My Abigail

Photograph by Spencer Stewart

Later this month my wife and I will celebrate our 41st anniversary.  When we first dated in college I used to write her poems and tack them to a bulletin board in the theater's green room.  She responded with a pen and ink drawing.  I'm still writing and now she paints.  This poem is for her.

MY ABIGAIL
           - For SallyAnn

            in these most foiling of times
            when I find myself at odds
            with friends and foe alike
            I think of you as my Abigail
            my rock   my wife   but most of all
            my friend   my best of friends
            without whom I am nothing
            but a tattered banner flying
            in the weakest of winds
            you are the mast to which I
            tether my greatest hopes and ambitions
            if I do not tell you this enough
            it is only a weakness in my character
            you are my country   its hope
            its flag   its sweetest anthem
            I can say no more than this
            you are its tallest shadow
            when the sun shines its brightest

Rain

        
I spent much of the month of October traveling throughout Germany, and during a week in Berlin I had an opportunity to visit some of the refugee and migrant processing centers in and around the city.  This was at a time when Germany had graciously opened its borders to what Carolyn Forché has called the victims of extremity . . . this at a time when they were arriving faster than the German authorities could handle them . . . at a time when other so-called civilized European nations were turning their backs on this tormented migration . . . at a time when other Islamic countries were quick to turn them away.  It is one thing to see their plight on television.  It is another thing to observe it up close and personal.  

This poem was written one evening in Berlin after a day of witnessing first hand what happens when much of the civilized world, including the United States, turns its back on the innocent victims of incivility in its most heinous aspect.
 
            RAIN

            a rainy evening on Alexanderplatz
            a Schnell Imbiss on Greifwalderstrasse           
            drinking Turkish beer a döner box
            to nourish me at the end of the day

            sitting alone here watching Erdogan
            on the big screen in the back
            a pause in a soccer match played
            in Monchen-Gladbach in the rain
            the fellow who made my dinner
            shakes his fist at the TV
            “lanet herif!!” he curses     
            that modern sultan who smiles
            in Ankara not hearing this
            the pleas of his own people
            this obscene taunting in rainy Berlin

            smiling I try to forget this morning
            in a park in Alt-Moabit a steady
            swarm of migrants stamping its feet
            standing numb in a line steaming
            in the rain I study each sad imprimatur
            anguish etching many damp faces
            no Azhan called out by a muezzin
            only the Johanneskirche bells tolling
            reminding them who and where they are
           
            they who are beyond their ken and culture
            they who transited Erdogan’s land
            crossing the vast Anatolian plains
            searching for lives better than
            the shattered ones they left behind
            they who put children in tenuous boats
            believing the Aegean safer than land

            I try to forget the image of the Syrian boy
            drowned and washed ashore in Turkey
            Erdogan still smiling in Ankara
            while the whole world watches in horror
            its tears like so much dismal rain

He has Earned His Sleep - In Memory of Tomas Tranströmer

On March 26th, poet, translator and psychologist Tomas Tranströmer passed away in Stockholm, Sweden at the age of 83.  And although his collected works occupy very little space on a bookshelf, the response to his poems, both in Sweden and abroad, has been immense, the honors many and impressive, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011 "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

Robert Bly, a prominent translator of Tranströmer, noted that when Tranströmer began to craft his early poems in the 1950s, it was still possible to write a nature poem in which nothing technological entered.  As his career progressed, however, it was not so easy to separate the two, as we see in his 1974 long poem Östersjöar [Baltics] and the mingling of maritime life in that wonderful labyrinth of forested islands and the waters of his native Stockholm Archipelago along the Baltic Sea coastline.  We marvel that the poetry of earth is never truly dead.

The American poet and critic Stephen Burt tells us: “More than most poets, Tranströmer survives translation, since his effects so often come from metaphors, images and situations.  Other effects come from silence, from negative space . . . .” 

In memory of Tranströmer’s passing, I would like to share one of his earliest poems, “Solitary Swedish Houses,” which was published in his second collection of poems, Hemligheter på vägen  [Secrets on the Way] (1958), and translated by Robin Fulton.  I first heard Tranströmer read this poem in Tucson, in 1974, and again a decade later, in Stockholm:

“Solitary Swedish Houses”

A mix-max of black spruce
and smoking moonbeams.
Here’s the croft lying low
and not a sign of life.

Till the morning dew murmurs
and an old man opens
– with a shaky hand – his window
and lets out an owl.

Further off, the new building
stands steaming
with the laundry butterfly
fluttering at the corner

in the middle of a dying wood
where the mouldering reads
through spectacles of sap
the proceedings of the bark-drillers.

Summer with flaxen-haired rain
or one solitary thunder-cloud
above a barking dog.
The seed is kicking inside the earth.

Agitated voices, faces
fly in the telephone wires
on stunted rapid wings
across the moorland miles.

The house on an island in the river
brooding on its stony foundations.
Perpetual smoke – they’re burning
the forest’s secret papers.

The rain wheels in the sky.
The light coils in the river.
Houses on the slope supervise
the waterfall’s white oxen.

Autumn with a gang of starlings
holding dawn in check.
The people move stiffly
in the lamplight’s theatre.

Let them feel without alarm
the camouflaged wings
and God’s energy
coiled up in the dark.

Tranströmer  was a hugely popular, almost rock star figure in his native land.  One American critic referred to him as “Sweden’s Robert Frost.”   So in closing, let me paraphrase that American bard:  The woods are lovely, dark and deep;  he has shared his music . . . and earned his sleep.

Je Suis Charlie!

At the Pond's Edge - A Tribute to Donald Hall

This past week The Washington Post reviewed Donald Hall’s newly-published volume, Essays After Eighty.  At the age of 86 he describes himself inhabiting an “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” that is old age.  It has become, sadly, “a ceremony of losses” of lovers, family and friends, including fellow poet Galway Kinnell who passed away just a couple months ago (see my November 9, 2014 tribute).  Hall freely admits that at his age he feels complacent about death.  I am reminded of his poem “Affirmation,” the open line that reads: “To grow old is to lose everything.”  And after a litany of losses encountered throughout life, it ends with a pledge to “affirm that it is fitting / and delicious to lose everything” in the muddy edge of the pond that is life.  Another loss he recognizes yet without mourning is poetry.  After a rich poetic life, Hall believes poetry has abandoned him in old age.   He has felt it gradually sliding away.  “I had 60 years of it; I can’t regret it.”  Thankfully, his prose endures. 

So, as a tribute to Mr. Hall and in celebration of his most recent volume of essays, I am going to share with you one of my favorite of his poems, a poem about the poet and one of his readings.  “To a Waterfowl,” should not to be confused with a similarly titled and mostly forgotten poem by the American poet William Cullen Bryant first published in 1818.  Yet, perhaps like Bryant’s poem, Hall speaks to the idea of being alone in the world.  Even more so now in that “unanticipated galaxy” of his final years on earth, wondering about the direction that poetry has taken him.  “Poems are image-bursts from brain-depths, words flavored by buttery long vowels,” he writes. “The sound of poems is sensual, even sexual.”

TO A WATER FOWL

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close briefcases and ask, “What are you in?”
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,

and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
“Oh, yeah?” they say, developing an interest in clouds.
“My wife, she likes that sort of thing?  Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I’d better watch my grammar, huh?”
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and take a limousine to the Women’s Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey’s Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges,
and I read them “The Erotic Crocodile,” and “Eating You.”
Ah, when I have concluded the disbursement of sonorities,

crooning, “High on thy thigh I cry, Hi!” —and so forth—
they spank their wide hands, they smile like Jell-O,
and they say, “Hah-hah? My goodness, Mr. Hall,
but you certainly do have an imagination, huh?”
“Thank you, indeed,” I say; “it brings home the bacon.”

But now, my poems, now I have returned to the motel,
returned to l’eternel retour of the Holiday Inn,
naked, lying on the bed, watching Godzilla Sucks Mt. Fuji,
addressing my poems, feeling superior, and drinking bourbon
from a flask disguised to look like a transistor radio.

And what about you?  You, laughing?  You, in bluejeans,
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.
__________

* "To a Waterfowl," published in The Town of Hill (1975)