Good poet, I must beg to differ, Especially in this year when our lives became More dangerous than even we could dream.
Dawn has turned my yard to monochrome, The snow from yesterday pocked by clumps Of leaves that form the surface of a moon. But more than season speaks of waiting.
In this long year of loneliness, my lover Metamorphosed to a stone of now That one might touch yet never reach, Dark magic with no “true apothecary.” My friends die off like ancient trees Snapped at last by living’s winds, marked In some accounting book I cannot see.
And yet, last week I watched three horses Turned to pasture. At first, they sprinted each To corners of the field, then slowly drifted Toward a center, as if remembering themselves. They nickered, pawed, and shook their manes. And then these strong and fearsome animals, With happy teeth and lips and tongues, Began to groom each other’s heads and flanks. It seems that only creatures can speak tenderness.
Within a night of sleep, a dream of stone and snag, I watched again my father climb a ladder, stringing boughs and lights for our whole town. In those auras he looked down at me. Catch a snowflake on your tongue And you will have it all your life.
Twenty years ago in Michigan, I watched A townsman hanging lights upon a bridge That crossed the Looking Glass River And penned these lines: “Father, do we go To Heaven/Or does it come to us?” In that dream he thought it was a prayer.
Now I sense that prayer is more A trade of breaths than pleading of desires. Hier bin í. Da, bist du.1
As the sun begins to lift a little, and The world brings color to its frames again, Drawing near such scenes that I can add To memory—seeking there my hopefulness. Here I am. It is enough.
1 These words (“Here I am./There you are.”) appear in Randall Jarrell’s poem A Game at Salzburg, in which he casts them as an exchange between ourselves and God. Make of that what you will.
And, through and over everything, A sense of glad awakening. —“Renascence” Edna St. Vincent Millay
—For Leslie Henry and Dorothy Quimby, librarians, both, and stewards of our words.
The fog below, the clouds above, the mists between. I remember well the times when that pewter lens Was all this altitude revealed. So I looked, As always, within it for the way beyond.
On that day of unexpected clarities From atop the mountain we could see The whole reach of Penobscot Bay Where the sun could shift its shape across The waters, the islands once so close, So familiar, dispersed like children, The spruce dark mystery no one solves.
One winter a friend and I had paddled out for lunch. There was a cabin crumbling to its cellar. Some logs and blocks, a rotting squirrel. But the shafts of light between the trees Speckled down on everything. We almost spoke. But suddenly the wind came back northeast, And we beat hell for home like frightened prey. Later there was time to wonder what we’d learned. All of that was someone else’s life now long ago.
Once in summer, I made the climb alone, Tracing the very steps she took between The sun and the footfalls of shadows In ghostly firs, as if bracketing a line That quivers between hope and desolation. From there that water that could terrify Seemed quiet as a mirror. It may be The oldest tale: water, stone and wood, The light, the dark, and those who see.
So many years ago I left a cruel interment In the valley of the Carrabassett, a daughter gone, Her hope extinguished by a patch of ice, The dark trees welcoming beneath the stars. Christmas looming. It happens that way.
When I was so alone, I used to listen for the silence Between carols on the radio. Waiting. As if each soul would find the moment there To seek ransom from its captive life. I am guessing that she would understand.
That sunny day atop the mountain, We crouched where she would crouch to contemplate A life as open and as fearsome as the Bay. Lights on the rocks like words, Burning even on the glyphs of lichen.
Tonight the snow is spinning, and we are home In Ohio, almost a universe away. I should know.
I do not need a photograph to see your smile, To feel your hand half around my waist. A night ago I watched you light a little candle. I wanted to say something. I have stories Like candles, but I decided just to watch and wait. I think I know the tricky craft of hopefulness.
“Look one way and the sun is going down, Look the other and the moon is rising.”
“Father, do we go to heaven, Or does it come to us?”
But thinking makes nothing quite so dear As the breaths we share. Tonight they wind above Our shoulders like a prayer. A prayer is a story, too. I believe that she would understand.
To friends both near and far. Leslie and I visited Mt. Battie this autumn past. It was a perch that drew me many times and in different moods and seasons during my nearly 30 years living in New England. The image stayed with me, especially after rereading the plaque bearing the lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous poem “Renascence.” I went back to that poem, and one of my own began to stir. By November, having visited my mentor Frederick Eckman’s paean to Millay, I realized I had stumbled on the next Advent poem. A curious poem about the hope of the season, perhaps. But aren’t they all?
The first set of quoted lines near the end are from Randall Jarrell’s poem “The Mockingbird.” The second set came from my older Advent poem, “Advent at the Looking Glass River.” They seemed to fit.
He shuffles through December rain that is waiting to be snow, waiting to be darkness. The river winds and bubbles, today its power more a rumble than a roar. He stands before the remnants of the lock that lifted the canal boats high across the river’s coils.
If he were not alone, someone might hear him whisper “The river is a path, the canal is a path, and then the water’s voices, too.” All paths that lead to last night’s dream, with his question to a cloud above his bed: How am I to love all things laid before me at this age of counting losses, in such a world as this? Lovers, friends and creatures—all consigned to memories. Hopefulness has always been his answer, but now the favored scripture passes from his lips like a habit worn out from its use. Lord I believe…
They built this canal to tame the waters,
but no water is ever tamed for good.
The canals fell to the rails, that fell to roads,
that swelled to highways. Each chance buried in another’s hope.
In any case he is standing here alone, once the hope of two,
waiting at the mossy lock as if it were a sepulcher.
Long ago, in a time of sorrow, a country pastor told him “Think of the present imperfect. Be emptying your hopes of everythingbut hope. Figure it out. You will be okay.”
He remembers two years ago exactly, Driving back down Riverview, dazzled by sunlight slanting through a stand of cedars Like a fold of angels. But that was then. Now the rain has found its temperature. In the darkness graupel dances on his hood and in his lights, sparking in the darkness. He is drifting to the boy in the back seat of a Mercury, staring at the Christmas lights, his breath a halo on the glass, the soft voices of assurance. The snow becoming fire, becoming stars. He is thinking he will be okay.
A note to my distant friends: Lock 29 on the old Ohio & Erie Canal was actually an aqueduct that raised the canal boats above the bending stretch of the Cuyahoga River at the village of Peninsula, Ohio. Remnants of the old lock remain, and I have visited many times. For some reason, Lock 29 called to me as a site for this year’s poem. You might think it an odd place to seek hopefulness, but I have found all such places to appear odd choices, at least at first.
People respond so individually to works of art, and one can never be sure where the journey of understanding will begin or end. I am sure that avid gardeners will revel not only in the paintings in this exhibit, but also in the technical details and horticultural expertise shared among the painters. Others may focus on the idea of the garden as a place of solace, so close to our most primal mythologies. As I leave aside the myriad of other possible perspectives on what was, for me at least, a stunning exhibition, I will try to describe a bit of this one poet’s journey, hoping that it might add some small grace to the journeys of others
My first time walking through these galleries of gardens I felt an overwhelming explosion of the senses as the feast of colors leapt from the canvas in such works as these (of course, these thumbnails hardly do justice!). One can almost breathe in the fragrances, feel the touch of wind, and hear the insects flitting back and forth, the hushed voices of humans carrying their watering cans.
Dennis Miller Bunker, Chrysanthemums, 1888
Chrysanthemums, 1888. Dennis Miller Bunker (American, 1861–1890). Oil on canvas; 90 x 121 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, P3w5.
Images in this article provided courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art Press/Media Kit.
But after the overwhelming response of the senses, other interactions emerge as a dialogue with those long distant moments of creation, at first between poet and painting, then through the painting to the painter. What can I really see here if I just look long enough? What were you thinking as the painting came to rest as what I see? As a poet I might paraphrase Karl Shapiro’s prescient question: What is the poetry of all of that? If the poet has any luck at all, the answers blossom everywhere.
Poets have a long history of ecphrasis, using one of the other arts, usually visual arts, as an inspiration for a poem. John Hollander captures this history well in The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. (1995). Of course, even his subtitle begs the question of whether any work of art is truly silent. For a walk through these gardens so strongly resembles the journey through a really wonderful poem that I can scarcely let go of the experience. I can recall two other CMA exhibitions that affected me so, both in 1991. The first was The Triumph of Japanese Style, with its evocative, large painted screens that even had poems as part of the art itself. This show led to a set of “Sun and Moon Landscape” haiku. The second was Reckoning with Winslow Homer, an excursion that unfolded as a complete surprise, one that shattered all my preconceptions about that artist and led directly to one of the longest, most complex and thoroughly rewarding poems I ever wrote. So a rendered garden is also a story on its way to being.
And what can live in such gardens as these? Whatever one wishes, or even dreads. As people become more prominent in the paintings, or as the world outside the garden casts a deeper shadow in them, the stories emerge with greater force.
“Each day brings its toad, each night its dragon.” This opening line from Randall Jarrell’s “Jerome” somehow surfaced during my second view of the exhibit. Jarrell’s poem has as its framework an ecphrasis based on a Durër engraving of St. Jerome and His Lion, but quickly recasts itself as a journey into the life of a psychoanalyst—his aloneness, his solitude, the weight of the night’s dreams, and the solace brought him by the dawn. The extensive worksheets for this poem were preserved by Mary Jarrell in Jerome: The Biography of a Poem (1971). These worksheets reveal how the conversation between poet and work of art emerges and changes the resulting poem as it grows to something like completion. I believe that this sort of conversation lies at the heart of ecphrasis, at the heart of making the poem. One must imagine that painters have the same sort of interaction with their subjects.
Paul Klee German, born Switzerland, 18791940 Death in the Garden (Legend), 1919 Oil on cotton, on cardboard nailed to wood 10 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. (27.3 x 24.8 cm) Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Randall Shapiro 1996.393 The Art Institute of Chicago
When works such as these spark responses of such deep wonder, the question is never if a poem will emerge, but rather when it will emerge, how many will do so, and in what fashion. I read somewhere that later artists among the Surrealists and Dadaists felt the works of the Impressionists too constructed, too linear, too distant from the unconscious. That view would seem very odd to a poet just done “talking” with them, pressing the conversation deeper and deeper into the boundless garden, into the making of a painting or a poem—all the shifting lines and changes, the epiphanies and surprises along the way in these works that are never really static, never truly silent, and never the last word.
Bibliography
Hollander, John. The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Jarrell, Mary. Jerome: The Biography of a Poem. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971.
