(no subject)

Took a break the other day to read around in the Contemporary volume of the Norton Modern Poetry set, to see what I maybe don't know I don't know. The only one that stood out as more than momentarily moving in a couple hours of random flipping was one I knew already:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

No idea how I felt about that one before four years ago (what did I know? - maybe one iteration expresses a real confusion) past that I remember it well, but I can't not see it as perfect now. Seeing the poetry of old in your own old days, the sadness that all days are old twinned with the wonder that all days are poetry - but all of that as background to or extrapolation from the more personal thing. Pure Empsonian pastoral, a sickening stomach fall of unhappy realization made just supportible by its immediately enabling something else, something badly missed your whole life until then, to fall into place.

Frost's great "Tuft of Flowers" is behind this, but the modifications are all improvements. It's closer in.