Evening Without Angels

This past weekend we brought a cut tree into our living room, put multicolored lights on it, and hung ornaments from it, a process always regarded with intense wonder by our cats, who thinks it's odd and exciting. On the top of the tree, we put a star.

When I was growing up, we were only allowed to put birds and pears on our tree, with an angel at the top. In reaction to that, I've always hung anything and everything on my own trees, including bits of baked and painted clay or bells twisted up with pipe cleaners that my kids brought home from preschool. I hang ornaments people have given me as gifts, including a number of very pretty angels.

Looking at the lighted tree this morning, when we all had to get up before dawn, made me think of the poem, "Evening Without Angels," by Wallace Stevens. Like most Stevens poems, it's not one that I feel like I completely "get," but I like the way the words make me feel. It's not a poem I think you need to try to understand; it's enough to try to absorb the images as they go by:

Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
Above the trees? And why the poet as
Eternal chef d'orchestre?

Air is air.
Its vacancy glitters around us everywhere.
Its sounds are not angelic syllables
But our unfashioned spirits realized
More sharply in more furious selves.

And light
That fosters seraphim and is to them
Coiffeur of haloes, fecund jeweler--
Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?
Sad men made angels of the sun, and of
The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,
Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun
And men of day and never of pointed night,
Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air
In an accord of repetitions. Yet,
If we repeat, it is because the wind
Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form
To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its very darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.

...Evening, when the measure skips a beat
And then another, one by one, and all
To a seething minor swiftly modulate.
Bare night is best. Bare earth is best. Bare, bare,
Except for our own houses, huddled low
Beneath the arches and their spangled air,
Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,
Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,
Where the voice that is great within us rises up,
As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

This is a time of year when a lot of us feel like our most "furious selves," isn't it? And we're approaching the longest night of the year. Despite the pronoun, I feel the lines "we are men of sun/And men of day and never of pointed night" because even during this magical time of year, with Christmas lights and trees and angels all around, dawn comes to me as a relief and dusk as something to ward off with lamps and candles, "huddled" in the house.

What is (or will be) on top of your Christmas tree?

Sunday Morning

This past Sunday, convalescing after the flu, I sat in a patch of weak November sunlight coming in through the picture window that has a spot of blood and feathers on it and reread one of my favorite poems, Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning.

It's a long poem, but if you pick out a few lines to admire, it has lovely images. I'm going to comment on how I interpret the lines (at least how I interpret them this week) as I go along.

I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

--Someone is not going to church, but enjoying the sensual pleasures of sleeping in and having a leisurely breakfast.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.

--The sensual pleasures of reality dim in the light of her thoughts about the crucifixion. I think it must be spring, almost Easter.

The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

--There's a gap between how she feels and how she thinks she should feel on this fine morning.

II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

--Why should she have gotten up early, crammed herself into her good clothes, and gone off to a hard pew in a cold church lit mostly by the dimness of the early spring sunlight as it makes its feeble way through the thickness of stained glass? Why should she believe in anything except what she can feel?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

--Can't ordinary things lift her up the way she's been taught that faith in a mythical Heaven can?

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

--She resolves to value what she can experience with her senses, rather than try to cultivate faith in anything she can't experience.

III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

--Jove (or Zeus) had intercourse with humans.

Until our blood, commmingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

--The desire for intercourse with God results in the Virgin birth and the Nativity story of Jesus.

Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?

--Is any part of us more than mortal?

The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

--We'll understand more if we become more than mortal.

IV
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

--I like to hear birdsong in the morning

But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"

--Is there anything more in life than transitory, sensual pleasure?

There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden undergrounds, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured

--These stories don't have the same power for me as anything sensual and real.

As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

--This is what moves me, these are the things that make me feel that life has meaning. (Especially at this time of year, the "desire for June and evening" seems a thought of something impossibly lovely.)

V
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."

--I still feel the need to believe that something of me will live on once I'm gone from the earth.

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.

--Only in death can we know if anything survives death

Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

--The fact that life ends gives urgency and meaning to the everyday events of our lives.

VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

--Could we love the sensual pleasures of the earth as much if they were always available?

With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

--It's the ephemeral qualities of life that keep us going, looking for more.

Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

--What use would these pleasures be if they were eternal and unchanging? How can a song be beautiful without any conflict?

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

--It's the possibility of loss that makes our mortal mothers want to cherish every minute with their children, even the painful (burning) ones.

VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.

--Rituals are what we use to try to understand that which is beyond our understanding.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.

--Rituals are also how we try to make the ephemeral pleasures of the earth immortal--through making music, for example, music that will outlast its makers.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.

--They consciously experience ephemeral pleasure so they can express the full glory of its potential.

And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

--Perhaps the footsteps they leave on our memory will be as transient as morning dew, and as briefly beautiful.

VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."

--She is brought back from her daydreaming by a recollection of what she's been taught in church.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

--Her daydreams are more satisfying to her longing for something beyond transitory sensual pleasure, even though she can't get past the barrier of imagining what could be beyond this world.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

--the beauty of the world must be enough to take her out of herself. It is now evening, and she doesn't know any more than when she started. She can't read anything into the pattern the pigeons are making. She is left with beauty and uncertainty, and with the abundant consolation that ephemeral beauty offers to the alert observer.

After Sunday, we go into the week with purpose, trying to avoid the deer (and around here, the quail) on the highways, washing and eating the berries that are ripe, and flying down to the eventual darkness of the winter solstice on the extended wings of our busy schedules. It happens so fast that sometimes it is good to stop what you're doing, sit in a sunny chair, and daydream. Do you ever have time for that?

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I came back from France thinking that Wallace Stevens, lover of things French and Floridian, might have a poem that would provide a good opening for me to share some of the experiences of what my daughter calls our "French adventure," but I haven't come up with one yet. Instead, I got stuck on one that seems to me related to my recent post about funding for public libraries in Ohio and a post over at Linus's Blanket about whether blog reviewers should add disclaimers to their reviews, in that it's about finding truth--about finding some truth calmly, on your own, in the quiet of a summer night:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Reading only books that you think you agree with--because of disclaimers or reviews or anything else--can lead to increasing narrow-mindedness. Our country is getting fragmented enough without people trying to read only the books that they already agree with. I’d like to see more people read books that challenge some of their beliefs. In fact, I guess that will have to be my summer reading challenge. I'll go out and find a book that I suspect I don't agree with, read it, and report back to you all before September.

Join me in this challenge? It doesn't even have to be a whole book--an essay would do nicely.

Update: For those of you who don't want to read non-fiction this summer, you could choose something outside your usual comfort zone--a new genre, or a classic author if you usually read new fiction. Here are a few suggestions:

Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--for a look at what theocracy could look like in the U.S.
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer--to remind yourself what it's like to be frustrated with dating and marriage rituals
Buckley's Boomsday--to decide if you should worry about whether you'll ever be able to retire
Kaufman's The Laramie Project--an explosion of the excuse that "this sort of thing doesn't happen here"
Hughart's Bridge of Birds--a good story that isn't all it seems
Ozeki's All Over Creation--if you don't know much about modern agriculture
Orwell's 1984 and then Doctorow's Little Brother--if you think safety can be more important than freedom
Anderson's Feed--if you spend much time in front of a screen
Miller's Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath--for company in economic misery

Reading Poems in a Circle

Kim has been presenting poems by Billy Collins (master of the "readable" school of poetry) this month. And although I love his poems, I also love more complicated poems, like those of Wallace Stevens, so I was trying to think of a way to encourage people to move from the more accessible poems to the less. Because if all of your feelings were simple enough for you--or anyone--to be able to articulate them, it would be an easier world.

This is how I read difficult poems: in a circle. Try this:
Read the poem and immediately go back to the beginning and keep reading until you either understand something (an image, the significance of a pause for a line break) or you feel a glimmer of emotion. Then stop. Try to articulate that one thing you understand or feel. Then see if you can relate other pieces of the poem to that understanding, or that feeling. Sometimes you can put the whole poem together that way. Sometimes you can only put a line or two together, but then maybe it’s time to put the poem away. A line or two of poetry in the brain is good for a rainy day.

Here's a demonstration. First, a poem by Michael Hartnett ("Death of an Irishwoman") that fits into the category of "readable" and then a more complicated Wallace Stevens poem ("The Emperor of Ice Cream") on the same general theme.

Death of an Irishwoman

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but pucas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was child's purse, full of useless things.

Aren't the last six lines evocative? I got the feeling that she had outlived her time with "she was a song that nobody sings" and again powerfully with the final line. So I felt some emotion from this poem the first time I read it through, and I didn't have to read it in a circle to feel like I understood something about it.

This one, though, most people have to read in a circle until they're almost dizzy:

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Take from the dresser of deal
Lacking the three glass knobs,
That sheet on which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

When I read this poem in a circle, I stop at the repeated line, thinking that the emperor of ice-cream is kind of like the "king of the hill"--it's a kid who won't have an empire very long. But it's not just kids who like ice cream. Have you ever met anyone who doesn't like ice cream? I haven't! If you were the emperor of ice cream, could you command the ice cream truck to stop in front of your house? Could you afford to eat all the ice cream you wanted? Would you be able to eat all you wanted without lactose intolerance or concern about gaining weight? What would it be like to be the person in charge of all ice cream?

But my understanding that the title "Emperor of Ice Cream" is the most ephemeral of titles is just a stopping place. How does it connect to the "concupiscent curds" and the "dresser of deal"? Many people get caught up in those images and conjure up an image of a whorehouse, which doesn't interfere with understanding the poem as a whole, but doesn't always help, either. The sexual connotation of "whipping" those "concupiscent curds" has to be related to the ephemeral pleasure of being in charge of ice cream--so it becomes a sort of "take your sexual pleasure while you can" idea. And the "dresser of deal" may be a place where money was exchanged for sex, or it may simply be a dresser made of cheap pine wood--but one thing is sure--she didn't take it with her.

So come down farther in the poem. "Let the lamp affix its beam." Look at her apart from the death rituals and the signs that other lives are going on. Whatever she was in life, now she's cold, like ice cream...the suggestion I get is that she might have been as universally liked, and perhaps people fought over who got to tell her what to do. But now nobody can tell her what to do. In the end, we all have the same "emperor."

I don't think the Stevens poem is better; I like both these poems. But the Stevens poem has more lines that stick in my head, and an idea that is interesting in a different way every time I go back to it.

Depression Before Spring

Wallace Stevens' poem Depression Before Spring is about weather and the weariness of waiting:

The cock crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!
But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.

And yes, I'm tired of the frost on the crocus and the lined waterproof boots, and more than ready for slipper green. But also this morning the newspaper is full of speculation about whether we're in a recession or a not-so-great depression, so it's time for some distraction. How many of you have seen the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical CATS, based on T.S. Eliot's poems? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Remember the song about Macavity the Mystery Cat? It had the mysterious music and the flashing lights!

Macavity's a Mystery Cat: he's called the Hidden Paw -
For he's the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there!

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime - Macavity's not there!
You may seek him in the basement, you may look up in the air -
But I tell you once and once again, Macavity's not there!

Mcavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.
He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake;
And when you think he's half asleep, he's always wide awake.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square -
But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!

He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)
And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard's.
And when the larder's looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,
Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke's been stifled,
Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair -
Ay, there's the wonder of the thing! Macavity's not there!

And when the Foreign Office find a Treaty's gone astray,
Or the Admiralty lose some plans and drawings by the way,
There may be a scrap of paper in the hall or on the stair -
But it's useless to investigate - Macavity's not there!
And when the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:
`It must have been Macavity!' - but he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spaer:
At whatever time the deed took place - MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

At our tea and poetry reading this weekend (for which Eleanor and I wore our feather hats), Ron read a parody of Macavity, the Mystery Cat, and I'd like to share it with you now, on this auspicious low-Dow day:

Liquidity, the Accounting Cat
by John Clarke

Liquidity's a mystery; it's very rarely seen,
It strikes and then is gone again, its getaway is clean,
And despite forensic evidence and great deductive flair,
The conclusion's inescapable, Liquidity's not there!

Liquidity, Liquidity, there's nothing like liquidity,
Its presence gives you confidence, its absence is timidity,
You own perhaps a property, you own perhaps a share,
But once you've lost your credit card, Liquidity's not there!
Your understated opulence inheres in what you wear,
But in the end you face the fact, Liquidity's not there!

Liquidity's a nifty term, it's business talk for cash,
It's money not tied up in things or hoovered in the crash,
Investments may return amounts of staggering obscenity,
The vastness of your holdings may explain your great serenity.
In publishing, to take the case of either of the Fabers,
A warehouse full of Larkin and The Bumper Book of Neighbours
Is very well, and when they sell, will satisfy the editors,
But not much use, in real terms, when dealing with the creditors.

Liquidity, Liquidity, there's nothing like Liquidity,
The glint of actual duckets brings respect and dipthelidity,
It's likely to self-immolate on contact with the air,
Say 'Raffle' in a crowded room; Liquidity's not there!

In the conduct of a company (proprietary limited)
There's always a suspicion that the system's maladministered,
In proper corporate planning you allow a little spare,
But when you need the wherewithal, Liquidity's not there!

Liquidity, Liquidity, there's nothing like Liquidity,
In purely economic terms it constitutes validity,
I wish I had a pound for every credit millionaire,
Who completely failed to register, LIQUIDITY WASN'T THERE!
When reputations tumble and the search is on for clues
(I might mention humpo-bumpo, I might mention drinkie-poos)
There's a suspect who can prove he was in Lima at the time,
They can't catch him, he's the brilliant Scarlet Pimpernel of crime!

If that's not enough to get the song playing in your head for the rest of the day, you can hear it here. Does that help? Anyone?

A Mind of Winter

Did you notice that this entire blog turned blue with cold last week?

After getting stuck trying to fly home from the east coast on Sunday, this morning I just was not in the mood to let the threat of weather make me stay home from my haircut appointment. I went off to Columbus (an hour away) hoping the snow would hold off until noon. But it didn't. So I had to drive the white-out divided highway of horrors and then the two-lane wheeltracks of doom until finally, with my white knuckles, I made it home. I used the bathroom and then set out again to pick up kids from school. And just to top off all the driving in snow, I've scheduled a meeting tonight at the local college. I truly feel like a northerner now, because I don't feel like calling it off. And hey, my hair looks good for it.

I kept trying to appreciate the beauty of the scene as I drove. Because, after all, I don't often get out when it's snowing that hard. But my attention kept drifting, and I kept thinking of lines from this poem, The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The snow looked like what was falling down behind a window in The Nutcracker we saw in December. I kept trying to tell myself that it looked like the jubilant snow in a Harry Potter movie. But what it ends up looking like after miles and miles is...nothing.

Comfort and Joy

This really happened (as Cody used to say every time he told a story about his childhood, in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant).

This is the end-of-dinner conversation at my house on a wintry Tuesday night:
Ron comes out of the kitchen, where he has been making tea, scoops the cat (Sammy) up because he's been following him around squeaking insistently, and holds him near Eleanor's face, as she eats her doughnut. I say don't hold the cat up to peoples' faces when they're eating. Ron says that Sammy wants attention and kisses him. Walker and I tell him to take the cat in the bedroom. "Forbidden love," the kids say and then we all chorus "the love that dare not squeak its name."
“I’m laughing too hard to eat my doughnut” I choke.
“That’s the ultimate sign that your life is good” Eleanor declares.

Gradually, I recover from my laughing fit. The parakeets in the corner of the dining room adjust their volume down a notch as I do. Ron goes back to telling Eleanor what she should say to the teacher who told her she had a red face today in the cafeteria. "That's racist," he insists. "She'll give me detention for being a smartass," Eleanor replies.
We continue discussing the school dress code and wondering why it's not allowed to wear a t-shirt with a heart on it if the heart has spikes through it.

After dinner, we watch a heart-warming Christmas special in which Santa and Jesus do a nightclub medley of Christmas songs and Satan sings "It's Christmastime in Hell." Later I have to drive to work in the freezing drizzle, but Ron is reading to both kids and what I have to do ends up taking only a few minutes, so I'm back in time to say goodnight.

Eleanor's declaration has colored the whole evening, for me. It's like this Wallace Stevens poem, Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is:

Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, "Phooey, Phoo!"
She whispered, "Pfui!"

The demi-monde
On the mezzanine
Said "Phoeey!" too,
And a Hey-de-i-do!"

The bee may have all sweet
For his honey-hive-o,
From the eglantine-o.

And the chandeliers are neat...
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the parrots cried,
In a place so debonair.

The Johannisberger, Hans.
I love the metal grapes,
The rusty, battered shapes
Of the pears and of the cheese

And the window's lemon light,
The very will of the nerves,
The crack across the pane,
The dirt along the sill.

Sometimes you take a step back to be able to see something you've missed from day to day, like the dirt along the sill, in order to clean it up before you invite guests for dinner. And then sometimes you are spurred to take a giant step back ("mother may I?" "Yes, you may") and you can see everything, even the dirt, as part of the particular joy of that moment.

Words

"I'm afraid of worms, Roxanne." ("Words!")

The builder was asking me about which parts of the door to our new bathroom we would stain, and which parts we would paint. "Will you stain the lintel?" he asked. I looked at him, mind rushing to put an image with the word "lintel." No image came. Finally he had to walk me into the bedroom and point to the lintel, which is the frame around the door. I think of it as "molding," but that's not le mot juste.

I am unused to other people knowing words I don't know. If I had paid more attention to my favorite graduate school professor, Eugene Hammond, I would have learned more words for the frames around doors and windows (he advised that, in the course of advising writers to use details in their descriptions).

With first-year college students, the single most successful teaching technique I have discovered for getting them to understand--and possibly like--a poem is to make them look up the words. (How do you "make" students do anything? You give them a quiz on it. It doesn't matter how little the quiz is worth, in terms of their final grade.)

The poem I think I learned the most about when I looked up the words is "The Emperor of Ice Cream," by Wallace Stevens (from my list of essential poems and a favorite for both me and permanent quivive):

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The word that illuminated the poem, for me, is "deal." Sure, I got the connotation, that maybe it's where the men left their money for the dead woman, but for years I didn't get the denotation of the word--literally, it's a cheap dresser made of soft pine wood, one that won't last for more than a generation. I've seen a lot of students get the connotation of the word "horny" without getting the denotation, which is "calloused." Is this a measure of the power of the poem? That it can evoke feeling without us even realizing exactly how?

I think the word "concupiscent" might work in such a non-logical way. How on earth can curds, presumably for ice-cream, have "strong sexual desire" (the definition for "concupiscent")? Is it the way he's whipping them that's concupiscent? Is it that desire is like ice-cream, and you'd better enjoy it before it wanes again (is this why husbands typically touch their wives amorously while the wives are trying to finish loading the dishwasher?)

This is a good poem for a spring morning. It's less adult than the finale of Avenue Q, with its decorous "only for now." It's like a kid playing "king of the hill," except that the object of this game is to have an empire of...um, ice cream. Do the rules include whether you're still an emperor if some of your flavors melt? Maybe you're just king of one flavor then, and finally just "dumb," that, is, speechless, probably because your mouth is cold and full.

Our house/my mind is a dump

I am a person who parts with empty cardboard boxes with great reluctance. I still have some of my maternity clothes, plus a bag of baby clothes with the left arm slit or missing because Ron said we should keep it "in case" something else happened like our 14-month-old daughter falling off a two-step Little Tikes slide and breaking her wrist on the grass. Last night, Ron finally persuaded me to at least store some of the old taco sauce jars that I use for drinking glasses downstairs (often a stop on the long way to the trash). This morning my son filled up our trash cans with stacks of papers and old pieces of toys after the cat dropped a mouse from her jaws inside our house, and it ran into Walker's room. In the process of finding it and taking it outside (still alive), we got a bit of cleaning done in that room.

Generally, our household is not a place where papers, catalogs, magazines, or books ever get thrown away. The whole idea of a commonplace book, for me, is to have a place to keep all the ideas that I'm interested in and want to make a part of myself. When you live with them long enough, they become commonplace ideas.

So instead of spring cleaning, I'm thinking of one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens:

The Man on the Dump

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho. . . The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia, the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut--how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these thing except on the dump.

Now, the in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),
Between that disgust and this, between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on),
One feels the purifying change. One rejects
The trash.

That's the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow's voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher's honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest, is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

Snow

It is snowing here today. When it snows, I always murmur Wallace Stevens to myself, the end of 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
It's the perfect way of describing our sense of expectation and dullness, the white cloak that snow draws over the world, and underneath it we see less and less until complete darkness sets in and we can't tell if the snow is still falling or not. It's an endless, quiet, present.