The Ladder Herald

The Poem I Keep Thinking About

Julia read it to me on my birthday. That wonderful birthday that everyone was here for Thanksgiving, and we all drove to the beach at Carmel, and everyone read a poem or sang a song and I felt like I was meant to live here on earth.

I keep thinking about it because lately I am feeling so many feelings: joy and grief and love and excitement and hope and fear and I keep saying, "abide with me" to the feelings. Abide. Abide. Abide with me.

I suggest you read it aloud as Julia did. It's too good, especially, "I took the lake between my legs". So, go on...

Here's Maxine Kumin:

Morning Swim

Into my empty head there come
a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.
In their green zone they sang my name

and in the rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four-time slow hymn.

I hummed "Abide With Me." The beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang "Abide With Me."

This One Too

THE DISTRIBUTION OF HAPPINESS

Bedcovers thrown back,
Tangled sheets,
Lustrous in moonlight.

Image of delight,
Or longing,
Or torment,

Depending on who's
Doing the imagining.

(I know: you are the one
Pierced through, I'm the one
Bent low beside you, trying
To peer into your eyes.)

—Robert Hass, "Time and Materials"

Robert Hass Poem

Just picked up his new book, "Time and Materials" and read it. A very big treat for today.

I like it. It has a fighting-with-your-spouse poem in it, and I really appreciate writers who let the reader into this—it is so good to know how other people who are in love, fight. To see what to do and what not to do.

But this is not that poem:

AFTER GOETHE

In all the mountains,
Stillness;
In the treetops
Not a breath of wind.
The birds are silent in the woods.
Just wait: soon enough
You will be quiet too.

Something For the End of The Day

The last, most beautiful stanza from "Vita Nuova", better than any prayer ever written, I say:

Moon of the soul, accompany me now,
Shine on the colosseums of my sense,
Be in the tabernacles of my brow.
My dark will make, reflecting from your stones,
The single beam of all my life intense.

Stanley Kunitz

Walt and Emily

I used to go over to Berkeley and audit Robert Hass's freshman lecture on Modern Poetry in the fall. I'm sort of longing for it right now. Nothing made me happier than to sit in the bleachers and listen to Hass talk about poems. We had the Norton anthology and just went clean through all these greats: Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Sandburg, Stevens, Joyce, Williams, Pound, H.D., Jeffers, Moore, Eliot, Millay, Cummings, Hughes, Roethke, Brooks, Lowell, Bishop, Plath, O'Hara...etc

He once spoke about how strange it is that Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were contemporaries. Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 and died May 15, 1886. Walt Whitman was born May 31, 1819 and died March 26, 1892.

The summer issue of Poetry magazine has this great poem by Campbell McGrath about the two poets as parents (they are all our parents):

Emily and Walt

I suppose we did not want for love.
They were considerate parents, if a bit aloof,

or more than a bit. He was a colossus
of enthusiasms, none of them us,

while she kissed our heads and mended socks
with a wistful, faraway look.

She might have been a little, well, daft.
And he—Allons, my little ones, he'd laugh

then leave without us.
And those "friends" of his!

Anyway, he's gone off to "discover
himself" in San Francisco, or wherever,

while she's retired to the condo in Boca.
We worry, but she says she likes it in Florida;

she seems, almost, happy. I suppose they were
less caregivers than enablers,

they taught by example, reading for hours
in the draughty house and now the house is ours,

with its drawers full of junk and odd
lines of verse and stairs that ascend to God

knows where, belfries and gymnasia,
the chapel, the workshop, aviaries, atria—

we can never hope to fill it all.
Our voices are too small

for its silences, too weak to spawn an echo.
Sometimes, even now, when the night-wind blows

into the chimney flue
I start from my bed, calling out—"Hello,

Mom and Dad, is that you?"

Ted Hughes' Poem: Seal

Seal

Where Ocean heaved
A breast of silk
And a black jag reef
Boiled into milk.

There bobbed up a head
With eyes as wild
And wide and dark
As a famine child.

I thought, by the way
It stared at me,
It had lost its mother
In the sea.

Ted Hughes

[Anemone, Fitzgerald Marine Preserve, California.]

[Fitzgerald Marine Preserve, California.]

I read this poem to Jonah tonight before bed and he loved it. He and I both have a thing for a seal.

I like all the ways Northern California is like Ireland. Our fog, the green (in winter only of course) rolling hills and crags, our poets, our gray ocean and our beer, and especially our seals. It is so amazing how they bob their heads out of the water to stare at us, just exactly as we are staring at them. As if we are equally curious about one another, and they talk about this beach in just the same way, maybe..."Hey, let's swim over to that human beach and watch them walk around!"

The last time we went to the special tide pool/seal beach, we saw a whole extended family of fat, gorgeous selkies lolling up on the beach dozing and sunning. Two little babies scampered and surfed at the edge of the water and generally irritated their trying-to-sleep parents. Jonah and his friend Sophie and Sophie's Mom Claire and I sat a few feet away and watched. The kids were so so quiet and respectful. They especially loved watching the little seals skitter around in the waves.

"I could watch seals forever." Claire said quietly. Yeah.

Later, I noticed an educational sign that explained that seal babies nurse so much that they gain about a pound a day. Claire and I, both nursing newborns, had a laugh about that. Ouch.