A Poem Memorized

I have finally memorized the poem I was given: "The Solitude of Cataracts."


He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling it's common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks,
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nail fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it
would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without any oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing is bronzen breath at the azury center of time.


Now if I remember correctly, the class will be reciting their memorized poems this next week. However, due to a senior graphic design trip to Seattle I will not be in class all that week. Perhaps I could present my poem to the class today? I guess I will have to wait and see what Sexson thinks.


On a side note...An irish poet by the name of Derek Mahon was clearly inspired by "Solitude of Cataracts" and in his own poem has given us his perspective.

 "Heraclitus On Rivers"

Nobody steps into the same river twice.
The same river is never the same
Because that is the nature of water.
Similarly your changing metabolism
means that you are no longer you.
The cells die, and the precise
Configuration of the heavenly bodies
When she told you she loved you
Will not come again in this lifetime.

You will tell me that you have executed
A monument more lasting than bronze;
But even bronze is perishable.
Your best poem, you know the one I mean,
The very language in which the poem
Was written, and the idea of language,
All this things will pass away with time.

"Of the Surface of Things"

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; 

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four 

Hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, 

Reading where I have written, 

"The spring is like a belle undressing."

III

The gold tree is blue, 

The singer has pulled his cloak over his head. 

The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

Upon opening my Bible, I happened to come across this particular poem. A poem about poetry perhaps more obviously stated than others. I found the three sections to be a series of steps or dimensions in the process of writing poetry.

The first verse is observing the world in an immediate reality. "In my room, the world is beyond my understanding." The poet seems stuck, confined to a state of mind that does not let him see past the common reality of things. It's not until the poet ventures outside of his comfort zones and give up his illusions that he is able to progress.

In the second verse, the balcony acts as a threshold between dimensions of reality and imagination. He is in the "yellow air" of enlightenment, an altered state of consciousness that helps him converse between the outside world of reality and the inside world of imagination. 

In the third verse, the poet is lost in his revelation crossing over into the realm of imagination. The poet is no longer bound to mimicking what he sees in the world. The cloak he wears is his imagination and within it he can obscure the immediate reality of the world and finally see the world as it truly is.

"Earthly Anecdote"

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/earthysmall.jpg

"Tattoo"

The light is like a spider. 

It crawls over the water.

It crawls over the edges of the snow.

It crawls under your eyelids

And spreads its webs there--

Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes

Are fastened 

To the flesh and bones of you

As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes 

On the surface of the water 

And in the edges of the snow.

"Floral Decorations for Bananas"

Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.
These insolent, linear peels
And sullen, hurricane shapes
Won't do with your eglantine.
They require something serpentine.
Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,
In an eighteenth-century dish,
And pettifogging buds,
For the women of primrose and purl,
Each one in her decent curl.
Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched ...
The table was set by an ogre,
His eye on an outdoor gloom
And a stiff and noxious place.
Pile the bananas on planks.
The women will be all shanks
And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees,
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

"The Load of Sugar-Cane"

The going of the glade boat
Is like water flowing;
Like water flowing
Through the green saw gr,
Under the rainbows;
Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,
While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,
When they rise
At the red turban
Of the boatman.

"Of Heaven Considered a Tomb"

What word have you, interpreters, of men
Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,
The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?
Do they believe they range the gusty cold,
With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,
Freemen of death, about and still about
To find whatever it is they seek? Or does
That burial, pillared up each day as porte
And spiritous passage into nothingness,
Foretell each night the on abysmal night,
When the host shall no more wander, nor the light
Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?
Make hue among the dark comedians,
Halloo them in the topmost distances
For answer from their icy Elysee.

"Anecdote of Men by the Thousand"

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province.
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

"Nuances of a Theme by Williams"

It's a strange courage
you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

I
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow's bird
Or an old horse.

A Postcard from the Volcano

With his autumn gone, all that remained was the inevitable frost of winter ahead. Despite the looming end, all the man could think about was the children and the spring they would return to his mansion on the hill. He knew what they would do. They'd do just as he had and has he suspected those before him had done. The children will pick up his heirlooms, his bones, and only see them for what they are rather than what they were. The children will never guess he left much more. They will merely talk of him as he had spoken of those before him, as though the spirits were still there, lingering in the walls haunting their every step. There would be nothing he could do to change the cycle of what would happen. In the spring, the mansion would return to it's dirty and tattered state as he will have said. Just like the old man, the children may not see the gold smeared in the dirt until autumn returns to the mansion on the hill.

How to live. What to do.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor rested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.