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Second Childhood
Books by Fanny Howe
POETRY
Eggs
Poem from a Single Pallet
Robeson Street
The Vineyard
Introduction to the World
The Quietist
The End
O’Clock
One Crossed Out
Selected Poems
Gone
This of Thee
On the Ground
The Lyrics
Come and See
Second Childhood
FICTION
Forty Whacks
First Marriage
Bronte Wilde
Holy Smoke
In the Middle of Nowhere
The Deep North
Famous Questions
Saving History
Nod
Indivisible
Economics
Radical Love: Five Novels
The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where
Something Got Broken
What Did I Do Wrong?
ESSAYS
The Wedding Dress:
Meditations on Word and Life
The Winter Sun:
Notes on a Vocation
Second Childhood
Fanny Howe
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2014 by Fanny Howe
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-682-8
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-917-1
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2014
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013958013
Cover design: Kapo Ng
Cover art: Maceo Senna
Contents
For the Book
The Garden
Parkside
My Stones
Evening
Xing
Between Delays
For Miles
Loneliness
The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams
Second Childhood
Progress
Why Did I Dream
Flame-Light
The Cloisters
Angelopoulos
Sometimes
A Child in Old Age
Born Below
The Coldest Mother
Dear Hölderlin
A Vision
Alas
Fear & hope are—Vision
WM BLAKE
Second Childhood
For the Book
Yellow goblins
and a god I can swallow.
Eyes in the evergreens
under ice.
Interior monologue
and some voice.
usual trials and
a place to surmise
blessedness.
The Garden
Black winter gardens
engraved at night
keep soft frost
on them to read the veins
of our inner illustrator’s
hand internally light
with infant etching.
Children booked
on blizzard winds
and then the picture
is blown to yonder
and out of ink:
the black winter verses
are buds and sticks.
Parkside
Stone walls and chalk scratches
for different ages.
None of us could be sure now
how many we were or where.
There were hurtful pebbles,
cracked windows
and bikes. We cut the butter
and the day’s bread evenly.
We were children and a metal bed.
Twelve loaves
and five thousand baskets.
Five baskets,
twelve pieces of dough.
Twelve times five and butter
for a multitude.
Bread made—that is—
with twelve thousand
inhalations of leaven.
My Stones
A pebbled island
is a kind of barge:
seaweed blackened
another glacial strand.
White quartz.
Some green mermaid’s tears.
(A cask of bottles shattered.)
That home of mine
lost four inches
to erosion and great white sharks
but we kept floating.
I even found bedside stones
to play with in the night.
A colorful set to pretend
I could now see Ireland
from Boston.
Evening
Christmas is for children
on an English hill.
Simple, dismal,
and blissful,
a few little balls and crystal.
Dark by 4 p.m.
but you can ride your scooter
up the hill and down
in the arctic rain
each drop a dimple
on a—
and a silver handle
in a drain and a boy
can stand beside your hand
at the window
of a store full of cribs
and tinsel
before an icon
of the infant
with the news
rolled in his hand.
Xing
Odense is in Denmark and where are we now?
In a flying sleigh en route to Odessa.
The Black Sea is steaming below.
We sweep like snow-crystals every which way.
We who? My baby and me.
Off to the left, the sky is fleece.
In our warm sleigh and north of Norway,
away, away, what fun we are having!
More snow coming, more souls.
Baby lashes the dogs with a strand of her hair.
Her round face is circled with ermine.
Between Delays
You’re like someone crossing a border daily
a person who is to itself unknown.
You’re like a fragment that can’t find what has lost it
or illuminate
what’s going on or what it’s seeing through.
Are we a child or a name?
John, John, John and John,
you’re all so far from me.
Each like a walking stick inert
until picked up.
A person, the first I—
with few verbs left.
Vertical even when you laugh.
For Miles
Sunset in DC comes at 4:56.
This is nearly the same time as sunset in LA
when the El Royale sign lights up.
Sunset in Shannon comes several minutes earlier in the day.
Sunsets in Hong Kong and Havana are just about the same but far away.
Sunset in Chile and sunset in New Zealand
are only six minutes apart on different days.
The length of today in Boston is nine hours and fifty-one minutes.
The length of today in DC is ten hours and seven minutes.
I knew there was a difference between cities.
Don’t worry. You didn’t have to tell me about the bulge in the circumference.
If the light is shining in the House, Congress is still in session.
Of course the shape of earth is an oblate spheroid
wider in the middle by very few miles.
Even here on 21st Street, I can feel the sun moving in Vancouver.
There are twelve hours of light on one day in October.
I only needed to exist to know that the sun turns around the earth
and everything else at the center of the universe.
Loneliness
Loneliness is not an accident or a choice.
It’s an uninvited and uncreated companion.
It slips in beside you when you are not aware that a choice you are making will have consequences.
It does you no good even though it’s like one of the elements in the world that you cannot exist without.
It takes your hand and walks with you. It lies down with you. It sits beside you. It’s as dark as a shadow but it has substance that is familiar.
It swims with you and swings around on stools.
It boards the ferry and leans on the motel desk.
Nothing great happens as a result of loneliness.
Your character flaws remain in place. You still stop in with friends and have wonderful hours among them, but you must run as soon as you hear it calling.
It does call. And you climb the stairs obediently, pushing aside books and notes to let it know that you have returned to it, all is well.
If you don’t answer its call, you sense that it will sink towards a deep gravity and adopt a limp.
From loneliness you learn very little. It pulls you back, it pulls you down.
It’s the manifestation of a vow never made but kept: I will go home now and forever in solitude.
And after that loneliness will accompany you to every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema, and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near your hand like a habit.
But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.
It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself against you.
You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you made finally, when it was unnecessary.
If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would you ask it to go?
How would you replace it?
No, saying good-bye would be too embarrassing.
Why?
First you might cry.
Because shame and loneliness are almost one.
Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.
Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.
The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams
The monk is a single
and so am I
but which kind?
All of them
from young to wild
and the boyish one
(mine) cared for the weak
until there was no one
to care for him
besides an old woman
who lived as a she.
I became a penitent
sequentially:
first in sandals
then in boots
then with a hood
and bare feet.
Now night-bound, now nude, then old.
Another brother and I took a train with a view of mountains
floating in water
out of Limerick Junction
to Heuston Station where Wittgenstein
tried to discover emotion.
He hit a horizon.
“Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”
In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards
for time has ceased its labors
and no cattle tremble.
You can contemplate the peripheries
and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.
Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.
Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.
Towards a just
and invisible image
behind each word
and its place in a sentence
we must have been sailing.
Scarcely defended, best
when lost from wanting perfect sense.
But still, recognizable.
Be like grass, the phantom told us:
lie flat, spring up.
Our veils were scrolls
you couldn’t walk into
but only mark the folds.
I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.
We will never come back to that hour.
Let me write about the place again the path so sandy
and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.
It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched
and headed out on the train.
Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals
were hard to identify so many copies.
Let me concentrate on ancestral faces
and I will recognize hers
before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared
on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons
and replicated, sucked or kissed into the lips of strangers.
I have to pass through the estuary
to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings
at the beginning of everything.
Scrapes like threads seeking holes.
It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.
This one did:
its blue led to the edge.
Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman
who sews and passes it along?
So I ran with it in my hands.
A kind of eucharist.
No break in its material from the first day on earth
to the Sabbath where all are equal
and the cows covered in sackcloth.
Where has my mind gone?
The bloody thieves
are very quick.
You may have noticed I’m naked
and sliced by glass.
Soon words will be disappeared
and then the Celtic church
and seven friends
I will not name.
One word that contains
so many:
dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and
I must examine each part
then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.
The slide downhill on my back to a ledge
and the sea out there and a city
to the left of the mud.
The place they call an area
preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds
of hungry old people lining for bread.
One woman collapsed on her side
and another helped her up
and I was let into the bunker
by the best kind of communist.
There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.
The hills! No b
ells.
I went down for what reason.
Not to enter a cell.
Luckily no one was white.
We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days
that I indicated pleased me
because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.
I paused long enough to encounter
a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.
The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.
The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.
But there was a huge blast from the building beside us
And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what
was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.
A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.
We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss
our love of failures, every one of us.
I hauled so many children after me
with ropes and spears and nets
like sea-creatures that others would eat
without them I have no purpose.
As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief.
But now there would be what? For he, the little one,
was kneeling and saying, You must run.
The lover I still loved stayed near the door
so I raced off, you stood, when the police came
seeking coherence in everything.
The total machine of retribution presses on.
Regardless of a prayer or what a person did.
This is incredible.
We’re breaking up.
A Trappist led me around as one of him
to a ship heading for the country where they edit the best films.
There was a city on deck: residential with pleasing evening trees
and then a downtown area until we couldn’t tell the suns
from the portholes on board.
The ship would transport us to a staging dock in Iona.