The Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind on our faces.

Rainier Maria Rilke (Robert Bly, trans.)
"The Walk"

The daily walk with the pup does involve a sunny hill in the distance; and it would not be stretching too far to say it has an inner light. Our time, the walk. "What we feel" is so often not what is, or only a surface layer; this seems to me the truth of the poem.

The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  Snow coming down steadily.  Yesterday's 30 inches or so now joined by today's one-inch-per-hour.  We'll be close to four feet by afternoon.  So much for yesterday's back-breaking driveway shoveling/car clearing.  I'll be out again once it tapers off, using my ka-nees as much as possible; then likely drawing a very hot bath.  The plow trucks do not work on Sundays--so we're likely in for the day.

The reading list this month--as I've cleared away some things and given myself license to make a "community" of the books and authors drawing me in, silencing (or at least quieting) the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--has been long and various.   It is a time for simultaneity, apparently--partly because a few in the mix are 500 pages-plus, and I want to move through them steadily while also connecting elsewhere.  Something like deeply enjoying an intense, needy friend, but not wanting to allow that friend the sole short-term domination she might require--life is short, there is much to read.  Your commitment to that friend is life-long, anyway--which is ultimately really what she needs.

Proust--Swann's Way--is one of those hefty, long-term commitments.  We're about four weeks and 300 pages in.  It's evening reading, somehow.  The Brothers Karamazov is another in this category. I started over a year ago, put it away, and am back into it with FMD.  An essay on Dostoevsky by the late David Foster Wallace, from his essay collection Consider the Lobster, adds fuel to the resolve to finish.  Balzac's Pere Goriot (inspired by Proust) is one I'm listening to on DVD, during commutes to and from the city and on my ipod (while shoveling, walking the dog, etc.).  Moments of Being, a collection of memoir-essays by Virginia Woolf, given to me as a gift and awful lovely and sad.  As yet uncracked--and due back to the library in two weeks--is Rose Tremain's novel The Road Home.

In poetry, over coffee in the morning, sometimes just before sleep: Rilke (the Galway Kinnell translation), Kinnell (his first three collections collected together, along with The Book of Nightmares), Denise Levertov's This Great Unknowing, and Jane Kenyon's Otherwise.

Somewhat "central" in all this readingabout is Paul Elie's The Life You Safe May Be Your Own, a kind of quadrography of the lives of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy--ardent Catholics and artists all.  Each living a kind of monastic existence, even if not literally (except for Merton).  The title of Day's autobiography--The Long Loneliness--rather than that of O'Connor's short story, may have been an equally apt title for the book.  The book pushes 500 pages, I wasn't sure (during the first 100 pages) that Elie's style or his vision for the thematic/personal web among these four would keep me engaged; at p. 280, I'm hooked the way one is hooked by a good novel.  Here are four writers who, you could say,  gave themselves license to make a community of the books and authors that drew them in, silencing (or at least quieting), the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--with compelling results, i.e. an honest and deep and, yes, often painful, life in letters.

Of Self-Blessing

A spring (ish) poem for the middle of winter. In some ways, most appropriate for a dark, snowy night such as this.

"Saint Francis and the Sow"

by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Autumn Into Winter

We're almost at the end of autumn, but this one still hits home. Autumn into winter...


"Autumn Day"
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was so immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials,
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

First Snow, and Rilke on Ambition

The snow is falling fast here this morning - it's lovely. About a foot I'd say. Should taper off this afternoon. The wood pile is almost all stacked in the shed (yesterday's labor), and the new furnace is humming along. We discovered a mystery electrical cord emerging from the crawl space in the basement and realized that it's heating tape for the kitchen and bathroom pipes - the ones that froze last winter. C. the Postmistress told me about heating tape - you attach it to your pipes, plug it in, and it (safely) heats the pipes when temps fall below freezing. I was planning on researching and trying to install, so what a relief - one of those gifts from above - that it's already done. My second winter, and I'm just a little more prepared, which is a good thing.

So winter is officially here, and in the quiet of the world going dormant, laying itself down to sleep, I have been reading Rilke's early poems and some biography. The poet's realm was that of the soul, the deep inner life. In Robert Bly's intro to his translations of selected poems, he writes:

When I first read Rilke in my twenties, I felt a deep shock upon realizing the amount of introversion he had achieved, and the adult attention he paid to inner states. From the pragmatist or objectivist point of view, Rilke goes too far in this attention; he goes over the line. The American, in Latin America or North America, is willing to accept some introversion, but when it goes this far, he may dismiss the whole thing as solipsism, or as an evasion of political responsibility... Rilke knows what Tolstoy knows in The Death of Ivan Ilych: that our day-to-day life, with its patterns and familiar objects, can become a husk that blocks anything fresh from coming in. Before the industrial revolution brought its various creature comforts, it is conceivable that the shocks of winter cold, sudden poverties, plague, brutal invasions, abrupt unexplainable deaths, regularly broke the husk. In our time the husk is strong, and Rilke turns to look at it.

Here in the country, in solitude, I find that the husk falls away. The soul, the spirit, unfolds:

I want to unfold.
I don't want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

The spareness and the stillness of a country road, farmlands minding their own seasons and work in good time, big sky, snow falling... the slow, deep work of fruitfulness that is born of nature, as opposed to human-driven competition or ambition. And yet Rilke, like Donald Hall, has a very clear idea of his ambition:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst....

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Calmly. As Denise Levertov reminded us, "Much happens when we're not there." And much happens when we do nothing. We unfold... and we hear things. We may even hear the snow falling.

Poem for a Quiet Morning / a Quiet Life

Much happens when we're not there.
Many trees, not only that famous one, over and over,
fall in the forest. We don't see, but something sees,
or someone, a different kind of someone,
a different molecular model, or entities
not made of molecules anyway; or nothing, no one:
but something has taken place, taken space,
been present, absent,*
returned. Much moves in and out of open windows
when our attention is somewhere else,
just as our souls move in and out of our bodies sometimes.
Everyone used to know this,
but for a hundred years or more
we've been losing our memories, moulting, shedding,
like animals or plants that are not well...
And though it may have nothing at all to do with us,
and though we can't fathom its designs,
nevertheless our condition thereby changes:
cells shift, a rustling barely audible as of tarlatan
flickers through closed books, one or two leaves
fall, and when we read them we can perceive,
if we are truthful, that we are not dreaming,
not dreaming but once more witnessing.

-Denise Levertov, from "Window-Blind"

*This line should be indented, blogger's formatting not cooperating.

The Rustle of Autumn

More richly and more recklessly,
Leaves, leaves, give tongue and whirl away,
Fill yesterday's cup of bitterness
With the sadness of today.

Impulse, enchantment, beauty!
Let's dissolve in September wind
And enter the rustle of autumn.
Be still, or go out of your mind!

-From "Autumn," by Boris Pasternak

I spent part of the country weekend with the Russians - Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova. Random? Even more so: after a day of Russian poetry, I sat down to watch OLD SCHOOL - an adult(ish) frat movie starring Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Luke Wilson.

A strange stretch in the country. Quiet and unbothered, yet work-ful. Not particularly restful. If I were to oversimplify the city-country dichotomy, I would say city=intellect, country=body. Lawn & yard, cooking, cleaning, laundry, hauling fire wood, climbing the hill with the dog, car maintenance... in the country, I mysteriously turn into a farm woman. The Russians were I guess a mini-antidote to all that. (OLD SCHOOL a mini-antidote to the Russians.)

The physical work is how we get ready for the change of seasons, I suppose. Putting away summer things, getting out sweaters and wool socks and space heaters, the last mowing of the season, the final harvest of lettuce and spinach, raking the leaves and covering the garden with them...and changing the clocks, of course. We enter the dark of winter. Everything smells of burning wood (hair, clothes, dog).

I am not sure if I have quite yet entered the rustle of autumn. Be still, or go out of your mind! We are facing translation issues here, I would imagine. And yet, the sentiment speaks to me - be still, be still. The chores will always be there. More richly, and more recklessly...

The Claims of Reasonable Gloom (In Refusal of)

Time for a poem, no doubt. Less words, greater beauty, deeper meaning (than all my yadda yadda).

This from Denise Levertov, writing about a place which is a kind of "country city" - Seattle - and where I lived for eight years. (This goes out to Seattle compadres BMD, LN-R, and, if you're reading, TPN.)

Celebration

Brilliant, this day - a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green -
whether it's ferns or lichen or needles
or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes -
greener than ever before.

And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for blessing,
a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

Let Evening Come

I'm in the city today, but it's one of those days... when I'm hating being here.

"Let Evening Come," fall poem, a country poem, by Jane Kenyon... about letting go of summer, letting go of daylight; fearing not the cold nor the dark, knowing that we are never without comfort.


Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes us her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.


Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Roses, Late Summer

Here's one - a poem about the coming of autumn, that is. Which is a poem about many things, big and small, arrival and departure, the coming of going. By Mary Oliver, one of my favorites.

What happens
to the leaves after
they turn red and golden and fall
away? What happens

to the singing birds
when they can't sing
any longer? What happens
to their quick wings?

Do you think there is any
personal heaven
for any of us?
Do you think anyone,

the other side of that darkness,
will call to us, meaning us?
Beyond the trees
the foxes keep teaching their children

to live in the valley,
so they never seem to vanish, they are always there
in the blossom of light
that stands up every morning

in the dark sky.
And over one more set of hills,
along the sea,
the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness

and are giving it back to the world.
If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

Cased in Clean Bark You Drift

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are - cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,

the key is turned. Extend yourself -
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.

-Louis Gluck, "The Undertaking"

It was only a matter of time before I began invoking poetry into these posts. Hence, a new blog category. It was only a matter of time before I began invoking Louise Gluck. I am told she is the most popular poet among New Yorker magazine readers, young and old. Hmm... The excerpt in my last post was published recently in the New Yorker; "The Undertaking" is from her collection The House on Marshland, published in 1975. Her later poems are very much death/mortality-focused, (emotionally) spare to the point of near-desolation (it is the "near" that is significant here...). The above is brimming with the warm hope of a woman 30 years less worn, less lived.

Autumn is in the air here in the farm lands. It was chilly last night, and windy. Today, the chill remains. The second crop of cool-weather greens is starting to sprout (lettuce, spinach, snap peas). The tomatoes and squash are struggling to turn color. J. has gone fishin', I am here with my words.

Autumn and Louise Gluck - they go together for me. Perhaps because the first poem of hers which struck me, from her recent collection Averno, is called "October." These are the lines that somehow stopped me in my tracks:

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

Something about the artist's deep sense of uselessness, of ultimate incompetence, at the end of the day, amidst all the world's troubles. And yet, wanting to be useful, seeking those tiny opportunities, to make offerings. And now/all fear gives way... It's not much, it's not much. But it's something.

Lettuces, Lettuces

K. from down the block (aka "The Bird Man") came by to look over the back yard here in the Bronx. Initially he was all "volunteer" about it; yesterday, it was clear he was hustling for paid work (and being skeazy about it). How silly of me - to think that someone would actually do something for nothing. But seriously, I understand, we all need to make ends meet, we all need to do what we need to do. It's the misleading part that bugs me.

So the backyard project may go slower than we thought. Which is fine... "slow and steady wins the race," as they say. In the meantime, I've gone ahead, with our landlord's approval (and funding) on a few plants for the stoop and fire escape: two butterfly bushes, a couple of lavenders (hardy Grappenhall), and wild lettuces. We did the supplies shopping last night (pots, trowel, potting soil) and picked up the plants from Trina at Union Square Market today. Trina's nursery is the one out in the country; my butterfly bushes were labeled and ready for me.

Lettuces, lettuces. From Louise Gluck's poem "A Village Life," recently published in The New Yorker:

I move through the dark as though it were natural to me,
as though I were already a factor in it.
Tranquil and still, the day dawns.
On market day, I go to the market with my lettuces.