I happened up on this gem at TLS. If you have a moment to read their gentle dissection you’ll be glad you did. You’ll also be glad I spared you the [colorful] picture that inspired Once Upon A Dead Gull. 😉
The Seagull
By Stanley Moss
When I was a child, before I knew the word
for a snowstorm, before I remember
a tree or a field,
I saw an endless grey slate afternoon coming,
I knew a bird singing in the sun
was the same as a dog barking in the dark.
A pigeon in a blizzard fluttered
against a kitchen window,
– my first clear memory of terror,
I kept secret, my intimations
I kept secret.
This winter I hung a grey and white stuffed
felt seagull from the cord of my window shade,
a reminder of good times by the sea,
of Chekhov and impossible love.
I took comfort from the gull, the graceful shape
sometimes lifted a wing in the drafty room.
Once when I looked at the gull I saw
through the window a living seagull glide
toward me then disappear, – what a rush of life!
I remember its hereness,
while inside the room
the senseless symbol
little more than a bedroom slipper
dangled on a string.
Beyond argument, my oldest emotion
hangs like a gull in the distant sky.
Eyes behind bars of mud and salt
see some dark thing below,
– my roof under the sea.
Only the sky is taken for granted.
Hold your horses you little whipper-snappers. We’re not done yet.
It is still National Poetry Month and we are going to see this thing through! I know some of you don’t really love poetry and there are others who think it’s too far over their head. That’s cool. It may be wrong but it can still be cool. Then (you see me shaking my finger at you because you know who you are) there are a few of you who just want to play hooky and hang out in smoke filled bars until the end of April. Well if that’s your attitude you can just order me a pomegranate martini by gosh!
This week we’re gonna mix it up a little. Not the drinks silly. For the next five days [if the good lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise] I’m going to pick a photo I’ve taken and find a poem to go with it. Oh this is going to be sooo fun!
I wonder if words can breathe life into a photograph? If so does it make the picture worth more than a thousand words? Let’s see.
Iris
by David St. John
There is a train inside this iris:
You think I’m crazy, & like to say boyish
& outrageous things. No, there is
A train inside this iris.
It’s a child’s finger bearded in black banners.
A single window like a child’s nail,
A darkened porthole lit by the white, angular face
Of an old woman, or perhaps the boy beside her in the stuffy,
Hot compartment. Her hair is silver, & sweeps
Back off her forehead, onto her cold and bruised shoulders.
The prairies fail along Chicago. Past the five
Lakes. Into the black woods of her New York; & as I bend
Close above the iris, I see the train
Drive deep into the damp heart of its stem, & the gravel
Of the garden path
Cracks under my feet as I walk this long corridor
Of elms, arched
Like the ceiling of a French railway pier where a boy
With pale curls holding
A fresh iris is waving goodbye to a grandmother, gazing
A long time
Into the flower, as if he were looking some great
Distance, or down an empty garden path & he believes a man
Is walking toward him, working
Dull shears in one hand; & now believe me: The train
Is gone. The old woman is dead, & the boy. The iris curls,
On its stalk, in the shade
Of those elms: Where something like the icy & bitter fragrance
In the wake of a woman who’s just swept past you on her way
Home
& you remain.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling
30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936
Once upon a time hit and run sex was sooo romantic.
Rudy was too sophisticated for a one night stand but give him a sensuous landscape in the hills of India and lust looks a lot like love.
A Ballade of Jakko Hill
One moment bid the horses wait,
Since tiffin is not laid till three,
Below the upward path and straight
You climbed a year ago with me.
Love came upon us suddenly
And loosed — an idle hour to kill —
A headless, armless armory
That smote us both on Jakko Hill.
Ah Heaven! we would wait and wait
Through Time and to Eternity!
Ah Heaven! we could conquer Fate
With more than Godlike constancy
I cut the date upon a tree —
Here stand the clumsy figures still:
“10-7-85, A.D.”
Damp with the mist of Jakko Hill.
What came of high resolve and great,
And until Death fidelity!
Whose horse is waiting at your gate?
Whose ‘rickshaw-wheels ride over me?
No Saint’s, I swear; and — let me see
To-night what names your programme fill —
We drift asunder merrily,
As drifts the mist on Jakko Hill.
L’ENVOI.
Princess, behold our ancient state
Has clean departed; and we see
‘Twas Idleness we took for Fate
That bound light bonds on you and me.
Amen! Here ends the comedy
Where it began in all good will;
Since Love and Leave together flee
As driven mist on Jakko Hill!
(December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886)
Today I thought I’d visit the modest rhymes and musings of sweet Emily Dickinson but then I changed my mind.
Not that I don’t adore Emily’s simplicity – we were like best friends for a long time. Did you know if she hadn’t died of kidney disease or heart failure she would have been 184 years old next month? We were going to go skydiving…
Okay, back to earth and the late Emily Dickinson.
Instead of sharing the standard fluffy stuff of hopes and dreams and sugary illusions of death she is known for I decided to show her darker side with this letter and poem to her sister in law Susan Huntington Dickinson.
I heard if you invert Em’s photo you’ll see that she actually has horns. [gasp! yikes! yee gads it’s true!]
She lived and died in Massachusetts ya know.
THE LETTER
Tuesday morning – [1854] Sue – you can go or stay – There is but one alternative – We differ often lately, and this must be the last. You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved, – sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to an oblivion rather bitterer than death – thus my heart bleeds so frequently that I shant mind the hemorrhage, and I can only add an agony to several previous ones, and at the end of day remark – a bubble burst! Such incidents would grieve me when I was but a child, and perhaps I could have wept when little feet hard by mine, stood still in the coffin, but eyes grow dry sometimes, and hearts get crisp and cinder, and had as lief burn. Sue – I have lived by this. It is the lingering emblem of the Heaven I once dreamed, and though if this is taken, I shall remain alone, and though in that last day, the Jesus Christ you love, remark he does not know me – there is a darker spirit will not disown its child. Few have been given me, and if I love them so, that for idolatry, they are removed from me – I simply murmur gone, and the billow dies away into the boundless blue, and no one knows but me, that one went down today. We have walked very pleasantly – Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge – then pass on singing Sue, and up the distant hill I journey on.
I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing –
The spring decoys.
And as the summer nears –
And as the Rose appears,
Robin is gone.
Yet do I not repine
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown –
Learneth beyond the sea
Melody new for me
And will return.
Fast in a safer hand
Held in a truer Land
Are mine –
And though they now depart,
Tell I my doubting heart
They’re thine.
In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
each little discord here
Removed.
Then will I not repine,
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown
Shall in a distant tree
Bright melody for me
Return.
Mark your calendars and your books because… [drum roll]
April is National Poetry Month!
Last years celebration was fun and I already have several hundred in mind for this year. If you have one you’d like to share or see dissected let me know.
That is a question I have heard more than once and the answer is always yes. Yes indeed I have considered it but considering is a far cry from accomplishing.
I wrote a poem last year for my grandson when our fancy goldfish died because (as I explained to him) this sort of thing gets the creative juices flowing and writing can be very therapeutic.
I thought he would find it entertaining instead he cried and said “that’s not funny Nana and I don’t feel better.” Oops, my bad.
This same grandson loves the Skippyjon books by Judith Schachner so when he had finished mourning the goldfish he asked, “Can you write something like Skippyjon Jones and make him be a pirate?” I of course wanted to rectify the damage I had done so I quickly penned him another little poem.
In the house where he lived void of laughter and kisses
In the room where he smoked and the little dog pisses
Where the ghost of a bloke stirs a foul reminiscence
Lies the frame of a maimed Skippy Red
…
Go down, go down poor Skippy Red
Alas, alas no water to tread
No ropes, no planks, no breaking of bread
In your world of endless abysses
…
Go on, go on let sleeping dogs lie
A new crib for you, twas a good day to die
Hoist a fresh cup, here’s spit in your eye
Abaddon is better off dead
…
Farewell, farewell Skippy Red
Well… Dang it!! I struck out again! Being scolded by a seven year old for saying piss is a shameful experience but at least he didn’t cry.
I wanted to impress him with my literary accomplishments be a good grandmother so I scribbled a few more verses. Judging from the look on his face each one was worse than the one before so after a few hours I untied him. He rubbed his little wrists, shook his head and walked away. At that point I had to be honest with myself and admit …
Just in case I missed telling one person in the far reaches of Idonwannaherit (which is my husband’s country of origin) April is National Poetry month.
And guess what?! I was informed this morning that I have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize Award. I’m thinking OMG! Am I so special they called me early? Turns out it was an April Fool’s joke. Damn you cruel jokester and may the winning of Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes forever be just out of your reach.
With the fool’s business out of the way I’d like to talk about Plath.
Not because of her life’s work. In all honesty it is/was her chronic obsession with death that compels me.
In reading Lady Lazarus with or without knowing Plath’s history I could have imagined a poet scribbling thoughts that were just that- thoughts.
But the [reportedly] last two pieces she wrote and the two small children she left behind. I became strangely fanatical.
photo by Rollie McKenna
I tried hard not to judge her as a person and to focus only on the writing but I fell short. History, rumor and suspicion clouded my judgment.
In Balloons all I could see was her surveying her child at play – a child she would [knowingly?] soon leave motherless.
And in Edge… it would have been eerily sufficient without knowing Sylvia Plath Hughes had made for herself a gas chamber.
In doing so she had eliminated the need for an executioner so I became her judge, juror and examiner.
It wasn’t enough for me to obsess over the tragedy I insisted my husband partake of the mind numbing fixation.
His first response was, “You know I don’t read poetry. I don’t read anything that doesn’t have live game, a stock symbol or a machining program written on it.”
To that I handed him a beer and smiled, “Okay. I’ll read it to you and you tell me what you think.”
He agreed, though once I finished reading Edge aloud he held out his hand and ordered me to give it to him.
I graciously obliged.
Here it is in its entirety. Our discussion will follow.
Edge by Sylvia Plath 1963
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
When he finally looked up I asked, “So what do you think?”
He took a long drink and shrugged, “She obviously wanted to be dead and she’s happy about it.”
“Yes, yes. Go on.” I urged, “What about the scrolls of her toga?”
“Sounds like the Clinton – Lewinsky thing. You know with the stained dress.”
I laughed and he continued. “Here where she says ‘it is over’ means just that – she’s finished.”
“What about the lines ‘each dead child coiled, a white serpent, one at each little pitcher of milk, now empty’ what do you think about that?”
“The Exodus? It sounds like the first Passover and the last plague in Egypt to me.” He looked back at the page in front of him and read,
“She has folded them back into her body as petals of a rose close when the garden stiffens and odors bleed from the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.”
He shook his head and returned the poem, “Did she plan to kill the kids and take them with her? I guess it doesn’t matter- It was fifty years ago, she was mentally ill and she’s glad she’s dead.”
“What about ‘the moon has nothing to be sad about, staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag’ – what are your thoughts on that?” I asked, watching as he became more uncomfortable.
“It sounds like craziness. She was obviously mentally ill. Did you say she stuck her head in an oven?”
I nodded.
“Was it butane or natural gas?”
“I have no idea. Why would that matter?”
“Well one falls and the other rises – natural gas rises. Did she live in town or in the country? If she lived in town it was probably natural gas.”
“She lived in London, a town residence once occupied by Yeats.”
“Hell, it might have been coal fuel.” He paused as if it took added effort to ask the next question. “Did she kill her kids too?”
“No.” I answered.
His face relaxed a bit until I added, “The youngest, a boy named Nicholas hung himself in 2009. The daughter who was less than three years old when it happened went on to become a painter and poet.”
“Dammit! How’s the girl doing?”
“I don’t personally know her but she was still alive the last I heard.”
“Poor thing. Damaged people leave a lot of garbage in their wake. Hopefully she’s not too messed up.”
With that he bent and twisted the empty can indicating the discussion was over.
I mumbled a thank you, delighted I had snagged him into reading a poem yet a little ashamed that I had disturbed him with the past of Sylvia Plath.
Next week maybe I will entice him with a new poet, a living poet.
I will probably [silently] take a closer look at the works of Ted and Frieda Hughes, dissecting their psyches and torturing myself in the aftermath of Sylvia Plath.
The Real Janna Hill in 