Galway Kinnell – Fourteen Lines

Holding Hands In Our Sleep

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.
Galway Kinnell

After Making Love We Hear Footsteps

By Galway Kinnell

For I can snore like a bullhorn

or play loud music

or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman

and Fergus will only sink deeper

into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,

but let there be that heavy breathing

or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house

and he will wrench himself awake

and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,

after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,

familiar touch of the long-married,

and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,

the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—

and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,

his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other

and smile

and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—

this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,

sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,

this blessing love gives again into our arms.

Why Regret?

by Galway Kinnell

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Kin Drinking Kin

Gypsies believe bear and man are brothers. The evidence? They have the same body beneath their hides, each likes to drink beer, enjoy music and under its sway, dance.
Gypsy Folklore

Mr. Virtue and The Three Bears

by R. P. Blackmur

We hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. Flaubert

This morning at his gas stand in Lucerne on Route 1, Mr. Virtue was found devoured by his bear. Mr. Virtue left no known relatives. (Remembered some fifteen years later from the Bangor Daily News.)

I knew a bear once ate a man named Virtue
All but a mire of clothes, an unlicked bear
Caught, a May cub, to dance for soda pop;
Who when half-grown lumbered before us slowly,
Gurgling and belching in the gas-stand yard,
On a sorry chain, and made rough music there.

A chattel property of Mr. Virtue,
Untaxable and nameless, this black bear,
For some a joke to sell flat soda pop,
For some terror in chains, wove himself slowly
Through foundered postures, till hunger smalled his yard,
And he broke free by eating Virtue there.

If no kin came to claim the clothes of Virtue,
Yet hundreds claimed themselves in that black bear
And drank the upset crate of soda pop,
Kin drinking kin: drinking the stink that slowly,
Like a bear’s pavanne, swept the gravel yard
And made of vertigo a music there.

So fell the single hymn to Mr. Virtue:
In rough music that burst from that young bear
When sudden soda in his loins went pop,
All longing and no hope, and he danced slowly,
Rearing and dropping in his chain-swept yard,
Till Mr. Virtue dumped spoiled blueberries there.

–And yet, there move two musics wooing Virtue:
Those of the Great and of the Lesser Bear,
Of the star falling and of new soda pop;
And these two bears dance best when long time slowly,
Overheard, the Dipper spills by inch and yard
The northern lights on us from darkness there.

So praises blew in this bear feast on Virtue.
The greater sprang within the lesser bear
In music wild in the spilled light, to pop,
And by created hunger move, most slowly,
The blacker stars, fast set in their hard yard,
To loose their everlasting shivers there.

Let us in virtue so beseech the bear,
With soda pop, that he may dance slowly
Move in our yard constellations darkly there.

It is not often I swerve in this blog from short to longer form poems. But today is an exception. Maybe its because I am feeling like a bear in need of eating virtue, or maybe I am a man, out to gut my brothers? Or maybe I a man in need of a drink, or maybe I am a bear in need of blood? Or maybe because its April fool’s day? Whatever the cause, I was inspired by the balance in these two poems, justice denied, justice deserved. Are we the constellations in the heavens, in our slow rotating dance, or are we hungry bears here on earth? Either way brothers (and sisters), let’s find a better way forward than eating each other….

The Bear

By Galway Kinnell

In late winter

I sometimes glimpse bits of steam

coming up from

some fault in the old snow

and bend close and see it is lung-colored

and put down my nose

and know

the chilly, enduring odor of bear.

I take a wolf’s rib and whittle

it sharp at both ends

and coil it up

and freeze it in blubber and place it out

on the fairway of the bears.

And when it has vanished

I move out on the bear tracks,

roaming in circles

until I come to the first, tentative, dark

splash on the earth.

And I set out

running, following the splashes

of blood wandering over the world.

At the cut, gashed resting places

I stop and rest,

at the crawl-marks

where he lay out on his belly

to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice

I lie out

dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.

On the third day I begin to starve,

at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would

at a turd sopped in blood,

and hesitate, and pick it up,

and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down,

and rise

and go on running.

On the seventh day,

living by now on bear blood alone,

I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled,

steamy hulk,

the heavy fur riffling in the wind.

I come up to him

and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,

the dismayed

face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils

flared, catching

perhaps the first taint of me as he

died.

I hack

a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,

and tear him down his whole length

and open him and climb in

and close him up after me, against the wind,

and sleep.

And dream

of lumbering flatfooted

over the tundra,

stabbed twice from within,

splattering a trail behind me,

splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,

no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence,

which dance of solitude I attempt,

which gravity-clutched leap,

which trudge, which groan.

Until one day I totter and fall—

fall on this

stomach that has tried so hard to keep up,

to digest the blood as it leaked in,

to break up

and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze

blows over me, blows off

the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood

and rotted stomach

and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,

blows across

my sore, lolled tongue a song

or screech, until I think I must rise up

and dance. And I lie still.

I awaken I think. Marshlights

reappear, geese

come trailing again up the flyway.

In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear

lies, licking

lumps of smeared fur

and drizzly eyes into shapes

with her tongue. And one

hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,

the next groaned out,

the next,

the rest of my days I spend

wandering: wondering

what, anyway,

was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

The Long, Perfect Loveliness

St.-Francis-and-the-Sow — St. Francis and the Sow

Prayer

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell

Fair Flower

Thomas Gent (1693 – 1778)

Fair flower! that fall’n beneath the angry blast,
Which marks with wither’d sweets its fearful way,
I grieve to see thee on the low earth cast,
While beauty’s trembling tints fade fast away.
But who is she, that from the mountain’s head
Comes gaily on, cheering the child of earth;
The walks of woe bloom bright beneath her tread,
And nature smiles with renovated mirth?
‘Tis Health! she comes, and hark! the vallies ring.
And hark! the echoing hills repeat the sound;
She sheds the new-blown blossoms of the spring,
And all their fragrance floats her footsteps round.
And hark! she whispers in the zephyr’s voice,
Lift up thy head, fair flower! rejoice! rejoice!

The zombie apocalypse has begun. At least it feels that way a bit with corona virus in the news 24/7. All my plans for the next 30 days seem to have been reformed, rewritten or scrapped all together as the week progressed. The picture changes by the day in terms of what does and doesn’t make sense in terms of travel, over reacting, under reacting – who knows? I am feeling second guessed (mostly by myself) for any decision I make regarding human contact. The politically correct thing to do right now is stay home for the next 14 days, avoid all human contact, but that seems a little extreme given that we likely have barely even kicked this pandemic off yet. We maybe only experiencing the pre-game ceremonies of the covid-19 games and just at the start of the first quarter. It’s going to be a long, long game. Hope you stocked up on toilet paper, nacho chips and salsa.

I enjoyed Stephen Fry’s tweet on Friday. Go team Fry! Even if we aren’t related, Stephen and I, I am always glad to see my namesakes being compassionate and intelligent. I agree, kindness and civility need to rule the day right now. It’s okay to be a rattled or even activated by all this crazy weirdness of COVID – 19. Reach out to friends and family and stay connected even if that means a little less face to face and a little more technology. Ask for reassurance. It is going to be okay, even though sadly, for some it probably won’t. That was true before COVID – 19 and will be true after it. However, faith in the benevolence of the universe is a better place to start this next global recession than grabby pessimism.

St. Francis and the Sow

by Galway Kinnell (1927 – 2014)

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Another Spring

by Kenneth Rexroth

The seasons revolve and the years change
With no assistance or supervision.
The moon, without taking thought,
Moves in its cycle, full, crescent, and full.
The white moon enters the heart of the river;
The air is drugged with azalea blossoms;
Deep in the night a pine cone falls;
Our campfire dies out in the empty mountains.

The sharp stars flicker in the tremulous branches;
The lake is black, bottomless in the crystalline night;
High in the sky the Norther Crown
Is cut in half by the dim summit of a snow peak.

O heart, heart, so singularly
Intransigent and corruptible,
Here we lie entranced by the starlit water,
And moments that should each last forever

Slide unconsciously by like water.

There are days we are more attuned to the relentless march of time than others. Sitting through another endless business meeting yesterday, trying to stay interested, I felt like the protagonist of Gary Snyder’s poem below. White collar, blue collar and everything in between, any one of us who works a job long enough starts to wonder where time went.

It’s why Rexroth’s gorgeous poem about connecting with nature and the timeless quality such experiences can create in our life speaks to me. I had my first camp fire of the summer last weekend. Sitting beneath the stars with the embers twinkling I was connected to my past, present and future self in that simplicity of silence. We all feel like there will be another spring, even if we are appreciating the one we have. Nina Simone voiced it honestly. Living in the moment is easier said then done sometimes, but worth the effort. Do you have plans for a campfire this summer? Who will you enjoy its fiery presence with?

Hay For The Horses

by Gary Snyder

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
—The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds—
“I’m sixty-eight” he said,
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.

As Words Sometimes Do

If This Night Is Other Than Night

by Galway Kinnell (1927 – 2014)

If this night is other than night,
Come back to life, distant beneficent voices, wake
The heaviest clay in which grain ever slept.
Speak: I was no more than craving earth,
Now at last have come the words of dawn and rain.
But speak, that I may be propitious earth,
Speak if it is still a buried day.

Rare is the poet that can speak with voices both human and inhuman. Galway Kinnell denied that he was a nature poet and certainly humanity takes center stage in his voluminous writing, but Kinnell’s writing is edged with all forces on earth, including animals and the world in which we and them inhabit. Kinnell won the Pulitzer prize in 1980 for Selected Poems, as much for his consistency in my opinion as for his seminal brilliance for specific poems. Kinnell, along with fellow Princeton classmate, M. S. Merwin, both had long and fruitful writing careers, neither stretching the boundaries of form much, rather developing distinctive styles and perspective.

I am currently visiting Durango, Colorado, having flown into Albuquerque, New Mexico and driven over through the deserts of the Southwest. We stopped and stretched our legs on a BLM nature preserve path and were struck by the abundance of flowers, a recent rain storm having coaxed forth blooms on perennials, succulents and annuals in the reddish, brownish clay of the desert. When I was researching this blog entry, my sister sat down and I read her the opening poem and asked her what she thought. She said, “I don’t understand it, what does it mean to you?” I said, “I love this poem, and the key to my relating to it is the line; The heaviest clay in which grain ever slept. It makes me think like a seed in the ground, lying for possibly decades in that dry clay, waiting to speak with the voices of rain, wind, night and sun to awaken my potential to grow.” I had her close her eyes and stop thinking human and I read it to her again, twice. She said, “my goodness, maybe I need to stop thinking human when I read poetry, more often.”

Exactly, you got it Sis! But not too often.

Blackberry Eating

Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.