by Anthony
their fauna, their geography.
Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it
another minute longer, Friday came.
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He’d pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
– Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.
And then one day they came and took us off.
Now I live here, another island,
that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I’m old.
I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf –
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle . . .
Now it won’t look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.
The local museum’s asked me to
leave everything to them:
the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,
my shedding goatskin trousers
(moths have got in the fur),
the parasol that took me such a time
remembering the way the ribs should go.
It still will work but, folded up,
looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.
How can anyone want such things?
– And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.
(1976)
Andrew Solomon (b.1963) won the 2001 National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and named as one of the London Times’s one hundred best books of the decade. His most recent book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (2012), received the National Book Critics Circle Award. An activist in the fields of mental health, LGBT rights, education and the arts, he is also the author of The Irony Tower (1991) and a novel, A Stone Boat (1994), as well as numerous award-winning articles for major US newspapers, magazines and academic journals.
For Julia, in the Deep Water
JOHN N. MORRIS (1931–1997)
TOBIAS WOLFF
I have raised three children, and lived through this very moment with each of them, not only in watching them learn to swim, but in sending them off for their first day of school – watching them wave uncertainly, bravely, from the window of the vanishing bus; handing them the keys to the car for their first solo run; sending them away to college, to foreign countries, to romance and marriage – learning to stand back, ‘doing nothing’, as they enter the deep water.
And this poem always makes it happen again for me: that sense of my children needing help, needing me, that helplessness, that desolation of letting go, that joy in their courage, their hunger for all of life’s possibilities and hazards. And always the knowledge, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake, sometimes jangling like an alarm, that in the end they will follow where I am bound, whatever the skill and struggle that has kept us afloat. They will learn to let go, as I am still learning to let go. I never did anything harder.
For Julia, in the Deep Water
The instructor we hire
because she does not love you
Leads you into the deep water,
The deep end
Where the water is darker –
Her open, encouraging arms
That never get nearer
Are merciless for your sake.
You will dream this water always
Where nothing draws nearer,
Wasting your valuable breath
You will scream for your mother –
Only your mother is drowning
Forever in the thin air
Down at the deep end.
She is doing nothing,
She never did anything harder.
And I am beside her.
I am beside her in this imagination.
We are waiting
Where the water is darker.
You are over your head,
Screaming, you are learning
Your way toward us,
You are learning how
In the helpless water
It is with our skill
We live in what kills us.
(1976)
The books of Tobias Wolff (b. 1945) include the memoirs This Boy’s Life (1989) and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994); the short novel The Barracks Thief (1984); the novel Old School (2003); and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985), The Night in Question (1997) and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008). He has also edited several anthologies, among them The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (1994). He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.
Aubade
PHILIP LARKIN (1922–85)
WILLIAM SIEGHART
Philip Larkin has, amongst his many gifts, an extraordinary ability to embrace a feeling or thought that the rest of us would quickly strike from our mind because it was so disturbing, and examine that thought properly and turn it into a poem. ‘Aubade’ is the supreme example of this. Waking up in the middle of the night and worrying about one’s death is an experience we all can recognise, one that most of us would rather not spend too much time thinking about. Yet Larkin does the opposite and constructs a poem of universal relevance without the conceit of poetic obfuscation. I think it is one of the finest poems written in the last half of the twentieth century and, however many times I read or recite it, the eyes inevitably begin to moisten.
Aubade
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
– The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down
to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
(1977)
After cofounding Forward Publishing in 1986, the British entrepreneur and philanthropist William Sieghart (b. 1960) launched the influential Forward Prizes for Poetry in 1992 and two years later National Poetry Day, which sees poetry celebrated around the UK each October. In 2012, to mark the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, he launched Winning Words, a public art project to place poetry in public places, as well as editing an anthology of that title.
Dear Bryan Wynter
W. S. GRAHAM (1918–86)
NICK LAIRD
I’m not sure any poem has made me cry exactly, but there are many poems I find very moving. Some come to mind immediately: Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’ or ‘Old Man’, Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Remembering My Father’, Heaney’s ‘Clearances’ sequence, Les Murray’s ‘The Mitchells’, Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with You’, Rilke’s Eighth Elegy, Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, George Herbert’s ‘The Pearl’. But today I’ll opt for W. S. Graham’s ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, which, along with his poems ‘Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch’ and ‘Private Poem to Norman MacLeod’, says something lean and direct about the strengths and limitations of friendship, about how far one can journey from the ‘ego house’, as Graham calls it in the MacLeod poem, and suggests that poetry, ‘a kind / Of news of no time’, is a way to practise talking with the dead.
Dear Bryan Wynter
1
This is only a note
To say how sorry I am
You died. You will realise
What a position it puts
Me in. I couldn’t really
Have died for you if so
I were inclined. The carn
Foxglove here on the wall
Outside your first house
Leans with me standing
In the Zennor wind.
Anyhow how are things?
Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
Are you there at all?
I would like to think
You were all right
And not worried about
Monica and the children
And not unhappy or bored.
2
Speaking to you and not
Knowing if you are there
Is not too difficult.
My words are used to that.
Do you want anything?
Where shall I send something?
Rice-wine, meanders, paintings
By your contemporaries?
Or shall I send a kind
Of news of no time
Leaning against the wall
Outside your old house.
The house and the whole moor
Is flying in the mist.
3
I am up. I’ve washed
The front of my face
And here I stand looking
Out over the top
Half of my bedroom window.
There almost as far
As I can see I see
St Buryan’s church tower.
An inch to the left, behind
That dark rise of woods,
Is where you used to lurk.
4
This is only a note
To say I am aware
You are not here. I find
It difficult to go
Beside Housman’s star
Lit fences without you.
And nobody will laugh
At my jokes like you.
5
Bryan, I would be obliged
If you would scout things out
For me. Although I am not
Just ready to start out.
I am trying to be better,
Which will make you smile
Under your blue hat.
I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.
(c. 1977)
Nick Laird (b. Northern Ireland, 1975) worked as a litigator for several years before leaving to write full-time. He has published three collections of poetry, To a Fault (2005), On Purpose (2007) and Go Giants (2013), and two novels, Utterly Monkey (2005) and Glover’s Mistake (2009). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Princeton University.
A Meeting
WENDELL BERRY (1934– )
COLUM MCCANN
The only person who truly wants to admit to crying over a poem is the poet herself or himself. Most poems don’t come like a burning bush or a pillar of light. They are worked and worried into being. But when they finally emerge they should have the appearance of absolute ease. Poets are so much like dancers who ruin their ankles for the sake of a moment’s beauty in the air. The fact is that they occasionally soar. So much craft goes into the making of a poem that I imagine most poets would be delighted to learn that someone else, other than themselves, has cried over it. Still, it can happen. And, like most men, I’m more easily moved to tears than I’m prepared to tell anyone. I don’t know a poem that consistently brings a tear to my eye, but I can always count on Wendell Berry’s ‘A Meeting’ to create wine from water. It’s a beautiful poem, not meant to make us cry, but to celebrate the passing of loved ones. I read it recently at the wake of a good friend. It did indeed make me weep then, though there are other times it simply breaks open the day.
I have developed a favourite thing at Christmastime, where I ask my kids to learn a poem off by heart and ‘give’ it to me rather than a pair of socks or yet another scarf. It’s my favourite moment of the whole year. I give them a poem and they learn it. Sometimes the poems are wildly different, from ‘A Meeting’ to ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’. But this Berry poem will always be theirs, and therefore mine.
Berry is a poet who has a singular refusal to engage with the sentimental and yet is always brave enough to engage the necessity of sentiment. We are, all of us, going to end up under some mighty fine trees. All good poems come around to other poems. I suppose the question is, ‘Do we dare to eat the peach?’ In Berry’s world, we always do.
A Meeting
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: ‘How you been?’
He grins and looks at me.
‘I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.’
(1980)
The novels of the Irish writer Colum McCann (b. 1965) range from Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994) and Songdogs (1995) to Zoli (2006), Let the Great World Spin (National Book Award, 2009) and TransAtlantic (2013). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Hunter College, New York.
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eulogy to a hell of a dame –
CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920–94)
MIKE LEIGH
Near the bone. Strikes a chord. Takes me back. Hits a nerve. Brings a lump.
eulogy to a hell of a dame –
some dogs who sleep at night
must dream of bones
and I remember your bones
in flesh
and best
in that dark green dress
and those high-heeled bright
black shoes,
you always cursed when you
drank,
your hair coming down you
wanted to explode out of
what was holding you:
rotten memories of a
rotten
past, and
you finally got
out
by dying,
leaving me with the
rotten
present;
you’ve been dead
28 years
yet I remember you
better than any of
the rest;
you were the only one
who understood
the futility of the
arrangement of
life;
all the others were only
displeased with
trivial segments,
carped
nonsensically about
nonsense;
Jane, you were
killed by
knowing too much.
here’s a drink
to your bones
that
this dog
still
dreams about.
(1984)
The television and feature films made by the writer and director Mike Leigh (b. 1943) include Bleak Moments (1971), High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990), Naked (Best Director, Cannes, 1993), Secrets and Lies (winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, 1996), Career Girls (1997), Topsy-Turvy (1999), Vera Drake (winner of the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion, 2004), Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) and Another Year (2010). He has also written and directed stage plays including Abigail’s Party (1977) and, most recently, Grief (2011).
Midsummer: ‘Sonnet XLIII’
DEREK WALCOTT (1930– )