Ablaze with Life’s Passion

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
from Sylvia Plath’s …. "Tulips"

Hunkering Down

The last half of Margaret Atwood: Selected Poems II focuses a lot on snakes, not a favorite of mine, and old age, a subject I’m more familiar with, but not much fonder of. There are titles like “Aging Female Poet Sits on the Balcony,” “Aging Female Poet Reads Little Magazines,” and “Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day.” While these poems aren’t without their insights into life, they’re not particularly the kind of insights that engage this Aging Male Blogger.

However, I can certainly identify with the attitude expressed in:

PORCUPINE MEDITATION

I used to have tricks, dodges, a whole sackful.
I could outfox anyone,
double back, cover my tracks,
walk backwards, the works.
I left it somewhere, that knack
of running, that good luck.

Now I have only
one trick left: head down, spikes out,
brain tucked in.
I can roll up:
thistle as animal, a flower of quills,
that’s about it.

I lie in the grass and watch the sunlight pleating
the skin on the backs of my hands
as if I were a toad, squashed and drying.

I don’t even wade through spring water
to cover my scent.
I can’t be bothered.

I squat and stink, thinking:
peace and quiet are worth something.
Here I am, dogs,
nose me over,
go away sneezing, snouts full of barbs
hooking their way to your brain.
Now you’ve got some
of my pain. Much good may it do you.

In the old days, says two or three months ago, I could dodge with the best of them. Now with my back out of whack, I wouldn’t dare dodge unless my life depended on it. Way back in the old days, I could verbally parry with anyone I ever met. Sarcasm was my weapon of choice that I honed ever since I discovered that you lost even when you won a fist fight.

Lately, though, I have less desire to fight back. I merely want to lower my head and duck and cover, letting the storms of controversy pass over. No Burningbird, be I.

I just wish I had the porcupine’s quills to protect myself. I just want to squat here thinking, trying to find a little peace and quiet. I’m afraid that the readers who come by to visit lately may, like the dog, feel like they come away in pain, like a hound with a snout full of barbs.

Yesterday one of my ex-teacher friends sent me a short, succinct summary of the effect my blog had on her: “After months I read your blog … that was what was depressing … or maybe I should say … it was the way the world is.”

Atwoods Selected Poems II

I’ve started reading Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 197-1986. While I’m a little turned off by how many of the poems are seen through a decidedly feminist perspective, it’s impossible to deny the power of many of her best poems. Perhaps the war in Iraq has made me more sensitive to certain poems, but my favorite poems in the section entitled “From Two-Headed Poems:1978” are found in a selection entitled “Four Small Elegies (1838, 1977),” particularly sections I and II.

The sense of moral superiority currently being displayed by some of our neighboring bloggers to the North may well have influenced my choice of these poems for the poems must be read in light of this endnote, at least for those of us unfamiliar with Canadian history:

NOTE: After the failure of the uprising in Lower Canada (now Québec) in 1838, the British army and an assortment of volunteers carried out reprisals against the civilian population around Beauharnois, burning houses and barns and turning the inhabitants out into the snow. No one was allowed to give them shelter and many froze to death. The men were arrested as rebels; those who were not home were presumed to be rebels and their houses were burned.

The volunteers from Glengarry were Scots, most of them in Canada because their houses had also been burned during the Highland Clearances, an aftermath of the British victory at Culloden. Dufferin, Simcoe, and Grey are the names of three counties in Ontario, settled around this period.

The first elegy is devoted to the women who were turned out into the snow after their houses were burned:

BEAUHARNOIS

The bronze clock brought
with such care over the sea,
which ticked like the fat slow heart
of a cedar, of a grandmother,
melted and its hundred years
of time ran over the ice and froze there.

We are fixed by this frozen clock
at the edge of the winter forest.
Ten below zero.
Shouts in a foreign language
come down blue snow.

The women in their thin nightgowns
disappear wordlessly among the trees.
Here and there a shape,
a limp cloth bundle, a child
who could not keep up
lies sprawled face down in a drift
near the trampled clearing.

No one could give them clothes or shelter,
these were the orders.

We didn’t hurt them, the man said,
we didn’t touch them.

The startling images of the heirloom clock frozen in time, of women, ghost-like floating through the trees in their nightgowns, and, most of all, of the “limp cloth bundle” that turns out to be frozen child who could not keep up with his mother stand in sharp contrast to the startling truth that ends the poem, “we didn’t hurt them, the man said,/ we didn’t touch them.” Sounds remarkably similar to the half truths we often hear in modern war doesn’t it? Remind anyone else of Operation Iraqi Freedom?

Although this first poem is the most moving of the four, the second poem in the sequence is, at least to me, the most chilling:

II BEAUHARNOIS, GLENGARRY

Those whose houses were burned
burned houses. What else ever happens
once you start?

While the roofs plunged
into the root-filled cellars,
they chased ducks, chickens, anything
they could catch, clubbed their heads
on rock, spitted them, singed off the feathers
in fires of blazing fences,
ate them in handfuls, charred
and bloody.

Sitting in the snow
in those mended plaids, rubbing their numb feet,
eating soot, still hungry,
they watched the houses die like
sunsets, like their own
houses. Again

those who gave the orders
were already somewhere else,
of course on horseback.

The line “What else ever happens/ once you start” reminds one of far too many historical events doesn’t it? Because it’s the English involved in this poem, it’s hard not to think of Ireland, at least for me. Of course, it immediately calls forth images of tanks bulldozing homes in Israel followed by explosions in outdoor markets. Unfortunately, at the moment it makes me think of luminescent green images of Baghdad explosions.

Even more haunting than this is the image that closes the poem, the idea that it’s the ruling class that provokes the violence while at the same time somehow standing above and beyond it.

Wendell Berry More than Nature Poet

During a slight lull in tax preparation, I managed to finish Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir. Strangely, about the time I started feeling that Wendell Berry was an overly optimistic poet, I suddenly encountered this poem from 1991:

The year begins with war.
Our bombs fall day and night,
Hour after hour, by death
Abroad appeasing wrath,
Folly, and greed at home.
Upon our giddy tower
We’d oversway the world.
Our hate comes down to kill
Those whom we do not see,
For we have given up
Our sight to those in power
And to machines, and now
Are blind to all the world.
This is a nation where
No lovely thing can last.
We trample, gouge, and blast;
The people leave the land;
The land flows to the sea.
Fine men and women die,
The fine old houses fall,
The fine old trees come down:
Highway and shopping mall
Still guarantee the right
And liberty to be
A peaceful murderer,
A murderous worshipper,
A slender glutton, or
A healthy whore. Forgiving
No enemy, forgiven
By none, we live the death
Of liberty become
What we have feared to be.

The poem evoked some eerie feelings for me. The lines “Hour after hour, by death/ Abroad appeasing wrath,/ Folly, and greed at home” could aptly summarize our current attacks on Iraq, couldn’t they? The war is little more than an attempt to appease America’s wrath over the 9/11 attack despite little evidence that there is really any direct link. If Berry thought “Desert Storm” was “folly,” what must he be thinking about “Operation Iraqi Freedom?” Surely, America’s attempts to secure the oil fields before anything else would support his contention that greed is a major factor in these wars.

I wonder how accurate Berry is in ascribing the causes of this war to the same greed that threatens to destroy our environment. Does our love of “highways” and “shopping malls” drive not only the destruction of our environment but also our attempts to dominate the world?

In our attempts to “make the world safe for democracy” will we merely become a “capitalistic empire,” little different from the British Empire that we seceded from in order to ensure our ability to control our own fate?

Thankfully, “The year begins with war” is but a temporary interruption in Berry’s celebration of man’s relationship to nature and to each other. The following poem, one of my favorites in the second half of A Timbered Choir, is typical of what follows:

A bird the size
of a leaf fills
the whole lucid
evening with
his note and flies.

I strive to believe that the human soul, as small as it seems, can, like the small bird, illuminate our world and fill it with music.