April in Paris

No, wait, it’s May in California, still it will always be …

Paris by Moonlight

Oh my god, it’s Paris by moonlight
Even the trees are drunk and walking
A single pink slipper floats down the Seine
What kind of trees are those?
Those are trees in Paris by moonlight
And what size is her slipper?
It is the exact size of the sole
We ate in the little restaurant an hour ago
Under the trees in Paris by moonlight
There is no end to our painlessness
The trees will never find it
The slipper never reach it
Morning after morning the smell of coffee
Makes them nauseous
While we go on painlessly in Paris
Barefoot and swaggering
Our aluminum heads in the moon glow so
We are like an advertisement
For those who will come after us
Anyone can see without French
They should just stay in bed

Mary Ruefle

A prose poem for Monday

It seems to me that Mary Ruefle, one of my very favorite poets, has perfectly captured something in this poem, though it would be hard for me to articulate exactly what. Perhaps you will experience that, too (photo of Mary by Hannah Ensor):

The Bench

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half-acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wildflower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt. This bench would hardly ever be used and in the summer when the grasses were high would remain partially hidden from view. We both knew we wanted the bench to be made of teak so that it would last a long time in the harsh weather and so that we would never have to paint it. Teak weathers to a soft silver that might, in November or March, disappear into the gray hills that are the backdrop of our lives. My husband wanted a four foot bench and I wanted a five foot bench. This is what we argued about. My husband insisted that a four foot bench was all we needed, since no more than two people (presumably ourselves) would ever sit on it at the same time. I felt his reasoning was not only beside the point but missed it entirely; I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench, the look of it there, to be gazed at with only the vaguest notion it could hold more people than would ever actually sit down. The life of the bench in my imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might serve. After all, I argued, we wanted a bench so that we could look at it, so that we could imagine sitting on it, so that, unexpectedly, a bird might sit on it, or fallen leaves, or inches of snow, and the longer the bench, the greater the expanse of that plank, the more it matched its true function, which was imaginary. My husband mentioned money and I said that I was happier to have no bench at all, which would cost nothing, than to have a four foot bench, which would be expensive. I said that having no bench at all was closer to the five foot bench than the four foot bench because having no bench served the imagination in similar ways, and so not having a bench became an option in our argument, became a third bench. We grew very tired of discussing the three benches and for a day we rested from our argument. During this day I had many things to do and many of them involved my driving past other houses, none of which had benches, that is they each had the third bench, and as I drove past the other houses I could see a bench here and a bench there; sometimes I saw the bench very close to the house, against a wall or on a porch, and sometimes I saw the bench under a tree or in the open grass, cut or uncut, and once I saw the bench at the end of the driveway, blocking the road. Always it was a five foot bench that I saw, a long sleek bench or a broken-down bench, a bench with a slatted back or a bench with a solid, carved back, and always the bench was empty. But I knew that for my husband the third bench was only four feet long and he saw always two people sitting on it, two happy or tired people, two people who were happy to be alive or two people tired from having worked hard enough to buy the bench they were sitting on. Or they were happy and tired, happy to have reached the end of some argument, tired from having had it. For these people, the bench was an emblem of their days, which were fruitful because their suffering had come to an end. On my bench, which was always empty, nothing had come to an end because nothing had begun, no one had sat down, though the bench was always there waiting for exactly that to happen. And the bench was always long enough so that someone, if he desired to, could lie all the way down. That day passed. Another day followed it and my husband and I began, once more, to discuss the bench. The sound of our voices revealed a renewed interest and vigor. I thought I sensed in him a coming around to my view of the bench and I know he sensed in me a coming around to his view of the bench, because at one point I said that a four foot bench reminded me of rough notes towards a real bench while a five foot bench was like a fragment of an even longer bench and I admitted it was at times hard to tell the difference. He said he didn’t know anything about the difference between rough notes and fragments but he agreed that between the two benches there was, possibly, just perhaps — he could imagine it — very little difference. It was, after all, only a foot we were talking about. And I think it was then, in both of our minds, that a fourth bench came into being, a bench that was only a foot long, a miniature bench, a bench we could build ourselves, though of course we did not. This seemed to be, essentially, the bench we were talking about. Much later, when the birds came back, or the leaves drifted downwards, or the snow fell, slowly and lightly at first, then heavier and faster, it was this bench that we both saw when we looked out the window at the bench we eventually placed in the meadow which continued to grow as if there were no bench at all.

Mary Ruefle, from The Most of It

Rain

rainThis is our first real rainy day this year.How delicious to be inside, watching the earth soak up, at last, some moisture.  In its honor, two rain poems. And also the rain room at LACMA.

Rain Effect

A bride and a groom sitting in an open buggy
in the rain, holding hands but not looking
at each other, waiting for the rain to stop,
waiting for the marriage to begin, embarrassed
by the rain, the effect of the rain on the bridal
veil, the wet horse with his mane in his eyes,
the rain cold as the sea, the sea deep as love,
big drops of rain falling on the leather seat,
the rain beaded on a rose pinned to the groom’s
lapel, the rain on the bride’s bouquet,
on the baby’s breath there, the sound of the rain
hitting the driver’s top hat, the rain
shining like satin on the black street,
on the tips of patent leather shoes, Hokusai’s
father who polished mirrors for a living, Hokusai’s
father watching the sky for clouds, Hokusai’s father’s son
drawing rain over a bridge and over the people crossing
the bridge, Hokusai’s father’s son drawing the rain
for hours, Hokusai’s father rubbing a mirror, the rain
cold as the sea, the sea cold as love, the sea swelling
to a tidal wave, at the tip of the wave white.

Mary Ruefle (from Cold Pluto)

And this old favorite, by Robert Creeley

Rain

All night the sound hadScreenshot 2015-11-09 09.29.53
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Continue reading “Rain”

Keats

491px-John_Keats_by_William_HiltonI rarely post poems by 19th century poets, preferring to stay with the contemporary. But in this poem by John Keats, if you simply substitute modern pronouns for “thy” and “thine” and “thou,” seems to me it could have been written tomorrow.

And Keats, 1795 – 1821, is just barely a 19th century poet. This poem is almost 200 years old.

The Living Hand

Continue reading “Keats”

An exemplary sentence

Sentence DiagramI’ve been enjoying a book of essays on poetry, Madness, Rack, and Honey, an excellent read for literary-minded. I’ve mentioned the author, Mary Ruefle, before. There are many thought-provoking ideas interlaced in her very conversational, deceptively rambling style. Here’s one I like, from “Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World”:

“Once this thought crossed my mind: every time an author dies, out of respect a word should also pass out of being. A word the author loved and used repeatedly in writing–that word should be theirs and die with them. Continue reading “An exemplary sentence”

Poetry Monday–the problem with poetry

I had two books of poetry from the library this week, The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt, and Continuum, a selection of poems by Nina Cassian. Clampitt’s collected poems was 471 dense pages, and even though I have read a number of poems of hers I like, the sheer weight of it all was overwhelming. Any poet’s collected works is bound to have hundreds of uninteresting poems. It’s so much easier to get to know a poet through their selected works.  But in the case of Cassian, either I don’t like her, or I don’t like the selection.  It’s so difficult to get to know a new poet, to find the right poems, to get a sense of whether their voice really interests you!

So in hopes of saving you a little time, here is a poem by a poet you may not have heard of whom I like very much: Continue reading “Poetry Monday–the problem with poetry”