Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy

by Neil Astley

abides, from which I struggle

  not to stray.

  When I look behind,

  as I am compelled to look

  before I can gather strength

  to proceed on my journey,

  I see the milestones dwindling

  toward the horizon

  and the slow fires trailing

  from the abandoned camp-sites,

  over which scavenger angels

  wheel on heavy wings.

  Oh, I have made myself a tribe

  out of my true affections,

  and my tribe is scattered!

  How shall the heart be reconciled

  to its feast of losses?

  In a rising wind

  the manic dust of my friends,

  those who fell along the way,

  bitterly stings my face.

  Yet I turn, I turn,

  exulting somewhat,

  with my will intact to go

  wherever I need to go,

  and every stone on the road

  precious to me.

  In my darkest night,

  when the moon was covered

  and I roamed through wreckage,

  a nimbus-clouded voice

  directed me:

  ‘Live in the layers,

  not on the litter.’

  Though I lack the art

  to decipher it,

  no doubt the next chapter

  in my book of transformations

  is already written.

  I am not done with my changes.

  STANLEY KUNITZ

  The Road Not Taken

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  Then took the other, as just as fair,

  And having perhaps the better claim,

  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

  Though as for that, the passing there

  Had worn them really about the same,

  And both that morning equally lay

  In leaves no step had trodden black.

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  ROBERT FROST

  The Way It Is

  There’s a thread you follow. It goes among

  things that change. But it doesn’t change.

  People wonder about what you are pursuing.

  You have to explain about the thread.

  But it is hard for others to see.

  While you hold it you can’t get lost.

  Tragedies happen; people get hurt

  or die; and you suffer and get old.

  Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

  You don’t ever let go of the thread.

  WILLIAM STAFFORD

  ‘I drew a line…’

  I drew a line:

  this far, and no further,

  never will I go further than this.

  When I went further,

  I drew a new line,

  and then another line.

  The sun was shining

  and everywhere I saw people,

  hurried and serious,

  and everyone was drawing a line,

  everyone went further.

  TOON TELLEGEN

  translated from the Dutch by Judith Wilkinson

  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  Whose woods these are I think I know.

  His house is in the village, though;

  He will not see me stopping here

  To watch his woods fill up with snow.

  My little horse must think it queer

  To stop without a farmhouse near

  Between the woods and frozen lake

  The darkest evening of the year.

  He gives his harness bells a shake

  To ask if there is some mistake.

  The only other sound’s the sweep

  Of easy wind and downy flake.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  ROBERT FROST

  Migratory

  Near evening, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts,

  seventeen wild geese arrowed the ashen blue

  over the Wal-Mart and the Blockbuster Video,

  and I was up there, somewhere between the asphalt

  and their clear dominion – not in the parking lot,

  its tallowy circles just appearing,

  the shopping carts shining, from above,

  like little scraps of foil. Their eyes

  held me there, the unfailing gaze

  of those who know how to fly in formation,

  wing-tip to wing-tip, safe, fearless.

  And the convex glamour of their eyes carried

  the parking lot, the wet field

  troubled with muffler shops

  and stoplights, the arc of highway

  and its exits, one shattered farmhouse

  with its failing barn… The wind

  a few hundred feet above the grass

  erases the mechanical noises, everything;

  nothing but their breathing

  and the perfect rowing of the pinions,

  and then, out of that long, percussive pour

  toward what they are most certain of,

  comes their – question, is it?

  Assertion, prayer, aria – as delivered

  by something too compelled in its passage

  to sing? A hoarse and unwieldy music

  which plays nonetheless down the length

  of me until I am involved in their flight,

  the unyielding necessity of it, as they literally

  rise above, ineluctable, heedless,

  needing nothing… Only animals

  make me believe in God now

  – so little between spirit and skin,

  any gesture so entirely themselves.

  But I wasn’t with them,

  as they headed toward Acushnet

  and New Bedford, of course I wasn’t,

  though I was not exactly in the parking lot

  either, where the cars nudged in and out

  of their slots, each taking the place another

  had abandoned, so that no space, no desire

  would remain unfilled. I wasn’t there.

  I was so filled with longing

  – is that what that sound is for? –

  I seemed to be nowhere at all.

  MARK DOTY

  Alone

  I

  One evening in February I came near to dying here.

  The car skidded sideways on the ice, out

  on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –

  their lights – closed in.

  My name, my girls, my job

  broke free and were left silently behind

  further and further away. I was anonymous

  like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.

  The approaching traffic had huge lights.

  They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel

  in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.

  The seconds grew – there was space in them –

  they grew as big as hospital buildings.

  You could almost pause

  and breathe out for a while

  before being crushed.

  Then something caught: a helping grain of sand

  or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free

  and scuttled
smartly right over the road.

  A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it

  flew away in the darkness.

  Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt

  and saw someone coming through the whirling snow

  to see what had become of me.

  II

  I have been walking for a long time

  on the frozen Östergötland fields.

  I have not seen a single person.

  In other parts of the world

  there are people who are born, live and die

  in a perpetual crowd.

  To be always visible – to live

  in a swarm of eyes –

  a special expression must develop.

  Face coated with clay.

  The murmuring rises and falls

  while they divide up among themselves

  the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.

  I must be alone

  ten minutes in the morning

  and ten minutes in the evening.

  – Without a programme.

  Everyone is queuing at everyone’s door.

  Many.

  One.

  TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER

  translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton

  Encounter

  We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

  A red wing rose in the darkness.

  And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

  One of us pointed to it with his hand.

  That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

  Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

  O my love, where are they, where are they going

  The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

  I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

  CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ

  translated by Czesław Miłosz & Lillian Vallee

  At the Fishhouses

  Although it is a cold evening,

  down by one of the fishhouses

  an old man sits netting,

  his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,

  a dark purple-brown,

  and his shuttle worn and polished.

  The air smells so strong of codfish

  it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.

  The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

  and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

  to storerooms in the gables

  for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

  All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

  swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

  is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

  the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

  among the wild jagged rocks,

  is of an apparent translucence

  like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

  growing on their shoreward walls.

  The big fish tubs are completely lined

  with layers of beautiful herring scales

  and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

  with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

  with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

  Up on the little slope behind the houses,

  set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

  is an ancient wooden capstan,

  cracked, with two long bleached handles

  and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

  where the ironwork has rusted.

  The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

  He was a friend of my grandfather.

  We talk of the decline in the population

  and of codfish and herring

  while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

  There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

  He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

  from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

  the blade of which is almost worn away.

  Down at the water’s edge, at the place

  where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

  descending into the water, thin silver

  tree trunks are laid horizontally

  across the gray stones, down and down

  at intervals of four or five feet.

  Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

  element bearable to no mortal,

  to fish and to seals…One seal particularly

  I have seen here evening after evening.

  He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

  like me a believer in total immersion,

  so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

  I also sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’.

  He stood up in the water and regarded me

  steadily, moving his head a little.

  Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

  almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

  as if it were against his better judgment.

  Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

  the clear gray icy water…Back, behind us,

  the dignified tall firs begin.

  Bluish, associating with their shadows,

  a million Christmas trees stand

  waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

  above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.

  I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,

  slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

  icily free above the stones,

  above the stones and then the world.

  If you should dip your hand in,

  your wrist would ache immediately,

  your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

  as if the water were a transmutation of fire

  that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

  If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

  then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

  It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

  drawn from the cold hard mouth

  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

  forever, flowing and drawn, and since

  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  ELIZABETH BISHOP

  Snow

  The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

  Spawning snow and pink roses against it

  Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

  World is suddener than we fancy it.

  World is crazier and more of it than we think,

  Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

  A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

  The drunkenness of things being various.

  And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

  Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –

  On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –

  There is more than glass between the snow and the huge

  roses.

  LOUIS MACNEICE

  A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

  Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.

  SEFERIS, Mythistorema

  (for J.G. Farrell)

  Even now there are places where a thought might grow –

  Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

  To a slow clock of condensation,

  An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter

  Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft,

  Indian compounds where the wind dances

  And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

  Lime crevices behind rippling rain-barrels,

  Dog corners for bone burials;

  And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

  Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,

  Among the bathtubs and the washbasins

  A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

 
This is the one star in their firmament

  Or frames a star within a star.

  What should they do there but desire?

  So many days beyond the rhododendrons

  With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,

  They have learnt patience and silence

  Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

  They have been waiting for us in a foetor

  Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,

  Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure

  Of the expropriated mycologist.

  He never came back, and light since then

  Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.

  Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew

  And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –

  A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue

  Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

  There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking

  Into the earth that nourished it;

  And nightmares, born of these and the grim

  Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.

  Those nearest the door grow strong –

  ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’

  The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling

  Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning

  For their deliverance, have been so long

  Expectant that there is left only the posture.

  A half century, without visitors, in the dark –

  Poor preparation for the cracking lock

  And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,

  Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

  Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought