Mind of Winter

The Sunlight on the Garden

by Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Permanently

by Kenneth Koch

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing— for example, “Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth.”
Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”
Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

Separation

by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

The Illiterate

by William Meredith

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

I’ve been thinking about this word today. The thing that struck me was that it is defining a noun, “summer,” as an activity, “unbosoming.” Can anyone think of examples where this is commonly done?

This question falls into the context of our discussion on the poet’s relationship to images: can he capture them or do they always move for him? I noticed that besides this place where the summer becomes an activity that there are many other strange movements:

The third stanza has a bunch of movement in the images and even the images themselves (in the context of this poem) are active
an image: disturbs
the crocus: opening its mouth
flowers: breed
water: (washing) cools, is spilt
an image: born, hastens
life: forks
image: changes
flowers: drop
fresh images: surround, catch

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Hey! Can we do poetry this week at our place? It would help me out and it looks like chez Jon and Sam is the place to be FRI night. If its inconvenient, though, no worries.

To go along with the sun, here are the stars:

Stars

by Mary Oliver

Here in my head, language
keeps making its tiny noises.

How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars

whose flaring and hissing are not speech
but a pure radiance?

How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them

Where nothing, ever, is spoken?
Tonight at the edge of the field,

I stood very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.

What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?

Then it was over, the wind
roused up in the oak trees behind me

and I fell back, easily.
Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos—

even the distant bird
as it talks threat, as it talks love

over the cold, black fields.
Once, deep in the woods,

I found the white skull of a bear
and it was utterly silent—

and once a river otter, in a steel trap,
and it too was utterly silent.

What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,

modest and willing, and in our places?
Listen, listen, I’m forever saying,

Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,
to the mockingbird, to the Jack-in the pulpit—

then I come up with a few words, like a gift.
Even as now.

Even as the darkness has remained the pure, deep darkness.
Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,

looking up,
one hot sentence after another.

—from Stars in West Wind,
Houghton Mifflin, 1997

I tell ya, I’m such a sucker for alliteration. (That and lights on trees in the winter.) So, needless to say, I enjoyed the Swinburne poem you posted Mike.

The snow is blowing out here in Nebraska, but not as high as the trees. That’s a good thing though since I intend to come home tomorrow. Thursday at Jon’s place sounds good to me.

See you all soon!

I apologize for being so out of things and unresponsive lately. I am so deeply drenched in the depths of the unpoetic and pathetic linguistic that the pressure is poised to prompt me to implode. But I’m hoping to take a break from it all for a couple hours to do our thing thursday night. Our place would be fine but lets keep it simple and do Jon’s unless he (or others) would prefer to come out to the palisades. And the poems Jon mentioned sound good to me. Oh and I heard this poem read recently and liked it. Its also contemporary and female (Elizabeth Bishop). ESSO was Exxon before it was Exxon.

Filling Station

by Elizabeth Bishop

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO–SO–SO–SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

A poem in your honor:

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