Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

It’s amazing how just three lines can be so ominous. The whole poem is like that: powerful and heavy and mysterious.

On p. 94, “The Summer Day” (here)

On p. 110, “The Wild Geese” (the first one on this page)

This poem is not nearly as exciting to me as “To help the monkey cross the river,” (did I post a link to that a few weeks ago? I think so, but here it is again). It has a similar twisting ending — and I like surprising little twists in poetry — but in the Rat and Mouse poem the metaphor is much closer to the surface. Less to chew on. And I also like the read-out-loud sound of the monkey poem. OK, tonight’s poem was NOT the monkey poem. I shall move on.

So here I am with a poem for today after quite a few days with no poetry. Today’s poem is “Mexico” by Robert Hass. It came to my email box via the Writer’s Almanac, which is sent daily with a poem and some factoids about writers’ birthdays and such. The poem seemed fitting after my time in Austin. Not Mexico, but near Mexico. As near to Mexico as I’ve been. Which is suitable for the poem, if you read it.

***

The internet knows my intention. Just as I hit “publish” on this post, I went to my email and saw another missive from the Writer’s Almanac had come in. I read the poem — “When I Look at the Old Car” by Marcia F. Brown — and had to add it to this post, because it is lovely.

The form’s challenge lies in creating an interesting poem that develops, rather than merely repeats, its content. Add to this the limited ab rhyme scheme over nineteen lines, and the poet also faces the difficulty of making the poem sing, rather than grate on the ear. (p. 252)

When a villanelle works it feels tight and rollicking, almost soothing. I have two to share, from yesterday and from today.

First, Molly Peacock’s “Little Miracle” (p. 257), which begins:

No use getting hysterical.
The important part is: we’re here.
Our lives are a little miracle.

You can read the rest of the poem yourself here (scroll down to read the first comment; the poem is transcribed there).

Next, Eli Mandel’s “City Park Merry-Go-Round” (p. 256), which is not available on the internet. This poem reminds me of Joni Mitchell’s song “Circle Game” — the metaphor of a merry-go-round, obviously. Mandel’s poem isn’t, as I read it, about aging, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what I make of it. But it made me think about my own experiences of repeated, failed attempts to leash a new habit to my life routines. If you can’t find this one to read it for yourself, go back and read the Molly Peacock poem again.

Tonight I’m reading two glosas — one for today and one for yesterday, when I was traveling all day without a poetry book in my carry-on. I love the glosa. Here’s a bit about it, from the book:

Originating in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century Spanish courts, the glosa is a delightful way for poets to exchange or build upon one another’s ideas in a structured poetic form. [...] A glosa normally has four ten-line stanzas preceded by four lines quoted from another poet (this quatrain also acts as a kind of epigraph to the poem). Each stanza ends with a line taken sequentially from the borrowed quatrain. (p. 88)

The first glosa I read tonight (yesterday’s poem, so to speak) is “Planet Earth” (p. 90) by P.K. Page, in which she builds on four lines by Pablo Neruda. I love this poem. Please go read it (out loud, if you dare). I had read it before, a year or two ago, and loved it. Reading it again tonight, it took on a different meaning in light of the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the metaphor of a laundress washing and cleaning the earth felt a little more sinister than just loving.

The second glosa I read (today’s poem) is Patrick Lane’s “The Garden Temple” (p. 92), which builds on four lines by P.K. Page (who wrote a lot of glosas). So there isn’t just a glosa theme today, there’s also a P.K. Page theme. Anyhow, Lane’s poem is also anchored in observations of nature, though more in the context of the built environment of a garden. Thematically, though, it is about being separated from a loved one. Not as grand and sweeping as “Planet Earth” in its scope, but an intricate rendering of one person yearning for another — and the experience of the yearning is embodied in the everyday, prosaic details observed by the poet as he addresses his love. I can’t find this one online for you, so you’ll have to seek it out IRL.*

*in real life

Sunday’s poem: Nancy Pagh, “Titles of Twenty-Nine Poems I Did Not Write” from No Sweeter Fat (p. 44). This poem moves quickly from whimsical to sobering. I can’t find it online for you, but here is “Blackberries”, my favorite poem by Pagh, a Pacific Northwest poet. Note that the formatting is atrocious — the gaps between stanzas have been erased — but maybe you’ll be inspired to seek out No Sweeter Fat, where you can read it properly.

Today’s poem: Tony Curtis (the Irish poet; not the American actor), “When Sometimes all I Can Imagine are Hands” from The Well in the Rain: New and Selected Poems (p. 53). Tony Curtis is a lovely man. I saw him read a few weeks ago and two years ago (Nancy Pagh, too, for that matter) at the Skagit River Poetry Festival. When I read this poem I had to look up Akhmatova. She’s a poet, natch. I still have so much to learn. Anyhow, I enjoyed the quiet, interior contemplation of this poem.

Anyhow, tonight the poems — because there is more than one, again — come from Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems: Volume One. I started with a poem near the end of the book, “The House” (p. 244; and you can find it here). When I started reading the poem, a feeling of foreboding came over me, and I thought, in particular, of romantic relationships, partnerships, and how things can shift and fall apart almost without one’s noticing.

We did not hear, beneath our lives,
The old walls falling out of true,
Foundations shifting in the dark.

And then a little later in the relatively short poem…

We made our minor, brief repairs,
And sang upon the crumbling stairs
And danced upon the sodden floors.

Until…

For years we lived at peace, until
The rooms themselves began to blend
With time, and empty one by one,
At which we knew, with muted hearts,
That nothing further could be done

I see, by the end of the poem, aging and death as its themes. And not the slow, quiet falling apart of relationships. But one of my own fears is that in my own romantic partnership, we would drift apart so slowly that by the time we realized we had lost our foundation, it would be too late to recover. So there’s where the chill in the reading comes from for me. And I’m left feeling slightly hollow.

Mary Oliver just seems to be like that for me, though. Beautiful poems that leave me a little hollow with sadness or fear or apprehension.

The next poem I skipped to, just flipping through the book, was “A Visitor” (p. 116; it is the second poem here). I assumed on first read that the father was dead and coming to the author in her dreams. That she turned him away, unready to face him or to reconcile or to even accept the part of herself that loves him. And that she then experiences some internal shift and was able to come to terms with him, with her past, with that part of herself. Reading it again I realized that the father could just be old, and in need, and not dead and in dreams. She writes:

But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him

I hope someday I can be at that place with my own father. But not yet.

Hm, still feeling kind of hollow after that one, I kept flipping through the book and came to “Dogfish” (p. 103; it can be read here, among many other places). It’s a longer poem, and I still need to think about it longer before I have something really distilled to say about it. But I will end this post with the end of the poem, in which the dogfish is preying upon three smaller fish. (Please go read the whole poem, though. And if you have something to say about it, comment).

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

“On the Sagging Porch” (p. 26)

“Dogs Hear It” (p. 27)

I continue to like Simic.

I usually look at the table of contents, like I said, and choose a poem when a title jumps out at me. Last night’s book (Milosz) had poems with titles that didn’t inspire, and I wasn’t as taken with the poem either. But tonight I couldn’t decide which poem to pick because so many of the titles intrigued. At the end, I chose “Free the Goldfish” (p. 45). Are you surprised? If you are, you don’t know me too well.

I liked “Free the Goldfish” well enough, though its joy lay mostly in the juxtaposition of the title with the poem. But it was short, and I was hungry for more, so I read, on the opposing page (p. 44) “Don’t Wake the Cards.” I read it twice. It was fantastic. (If you really want to read it, the evil Amazon.com itself offers the diabolical suggestion that you can use its ‘Search Inside’ feature).

I want my life to feel like that poem every day.