With dark cloud cover looming low again every single day, I can think of nothing but litany poems. Everything seems to be repetition. Nothing seems to have much of a point except drinking or dancing or anything that, at least for the moment, might bring me out of the moment...
So I offer you Mary Ruefle's poem "Merengue":
I'm sorry to say it, but fucking
is nothing. To the gods, we look
like dogs. Still, they watch.
Did you lose your wallet?
Did you rip up the photo?
Did you pick up the baby
and kiss its forehead?
Did you drive into a deer?
Did you hack at the grass
as if it could kill you?
Did you ask your mother for milk?
Did you light the candles?
Did you count the buttons on your shirt?
Were you off by one? Did you start again?
Did you learn how to cut a pineapple,
open a coconut?
Did you carry a body once it had died?
For how long and how far?
Did you do the merengue?
Did you wave at the train?
Did you finish the puzzle, or save it for morning?
Did you say something? Would you repeat it?
Did you throw the bottle against the wall?
Did it break? Did you clean it up?
Did you tear down the web? What did you do
with the bug the spider was saving?
Did you dive without clothes into cold water?
Have you been born?
What book will you be reading when you die?
If it's a good one, you won't finish it.
If it's a bad one, what a shame.
I'm reading two books that I don't want to be reading when I die because then, well, "what a shame." How about you? Are you reading a good one? What do you figure your chances are for getting to finish it?
Showing posts with label Mary Ruefle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mary Ruefle. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Monday, November 15, 2010
The Intended
Well, the choice is made. Eleanor applied for an early decision to a college that is eleven hours away by road. We'll know in a month if they will accept her for next year.
She's been asking for copies of some of her favorite books. She got a nice, leatherbound copy of the Narnia stories for her birthday in August, she already has The Lord of the Rings and The Borribles, and we might need to get her a set of the Harry Potter books.
Probably she'll leave the framed print of the Lady of Shalott that she carried in her suitcase all the way home from the Tate Gallery when she was six years old. She may leave the seascape she picked out when she was nine from the children's gallery at a local arts festival. But I wonder if she'll take her Hiroshige print.
I'll be thinking about this poem, Mary Ruefle's "The Intended," all the next month:
One wants so many things...
One wants simply, said the lady,
to sit on the bank and throw stones
while another wishes he were standing
in the Victoria and Albert Museum
looking at Hiroshige's Waterfall:
one would like to be able to paint
like that, and Hiroshige wishes
he could create himself out of the
Yoro sea spray in Mino province where
a girl under the Yoro waterfall wants
to die, not quite sure who her person is,
but that the water falls like a sheet of tin
and another day's thrown in the sieve:
one can barely see the cherry blossoms
pinned up in little buns like the white hair
of an old woman who was intended for this hour,
the hour intended to sit simply on the bank
at the end of a long life, throwing stones,
each one hitting the water with the tick of
a hairpin falling in front of a mirror.
When "another day's thrown in the sieve," there have to be a few remembrances caught in the bottom--a story, a picture, a shoe so old it has the imprint of a foot in its sole.
She's been asking for copies of some of her favorite books. She got a nice, leatherbound copy of the Narnia stories for her birthday in August, she already has The Lord of the Rings and The Borribles, and we might need to get her a set of the Harry Potter books.
Probably she'll leave the framed print of the Lady of Shalott that she carried in her suitcase all the way home from the Tate Gallery when she was six years old. She may leave the seascape she picked out when she was nine from the children's gallery at a local arts festival. But I wonder if she'll take her Hiroshige print.
I'll be thinking about this poem, Mary Ruefle's "The Intended," all the next month:
One wants so many things...
One wants simply, said the lady,
to sit on the bank and throw stones
while another wishes he were standing
in the Victoria and Albert Museum
looking at Hiroshige's Waterfall:
one would like to be able to paint
like that, and Hiroshige wishes
he could create himself out of the
Yoro sea spray in Mino province where
a girl under the Yoro waterfall wants
to die, not quite sure who her person is,
but that the water falls like a sheet of tin
and another day's thrown in the sieve:
one can barely see the cherry blossoms
pinned up in little buns like the white hair
of an old woman who was intended for this hour,
the hour intended to sit simply on the bank
at the end of a long life, throwing stones,
each one hitting the water with the tick of
a hairpin falling in front of a mirror.
When "another day's thrown in the sieve," there have to be a few remembrances caught in the bottom--a story, a picture, a shoe so old it has the imprint of a foot in its sole.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Perfect Reader
Every once in a while I have to watch the movie Elizabethtown in order to have the courage to go on with my life, to make 'em wonder why I'm still smiling. And then I go out into the world and remind myself that it's really not all about me. Even if I am six feet tall and wearing red, everyone is not looking at me; in fact many of them saw and dismissed me years ago.
I obsess, though. I think about what I'm going to do and say as if it's going to make some kind of indelible impression. I'm like the speaker of this poem by Mary Ruefle, who I think believes what she is saying at the same time she's being amused by the absurdity of it:
Perfect Reader
I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:
I throw my arms around a tree, I kiss the pink
and peeling bark, its dead skin, and the papery
feel of its fucked-up beauty arouses me, lends my life
a certain gait, like the stout man walking to work
who sees a peony in his neighbor's yard and thinks ah,
there is a subject of white interpolation, and then
the petals fall apart for a long time, as long as it takes
summer to turn to snow, and I go home at the end and watch
the news about the homeless couple who met in the park,
and then the weather, to see how they will feel tomorrow.
Trying on other points of view can be, oddly, a solipsistic exercise. I like the title of this poem, the way it seems to intimate that the perfect reader is the one most like . . . you.
I obsess, though. I think about what I'm going to do and say as if it's going to make some kind of indelible impression. I'm like the speaker of this poem by Mary Ruefle, who I think believes what she is saying at the same time she's being amused by the absurdity of it:
Perfect Reader
I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:
I throw my arms around a tree, I kiss the pink
and peeling bark, its dead skin, and the papery
feel of its fucked-up beauty arouses me, lends my life
a certain gait, like the stout man walking to work
who sees a peony in his neighbor's yard and thinks ah,
there is a subject of white interpolation, and then
the petals fall apart for a long time, as long as it takes
summer to turn to snow, and I go home at the end and watch
the news about the homeless couple who met in the park,
and then the weather, to see how they will feel tomorrow.
Trying on other points of view can be, oddly, a solipsistic exercise. I like the title of this poem, the way it seems to intimate that the perfect reader is the one most like . . . you.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Glory
This morning my morning glories are at their peak of glory. It's the time of year for glory--one last big explosion of it before the frost... come to think of it, it's almost time for northern gardeners to be getting out the insecticidal soap before bringing in the potted plants. Always something to do besides dream the autumn away. Those of us who are "not very high up on the vocational chart," as the poet Mary Ruefle puts it, have a little time for reverie, not to mention obsessional posting of autumn poems all the way up until the equinox:
Glory
The autumn aster, those lavender ones,
and the dark-blooming sedum
are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth
with the remote intensity of a dream. These things
take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up
on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see,
everything I can think of. I want ordinary men and women,
brushing their teeth, to feel the ocean in their mouth.
I am going to glorify the sink with toothpaste spat in it.
I am going to say it's a stretch of beach where the foam
rolls back and leaves little shells. Ordinary people
with a fear of worldly things, illness, pain, accidents,
poverty, of dark, of being alone, of misfortune.
The fears of everyday life. People who quietly and secretly
bear their dread, who do not speak freely of it to others.
People who have difficulty separating themselves
from the world around them, like a spider hanging
off the spike of a spider mum, in an inland autumn,
away from the sea, away from that most unfortunate nation
where people are butterballs dying of meat and drink.
I want to glorify the even tinier spiders in the belly of the spider
and in the closed knot of the mum's corolla, so this is likely
to go on into winter. Didn't I say we were speaking of autumn
with the remote intensity of a dream? The deckle edge of a cloud:
blood seeping through a bandage. Three bleached beech leaves
hanging on a twig. A pair of ruined mushrooms. The incumbent
snow. The very air. The imported light. All autumn struggling
to be gay, as people do in the midst of their woe.
I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one's mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That's when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the world glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw.
Something that would have no meaning in the astral realm.
One doesn't want to glorify everything. What might I actually say
when confronted with the view from K2? I'm not sure
I would say anything. What's your opinion?
You're a man with a corona in your mouth,
a woman with a cottonball in her purse,
what's your conception of the world?
What is your conception of the world today? Are you having one of those days when a pleasant feeling casts a glow on everything else you do? A landmark day when you're doing everything in honor of a birthday or anniversary? A day when some trouble shadows your attempts to get everything else done?
Glory
The autumn aster, those lavender ones,
and the dark-blooming sedum
are beginning to bloom in the rainy earth
with the remote intensity of a dream. These things
take over. I am a glorifier, not very high up
on the vocational chart, and I glorify everything I see,
everything I can think of. I want ordinary men and women,
brushing their teeth, to feel the ocean in their mouth.
I am going to glorify the sink with toothpaste spat in it.
I am going to say it's a stretch of beach where the foam
rolls back and leaves little shells. Ordinary people
with a fear of worldly things, illness, pain, accidents,
poverty, of dark, of being alone, of misfortune.
The fears of everyday life. People who quietly and secretly
bear their dread, who do not speak freely of it to others.
People who have difficulty separating themselves
from the world around them, like a spider hanging
off the spike of a spider mum, in an inland autumn,
away from the sea, away from that most unfortunate nation
where people are butterballs dying of meat and drink.
I want to glorify the even tinier spiders in the belly of the spider
and in the closed knot of the mum's corolla, so this is likely
to go on into winter. Didn't I say we were speaking of autumn
with the remote intensity of a dream? The deckle edge of a cloud:
blood seeping through a bandage. Three bleached beech leaves
hanging on a twig. A pair of ruined mushrooms. The incumbent
snow. The very air. The imported light. All autumn struggling
to be gay, as people do in the midst of their woe.
I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one's mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That's when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the world glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw.
Something that would have no meaning in the astral realm.
One doesn't want to glorify everything. What might I actually say
when confronted with the view from K2? I'm not sure
I would say anything. What's your opinion?
You're a man with a corona in your mouth,
a woman with a cottonball in her purse,
what's your conception of the world?
What is your conception of the world today? Are you having one of those days when a pleasant feeling casts a glow on everything else you do? A landmark day when you're doing everything in honor of a birthday or anniversary? A day when some trouble shadows your attempts to get everything else done?
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