Aesthetic Confusion

Walter Benjamin famously opined that every monument to beauty is also a monument to barbarism. Mont St. Michele, for instance, so grand and gorgeous on its spit of land, demanded unimaginable labor and doubtless suffering amongst those who did the grunt work. That was my first thought on seeing the abbey, even though I was a witless, late-teenager, not yet inclined to ponder the world's ambiguities.

But one's aesthetic sense can be addled even by the natural world. Seeing the hawk I describe in this poem attempt (vainly, as it turned out) to murder a squirrel– well, first of all, it would have been imbecilic to anthropomorphize the whole scene, as if the squirrel were a mere innocent and the raptor a villain. These creatures were simply doing what such creatures do. And yet I found myself, for all of that, uncertain whether I was glad for or disappointed by the predator's failure to succeed in his/her intention.

Here's what resulted:

 Aesthetics

Tuesday. Somewhere I’d guess around the 4000^th

one of my life, and I’m washing my coffee pot

and putting it onto the dish rack, the way I’ve done

every Wednesday too, every Thursday, every Friday,

Saturday, and Monday for many years–

most of the 72 by now– so there’s nothing

that you’d call thought in the process, and then –whoosh!–

like thrilling cascade or comet, in broadest daylight

a broadwing hawk swoops in and scatters the finches

from the feeder, which, whatever we try, is a feeder

for squirrels as well, both red and gray. It’s a gray

the hawk had his eye on, and the hawk seems big as a hog,

though he’s lithe and deft and unbelievably quick

in his stoop. Which misses, however. His quarry cartwheels

under a stunted pine I’ve meant again

and again to hew to better the view we have

through this same kitchen window. And now, as something you might

call thought returns after all, I’m pondering whether

I’m glad to have left it standing. The hawk was lordly,

as much as the eagle my wife reported seeing

last week, which started an almost identical dive

but flared up the ridge when he found no game out there

among spilled seeds, where the blood on wet March snow

would in either case have shown so gorgeous, so brilliant.

The look of the squirrel would of course have been pathetic,

no doubt about that. The world’s a puzzling place.

Narrative Values

Tomorrow evening I will be giving a talk on poetry at an excellent independent bookstore in Norwich, Vermont, not far from where I live, but on the other side of what some of us jokingly call The Volvo Line. It is called "Narrative Values, Lyric Poems: Inviting the Reader In." Below, I excerpt just a few sections of it to give the drift.

Please excuse the odd formatting, which I seem powerless to amend.

...Nothing I say tonight has doctrinal value. I try never to make the

claim That’s not poetry, simply because there have likely always been almost as many different notions of what poetry is as there are poets.

No, I have no sweeping take on what poetry may be. Even if I did, however, it wouldn’t be very important. What I’ll really be talking about tonight is my own practice as a writer. And my practice is my practice not because it represents the “right” way but because it’s my practice, if you’ll allow me some circular logic. I don’t want to make what I can do the measure of virtue in poetry and therefore make everything else into a vice. That itself would be a vice called narcissism. It would also exclude any number of my favorite contemporary poets, maybe in fact most of them, from my inner circle.

No, I have no sweeping take on what poetry may be. Even if I did, however, it wouldn’t be very important. What I’ll really be talking about tonight is my own practice as a writer. And my practice is my practice not because it represents the “right” way but because it’s my practice, if you’ll allow me some circular logic. I don’t want to make what I can do the measure of virtue in poetry and therefore make everything else into a vice. That itself would be a vice called narcissism. It would also exclude any number of my favorite contemporary poets, maybe in fact most of them, from my inner circle.....

I want to speak of narrative values in lyric poetry not merely because I employ them but simply because I think they can help us avoid the sort of density, even impenetrability, of many a contemporary poem read, say, in The New Yorker– the sort of writing, as I see it, that can give poetry a really bad name even among people who read a lot, who come to libraries and good bookstores like this one.....

My friend, the brilliant Garret Keizer, tells me that when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war broke out, Israeli conscripts rushed home to get their rifles, which they were obliged to own, and copies of poetry collections by the great Yehuda Amichai. That is an extreme example, of course, but perhaps illustrative: I find it impossible to imagine anyone’s running home for copies of the cleverness and self-indulgent word-play that marks so much of current fare.

Before I proceed further, I should tell you that many younger editors are all but militantly anti-narrative. At 72, then, I’m doubtless quaint, and becoming more so in ways that I don’t even recognize, but that those younger people will. So be it. I’m old enough not to care what the smart and hip people think.  

As the title of my presentation suggests, I want poems that invite readers in, rather than ones that exclude them, and this is what in my opinion narrative values can help us with.

Mind you, I say narrative values, which is not the same as talking about writing narrative poetry– with actual plot, beginning, middle, and end. I have written a certain amount of such poetry, and I have surely enjoyed it in other writers, all the way from the extraordinary epics of Milton and Spenser to much of Frost’s longer work to Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie to a lot of Sharon Olds’s poetry to the matchless story-poems of B.H. Fairchild to fabulous stuff by Maine’s poet laureate, Wesley McNair .....  

Narrative values, the values of conventional short fiction, ones that my generation learned about in grammar school: character, plot, and setting– I think they come in as a way of inviting the reader into your creation.

For me, in any case, there are a few basic questions I pose to any draft I produce, and they are much related to character, setting, and plot. Who’s talking? To whom is he or she talking? Where is the speaker on delivering the words we read? Answers to these questions in the trombone poem are impossible for me to find. The speaker, whatever strange beast he is, could be anywhere as he waits for a letter containing the word “trombone,” though why he should desire such a letter is mysterious in the first place; so I lack a sense of setting. Who the speaker is remains totally unclear; I have no sense of character. I want that sense, and if I write or read a poem in the first person, I want the character named I to show some characterological qualities too– I am not interested in the thoughts or feelings of a mere pronoun. In this case, if the poem were unattributed, just for trivial example, we could equally imagine its speaker to be female as male. If I can’t even know be sure of something so apparently trivial as that, how may I be expected to know what my students have always called “deeper meanings”?

Who, way, what, where? If my poem can’t answer at least some of these questions, I feel I need to work on it further.

As the saying goes, I want to know, in my poem or someone else’s, what’s the story here? Not knowing that, not knowing, as my generation used to say, where the speaker is coming from, I feel not invited in but– almost intentionally it seems– excluded. I feel a need to know some encoded language, or some other secret, in order to enter the poem. Lacking the knowledge of who-what-where-why, etc., I turn away– and that, for me, is about the last effect I want to have on my reader.

Again, as writer, and in fact as reader too, I ask those basic questions of the unit of language before me: who’s talking, to whom, where, and why? Who is the character or characters? Where do they find themselves? I don’t need a plotted story per se, but I want those seemingly factual issues to be as clear as possible.

Does this mean that as writers we need to “dumb down” our poems? Scarcely. Poetry by its nature is engaged with complex feelings and thoughts. But there is a vast difference between complexity and mere complication. ...That's the difference, to my taste, between Robert Frost, one of the most complex minds in our literary history, and Ezra Pound, one of the most complicated.

If as poets we present complex material, we are already challenging our readers to pay very close attention. There is no speed-reading of poetry, no scanning for story. Why would we want to expand that challenge to include what I have called simple facts: who, what, where why? Again, the presentation of such facts is what I call the invitation to the reader. To use a famous example, that reader may say, “This is tough stuff to sort out, but at least this much I can know”:

                 

                Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

                And sorry I could not travel both

                And be one traveler, long I stood

                And looked down one as far as I could

                To where it bent in the undergrowth.

             We have a starting point for the famous instance I use here. A sort of door has been held open to us as we move into a poem that, though often reduced to a mere pep talk about self-reliance, is in fact profoundly ambiguous and finally even mysterious, perhaps like all good lyric.

And so on.....

#####################################################

Here is a recent poem dealing with an unusual physical (and, it seems, psychological) condition.

        Anosmia

A student told me this story,

because the one she’d written

used the word, anosmia,

which I’d never heard and which

the one on the page did not

define or refer to again.

It just said the protagonist

had such a condition and then

went along without pause about race-cars,

machines that traveled much faster

than anything should. The girl

had fallen for one of the drivers

and ended up in a trap.

He was clearly a son of a bitch.

All that NASCAR lore, I confess,

was stuff I’d always dismissed

as pure yahoo, but it had its appeal.

The love plot didn’t– way

too familiar, the kind of thing

that any young person will say

in writing, or if so inclined,

face-to-face. I’m afraid that old tale

couldn’t hold me for long. I’m jaded,

I guess. But anosmia... well,

I’ve always been crazy for words,

and I wanted that one for me.

It kicked off the more gripping story:

her dad was an EMT,

and as a small girl she’d peeked

inside his vinyl bag

and found the smelling salts.

What are these for? she begged,

and although he didn’t want to,

she insisted, he gave in,

she took a sniff and –poof!–

she’d never smell again.

That as I say made a better

tale than what she wrote,

which was same-old-same-old-same old.

I waited her out while she spoke,

then asked her about her sense

of taste. She said all she cared for

was Mexican cooking or Thai,

and only the spiciest flavors.

She’d soon enough gotten used

to mouth-searing pepper and sauce.

They never bothered her now.

My mind strayed off, because

I was close to her father’s age,

and what I mostly conjured

was how that man must have tried

his hardest not to surrender

but did, and then– too late.

He’d likely meant to do good.

Don’t most of us strive for that?

Driving home, I looked out

on a late March moon, and directly

beside it, Aldebaran,

brightest star in Taurus.

And if you have any faith in

this sort of thing (I don’t),

the Bull always craves reward.

Born in that sign, you’re a sucker

for wet kisses, fine wine and food.

What can it possibly feel like,

if you have a decent heart,

to have made so small a mistake

and deprived your child of all that,

anosmia hanging on

in the life of a daughter you love?

Fo you go on replaying that moment?

I don’t know, but my guess is you must.

I remembered a woodsman named Don.

He and two wives had a slew

of kids. His manner was terse,

but he had a nose for truth.

(That moon looked sharp as an axe-blade.)

I got thinking of something he said,

and not about children only:

Some damned strange traps is set.

 

 

 













 

Confessions of a Language Nerd

I have been to over a hundred Vemont libraries since my 2011 installation as Vermont Poet Laureate. In those visits, the question I’m most frequently asked is “Why doesn’t that rhyme?” I’ve considered that in prior blog posts, so in this one, I’ll look, at least to begin with, at the second most frequently asked: “Where do you get your inspiration?”

Well, fact is, I’m not quite sure I believe in inspiration. At least I have surely never believed some higher power had singled me out as a medium. But come to think of it, I do sometimes feel at that as if I were being drawn along in unexpected ways, and usually in surprising directions. That’s when I abandon myself to my own material, and such a development can pass in my case for inspiration. It is certainly the greatest payoff I experience as a writer.

Just what, however, do I mean by my own materials? Well, language of course. Its properties can be –indeed, they have to be– my guiding lights above all. Now I know that sounds vague enough. On the other hand, would we charge a painter with vagueness for referring to paint as her material? Who would question a composer’s saying that notes were his? From that perspective, it does seem strange that so many readers (not to mention literary critics and English teachers) hop right over so self-evident a truth as that poets’ primary material is language. Too often, in responding to poetry, they begin by snooping around for what must have been the originating “idea.” I should plead guilty, especially in literature classes, of the same error on a bad day.

But the plain truth, at least in my own experience, is that so-called ideas come after the fact. Word takes me to idea, not the other way around.

Much of this has to do, of course, with a certain proclivity of mine: I am a language nerd, and in fact I think poets need to be language nerds. That I am nerdy in precisely that way may explain my almost overwhelming delight in having taken part for three consecutive years in the Cabin Fever Spelling Bee, held at Montpelier, Vermont’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library, most recently on the final day of February this year. I have been pronouncer, definer, putter-into-sentences, and judge of the competition.

I’ve lately been pondering why, the moment that annual event is over, I start looking forward to next year’s. The subject of this column is my devotion to language. But such devotion, of course, is personal and not the prime ingredient in the great fun of the Cabin Fever Spelling Bee. There is always a full-house audience, and its members have a lot of pleasures to choose from or combine, not least the beauty and commodiousness of the library building itself. They also sense and contribute to the event as a genuinely communal event. Its meticulous organization is patent: with clarity and eloquence, library board chair Tom McKone explains the contest’s rules both to players and crowd; Rachel Senechal, head librarian, sees to every last detail of logistics; Rick Winston, Andrea Serota, and George Spaulding deftly assemble a list of words, which grows more challenging with each new round of the three.

Of course, the contestants make the event what it is in the end. They are divided into two groups: Vermont readers and Vermont writers. I especially enjoy the good-natured joshing between the camps, and between competitors and me. Before the event, all straight-faced,  the locally celebrated author and humorist Willem Lange asked me if English was my native language; during the game itself, he remarked that it resembled a cavalry charge: “Every time you look around there are fewer horses.” Sometimes the banter is actually among members of one team, and indeed in one case, within one family, slam master poet Geof Hewitt and his witty son Ben.

This year, for the second time in a row, the grand champion was young adult fictionist (and so much more), Roberta Harold; the runner-up, also for the second consecutive year, was reader Emily Tredeau. But there was keen competition right along. I think of the bright, poised 85-year-old Maxine Leary, a former school teacher whose student I would love to have been.

But in the end, my keenest attraction to the Cabin Fever bee may well be that language nerdiness of mine, all of which may have started, though I didn’t know it then, in 6^th grade Latin class with Mr. Richard Cutler and continued, annually, through the class of Mr. Zygmund Wardzinski, Polish refugee and polymath. Though I was just the sort of adolescent student who made choosing not to teach at that level a no-brainer, I did do well in Latin. It seemed a silly thing to be studying, yes, but it came to me easily, and I could count on its providing me one of the few easy A’s (or any A’s) I got back then.

Little did I know that my grounding in Latin (and French, taught by the best instructor I ever had, kindergarten through Ph.D., the late Ted Wright) would be enormously helpful when I elected to teach myself Italian in my forties. Still less could I have predicted how stimulating it would be to sense, almost immediately, the etymological journey of most words I encounter. Though our ancestral Anglo-Saxon was the language of Germanic people in England from the 5^th century through the Norman Conquest, its melding of  Teutonisms with Latinate idioms (which had already felt the significant effect of Greek ones) have made English a tongue that’s full of potential for poets, indeed for all us language nerds.

As words occur to me in a poem, then, they bear the freight of their own history, no matter my German is scanty and my Greek almost nonexistent. To consider that history somehow helps me to surrender to them in the way I’ve mentioned.

Consider, in fact, a word I used in that last sentence: I mean– “consider.”  Its first syllable, “con” is related o German “kennen” (to know) and Latin “sidus, sider” (star). Though in our time we use the word very casually, its originative value involved knowing the stars.

A related value attends our word “disaster,” which literally means an ill-starred occurrence, combining “dis,” connoting negation, or “dys,” meaning bad, with another root for star, in this case “astrum.” The Latin influence is patent (and of course “influence,” like “influenza,” means a flowing in, for good or ill, from.... the stars).

We could speak at length of that prefix, “dis” or “dys,” and in dis-cussing it, we would be harkening, awares or unawares, to its value up to and through Anglo-Saxon times. A discussion, derived from “dis,” in this case meaning “apart,” and the Latin verb “quatere,” “to shake,” became “discutere,” signifying, literally, a shaking apart. Given the nature of discussion in the contemporary U.S. Congress, say, one might almost believe the word is reverting to its earliest implications.

I could go on and on in this way. It’s a bit like finding a favorite song or singer on YouTube: you listen to it or her or him or them and you are reminded of other favorites; you look those up, and in the process come on a musician or a tune you hadn’t known. There may be more of my readers who can identify with such a reference (such a “carrying back”) than with my own nerdy gorging on etymologies and linguistic history. But there are clearly enough of the latter to fill up the beautiful main room of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier.

new poem

My friend Fleda Brown and I have been sharing poetry prompts. The following is what I did with her demand that I write a poem about a dried-up creek (which I made into a brook, a likelier name in upper New England), a golf ball, and a collapsing barn.

                      Not To Be Expected

One evening before Youth Fellowship I found

Some organ pipes on the floor, and knelt beside them,

Singing “Long Tall Sally” into one. Meanwhile,

I signed my name with a finger in the dust

Of the nubbled concrete. No one had ever done

These things at once. No one would ever do them.

That was a fusty basement room in St. Luke’s.

Why this recollection on the bank of this brook?

Less strange to remember a poem by Robert Frost,

Whose brook runs out of song and speed come June.

The one I’m looking at has never sung,

Has never run. It barely crawls at ice-out,

And by now, mid-May, its water’s long since gone.

What’s new? Not much. It does this every year.

Snow melts, the freshets feed it, then it dies.

The barn opposed across the way... Enough

Of Frost, irrelevant here, where a barn leans sideways

In a field of weeds. It needs refurbishment,

Which it won’t get. The sills are rotted, walls

All splayed like a doomed doe’s legs on ice.

Did someone stand in the mow, golf clubs in hand?

Unlikely. How on earth did that dimpled ball,

Egg-like below me, find its nest of dried algae?

Nothing’s to be expected, never was.

Consider, say, some so-called normal couple,

And ready yourself to hear of odd behavior.

One may raise chinchillas, one love tango.

We wonder, Who’d expect it?  Answer: no one.

I labored to be unique when I was young,

But what of my uncle, who’d listen to the Ring

Of the Niebelung while plucking his farmyard geese?

It was just what he did, not striving to be eccentric.

His brother, my father, served a tough stint as a soldier,

Regular army, Europe, World War II.

So why did he love to sing old navy tunes?

Search me. Search him. He hated all salt water.

I smell his bay rum now as I recall him,

And contemplate a ball in withered muck,

And note a certain barn, gap-toothed, neglected,

And conjure Robert Frost, a favorite author,

And remember trying to sing like Little Richard–

Now what, I ask you, what can be expected?

On Literary Theory, and a New Poem

 I came across the following by way of the excellent online journal Numéro Cinq (full disclosure: I am an adviser to the magazine, which is edited by my good friend Douglas Glover, a superb Canadian fictionist and essayist –see, most recently, his remarkable story collection, Savage Love). Here is a comment by one Paul Bowes, of whom I know nothing save that he echoes many of my own sentiments. Mr. Bowes is responding to an article in The Guardian (U.K.) called "In theory: the death of literature," by Andrew Gallix.

In critical circles, ... (an argument) seems to depend increasingly on placing excessive weight on the 'symptomatic' significance of essentially minor writers such as Blanchot, whose reputation in the anglophone world as an important fictionist I find to be simply undeserved. (His non-fiction may be another matter.)

The recent literary-theoretical attention to Blanchot seems to me to have a lot more to do with the academy's perennial need to find new fodder for theorising - and to make careers for young entrants to a well-worked-over field - than any inherent merit in the writer. Theory will always be more fascinated by notions like 'belatedness' and 'exhaustion', because by implication they magnify the status of theory in relation to creative work. In readings of 'thin', 'exhausted' literature, the theorist is usually doing - and can be seen to be doing - more creative work than the original writer.

I also find arguments of this type curiously olde-fashioned, even Whiggish. They all seem to assume that 'literature' has a guiding spirit, and that its history is always moving towards the realisation of some final predestined form. But curiously, no matter which book or writer or era one chooses as the 'last book' or 'final author' or 'terminal epoch', actual literature has the bad manners to pay no attention, and persists in appearing in new forms.

The worst thing about these ideas is the authoritarian way in which they seek to take control of, and foreclose on the future. Where is literature going? These people don't know, any more than the rest of us, and their notions are essentially polemical rather than diagnostic.

Amen and amen.

The following new poem takes its impetus from the coldest Vermont winter I can recall in years and years. The temperature dipped to 30 below two nights ago, and has gone below zero every night for weeks. When the weather is thus frigid, however, the beauty of the woods and mountains is, as the poem implies, indescribable:

          Keeping At It at 20 Below

It’s too cold for me to stay out long at my age,

So I trek the half-mile road below our shed,

Its earth deep-hidden beneath the white.

Far east, Black Mountain shows up, razor-edged

On a sky full of crystals. My boots on frigid ground

Cheep so loudly that with my old guy’s ears

I can’t right off discern another sound:

Pine siskins in their scores. They wheeze from every

Evergreen in sight. I used to plow

On snowshoes through powder, hour on hour.

It shames me to say the notion scares me now.

Still it’s hard to keep with wistfulness when air

Keeps glittering so, and creatures no bigger than thumbs

Keep at it, cheerful, determined. Each bird tears

At bough-tips, feeding and chanting. I focus on one

That doggedly worries the tip of a spruce-cone, eats,

Then flits away.

                                                               Beyond the bird,

Beyond the emerald tree in which it sat,

Beyond the outlying mountain– well, what passes

Even beyond bright air, and who might sense it?

Not I.  It’s birdsong that prompts such opening phrases.

Beyond all this, let time complete my sentence.

 

More geezer poetry

A few months back, I reconsidered an old book of mine, The Floating Candles (1982).  I did not think all that badly of what I read in it, yet I had this odd impulse to take some of the poems and revise them as filtered through the three-decades plus of experience I've had since then. As a matter of fact, I have done just that, though I doubt anyone interested would be able to discern the original lurking behind the newer work.

The following poem was motivated in part by reflection on my vague curiosity as to what such "translations" would look like. 

A matter perhaps related: I so love being a grandparent that I'm beginning to wonder whether I can ever write another poem without at least some oblique mention of those beloved children. At all events, here we go:

              

                     Waking Late

My wife of three decades is at work

already.  Retired, I have time to consider

the smell of her cheek when she came indoors

from this morning’s chill. Can there be a heaven?

If so, it will hang in the air, that odor.

I’m not alone.

I have dear friends of a certain age

who scan the notices of death

like me, first thing, in the local paper,

comparing the age of the vanished with theirs.

We reckon the years we likely have left.

“A good, full life”–

that’s the cliché for those gone at 80.

I’m 72. I guess I’d expect

in heaven to hear babblings from our youngest of five

grandchildren, the constantly smiling Ruthie,

seven months old, and the wise-guy remarks

of her big sister Ivy,

the insouciant ones of her twin brother Creston.

Who’s afraid of Big Bad Death?

Not I. It’s what I’ll leave that hurts me,

including just now the best two dogs

we’ve owned, however we loved the rest.

It’s 20 below,

male pointer and female retriever nestle

by the reddened woodstove, tight together.

Outside, pine siskins jostle the feeder

and juncos peck their spills on snow.

We can see, in such clear and brilliant weather,

all the way to the mountains,

the rugged Whites beyond the river.

My wife and I love walking along

that totem flow on this side from New Hampshire.

Yesterday, after thaw and freeze,

the streambed’s ice chunks slapped back the sun

like gigantic gems.

I’ve had this late urge to go back and revise

my poems from an earlier time. Who failed

to be a little naïve when young?

There was so much I couldn’t imagine back then.

I had scarcely dreamed the oldest grandchild,

Cora, raspy

of voice, sharp of humor, her four-year-old brother

Arthur, who loves to tie me to chairs.

I tell myself now: Look up, out the window.

It’s a Monday, blunt cold, in February,

8 a.m. in the Year of Our Lord

2015,

when beleaguered deer are forced to keep moving

for fear of freezing if they pause too long,

when a sleek doe tiptoes down our drive,

her ten-month-old twin offspring behind her–

three silhouettes against whited lawn.

It’s been a hard winter,

with more to come, but they look so alive.

Rediscovery

I was recently going through some old folders of mine, and I came on a (very different) version of this poem– or rather the start of it. I clearly gave up back then, perhaps 20 years ago. All I had was the inscription from Freud, though I can't even remember why it should have caught my attention, nor where I stumbled on it, having not read Civilization and Its Discontents since my college days, which have receded into a fantastical era of fifty years and more back. I had the inscription and about 20 lines.

In any case, I elected to finish the poem, as I have here, though in all honesty I am not sure what this composition "means." That's all right. I may figure that out in due course. Meanwhile, as follows:

     On My Love of Country Life

                                    The question may be raised why we chose precisely the past of a                                                       city to compare with the past of a mind.

                                                                                          –Civilization and Its Discontents

He ruminated, cigar in crippled jaw.

Cocaine pulsed like the strobe on that cop’s cruiser.

There’s oceanic distance from where Freud sat

To where I stand just now as I visit Manhattan,

Which back in the doctor’s day was no Big Apple.

The Sheep Meadow still held sheep. But in time they’d vanish,

The park be thronged, and we’d raise his question–

Or I would, comparing his moment to our own,

When even that rim of posies by the reservoir’s

South end at 87^th seems a threat.

Imagination, mine at least, would crave

A village, clean, essential, if maybe not

The one I’ve lived in so long. Are you like me?

Can you conjure some antique European village,

Complete with organ grinder, playful monkey,

Coins chink-chinking softly in a cup,

Air soft as bedclothes too? Here in the city,

That bus’s diesel chokes me. Jackhammers rattle.

The very pigeons move from there to there,

Cosmopolites, while the park affects a show

Of green among the cans and candy wrappers,

Rinds and condoms, jugs of Sneaky Pete

In shards. The traffic seems deployed for battle.

Its headlamps will sweep across the stoops come dark,

Across the benches, where mad folks rage against

The day gone by, or politicians, sports teams.

Just so we heard our elders, late at night,

In our anxious puberty. They madly shrieked

Their calumnies downstairs, and slammed their doors.

Are you like me? Did you long for more precision?

Did you crave an explanation? Why do I keep

Including you? You may not be like me,

Who craved it –how I craved it– for years and years,

Some way to make some sense of my inward city,

Though I didn’t think in those terms, and even then,

My mind ached likewise for another place,

The one in which things blurred: soft nap of meadow,

The spring blooms’ brightness muted, peasant wagons

Full of hay gone evening-fragrant, glow

Of a setting sun on the houses’ brick, and beasts,

Both wild and tame, intent upon their grazing–

Their placid grazing, narcotic, every moment

Much like the one before, their mild jaws rolling.