Your Source for 'Ff'lo

From now on things are going to be different around here.

All bets are off. Clearly I have nothing better to do.

Mark my words, I ain't saying this twice. Fight
to the last man standing. And never in all my born days,
says Fortinbras, have I seen such a sight as this.

It takes a worried man to sing
a worried song. And they hitched
up the wagons and rode into town.
 

Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein,
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
drange sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte süsse in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blatter treiben.

--Ranier Maria Rilke


Autumn Day

God, it's time. Summer was long.
Cast shadows on the sundials,
and let the winds loose on the fields.

Urge the last fruits to fullness; give them
just two more sun-warmed days
to move to ripen, to squeeze
their final sweetness into heavy wine.

Anyone with no home now
will not be making one.
Anyone who is alone
will live on long alone,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the streets, up and down,
restless, while the leaves blow.

( the first six in the [loose] crown are back here )

Don't wonder whether it could come to call
and tie the room together, like a rug,
for it would untie everything withal
as it has untied everything withal.
Don’t wonder, there’s no point, why you might want
a tying to to hold you in its thrall
—that sailor doesn't put much stock in knots,
while, all the while, the sailor's knotting taunts.
When student surgeons have a nasty itch
they're told to use a trick the old ones know—
to make the itch end, what you do is this:
Wait. Wait, and, finally, it will go.
But, oh, to learn to hold the itching close
while itching for whatever you crave most.

i keep seeing those fingers, hovering over those pages
those everyday spiral-bound casual pages
sharp-cornered, thin line-ruled pages you might use
for notes to the cat sitter, or grocery needs

those fingers, held still but not resting:  suspended
beside the handwritten black marks of the words
at the table where nothing like this'd ever happened
'til us, in the room on this night for this thing

a voice that belies just as much as the pages,
near calm, nearly even, like the eyes that look down to
move steady and slow over lines on the pages of
stunned anguish, emptiness, "no"

the tiniest twitches— are they in the fingers,
the voice and the eyelids? or are they in me?
so strange, the perception of how these perceptions
of small words on pages she quietly reads

i've never seen anything quite like those fingers
apparently fingers can do this to me

                  How Big

"So big!" goes the little one, taught
with glee this estimation we speak
for her whose arms are new
to gesture, whose words are not yet,
or barely've been, formed by mouth,
tongue & teeth, breath & throat
that render and embody voice.

And it is big, for her---
bigger than her---but our secret
laugh:  it's not so big. It's
regular big.  One-person big.
One not at all big person big.
It's big, for her, bigger than her, but
not---someone tell her, some day---so very very too very big.
 

Had an e-mail from M*** C. H*** this a.m. She reports having seen the H-bomb this past summer, how the bomb has grown, and how she wishes the bomb and I could be friends. And that she loves us both a lot.

I ponder what I might say writing back.

I could tell her that I wish that very much, too, she has no idea. I could tell her how the ways that seems to be impossible are all tied up with the post-split gaslighting I have had to work so hard to get through. I could say it seems probable, given what I've heard, that it would be impossible for the H-bomb to accomodate, to integrate into her current reality, any contact with me. And of course there's the whole other angle I might mention of how re-established contact could be dangerous for me, if the bomb's not grown in ways that include de-fusing, and (moreover) that even to want it still the way I do is arguably not a good thing, or a healthy desire, or an indication of a full measure of self-worth.

More fundamentally, to tell MCH anything, with the kind of context it would need to have meaning, would be to tell her so much I feel I can't tell her, not wanting to either badmouth her friend to her, or report how I hear her friend has badmouthed her (and worse, as word has it).

But, you know me (perhaps) (depending which you you are): my mind keeps touching that "she has grown" thing, like a hole in fabric ("you'll just make it bigger"), and I wonder, and I wish. This even though just weeks ago I saw her, bizarro-surreal "right there" close, for a good long moment, and knew somehow by instinct not to make contact, in those circumstances--- despite so much of my being, in other moments, aching to do that very thing. Same part of my being that was shaken by it, and wondered later whether I'd missed a rare opportunity. Call it the part of me that still hasn't jettisoned that hammered aluminum, just in case.

The poem I keep meaning to mention is one schroederjt pointed out to me in a comment here to a post referring back to this post about my unfinished(?) valediction:

Marilyn Hacker's "Nearly A Valediction"
Quite a bit of verse, huh? I'm tickled that Marilyn also engaged/grappled with the valediction in a complicated way. Years ago, on a whim, I bought a book of hers I stumbled on in the women's bookstore. It had yugg-o cover art (which's been improved since), and a lousy-"big" title, too---Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons---but I fell hook, line & sinker for its cycle of poems tracing the whole life of a romantic relationship. They're almost all sonnets. They play with the form, and, here's the thing, include crazily colloquial language, yet with such (a formalist's) care for each syllable. I sped right through that hefty little volume and still love it when I pick it up.

I guess I say that to say I'm not surprised I liked Marilyn's near-valediction.

As for my own, the only thoughts I've had about the poem since bringing it up here are that I could take the comma out of the title (ooooh) and that it could take the framework (I am drawn to anyway) of being about its being written. And then the strain of difficulty, stops-and-starts, etc., in the writing of it, and thus in it, stand for the difficulty, etc., in the process of farewell it references. The method-cum-theme of "so sensitive you touch it only two steps removed." And valediction is speech that acts. So there's that.

I suppose it could even ask the reader whether there should be a comma in the title.

The comma in the title indicates that the valediction is now being made; no comma and the poem says it's about one not made yet, and not made herein either.

Oh, who knows. Maybe it starts with the encounter:


Valediction Overdue

Finally, it's just a town, I sighed to think I'd come to
feel, wistful but safer, when you'd left. Then I walked through a door
to your face two feet from mine. Which I scrunched. Six ways, then
six more, squinting above its slacked jaw, as if facial muscles
could help me know whether I'm dreaming. Truth is, you'll never
be gone, and I know it. Mutherfuck mutherfuck mutherfuck mutherfuck....


Hmmm. Perhaps it's taking a wrong turn in that last line.  :]

Geez those are some long-ass lines, for this poet.

Wonder if it's the Terri influence.

I've made up probably 5 or 6 songs about the H-bomb since it went off, but haven't finished one poem.

o you dogged construct of the dichotomous
i am likely ever trapped in, trapped out