Now & Then, page 19
I want to be in Georgia, when the
Big storm starts to blow.
Yes, I want to be in Georgia when that
Big storm starts to blow.
I want to see the landlords runnin’ cause I
Wonder where they gonna go!
I got them red clay blues.
Pleasant to think of the two of them—Hughes was 37, Wright 31;
Hughes already a famous poet, Wright having just come to prominence
with the book of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children—hammering this out to-
gether. They must have had fun with the rhymes in the second stanza,
when the feet get tired of the concrete street.
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april 18
Wang Ping
Coffee House Press in Minneapolis has just published a book, Of Flesh
and Spirit, by Wang Ping, a Shanghai-born novelist, poet, and short-story
writer, who has made her home in New York since 1985. She writes in
English, and seems to have developed her idiom and some of the fresh-
ness and energy of her poems from the scene around the St. Mark’s Poetry
Project, which has been a kind of home for experimental writing in the
city for the last twenty-five years.
Of Flesh and Spirit experiments with lyric forms, prose forms, mixes of
prose and verse, as it meditates on heritage, immigration, memory, anger,
women’s lives, and the life of the city. Here’s a sample, a prose piece in
which the author recalls her grandmother:
Resurrection
Who said a soul can’t cross the sea? Last night, you slipped
through my door again (three Medicos plus a latch), like a rain-
drop drifting into a broken dream. You leaned on the red brick
wall, unwinding the endless bandages on your feet.
Eighty years, all carved on your huge heels and toeless soles.
Your lips squirmed with your last request: a banana and a black
silk gown.
No need to apologize, Nainai, for your reproaches or spankings.
I only remember your tears of joy for the first bite of ice cream
on your 79th birthday. It was a Friday. We were standing outside
a food store on the Nanjing Road when you suddenly said it
was your birthday. And I said, “Oh, let’s celebrate,” and ran in to
get you a chocolate ice cream brick.
Please do not look at me with those bleak eyes. Even father’s
filial piety couldn’t stop mother’s fury and keep you at home.
The night I carried you to the ship for Qingdao, I dreamed of
turning into surging waves to retrieve your fading steps. I didn’t
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156 Robert Hass / 1999
realize until then that my childhood had been a vine hanging
over the precipice of your life.
Do not wave your bandages at me. My feet have grown as hard
as white poplars in our native town. I’ll make a pair of wings
with them, to carry your soul into spring, into the forest and
grass, into a world without memory. Be a bird, a bee, or even a
fly. Just to live again, with joy.
april 25
Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje, who was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Toronto, has
not published a book of poems in some years. During that interval he’s
made his reputation as a novelist with In the Skin of the Lion and The
English Patient, and one of the most brilliant and strange and readable of
memoirs in this time of memoirs, Running in the Family. The new book
of poems, Handwriting (Alfred Knopf ), is a departure from his rowdy and
unpredictable early poems. It’s extremely beautiful, for one thing, and
much of it is set in Sri Lanka.
Here’s a poem:
House on a Red Cliff
There is no mirror in Mirissa
the sea is in the leaves
the waves are in the palms
old languages in the arms
of the casuarina pine
parampara
parampara, from
generation to generation
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The flamboyant a grandfather planted
having lived through fire
lifts itself over the roof
unframed
the house an open net
where the night concentrates
on a breath
on a step
a thing or gesture
we cannot be attached to
The long, the short, the difficult minutes
of night
where even in darkness
there is no horizon without a tree
just a boat’s light in the leaves
Last footsteps before formlessness
Parampara is Sri Lankan. It means “from generation to generation.” I
don’t know where this place is (a family house, the sense of generations
that the grandfather’s tree would suggest), or why exactly the poem begins
by telling us there is no mirror there. Perhaps because the sense of time, of
trees that are in water and water that is in trees, of a house open to the air,
makes a place where it becomes possible to let the mirrored ego go.
A lot of the poems in the book are about place and about the architec-
ture of human desire. Here is a short poem that takes up the theme:
The First Rule of Sinhalese Architecture
Never build three doors
in a straight line
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158 Robert Hass / 1999
A devil might rush
through them
deep into your house,
into your life
Another poem’s atmosphere reminds me of the old, wrecked Italian
villa in The English Patient. It ends by describing an ancient Ceylonese
Buddhist monastery, which becomes, like the villa in the novel, the source
of a meditation on the architecture of desire:
Step
The ceremonial funeral structure for a monk
made up of thambili palms, white cloth
is only a vessel, disintegrates
completely as his life.
The ending disappears,
replacing itself
with something abstract
as air, a view.
All we’ll remember in the last hours
is an afternoon—a lazy lunch
then sleeping together.
Then the disarray of grief.
*
On the morning of a full moon
in a forest monastery
thirty women in white
meditate on the precepts of the day
until darkness.
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They walk those abstract paths
their complete heart
their burning thought focused
on this step, then this step.
In the red brick dusk
of the Sacred Quadrangle,
among holy seven-storey ambitions
where the four Buddhas
of Polonnaruwa
face out to each horizon,
is a lotus pavilion.
Taller than a man
nine lotus stalks of stone
stand solitary in the grass,
pillars that once supported
the floor of another level.
(The sensuous stalk
the sacred flower)
How physical yearning
became permanent.
How desire became devotional
so it held up your house,
your lover’s house, the house of your god.
And though it is no longer there,
the pillars once let you step
to a higher room
where there was worship, lighter air.
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may 2
Forrest Gander
Forrest Gander is a Southern poet of a relatively rare kind, a restlessly
experimental writer. Science and Steepleflower (New Directions) is his
fourth book and, as good as some of the earlier ones are—Lynchburg,
Deeds of Utmost Kindness—it is perhaps his best yet.
Be ready for a ride. The sentences often don’t make sequential sense. He
uses expressions from geology like “agnostoid lithofacies.” It is a strange
melange of pungent, physical detail, scraps of geological and evolutionary
science, oddly erotic images, and almost surreally exact bits of description:
a poet moving through words, through time, in a way that seems at once
precise and hallucinatory.
Field Guide to Southern Virginia
True as the circumference
to its center. Woodscreek Grocery,
Rockbridge County. Twin boys
peer from the front window, cheeks
bulging with fireballs. Sandplum trees
flower in clusters by the levee. She
makes a knot on the inside knob
and ties my arms up
against the door. Williamsburg green.
With a touch as faint as a watermark.
Tracing cephalon, pygidium, glabella.
*
Swayback, through freshly cut stalks,
stalks the yellow cat. Can you smell
where analyses end, the orchard
oriole begins? Slap her breasts lightly
to see them quiver. Delighting in this.
Desiccation cracks, and plant debris
throughout the interval. In the Black-
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water River, fishnets float
from a tupelo’s spongy root
chopped into corks. There may be sprawling
precursors, descendent clades there are none.
*
The gambit declined was less
promising. So the flock of crows
slaughtered all sixty lambs. Toward the east, red
and yellow colors prevail.
Praying at the graveside,
holding forth the palm of his hand
as symbol of God’s book.
For the entirety of the Ordovician.
With termites, Mrs. Elsinore explained,
as with the afterlife, remember:
there are two sides to the floor. A verb
for inserting and retrieving
green olives with the tongue. From
the scissure of your thighs.
*
In addition, the trilobites
were tectonically deformed. Snap-on
tools glinting from magenta
loosestrife, the air sultry
with creosote and cicadas.
You made me to lie down in a peri-Gondwanan back-arc basin.
Roses of wave ripples and gutter casts.
Your sex hidden by goat’s beard.
Laminations in the sediment. All
preserved as internal molds
in a soft lilac shale.
*
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Egrets picketing the spines of cattle in fields edged
with common tansy. Flowers my father gathered
for my mother to chew. To induce abortion. A common,
cosmopolitan agnostoid lithofacies naked in the foothills. I love
the character of your intelligence, its cast as well as pitch.
Border wide without marginal spines. At high angles
to the inferred shoreline.
*
It is the thin flute of the clavicles, each rain-pit
above them. The hypothesis of flexural loading. Aureoles
pink as steepleflower. One particular day, four hundred
million years ago, the mud stiffened
and held the strokes of waves. Orbital motion.
Raking leaves from the raspberries, you
uncover a nest of spring salamanders.
may 9
A Serbian Poet: Vasko Popa
Because, as I write this, American pilots are bombing the city of Belgrade,
I’ve been remembering a sunny fall day in the mid-1980s, when I walked
with friends through a park in the center of that city to an elegant old
apartment building on the park’s edge where Serbia’s best known poet,
Vasko Popa, lived. The neighborhood reminded me a little of Gramercy
Park in New York, though it was not in such good repair and it had had
a different history. There were still splinterings of bullet holes in some of
the old brownstones from what must have been machine gun fire in the
Second World War.
Popa belonged to the group of Eastern European poets—Zbigniew
Herbert in Poland, Miroslave Holub in Czechoslovakia—who went
through that war in their late adolescence and afterward wrote the poetry
that many of us turned to to understand what a poetry with a personal
acquaintance with historical and political disaster was like. I remember
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that he seemed a radiantly healthy man with sad eyes, that we walked back
through the park to a beautiful old restaurant full of gleaming mahogany,
that the first course was a shot of cold Slivowitz—the transparent Serb
plum brandy—and a plate full of raw, unpeeled sweet peppers, red and
yellow and orange, which we ate like fruit. He did not speak much Eng-
lish, but my friends spoke both Serbian and English and Popa was fluent
in French, so the conversation proceeded—much of it gossip about poets
and poetry—in cheerful and polyglot high spirits in a mixture of the three
languages that probably no one person at the table followed entirely.
Popa’s poetry, especially the work of the 1970s, is steeped in Serbian
history and national mythology and draws its style, or so I thought, from
French surrealism. It seemed to me then a striking combination of tribal
memory and modernist method. In these poems Belgrade is “the White
City,” Kosovo is “the Blackbird’s Field,” the Serbian people are the wolf ’s
children, and St. Sava, the patron saint of the Serbs, is the wolf-shepherd,
and the wolf ’s children are everywhere beset by enemies. Here, for exam-
ple, are a few lines from a poem called “The Wolf Land”:
My son I see our land crucified
Between four grindstones
On which the wolf is sharpening his teeth
This was originally published in 1978 by Persea and is now available in
Collected Poems of Vasko Popa, translated by Anne Pennington and Francis
R. Jones (Anvil Press, 2001). I read it then as a dream journey through a
violent past. I had no notion how active that past was, or could be made
to seem. The sequence ends with the poet’s return to Belgrade and with
poems to the city and its river. Here they are:
Great Lord Danube
O great Lord Danube
In your veins flows
The blood of the white town
If you love it get up a moment
From your bed of love
Ride on your biggest carp
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Pierce the leaden clouds
And visit your heavenly birthplace
Bring a gift to the white town
Fruits and birds and flowers of paradise
Bring too the stone which can be eaten
And a little air
Of which men do not die
The bell-towers will bow down to you
And the streets prostrate themselves before you
O great Lord Danube
Belgrade
White bone among the clouds
You arise out of your pyre
Out of your ploughed-up barrows
Out of your scattered ashes
You arise out of your disappearance
The sun keeps you
In its golden reliquary
High above the yapping of centuries
And bears you to the marriage
Of the fourth river of Paradise
With the thirty-sixth river of Earth
White bone among clouds
Bone of our bones
When I walked back to my hotel, it was almost four o’clock and the
streets were full of people, just walking; it was teeming with them, fam-
ilies, old women holding hands, young women holding hands, young
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soldiers in pairs with loosely locked arms, old men talking and smoking. It
was a custom, my friends said, all over Yugoslavia, and told me the Serbian
word for it, something like “promenade.” In the afternoons, if the weather
was fine, the whole town turned out on the streets and strolled and visited
and stopped at cafes for coffee or brandy.
may 16
Adrienne Rich
I was looking for a poem about spring, about the soft, almost-summer
