the same score:
you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.
No harmony. No counterpoint. Except
they’re not performers;
real tears are shed.
Luckily, you’re dead; otherwise
you’d be overcome with revulsion.
But when that’s passed,
when the guests begin filing out, wiping their eyes
because, after a day like this,
shut in with orthodoxy,
the sun’s amazingly bright,
though it’s late afternoon, September—
when the exodus begins,
that’s when you’d feel
pangs of envy.
Your friends the living embrace one another,
gossip a little on the sidewalk
as the sun sinks, and the evening breeze
ruffles the women’s shawls—
this, this, is the meaning of
“a fortunate life”: it means
to exist in the present.
Louise Glück
ENOUGH
It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning
warm enough for you to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through the fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you
when you catch yourself telling off the boss
for a decade of accumulated injustices,
all the things you’ve never said circling inside you.
It’s the rising wind that pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.
Jeffrey Harrison
MY BIRTHDAY PRESENT
Seventy-nine, seventy-nine,
I say it over, and every time
it sounds peculiar. Is it a prime?
It’s a queer number, seventy-nine.
I will enter my eightieth year
tomorrow evening, somewhere near
six o’clock, around dinnertime,
my mother told me. That’s a queer
hour to be born, or to enter an eightieth year.
But all of it’s queer, being here.
Thinking how what I thought was mine
was only borrowed, and what was dear
has been forgotten, and every line
I’ve written will become a sign
for nothing at all, given time.
But that’s what I was given, time.
That’s my present, present time.
Ursula K. Le Guin
THE DECISION
There is a moment before a shape
hardens, a color sets.
Before the fixative or heat of kiln.
The letter might still be taken
from the mailbox.
The hand held back by the elbow,
the word kept between the larynx pulse
and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.
The thorax of an ant is not as narrow.
The green coat on old copper weighs more.
Yet something slips through it—
looks around,
sets out in the new direction, for other lands.
Not into exile, not into hope. Simply changed.
As a sandy track-rut changes when called a Silk Road:
it cannot be after turned back from.
Jane Hirshfield
What is a moment in time? Can it be measured? In a striking series of visual and aural comparisons, Hirshfield gradually compresses time to the narrowest possible dimension, thereby demonstrating how an apparently inconsequential decision may have momentous results. All in her journey to the awkward but inevitable last line.
THE ROUND
Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed…”
I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.
Stanley Kunitz
2
“THE SOUND OF TIME”
We experience the passage of time in many ways. It can both speed up and slow down, sometimes almost simultaneously. Minutes can feel like hours (a watched pot never boils) and vice versa (so-called “flow”). The summers of childhood are endless; those of old age vanish in a twinkling. But one thing is certain: the less time we have ahead of us, the more importance it assumes.
As we relinquish various activities and undergo inevitable losses, our thoughts about time change. Perhaps for the first time, life’s finitude becomes real. And many poets whose youthful work has been considered obscure start to write more openly and directly as they face the end of their lives. There is a new, more common ground between author and audience. But the mystery of time remains for all of us.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
T. S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”
FALL WIND
Pods of summer crowd around the door;
I take them in the autumn of my hands.
Last night I heard the first cold wind outside;
the wind blew soft, and yet I shiver twice:
Once for the thin walls, once for the sound of time.
William Stafford
SLOW SEASON
Now light is less; noon skies are wide and deep;
The ravages of wind and rain are healed.
The haze of harvest drifts along the field
Until clear eyes put on the look of sleep.
The garden spider weaves a silken pear
To keep inclement weather from its young.
Straight from the oak, the gossamer is hung.
At dusk our slow breath thickens on the air.
Lost hues of birds the trees take as their own.
Long since, bronze wheat was gathered into sheaves.
The walker trudges ankle-deep in leaves;
The feather of the milkweed flutters down.
The shoots of spring have mellowed with the year.
Buds, long unsealed, obscure the narrow lane.
The blood slows trance-like in the altered vein;
Our vernal wisdom moves through ripe to sere.
Theodore Roethke
Here the poet takes one of the most commonplace of comparisons—that between the year’s aging and our own—and, by his virtuosic choice of language and cadence, fashions an exquisite lyric poem. Read it aloud, slowly, savoring both sense and sound.
SEASON TO SEASON
I have been fooled before, and just because
This summer seems so long, it might not be
My last. Winter could come again, and pause
T
he sky liked a taped tactical descent
Of pocket paratroopers. Things to see
Could happen yet, and life prove not quite spent
But still abundant, still the main event.
The trick, I’m learning, is to stay in doubt,
Season to season, of what time might bring,
And patiently await how things turn out.
Eventually time tells you everything.
If it takes time to do so, no surprise
In that. You fold your arms, you scan the skies,
And tell yourself that life has made you wise,
If only by the way it ebbs away.
But still it takes an age, and after all,
Though nearly gone, life didn’t end today,
And you might be here when the first leaves fall
Or even when the snow begins again,
If life that cast you, when this all began,
As a small boy, still needs a dying man.
Clive James
LONG LIFE
Late Summer. Sunshine. The eucalyptus tree.
It is a fortune beyond any deserving
to be still here, with no more than everyday worries,
placidly arranging lines of poetry.
I consider a stick of cinnamon
bound in raffia, finches
in the grass, and a stubby bush
which this year mothered a lemon.
These days I speak less of death
than the mysteries of survival. I am
no longer lonely, not yet frail, and
after surgery, recognize each breath
as a miracle. My generation may not be
nimble but, forgive us,
we’d like to hold on, stubbornly
content—even while ageing.
Elaine Feinstein
While giving thanks for the miracle of daily life, the speaker is also offering a sardonic challenge to some current attitudes toward the old.
THE WAY IT IS
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen: people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
STARFISH
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?
Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.
And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.
Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.
So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
Eleanor Lerman
ALICE AT ONE HUNDRED AND TWO
Yes, she said, I want to live a lot more years
and see what happens, but
I want new fruits—a century of apples, oranges
and bananas is enough.
And I want new rooms. I want balustrades,
inglenooks, casement windows, and chintz!
Yes, I want chintz! Whatever happened to chintz,
with the sunlight or lamplight carving mother,
grandmother, aunt, out of its shadows?
And I want something to happen here, quickly—
the inexplicable death of a wealthy tycoon, six
likely suspects—midnight melodrama, love and
betrayal—a diamond robbery, fugitive in disguise—
Something!
Yes, she said, I want to live a lot more years,
but not so slowly.
Elizabeth Alexander
POSTHUMOUS LETTER TO GILBERT WHITE
It’s rather sad we can only meet people
whose dates overlap with ours, a real shame that
you and Thoreau (we know that he read you)
never shook hands. He was, we hear, a rabid
Anti-Clerical and quick-tempered, you the
quietest of curates, yet I think he might well have
found in you the Ideal Friend he wrote of
with such gusto, but never ran into.
Stationaries, both of you, but keen walkers,
chaste by nature and, it would seem, immune to
the beck of worldly power, kin spirits,
who found all creatures amusive, even
the tortoise in spite of its joyless stupors,
aspected the vagrant moods of the Weather,
from the modest conduct of fogs to
the coarse belch of thunder of the rainbow’s
federal arch, what fun you’d have had surveying
two rival landscapes and their migrants, noting
the pitches owls hoot on, comparing
the echo-response of dactyls and spondees.
Selfishly, I, too, would have plumbed to know you:
I could have learned so much. I’m apt to fancy
myself as a lover of Nature,
but have no right to, really. How many
birds and plants can I spot? At most two dozen.
You might, though, have found such an ignoramus
a pesky bore. Time spared you that: I
have, though, thank God, the right to re-read you.
W. H. Auden
ARS POETICA
To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.
To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.
To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind’s days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of t
he years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,
To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours.
They tell how Ulysses, glutted with wonders,
Wept with love to descry his Ithaca
Humble and green. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of wonders.
It is also like an endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.
Jorge Luis Borges
(translated from the Spanish by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland)
“Ars Poetica,” or “The Art of Poetry,” is a poem by the ancient Roman poet Horace. Other poets down through the ages have used this title for their own poems defining poetry, as Borges does here. In Horace’s view poetry was an ars, which also means “craft” in Latin. Following this idea, Borges likens it not to a place of wonders but to the humble island of Ithaca, home of Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s Greek epic the Odyssey. (Ulysses is the Latin version of the name Odysseus.) After leading the Greeks to victory in the Trojan War, Ulysses wandered for ten years before finally returning to the little green island that held first place in his heart.
Heraclitus, Greek philosopher of the fifth and sixth centuries BC, said famously: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”
ITHACA
As you set out for Ithaca
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
The Laestrygones and the Cyclopes
and angry Poseidon, do not fear them:
such on your way, you shall never meet
if your thoughts are lofty, if a noble
emotion touch your mind, your body.
The Laestrygones and Cyclopes
and angry Poseidon you shall not meet
if you carry them not in your soul,
if your soul sets them not up before you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.