in this cage all the sky she can attain,
the wide, clear, patient silence of the mind
where flight goes far and fierce thought can forsake
words and seek distances out past all pain,
ache, and heartache.
Seasonal Lines
July, August
high over the uplands of summer evening gold stretches on long after Venus has followed the sun down
and the silver of Vega is only longing and guesswork till always it seems all at once the bright wings
shine out to carry the Swan in silence across the river of midnight to the warm dim shore where the first
bird
will speak
November, December
down from
the high
hill of Fall
a road goes
through dark
to cold
past a ring of great grey-shouldered stones that keep the secret of the moment when the unseen sun
stops
and turns
October
A slight, white drift
of high mist down the river
and all blue goes grey.
The sun turns silver.
Summer’s honey drains away.
Dry cottonwoods shiver.
Sea Hallowe’en
Three-quarter moon outshines
stars around her, slides
west to the tide rising,
cold, cold and wild.
October’s last night goes
lone to the day of souls,
a ghost on a north wind blowing
wild, wild and cold.
Between
Between the acts, the interval.
The leaves were late to fall, this fall.
Between the verdict and the doom,
a whisper in the waiting-room.
A non-event between events
holding a secret and a sense.
A winter wind just whispers where
two winter trees stand tense and bare.
Writing Twilight
Ashland, Oregon, 2014
On August thirtieth
on the deck above the deck
above the little leaf-hidden river
where old raddled hippies
smoke pot and shout fuck at each other
in the small city
that thrives on Shakespeare’s language
in the late evening
of the late summer
of the late, late age we’ve come to
I sit and hear the crickets chorusing
and a far crow caw
and I want to write a poem
that says late twilight
and the very end of August,
my golden August,
and all summer
and I guess I’ve written it.
No not quite yet.
Here:
wind of the end
of summer, wind
of the end of day
softly
play
in the leaves, in the many
leaves
softly softly
from all the air
gather, evening,
everywhere
THE OLD MUSIC
The Old Music
The form is from Goethe’s “Nachtgesang.”
I sought a newer music,
but it rang false and wrong.
I’d find a tune and lose it,
hearing an older song.
I’d find a tune and lose it,
and always, all day long,
among my thoughts and doings
half heard some older song.
Among my thoughts and doings
a tune would ring out strong,
yet change when I pursued it,
lost in that older song.
The tunes of my own choosing
all sounded false and wrong.
I sought a newer music,
I found an older song.
Disremembering
In Alice’s wood where things forgot their names
and fawn and child walked together fearless,
a stone might flower, a spring burst into flames,
a heavy human soul go light and careless.
But through the forest of the failing mind
where words decay like leaves, and paths long trodden
are lost, the soul plods onward to no end,
fawns, children, flowers, flames forgotten.
Crossing the Cascades
words for a country song
Coming down the cloudy side
leaving the bright behind us
isn’t any place to hide
where the rain won’t find us
Driving down so low so fast
all the sunlight in the past
Coming down the cloudy side
to another weather
got to be a place to hide
and try to stay together
The world looks so cold and wide
coming down the cloudy side
Sorrowsong
Come with me my sorrow
come away with me
where the road grows narrow
westward to the sea
where the waters darken
slow as evening falls
where no winds waken
and no voice calls
The Old Mad Queen
I
The Queen of Spain, Grown Old and Mad,
Writes to the Daughter
She Imagines She Had with Christopher Columbus
Most beautiful,
I disclaim you.
You are not my new found land
nor my Hesperides
nor my America.
You are not mine
and I do not name you.
I tear up the map
of the world of you
that had your rivers
in the wrong places,
imaginary mountains,
false passes leading my expeditions
to quicksands,
cannibals, jaguars.
Most truthful,
I disown you.
I do not own you.
Truly I have never known you.
When you tell me
who you are
I will call you by that name.
When you tell me
where you are
my compass will point there.
When you tell me
of your prairies, your sierras,
I will see them in the blue air
above the western sea.
O golden Peru,
treasure never mine,
most beautiful, most true!
Between us
is neither forgiveness
nor reparation
but only the sea waves, the sea wind.
If ever you send
across the sea,
bells will be rung
in the old towers
and the Te Deum sung.
Crowned, jeweled, furred,
I will come forward:
Tell me, my Lord Ambassadors!
From the New World
what word, what word?
II
The Queen Despairs
A dark water flowing deepening
till there is nothing but dark water
and dark air and the wind blowing
At the far side of the sea the sea
falls over the end of everything
in a wide smooth silent stream forever
Three ships on silent water
and nothing else ever but the wind
blowing and blowing to the west
O my daughter my secret daughter
unborn and borne away into the west
over dark water never to come to me
III
The Queen’s Ballad
He was the sailor of my heart,
but I was Queen of Spain
> and so I could not follow him
when he sailed away again.
He took our daughter with him
and she was all I had.
Clear to the River of Paradise
he sailed, and there went mad
with drinking of that water
that runs from Heaven to earth
and back to Heaven forever
through the hills of death and birth.
His soul came weeping to me
from the Isles of the Unblest:
“Our daughter rules in far Cathay
and all the utmost West:
she rules a land of savages
who have no god or priest.
Oh, call her to come back to you,
back to the pious East!”
But she is far too far to hear
across the ocean’s plain.
No captain now will sail for me
though I am Queen of Spain.
So I have built a secret ship
of moonlight and the wind
and ordered his soul to sail with me
west to the Isles of Ind.
And there the Queen my daughter
will take and hold my hands,
and we will dance the night away
on those unblessèd sands.
The Pursuit
A Moral Ballad
It laughed and sang, it leaped and ran,
The gleeful Happy Beast,
And swift it raced from East to West
And back from West to East.
And close behind in hot pursuit,
Fearless of feint or fall,
Sir Thomas rode, to catch and keep
That gladsome animal.
But ever the Beast ran on and laughed
And giggled and cavorted,
Until Sir Thomas’ steed, forespent,
Hung down its head and snorted.
Then cried Sir Thomas, “Gallop on!
On oats tonight you’ll feast,
My brave Content, when I have caught
The fleeting Happy Beast!”
He spurred his horse and whipped it sore
To gallop bravely after
The cheerful prey that fled away
In gales of merry laughter.
The horse ran hard, it burst its heart,
It fell and could not rise.
And as it lay it turned to look
Its master in the eyes.
“O faithless one,” Sir Thomas cried,
“You have betrayed and shamed me!”
Then as it died, the horse replied,
“Remember what you named me.”
Over his horse’s grave he raised
A marble monument,
And on it carved a single word,
The horse’s name, Content.
Yet still Sir Thomas’ ghost must run
From East to West on foot,
And West to East, behind the Beast
That laughs at his pursuit.
2014: A Hymn
Our prophets lead our people on
Fast to the promised land,
And where we pass, the green of grass
Turns to bare brown sand.
So high our cities’ towers soar
Above the deep-set fault,
Immense they rise into the skies,
Pillars of cloud and salt.
Impatient with the patient day,
We rush to gain tomorrow.
Our ships that plough the seas with nets
Leave a long, empty furrow.
Our quick inventions spend our time
Faster and ever faster,
While kind and unforgiving Earth
Endures our brief disaster.
For all we do is nothing to
Her bright eons of days.
So let my dark tune turn and end
As all song should, in praise.
And in the hope of wisdom yet,
I’ll sing the hymn that praises
Earth’s greater life that gives us life,
The grace that still amazes.
ENVOI
The Mist Horse
O daughter of November
come riding, come riding
on the red dun mare
the wise dun mare
blind in one eye but sure-footed
across the sunlit lands, the uplands
of the standing wheatstraw
down to these cloudy lowlands
of crowded alders.
Come riding, O my autumn daughter,
come riding and dismount
here where I may watch you dance
almost unmoving with the mist horse
the young white mare
among the rainy alders
in silence, almost unmoving,
the wild white mare of Iceland
and the daughter of autumn, dancing.
AFTERWORD
Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts
A poem that rhymes, has a regular meter, or follows a particular pattern is said to be “in form.” If it has no regular pattern, it’s “free verse.” Some poets get entrenched behind form, some behind free verse, and these days many caper about in the minefield between the two extremes.
I’m one of the caperers. I’m at home in no-man’s-land. In this matter, I have no theories, no lasting preferences, not even many opinions. So long as a poem works, it makes no qualitative difference to me what its form is or if it has no discernible, describable shape but its own.
As a kid writing poetry, I wrote in rhyme and meter because the poetry I heard and read was in rhyme and meter. Also, I think, because most kids respond naturally, physically, to a drumbeat, the soundplay of language, and the kinetic dance of regular change and repetition.
As I got a little older I began to read poetry without regular meter and with only hidden rhymes or subtle echoes, and began writing that way too. I felt the ease and independence of not having to think about how many beats per line, what rhymes with the word at the end of the line … the freedom of free verse.
But then sometimes a poem as I wrote it would begin to seek a pattern of its own, and I would follow it.
For the last ten years or so, I’ve met regularly with a small group of poets who write (if we feel like it) to assignments we give one another. Some of these assignments have to do with form, others with content. Challenged to write in some complex classic patterns I’d never tried before, I became aware of certain aspects or effects of writing in form that I hadn’t thought about before.
My most revealing discovery was that a form can give me a poem.
I don’t mean that if I write a formally correct sonnet, fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with one of the obligatory rhyme schemes, I’ve written a poem. Simple diligence can produce an example of any form. Being given a poem by the form is quite another matter.
Free verse is individualistic: the entire poem is entirely up to you. Every aspect of it is your choice, your decision. You make it all. In a sense, every free-verse poem reinvents the poem.
Writing in form, you agree to use a certain conventional pattern. It may be simply a stanza, a meter, a rhyme scheme, or it may be one of the classic named forms with a set of technical requirements. Whether it’s as simple as a rhymed quatrain or as complex as a villanelle, only part of it is up to you: the words. The shape your words go into was chosen and decided, was made, by other people, often long ago and somewhere else.
A form has rules, and to write in form is to obey the rules. So why would you choose to obey arbitrary rules? Isn’t freedom an absolute good?
The conventional patterns of English verse, and the rules of a formal poem, are matters that the general community of poets and their readers agree on, much as the general community of musicians agree on what the scales are. When you use these forms you’re not entirely on your own. You’re an individual working within, as part of, a community, within a consensus. So what you have to say is no longer totally
and entirely up to you. It has to find how to say itself not only within this pattern, these set confines, but through them. The words must fit themselves into the pattern, and the form must express the content.
When you’re working in a strict form sometimes a certain magic takes place. You realize that the content is finding itself through the form. The form gives you your poem.
“Form follows function,” engineers say. Evidently it can go the other way round. Following form, you find function.
You begin saying things you didn’t know you had to say. The rhyme-pattern forces you to find it, or the meter demands it, or the required repetition of a line leads you further than you knew you were going. Your poem is more than you intended or envisaged.
This doesn’t by any means always happen. But when it does, it is impressive and mysterious. Enough to explain why poets write in form.
Enough that I’d like to encourage any young poet who hasn’t tried writing in form to give it a try.
For those interested in the mystery of form but unused to recognizing it or unfamiliar with its technical terms, Lewis Turco’s New Book of Forms is an almost obsessively exhaustive but quite reliable source-book. Like all crafts, formal verse has a jargon vocabulary. It looks formidable, but is easy to learn by doing the things it describes.
Some poets make very free with the classic names; having written a poem that in some ways or even in only one way does what a sonnet does, they call it a sonnet. This seems rather arrogant. For me, the specific power and vigor of a set form lie in the observance of the form. A game’s good only if you play by the rules. And writing a poem in a strict, complex form such as the villanelle can be a terrific game. It requires both caution and daring. It beats solitaire all hollow.
One may feel that a form has been pretty much worn out by time and unsurpassable example (as indeed I find the sonnet), in which case there’s good reason to change the rules, make up your own. But since the result isn’t a sonnet, give your variation its own name—as G.M. Hopkins did with his Curtal Sonnets, the greatest of which is “Pied Beauty.”
This brings us close to the large region between form and free verse now inhabited by poets writing in what I call “free form.” (It may have other names, but I don’t know them.) By free form I mean a discernable pattern—involving a regularity, repetition of stanzas, line lengths, metric beat, end-rhymes, inner rhymes, whatever—that is unique to a certain poem. The result has no name and description in the Book of Forms, yet it is a describable, essentially rhythmic, pattern.
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