The Ramble & Rumble

“…the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine”

[calfo]

Künstlerroman

In a number of rooms in a number of states

I began then abandoned notebooks.

Pages long and blank. Sparse fragments

in the margins: eager for otherwise    a second infancy

Inside me, bones inflating,

kites crowding a florid dome.

In answer to a question, the poet said

I write to return opacity to the glassbright world.

Line after line slackened. My benedictions

darkened like lack into night’s eventual black.

The dead artist said for a painting to move us,

it must become, not remind us of life.

I stood vainly for many months, watching snow

sink to the bottom of my mirror.

For protection, I studied the contours

of a deeper sorrow than the kind I grew.

I thought I thought best with my hands

in my hair, sweeping fears off my face.

My nothing was novel—my desire

for a different ending is a failure of imagination.

All my life it’s been there, dormant

knell ringing my neck.

I was a finch, a feathered bellwether.

Or I am an organ wringing, then wrung.

— Sarah Ghazal Ali

[therambleandrumble]

POEM FOR MY FATHER’S GHOST

MARY OLIVER

Now is my father

A traveler, like all the bold men

He talked of, endlessly

And with boundless admiration,

Over the supper table,

Or gazing up from his white pillow —

Book on his lap always, until

Even that grew too heavy.

Now is my father free of all binding fevers.

Now is my father

Traveling where there is no road.

Finally, he could not lift a hand

To cover his eyes.

Now he climbs to the eye of the river,

He strides through the Dakotas,

He disappears into the mountains. And though he looks

Cold and hungry as any man

At the end of a questing season,

He is one of them now:

He cannot be stopped.

Now is my father

Walking the wind,

Sniffing the deep Pacific

That begins at the end of the world.

Vanished from us utterly,

Now is my father circling the deepest forest —

Then turning in to the last red campfire burning In the final hills,

Where chieftains, warriors and heroes

Rise and make him welcome,

Recognizing, under the shambles of his body,

A brother who has walked his thousand miles.

⁃ From Twelve Moons, 1972

[therambleandrumble]

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it

I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

— W. S. MERWIN

[calfo]

Peace Treaty

El Retiro, Colombia

When I step naked into my shower, I find, staring down at me, its eight dark eyes peering over the silver lip of the sprayer, a tarantula the size of a bar of soap.

There’s a reason we tap out our shoes, check behind pillows every night before bed. Spiders and scorpions make a daily pilgrimage of this house, through windows and doors, to and from the jungle that presses in on us from all sides.

How many have I displaced, or killed, I wonder, looking up, surprised by this creature, each of us weighing options: four pairs of legs leaping into the falls and down the bluff of my body. Or two, scrambling out into the cold to fetch a broom.

And I think, not my shower today, but ours.

“You stay up there and look,” I hear myself say, and with this a small peace forms between us. My hands lather and scrub. The brown voyeur drums one hairy finger just at the edge of the cascade—that thin wet line between curious and afraid, where each of us must make a home. — AE Hines

[therambleandrumble]

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”

— from Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Céline

[therambleandrumble]

Marriage is not

a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge

of the desert

the unpainted stairs

at the back where we squat

outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far

we are learning to make fire

— “Habitation” excerpted from Selected Poems 1965–­1975 by Margaret Atwood

[havingapoemwithyou]

Harrowing by Maggie Smith

[onetwofeb]

[apoemaday]

[since feeling is first]

by E.E. Cummings

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world

my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry — the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

[wovi]

[someforbiddenparadise]

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin (as appears in his 1928 treatise One-Way Street, in a section titled "Post No Bills")

[havingapoemwithyou]

Encounter by Czesław Miłosz tr. Czesław Miłosz

[therambleandrumble]

The desk was long laminated plastic wood with metal legs. My books sat there, a presence. The screw. I couldn't keep up with the program. It was there when I woke, the imperatives: Do this and this then this and this do not stop you suck you will fail you are ugly you have so much to learn you are so far behind you will never succeed you will always be alone your loneliness will never be rocked you will never write the way your heroes do.

I imagined Leo counting the pills and I could do this, too, one after the other, a row or two rows, a line or two lines, counting and it would be enough, I swallowed each row, one and another, stuffing my mouth full, swallowing until I choked. I sipped from my water bottle and lay on my bed: metal frame, thin mattress, one blanket, a crunchy pillow. I waited. I saw the faces on my wall.

I could hear one or the other laughing. I heard Leonard Lopates voice on the radio. The window, the brick wall. I couldn't see our but it all got in; the incessant sounds of that city—an ambulance, birds screeching, garbage trucks, shouting, car horns. I was going to vomit, I was too awake, it was all taking too long. I turned into a fetal position. A loneliness that can be rocked. The great female tragedy. My mother, my love. It was too late. I ate books, I could live here.

— from Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon

[therambleandrumble]

In the worst hour of the worst season

of the worst year of a whole people

a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.

He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.

He lifted her and put her on his back.

He walked like that west and west and north.

Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

But her feet were held against his breastbone.

The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.

There is no place here for the inexact

praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.

There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.

Also what they suffered. How they lived.

And what there is between a man and woman.

And in which darkness it can best be proved.

— Quarantine by Eavan Boland, 2008

[therambleandrumble]

Love to his singer held a glistening leaf,

And said: “The rose-tree and the apple-tree

Have fruits to vaunt or flowers to lure the bee;

And golden shafts are in the feathered sheaf

Of the great harvest-marshal, the year’s chief,

Victorious summer; aye, and ’neath warm sea

Strange secret grasses lurk inviolably

Between the filtering channels of sunk reef.

All are my blooms; and all sweet blooms of love

To thee I gave while Spring and Summer sang;

But Autumn stops to listen, with some pang

From those worse things the wind is moaning of.

Only this laurel dreads no winter days:

Take my last gift; thy heart hath sung my praise.

— Sonnet LXI: Love’s Last Gift, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

[therambleandrumble]

A friend reads what I've been writing and says to me over coffee, "You're romanticizing the street. Don't you know that New York has lost seventy-five percent of its manufacturing base?" In my mind's eye, I stare into the faces of all the women and men with whom I interact daily. Hey, you peo-ple, I address them silently, did you hear what my friend just said? The city is doomed, the middle class has deserted New York, the corporations are in Texas, Jersey, Taiwan. You're gone, you're outta here, it's all over. How come you're still on the street?

New York isn't jobs, they reply, it's temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human ex-pressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.

Or perhaps I should say that it is I who cannot.

— from The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick

[therambleandrumble]

That scraping of iron on iron when the

wind

rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t

quit with, but drags back and forth.

Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close,

just

beyond the screened door, as if someone

there

squats in the dark honing his wares against

my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal

wing,

nothing and anything might make this

noise

of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning

of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of

rust,

or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows

that should not bend. Something stiffens that

should

slide. Something, loose and not right,

rakes or forges itself all night.

— Nocturne, Li Young Lee