Midst of the Sea

And also to make myself feel better, one of my favorite pieces of poetry:

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore.
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, shout, nod to me, and laughingly dash with your hair.

from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Isn't it lovely? Maybe tomorrow I'll quote the rest of it, as it so aptly describes what I feel like we're doing. Or what I hope we will do.

Comeback

After over two months' hiatus, she's back.

Difficulties with Dan (formerly TZ) have sort of sapped my energy of late--and one doesn't like to complain too much on a blog (at least, I don't). But I think things are on the upswing. Also, goofy issues with school and babysitter schedules have taken away a few of the hours I used to use to write.

I was thinking the other day about stuff I used to teach, and I remembered something I loved. That is, fragments of something I loved: moths and fire, the word "immolate", the image of a monk. So I had to google it: poem moth immolate. The poem came right up. When I saw it, I realized there was something else. I thought maybe it was by the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (seach: Tinker Creek; result: Annie Dillard). So I searched for Annie Dillard moth. Ta-daa. I love living now.

The first piece is a poem by Don Marquis in the voice of archy, a cockroach who cannot punctuate or capitalize because he's, well, a cockroach typing on a typerwriter. The second is an excerpt of an essay by Annie Dillard. I especially love the images in Dillard's piece, and I love the voices of the moth and the cockroach in Marquis' poem.

the lesson of the moth

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

--Don Marquis

From "Death of a Moth"

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when the shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspread, flapped into the fire, drooped abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, and frazzled in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, like angels' wings, enlarging the circle of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine; at once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time, her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving mouthparts cracked like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Her head was a hole lost to time. All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax---a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the shattered hole where her head should have been, and widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two winding flames of identical light, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling---only glowing within, like a boiling fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

--Annie Dillard

Poem of the week: In honor of birth

I spent two days at the hospital with my friend K, who gave birth to her lovely little girl baby early Saturday morning. Her husband was there, too, of course. It was a long, grueling labor, but everything came together in the end. There were moments when I thought I'd never seen K look more beautiful.

3 : 6 (excerpt)

one hesitates to bring a child into this world without fixing
it up a little. paint a special room. stop sexism. learn how
to love. vow to do it better than it was done when you were
a baby. vow to make, if necessary, new mistakes. vow to be
awake for the birth. to believe in joy even in the midst of
unbearable pain.

Alta

Poem of the week

Last week's post reminded me how much I love and have not been reading poetry. So now, Poem of the Week.

I bought Tai a copy of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, and inspired by his delight, broke out his old Poetry Speaks to Children. As we read through it, I saw a poem by Billy Collins, one of my favorite poets. Here it is:

Wolf

A wolf is reading a book of fairy tales.
The moon hangs over the forest, a lamp.

He is not assuming a human position,
say, cross-legged against a tree,
as he would in a cartoon.

This is a real wolf, standing on all fours,
his rich fur bristling in the night air,
his head bent over the book open on the ground.

He does not sit down for the words
would be too far away to be legible,
and it is with difficulty that he turns
each page with his nose and forepaws.

When he finishes the last tale
he lies down in pine needles.
He thinks about what he has read,
the stories passing over his mind
like clouds crossing the moon.

A zigzag of wind shakes down hazelnuts.
The eyes of owls yellow in the branches.

Blackberries

courtesy of whatscookingamerica.com

Still so much to write about, but here's something short and sweet until I have time to write about the other things:

We got a pint of blackberries in our CSA basket on Tuesday. I've seen blackberries in the stores and at the farmer's market for weeks now without a spark of a reaction. But Tuesday was different. Maybe it was the effect of seeing them there in the basket, freshly picked, or the fact that I had noticed a blackberry bramble earlier that day--but I was reminded suddenly of this poem by Galway Kinnell:

Blackberry Eating

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.



 Wrong month, I know, but it's a lovely poem all the same.