FROM GHENT. ALSO FROM KALAMAZOO

The second thing they teach you

At the tourist bureau in Ghent

Is that there was no good news

And certainly not from Aix;

Browning made it up.

His eyebrows rising heavenwards

The chief clerk asks

“And who would give a horse

Their last measure of wine?”

On a narrow street in Kalamazoo

Where everything’s old and nothing is new

On a rainy day, in that shadowed way,

I stood a while and thought of you.

On every corner in Kalamazoo

A church stands. Ghosts have much ado

Beneath a steeple to pass as people

On Stuart or Westedge Avenue

The false is close kin to the true

The past will always claim its due

And filled with rue I dreamt of you

On that narrow street in Kalamazoo

ANOTHER ANNE MILTON POEM

There are many Anne Milton poems. Deal with it.

God came to Anne Milton’s house

One wet November night to find

Satan in the kitchen drinking tea

With just a touch of something in it

To ward off the chill. Satan nodded as if

It was the most ordinary thing to see

His great friend, his eternal foe

Contracting Himself so that his head

Barely scraped against the low ceiling.

Another cup appeared; Anne filled it

Angels crowded around the house

Peering through windows, listening at doors

Having hastily made for themselves bodies

From mist or smoke or gutter-fallen leaves.

Abetha Gill,46,Anne’s red-haired maid,

Drove them briskly away, saying

“This is a respectable house; we’ll not have

Angels larking about. There’s the Queenshead

Three roads over. It is filled with demons

But they have manners. Pay for your own drinks

And there will be no problems.”

Parents

The following was written a little while ago but it feels right to post it today. There are other people who have left their poetry with me – including Rick, who taught me the Browning beginning “Grr! There you go, my heart’s abhorrence!” and Carlynn, whose copy of Don Juan I still have (I didn’t steal it! She had sold it to Powell’s in Hyde Park). Then, of course, there are those who are themselves poems.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day my mother died, and I’ve been thinking about her. In particular, I find myself conjuring up her voice when she recited Edna St. Vincent Millay’s My candle burns at both ends/ It shall not last the night/ But, oh my foes and ah my friends/ It gives such a lovely light. I believe this is a slight misquotation, actually, but my mother had a talent for embellishment, and it is her voice I am hearing more than Millay’s. I took hearing this sort of thing as a matter of course and it was years before it occurred to me that most people aren’t prone to breaking into scraps of poetry. You could hear her admiration for the poem and the poet especially in the last line. She put on no airs when poetry broke from her; didn’t stand up straighter or put her shoulders back; she did it almost without thought, as some people whistle or talk to themselves when doing a job of work.

            My father knew a great deal of poetry too, but it came when he summoned it in conversation or when it would add to or illustrate something he wrote; it didn’t often come of its own will to him as it did to my mother. (He did recite some set pieces to his three children when we were all very young, but usually once we’d been put to bed for the night. Perhaps he hoped the two year old whom he was keeping company would be so stunned by hearing the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth suddenly performed that we’d forget our vigilance and be surprised by sleep. After he had died, though, I found some he had written.) When I find myself muttering “Just for a handful of silver he sold us!” while washing dishes or warning fellow commuters that “Clay lies still but blood’s a rover/ Breath’s a ware that will not keep/ Up now! When the journey’s over/ Time enough there’ll be to sleep.” I am simply being my mother’s son; when I pause to reflect that why I do this, I am my father’s.

Today's poem

ANNE MILTON SPEAKS ABOUT SATAN, WHO HAS STOPPED BY AFTER AN EVENING SPENT LISTENING TO HER BROTHER JOHN DICTATING PARADISE LOST

To give him his due – unwise to give him less! –

Satan is the best of mimics. When he talks about

His family I can see them each before me

His spine stiffens; the humor flees from his eyes

And there is Michael; his fingers on the hilt

Of a rustless sword. A subtle twitch; Uriel is there

Always a step behind and two steps to the side.

I’ve never met Galadriel, but I know her blink;

I know how the Recording Angel cocks his head

Listening for the echo of his own lost name.

Then God is there and there is no room for me

Too much light, too much roaring silence.

If I could speak, if I could ask, if I could exist

In the face of this, I would beg that it stop.

It does; my house stands; I am not mere ashes.

Thank God! It is only Satan sitting here

A hand on his forehead, his eyes like candles.

As far as I am concerned, Anne Milton did not die young lived long enough to make friends with Satan, who would come by after a long evening of listening to John dictate Paradise Lost. As proof that this is so, I have a large number of poems by or about her. Who could ask for more solid evidence than this? (Comments are more than welcome; however I already know about Galadriel).

Feet and a poem about St. Jerome's lion

        I have generally been fond of my feet; if not quite those of a human being they are those of a passing honest, quite possibly a sedulous, ape. They were my father’s feet before me, and probably his father’s before him, running (or, more likely, dignifiedly ambling) back to my ancestor who had other concerns than coming down from the trees. Now I’m told that feet like this shant do at all; they should have an arch or some such fancy new-fangled structure. (The podiatrist kept circling back with wonder to how very flat they are). The Achilles tendon is not happy apparently, and an unhappy Achilles can lead only to the fall of Troy and the rise of Greek literature. A variety of things should be done; strange footwear worn; odd exercises done; savage gods propiatiated. At some point there will be a filmed gait analysis. (I suspect it will go viral; who would not wish to see me walking? Perhaps I should do a little dancing as well).

        All this is mere prologue to a poem inspired by having seen St. Jerome sitting in a Manhattan doorway (there was no mistaking him; he looked just like El Greco’s painting). Saint Jerome, of course, has a lion (Saint Anthony has a pig; Saint Lucy carries her eyes on a plate. Being a saint has all kinds of cool perogatives).

After all this time together the lion

Can work small miracles.To see him

Following St. Jerome on Lexington Avenue

You would say he is a dog. Of course

The real dogs know. They have decided

One of them must learn to speak

The flat language of men. “Beware!”

She will say; “there is a lion here

And he has a saint with him!

Quick, make this next turn

We can take Madison home.”

 

POEMS AND NO NEWS FROM VENEZUELA

          So far, the proportion of Venezuelan to American readers of this blog is 1 to 477. On the other hand, my one lost Venezuelan is the only soul in all of South America to wander here; I hope this makes her (or him, or it) quietly proud.

TWO SIDES

                             I

So slow the change; there was no second

On which I could have tapped my foot

Saying on one side “And now I am his”

And on the other “And now I am my own.”

The weather grew colder; that’s all

Until I knew he no longer stood

Between the north wind and me.

                             II

When my soul was lost I could

Have pilgrimmed forth to find her

Or slept easy, free of the weight

Of her regard for me.

I took, instead, a room in town

And gathered scraps and bits

Trying to make a new one.

Rabbits and Spain. Also Ghent

Questions multiply. I still haven’t figured out why the rabbits wanted to hide Spain, nor why they didn’t succeed better. Of course, it may be that they succeeded far better than any of us know, and the Spain we see is merely a small portion of the Spain we don’t. This blog has been accessed nine times by people in Germany – perhaps one person who keeps making the same mistake, typing “Shrewsburyclock.blogspot.com,” when he or she means to type “catvideos.org” – and one Venezuelan. If a German is willing to look into this question of what the rabbits are up to, the Venezuelan might be willing to translate.

Meanwhile, another poem from Ghent.

They tell you, when you begin in Ghent

The most junior Tourist Bureau employee

That you must never show surprise.

No one plans to visit Ghent

Yet somehow there are tourists

Each and every one of whom

Has taken a wrong turning.

Some missed the left at Alberquerque;

Others, midway in life’s journey

In a dark forest, paused

And Vergil passed them by.

Not Hell do they visit; only Ghent.

Help them make the best of it and never

Say what brought you here.