The Old Mule

Sunday on the Green River,

land low slung with hickory,

river drifting, swamp lily ripe

and bent and all the world fine

for a breath, everything asleep-

sounding in Spring but a whir

of the engine and your voice. This

is the year for letting go, you say

as you lean on the bent hood. Hips

slide on the seat,  your hand near

my lap. I don’t want to spend

another birthday in Cleveland,

you tell me, then lean back, push air

hard from your lungs, some hair now

out the window. Someday I might

come back, she drifted off with that

as thin shades of dusk lock the forest

in a spell of rest. The farm gate is rusted

but swings closed with a pull, and

we head back toward town in quiet.

This poem explores the sense of place that we all use as a guide to keep back the chaos of un-knowingness and fill back the void beyond that moon that waits for us to feel unclear and confused. I think that routine and habit are our minds way of making sense of our peculiar and disorderly surroundings. And the good rhythm and music of well written poetry is a decidedly modern comfort too. All is well, for this moment:

"Profile of the Night Heron" by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City. © Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Profile of a Night Heron

In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the night
heron is on his branch of his tree, blue
moon curve of his body riding low
above the pond, leaves dipping into water
beneath him, green and loose as fingers.
On the far shore, the ibis is where
I left him last time, a black cypher
on his rock. These birds, they go to the right
place every day until they die.

There are people like that in the city,
with signature hats or empty attaché cases,
expressions of private absorption fending
off comment, who attach to physical
locations—a storefront, a stoop, a corner,
a bench—and appear there daily as if for a job.
They negotiate themselves into the pattern
of place, perhaps wiping windows, badly,
for a few bucks, clearing the stoop of take-out
menus every morning, collecting the trash
at the base of the WALK/DON'T WALK sign
and depositing it in the garbage can.

Even when surfaces change, when the Mom & Pop
store becomes a coffee bar, when the park
benches are replaced with dainty chairs and a pebble
border, they stay, noticing what will never change:
the heartprick of longitude and latitude
to home in on, the conviction that life
depends, every day, on what outlasts you.

One of my favorite poets. What a treat to find this, read it over breakfast at my table, watching birds.

Marriage    by Louise Gluck, (from the New Yorker)

 

All week they’ve been by the sea again

and the sound of the sea colors everything.

Blue sky fills the window.

But the only sound is the sound of the waves pounding the shore—

angry. Angry at something. Whatever it is

must be why he’s turned away. Angry, though he’d never hit her,

never say a word, probably.

 

So it’s up to her to get the answer some other way,

from the sea, maybe, or the gray clouds suddenly

rising above it. The smell of the sea is in the sheets,

the smell of sun and wind, the hotel smell, fresh and sweet

because they’re changed every day.

 

 He never uses words. Words, for him, are for making arrangements,

for doing business. Never for anger, never for tenderness.

 

 She strokes his back. She puts her face up against it,

even though it’s like putting your face against a wall.

 

And the silence between them is ancient: it says

these are the boundaries.

 

He isn’t sleeping, not even pretending to sleep.

His breathing’s not regular: he breathes in with reluctance;

he doesn’t want to commit himself to being alive.

And he breathes out fast, like a king banishing a servant.

 

Beneath the silence, the sound of the sea,

the sea’s violence spreading everywhere, not finished, not finished,

his breath driving the waves—

 

But she knows who she is and she knows what she wants.

As long as that’s true, something so natural can’t hurt her.

Rain today. It sends me writing. Much afoot. I just returned from a house up the street, talking about (and learning) the harmonized scale. Tomorrow makes 35. Thirty five. Good gracious. And next year will be tossed from a rope swing to the river. It does speed up. And I sat up all night yesterday thinking about Alaska. Alaska. Deep wood, sitka spruce, a long pond of quiet off from everybody. I don't need anything complicated. I just want to be left alone. And I aim to work that out, somehow. Alaska. Not to live, but to get lost in.

Going back a bit, I have always found myself more happy out of the city. Hands in dirt. Skin no longer clean. Humans take to the woods, but they forget to touch: the trees, the stones or water, the soil. I forgot too, but feel better dirty, and calm a bit that way. There is an excitement of City, but I was made for country. We all were, right? Prima facie. 

I found this old poem from notes I had written in a small hotel in New York City:

The Seventh Sea

 

Ship's bow heads

toward cool water

waves on side

hard wood, planks

strapped tight, room

lit by whale candles,

pans clank, a tap

of seaman's boot. We

sleep deep in this

night, dream in fathoms,

paddle with arms

over feet, over

anything to push

this wreck farther.

This is just a great photo -- Johnny Horton and Johnny Cash on the steps of a post office in Cleveland County, 1959 (Photo by Don Hunstein)