Poetry & Poets

The first person in recorded history
struck by a comet slept on her couch
across the road from the Comet Drive-In

and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee,
and woke her. Everything that hurts

hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary
on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated
that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built

so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent
like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm... Here

England, with all thy faults, I love thee still
My country! and while yet a nook is left
Where English minds and manners may be found,
Shall be constrain’ d to love thee. Though thy clime
Be fickle, and thy year, most part, deform’ d
With dripping rains, or wither’ d by a frost,
I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies
And fields without a flow’ r, for warmer France
With all her vines; nor for Ausonia’ s groves
Of golden fruitage and her myrtle bow’ rs.
To shake thy senate, and from heights sublime

Thus heav’ n-ward all things tend. For all were once
Perfect, and all must be at length restor’ d.
So God has greatly purpos’ d; who would else
In his dishonour’ d works himself endure
Dishonour, and be wrong’ d without redress.
Haste then, and wheel away a shatter’ d world,
Ye slow-revolving seasons! we would see,
(A sight to which our eyes are strangers yet)
A world that does not dread and hate his laws,
And suffer for its crime; would learn how fair
The creature is that God pronounces good,

Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,
over the girl with her first electric, how her high,
thin voice, amplified many times
over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's
in the green grass of the festival site.
Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide
the pistil and the pollen inside.
Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands,
over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening.
It rejoices over Japan, over Korea,
over arts refined over a thousand years —
the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea.

The fire was so fierce,
So red, so gray, so yellow
That, along with the land,
It burned part of the sky
Which stayed black in that corner
For years,
As if it were night there
Even in the daytime,
A piece of the sky burnt
And which then
Could not be counted on
Even by the birds.

For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house
after my mother’ s death; she died the year before;
she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments
of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute
to weed the garden or to walk just a little way
along Prospect Street, for a few minutes only and now
almost now she’ d be coming back, we’ d hear the screen door,
Bev would be back and saying something casual about —

I read that in this famous person’ s poems “she searches
for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self.”
Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn’ t know

whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen,
I came across Tolstoy’ s “What is Art?” where he said
an artist is different from other people because instead

of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why
can’ t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war
just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground

Ah Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would you do with it?
I’ d take my earrings out of hock,
Marry a blind man,
And live on a tree-lined block.

But Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would your mother say?

The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton’ s victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
everybody bad dreams. So we do need to solve
the problem of students reading difficult things
that will lead them astray: why did Rimbaud
turn from socialism to capitalism? As if

To be free of situations,
To live from day to day without events