“Bufflehead Dawn” a poem by William Hathaway

Mar 012010
 

William “Kit” Hathaway is an old friend dating from my early days in Saratoga Springs when he taught at Union College and lived in a lovely house on Regent Street with his second son, Nate, and his daughter, Suzanne, a redoubtable high school rower who would join Kit and Steve Stern and me for our Tuesday night liver-and-onions blow-outs at Shirley’s Diner. Kit has published several books. Look him up. He lives in Maine now. We share, among other things, a love for Dalmatians, although he claims I tried to kill his poor deaf dog Lucy one extremely cold and cruel winter night eons ago. Full disclosure: My current Dalmatian is named Lucy.

dg

Bufflehead Dawn

Like so many skunk kits,
trooping one-two-three-four across
a broad golf course, the imperceptible
glide of buffleheads down the center
of this morning’s wrinkled cove
seemed to charm wavelets
only moving as a glimmer and firs
still as ghosts that darkly stand and stare
in mirrors into a full scene more
than merely scenery. But skunks
are skunks and ducks are not,
and to say God lurks in details does not
say God’s more parts than sum
or that seeming should be an end-all
of being, but merely that this mind
this morning once saw a line
of small black skunks waddle to and fro,
white tails flouncing side to side,
along a green, and a charm
like a gift is to see again
both buffleheads and skunks,
now and then, seize this dawn
in simple black and white.

 

William Hathaway

See also “Betrayal,” “The Poetry Career,” “Today.”

Solomon’s Judgement: Poem — Karen Mulhallen

Feb 082010
 

Karen Mulhallen

This is a poem by Karen Mulhallen whose book of selected poems Acquainted With Absence came out in 2009 (I selected the poems and wrote the introduction). Karen is an old friend, publisher of Descant, the venerable Toronto magazine, a Blake scholar and a poet (look her up) who also had a dog named Lucy once upon a time. Karen and I both come from southwestern Ontario. We both know the Halton Sand Hills and the definition of a turtleback. For years we’ve met for lunch at Southside Louie’s on College Street, a favourite haunt of my boys.

dg

 

Solomon’s Judgement

Start, don’t arrive
Give, don’t receive
Sow, sow, never harvest
Burn, don’t be consumed.

To be impoverished, but not to cheat
To be disappointed, and again to trust
To be thirsty, yet not to drink
To live once,
and still die a hundred times.

Have faith, live in sin
Hurt, ask no forgiveness
Break, do not bend.
Frozen veins
the summer’s heat
escape

Waiting for the one who never comes
Still among lightning
singing.

—Karen Mulhallen, from Acquainted With Absence

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Insomnia, Lawrence, Wrigley and Lawrence

Jan 222010
 

I finished reading D. H. Lawrence’s story “None of That” which Kenneth Rexroth mentioned in his introduction to the selected poems. What’s interesting about the story, other than the fact that Ethel reminds me of someone I used to date, is the narrative setup. There is a first person narrator who is solely an interlocutor, not a character in the story at all. And he meets an old acquaintance in Venice who tells him in dialogue the story of Ethel and the bullfighter Cuesta. (I love Lawrence’s impish directness–e.g. the male orgasmic “spurt of blood” as Cuesta stands over the dying bull.) This second narrator is involved in the story but mostly as an observer and a go-between. In effect, the text is all telling and in dialogue and the narrators are nested. If you look at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, you’ll see it’s similar. There is a first person narrator who’s barely mentioned who is listening to Marlow tell the story. This is a really difficult narrative structure to carry off nowadays, difficult because it’s hard to achieve immediacy–or maybe none of us is good enough to write it.

I was almost asleep, then made the mistake of reading Robert Wrigley’s poem “Thatcher Bitchboy” which I thought was going to be something about gay s&m but turned out to be about a boy watching his beloved chicken-stealing dog being led off to die. Obviously, I couldn’t sleep after that and had to read some comforting Lawrence death poems. E.g. “Kissing and Horrid Strife”

dg

4 a.m.

Jan 202010
 

Up til 4 a.m. The Robert Wrigley epigraph sent me to D. H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems with the amazing Kenneth Rexroth introduction.

In a world where death had become a nasty, pervasive secret like defecation and masturbation, Lawrence re-instated it in all its grandeur–the oldest and most powerful of the gods.

Read “The Ship of Death” as soon as you can.

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises/ We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying/and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us/ and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world./We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying/and our strength leaves us,/and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,/cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

Also check out, for that matter, Rexroth’s gorgeous An Autobiographical Novel which isn’t really a novel but a memoir.

dg

Adorno on Spengler

Jan 192010
 

I finished reading the essay last night. A touch of hopefulness at the end.

“In a world or brutal and oppressed life, decadence becomes the refuge of a potentially better life by renouncing its allegiance to this one [life] and to its culture, its crudeness, and its sublimity.”

I too am admirer of decadence, of mixed form, parodies, anatomies and Menippean satires.

Now I am reading Lives of the Animals by Robert Wrigley, a book of poems mentioned by Cheryl Wilder in her graduate lecture at the last residency. The epigraph is from D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Ghosts.”

“And as the dog with its nostrils tracking out the fragments of the beasts’ limbs, and the breath from their feet that they leave in the soft grass, runs upon  a path that is pathless to men, so does the soul follow the trail of the dead, across great spaces.”

dg

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