ENCW 101 Spring 2019

“Answer My Questions:” is a poem written by Meg Day that is written from the point of view of someone having to witness the impending or current death of a child. This is told to me by the last couplet in the poem,

How do you choose a coffin

for a body that’s still growing

This poem really spoke to me, not for similar life experiences, but I feel sympathetic to the sadness and desperate questioning the narrator is feeling. It talks about some child developmental milestones like in the second stanza.

who taught them to hold the pencil

that recorded the hour, tick marks

in a bedpost, or your height

against the kitchen wall

I find this to be a great example of humanizing the entire story and making it feel more real because it describes a common tradition in families, which makes the reader feel more connected to the story in this poem.

In her collection of poems Last Psalm at Sea Level, Meg Day explores different form to treat different subjects and their limits. In the poem “On the Day That He Goes, I Will”, she dedicates the poem to Avery and we can imagine that this is one of her loved ones. The first surprise is at the very beginning with the lack of a capital letter to start the poem. Indeed, it makes us feel that something is missing and that we arrive in the middle of something that we don’t know. The presence of the point at the end of the first short sentence emphasizes this feeling and also creates an interesting rhythm that is fragmented. But what is most striking to me, is the fact that we actually don’t know how to read the poem. Or, to be more precise, we have at least three different ways to read it: considering that there are two different stanzas, the one on the left and the one on the right and reading them one after another; Reading by lines without paying attention to the space left on the page between the left and the right sections; Or, reading the two sections one after another but starting with the left one first.

These three different ways to read the poem are interesting because it doesn’t really change the content of it and we still comprehend it but it changes the chronological order of it. If we start by reading the left section and then the right one as a following, we feel that the first stanza is addressed to a person, probably Avery, and that the second section is a response to the first one and is an introspective reflection that the speaker has. If we read by lines without paying attention to the two sections, it feels like every line of the right side answers or gives more information about the left side and it is really interesting. It gives the impression that the poem could be one or the other and feel complete too but that the right section/stanza is more developed when the first one feels concise.

Overall, the form and how the author plays with it in this poem shows a variety of possible ways to read a poem without taking away the meaning of it and the intention which pushes the limits of the form pretty far and is inspiring as it feels like a unity.

Meg Day’s “Answer My Questions:” is a sorrowful poem about the impending death of someone close to the speaker.  In the poem, the speaker uses “you” to address the dying person, but it doesn’t seem as though they actually voice these thoughts to the person aloud.  Throughout the poem, the speaker makes references to things that indicate the dying person is a child. In my mind, this paints a scene of the speaker thinking these terrible thoughts while with the child, perhaps looking at them tenderly as they lie vulnerably in a hospital bed.  Who could say these things to a child? The speaker must deal with them internally, this poem of their thoughts their only outlet for their grief.

The speaker doesn’t outright say that the dying person is a child, which leaves it to the reader to draw this sad conclusion.  The second stanza in particular references things that one would do to mark the growth of a young child:

“Who taught them to hold the pencil

that recorded the hour, tick marks

in a bedpost, or your height

against the kitchen wall”

Part of the impact of this poem is the lack of confirmation that it is a child who is dying, because it allows the reader to hope that they read the poem wrong, that it’s someone who has lived a long and happy life in this situation instead of a child who hasn’t yet experienced the world.  This hope mirrors the hope that the speaker might still feel that the child will make a sudden recovery.

But the very structure of the poem crushes this hope.  The first three stanzas are quatrains, but the last breaks this pattern and is only a couplet; cut short, just like the child’s life will soon be.  The speaker seems to have accepted this by the end, as they go from asking “who” at the beginning of each stanza to asking:

“How do you choose a coffin

for a body that’s still growing”

Asking “who” is a way of demanding accountability from the universe, or perhaps a deity, as though the speaker wants to find out so they can argue or bargain for the child’s life.  Bargaining is the third stage of grief; the fourth being depression, and the last, acceptance. By the end of the poem, the speaker seems to have nearly reached acceptance, as they are clearly beginning to make preparations for the child’s death.  Asking “how” means they are no longer looking to change what will happen. What’s even sadder is that it’s clear that the child hasn’t died yet; in a way, this poem represents a person’s attempt to reconcile the fact that someone close to them will soon die.  But no matter how much they try to deal with grief before the person leaves them, the true sorrow is yet to come. No amount of preparation helps.

Meg Day’s “When They Took Her Breasts, She Dreamt of Icarus” is a poem describing the aftermath of a mastectomy, in which Icarus entertains our speaker as she recovers with all the grace of the titular figure plummetting into the ocean. Though complicated by enjambment and slants, the rhyme scheme is a clear indicator of the form the poem takes: it’s made up of sonnets.

The first stanza takes on the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet, the classic ABABCDCDEFEFGG, while the second takes on the ABBACDDCEFFEGG of Italian sonnets. The third stanza, again in Italian rhyme, complicates matters, as instead of ten to twelve syllables per line, it is made up of at least fourteen syllables per line. (Because of this syllabic variation, I want to tread lightly in calling it a sonnet, but poetry frequently takes on more complicated forms than high school teachers were ever willing to admit, so a sonnet it is.) This length lends emphasis to this final stanza, as Icarus and the speaker discuss their thoughts on their inevitable deaths.

The content of the poem is somewhat narrative, with the speaker describing the process of undergoing and recovering from surgeries, giving us such details as her punctured lungs and cauterized cuts. The poem begins with her near death and ends with her reflection on what she wants her death to be; unlike Icarus, whose story most audiences find themselves intimately familiar with, the poem’s speaker is yet undecided, which is apparently how she wants it.

O, how I’d come to crave the surprise of death instead of its prediction:

let me be amazed by my departure, let it be some unafflicted eviction

This is one of the only moments in the poem in which the speaker is an active participant. The work is so much about the things that happen to her. These two lines are a rare instance of her agency, which she uses to bring her story to its end.

Ansel Elkins poem “A Girl with Antlers” is a medium-length tale about a girl finding herself though she is different.

Throughout the poem, the speaker is meant to represent the hard transition many find themselves faced with. She grows up. The poem is segmented into different portions of her life, from her birth to the moment she is perceived to become a woman. In her birth we learn her mother died while she survived, and through the word choice and an opposing line we realize she feels guilt over this. She tells of a midwife naming her Monster, along with her mother coming to her in a dream. Her mother tells her she must find happiness with who she is, but when she awakes she is still alone and guilty in the woods.

When a woman finds her and brings her in, the speaker realizes how different she is by the woman’s expectations. She wishes the girl to wear dresses and gets concerned when her antlers aren’t shed like a whitetail deer’s. The speaker reminds the woman she isn’t a deer. While the two have opposing views on some things, it is the first acceptance the girl finds. This leads to the ending line, which impacts the speaker in a big way. She seems to finally accept herself as she is and be proud of it once the woman tells her:

You are fearfully and wonderfully made.

Mainly, the poem is about accepting everything that makes up you. The fearful things, the things that you think are wrong or monstrous, and the wonderful things as well. You must find happiness in the wildness of you and never change who you are for someone else’s acceptance.

“The Girl With Antlers” by Ansel Elkins is a quirky, complex and somewhat enchanting poem. Tracing a girl’s life from her birth to her teen years, the poem starts out by describing, in gruesome detail, how a baby girl was in fact born with antlers, which made the delivery a painful, displeasing process. Abandoned, and dubbed a monster by the midwife who aided the delivery, the girl grasped onto some words her mother presented to her in a dream: “You must find joy within your own wild self.” Swept up by a concerned women in the woods, the girl spent many of her evenings, as a youth, sitting by a roaring fire, listening to the tales the women had to share. The woman did pause every now and then to watch the shadows from the girls antlers dance across the wall illuminated by the intense glow from the flames. The woman worried, the young girl did not want to wear dresses, she roamed the forest naked. She never conformed to the typical customs of those around her, rather, she stayed steadfast to her unique self. When the girl was fifteen she saw that a change had occurred, no longer were her antlers something to gawk at, they had transformed into a beautiful aspect of this young girl that only strengthened her image. The poem comes to a close with the woman saying “What you are, I cannot say but nature has created you. You are fearfully and wonderfully made.” Quoting Psalm 119:14, this poem expresses the belief that humans each have something specific to themselves that sets them apart from others and regardless of what that defining characteris may be each person was created with the utmost care and consideration.

When I first read “Going to the Movies Alone” by Ansel Elkins, I had not paid much attention to the title. In doing so, the first few lines seemed extremely disturbing and like something one of the darker versions of The Joker would write.

Tonight, I want to see something explode.
I want to see a dirty blonde
in a ripped white tank
pointing a gun at a bald man
who looks like me.
I want to see a lot less talk and a lot more action.
I want to watch a powerful man be seduced
by the wrong woman.

This, if taken completely out of the context that the speaker wants to see an action movie, sounds disturbing and like the slow ramblings of an unstable person.

The speaker describes a movie in which lots of people die; the main protagonist is someone somewhat normal, like him; and even though a lot of bad things happened, they still consider it a victory. This feels like that’s what the narrator is feeling in his life, and he is looking for a similar resolution to his movie, to his own life. The title “Going to the Movies Alone” says exactly that about the narrator and that he’s looking for a short escape from reality and that he probably wouldn’t be going alone if that wasn’t his only option.

In few words, Ansel Elkins embodies an omnivert’s character. The speaker is confident enough to go to the movies alone, but goes to the movies to allow himself to experience the feelings he’s missing out on. But he’s fine with missing out on it. The speaker seems to be content with life as it is, doing only what is necessary and not putting himself out there to be scrutinized by others. And when he’s feeling the need to experience something, he goes to the movies by himself and watches something for what ever feeling he has that day. It’s a feeling not everyone gets, especially people who constantly need the reassurance of those around them, but for an omnivert there’s something that makes you feel content about just being.

“Riven” is defined as something that is split or torn apart, and that is exactly what Christian Wiman does to the first lines of each stanza in “Every Riven Thing.” He repeats the phrase “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” at the beginning of each stanza, but uses different punctuation to change the meaning each time. In the first stanza, he discusses how evidence of God exists in everything that God has created, simply because those things are what they are.

“God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,

man who sees and sings and wonders why”

He then uses the same beginning sentence structure and alters the punctuation so that he’s able to write about what “belonging” means to everything in the universe. What’s even more fantastic is that the last line of each stanza blends into the first line of the next, making one complete sentence that spans the gap. For example, between the first stanza and the next, the complete phrase “man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes.” exists despite the gap:

“man who sees and sings and wonders why

 

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of the atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into a stillness where”

Despite the poem’s focus on the state of being riven, each part of the poem flows easily into the next. The first three stanzas begin with God (creation), move into nature (existence), and end with man (questioning). In the second to last stanza, however, Wiman breaks from this pattern and doesn’t discuss nature. Instead, he focuses on the relationship between man’s pondering mind and the existence of God.

“God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows,

apart from what man knows,”

Wiman seems to be saying that man’s questioning of God’s existence is what makes God exist, and should bring us closer instead of farther from the divine. The poem feels like an attempt to comfort someone who feels that their disbelief is separating them from God. The end rhyme pattern Wiman uses is erratic, but adds to the almost prayer-like feel of the poem. In this stanza, Wiman uses word play to make his point, toying with the contrast between “a part” and “apart.” Continuing the theme of separation, each thought in every line, with two exceptions, is incomplete, and continues into the next line or the next stanza. The first exception is the line, “Think of the atoms inside the stone,” which shows how the speaker admires the simplicity of nature, and continues the theme that being exactly what you are is the best way to be closer to God. The second exception is the last line, when Wiman completes the poem with the full, unriven sentence:

“God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.”

In “The Portrait,” the narrator describes his experiences growing up in his mother’s grief. His mother apparently decided to erase her husband’s memory from their home, saying, “She locked his name/ in her deepest cabinet/ and would not let him out/ though I could hear him thumping.” When the narrator tried to bring his father up, years later, his mother tore up the photo and slapped her child, unable to face her feelings on the matter. The nature of grief is such that those experiencing it do odd things, and this woman never fully was able to process these feelings, which made her lash out at her child for daring to acknowledge that this was an experience she had.

In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sunday’s” he gives us a poem about memory, recalling actions of his father who each Sunday would wake up early and make a fire for them and shine his shoes. He added,

“No one ever thanked him”

He uses a reflective tone, and is very aware and greatful of the sacrifice that his hard father (parent figure) has made for him. He started to realize in his later years that his father went unnoticed and unappreciated and he’s dedicating this poem to his father. This poem brings up loneliness, that his father was alone while doing these kind acts, parental duty that the father has to his family, how time heals unnoticed feelings,

“What did I know, what did I know”

Fathers and mother as well do things not asking for anything in return, which is what the father has done. Hayden uses the word “did” because he’s using a reflective tone acknowledging the past that he was young and naïve. Work and family plays a huge part in this poem as well, because most fathers and mothers would do anything for there family\son or daughters.

In Stanley Kunitz’s “A Portrait” we are introduced to a mother that is hurt, distressed, sad and embarrassed about the passing of her early husband.

“My mother never forgave my father

for killing himself,

especially at such an awkward time

and in a public park,…”

Taking this in a literal and figurative way, we see later on in the poem that the father killed himself before the son was born, and he never got a chance to meet him. The poem carries itself in a way that appears as the father killed himself because of the son being born and the father not wanting anything to do with the son,  but it’s not for sure.

“…when I was waiting to be born.” 

Kunitz gives us a poem full of confusion, pain and sorrow. Instead of the mom facing her fears she decided to cope another way by taking her anger out on her son that didn’t know any better, or did he? He thinks of his father as a heroic figure as most children do and wanted an explanation on why he isn’t around anymore, or where he went. When the mother slaps him hard he could still feel it many years later burning on his check.

“she ripped it into shreds

without a single word

and slapped me hard

In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek

still burning.”

Though this sounds as if it’s a terrible thing done to the son (because it is) it’s imoorstnt to also think about how they mother was feeling during this interaction. It’s doesn’t justify it,  ut it shows the audience that the passing of her ex husband hurts her as well and she doesn’t want to address it.

Dave Lucas’, “About Suffering” is a beautiful, rich poem that addresses the topic of suffering. The poem begins by pointing out what true suffering is. Whether suffering strikes the unexpecting, regular people leading regular lives or people who knew misfortune was on its way,  genuine suffering comes bearing great impact. Through the use of imagery and a narrator who seems to completely empathize with the character of true suffering, Lucas paints a detailed picture of how suffering feels. The poem initially explained that, “Suffering… is incubated by the sidewalk speak of bureaucrats and under soft, fluorescent suns of waiting rooms,” meaning,  it can be anywhere, at anytime and affecting anyone. Referencing Icarus at the beginning, Lucas moves forward saying “Icarus is not for us, he flies and falls, that’s all.” In other words tales of suffering similar to those of Icarus do not have much leverage. Icarus did not experience the tragic, drawn out agony that so often comes with suffering. It seems as though Lucas does not consider Icarus to be a story about true suffering, because the content does not reach a depth that can properly relate to people who are devoured by suffering.  It is so much deeper than just a fall. The poem continues to give vivid images of what suffering can be like. For example, suffering can be like “cuts that bleed you dry.” Coming to the conclusion that “love and work and life could be passing vapor, and all the wings he’s made he’s made of paper.” allude to the fact that all that human suffering may have been in vain and will yield no benefit.

Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait” explores how loss, abandonment, and childhood incidents last with people long after they have passed.

As much as this poem is about the speaker, it is also about his mother. He begins the poem introducing the fact that his father committed suicide in a public park when his mother was still pregnant with him. He does this with very plain language, not using any similes or metaphors, to set up the reality of his childhood. It was just a fact to him, nothing more or less, but he became curious as children tend to when something is off limits to them.

The mother obviously feels very abandoned at this time, left to raise a child all by herself. She is angry at him for leaving and locks everything about him up, not even speaking his name. By not addressing the loss, grief, and anger she has, she ends up lashing out and hurting her child for being curious about his own father. This stays with him long after it is done, much like his mother’s grief and anger stays with her. And, much like her, he probably never addressed how this affected him out loud, until he wrote the poem.

“Autumn Day,” by Rainer Maria Rilke has a rhyme scheme that is very inconsistent. In the first verse, there is this one rhyme and what follows it is very fluid to say.

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.

In the second verse, the ending of the first and last lines rhyme but the two middle lines are written very awkwardly and I find that the third and fourth lines don’t flow well.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;

grant them a few more warm transparent days,

urge them on to fulfillment then, and press

the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

The last verse has repetition and the endings of the last word in lines three and five ends with an -ing.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

Whoever is alone will stay alone,

Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,

and wander on the boulevards, up and down,

restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

I find that the erratic rhyming and structure very interesting, it’s like how feelings are in oneself. It feels like a very sad poem and it talks about loneliness. It feels like someone is talking about how life won’t change even if the seasons do and how some days are nice, but life is generally not changing. The repetition of Whoever is like the monotony of the description of life.

“The Portrait,” by Stanley Kunitz, also feels very erratic and sharp, but it also feels fluid in both the story and the structure. It has a straightforward timeline/series of events, but each line had a scene that began and ended in that line. This is what makes it feel almost erratic in it’s finality in each line.

No Children

by John Darnielle

I hope that our few remaining friends
Give up on trying to save us
I hope we come up with a failsafe plot
To piss off the dumb few that forgave us
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it’s already too late
And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this town
Again in my life
I hope I lie
And tell everyone you were a good wife
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow
I hope it bleeds all day long
Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises
We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong
I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn’t over
And I hope you blink before I do
Yeah I hope I never get sober
And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You’d stay the hell out of my way
I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die

For more poems by Melissa Lozado-Oliva, go here.

“Those Winter Sundays” is a poem written by Robert Hayden that begins with the speaker reflecting on the father’s routine:

then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

The speaker clearly displays in his eyes that the father  has never been treated correctly for the work he has completed. It appears that the father is a firefighter as well as the speaker. The speaker never realized how much the father did for them as an individual.

“A Portrait” a poem by Stanley Kunitz the speaker talks about the guilt that the mother has against the father for making a decision that goes against what she felt.

She locked his name in her deepest cabinet and would not let him out, though I could hear him thumping.

The mother hides the father from the speaker but even as a child the speaker still felt the fathers presence. The life the speaker has lived without the presence and knowledge of the father, knowing that the mother knew still has an impact on the speaker.

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly…
— Ted Hughes, “Wind”

This poem is full of remarkable metaphors: a house “far out at sea all night,” the woods “crashing through darkness,” the “skyline a grimace,” the house ringing “like some fine green goblet in the note / That any second would shatter it.”  My favorite image from this poem, though, is in the two lines above, a “black- / Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.” The exaggerated alliteration of the b  sound combined with the staccato rhythm of the short syllables seems to conjure the brutal strength of the wind, a tension that is released in the very different sound of slowly. Every time I read this poem I feel as though I can see the gull straining and straining against the storm’s winds, its wings extended, and then, when its strength is finally gone, its form slowly bending before it is swept away.

The Poetry Foundation’s brief biography of Ted Hughes contains this assertion: “The rural landscape of Hughes’s youth in Yorkshire exerted a lasting influence on his work. To read Hughes’s poetry is to enter a world dominated by nature, especially by animals.”

“The Wind” is one such poem in which the natural world does not merely appear; it dominates:

Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other.

Here’s the complete poem:

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

— Ted Hughes

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

— Donald Justice

I remember when, years ago, I would read Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty” with a kind of anticipatory nostalgia, imagining the sweet melancholy I would feel when I left my thirties behind and joined the legions of men who must, as Justice puts it,  “learn to close softly / The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to.” I imagined what it would be like to stand before a bathroom mirror and encounter my own image in precisely the manner that the poem describes –

And deep in mirrors 
They rediscover 
The face of the boy as he practices trying 
His father’s tie there in secret 

And the face of that father, 
Still warm with the mystery of lather

–  past and present merging in the very features of my face, a face that would have become more like my father’s than that of the child I had once been. “They are more fathers than sons themselves now,” Justice declares with a kind of forlorn certainty, the scale of time finally tipped from one side to the other, and I imagined that this would of course be true.

It was not true for me, though, when I turned forty. I continued to feel then more son than father, though my father had already died. Now that I am fifty – past fifty, having turned fifty-one – it does indeed seem true, indisputably and inconsolably true. Any childhood photograph of me looks a great deal more like my son than like me, this son who now at seventeen looks more like a man than a boy. And I am startled from time to time when I look in the mirror and feel that I have caught a glimpse, brief and unsettling and spectral, of my father’s weathered face, my startled expression become his, as if he too is surprised to have stumbled upon me in such an otherwise insignificant moment.

As for the photos I have of my father, they have begun to look – not more like me than him, not that, but more of me, as if they were taken as sly predictions or gentle warnings (to which I was, of course, always much too young to attend) that this is what I would become, the expression I would bear, the lines and folds that I would wear as though they were etched there, as indeed they were in a way, in some act of ritual scarification.

“Something is filling them,” filling these men, Justice goes on to write at his poem’s conclusion,

something 
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgage houses.

And I used to snicker a little, way back when, at the sweet sad irony of that final line, of the mundane earthly debts and responsibilities – the mortgaged house and all that comes with it: the slope behind it with its inevitably disappointing lawn and the gray mulched flower beds and the scattering of sticks and snake holes and dried leaves – so many inconsequential annoyances and obligations intruding upon that immense and somber and crepuscular sound, the universe’s holy shimmering that the man who has turned forty has just begun to detect.

I don’t snicker any more. I don’t snicker because I know what I didn’t know at thirty or even forty, what even Donald Justice may not have known when he wrote this poem.  He was, after all, only just past forty himself when the poem appeared in his 1967 collection Night Light, and so perhaps he was still caught in the sweet pleasures of its sad embrace. I know now, a man at fifty, that even our mundane earthly debts acquire, as time passes, as the scale dips further down, their own spectral grace. We begin to sense that these too – and not just our mortgaged house but the spindly trees we planted, the weedy beds to which we seasonally attend, the dry leaves spilling from the woods’ edge, the sputtering car with its cracked windshield, the flat-tired wheelbarrow, the unwieldy unreliable rake, the vines creeping around porch rails and above doorways, the wasp-infested birdhouse, the nest spilling twigs and cloth from its perch, the carpenter bees’ tunnels of mud and spit, the aching joints, the calloused hands, the cloudy eyes, the stacks of bills in their leather folder, the empty bottles and cans in the kitchen cupboard, the unsprung mousetraps and garbage bags and dryer sheets and wicker baskets and clothes yet to be ironed and nearly spent candles and loose change on the counter – all of this, every bit, are merely the notes composing the grand elegiac hymn, a million and a million more droning voices. They are all, all of them, that twilight sound I hear. It is immense, unceasing, terrifying, as haunting and beautiful a sound as anyone would ever hope to hear.

And I know this, too, I guess, or suspect it – that at sixty I will finally understand that at fifty I had not yet heard the half of it, did not have a clue of the great, magnificent sounds the earth could make, the giant crash of thunder or an axe raised high against the darkening sky to again and again split the wood.

(This post is reprinted from the blog The Admonishing Song.)

My Papa’s Waltz

by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

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Minstrel Man

by Langston Hughes

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die?

For more information about The Favorite Poem Project, go here.