...From way, way over yonder its theme of old blossomings...

Brian Brown, Photographer

Reed Whittemore, Interim Poet Laureate, 1984-1985

The Music of Driftwood

 

The music of driftwood? Yes. It comes from deep water
And floats with the wind in the foam and is beached and
bleached,
Lying still for a movement or two, then floating farther
To enter the mind's many chambers,

as Wagner perhaps,

Or Bach, or whatever — it changes,
But always I like it.
I think, I hope without arrogance, it is the music
Of poetry,

true to the temper and pulse

Of each flutelike, bassoonlike image that pads or flutters
Within in the midnight recesses, yet true too

To its own poor selfless self, bare, bearing
From way, way over yonder its theme of old blossomings:
Temples in orchards, rites, supplications,

art.

A Year to be Grateful for, come Thanksgiving...

...I say this childermas...

Leon Cogniet (1794-1880), Massacre of the Innocents

Anthony Hecht, Poet Laureate, 1982-1984

“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.”

Tonight my children hunch

Toward their Western, and are glad   

As, with a Sunday punch,

The Good casts out the Bad.

And in their fairy tales

The warty giant and witch

Get sealed in doorless jails

And the match-girl strikes it rich.

I’ve made myself a drink.

The giant and witch are set

To bust out of the clink

When my children have gone to bed.

All frequencies are loud

With signals of despair;

In flash and morse they crowd   

The rondure of the air.

For the wicked have grown strong,   

Their numbers mock at death,   

Their cow brings forth its young,   

Their bull engendereth.

Their very fund of strength,   

Satan, bestrides the globe;

He stalks its breadth and length   

And finds out even Job.

Yet by quite other laws

My children make their case;   

Half God, half Santa Claus,   

But with my voice and face,

A hero comes to save

The poorman, beggarman, thief,   

And make the world behave   

And put an end to grief.

And that their sleep be sound   

I say this childermas

Who could not, at one time,   

Have saved them from the gas.

Oh, Jack...

Franz Marc, Dreaming Horse

Maxine Kumin, Poet Laureate, 1981-1982

Jack

How pleasant the yellow butter

melting on white kernels, the meniscus

of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets

where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are

after shucking the garden's last Silver Queen

and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses

the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:

our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28

which calibrates to 84 in people years

and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster

at 22. Every year, the end of summer

lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:

suddenly it's 1980, winter buffets us,

winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow

we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,

a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president's portrait

lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it

the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his

hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others

who hang their heads over their dutch doors. Sometimes

he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.

That spring, in the bustle of grooming

and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go

to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following

fall she sold him down the river. I meant to

but never did go looking for him, to buy him back

and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table

my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons

the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.

Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone

did you remember that one good winter?

Fog Moon

The Name of the Full Moon in November

~ Wendell Berry ~

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

And what would we do, given a fresh sky....

Starlight, Andromeda – Virgo (2003)

by Alicja Kwade

Constellations

created in blackout windows

William Meredith, Poet Laureate, 1978-1980

Starlight

Going abruptly into a starry night

It is ignorance we blink from, dark, unhoused;

There is a gaze of animal delight

Before the human vision. Then, aroused

To nebulous danger, we may look for easy stars,

Orion and the Dipper; but they are not ours,

These learned fields. Dark and ignorant,

Unable to see here what our forebears saw,

We keep some fear of random firmament

Vestigial in us. And we think, Ah,

If I had lived then, when these stories were made up, I

Could have found more likely pictures in haphazard sky.

But this is not so. Indeed, we have proved fools

When it comes to myths and images. A few

Old bestiaries, pantheons and tools

Translated to the heavens years ago—

Scales and hunter, goat and horologe—are all

That save us when, time and again, our systems fall.

And what would we do, given a fresh sky

And our dearth of image? Our fears, our few beliefs

Do not have shapes. They are like that astral way

We have called milky, vague stars and star-reefs

That were shapeless even to the fecund eye of myth—

Surely these are no forms to start a zodiac with.

To keep the sky free of luxurious shapes

Is an occupation for most of us, the mind

Free of luxurious thoughts. If we choose to escape,

What venial constellations will unwind

Around a point of light, and then cannot be found

Another night or by another man or from other ground.

As for me, I would find faces there,

Or perhaps one face I have long taken for guide;

Far-fetched, maybe, like Cygnus, but as fair,

And a constellation anyone could read

Once it was pointed out; an enlightenment of night,

The way the pronoun you will turn dark verses bright.                                               

Derwid by Jacek Malczewski, 1902




 

Here space and time exist in light...

Robert Hayden, Poet Laureate, 1976-1978

Monet's Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon

poisons the air like fallout,

I come again to see

the serene, great picture that I love.

Here space and time exist in light

the eye like the eye of faith believes.

The seen, the known

dissolve in iridescence, become

illusive flesh of light

that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that world

each of us has lost.

Here is the shadow of its joy.