Jack Gilbert, 1925-2012

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I have been telling myself, each week, that next week will be less busy; next week I will get more writing done. But each week quickly fills up with things to do: bad report cards, doctor’s appointments, eye appointments, visits to the veterinarian. Sometimes, good things: a call from an old friend, a poetry reading, a lovely lunch with my mother and sister, a choir concert. Even so, each morning I get up and try to put in some time on my novel rewrite. I pack it up and carry it with me. When I look back on these months, working on the novel will be one part of it. I have felt harassed, too busy, not joyful enough, but I already know that I will remember it differently, as a process I let myself be part of. My children’s lives; my mother’s life; my life. All good.

So, in that spirit, of “Failing and Flying,” here is an old favorite of mine, from poet Jack Gilbert.

FAILING AND FLYING

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like an antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Northwest Greats

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When I visited Edmonds Bookshop for my reading last week, I was inspired by a couple of things. First, I am almost certain that it was something I saw there (on the website? on a poster?) suggesting I plant a northwest shrub in honor of northwesterner and writer Ivan Doig, who died on April 9. So this weekend I bought a blossoming currant. (And snapped a picture for you.)

A second northwest impulse inspired by the bookshop — while browsing their poetry shelves, I found Robert Michael Pyle‘s Evolution of the Genus Iris. And even though I seriously do not need to buy any more books (!) I bought it. Here’s a poem for spring. And peace.

PINK PAVEMENTS

How the sidewalks flush and run
when cherries, crabs, and apples shed
their petal pelts. How exploded
blossoms soften concrete and stone.

In Colorado, nights before track meets,
I walked and walked, dreaming of Olympus,
holding in the exhalations of Hopa crabs
that lined our streets. Next day, the same cold
wind that always blew my discus down too soon
would strew the streets with pale pink disks.

In Cambridge, cherry blossoms daubed
the rosy fronts of colleges, scented stale
doorways of pubs. Memories of winter on harsh
fen breath stripped set fruits of flower, laid
pink silk over ancient pavements, lifting skirts
and dressing lanes in time for the May Balls.

Even now, when hard spring wind unclothes
the cherries in town and crabapples thicken
the night air, I feel the blunt rim of the discus
on my fingers, the cool rim of the pint on my lips.
And I think, as yet another April whiles itself
away in war,

how the pavements of Baghdad must go pink,
spattered with the petals of peaches and plums,
when the car bombs burst. How blossoms
soften exploded concrete and bone.

-Robert Michael Pyle

Maxine Kumin, 1925-2014

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Maxine Kumin’s poetry, rich in horses, has always been dear to me. Here, from her 1978 book, The Retrieval System, is her poem, “Late Snow”:

LATE SNOW

It’s frail, this spring snow, it’s pot cheese
packing down underfoot. It flies out of the trees
at sunrise like a flock of migrant birds.
It slips in clumps off the barn roof,
wingless angels dropped by parachute.
Inside, I hear the horses knocking
aimlessly in their warm brown lockup,
as the soul must, confined under the breastbone.
Horses blowing their noses, coming awake,
shaking the sawdust bedding out of their coats.
They do not know what has fallen
out of the sky, colder than apple bloom,
since last night’s hay and oats.
They do not know how satisfactory
they look, set loose in the April sun,
nor what handsprings are turned under
my ribs with winter gone.

-Maxine Kumin

A beautiful, brown horses in the farm during the sunrise. Rural morning scenery of Northern Europe with farm animals.

Dorianne Laux, “On the Back Porch”

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Dorianne Laux was a great favorite of mine before she chose Sparrow for the Gell Poetry Prize, before she wrote the forward for Sparrow, before I met her at LitFuse in 2013. I’ve included her poetry on the blog before, but in doing a little research today, I found an interview at a fascinating poetry site called Dive Dapper; divedapper? Anyway, click on the link to find out more. I am all the more determined to see that our paths cross again. And again.

In the meantime, here is a poem from her early collection, Awake. 

ON THE BACK PORCH

The cat calls for her dinner.
On the porch I bend and pour
brown soy stars into her bowl,
stroke her dark fur.
It’s not quite night.
Pinpricks of light in the eastern sky.
Above my neighbor’s roof, a transparent
moon, a pink rag of cloud.
Inside my house are those who love me.
My daughter dusts biscuit dough.
And there’s a man who will lift my hair
in his hands, brush it
until it throws sparks.
Everything is just as I’ve left it.
Dinner simmers on the stove.
Glass bowls wait to be filled
with gold broth. Sprigs of parsley
on the cutting board.
I want to smell this rich soup, the air
around me going dark, as stars press
their simple shapes into the sky.
I want to stay on the back porch
while the world tilts
toward sleep, until what I love
misses me, and calls me in.

-Dorianne Laux