The Wren

- Barbara McCauley

he was small not ready yet
frantic
under the hedge
I caught him took him home
my father wasn’t sure
wild birds he said
we’ve tried so many times
but he ate
what we made for him
and in three days
could fly
around the living room
it’s time my father said
you have to let him go

outside
he sat on my shoulder
I shook him off he flew
to a branch of the maple
perched there
silent
his little eyes
I was a child I called him
back he came
stood for a moment
on my finger
then gone
I felt the spring of his legs
all day

Summer Secrets

A year ago today I was concerned with distance, afraid of growing apart, hoping that the purple martin inside of me could still be seen. Today a year of distance is between us, and I’m done with second person for a while.

The distance was not a gorge or a raging river to be crossed; it was just the foggy sea of space that we had put between ourselves. Things had been hazy for a long time.

Now I’m finding clarity in cemetery walks and ice cream shops. The future is full of plans, of bright shining plans. We are all drawing blueprints, all of the time. We are all speaking softly at night, whispering almost, because these plans are secrets, and we are hushed and dying to share them.

Walking through the cemetery, you may stumble across one of mine. I forgot it there last night, left it somewhere in the matted, dewy grasses of the hillside in the dark. I won’t go back for it, though. Had you not been there, I would have never known I had it in the first place.

Bon Iver–Re: Stacks

Vernon says this song is about a time he saw his soul at a poker table.
And don’t forget to look up a word if you don’t know it.

And for a good look behind the scenes, head over to Wordsworth. What a great place.

This my excavation and today is Kumran
Everything that happens is from now on
This is pouring rain
This is paralyzed

I keep throwing it down two-hundred at a time
It’s hard to find it when you knew it
When your money’s gone
And you’re drunk as hell

On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load
In the back and the racks and the stacks are your load
In the back with your racks and you’re unstacking your load

I’ve twisting to the sun I needed to replace
The fountain in the front yard is rusted out
All my love was down
In a frozen ground

There’s a black crow sitting across from me; his wiry legs are crossed
And he’s dangling my keys he even fakes a toss
Whatever could it be
That has brought me to this loss

On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load
In the back and the racks and the stacks of your load
In the back with your racks and you’re unstacking your load

This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization
It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be
Safe with me

Band of the Week 5-26-09: Bon Iver

The rain is sweeping in to cool off what was a scorching Memorial day, and the dullness behind it all must be something like what Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon felt two years ago, alone in a cabin in northwest Wisconsin. After break-ups with his band and girlfriend, and while struggling through disease, he moved from North Carolina back to his native Wisconsin, north, to spend the winter in the cabin his father had built. For the next three months he recuperated, making sure to keep busy with jobs like chopping wood. Making sure to avoid the black hole that time alone can become.

Though he didn’t intend it, a record began spiraling into shape in those woods, and now For Emma, Forever Ago is ours to enjoy. From this winter in the woods comes the name of the band, Bon Iver, from the french for “good winter.”

Here is a man sometimes grieving, sometimes struggling, sometimes remembering the sweetest of things.
Here is a man who feels it.

Skinny Love

Come on skinny love just last the year
Pour a little salt, we were never here
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer

I tell my love to wreck it all
Cut out all the ropes and let me fall
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Right in this moment this order’s tall

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
And I told you to be balanced
And I told you to be kind

In the morning I’ll be with you
But it will be a different kind
I’ll be holding all the tickets
And you’ll be owning all the fines

Come on skinny love what happened here
We suckled on the hope in lite brassieres
My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my
Sullen load is full, so slow on the split

And I told you to be patient
And I told you to be fine
And I told you to be balanced
And I told you to be kind

And now all your love is wasted
And who the hell was I?
I’m breaking at the bridges
And at the end of all your lines

Who will love you?
Who will fight?
Who will fall far behind?

Moons

by Josh Ritter

There are planets you don’t know
And there are moons that you don’t see
Invisibles between the rings of
Mars and Mercury.
The harbors that they built
for the ships to set me free,
And sometimes when it’s all too much
I know they’ll come for me
Come for me

The End of the 5th Sun Circle Is Approaching!

Variations on a Theme by Milosz

T.S. Eliot
Excerpts from The Hollow Men

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
…This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Douglas Coupland
from Generation X

And so then, just before the front windows become a crinkled, liquefied imploding sheet—the surface of a swimming pool during a high dive, as seen from below—
And just before you’re pelleted by a hail of gum and magazines—
And just before the fat man is lifted off his feet, hung in suspended animation and bursts into flames while the liquefied ceiling lifts and drips upward—
Just before all of this, your best friend cranes his neck, lurches over to where you lie, and kisses you on the mouth, after which he says to you, ‘There, I’ve always wanted to do that.’
And that’s that. In the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you’ve been imagining since you were six, it’s all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by regret. A lot like life, wouldn’t you say?

And

“a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out.”

Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections

“…he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you. The light in the windows was failing rapidly.”

And

“Once, when he was a boy, there was a total eclipse of the sun in the Midwest, and a girl in one of the poky towns across the river from St. Jude had sat outside and, in defiance of myriad warnings, studied the dwindling crescent of the sun until her retinas combusted. “It didn’t hurt at all,” the blinded girl had told the St. Jude Chronicle. “It felt like nothing.”

Theodore Roethke
Last Words

Solace of kisses and cookies and cabbage,
That fine fuming stink of particular kettles,
Muttony tears falling on figured linoleum,
Frigidaires snoring the sleep of plenty,
The psyche writhing and squirming in heavy woolen,-
O worm of duty! O spiral knowledge!

Kiss me, kiss me quick, mistress of lost wisdom,
Come out of a cloud, angel with several faces,
Bring me my hat, my umbrella and rubbers,
Enshroud me with Light! O Whirling! O Terrible Love!

REM
It’s the End of the World As We Know It

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it (can’t I have some time alone?)
It’s the end of the world as we know it (can’t I have some time alone?) and I feel fine

2012 Doomsday

Sam Beam
Die

And though our fathers’ fathers slept in stolen houses
All that’s over now
And our babies never cry
And we can look you in the eye
And say, “We’re not afraid to die”
And yes, our mothers’ mothers saw in black and white
But all that’s over now
And our children never lie
And no matter how we try
We are not afraid to die

Richard Wilbur
Translation of Borges’ Everness

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirror as you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe.
Whoever in its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only on the sunset’s farther side
Will see at last the Archetypes and Splendors.

And

From Blackberries for Amelia

“…as random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we now are told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.”

Robert Frost
Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

NASB
Isaiah 34:4 “And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.”
Revelation 6:12-17
12I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood;
13and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind.
14The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
15Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains;
16and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb;
17for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”

A Song On the End of the World

by Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Anthony Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

The Bridge

What do you say after almost a month? What
I wish I could say is in too many languages.

I keep so many things on the table: the pictures,
the poems, the letters to you. They hide under books
and shirts and all the detritus of a life in words.

Later, much later, I will look back on today
and remember nothing but the green of the grass–
nothing but clouds in those puddles.

In too many of my ambitions I have failed,
and today I see some as failures in progress,
with no conceivable salvation. The trick is
to prune these branches back. The trick is
to forget them completely.

I forget how many times I’ve failed
to say I miss you, I’ve missed you. I forget
to try to visit now and then.

For now, I’ll settle for a cleaner table.
A stack of papers and the dark, smooth wood.
For now I know a poem is a prayer,
but soon I pray this thing becomes a bridge.

2 misses, 1 hit

It hasn’t been a month since I’ve seen you, and already I’m imagining your swelling belly, your glowing cheeks, and the reddening bottoms of your feet.  Ammons says “it was once weddings that came so thick and / fast, and then, first babies” and really, those weddings are just now starting to come, with your baby already on the way.  We are aging–at least some of us are–as fast as ever.

In spite of everything, I left college with one drink to my name: a nervous sip of alcohol that left my tongue wondering if it was permanently damaged.  Among a nation of red plastic cups and kegstands, I walked quietly, eyes focused on each step, all the way up and across the commencement stage.  Here, in the city, things are different.   It’s been a year since I’ve seen a red cup, and all of a sudden breweries are traded like poets: you have to try a Bell’s while you’re in Michigan). When did this happen?

There is a tree in the backyard–I rarely notice it–8 or 10 feet tall.  And for years it has been there, so stagnant.  But 18 years ago that tree was a seed.  In those days the backyard was still shaded by the twintrunked silver maple, and my afternoons were spent digging holes in the yard and practicing my mini-golf technique with the only club we had: the sand wedge.  In any case, the grass was so long that it usually worked best to chip the ball up and over toward the hole.  Those days, I imagined worlds full of games and mazes. 
Mini-golf was only the beginning.  The way the clock’s pendulum would swing in front of the 7th hole–it was a puzzle to unravel.  Then the maze of ancient Egypt took hold of me.  A cut-away model of Khufu’s pyramid showed my interpretation of the inner chambers and air ducts.  I practiced my archaeology in the backyard with a garden spade and a hammer.  The mysteries inside of the pyramids lost their grip, but soon I was investigating the arrangement of the pyramids and of Stonehenge and the celestial significance of it all.  But the maze in the stars was too much for me.  It wasn’t until I lived in the mountains that I really saw anything up there.
And I see more everyday.  While the ancient celestial calendars led me to clocks, some part of me believes that I learned from a young age to internalize the ticking I heard at night.  These puzzle boxes have so much going on inside of them that, really, it’s a marvel we rely on them for anything.  I guess it’s becoming rarer and rarer that we do, but as an homage to the past, I have vowed to carry on in that tradition.  The puzzle is still unsolved, after all, and so few people are around to help.  Someday all the clockmakers will be dead, but somewhere in a dark basement is a man who can help me.  He is one who deals only in the most elaborate puzzles, but most likely got his start in something like family.  You see, puzzles were never his hobby.  His life was spent locating the path to an elusive father, and then trying to mesh with the gears of his wife and kid.  It’s not that he never wanted anything else–just that there was never another option.  This man could teach me some things, I think.  He has some things to say.