This poem, all my life.

By Frank O’Hara:

Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then

when we were still first rate

and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

It’s not use worrying about Time

but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves

and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal

we didn’t need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster

or greener than now if you were with me O you

were the best of all my days

[1950]

Wild horses, Shackleford Banks © Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams 2016

Surfacing

with Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951-2016).

. . . They would
Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees
Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

from “Song

An Overlay of Foxes

Yesterday at dusk, out on a walk, I saw another fox. The roads were empty, and the fox stopped in the center lane to look at me. I watched as it turned and limped into the treeline. Perhaps it was hurt, or perhaps foxes always appear to be limping prettily and daintily to me. In any case, a red-tailed hawk swooped low over my shoulder and vanished after it. I could have reached up and grazed the bird's belly with my fingertips. That hawk ate an opossum a few evenings ago. My neighbor made a film of it. Maybe all this is why, today, I have been in three places: Lia Purpura's "Red: an Invocation," Margaret Atwood's "Red Fox," and the overlay of these two pieces in my own puttering brain. The overlay, I'm coming to understand, is memory: my fox underpinned by theirs. Like shadows behind these two works are all the other foxes I've read about, and isn't it something how many worlds we carry and lay down for our own feet to walk again and again.

I first read Purpura's flash essay in the Seneca Review years and years ago. It begins:

"I remember the fox in the light I drove forth. It was just before dawn. The headlights lit the fox's eyes, who did not blink but passed the light back, so it shone between us. Two beams of dust in the colloidal silence spread and touched the dark brush by the side of the alley. The fox was ember-colored, fresh-snapped, and already cooling."

And here is Atwood's poem:

Red Fox

The red fox crosses the ice
intent on none of my business.
It's winter and slim pickings.

I stand in the bushy cemetery,
pretending to watch birds,
but really watching the fox
who could care less.
She pauses on the sheer glare
of the pond. She knows I'm there,
sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder.
If I had a gun or dog
or a raw heart, she'd smell it.
She didn't get this smart for nothing.

She's a lean vixen: I can see
the ribs, the sly
trickster's eyes, filled with longing
and desperation, the skinny
feet, adept at lies.

Why encourage the notion
of virtuous poverty?

It's only an excuse
for zero charity.
Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger
corrupts absolutely,
or almost. Of course there are mothers,
squeezing their breasts
dry, pawning their bodies,
shedding teeth for their children,
or that's our fond belief.
But remember - Hansel
and Gretel were dumped in the forest
because their parents were starving.
Sauve qui peut. To survive
we'd all turn thief

and rascal, or so says the fox,
with her coat of an elegant scoundrel,
her white knife of a smile,
who knows just where she's going:

to steal something
that doesn't belong to her -
some chicken, or one more chance,
or other life.

The World Offers Itself

Late last night, at around midnight, we rode bikes far out into the marsh over the rain-slicked wood jetties. Heat lightning over the sound and the ocean, and the tall grass lit and the sea did too and it all went on forever.

 

 

Here's a poem's been on my mind lately. 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver...

 
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
 

Something Like Process

Oversimplified, it goes like this:

Return to Anne Carson's 'Short Talk on Shelter' --> fish heart diagram --> etymology of ventricle, of atrium --> memory of moment --> vicious pruning of moment --> fictionalizing moment --> braiding, drafting, editing --> braiding, drafting, editing --> send to Eric --> cut, cut, cut, reposition, reformat, retitle --> poem?

And running under this whole rickety hull is a benthic depth of struggle.

I'll leave you with Anne Carson & one of the prettiest passages I've ever come across. Will you let me know if you like it? You know how it can get lonesome being alone with something beautiful?

'Short Talk on Shelter'

You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it’s because of the phosphorous. They eat it. There are shacks like that down along the river. I am writing this to be as a wrong as possible to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now you tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me.