The Old Mule

Hotel del Mayo

Raymond Carver has been one of my favorite writers for quite some time. He is not upbeat. He is not happy. But he certainly is real. And that is what separates him from so many of the others. Take this poem for instance, The Hotel del Mayo -- dour subject matter, but not something you will easily forget. This will stay with you long past lunch.

I have just returned from New York. I am glad to be home, to walk down my sidewalks and not be bumped out of the way. But there was this museum, and a bar down an un-named alley, and a cab driver named Frank. I will have to tell more about those, but I am out the door.

--

"In the Lobby of the Hotel del Mayo" by Raymond Carver, from Ultramarine: Poems.

In the Lobby of the Hotel del Mayo

The girl in the lobby reading a leather-bound book.
The man in the lobby using a broom.
The boy in the lobby watering plants.
The desk clerk looking at his nails. The woman in the lobby writing a letter.
The old man in the lobby sleeping in his chair.
The fan in the lobby revolving slowly overhead.
Another hot Sunday afternoon.

Suddenly, the girl lays her finger between the pages of her book.
The man leans on his broom and looks.
The boy stops in his tracks.
The desk clerk raises his eyes and stares.
The woman quits writing.
The old man stirs and wakes up.
What is it?

Someone is running up from the harbor.
Someone who has the sun behind him.
Someone who is barechested.
Waving his arms.

It's clear something terrible has happened.
The man is running straight for the hotel.
His lips are working themselves into a scream.

Everyone in the lobby will recall their terror.
Everyone will remember this moment for the rest of their lives.

New York City

I read this poem in college, during a dreary time, and I remember being floored by the language and imagery. It was around this time that I finally became certain that there was more to life than what I had been taught. I knew then that there was more to existence than the grocery store, your girlfriend's dog, the tear in your jeans. There are great plains of clouds, avenues of exploration and a thousand pools of unusual depth and ideas. One must put on a pair of boots, or set out a line. Wade out in to it all. Or, at least, read good poems.

William Butler Yeats
"Sailing to Byzantium"

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Theresa Duncan's Staircase

I am working, which is rare. Production. Telephones. Driving about, making notes. Next week I fly to New York where the weather will be all but unlivable. I have a heavy coat in the back of the closet. I have the Sun Also Rises. I have a new, blank journal. And to top it off, I read Aristotle's "Art of Rhetoric" after lunch, or a few pages of it at least. Things are well, I keep telling myself that. My work shoes feel like watered down pirate boots, and the coins in my pocket are skinny and silver. Things could be worse.

In the spirit of late winter, here is a wonderful piece from T. S. Eliot. This came from the website of Theresa Duncan. Which, if you don't know her story, you should.

--

from T.S. Eliot's East Coker (No. 2 of Four Quartets)

V.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Grammar, Hoagland, Rain

It is raining here, and I feel out  of sorts, out of line with the currents. There is a lot changing, always. And I feel breathless from the spin; each time I leave my house the world is new. But I am heading up to the South Carolina mountains early tomorrow morning. I need to walk around a bit, cut out through the rhododendron, run up on a bear or raccoon. If anything can jolt me out of a sour slide, it is the Blue Ridge. I feel most at ease up in the conifers and outcrops.  Not out of some need to be above the others, but I enjoy thin air, the slow thinking, the imagination that I live a century or two past our great present.

I woke up with Tony Hoagland in mind. He has written a few of my favorite poems. Here is a great one -- a stunning simple thing:

   

Grammar, by Tony Hoagland

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

Personal Letter No. 3

A Sunday poem by Sonia Sanchez. And by goodness who ever saw her coming? How about a line like..."no more wild geo / graphies of the  / flesh". You won't find that at the university.

--

Personal Letter No. 3 -  by Sonia Sanchez

nothing will keep
us young you know
not young men or
women who spin
their youth on
cool playing sounds.
we are what we
are what we never
think we are.
no more wild geo
graphies of the
flesh. echoes. that
we move in tune
to slower smells.
it is a hard thing
to admit that
sometimes after midnight
i am tired
of it all.

The End of Christmas

Jane Kenyon has a flair about her pen that I just love:

Here, as in Denmark,
it's dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.


"Taking Down the Tree" by Jane Kenyon, from Collected Poems

--


Taking Down the Tree

"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it's dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother's childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant.