theatre and poetry notes.

I didn’t know Kim Ricketts as well as I wish I had, but I knew two things about her: she loved her children more than anything, and she breathed poetry the way a fish breathes water (to borrow from Denise Levertov). I think of Kim whenever I read something by William Stafford, and especially when I read his poem ‘A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER.’ I was told that this was her favorite poem. I hadn’t heard it since her funeral, but it came up again during one of the plays in Seattle Rep’s Writer’s Group Showcase.

Elizabeth Heffron’s PORTUGAL is about the aftermath of an industrial accident at a Hanford nuclear waste farm. There are intertwined stories, but it is mainly about a young mother who is coming to the realization that she will not live to see her children grow up. Near the end, her mother-in-law gives her a book of poetry, and this is the poem that the young woman (played by Emily Chisholm, one of my favorite actresses) reads aloud to her husband. She read it with the serenity of someone who knows that they are going to die, and has accepted this as an unchangeable fact. I started to cry a few lines into the poem and didn’t stop until the play ended fifteen minutes later. It was a little bit embarrassing.

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

- WILLIAM STAFFORD. STORIES THAT COULD BE TRUE: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS.

Orpheus and Eurydice.

This is one of my favorite poems of all time, by Czeslaw Milosz. I was 26. I was in love with the writing of Charles Bukowski, and platonically in love with the man who had introduced me to poetry the year before. The latter would end, as these things do; the former has stayed with me and always will. Milosz I stumbled upon, accidentally, first his prose and then his poetry. This poem is the last one in his last book, Second Space. He died around the time it was published, and the poems are a farewell to old friends, old loves, all earthly life and its travels.

It's a long poem. I think it's one of the most beautiful poems ever written.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades

Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind

That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,

Tossed the leaves of the trees.  The headlights of cars

Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.

He stopped at the glass-paneled door, uncertain

Whether he was strong enough for that ultimate trial.

He remembered her words: “You are a good man.”

He did not quite believe it.  Lyric poets

Usually have – as he knew – cold hearts.

It is like a medical condition.  Perfection in art

Is given in exchange for such an affliction.

Only her love warmed him, humanized him.

When he was with her, he thought differently about himself.

He could not fail her now, when she was dead.

He pushed open the door and found himself walking in a labyrinth,

Corridors, elevators.  The livid light was not light but the dark

of the earth.

Electronic dogs passed him noiselessly.

He descended many floors, a hundred, three hundred, down.

He was cold, aware that he was Nowhere.

Under thousands of frozen centuries,

On an ashy trace where generations had moldered,

In a kingdom that seemed to have no bottom and no end.

Thronging shadows surrounded him.

He recognized some of the faces.

He felt the rhythm of his blood.

He felt strongly his life with its guilt

And he was afraid to meet those to whom he had done harm.

But they had lost the ability to remember

And gave him only a glance, indifferent to all that.

For his defense he had a nine-stringed lyre.

He carried in it the music of the earth, against the abyss

That buries all of sound in silence.

He submitted to the music, yielded

To the dictation of a song, listening with rapt attention,

Became, like his lyre, its instrument.

Thus he arrived at the palace of the rulers of that land.

Persephone, in her garden of withered pear and apple trees,

Black, with naked branches and verrucose twigs,

Listened from the funereal amethyst of her throne.

He sang the brightness of mornings and green rivers,

He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,

Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,

Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,

Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port,

Of tastes of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt.

Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon,

Of a dignified flock of pelicans above the bay,

Of the scent of an armful of lilacs in summer rain,

Of his having composed his words always against death

And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness.

I don’t know – said the goddess – whether you loved her or not.

Yet you have come here to rescue her.

She will be returned to you.  But there are conditions:

You are not permitted to speak to her, or on the journey back

To turn your head, even once, to assure yourself that she is

behind you.

And so Hermes brought forth Eurydice.

Her face no longer hers, utterly gray,

Her eyelids lowered beneath the shade of her lashes.

She stepped rigidly, directed by the hand

Of her guide.  Orpheus wanted so much

To call her name, to wake her from that sleep.

But he refrained, for he had accepted the conditions.

And so they set out.  He first, and then, not right away,

The slap of the god’s sandals and the light patter

Of her feet fettered by her robe, as if by a shroud.

A steep climbing path phosphorized

Out of darkness like the walls of a tunnel.

He would stop and listen.  But then

They stopped, too, and the echo faded.

And when he began to walk the double tapping commenced again.

Sometimes it seemed closer, sometimes more distant.

Under his faith a doubt sprang up

And entwined him like cold bindweed.

Unable to weep, he wept at the loss

Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead,

Because he was, now, like every other mortal.

His lyre was silent, yet he dreamed, defenseless.

He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.

And so he would persist for a very long time,

Counting his steps in half-wakeful torpor.

Day was breaking.  Shapes of rock loomed up

Under the luminous eye of the exit from underground.

It happened as he expected.  He turned his head

And behind him on the path was no one.

Sun.  And sky.  And in the sky white clouds.

Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!

How will I live without you, my consoling one!

But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,

And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.

Wednesday poem. W. S. Merwin.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

'For the Anniversary of My Death.'
W.S. Merwin.

Ever since I learned that a friend I loved would be going into the darkness and not coming back, this poem has been running through my mind. I didn't know when the darkness would come, only that it was waiting for her. She died a month ago today.

for whit.

(draft 1).

I fell asleep dreaming of spring
and lilacs stolen from gardens
and the memory of their fragrance
and time slips backwards
to a faraway summer
in St. Petersburg,
that city of palaces strung along
necklaces of boulevards,
floating at the edge of the sea
so far north the horizon seems to stop, there;
you have come to the end of the world.
Old women in their kerchiefs
sold bunches of lilacs
and lilies-of-the-valley
outside metro stations,
their scent trailing
down the escalators,
like Persephone descending
to the underworld.
Or rather, the reverse:
the sweet fragrance leading you upwards
from the subterranean palaces of the metro
like Persephone returning back to spring and earth.

a poem for a Saturday.

I found a scrap of paper as I was cleaning up my room last night, floating to the surface of the tide of flotsam and jetsam that fills that bedroom. It must have been tucked into a letter from my friend Ana, written when we were young. "A Wednesday Poem," it says. A handwritten note on the back suggests that we have 'Wednesday poems' every week, but somehow I think this tradition never took hold. It seemed serendipitously appropriate to find this at the end of a week of grieving for a friend, who died Monday afternoon. The letter I had been writing the Sunday before is in my bag, unfinished. I wrote another letter to her daughter, instead, late Monday night, still reeling from the news.

Day brings what it is going to be. Trees -
wherever they are - begin to stand.
I have a crossing to do today
onward through this shadowy land.

How still the earth stayed that night at first
when you didn't breath. I couldn't believe
how carefully moonlight came. It was
like the time by my mother's grave.

Today I am going on. In former times
when you were back there, then
I tried to hold the moon and sun.
Now when they ask me who you were -

I remember, but remember my promise
And I say, "No one."

Letting You Go.
(William Stafford).

My friend loved poetry; when her children were young she put poems in their lunchboxes every day in April, which is National Poetry Month. In return, they started a blog of poems for her at the beginning of this month, the three now grown children choosing a different poem each day. She died before April came to an end. This friend loved many poets, but her favorite poem was another one by William Stafford, posted here.

this is just to say. (with apologies to William Carlos Williams).

(second draft).

(the first draft is here)

this is just to say
i have eaten all the pickles
that you gave me
which filled a tall mason jar
which i had thought to save
for picnics with friends
at the beach
or on the living-room floor
sliced into an egg salad
or guarding a cheese plate
but instead i ate every last one
straight from the jar
they were so cold and crisp
and briny
and delicious.

Reading. Glück.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A friend posted a fragment of this poem by Louise Glück last week. I keep coming back to it again and again. It has been a sad autumn. A family friend died after an eighteen-month struggle with cancer. Another has relapsed after being treated last year for lung cancer. One friend has just been diagnosed with a rare and severe blood disorder; her youngest child has been living with leukemia since last winter. Another friend emailed to say that her father's lymphoma has returned. I came of age with AIDS awareness, in the 1990's, but cancer is the dark shadow that has touched everyone I know. No one I love has been spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

You would think that cancer would have been conquered by the beginning of this century, the way tuberculosis had been the century before, as Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. Not so. AIDS came closer to a cure, or rather a kind of temporary sanctuary, with expensive drugs that delayed disease progression and managed symptoms. Which for now is as good as it gets. That is not enough for us, for those friends and family who are now only memories I hold close to me. Their shades walk through my dreams and disappear when I wake.

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Cancer entered my life for the first time with the death of my grandmother in the late 80's. I did not know her well. Family stories tell me that she was not easy to know, but I regret that I do not remember her. Then, when I was in high school, my father returned from a meeting in Washington, D.C., having gone to the hospital with pains and discovered, via x-rays, that there was a mass in his chest. Further tests revealed a tumor, so rare that one of the pathologists who diagnosed him still remembers the case, fourteen years later. He had lost one brother to a heart attack and was watching the other fight the liver cancer which would kill him seven or eight years later. Lately I have been returning in my mind to that year. Last Friday was the fourteenth anniversary of my father's surgery.

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

I came to poetry late. I was 25. I have told this story too many times; surely I do not need to say again that I was going blindly into the dark and Bukowski pulled me back from it the way a fireman pulls a child from a burning building. Now I understand what poetry is for, to find in someone else's words a kind of map of my own innermost emotions, dark fears and sweet elations, to lay them bare before my eyes. Now I see in Glück's words that weight of despair, and yet the will to keep going, as I have seen in those who clawed their way back towards another Spring against the bleakest of odds.

you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.

Louise Glück, October. Averno. 2006.

Reading. Mary Oliver.

The other day, a friend wrote about the mother of her son's classmate, who was scheduled for some upcoming surgery. It brought to mind her own two battles with cancer, now in remission. She'd written of her experiences before, the first when she was 28, the second several years later, when her sons were 3 and 1. I had read her blog before we even met, and I was a little in awe of her. It was clear that L. is the kind of woman who makes everything around her beautiful, who seems to take pause and drink in all the moments that we should all stop and treasure. It felt like those months of illness and recovery, especially when her children were so small, were what made L. so determined to live with such awareness.

The anger and fear that she wrote about, of her own mortality and the body and life that would never be the same, of missing precious months of her sons' toddlerhoods, reminded me of the journalist Ruth Picardie. She died of breast cancer at the age of 33, leaving behind a husband and twin babies. For them her absence was not merely for the months of treatment, pain and anguish and hope, but for the rest of their lives. I knew of Ruth from her sister, the writer Justine Picardie, and from the late Elspeth Thompson, who gave us this poem. This was read at Ruth's memorial service:

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver, American Primitive.

I've always loved Mary Oliver for her clear way of writing about love and loss, of the fleeting moments of sadness interleaved with splashes of happiness that make up life. This poem is pinned to the wall above my desk at work, along with several others. It never fails to break my heart and then put it back together.

Readings. Mary Oliver.

The crowd at Benaroya Hall is not the usual symphony crowd. Here is a sea of silver-haired women, natural fibers, neutral colors, ethnic shawls and scarves and jewelry, very little makeup. Not sleek and black and gleaming gold, glittering diamonds. They are clutching volumes of poetry, hoping for an autograph at the end of an evening of poetry. The hall is nearly full, 2,500 Mary Oliver fans. E. is here, with her friends, and it was she who introduced me to the poetry of Mary Oliver a year or two ago, as she introduced me to Donald Hall more recently, just this year. I can see her, a few rows behind and to the left, a halo of curly grey-blonde hair. I wave, but she does not see me, on the far right of the auditorium.

Mary Oliver is a small woman, or appears to be, behind the podium. She introduces her sign-language translator, a handsome man wearing all black. She is sharp and funny - unbelievably funny - and every word seemed to captivate the entire audience. We were spellbound, laughing and sighing in turn, like one giant, single organism of 2,500 souls. When she announced that she would read, by request, the poem Wild Geese, a collective murmur swept over the crowd like a wave. There were twenty-five poems in all, several of them brief haikus written while a broken arm made typing difficult, one long poem that was a single, fractured sentence lengthened by pauses and dashes. But this is the poem that everyone knows.

Wild Geese.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I first encountered this poem in A Book of Luminous Things, a poetry anthology collected by Czeslaw Milosz, and it never fails to capture my attention.

Reading. Montale.

When I began reading Eugenio Montale (beginning, as is my habit, with the later works) I found that I could not fall in love with his words with the same heartbreaking, shattering swiftness as I had with his compatriot Giuseppe Ungaretti (some eight years older than Montale) a short time before. They had in common a language but their way of using it was altogether different, which is as it should be in all things. It would take a little while for Montale to draw me in, for his words to grip something deep and hidden in my consciousness, which is sometimes how literature works for me. I made my way slowly through the volume of works published after his death, some other things from the early 1970's, and then, at last, arrived at La Bufera e Altro (The Storm & Other Poems). And fell headlong into some darkness.

Montale himself, we are told, regarded La Bufera e Altro as his finest work; I have not read everything of his so I cannot judge that for myself. Everything I have read about Montale (in truth, not much) sees that this volume, published in 1956, marked the end of his first era of writing poetry, the years between 1925 (when his first work, Ossi de Seppia, or Cuttlefish Bones, was published), and 1956, when he was about sixty years old. There is a sense - and I refer to the last sentence of the title poem - of entering the dark. There is something beautiful and haunting of the images he evokes, the language referencing the words of Dante Alighieri (some six centuries before). (The word bufera was first introduced "into the literary idiom" by Dante in his Inferno; it "signifies a high wind with precipitation...suggests upheaval and is frequently used to suggest the effects of passion...much like 'tempest' in English...in Canto V:31 of the Inferno, Dante uses 'la bufera infernal' to describe the winds that perpetually drive flocks of lovers."

Here, then, is the first poem of this volume, The Storm.

Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grand's merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu'à nous persécuter...
(Agrippa D'Aubigné: `A Dieu)

The storm that trickles its long March
thunderclaps, its hail, onto the stiff
leaves of the magnolia tree;

(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)

the lightning that blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them
like images on a negative (a benediction
and destruction you carry carved
within you, a condemnation that binds you
stronger to me than any love, my strange sister);
and then the tearing crash, the jangling sistrums, the
rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango...and
overhead
some gesture that blinding is groping...

as when

turning around, and, sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,

you waved to me - and entered the dark.

Montale, Eugenio. trans. Wright, Charles. The Storm & Other Poems. Oberlin College, 1978. pp 18-19, 23-24.