

i. Feeder creek
above water
stump ends ice-encased
end game

ii. Islets of ice, eyelets of sun
“If she cracks she bears”
coronal splendors teethe the light

avid as tongue for water
the eye creases the ice

nuzzle pivots and frays
the wind: shoots

of man-smell flag the woods
like common grass

rive from river the high-tailed fear
the white-tailed beauty

“if she bends she breaks”
with crack of fire

iii. Great blue
The heron bides on one leg stumped
the kingfisher's harangue. Exiled inland
these solitary birds shy as bats

beat their wings like dirty rugs.
Trapped by winter they stoicize:
can freeze upright and fall with a clatter.

Mired in the Eno, their bodies are baled
with log and leaf, bottle, carcass of tire
foul and indispensable.

iv. The air this side
Brazen airings attack
us napped and felted inside-
outed by bluer breathings

They cap the riffles with foam
pour unvoiced over the river
the mercies of God

Shuttle steaming from lights
to heart, bolted to iron
swimming in us as we in them

Fluvial days, rivers
of exhalation: the noon light shivers
shivers and drowns the trees.

v. The bluer book
What matters cannot be said: in this field
of vision that obtuse angle of ridge and river
form of air and light, it is what you see
you cannot say, for you see nothing:

the opposite ridge sheared (like this) of woods,
the ice-mottled brush-lined river, the arc
of power lines carving the space:  these--
palpable and opaque—permit the void

to fill the eye. Moved inwardly by that glow,
we speak—must speak—though what we say, whatever
we can say, does not matter.  What it means, if it
means anything, is beyond our saying.

vi. Are these
The green pastures promised the righteous? The grass
is all browns, yellows, and grays, like a barbershop’s
day’s end sweepings. Where are the hoppers, the fiddlers,
the leg-scraping white-winged shit-spitters?

Like the rich, they are different: wear
their bones outside, breathe from the gut, sing
all summer long. Come back in July, climb
the high grassed hill before the power company

bushhogs it back to lawn, and they will rise
before you clickety-click in a green-brown tide,
in an arcing shoal of alien life. They will be
almost as strange to you as your own life,

if you ever see it for what it is; almost
as strange as the life you haven't lived.

vii. The king of hearts
Under the bridge, Twan of New York
has painted hearts in red and black.
Overhead the cars pass up and down Guess Road.
Climb the embankment—it's terraced
in red dirt, like a ziggurat--
and you can touch the roadway
with the flat of your hand.

Here you can escape the rain and sun
and even the traffic noise.
This is a sturdy bridge: 
at rush hour it doesn't shake or groan,
but hums like a big cat
after a kill. Twan
whose middle name is Dante

has sprayed on a lengthwise beam
just under the road bed, a red beetle--
the people's car, humped like a bison--
and on the concrete support
a rural mailbox labeled Old Farms.
Any escape is good, if you can find it. 
Here others, or Twan himself, warn

'fagots' of an imprecise wrath,
and you can inspect the products of the age--
flattened beer cans, Xmas paper
still in shape of the box,
a price list (suggested retail) for barstools,
flecks and shards of styrofoam.
As for every other spot of land,

someone no doubt has died for this.
Twan, perhaps, could live for it.
--Crucible, Fall 1994; winner of Sam Ragan Prize
  
Notes
ii. Italicized lines are from John Gordon, "If She Bends, She Breaks," in Aidan Chambers, ed., A Haunt of Ghosts.
iv. “airings”—a pun on airain, the French word for bronze
v. “the bluer book”—a joking allusion to the published notes of lectures by Wittgenstein called the Blue Book.
 
Posted 22 December 2024

My father killed himself forty-seven years ago on Monday, 12 December 1977. This week is the 13th and final week of fall. 

A Good Death
Fall 1977

I take my yellow pad and felt pen.
They’ve told me not to come to work again.
Your nerves are shot, they say. Get some help.
But they’re afraid I’ll talk. And I’m afraid,

sure they’ve bugged the house. Again
the do-re-mi in my head, as I slide
out of my car, wondering how I got here,
on the ridge I’m walking up, thinking

of the old man who could stand at the top
and see nothing he didn’t own but sky. Too tight
to spend his cash on fire, Jones wore his coat
indoors all winter and ate his supper cold.

I sit on a root and write, conjuring
the old man in his 80’s scything grass
with an easy, fluid motion, laying it down
in swatches as neat as a schoolmarm’s letters;

the muscles rippling across his back
as he swung the blade; the rhythm he settled into,
paying out no more effort than needed
to finish by dark. I write, I wish I’d learned

to die like Jones at harvest, a well-worn
tool in hand, a ripe field beckoning.
Now I’m back in the car, the Fury
starting, the world streaming by like water,

the road beneath my tires turning liquid.
Now I swallow the pills as if I were a child
and they were candy corn—a handful—two handfuls
like shaped notes in the mouth, the darkness

singing fa-sol-la, ‘tis eventide,
the stupor will abide with me,
and I know how the dead wake, eating
grains of dirt to get back to the light. 
      Skating Rough Ground, 2022; Bay Leaves, Spring 2012
 
******

Closing the Account
December 1977
 
The solstice nears. Slush of old snow funds
the Yadkin with dirty commerce. Clay banks
dictate their depositions to the river. 
The river is not satisfied. I write

over each doorway in the house
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The flamboyance
is for myself, to show God I really
suffer. What is it I’ve forgotten? 

I begin the last words on my pad: 
I rise with dawn and feel like hell. 
Voices in my head, voices among
the waking birds, ‘Come and see,

a bushel of barley for a penny.’
They led me like a child through court
to testify against my kind, my friends
from childhood. I did it for my children,

to look them in the eye. As my sole
bargaining chip with God. I’ve blazed all
the lintels with black magic marker,
but the angel will not pass over. 

Pill bottles by the bed, in the library
a rack of guns. But this is how it ought
to end: like cut grass, blanched. Like morning glory
shriveling to a pin. What will the milk cow do?

Go on chewing what she has chewed before,
her milk vein swelling to feed her bag. 
Cast into the fire, I will smoke like fat. 
The world we love will go on being the world. 
      Skating Rough Ground, 2022; Bay Leaves, Fall 2011

*****

Ripeness Is All

Weighting the low branches, vermilion
splotched with apple green, it hangs
in easy reach—not quite ready
to pick, but turn your eye away one
moment, it will bruise with neglect.

The exact moment never comes
when it falls easily to hand.
By day it holds the stem like
a hooked redeye, then over night
spikes itself on the stubble.

When is my time, you wonder,
when will I, trembling with plenty
let go into the ripe void?
When will I steer
drunkenly into the blade?
     Night Weather, 2010; Visions International, 2005


*****

hawk in the dripping tree
can soar and dive and kill
and sit still in the rain

Miguel de Cervantes:
     Let me tell you, answered Don Quixote, that there is no remembrance that time does not efface, nor pain that death does not end.
    But what greater misfortune can there be, replied Sancho Panza, than one that waits for time to efface it and death to end it?

Vaclav Havel:
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world . . . Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
     Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons . . .
     Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.
     Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (quoted in comment by Tatiana to blog post, "On Hope," by J. Nelson-Seawright)

The prophet Mormon (Moroni 7):
41 And what is it that ye shall hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection, to be raised unto life eternal, and this because of your faith in him according to the promise.
42 Wherefore, if a man have faith he must needs have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope.
43 And again, behold I say unto you that he cannot have faith and hope, save he shall be meek, and lowly of heart.

Posted 15 December 2024