Brunch on Sunday at Mark’s with Dan and Adam.
Dan in his new bedroom with Paxie and Remo.
***************
Poem For Adlai Stevenson And Yellow Jackets
Â
It’s summer, 1956, in Maine, a camp resort
on Belgrade Lakes, and I am cleaning fish,
part of my job, along with luggage, firewood,
Sunday ice cream, waking everyone
by jogging around the island every morning
swinging a rattle I hold in front of me
to break the nightly spider threads.
Adlai Stevenson is being nominated,
but won’t, again, beat Eisenhower,
sad fact I’m half aware of, steeped as I am
in Russian novels, bathing in the tea-
brown lake, startling a deer and chasing it by canoe
as it swims from the island to the mainland.
I’m good at cleaning fish: lake trout,
those beautiful deep swimmers, brown trout,
I can fillet them and take them to the cook
and the grateful fisherman may send a piece
back from his table to mine, a salute.
I clean in a swarm of yellow jackets,
sure they won’t sting me, so they don’t,
though they can’t resist the fish, the slime,
the guts that drop into the bucket, they’re mad
for meat, fresh death, they swarm around
whenever I work at this outdoor sink
with somebody’s loving catch.
Later this summer we’ll find their nest
and burn it one night with a blowtorch
applied to the entrance, the paper hotel
glowing with fire and smoke like a lantern,
full of the death-bees, hornets, whatever they are,
that drop like little coals
and an oily smoke that rolls through the trees
into the night of the last American summer
next to this one, 36 years away, to show me
time is a pomegranate, many-chambered,
nothing like what I thought.
David Young
***************
Matthew’s one word review of Orpheus X was, “Unexpected.”
Both he and Debbie thought the naked redhead (Eurydice) was unnecessary. I tried to argue that without clothes the actress portrayed greater vulnerability.
Matt replied, “Neither you nor Debbie should even have an opinion about this. She doesn’t like naked people, and you like them too much.”
Which reminds me that Uncle Paul also noted, “Matt has a sharp wit” (One more reason he felt Peter was the true father), and that he’s “Older than his years.”
el Kib
So many subtexts here … Are your thoughts, friends, diversions but the dismissable product of an alternate reality attempting a new thing, but casually swept away by your day’s habitual activities … ?
And what of the violence wrought — conceivably in others’names — on the titular creatures with whom the author appeared to have established quiet, mutual forbearance? But what of that was illustrative to him of this aspect of time’s nature?
And then what of Matthew’s assertions, which hold that you and Debbie claim the opposing tapered edges of a certain bell curve, implicit also that he the voluptuous middle … ? Eurydice and the role of nudity are arguably bell-curve-central bloggish fare, the other, tapered territories at which hinted probably better left untouched, here.
Jennifer
el Kib, thanks for making a beginning here. Michael, what made you choose this poem, this day? When I add 36 to 1956 (whose birth-year is that, by the way?), I get 1992, which would indicate … what, first gulf war? The pomegranate image connects with the various yellow-jacket images, for me — and then to “yellow rain” which in turn connects with the gulf war(s). And now it’s 2006. I really don’t get “… the last American summer /
next to this one, …”
michael
For me : this poem has innocent beginnings with the image of a camp resort, joggers, gossamer spider threads, shared caught trout and swims in a tea-brown lake. But soon we have (real life) gutted fish and yellow jackets drawn to fresh death who will eventually meet their own oily demise. I love the rolls of smoke filtering through the trees (isn’t that about time?); that smoke given birth by the death of something else. It’s a poem that sticks to me. No high falutin language to hold me at arm’s length.
Two more by David Young:
From “One A.M.”
You’ll show that toad-eater who wrote Night Thoughts
what’s happened in two centuries or so.
You’ll make your yard the spirit’s doorway
to metamorphs and comet-lit inventions.
Go ahead, walk the cathedral-volumned night.
Let Perseids stripe your eyes.
*
I read the other day
that giant black snowballs from outer space
created our oceans.
Center me, physics, keep me
from brooding too long on my fear,
on the pickup truck that rammed the school bus,
on the strange sea pastures of the Persian Gulf,
on love and its string of losses.
Now everything’s strings, they say, cosmic strings
that pull the galaxies toward the Great Attractor
holding all matter together.
Microcosm, meet macrocosm.
Solace us with your kinship, make
one little yard an everywhere.
I think of Calvino’s
dark, humorous mind,
another squirrel in the treetops–
how he made truth and wit
from troubling loops of knowledge.
And Miroslav Holub,
who lived alone in this house one spring
and pondered this yard as I do.
The appetite for fact
helped him survive, walk around
and laugh to himself, inside
this century’s bluntest terrors–
the one that Hitler made,
the one that Stalin added.
A string may link me to them here,
and run
right through the blackened school bus,
the rubble of Beirut,
down to the toxic wastes, on up and out
to the ice ball punching our atmosphere–
Like Theseus in his labyrinth,
I stand here holding
my little end of string.
*
I caught and cupped a firefly just now
like an old miser blowing on his palms
to keep some warmth in.
I’d like that glow to be
The milky streams of star-mess overhead,
the rivulets of words below,
nacreous teeth of the speaker in the dark
words folding into the spiral that runs up
to the coiled shape of galaxies
as the brain whorls match the labyrinthine curves,
echoing stairwell, spinning DNA,
the play with nests and shrinking models,
the sidewise slide, the folding-up of sense,
the web the spider swings and spins, connecting.
*
Is this a dream?–I see my grandpa milking,
I watch my mother watching him.
The cats swarm round, the barn is cold,
the cows chew steadily and stamp
in random patterns, defecate
in flops and splatters, steaming heaps.
I’m the froth of the milk, the silvery pail,
the piles of hay, the cats
spiraling round my legs.
I am the frost-coated lightning rod.
We play with infinity, this is our luck,
measureless measuring, lot lines and boundaries
always deferred, always potential,
doing, undoing, doing, undoing,
we repeat ourselves so infinity
can make love to finity, kiss it,
dance with it all night.
I taste the water from that old farm’s well.
The milk was warm. The water’s hard and sweet.
*
Repetition’s magic. I knew it in my bones.
Let me repeat my dream for you,
let me repeat it for myself.
Let me talk on in this starlight,
these meteor streakings of nonsense,
this chaos, these fractals and freckles.
Don’t take my words away from me yet.
I’m doing my midnight weeding,
grasping the thistles close to the root,
I’m losing the dream farm, I’m
probably failing, repeating
what others have said–
but that farm, like an old brown photograph
suddenly filling the senses–
and this night, like a silver gelatin print–
and a string that runs from me to the past:
the view from the farmhouse window
across the silent fields of snow.
OHIOÂ
Looking across a field
at a stand of trees
more than a windbreak
less than a forest—
is pretty much all
the view we have
in summer it’s lush
in winter it gets
down to two orÂ
three tones forÂ
varietyÂ
there might be
an unpainted barn
water patches
a transmission towerÂ
 yet there’s a lot
to see
         you could sitÂ
all day on the rustyÂ
seat of a harrowÂ
with the view before youÂ
and all the sorrowsÂ
this earth has seenÂ
sees now   will see
could pass throughÂ
you like a longÂ
mad bolt of lightningÂ
leaving you drainedÂ
and shakenÂ
still
at dusk
the field would beÂ
the same and the growingÂ
shadows of the treesÂ
would cross it toward youÂ
until you rose   your heartÂ
pounding with joy and walkedÂ
gladly through the weedsÂ
and toward the treesÂ
Â
Jennifer
Jeez, Michael. I want to think about a poem, hear what it means to the rest of you, but instead you overwhelm us with more.
michael
But I think “One A.M.” and “Ohio” combined with “Adlai” reveal a style. More spider threads, if you will.
And, unless you need perfect meter, can you not love:
I am the frost-coated lightning rod.
We play with infinity, this is our luck,
measureless measuring, lot lines and boundaries
always deferred, always potential,
doing, undoing, doing, undoing,
we repeat ourselves so infinity
can make love to finity, kiss it,
dance with it all night.
Besides, we need this lull before our anticipated pictures of riot police brandishing bloody batons. Or will they merely be full glasses of red wine next to flaky croissants?
adam
Marvelous poems. Rather than confound, for me Michael sometimes makes the comments followups deeper, perhaps, than the post itself.
Obvious, or serendipitous, that he chose the passage I’d have also illuminated? Perhaps starting a line or two earlier, but also ending, for sure, 2 lines/3 sentences later. And even later, this:
… these meteor streakings of nonsense,
this chaos, these fractals and freckles.
A man with my penchant both for alliteration and for inferred, oblique contrasts. No chaos/order ‘duh’ for him. Fractals & freckles euphonically invoke those two syllables, left nameless.
And Ohio does for me what the time in the field does for the author … Thanks!