May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time:
may you stop at Phoenician bazaars
and acquire the fine things sold there,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can.
To many Egyptian cities may you go
so you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind:
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey.
Better that it last for many years;
better to reach the island’s shores in old age,
enriched by all you’ve obtained along the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you wealthy.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
But she has no more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.
C. P. Cavafy
(compilation of various English translations by the editors)
In this poem Ulysses’s voyage is once more a metaphor for the journey of life. Even though modern poets have for the most part renounced the formal conventions of poetry in favor of a less restrictive style, they often reference classical sources in their work, as Cavafy does here.
The Laestrygones and Cyclopes were mythological tribes of giant cannibals who attacked Odysseus and his men as they sailed back to Ithaca. Poseidon, ill-tempered god of the sea, was the father of Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops who devoured two of Odysseus’s men.
IMMIGRATION LAW
When I ask the experts
“how much time do I have?”
I don’t want an answer
in years or arguments.
I must know
if there are hours enough
to mend this relationship,
see a book all the way to its birthing,
stand beside my father
on his journey.
I want to know how many seasons of chamisa
will be yellow then grey-green
and yellow
/light/
again,
how many red cactus flowers
will bloom beside my door.
I will not follow language
like a dog with its tail between its legs.
I need time equated with music,
hours rising in bread,
years deep from connections.
The present always holds a tremor of the past.
Give me a handful of future
to rub against my lips.
Margaret Randall
Chamisa is an aster, sometimes blooming twice in a season.
3
“THE GRACE OF THE WORLD”
When we speak of Nature, it is often as something separate from us. But even the slightest reflection reminds us that we, too, are part of the natural world, and we cut ourselves off from it at our peril. Especially in this time of rapid technological change, which leaves many of us panting at the sidelines, “the peace of wild things” becomes ever more precious, while the consequences of our actions vis-à-vis our environment grow more and more disturbing.
Poets, too, look to Nature for solace, and take refuge in the beauty of the visible world. They delight in the smallest details—a single leaf, a slant of sunlight—as well as the majesty of the heavens and the radiance of the stars. But they also imagine Nature looking back at us with sorrow—or taking no notice of us at all.
SUNDAY MORNING (EXCERPT)
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
Here, in this portion of a stanza from a much longer poem, a woman questions traditional religious beliefs passed on to her by those no longer alive. Should not divinity encompass the entire natural world and everything that exists, both dark and light? To read the complete poem is to grapple with Stevens’s complex views about life and death and the nature of heaven.
BRIDGE
Most of my life was spent
building a bridge out over the sea
though the sea was too wide.
I’m proud of the bridge
hanging in the pure sea air. Machado
came for a visit and we sat on the
end of the bridge, which was his idea.
Now that I’m old, the work goes slowly.
Ever nearer death, I like it out here
high above the sea bundled
up for the arctic storms of late fall,
the resounding crash and moan of the sea,
the hundred-foot depth of the green troughs.
Sometimes the sea roars and howls like
the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.
What beauty in this the darkest music
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.
So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above
the abyss. Tonight the moon will be in my lap.
This is my job, to study the universe
from my bridge. I have the sky, the sea, the faint
green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.
Jim Harrison
Since Antonio Machado, one of Spain’s greatest poets, died in 1939 and Harrison was born in 1939, we have to assume that Machado’s visit was imaginary. What is the bridge?
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
NIGHT ON THE PRAIRIES
Night on the prairies,
The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;
I walk by myself—I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never realized before.
Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death and test propositions.
How plenteous! how spiritual! how resumé!
The same old man and soul—the same old aspirations, and the same content.
I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.
Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I will measure myself by them,
And now touch’d with the lives of other globes arrived as far along as those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or pass’d on farther than those of earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life,
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to arrive.
O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman wrote this poem when he was forty-one, thirty-two years before his death. It is eerily prescient of our contemporary concerns, as is so much of his poetry.
“Resumé” in this nineteenth-century usage means “resumed,” the past participle (used as a noun) of the French verb “résumer.”
TO AN EASTERN BLUEBIRD
You beak-chattering blaze of blue,
patch of sky squatting on a power line,
teach me to cock my head, too.
Together, we’ll watch—what is there to see
in Tennessee? July can only shrug,
after a night’s caterwaul of katydids.
Now, in the deserted street, a fawn tiptoes
from the woods toward well-tamed lawn.
A dead branch moves, doe rustling to life.
You keep singing, bird, and no one minds,
but I have drawn breath too noisily—
toward me, eyes carved of obsidian turn.
Into mossy ears as big as a man’s cupped hand
a clamor pours: somewhere beneath us,
a mole shoves earth from one dark to another.
Blood blunders through the chambers of my heart.
My life waits to turn the page from fifty-nine to sixty.
A feather too blue to be real—how long does it last?
Debora Greger
A LEAF
A leaf, one of the last, parts from a maple branch:
it is spinning in the transparent air of October, falls
on a heap of others, stops, fades. No one
admired its entrancing struggle with the wind,
followed its flight, no one will distinguish it now
as it lies among other leaves, no one saw
what I did. I am
the only one.
Bronislaw Maj
(translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz)
BINSEY POPLARS
felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Almost one hundred fifty years ago Hopkins was bewailing the destruction of his beloved trees in a style that has never quite been replicated. It harks back to Old English or Anglo-Saxon, which in turn comes from the ancient Teutonic. Using a vocabulary that eschews most words of Latin origin, he relies on the alliteration and repetition of one-syllable words, placing great emphasis on their sound while at the same time keeping them anchored to their specific meanings.
The effects of the destruction both on the land and on our spirits resonate deeply with our contemporary concerns.
THREAT
You can live for years next door
to a big pinetree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pinetree’s beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash some day
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.
Denise Levertov
AN OLD-FASHIONED SONG
(Nous n’irons plus au bois)
No more walks in the wood:
The trees have all been cut
Down, and where once they stood
Not even a wagon rut
Appears along the path
Low brush is taking over.
No more walks in the wood;
This is the aftermath
Of afternoons in the clover
Fields where we once made love
Then wandered home together
Where the trees arched above,
Where we made our own weather
When branches were the sky.
Now they are gone for good,
And you, for ill, and I
Am only a passer-by.
We and the trees and the way
Back from the fields of play
Lasted as long as we could.
No more walks in the wood.
John Hollander
SPECIES
For seasons beyond count, age
after age, through generations,
they watched us, naked of eye,
through every possible lens:
we were pictured, widely, as
of more or less intelligence.
They measured our migrations,
guessed at the code in our blood,
the tidal pull of the sun,
or what the stars told us.
In weather when we spoke clearly
what they only partially sensed,
they knew to tape our voices;
they collected how they thought
we spoke. Or sang. Of how
we spoke they wrote music.
To our habitats, fieldmarks, even
our habits of pairing, they made
themselves guides. They saw
in us an endangered species;
they listed us with governments.
Out of guilt for the hunting,
even long after, or for what
we barely reminded them of,
we believe they almost loved us.
What we can never know is
how we failed to let them feel
what we meant in our deepest instinct,
in the great dance of our silence.
At the latitudes where we winter,
we only know to gather, to sing
to our young and ourselves, warning
after warning of how they became extinct.
Philip Booth
REQUIEM
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
they know not what they do.”
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
/>
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut
GRAVELLY RUN
I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:
for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:
the swamp’s slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:
holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
spires could make
green religion in winter bones:
so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:
no use to make any philosophies here:
I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.
A. R. Ammons
Here the stoic speaker postulates a bleak division between humanity and the rest of nature as well as the separation of each natural entity from all the others. He claims this existentialist view “seems sufficient.” Who is the “stranger” he addresses?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an early-nineteenth-century German idealist philosopher.
WINTER PARADISE
Now I am old and free from time
How spacious life,
Unbeginning unending sky where the wind blows
The ever-moving clouds and clouds of starlings on the wing.
Chaffinch and apple-leaf across my garden lawn,
Winter paradise
With its own birds and daisies
Coming to Age Page 3
