With Sara Teasdale.
Afterwards, amid the autumn dusk,
Let it be forgotten by February twilight,
these faults.
My heart is heavy with old love.
Love, this is not a word, but an epitaph.
What do I care, in the morning?
Says a voice around me now,
here in this spirit’s house.
***
Today is the birthday of American lyric poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). The lines above are composed with some of her poem titles. The title of this post references a collection she published in 1915.
Underwater museums.
See the reef people, bodies given over to coral, algae, seagrasses, sheltering conch, crustaceans: boy with a face in his hands, man with a head of branches; history’s dead and the severed heads of oracles, waiting rebukes to the next sales pitch that begins with a story of progress unlimited.
See the men with manes of seagrass, the ships for swimming through, the work of a lifetime to be schooled by fish.
After twenty centuries of stony sleep, what rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches to the shore to be reborn?
***
Inspired by the underwater sculptures of Jason deCaires Taylor. The italicized phrase in the final lines comes from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.
For Robert Hayden.
Your preference for the long view was balanced by an exquisite attention to the ragged, beating heart of the impossible moment. You called history a long, bloody becoming toward what might finally be, this beautiful, terrible, needful thing, still stirring.
You were moved by the idea that against failure after failure, something wars, something goes forward, something lights a match, and remembered the winged man of the laughing, longing night.
You kept your eye on the sharp sails that flayed the albatross and on a promise that it was yet possible to walk back home over Galilee’s waters to be washed of the effluvium of living death.
Your own aches bent elsewhere, you trained your eye toward life upon these shores, to study the deep immortal human wish amid a timeless yearning for the good old days that had never been good.
You studied the choreography of spirit hanging on, dancing its own shelter with an intensity bright enough to shine through the sordid and cruel deniers of hearts, of lives, of life itself.
You argued that a poem is an action unto itself, a catalyst of compassion, a weight to bend the moral arc ever slightly toward a softer hand, toward community, toward home.
You knew despair could seed a song to raise the roof and the hard loving of laughter in bed with misery and as a constant reminder you drew heart-shapes in the constant dust, as if to mark this side of heaven.
Even as you mourned the moaning empress of the blues, four bullets in her heart, you lifted us up with ostrich feathers to feel her still shining forward, to look with you, through the transience of loss, to the way they would rise early next Sunday, even against the next fistful of snow.
What did any of us know, anyway, of love’s austere and lonely offices?
***
On this day in 1913, American poet Robert Hayden (d. 1980) was born. The title of this post is adapted from an article Frank Rashid published in the Winter 2001 issue of Callaloo, “Robert Hayden’s Detroit Blues Elegies.” This post is composed using ideas and phrases from Hayden’s work and interviews, as well as a line (italicized above) from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body, a work that moved and influenced Hayden, particularly his historical vision. Where possible, I have linked lines above to the works from which they are adapted.
Bodies in time.
Like fabric in the hand, another remnant of memory is collected in an aftermath. We must have fed the flames that burned the bones of the old present when we danced its wild beat.
Now it’s possible to wonder if the point of storing so much water in living flesh is to embody this reverberation after the music stops. Or to cool against the fire, but that doesn’t explain this tendency for conduction, not to mention what happens when lightning strikes.
Probably the added volume simply makes us more suitable replacement frames, upon which these scraps of former seasons may be more elaborately draped.
With John Coltrane.
I want to talk about you, your ascension, the promise I wish I knew, too beautiful.
Say it.
Say more for the lovers, please.
Weaver of dreams, dripping stardust, you answered time after time, then I’ll be tired; still, insisting, love thy neighbor.
But how deep is the ocean after the rain?
An acknowledgement. Help me to be––compassion. Love.
An acknowledgement: Consequences.
Help me to be––serenity. Dearly beloved, I am a dreamer.
Dearly beloved, something I dreamed last night––
It was sometime around midnight, just after another take of something straight, no chaser, and all of us gathered like someone in love, alternating our so whats with melancholic meditations like someday my prince. It was soft lights and slow dance, and you leave me breathless on a misty night to hear a rhapsody. Lover, come back to me. I Cry!
Tender, it’s a fire waltz, a minor disturbance. It’s this chronic blues, a love supreme.
Call me by my rightful name, I’m old fashioned. I can’t get started. I’m too young to go––
Steady. But it’s all or nothing at all.
Dearly beloved, this is an acknowledgement.
Beloved, this is a song of praise
I wish I knew.
***
Inspired by the serendipitous appearance of A Love Supreme on last night’s random shuffle, the above is assembled almost entirely from the titles of John Coltrane songs. And, of course, by love.
Against the machine.
When the horror of a moment renders a body speechless, the acts of pen to page, brush to canvas, fingers to keys––become negotiations with death. Yours, mine: what are they and how do they relate? To account for whole cities of dead, a vast underground rendered invisible through banality. What is it to write a voice, paint a vision––while standing on ground in full recognition of the brothers beneath it, and the invisible sisters with their children and parents in mass graves? Welcome to the necropolis, says one, where screens herald the battalion.
What are the stakes at this scale? Life. Lives. Forget numbers, abstractions. Try instead: One.
One.
One.
One.
Each a brother, sister, mother, daughter, each with a scent of their own, a particular laugh and secret hopes––erased.
What is at stake? The human condition in the age of the war machine.
How to resist? The first act is naming.
***
Inspired by the work of Juan Ruflo, Christina Rivera Garza, and Achille Mbembe.
The poet remembers.
Only symbols. When I saw that the architecture was burnt out in me, I became a poet. Now I am grief, hunger, the embers of cities. But making is older than killing, and what is this man to make of this life but a brief flight in darkness, now and then on a rainbow?
***
This morning I learned that it was the birthday of poet Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky, who Robert Lowell once distinguished as the greatest living poet in any language. He came to fame during the Khrushchev thaw and was known as an outspoken critic of artistic censorship of any kind. I don’t have a complete translation of Voznesensky’s work, but I was able to find some selections online. The above is assembled from my a small sample of these findings, adapted.
Aging writers recollect.
Remember the silence of our thoughts where we would wait, crouched in corners with pens poised to catch them, spectral geometry flickering in the shadows as they flew across our line of sight? They appeared and disappeared like bats, to and from nowhere––and us beckoning, show yourself! Our own thoughts, retreating. The nerve. We would tame them.
We were young and eager to tie them down, to possess the authority of others who had managed to do so, somehow. Only by evading our pens could they find any haven.
Even a small one would be good, we thought––squirrel-sized, perhaps––anything from beyond the veil. If we could just catch one, we could prove ourselves successful hunters of what moved in the wilds of that other place. We could remove the skin, eat the meat, accumulate proud trophies. Others would envy what we had. But it was no good.
Rabid as we were, we didn’t see ourselves this way; we thought we were gentle. But they must have heard us, our pens poised like arrows to fly at them when they dared to run. No wonder they fled. We were starved for what we feared we would forget, but they knew it was worse than that. They knew they had already left us, and they recognized that we were in the stage of those still unwilling to accept the loss, who are willing to do anything to pretend that it is not what it is.
They would wait until the visions of trophies had left us and we were bald and frail with grief. Then they would come and sit at our feet, on our laps. We would let them build nests where our hair used to be. Okay, we’d tell them, have it your way.
Minds in flight.
Some of our buried stories float in the tidal regions where memory is known to flood this settled marsh that birthed our dreams, and so many of them depict these bodies with wings.
As the waters recede, some call this time to look.
The logic of brutality.
Careful now. The sleep of reason breeds monsters. Look, they have arrived.
Early morning, a firing squad. Captives at gunpoint.
The sleep of reason breeds monsters armed with a multitude of manufactured reasons. The cool efficiency of mechanistic executions. The gunmen are symmetrical. Stand, aim, hold, repeat. Stand, aim, hold, repeat––a relentless column.
Their target: crumbling, irregular men. One falls, one bleeds, one holds his head. Several hold one another. One prays. One, in the yellowed white shirt of a laborer, holds hands up, his palms already pierced by the nails of the erased cross.
In the center, a lantern. You can see what is coming next, how the soldiers will use its light to perfect their aim. The end will be quick. The march will continue.
See the bodies, finished. One bleeds into the next. The marching column, still bloodless, will move on. Where the order of the machine is the order of the moment, they will be celebrated.
In the background, a crowd with torches, looking on. Someone whispers, monsters.
Careful, don’t look. Here, take this. It will help you sleep.
***
Inspired by Francisco Goya’s iconic painting, The Third of May, which was groundbreaking in its depiction of brutality without catharsis. Goya’s handling of paint as well as his subversion of traditional symbols inspired a new generation of artists, including Manet and Picasso. On the disasters of war, Goya observed, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters).”
