It's a Wonderful Life
After the national fanfare died down, the quintuplets grew up protected from further exploitation in the safety and privacy that state funds and public donations ensured. But, inevitably, they had to enter the real world. On their eighteenth birthday they went to work as tellers in the same bank, my bank, the National Bank of Westchester. The first time I walked in and saw them behind the counter my heart skipped a beat: Veronica, Vanessa, Vivian, Next Teller Please, Valerie, Vicki. With their dark complexions, ruffled white blouses and full red lips -- like petals from a mythical flower, like the tens they plucked from their tills, they were identical down to the last curlicue. All I could think was that it would take a lifetime to explain this moment, an eternity to explain a lifetime. All I could say was, "Marvelous, incombustibly marvelous!" Words that echoed down the line as people from all walks of life couldn't help but agree. Behind his desk smiled B. Yourgrau, Manager, assured that another customer had found the answer to all his banking needs.
-- Paul Violi [photographed above with Star Black at KGB Bar 1998]
Happy birthday, Paul.
The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too.
from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012
Ultimately Justice Directs Them
1.
The soldiers are coming.
The soldiers
are coming to break America.
The soldiers are dispatched
from America
and they are landing
their boats on American shores.
2
Why are the soldiers coming?
Not because they believe
in what
they were told
but because they believe
that ultimately justice directs them,
that ultimately
the right thing will happen.
3
We say they are
the soldiers, but they are not:
they have chains and
moustaches
and hairstyles and daughters
and expressions on their faces
that their mothers remember on the faces
of the infants they were.
4
They are coming to break
everything down
to basics: America
has become too frumpy
for its pants.
Its health
care system cares not
for health.
5
Its laws are more paper.
6
Its schools are more paper.
7
Its schools are brick and paper.
8
The soldiers are yellow ribbon.
9
America looks at itself
and sees
itself, not America.
10
Itself looks at itself
and calls
what it sees America.
11
America has begun
calling everything
America no matter what.
12
Now more than ever.
13
Operation America.
Operation With Extra Cheese.
Operation With Fries With That.
Operation No Child Left Behind.
Operation Enduring Cheeseburger.
Operation Regurgitated Eagle.
Operation Prince of Freedom.
Operation All Night Long.
Operation Perhaps.
Operation No Really.
14
——
15
The soldiers are here.
16
Operation Big Time Pause.
17
Operation Please
And Thank You.
18
Operation Paper.
Operation No More Stars.
19
The Solders are wearing
yellow ribbons
in support
of the return
of the regular guy.
20
The soldiers are on TV
right outside
the door.
21
They are knocking——change
the channel.
22
Operation America Go!
Operation Yes!
Operation OK, OK.
Operation Every Man
for himself
and best of luck
to the women and kids.
23
——
24
By part 24 it is
already done.
– from No Tell Motel and The Best American Poetry 2009 [ed. David Wagoner]
2AM, and the Rabbinical Students Stand in Their Bathrobes
2AM, and the rabbinical students stand in their bathrobes
at the edge of the yeshiva parking lot, watching
the practiced motions of muscular firemen disembarking
from their engine. Soon, it will be determined
the youngest student in the building
pulled the basement alarm
after learning, over the dormitory pay phone,
his parents, back in Baltimore, intend to end
their nineteen year marriage before Passover.
The only one the rabbis have not accounted for
crouches in his closet behind a row of black sports coats.
And because the yeshiva caters to souls
but also bodies,
the early morning mysticism class
on why the Divine Presence cannot dwell
amongst those plagued by sadness
has been cancelled.
-- Yehoshua November
first posted on Verse Daily
#2 Devil
Manolo me Mammon
You gold-encrusted god of plenty
Park me on Park Avenue
Gild my walls. Chandelier my halls
Jet my days. Jaguar my bluestone nights
Pool me in my private Mediterranean
Yacht me & unstopper me
Margaux & Coach me
Cover me in coin. Booty & Botox me
Multiply my capacity for rapacity
Artichoke roast & spit me
Braise & flambé me
Let me live in your insatiable need
It's always a delight to stumble upon a new, previously uncollected poem by a master. Here is a poem Tom Disch wrote in December 2007.
Let's Make a List
The letter L
has cast her spell
on the whole English language.
The other letters willingly
anneal with her to form
all the words and things
we love the most: flowers
opening to the morning light,
the little birds fluttering
about the feeder, the swallows
along the river, ripplings,
dapplings, even loss.
L dies -- then lifts her head
and lives again. She smiles
in that special way she has
and it all becomes clear.
Look! there she is again
12/23/07
— Tom Disch
Reprinted by the Estate of Thomas M. Disch c/o Writers' Representatives LLC, New York, NY 10011. All rights reserved.
from David M. Katz's blog, we lift this tribute to Kenneth Koch:
<<<
Below I offer to readers of this blog a pre-New Year’s gift in the form of “You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” a delightfully funny poem by Kenneth Koch (1925–2002).
“Kenneth Koch” by Alex Katz. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Perhaps the poem, which first appeared in the May 18, 1998 issue of The New Yorker, may spur your thinking about the parameters for hatching resolutions for 2022. A poet of great and often giddy ebullience, Koch, I imagine, would have appreciated how its rhetorical structure seems almost to have enabled the poem to write itself. It’s a player piano of a poem.
In the first three lines, we discover the terms governing the situation, and their whimsical arbitrariness is part of the fun: You can have two out of three particular satisfactions of life—a robust circle of friends, a “passionate love life,” and fulfilling work—but only two out of three. Once the rules of the game have been established, it remains for this poet to work out the implications of each set of choices for the reader.
For an example of someone afforded the advantages of love and work, but not of a decent social life, the poet offers Michelangelo, who achieved the awesome task of painting the Sistine Chapel and whose passions were said to have been stirred by Vittoria Colonna. But no parties for you, Buonarotti.
Proceeding with seeming logic to the instance of another immortal artist, Koch envisions Homer as a party animal with enough staying power to write the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Homeric Hymns. Rhyming, with a witty preciousness, “banquets” and “lockets,” Koch portrays the great blind poet as lovelorn. And it’s hilarious to think of “Poor Old Homer,” as Ezra Pound referred to him, as shedding tears over the absence of a “Girl” in his life.
The two examples of artists whose labors spawned masterpieces set up the pleasure of a contrast with that of a bon vivant who has a great time at parties and in bed but achieves very little in life. While the poem ends just where we might have expected it to—at the point where Koch’s two-out-of-three formula is fully worked out—the shift in the tone of the poem in the last line to a colloquial, off-hand putdown has the subtle economy of a perfectly turned joke. “It must give pleasure,” wrote Wallace Stevens, in proposing the indispensable requirements of a poem. I hereby attest that Stevens’s poetic descendent, Kenneth Koch, has done so in “You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” and you can hear him read it here as you read along :
You Want a Social Life, with Friends
By Kenneth Koch
You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.
There isn’t time enough, my friends—
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?
Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.
https://davidmkatzpoet.com/blog/kenneth-koch-the-poem-writes-itself
When you leave, faceless
old lover, element
that I have tried for so long
to explain—I will be
suspended between
two large stones
for a moment
thinking you were good
before I am revived.
I will be laundry
that has gotten loose
from the line. Pantyhose
flying into traffic.
So long, handsome.
When you go, I will be
the moth, the butterfly,
turned to broth in the cocoon.
Reassembled, I will climb out
and you will be subsumed
into a majesty of vapor
gone as an orchid.
I plan it, little switchblade.
I will it, strand of sweet spittle,
endearing idiot I made
out of mud and loss—
you, whose shelf life is zero,
you, who keep me from totality
and the small sum of what
is otherwise infinite.
from Brooklyn Rail
New Year’s Day
Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—
a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen,
which is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day
or the feast of the Annunciation,
this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this cold day in late December, an only child.
And as an only child--
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning--
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more birthday might be a consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
in some kitchen calendar of the future,
the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,
party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
frirst published in Ballistics
Hello Tom. The day has come round at last
the day appointed for our meeting,
the day you are to die
and I decreed to be your executioner.
So you must look your best.
If you do not I will be dishonored
before all my rivals and companions,
a regular heavenly host they are
and quite particular in the protocols of death.
You should not seem to be expecting me, you know.
No candle in the window.
No Mahler on the record player.
(But they're not called that any more,
are they? The word has obsolesced, yes?
In any case, Mahler is forever
Mahler. Ewig!)
And for dinner something plain
and not to filling.
If there is to be a dinner.
Hello? Are you still there?
I'll have to cancel.
Yes, again.
Such a nuisance, yes I know.
Yes I see: everything's in such good order.
Even the bathroom floor.
But something has come up, it can't be helped.
I'll be getting back to you
but I can't say when.
Disappearance—My Euridyce
1967, New York City, East River
From Jackson Pollock, I had learned to hate
Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”--
Those white, white sheets--
thrown back covers
of the breakers’ unmade bed, and Venus
uncombed, unkempt, always just
decanted from sleep, that hair--
a serpentine peignoir tossed across her shoulders—
I scrubbed my palette down to nothing
but the colors of wash water and zinc bucket.
And embraced the iron light
between Broadway and the Bowery,
and, beneath the streetlights,
the junkies, fellow bees in a hive of misery.
I loved my oppression,
walked Cherry Street to the docks and--
--there--washed out,
dreamy, creepy,
drowned in her last experiment,
was a rat—
The dry clove of her eye glaring up.
If I bent down I would see
into the broken
hive of bones—
I did not look at her
staring at me from the window of her underworld.
About death
I didn’t give a damn.
I believed my hand
could open any lock.
And even if not,
as I forged ahead,
I did not once look back.
from The New York Review of Books
Shanked on the Red Bed
The perch was on the roof, and the puck was in the air.
The diffident were driving, and the daunted didn't care.
When I came out to search for you the lauded hit the breeze
On detonated packages the bard had built to please.
The century was breaking and the blame was on default,
The smallest mammal redolent of what was in the vault,
The screeches shrill, the ink-lines full of interbred regret ––
When I walked out to look for you the toad had left his net.
The discourse flamed, the jurors sang, the lapdog strained its leash ––
When I went forth to have you found the tenured took the beach
With dolloped hair and jangled nerves, without a jacking clue,
While all around the clacking sound of polished woodblocks blew.
When I went out to look for you the reductions had begun.
A demento took a shopgirl to a raisin dance for fun,
And for you, for me, for our quests ridiculous and chaste
The lead sky leered in every cloud its consummate distaste.
The mayors queued for mug shots while the banner rolled in wind
That beat at bolted windows and bore down upon the thin,
And everywhere warped deliverers got bellicose and brave,
When I walked out to find you in the reconstructed rave.
The envelopes were in the slots and paperweights were flung.
When I came down to seek you out the torrents had begun
To rip the pan from handle and horizons from their shore,
To rip around your heady heart looking there for more.
-- Susan Wheeler
from The Best American Poetry 1998 (ed. John Hollander)
From the archive, first posted March 13, 2009.
What is needed is a technique
Of conversation, I think, as I put on the
Electric light. But not the limited
Vocabulary of our experience, the
Surface irritations which pile up,
Accumulate a city, – but the expression,
Metamorphosed, of what they are the
Metaphor of; – and their conversion into light.
On the bus toward Midston House
I survey the people in their actions. Placid
And relaxed are they; this is the humdrum
Claptrap costume of girls and food, men
And work and house. The insurance
Of habit is circular, as
Democracy has interlocking duties,
Circular obediences.
Yet how to transform
The continual failing clouds of
Energy, into light? The vital
Intelligence of the man whom I am
Going to visit – does he know? I
Think how the sharp severing of
My life's task – severed associations,
Produced in me almost a
Lypothymia of grief and a hiatus of
Days, which grew fangs of anger, my
Lycanthropy – thank god, it's over!
I am fired from my job by flames, big
As angry consciences; I can do
Nothing; I have not one ability! This man
Whom I am waiting to see in the lobby –
All my life I am waiting for something that
Does not eventuate – will he
Exist?
The law of life, like an abstract
Rigorous lawyer, passes a terrifying judg-
Ment on poor little me, in a strange foreign
Syllogism. He is cheating me! He will not
Keep the appointment!
His probity
Rebukes my suspicion. What can I say, that
I love him; that I am un-
Worthy? My doubt makes me feel,
– Even as we discuss another's dishonesty –
Ugly, irate, and damned avid, a cunning
Rascal, like that ugly bird of the White
Nile.
But the poem is just this
Speaking of what cannot be said
To the person I want to say it.
I am sleepy with subtlety; the room strikes me as
Dark, so cold, so lonely. There is
No one in it. I will put on all the lights.
I wish I could go
On a long, on a long long journey
To a place where life is simple and decent, not
Too demanding.
No! On the vehicle, Tomorrow, I will see
That man, whose handshake was happiness.
Click here for Ron Horning's essay on David Schubert.
(Ed note: Ever since we posted the conversation between poets Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley we've been fielding requests for their poems. Here is How Much? by Jerome Sala, from his book How Much? New and Selected Poems. Watch this space for a poem by Jack Skelley)
How Much?
-- by Jerome Sala
How much is it worth —
the actual copy of
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
Frank O’Hara had in his pocket
when he wrote, “My heart is
in my pocket, it is
Poems by Pierre Reverdy
Probably not
as much as Duchamp’s chess set
or urinal: that’s because O’Hara
was not a painter but a poet,
and you know what that means:
while the other arts add value
to their objects, conspiring
with the world of commodities
to nurture the enrichment economy,
verse makes its objects worse
relieving them of their worth
casting them out into the world
beyond the cave of moneymaking
into another place that we do not
yet understand and cannot name.
How much is it worth,
the actual heart of Frank O’Hara,
the one stripped of its metaphors?
Can his heart actually be divested
of such accoutrements,
or must we be forever lost
in the moist mist, on the brink
of the heart in itself,
an irretrievable object?
When Shelley was
cremated, his heart refused to burn.
Mary Shelley carried it with her
for years wrapped in a silk shroud
inside a jar.
When revered Tibetan Buddhist
teachers die, their hearts become relics
and are said to bestow blessings—
the greatest of which
is the knowledge of emptiness.
[Originally appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Dec. 18—Jan. 19, 2019 issue.] Now available in How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala (NYQ books).
He knew how he would die. We all know that.
Some day the same as any other he'd be chewing his cud
And ruminating about the larger weather patterns
The clouds spoke of when Whump! like the trump of Doom
He would be stampeding to his death
With the whole country around him, their pounding
Hooves sounding like the drums you sometimes
Heard when the herds of horsemen camped
In some canyon close by, the very canyon it might be
In which he was destined to die.
Aiee! they would cry, or words to that effect,
As they sat by their fires beating on the stretched skin
Of one's relatives, which was their way
Of saying We won! We won! They were
An intolerable presence and he prayed
That someday someone would come, someone
Even nastier, someone even worse than the wolves,
And kill them, level their smelly villages
And cover them with rocks, like the rocks
He would lie on and rot when it came
His time to join the great stampede and die.
May 1, 2008
Days at the Races
“Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.”
— Groucho Marx
Away they go, with their outlandish names,
saddled with human baggage, desperate wagers —
enough to make a thoroughbred go lame,
be it a strapping colt or spry old stager.
Away they go, with Monday in the lead,
and Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday gaining speed.
Friday and Saturday, poor things, are off the bridle,
while Sunday, bless its heart, is simply idle.
Some like to be there — tremble at the crack
of every whip, eat dust, bathe in the lather
and feel the press of flesh. Me? I would rather
keep my distance, make my bets off-track.
Each week I pony up a little dough,
although I seldom win, or place, or even show.
First published in Raritan. Photo credit: Jennifer Croft.
On Heaven
--To V.H., who asked for a working Heaven
That day the sunlight lay on the farms;
On the morrow the bitter frost that there was!
That night my young love lay in my arms,
The morrow how bitter it was!
And because she is very tall and quaint
And golden, like a quattrocento saint,
I desire to write about Heaven;
To tell you the shape and the ways of it,
And the joys and the toil in the maze of it,
For these there must be in Heaven,
Even in Heaven!
For God is a good man, God is a kind man,
And God's a good brother, and God is no blind man,
And God is our father.
I will tell you how this thing began:
How I waited in a little town near Lyons for many years,
And yet knew nothing of passing time, or of her tears,
But, for nine slow years, lounged away at my table in the shadowy sunlit square
Where the small cafes are.
The Place is small and shaded by great planes,
Over a rather human monument
Set up to Louis Dixhuit in the year
Eighteen fourteen, a funnny thing with dolphins
About a pyramid of green-dripped, sordid stone.
But the enormous, monumental planes
Shade it all in, and in the flecks of sun
Sit market women. There's a paper shop
Painted all blue, a shipping agency,
Three or four cafes; dank, dark colonnades
Of an eighteen-forty Mairie. I'd no wish
To wait for her where it was picturesque,
Or ancient or historic, or to love
Over well any place in the land before she came
And loved it too. I didn't even go
To Lyons for the opera, Arles for the bulls,
Or Avignon for glimpses of the Rhone.
Not even to Beaucaire! I sat about
And played long games of dominoes with the maire,
Or passing commis-voyageurs. And so
I sat and watched the trains come in, and read
The Libre Parole and sipped the thin, fresh wine
They call Piquette, and got to know the people,
The kindly, southern people...
Until, when the years were over, she came in her swift red car,
Shooting out past a pram; and she slowed and stopped and lighted absently down,
A little dazed, in the heart of the town;
And nodded imperceptibly,
With a sideways look at me.
So our days here began.
And the wrinkled old woman who keeps the cafe,
And the man
Who sells the Libre Parole,
And the sleepy gendarme,
And the fat facteur who delivers letters only in the shady,
Pleasanter kind of streets;
And the boy I often gave a penny,
And the maire himself, and the little girl who loves toffee
And me because I have given her many sweets;
And the one-eyed droll
Bookseller of the rue Grand de Provence, -
Chancing to be going home to bed,
Smiled with their kindly, fresh benevolence,
Because they knew I had waited for a lady
Who should come in a swift, red, English car,
To the square where the little cafes are.
And the old, old woman touched me on the wrist
With a wrinkled finger,
And said: 'Why do you linger? -
Too many kisses can never be kissed!
And comfort her - nobody here will think harm -
Take her instantly to your arm!
it is a little strange, you know, to your dear,
To be dead!
But one is English,
Though one be never so much of a ghost;
And if most of your life has been spent in the craze to relinquish
What you want most,
You will go on relinquishing,
You will go on vanquishing
Human longings, even
in Heaven.
God! You will have forgotten what the rest of the world is on fire for -
The madness of desire for the long and quiet embrace,
The coming nearer of a tear-wet face;
Forgotten the desire to slake
The thirst, and the long, slow ache,
And to interlace
Lash with lash, lip with lip, limb with limb, and the fingers of the hand
With the hand
And...
You will have forgotten...
But they will all awake;
Aye, all of them shall awaken
In this dear place.
And all that then we took
Of all that we might have taken,
Was that one embracing look,
Coursing over features, over limbs, between eyes, a making sure, and a long sigh,
Having the tranquility
Of trees unshaken,
And the softness of sweet tears,
And the dearness of the dear brook
To wash away past years
(For that too is the quality of Heaven,
That you are conscious always of great pain
Only when it is over
And shall not come again.
Thank God, thank God, it shall not come again,
Though your eyes be never so wet with the tears
Of many years!)
ii
And so she stood a moment by the door
Of the long, red car. Royally she stepped down,
Settling one long foot and leaning back
Amongst her russet fires. And she looked round...
Of course it must be strange to come from England
Straight into Heaven. You must take it in,
Slowly, for a long instant, with some fear...
Now that affiche, in orange, on the kiosque:
'Six Spanish bulls will fight on Sunday next
At Arles, in the arena'... Well, it's strange
Till you get used to our ways. And, on the Mairie,
The untidy poster telling of the concours
De vers de soie, of silkworms. The cocoons
Pile, yellow, all across the little Places
Of ninety townships in the environs
Of Lyons, the city famous for her silks.
What if she's pale? it must be more than strange,
After these years, to come out here from England
To a strange place, to the stretched-out arms of me,
A man never fully known, only divined,
Loved, guessed at, pledged to, in your Sussex mud,
Amongst the frost-bound farms by the yeasty sea.
Oh, the long look; the long, long searching look!
And how my heart beat!
Well, you see, in England
She had a husband. And four families -
His, hers, mine, and another woman's too -
Would have gone crazy. And, with all the rest,
Eight parents, and the children, seven aunts
And sixteen uncles and a grandmother.
There were, besides, our names, a few real friends,
And the decencies of life. A monstrous heap!
They made a monstrous heap. i've lain awake
Whole aching nights to tot the figures up!
Heap after heaps, of complications, griefs,
Worries, tongue-clackings, nonsenses and shame
For not making good. You see the coil there was!
And the poor strained fibres of our tortured brains,
And the voice that called from depth in her to depth
In me... my God, in the dreadful nights,
Through the roar of the great black winds, through the sound of the sea!
Oh agony! Agony! From out my breast
It called whilst the dark house slept, and stairheads creaked;
From within my breast it screamed and made no sound;
And wailed... And made no sound.
And howled like the damned... No sound! No sound!
Only the roar of the wind, the sound of the sea,
The tick of the clock...
And our two voices, noiseless through the dark.
Oh God! Oh God!
(That night my young love lay in my arms...
There was a bitter frost lay on the farms
In England, by the shiver
And the crawling of the tide;
By the broken silver of the English Channel,
Beneath the aged moon that watched alone -
Poor, dreary, lonely old moon to have to watch alone,
Over the dreary beaches mangled with ancient foam
Like shrunken flannel;
The moon, an intent, pale face, looking down
Over the English Channel.
But soft and warm
She lay in the crook of my arm.
And came to no harm since we had come quietly home
Even to Heaven:
Which is situate in a little old town
Not very far from the side of the Rhone,
That mighty river
That is, just there by the Crau, in the lower reaches,
Far wider than the Channel.)
But, in the market place of the other little town,
Where the Rhone is a narrower, greener affair,
When she had looked at me, she beckoned with her long white hand,
A little languidly, since it is a strain, if a blessed strain, to have just died,
And going back again,
Into the long, red, English racing-car,
Made room for me amongst the furs at her side.
And we moved away from the kind looks of the kindly people
Into the wine of the hurrying air.
And very soon even the tall grey steeple
Of Lyons cathedral behind us grew little and far
And was no more there...
And, thank God, we had nothing any more to think of,
And, thank God, we had nothing any more to talk of,
Unless, as it chanced, the flashing silver stalk of the pampas
Growing down to the brink of the Rhone,
On the lawn of a little chateau, giving onto the river.
And we were alone, alone, alone...
At last alone...
The poplars on the hill-crests go marching rank on rank,
And far away to the left, like a pyramid, marches the ghost of Mont Blanc.
There are vines and vines and vines, all down to the river bank.
There will be a castle here,
And an abbey there;
And huge quarries and a long white farm,
With long thatched barns and a long wine shed,
As we ran alone, all down to the Rhone.
And that day there was no puncturing of the tyres to fear;
And no trouble at all with the engine and gear;
Smoothly and softly we ran between the great poplar alley
All down the valley of the Rhone.
For the dear, good God knew how we needed rest and to be alone.
But, on other days, just as you must have perfect shadows to make perfect Rembrandts,
He shall affect us with little lets and hindrances of His own
Devising - just to let us be glad that we are dead...
Just for remembrance.
iii
Hard by the castle of God in the Alpilles,
In the eternal stone of Alpilles,
There's this little old town, walled round by the old, grey gardens...
There were never such olives as grew in the gardens of God,
The green-grey trees, the wardens of agony
And failure of gods,
Of hatred and faith, of truth, of treachery
They whisper; they whisper that none of the living prevail;
They whirl in the great mistral over the white, dry sods,
Like hair blown back from white foreheads in the enormous gale
Up to the castle walls of God...
But in the town that's our home,
Once you are past the wall,
Amongst the trunks of the planes,
Though they roar never so mightily overhead in the day,
All this tumult is quieted down, and all
The windows stand open because of the heat of the night
That shall come.
And, from each little window, shines in the twilight a light,
And, beneath it the eternal planes
With the huge, gnarled trunks that were aged and grey
At the creation of Time.
The Chinese lanthorns, hung out at the doors of hotels,
Shimmering in the dusk, here on an orange tree, there on a sweet-scented lime,
There on a golden inscription: 'Hotel of the Three Holy Bells, '
Or 'Hotel Sublime, ' or 'Inn of the Real Good Will'.
And yes, it is very warm and still,
And all the world is afoot after the heat of the day,
In the cool of the even in Heaven.
And it is here that I have brought my dear to pay her all that i owed her,
Amidst this crowd, with the soft voices, the soft footfalls, the rejoicing laughter.
And after the twilight there falls such a warm, soft darkness,
And still there will come stealing under the planes a drowsy odour,
Compounded of all cyclamen, of oranges, or rosemary and bay,
To take the remembrance of the toil of the day away.
So we sat at a little table, under an immense plane,
And we remembered again
The blisters and foments
And terrible harassments of the tired brain,
The cold and the frost and the pain,
As if we were looking at a picture and saying: 'This is true!
Why this is a truly painted
Rendering of that street where - you remember? - i fainted.'
And we remembered again
Tranquilly, our poor few tranquil moments,
The falling of the sunlight through the panes,
The flutter for ever in the chimney of the quiet flame,
The mutter of our two poor tortured voices, always a-whisper.
And the endless nights when I would cry out, running through all
The gamut of misery, even to a lisp, her name;
And we remembered our kisses, nine, maybe, or eleven -
If you count two that I gave and she did not give again.
And always the crowd drifted by in the cool of the even,
And we saw the faces of friends,
And the faces of those to who one day we must make amends,
Smiling in welcome.
And I said: 'On another day -
And such a day may well come soon -
We will play dominoes with Dick and Evelyn and Frances
For a while afternoon.
And, in the time to come, Genee
Shall dance for us, fluttering over the ground as the sunlight dances.'
And Arlesiennes with the beautiful faces went by us,
And gipsies and Spanish shepherds, noiseless in sandals of straw, sauntered nigh us,
Wearing slouch hats and old sheep-skins, and casting admiring glances
From dark, foreign eyes at my dear...
(And ah, it is Heaven alone, to have her alone and so near!)
So all this world rejoices
In the cool of the even
In Heaven...
And, when the cool of the even was fully there,
Came a great ha-ha of voices.
Many children run together, and all laugh and rejoice and call,
Hurrying with little arms flying, and little feet flying, and little hurrying haunches,
From the door of a stable,
Where, in an olla podrida, they had been playing at the corrida
With the black Spanish bull, whose nature
Is patience with children. And so, through the gaps of the branches
Of Jasmine on our screen beneath the planes,
We saw, coming down from the road that leads to the olives and Alpilles,
A man of great stature, in a great cloak,
With a great stride,
And a little joke
For all and sundry, coming down with a hound at his side.
And he stood at the cross-roads, passing the time of day
In a great, kind voice, the voice of a man-and-a-half! -
With a great laugh, and a great clap on the back,
For a fellow in black - a priest i should say,
Or may be a lover,
Wearing black for his mistress's mood.
'A little toothache, ' we could hear him say; 'but that's so good
When it gives over.' So he passed from sight
In the soft twilight, into the soft night,
In the soft riot and tumult of the crowd.
And a magpie flew down, laughing, holding up his beak to us,
And I said: 'That was God! Presently, when he has walked through the town
And the night has settled down,
So that you may not be afraid,
In the darkness, he will come to our table and speak to us.'
And past us many saints went walking in a company -
The kindly, thoughtful saints, devising and laughing and talking,
And smiling at us with their pleasant solicitude.
And because the thick of the crowd followed to the one side God,
Or to the other the saints, we sat in solitude
In the distance the saints went singing all in chorus,
And our Lord went on the other side of the street,
Holding a little boy.
Taking him to pick the musk-roses that open at dusk,
For wreathing the statue of Jove,
Left on the Alpilles above
By the Romans; since Jove,
Even Jove,
Must not want for his quota of honour and love;
But round about him there must be,
With all its tender jollity,
The laughter of children in Heaven,
Making merry with roses in Heaven.
Yet never he looked at us, knowing that that would be such joy
As must be over-great for hearts that needed quiet;
Such a riot and tumult of joy as quiet hearts are not able
To taste to the full...
... And my dear one sat in the shadows; very softly she wept: -
Such joy is in Heaven,
In the cool of the even,
After the burden and toil of the days,
After the heat and haze
In the vine-hills; or in the shady
Whispering groves in high passes up in the Alpilles,
Guarding the castle of God.
And I went on talking towards her unseen face:
'So it is, so it goes, in this beloved place,
There shall be never a grief but passes; no, not any;
There shall be such bright light and no blindness;
There shall be so little awe and so much loving-kindness;
There shall be a little longing and enough care,
There shall be a little labor and enough of toil
To bring back the lost flavour of our human coil;
Not enough to taint it;
And all that we desire shall prove as fair as we can paint it.'
For, though that may be the very hardest trick of all
God set Himself, who fashioned this goodly hall.
Thus has He made Heaven;
Even Heaven.
For God is a very clever mechanician;
And if He made this proud and goodly ship of the world,
From the maintop to the hull,
Do you think He could not finish it to the full,
With a flag and all,
And make it sail, tall and brave,
On the waters, beyond the grave?
It should cost but very little rhetoric
To explain for you that last, fine, conjuring trick;
To give to each man after his heart
Who knows very well what each man has in his heart:
To let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,
If that is your idea of heaven; if you will, in the South of France;
If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night;
Where you will; how you will;
Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall;
He would be a very little God if He could not do all this,
And He is still
The great God of all.
For God is a good man; God is a kind man;
In the darkness He came walking to our table beneath the planes, And spoke
So kindly to my dear,
With a little joke,
Giving himself some pains
To take away her fear
Of His stature,
So as not to abash her,
In no way at all to dash her new pleasure beneath the planes,
In the cool of the even
in Heaven.
That, that is God's nature,
For God's a good brother, and God is no blind man,
And God's a good mother and loves sons who're rovers,
And God is our father and loves all good lovers.
He has a kindly smile for many a poor sinner;
He takes note to make it up to poor wayfarers on sodden roads;
Such as bear heavy loads
He takes note of, and of all that toil on bitter seas and frosty lands,
He takes care that they shall have good at His hands;
Well He takes note of a poor old cook,
Cooking your dinner;
And much He loves sweet joys in such as ever took
Sweet joy on earth. He has a kindly smile for a kiss
Given in a shady nook.
And in the golden book
Where the accounts of His estate are kept,
All the round, golden sovereigns of bliss,
Known by poor lovers, married or never yet married,
While the green world waked, or the black world quietly slept;
All joy, all sweetness, each sweet sight that's sighed -
Their accounts are kept,
And carried
By the love of God to His own credit's side.
So that is why He came to our table to welcome my dear, dear bride,
In the cool of the even
In front of a cafe in Heaven.
-- Ford Madox Ford
Friday, July 25, 1914
Band Practice
We have three bottles on the kitchen table.
One is filled with the music of a hundred old hornpipes
in the key of D that no one plays anymore. We drink
and play. Pretty soon they’re no longer hornpipes,
but tricky little reels from long-dead masters
remembered by no one but us. We play them
and they are like nothing anyone has ever heard
before now. Oh, the ins and outs and ups and downs
of them, like an old song the jolly ploughman
sings to the fair maiden at midnight under her
window, enticing her out for a forbidden fling
that will change her life forever. But pretty soon
all that’s left is an old waltz that we drag along
the living room floor by one foot till it falls apart
before we even figure out the second half of it.
We never even get to the other two bottles.
Seasons in the Abyss
Du Fu, you doofus, that’s not
a goose. You’re drunk.
Please allow me to introduce…
no, that’s not your horse.
(No, nor woman neither.)
Into every life a little
Freud must fall. I’m a fraud.
I stole that pun. Like I said:
I’m afraid. Into every light
a little moth must blunder…
Cue power ballad.
I don’t know what to call a spade.
The sky will lately swish stuff.
I open my barbaric yap.
Du Fu joins me on the veranda.
We are old and full of crap.
The millionaires across the way,
their homes are all ablaze.
We like it when those homes collapse
like moths before clichés.
This appeared in the June 2013 issue of The Walrus
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
