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... ings of storm. Nights I sat at the kitchen door listening out into the darkness until finally spring came, and everything transcended. As one by one the ponds opened, tool the white ice painfully into their dark beliefs, I began to listen to them shore-slapping and rock-leaping into the growl of creeks, and then of course the ocean, far off, pouring everything, ever and over, from jar to enormous jar.
You'd think it would stop somewhere, but next it was rocks flicking their silver tongues all summer, panting a little on their damp under-sides. Now I listen as fall rides in the wagons of the wind, lighting up the world with red, yellow, and the long-leaved ash as blue as fire, and I know there's no end to it, the kingdoms crying out-and no end to the voices the heart can hear once it's started. Already like small white birds snow is falling from the ledges of the north, each flake singing with its tiny mouth as it wings out into the wind, whispering about love, about darkness as it balances in the clear air, as it whirls down. Of course this is a beautiful poem, no doubt a more compelling poem than 'Spring' (I won't say a 'better' poem).
And we could begin talking about it from many different angles. But I think a particularly interesting way of 'thinking about' this poem (having already given ourselves to its immediacy, its living presence) would be to talk about, to think about, its language. The way, for example, the poems comes to say / dares to say. 'the voices the heart can hear, ' all of us knowing that the heart as a seat of the emotions is a much-mauled metaphor by now, one coarsened by the roar and grind of thousands of trucks along the endless highways of America, battered and smudged and lacerated by great strips and chunks of the immense tires our lives ride -- and explode -- on, always en route to nashville. And we know, as Donald Barthelme has eloquently said, that one of poetry's central, one of its most crucial, projects is 'restoring freshness to a much-handled language. ' The problem for the poet is to find language we can believe in, one in which there is an opportunity to hear something that is not merely comfortably familiar, not merely reinforcing of one's own prejudices or assumptions. It is always so, has always been so, though perhaps it is even harder today -- with the ever present pressure from our devouring commercial culture, our technology of hype and manipulation.
How can be one be sincere? How do we find a clean language, one free of political and social contamination? It is first necessary, always 'to silence an existing rhetoric' (Barthelme) - -necessary to clear the mouth and the throat and the ears. It is necessary to listen: to what makes available to us more than mere schemes and rationalizations, strategies and maneuvers. We must let the world as it enters our ordinary lives, not as world-view or system but in sharp particularity. ' First it was only the winter trees -- their boughs eloquent at midnight with small but mortal explosions, and always a humming under the lashings of the storm. As always, the world has entered the poem -- has entered us -- as that inseparable mixture of things and words.
Has entered the poet's memory and mouth, has entered her body's unconscious harmony with the physical realm we all are part of, which we wake and sleep on, its autonomic oneness. What Oliver's lines know is as much the body's knowledge as the mind's ; more even. And the words speak that knowledge, vibrate with its physicality. We " re not talking here of some instance of cleverness on the part of the poet, not pointing to some poetic device involving sound manipulation, not merely noting the sound of water in 'shore- slapping and rock-leaping. ' We " re talking about how the life of the body (ours and the rest of the world's) -- how the life of the body is somehow in them. In the words. How water, as both environment and constituent of the body itself, echoes in the lines.
In us. How it is both foreground (in the growl of creeks) and the immortal element itself, water, stretching and pouring, 'over and over, / from jar to enormous jar, ' our lives forever caught up in the vastness of it, the resistless run of it, around us and through us. And inherent in all this -- inherent in all this: the great roll of the seasons, known to all our senses, the very fact of Time incarnated, in this and in us. We read these lines, listen to their music of presence, and the world is alive in it -- alive in us -- our quiet fellow citizens the rocks ' flicking their silver tongues all summer, panting / a little on their damp under-sides. ' Already, we know, 'like small white birds//snow is failing, ' each flake, each word knowing their great fragility, the vulnerability of our brief launching's into flight, the desperate courage each winging out floats on, trusts to.
Nothing is about anything: everything is. But it is, of course, in time: actually in time, its poignant tug and pull. So when suddenly we, as the poem, say there is 'no end// to the voices the heart can hear once / it 's started, ' we are saying the literal truth this poem has found out the literal heart, with its dark, venous connections to the voices life sounds through us, their brief moments in time: the voices -- the body -- 'whispering about love, about darkness / as it balances in the clear air, as it whirls down. ' The literal heart. Its physical truth. And so, therefore, instant with metaphor.
Where the life is -- in the poem. The signs of its presence. That's what we " re talking about. This, I am suggesting -- this mysterious presence- -is a touchstone of something. If it is there, however difficult it may be to devise an adequate language to describe it, we believe in it; believe reality is in it; believe being is in it; believe it is an instance of -- to borrow a phrase from Heidegger -- world working. In other words, we believe it is art.
If however, we are unable, no matter how attentive we are, to find this presence of life in it- -in that case we are likely to say that what we faced with is a a failed poem. What we are talking about, therefore, is that which is most important for us to find in a poem and, if we are going to talk about it, that which is most important for us to talk (or write) about. It is what we must never remove, or kill off, by translating the poem into some other mode of discourse. This presence seems to be at the heart of the matter, and so must be preserved and respected at all cost when we speak of the poem. What is of primary importance is that poems should not -- must not -- be translated into some mere category; they must not be reduced to only an aspect of themselves -- of ourselves. They must not be only what we already know (or 'understand, ' or are able to explain).
Poems are never merely. That is to say, they have being rather than meaning. They are their own uses. They are not resolved, they are entered. Poems are where, physically, our own bodies and the bodies of words join in reality's pulse and movement. They are where, physically and spiritually, our existence is entered, in its mysterious fullness.
Poetry is not a saying: it is a becoming. It is never an errand, at the servi
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