Thanks

(...coming back to my words, through the words of others...)

(...I am still saying thanks, still he is giving, gone one year ago...)


Thanks
by W. S. Merwin


Listen 
with the night falling we are saying thank you 
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings 
we are running out of the glass rooms 
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky 
and say thank you 
we are standing by the water thanking it 
smiling by the windows looking out 
in our directions 

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging 
after funerals we are saying thank you 
after the news of the dead 
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you 
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators 
remembering wars and the police at the door 
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you 
in the banks we are saying thank you 
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us 
our lost feelings we are saying thank you 
with the forests falling faster than the minutes 
of our lives we are saying thank you 
with the words going out like cells of a brain 
with the cities growing over us 
we are saying thank you faster and faster 
with nobody listening we are saying thank you 
we are saying thank you and waving 
dark though it is


Berryman
By W. S. Merwin


I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
 
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
 
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
 
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
 
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
 
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
 
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
 
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
 
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
 
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write



(Two of my favorite poems by my favorite poet, on the 
anniversary of his death.)
(Difficult if not impossible to pick favorites, really, 
but these two seem timely.)

(With many thanks to Whimsy Mimsy 
for the connections, for the muddled thoughts...)

(...let us stay deep in tides of our own...)
(...until the words come drifting by...)

2020 – 062/366 – Intersections: The Dying Man

or, Notes On The Experience of Reading Fanny Howe’s The Needle’s 
Eye While Watching My Wife’s Father Die And Being Reminded, 
Perhaps Unavoidably, of Rilke’s First Duino Elegy
 

~~~

 

 
We arrive to wait and watch.
He lies, gape-mouthed and gasping,
flinching, wincing and moaning
intermittently.

~

We go and we sit in the room
and we watch the man die
                       the man dying
                       the dying man

We watch him breathe. We
watch him stop breathing.
We watch him start breathing
again.

~

We watch him wince and
moan and flinch and wheeze
and we listen to his lungs
gurgle and at some point—
as his eyes open less and less,
as the words leave his mouth
for good, as the food and the
water enter his mouth less and
less and eventually stop their
entering entirely—at some point,
watching someone die changes
into something else, changes
into something harder. At some
point—if the dying takes long
enough—watching someone die
becomes watching someone not die.

~

She says, The end of life is hard for the living.

~

He says that room back there
(waving towards the bathroom off
his room) must be hotter than this
one because he can see a white…
(gestures—fingers fluttering, hand
moving side to side)…a white…
(mumbles something and…).

Quiet.

Breathing.

~

“A person can feel the impression of a soft body of air indicating 
presence or further life on her hands or arms or anywhere, sometimes 
in stillness and safety, and understand that the entire universe is held 
against her skin in an equilibrium that holds her steady for her life 
span. Too great a sense of the tremendous explosion of creation in 
which we live would obliterate us. We feel what we can on our skins 
and through its porous cells into the nerves and bones where our 
reckless and pathetic ancestors carry on.”

~

He says he can see steam
rising from his feet.

~

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”

~

He says there was a woman
in his room wearing a peach dress
(Did you see her?) and holding a
basket in front of her.

~

“One thing surrounds you in parts, drops of sunshine, or shadows,
and these vaporous gods live on after you are gone.
But wait. Where have I seen that woman’s face before? Why did
she pause at the door as if she knew me?

She is folded in smoke from the crematorium over the hills there.”

~

She says that her mother's favorite
fragrance, White Shoulders, has been
in the room since the day he arrived.

~

“ ‘The trick is to follow the clue, to see the chance connection, 
attend to it, and against all reason, follow it to the next clue, 
or coincidence, yes, if the reading at Mass echoes what you were 
thinking about in the night, follow that message out into the 
streets, and the next, follow the coincidences.’ “

~

I don’t believe that my dreams
are prophetic. I don’t think that
they are trying to tell me anything.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t
listen to what they are saying.

~

The nurses come and they
moisten his lips and the inside
of his mouth with small disposable
sponges on the end of a stick which
they dip into the cup of ice water
that he is no longer drinking.

~

His lucidity slips
but
his slips are lucid

His lucidity is slipping
but
(t)his slipping is lucid.

~

A movement catches my eye.
It is his foot twitching, under
the volunteer-crocheted afghan.

But when I look up from my
reading, I see there also the
child’s foot, my daughter’s,
like an echo, she in the recliner
that already he has stopped using
just beyond his bed, the two of them
in the same basic position, her
mother—his daughter—between
them in a chair, the mirror of time
reflecting both ways and al(l-)ways
changing—age and youth, the mother—
his daughter—between them, between
him and his daughter’s daughter.

~

“She was born on a rise in
time facing two ways.”

~

A woman—another dying
person’s visitor—sits in one
of the sitting areas reading a
magazine and I notice the
title, “Sophisticated Living.”

She does not look sophisticated.
She mostly just looks like some
thing is being emptied out of her.

~

Hard shadows and
soft shadows.

Near and far.

Light from the window falls

through the blinds and
across my foot and

onto the corner of the bed

which doubles as a socket

for I.V. poles.

~

Always there is one thing
ending as another begins.

~

All positions
are transitions.

All positions
are transpositions.

~

These things begin to get
as confused as he is.

         but….is he?

Perhaps these things only
begin to sound as confused
as he does/is/seems.

Is he confused or is it his or
our reality that is confused?

~

Which is harder, watching him die
or watching him not die?

 

 

 

 

(All quotes are from Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye, Passing 
Through Youth except for the passage begginning, "Who, 
if I cried out...", which is from Rainer Maria Rilkes First 
Duino Elegy, Stephen Mitchell's translation)

Form (Less)

How do we dress...



...these forms... 



...that we find in the night?

Are they so ancient within us... 




...that they disappear... 



...into that with which we clothe them?

Do they hide behind... 



...what we put upon them?



Are they only there...



...as long as we look... 



...or as deeply as we see?

Or do we peer into a dark... 



...and empty... 



...mirror?

Rust Belt Buckle

Ms. Rebecca Moon Ruark over at Rust Belt Girl has been kind enough to share “Watching Time”, a little “phoetic essay” that I put together about my home town on the Old Mississippi.

I strongly encourage you to go check out her blog, especially her amazing story, ‘Recruit’, the print and audio versions of which are featured on Flock Literary Journal. Well worth the read AND the listen. A really touching and edgy story, well-presented by herself.

Many thanks, Rebecca!

In the Nave

Swimming

“If you do something in the spirit of non-achievement, there is a good quality in it. So just to do something without any particular effort is enough.”
Shunryu Suzuki



To make something of these times I 
must make something so I will find 
a frame in which to nail my thoughts. 
I cannot beat this lone silence

and I cannot take this seedless 
greening anymore, this yearning 
growth that knows only down and in,
only dragging my thoughts into 

the night where I cannot find them 
though I remember having them, 
remember how they felt if not 
how they looked, remember them close 

and warm, and thought them somehow grand 
or at least telling at the time 
I barely had them, but now? Now 
I barely have them even less. 

Now I am not sure if I have
them or if they have me. Now they 
are lost in their own depths, swimming 
silently in the rolling black 

medium of their making. Now 
they haunt me in their bare being
and unmake me and swim through me
and I will make nothing of them.