Well, tonight I board a flight for London. I traditionally spend the Saturday before the book first book fairs settling into my hotel and then heading out to visit London pubs with my old Oxford friends, which usually means I walk into the fairs without having really slept for two days. And that is how I like it. Takes the edge off. Anyway, it's been a lot of fun guest-editing here at Best American Poetry. I hope you found something to enjoy in my posts. Please head over to my own blog, E-Verse Radio, where these sorts of diversions go on daily.
And, finally, here’s one I think is a real stunner, a heart-breaker, from Alicia Stallings, from the forthcoming Swallow Anthology of New American Poets:
“Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother” by A.E. StallingsFirst—hell is not so far underground—
My hair gets tangled in the roots of trees
& I can just make out the crunch of footsteps,
The pop of acorns falling, or the chime
Of a shovel squaring a fresh grave or turning
Up the tulip bulbs for separation.
Day & night, creatures with no legs
Or too many, journey to hell and back.
Alas, the burrowing animals have dim eyesight.
They are useless for news of the upper world.
They say the light is “loud” (their figures of speech
All come from sound; their hearing is acute).The dead are just as dull as you would imagine.
They evolve like the burrowing animals—losing their sight.
They may roam abroad sometimes—but just at night—
They can only tell me if there was a moon.
Again and again, moth-like, they are duped
By any beckoning flame—lamps and candles.
They come back startled & singed, sucking their fingers,
Happy the dirt is cool and dense and blind.
They are silly & grateful and don’t remember anything.
I have tried to tell them stories, but they cannot attend.
They pester you like children for the wrong details—
How long were his fingernails? Did she wear shoes?
How much did they eat for breakfast? What is snow?
And then they pay no attention to the answers.My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.
But here there is no fodder for small talk.
The weather is always the same. Nothing happens.
(Though at times I feel the trees, rocking in place
Like grief, clenching the dirt with tortuous toes.)
There is nothing to eat here but raw beets & turnips.
There is nothing to drink but mud-filtered rain.
Of course, no one goes hungry or toils, however many—
(The dead breed like the bulbs of daffodils—
Without sex or seed—all underground—
Yet no race has such increase. Worse than insects!)I miss you and think about you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Though I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same thing as mushrooms.
Yet no dog is so loyal as the dead,
Who have no wives or children and no lives,
No motives, secret or bare, to disobey.
Plus, my husband is a kind, kind master;
He asks nothing of us, nothing, nothing at all—
Thus fall changes to winter, winter to fall,
While we learn idleness, a difficult lesson.He does not understand why I write letters.
He says that you will never get them. True—
Mulched-leaf paper sticks together, then rots;
No ink but blood, and it turns brown like the leaves.
He found my stash of letters, for I had hid it,
Thinking he’d be angry. But he never angers.
He took my hands in his hands, my shredded fingers
Which I have sliced for ink, thin paper cuts.
My effort is futile, he says, and doesn’t forbid it.
My wife is a classical archaeologist. This takes her annually to a dig at an Etruscan acropolis in Tuscany. Together, we wind up in all sorts of remote places in several continents, far from roads (at least modern ones) or any hint of civilizing influence. These are, of course, magical times, when we scale a ruin in a field of olive trees above a glistening Aegean or poke up slippery stone stairs a mile above a ravine in Peru to find a place where ancient rites were enacted, or descend into airless tombs painted with fantastic figures far below the earth. I’ve often thought I’d like to assemble a book of poems relating to archaeology and archaeologists. I have learned from visiting the homes of Lynn's colleagues that they are fiercely dedicated to their field, and they will consequently purchase anything that relates to it, refrigerator magnets, posters, figurines, and, of course, books. There may only be a few thousand of them, but by the Lilliputian publishing standards of poetry, that’s a serious audience. . . If any editor out there would like me to work up a prospectus for such a book, just say the word.
Poetry and archaeology have wound up in bed many times (my favorite Stallings, "An Ancient Dog Grave, Unearthed During Construction of the Athens Metro," makes me tear up every time I read it). In fact, two of my favorite Auden quotes appear in his poem "Archaeology": "guessing is always / more fun than knowing" and, later in the same poem, "What they call History / is nothing to vaunt of, // being made, as it is, / by the criminal in us: / goodness is timeless."
I’ll reproduce just two poems on archaeology today, though there are many, many others. Please write in with your favorites!
To Clio, Muse of History
On learning that The Etruscan Warrior in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is proved a modern forgery
One more casualty,
One more screen memory penetrated at last
To be destroyed in the endless anamnesis
Always progressing, never arriving at a cure.
My childhood in the glare of that giant form
Corrupts with history, for I too fought in the War.
He, great male beauty
That stood for the sexual thrust of power,
His target eyes inviting the universal victim
To fatal seduction, the crested and greaved
Survivor long after shield and sword are dust,
Has now become another lie about our life.
Smash the idol, of course.
Bury the pieces deep as the insterest of truth
Requires. And you may in time compose the future
Smoothly without him, though it is too late
To disinfect the past of his huge effigy
By any further imposition of your hands.
But tell us no more
Enchangments, Clio. History has given
And taken away; murders become memories,
And memories ecome the beautiful obligations:
As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,
The interpretation is only the next room of the dream.
For I remember how
We children stared, learning from him
Unspeakable things about war that weren’t in the books;
And how the Museum store offered for sale
His photographic reproductions in full color
With the ancient genitals blacked out.
Augusto Jandolo: On Excavating an Etruscan Tomb by Tom Sleigh
“When we lit our torches
My eyes went blind in the cave’s
Cool dark—
the damp rock rough against my palms,
I remember how we strained to lift
the great stone lid: slowly
It rose, stood on end ... then fell
Heavily aside, crashing down
in the smoky,
Turbulent light
So that just for an instant I saw—
It wasn’t a skeleton I saw;
not bones,
But a body, the arms and legs stiffly outstretched--
A young warrior’s flesh still dressed
In armor, with his helmet, spear, shield, and greaves
As though he’d just been laid in the grave:
For just that moment
Inside the sarcophagus I saw the dead live—
but then, beneath
The sea-change of our torches,
At the first touch of air, the warrior
Who’d lain there, his body inviolable
For centuries, dissolved—
dissolved, as we looked on,
Into dust . . .
his helmet rolling right, his round shield sagging
Into the void beneath his breastplate, the greaves
Collapsing as his thighs gave way . . .
But in the aura
Round our torches a golden powder
Rose up in the glow and seemed to hover.”
We'll close out this week with some of old Auden’s thoughts on books and reading:
- Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
- What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
- For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
- A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
- Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
Thanks for sticking around this week. I hope you found some of my posts amusing, at least. All best wishes. Hope to see you over at E-Verse Radio.
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