The Old Mule

New Year's words from a true poet

"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is life itself...That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life."

- Stanley Kunitz

--

photo by Simon Roberts, a stunning artist in his own right.

Lookout

by Frances Leviston, from Best Scottish Poems of 2007      

        Nothing in sight but water's deferrals,
        deflections, its million-galloned grief;
        though sometimes, when the light is angled so
        as to prism inside the waves' tips,
        it seems we're actually anchored in fields:
        that we could drop off and land on our feet
        in a rich plough-land confected with frost,
        in mud flats, or sand dunes. We could forget
        dry land is a dream in the dream of it

It is rain, make it snow

"Venetian Air," by Thomas Moore

--

Venetian Air

Row gently here, my gondolier; so softly wake the tide,
That not an ear on earth may hear, but hers to whom we glide.
Had Heaven but tongues to speak, as well as starry eyes to see,
Oh! think what tales 'twould have to tell of wandering youths
    like me!
Now rest thee here, my gondolier; hush, hush, for up I go,
To climb yon light balcòny's height, while thou keep'st watch
    below.
Ah! did we take for Heaven above but half such pains as we
Take day and night for woman's love, what angels we should
    be!

Philip Levine and a Russian C-mas card

This is an exceptional poem by Philip Levine. I first read this fifteen years ago on the second floor of the University of Oregon's library. I think it was almost christmas.

--

The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy."
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
"orange," saying it patiently over and over.
A long autumn voyage, the days darkening
with the black waters calming as night came on,
then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space
without limit rushing off to the corners
of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish
to find her family in New York, prayers
unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored
by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness
before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat
while smallpox raged among the passengers
and crew until the dead were buried at sea
with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.
"The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book
I located in a windowless room of the library
on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days
offshore in quarantine before the passengers
disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships
arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune"
registered as Danish, "Umberto IV,"
the list goes on for pages, November gives
way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.
Italian miners from Piemonte dig
under towns in western Pennsylvania
only to rediscover the same nightmare
they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.

 

Staying In

We finally have a good rain tonight. Cold. The rivers should be edging up; maybe I can get a canoe down the Edisto.

It feels like winter and I can hear tires down the wet of the road. The sound makes me want to stay home.  But I always get excited, worked up and have to move my feet a bit, listen to the old engine purr. So I go out for a while, pretend to be a regular member of society, then retreat back to my spread of old books, papers across the bed. I make a bit of tea.

A place of one's own is a simple, true pleasure. I have a small shell of a place with good windows and maps on the wall. Tonight I find it uplifting, really, and I make myself a cup of darjeeling tea because the name sounds far away, and I light a few candles and think back on all the things that have happened. It is a good season to keep the mind going - don't forget to let yourself roam.

Here is a poem I like by Gary Snyder, who, I am told, owns a huge poodle...

--

Not Leaving the House

When Kai is born
I quit going out

Hang around the kitchen -- make cornbread
Let nobody in.
Mail is flat.
     Masa lies on her side, Kai sighs,
     Non washes and sweeps
We sit and watch
     Masa nurse, and drink green tea.

Navajo turquoise beads over the bed
A peacock tail feather at the head
A badger pelt from Nagano-ken
For a mattress; under the sheet;
A pot of yogurt setting
Under the blankets, at his feet.

Masa, Kai,
And Non, our friend
In the garden light reflected in
Not leaving the house.
From dawn till late at night
     making a new world of ourselves
     around this life. 


                        Gary Snyder

Holding On, by Philip Levine

I know I am always carrying on about one thing or another, but Philip Levine is such a fine writer of real poems. When is the last time you read something that sounded like this?:

--

Holding On

Green fingers
holding the hillside,
mustard whipping in
the sea winds, one blood-bright
poppy breathing in
and out. The odor
of Spanish earth comes
up to me, yellowed
with my own piss.
                             40 miles from Málaga
half the world away
from home, I am home and
nowhere, a man who envies
grass.
                 Two oxen browse
yoked together in the green clearing
below. Their bells cough. When
the darkness and the wet roll in
at dusk they gather
their great slow bodies toward
the stalls.
                               If my spirit
descended now, it would be
a lost gull flaring against
a deepening hillside, or an angel
who cries too easily, or a single
glass of seawater, no longer blue
or mysterious, and still salty.

- Phlipe Levine

not white, yet

some folks seem to like this as much as I do: