by Gregory Orr
11. A Committed Life
“What are you looking at?”
My mother asked.
“Nothing,”
I answered.
“I thought
So,” and she turned away.
But I continued to study
Nothing. Noted its features,
Its calm demeanor; its smooth
Uninflected surfaces.
Later,
In large books, I read
About nothing—theories
Of nothing, histories
Of nothing. Over the years,
Nothing revealed to me
Its heights and depths.
Almost without knowing it,
I had become an expert
On nothing. People sought
My opinion about it.
“Nothing is important,”
I told them.
They were
Impressed. They lured me
To a great university;
They begged me to teach
All I knew about nothing.
It seemed only reasonable:
A final flowering of my life’s
Passionate commitment to nothing.
12. Not Without Risks
Nothing has changed
For me.
Gone are
Her smiles—
Transparent,
Terrifying.
Gone, the ways
In which
Nothing pleased me.
I think back to when
Nothing
Was everything
To me
And filled my world.
I was afraid
I would lose
Nothing if she changed.
My fears proved true.
13. That It Cares Deeply
So many people I loved
Are now a part of nothing.
Nothing took them in
Out of the cold
Where they stood,
Shivering and patient,
Hoping to again
Be part of something,
Which is,
Of course, impossible.
When you die, nothing
Has room for you.
Nothing makes a place
For you in its spacious
Domain.
You dwell there,
And nothing cares for you.
Reading Dickinson
If you ask me, when God
Speaks
From the whirlwind,
The syllables He utters
Are guttural,
Crude, destructive.
I prefer Emily’s music
That seems to issue
From a pool
Whose spiral motion
Is pulling her in and down.
Each poem is a whorled
Shell
I hold to my ear.
Roar of the Abyss?
Yes, but above it,
Her clear
And human voice,
Singing as she drowns.
Lines Standing in for Religious Conviction
Truth of it is: I was born
With an empty center.
When I find myself there,
It’s often despair.
But now and then, it’s Zen.
A leap of faith from a cliff?
I prefer hope
And bring my own rope.
A focused love is a doubled
Devotion—each shrine
I build deepens my mind.
Only when I yearn, do I learn.
And what helps me grow is holy.
Ode to Some Lyric Poets
. . . certain poems in an uncertain world
1.
“Audacity of Bliss”—that’s what
Emily Dickinson called it.
More than once I’ve felt it
And knew if I could
Turn it into words and share it,
I’d have a reason to live
And no matter
How badly
Life turned out, I could bear it.
I cherish that night she woke me
To hear her recite:
“Before and After—Vanished—
There is only—Now.
A Kiss—Appropriate
On its shining Brow.”
Who only a year earlier,
Had appeared in another
Dream to announce:
“We are bound by words
And wonder to the world.”
Then she scowled and smiled
At the same time,
And told me to write it down.
Who was I to disagree?
2. To Hart Crane
This huge bridge, cabled
Harp strung
Between two cities,
Heart stretched
Taut
Between two shores.
It’s here you paused
Where others
Had stood
Who couldn’t stand
The tension
And chose to leap.
You didn’t—you chose to sing.
3.
Wilfred Owen’s hunched
Over his shovel,
Muttering about
Corpse-stench, mustard gas.
And no matter how loud
I shout, he won’t look up.
His ears are ruptured;
His brain, concussed
From gigantic artillery
Explosions.
He’s dug
Enough trenches
To fill the entire
Twentieth century,
Yet no line is deep enough
To save a single one of us.
4.
The mind “has cliffs” that are
“Sheer, no-man-fathomed,”
And Gerard Hopkins clung
To more than one.
He knew
How vast and frightening
It can be inside
And never denied
His own brain was mostly
A landscape of chasms.
He descended, again
And again, clutching
Notebook and pen,
To the bottom
Of the deepest and darkest.
5.
Rimbaud, crashing
Through danger
And degradation—
Convinced
That on the other side
Resplendent wonder
Must abide.
What courage
It took—his poems
Spitting off sparks
As they raced through the dark.
6.
When Karl Marx was beardless
And young, he wanted most
To be a poet.
He gave it
A shot, but it didn’t click
And soon he switched
To other things for which
He became rightly famous,
For instance: the claim
That all labor ought to be sacred.
7.
I believe in nothing but the holiness of the heart’s
affections and the truth of imagination.
KEATS
I know it never
Happened:
She’s asleep
Now in the small room
They share.
Keats
Is still awake
At his desk,
Feverishly
Trying to translate
Her body into words—
Those ripening breasts—
“Their soft fall and swell.”
He pauses, puts hand
To chin and stares
Off into space—
A pose
He’s perfected
For working on poems.
After a bit, he’s restless
And stands up
To cross the room,
Lean down and,
With his lips,
Closely follow the original text.
8. The Lake Poets
Somber Wordsworth
Paced his closed-in garden
To the regular, iambic meters
He composed as he strolled;
How the wilder Coleridge,
When they went for walks,
Kept veering off the path
To scramble up steep
Slopes on hands and knees,
With urgent,
Spasmodic gestures—
Rhythms of his own poems.
9.
Wordsworth felt “the burden
Of this unintelligible world.”
Luckily, we don’t bear it alone—
The beloved’s eager to help.
Didn’t she carry it in poems, whole
Centuries before we were born?
Won’t he be lugging it in songs,
Long after we’re gone?
10. For Hölderlin
Who’d want to be
That plaster statue
Of the god Calm
Around whom
Chaos
Swirls and swarms?
Better to swim
Through harm
Than ride
So high above it
That we look
Down on suffering.
You must descend,
Love said,
You must embrace
What seeks to break you.
11.
“Chaos shimmering through a veil
Of order”—Novalis
Trying to define art,
But instead describing
The beloved, how her
Curves press against
Confining garments.
Always, Eros at the heart
Of it—the beloved
Bending over us,
His breath troubling
Our surface to get at our depths.
12.
Shakespeare noted: poets
Have a lot in common
With lunatics
And besotted lovers—
Except the poet’s eyes
Are free to rove
“In a fine frenzy
Rolling,” and so they
Take in both heaven
And earth (and add
“hell” as well)—
Take in all three realms,
And also
That wild one inside us.
Not to mention what’s going on
In the beloved’s head
And heart—that double
Mystery no one’s ever
Solved.
How to untangle
It all and make it plain?
“Grab your pen,” was
The Bard’s advice.
His command?
“Write like crazy!
It’s your only chance to stay sane.”
13.
Clutching a bottle of wine,
Petrarch follows his shepherd
Guide. They’re trudging up
The steep slopes of Mount
Ventoux.
What he’s up
To is pretty much without
Precedent (at least
In the West):
Climbing
A mountain
Just for the fuck of it.
True, he’s also one more
Trapped poet
Of the Middle Ages
Searching for some way out
That doesn’t lead to God.
Now, he’s reached the top
And suddenly gets it:
This huge vista his eyes
Are taking in—it
Mirrors the world inside.
Uncorking the bottle, he
Gazes south, frightened
But brave.
Biting
His lip hard, he tastes the sea.
14.
“The tears of things”—
Virgil’s phrase;
As if every object
Is filled
With grief
And wants to weep.
When that dark mood
Weighs me down,
I feel the urge to cut
Each bright thread
That binds me to this world.
My body’s a sad thing
I’d gladly leave behind—
Something I could
Step out of,
A long
Bandage I would unwind.
15.
“The whole country torn
By war. Only mountains
And rivers remain.”
Du Fu’s poem outlived
The strife it was born from.
History imposes its grim
Conditions: always,
The beloved is dying;
Always, rampant violence.
Always, the soul resists;
Someone somewhere
Is writing a poem,
And someone else waiting
(sometimes for centuries)
To read it—someone
Who needs it
So as not to yield to despair.
16. To Heraclitus
You taught the world’s
Unstable—
Not even
Atoms are tame.
You showed
Change
Is the name
Of the game,
And even the game
Can change.
You never said strife
Was nice; only
That we need fire
As much as ice—
That energy
Must flow:
A structure
That’s closed
Will only explode.
17.
Praxilla’s single poem—
That made her
A fifth-century BC
One-hit wonder.
It briefly
Topped the charts:
Lament from that bleak
And cheerless Afterworld,
Which was the best
Greeks could imagine,
Even for their greatest heroes.
Those four lines—nothing
But a little list of things
Adonis missed most:
Stars and moon and sun
And the taste of ripe cucumbers.
Ode to Words
They cluster
At tongue-tip,
The points of pens.
Shaping them
Into word-ships—
That’s my
Form of worship:
Riding the wild
River of this world.
*
The Bible says
Adam brought
Trouble
Into the world
With his small
Pink slab of muscle.
But if God didn’t
Want it to happen,
Why did He
Give him a tongue?
*
“God so loved the word
He gave His only
Begotten world
That it might be
Redeemed.”
I think the preacher
Used to say that
In my church
When I was a kid.
Then again, I could
Have gotten it wrong—
Back then
I wasn’t really listening.
*
“And the word
Was made
Fresh”—
Each one
Baked daily.
It’s the bread
By which I live.
*
Talk about miracles!
How I take empty air
Deep in my lungs,
Warming it there,
Extracting from it
What my blood needs,
Then breathing it back
Out as sound
I’ve added meani
ng to.
*
Outside our bodies, things
Wait to be named,
To be saved.
And don’t they deserve it?
So much hidden inside
Each one,
Such a longing
To become the beloved.
Meanwhile, the sounds
Crowd our mouths,
Press up against
Our lips
Which
Are such
A narrow exit
For a joy so desperate.
*
Vowels that rise
From our open throats . . .
Long “a” lounging, naked
In the leafy shade;
Then the low,
Lubricious moan of “o.”
The high “e” of grief.
And “u”—who
Could ever forget you?
“I” could never.
“Y” would I even try?
*
The word “mockingbird”—
It’s poised in my mouth
Same as the bird itself
Pauses on the dogwood branch.
When the bird flies away,
The word remains.
Look, now it’s right here—
Singing on the page.
*
The word is exempt from