(no subject)

[proximoception]

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.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"the sadness that all days are old twinned with the wonder that all days are poetry" Lovely. And your entry: an example of what it's about.

And you're right about Frost (I doubt I would have seen it), closer in and without the hokey, happy ending. Not without a happy ending, mind: but the happiness here is more Kafka: happy ending for the reader, not for the father at all, and only an ambivalent ending for the son, so that our own happiness is ambivalent, because being alone is the nature of the kind of love that it's a lonely happiness to discover.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Some part of me must have recalled it when I wrote that rooftop sonnet a couple years ago. It and the Frost both. I believe in unconscious processes but am still always shocked when it's proved they've happened locally.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

It *is* closer in. Beautiful. But that's all you found in that book?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Bishop's in there, and Carson and Ammons, all of whom I avoided. Roethke. A couple Glucks were okay, and a Mark Doty one about meeting a dead S.O. in a dream. But I read at most forty or fifty pages out of a thousand.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a time when I was about eight years old, and went off to summer camp for the first time. An hour after the bus stopped in the parking lot and let us out, I set my canvas bag down on the cot and found my lunch somewhere under the piles of knickknacks, folded clothes, etc. The sandwich was crushed, and half the juice had leaked out, seeping into the shirts and staining part of the canvas outer lining. And there was that heart-sinking feeling coincident with the realization that I couldn't call them about it. What came up from "the bottom of the pot," instead, was a kind of lonely gratitude that he or she would probably have called homesickness. Though it wasn't that, because the breach from home was just one of the necessary conditions for feeling thankful. (A gratitude or maybe a love like that "sharp pain stabbed in the depths of the mind," as Homer says when Jove recognizes Ate.) Thankful, and happy too -- because that was the first time I remember seeing a kind of wasteful abundance in the things outside me.