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The The Shampoo Insomnia The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself, but she never, never smiles) far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps shes a daytime sleeper. By the universe deserted, shed tell it to go to hell, and shed find body of water, or a mirror, on which to dwell. So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me. The End of March It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist. The sky was darker than the water it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed a track of big dog-prints (so big they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. Finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost A kite string? But no kite.
I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda? ), protected from spring tides by a palisade ore they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious. ) Id like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog a lame ricaine. Id blaze it with a kitchen match and lovely diaphanous blue flame would waver, doubled in the window. There must be a stove; there is a chimney, askew, but braced with wires, and electricity, possibly at least, at the back another wire limply leashes the whole affair to something off behind the dunes. A light to read by perfect!
But impossible. And that day the wind was much too cold even to get that far, and of course the house was boarded up. On the way back our faces froze on the other side. The sun came out for just a minute. For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand, the drab, damp, scattered stones were multi-colored, and all those high enough threw out long shadows, individual shadows, then pulled them in again. They could have been teasing the lion sun, except that now he was behind them a sun whod walked the beach the last low tide, making those big, majestic paw-prints, who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with. 1976, Geography III At the Fish houses Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fish houses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish it makes ones nose run and ones eyes water. The five fish houses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, created gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the waters edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals... One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me.
He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water... Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin.
bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation fo fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. 1955, A Cold Spring From a Key West Notebook Creeping under over hanging boughs In the dew-drenched total dark Meeting a hollow wind like a coffin in the air Searching for that rumoured pool There are stars in the roof of your mouth And a glowworm at the root of your tongue 193 The Shampoo The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed And since the heavens will attend as long on us, youve been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. For Time is nothing if not amenable. The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where, so straight, so soon? Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon. 1955, A Cold Spring Letter To Miss Pierson [a reader requesting advice on how to become a poet] from One Art: Selected Letters 437 Lewis Wharf Boston, MA May 28, 1975 I think you have set up difficulties for yourself that perhaps dont really exist at all.
I dont know what poetic tools &# 038; structures are, unless you mean traditional forms. Which one can use or not, as one sees fit. If you feel you are moralizing too much just cut the morals offer out. (Quite often young poets tend to try to tie everything up neatly in 2 or 3 beautiful last lines and it is quite surprising how the poems are improved if the poet can bear to sacrifice those last, pat, beautiful lines. ) Your third problem why shouldnt the poet appear in the poem? There are several tricks I or we or he or she or even one somebody's name. Someone is talking, after album of course the idea is to prevent that particular tone of voice from growing monotonous. From what you say, I think perhaps you are actually trying too hard reading too much about poetry and not enough poetry.
Prosodymetricsetc. are fascinating but they all come afterwards, obviously. And I always ask my writing classes NOT to read criticism. Read a lot of poetry all the timed not 20 th-century poetry. Read Campion, Herbert, Pope, Tennyson, Coleridge anything at all almost thats any good, from the past until you find out what you really like, by yourself.
Even if you try to initiate it exactly it will come out quite different. Then the great poets of our own century Marianne Moore, Auden, Wallace Stevens and not just 2 or 3 poems each, in anthologies read ALL of somebody. Then read his or her life, and letters, and so on. (And by all means read Keats Letters. ) Then see what happens. Thats really all I can say.
It cant be done, apparently, by willpower and study alone by being with input I really dont know how poetry gets to be written. There is a mystery &# 038; a surprise, and after that a great deal of hard work
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