Fall

“We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

― Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati

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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.   Denise Levertov

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Winter Litany   Robin Davidson
                        Kraków, March, 2004

I stand on Wawel Hill
in early March and morning snow
falls in flocks
tiny paper cranes
descending blowing dissolving
one into another
on the cobblestone walk
an avalanche of light

I believe this must be
what death is

this alternate
shining and melting, shining and flying

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“I like the floor as a place for grieving. You can't fall off." Kate Braestrup, Main Chaplain to Game Wardens on "Speaking of Faith."

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One Heart            Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

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Grief Daybook II                    Carol Ann Davis

There are panels of sky
as good as forgotten, 

Evans' gelatin folds of Florida
circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first

where the gulf lifts it,
then comes to me like a halo 

around the palm tree with its neck bent,

its spray of branches 

leaning out of frame
as if to flee. Its roots pull 

at sand, as if to say,
this is what it takes.

I'd believe, if not for the way

my breath catches, 

if not for the wild faint

sleep's become. The palm's branches

are spears left
where they've fallen 

in the dirty sand, too heavy

for the tide to take them. Where the neck bends, 

cut branches—like stubble on a chin
as seen from below—seem to ask

something of the photographer,
something not washed away

in the chemical bath. The shadow of the trunk
just underlines—means to prove the existence 

of the world. It's three o'clock

and the latticework of 1934 

is pulling around me in this light

as if to say my god, my god,

a hymn sung

by infidels to believers 

as a way to ask for water.

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Apprehension in the Blurry Trees                            Cameron Thomas

Fallen, what can a leaf care about being plucked from its
      branch?

Two crows forage on the roof across the street, stepping
      along a gutter, picking through tan and rusty
      swatches, and casting them to the ground.

One finds what he wants, so he steps to the edge, drops,
      and glides across the blurry trees.

The other remains, keeping a leaf in her beak as though
      it were a body.

She must be the one who speaks from the heart and ruins
      everything.

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Fall down seven times; get up eight.                                          Japanese proverb

It's Eshle-Man to the Rescue!

I've been struggling mightily with a poem the last few days. Today I spent time sitting at the dining room table staring at the errant piece, getting nowhere (again!). So I decided to give up and read some poetry instead, hoping for a respite from my frustration.

I went to my bookshelf and found Clayton Eshleman's The Aranea Constellation (Rain Taxi, 1998). It's a chapbook of poetics that I don't remember getting; I'm sure someone sent it to me, but I don't know who. So I opened it up, and unbelievably, I immediately came across a different way to look at my problem with my poem.

I'm not going to share that with you today (don't want to sap the power from it till the poem is done), but here are two passages from the chapbook that also struck a chord:

Quoting Anton Ehrenzweig: "Any creative search, whether for a new image or idea, involves the scrutiny of an often astronomical number of possibilities. The correct choice between them cannot be made by a conscious weighing up of each single possibility cropping up during the search; if attempted it would only lead us astray. A creative search resembles a maze with many nodal points. From each of these points many possible pathways radiate in all directions leading to further crossroads where a new network of high - and by-ways comes into view. Each choice would be easy if we could command an aerial view of the entire network of nodal points and radiating pathways still lying ahead. This is never the case. If we could map out the entire way ahead, no further search would be needed. As it is, the creative thinker has to make a decisions about this route without having the full information needed for his choice. This dilemma belongs to the essence of creativity."

And Eshleman's original writing: "There is an archetycal poem, and its most ancient design is probably the labyrinth. One suddenly cuts in, leaving the green world for the apparent stasis and darkness of the cave. The first words of a poem propose and nose forward toward a confrontation with what the writer is only partially aware of, or may not be prepared to address until it emerges, flushed forth by digressions and meanders. Poetry twists toward the unknown and seeks to realize something beyond the poet's initial awareness. What it seeks to know might be described as the unlimited interiority of its initial impulse. If a "last line," or "conclusion," occurs to me upon starting to write, I have learned to put it in immediately, so it does not hang before me, a lure, forcing the writing to skew itself in order that this "last line" continues to make sense as such."

When is a Poem True?

Poetry Daily Prose Feature this week is an essay by Lawrence Raab entitled "Should Poems Tell the Truth?" (originally in New Ohio Review, Fall 2014). This is a question I have wondered, moreso when I've found out that an experience described by a poet was fiction (and I felt betrayed) than when I've written a poem that isn't based on fact (and haven't felt like I was betraying anyone at all). This paradox has interested me over time. Apparently the same is true for Lawrence Raab, who quotes Paul Valery and then ruminates further:

'As Paul Valery writes in "Poetry and Abstract Thought": "A poet's function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others." Yet young writers are often startled by that remark. The poem is made for the reader, and is sent out into the world to do its work as best it can, and without any intervention from the author. As Richard Wilbur has said, the poem is "a kind of machine of feeling which other people can use." The rest is private.'

Raab explores specific poems and their relationships to historical fact, and how that affects the reader, and what the moral implications are. If this subject has ever interested you, check out this essay. 

Eye Eye Eye Eye

Walking Home on an Early Spring Evening                         David Young

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.

Who hasn't seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield
who hasn't heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate

and you'll feel part of it for once,
you'll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you'll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you'll

say "Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song." The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,

its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we've made
and then the one we haven't.

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Anatomical Angel                                    by Averill Curdy

L’ange Anatomique, by Jacques-Fabien Gautier Dagoty, 1746

                        Unfastened avidly from each ivory button

          of her spine, the voluntary muscles open

virtuosities of red: Cinnabar

                        the mutagen, and carmine from cochineal

          born between fog and frost, so many little

deaths Buddhists refuse to wear

                        robes soaked in its thousands. Sunsets

          of other centuries fade in galleries to ash.

Red is fugitive: As the voice, the blow

                        of gravity along a nerve opening to an ache

          the body can’t unhouse: As the carnation

suffusing cheek and haunch like saucers

                        from the king’s porcelain rinsed in candlelight.

          Gratuitous as the curl, the urn-shaped torso,

the pensive, brimming gaze of pretty

                        post-coital thought she half-turns over one

          excavated shoulder. As if to see herself

in a mirror’s savage theater as elegy

                        to the attempt to fill an exhausted form,

          to learn again the old ordeals of wound

and hand and eye. To find the source of burning.

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Habitus                    Thom Satterlee

Language, he asserted, was a habitus... What precisely
he meant by habitus is not explained, but the context in
which the word is applied to language would suggest a
sense of "clothing... "
— Anne Hudson, "Wyclif and the English Language"

All morning he read from a thick volume
propped on a stand. He read and he read,
and when he closed his eyes
he continued to read
until the words took off their clothes
and laid them down on a hillside
that vanished whenever a cloud
passed between it and the sun.

All his life Wycliffe had wanted this:
the words undressed and he going to them,
a child to a fair, burning to see
if Faith wore her hair in a braid,
whether Why held out its hands, palms up,
and where Simony put his coins
when he stood naked in the light.

But no: Wycliffe had got it all wrong.
He was not going to see the words.
They were coming to him
with their arms loaded with robes
stacked so high he couldn't see their faces,
and before he knew it, invisible hands
began measuring him with ropes
stretched between his wrist and his chest,
from his hip down to the ground,
around his waist and around his neck.

The fitting took all day. He tried on
Son and Friend, Scholar, Reformer,
Heretic; he slipped into Priest,
wore also Doctor Evangelicus
and Morning Star. Some robes
hung too loosely; others pinched his neck.

In the end, he had to wear them all
and learn the sadness of being a word —
only one surface to show the world
while he lived underneath the layers
and listened for the barely audible
sound of his own heart beating.

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After the Moon                                                                                                          Marianne Boruch

eclipsed itself, the rumor or darkness

true, the whole radiant business

almost over, only a line,

an edge, like some

stray part of a machine

                                                        not one of us

can figure any more:

what it thrashed or cut, what it sewed

quietly together, what it scalded

or brought back from the dead. After this,

I came inside to sleep.    

                                          But it’s the moon still,

pale run of it shaping

the door closed against the half-lit hall.

The eye is its own

small flicker orbiting under the lid

a few hours.

                        Not so long,

bright rim,

giving up its genius

briefly, mountains under dark, craters

where someone, then no one

is walking.

Mende-Lego-Ev

Dmitri Mendeelev, as imagined by Reasonably Clever: