T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"

I won’t often devote this column to poetry. Since much of the best poetry is written in shorter forms, it doesn’t really fall within the scope of a “great books” column. (Though, even as I write this, it occurs to me that I may have to write about handfuls of poems by Stevens, Wilbur, and others, someday.) But, I could not long put off writing about T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, for me the best long poem of the English language of the 20th century.

Though I first studied the poem in college — emphasis on “studied”, which doesn’t always mean “experience” or “appreciate” — my first encounter with Four Quartets took place while being chased by fierce thunderstorms across Interstate 70 in Kansas in the early evening. (I learned the next day that I had been surrounded by tornados!) I had put in a cassette recording I’d made off an LP of Four Quartets being read by Sir Alec Guinness.

No, the incredible impression the poem made on me at the time had nothing to do with Obi Wan Kenobi. Guinness’ delivery, though, seems the perfect voice for this poem, much more earnest and spiritually aware than Eliot’s own weary, almost defeated delivery. (The recording is hard to find, but well worth the search. Highly recommended.)

From the beginning, I was captivated by the cadence, the imagery, and the playful, seeking nature of the words. It’s impossible to quote anything less than the whole of the first section:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.

Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Hamlet is the play, they say, with the greatest number of memorable lines. For me, there’s not a single unmemorable line in what you’ve just read (more than once, and out loud, is recommended).

Perhaps the greatest conundrum of human existence is time, its evanescence balanced by its relentlessness. We can only understand it in the presence of things, such as the “drained pool,” itself a metaphor for time; and we can only understand things in the context of time, their creation, existence, and passing. And, beyond that, most crucially, is what we cannot see or hear or experience as duration, what those of a spiritual bent, “the unseen eyebeam”, perpetually seek: “for the roses/Had the look of flowers that are looked at”. For Eliot, as he says later in Burnt Norton, we can only find that “at the still point of the turning world”, where time and being eternally intersect.

Eliot wrote Burnt Norton in the relative serenity of the mid-30’s. The three remaining long poems that make up Four Quartets — East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding — were written during World War II and with the air-bombardment of London in the background.

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass,
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

Here, a description of what would appear to be the natural cycle of creation and destruction, only hints at the larger context. This is not a poem about the war, as such, but clearly the war is at the heart of lines such as this.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action,
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
Such moments of lucid despair are soon followed by a return to the spiritual seeking which is the great theme of Four Quartets.
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

At the heart of the third poem, The Dry Salvages, Eliot confronts the existential notion of “right action” in a world whose contradictions we can never fully understand. He draws upon the Hindu teachings of Krishna.

“Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: ‘on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death’ - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward,
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgment of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.”
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle,
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

But, though it is essential for us not to despair, and to “fare forward,” Eliot brings some light and hope into the equation — assuming that we remain committed to the challenge.

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is
Incarnation. Here the impossible union
Of spheres of evidence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement-
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying.

In the final poem, Little Gidding, after describing death by air, fire, and water, Eliot meets “some dead master”, who may be Christ or some other spiritual guide from the past. What follows is a brief sermon, which leads the entire poem back to lines reminiscent of the beginning of Burnt Norton.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

Only there is a new tone, one of comfort and reasurrance. The children of the rose garden have returned, accompanied by the redemptive image of Pentecostal fire.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Published in 1944, Four Quartets — four poems in five sections each — is less than 50 pages long. I’ve quoted enough of it here, I hope, to convince you to read the entire work. While written by a devoted Christian, it is spiritual without being preachy, its language deeply influenced by Eastern religions. No poem has given me greater solace or hope in the face of what is unknown and unknowable.

THE FUTURE

At what point did the present stop
Being present and become the future?

I wake and I am no longer secure
In the bedclothes as I’ve always been.

Nothing threatens, but there is nothing,
No one, I can safely rely on either.

Was it just another tick of the clock?
The one too many? The fatal one?

Is it only what I’ve lost, beckoning,
Being ignored, rescinding sanctions

Of such long standing I’ve forgotten
How crucial they were to my senses?

Time? Or self? No, what I now fear
Is the two become the same thing --

A last fling, a dance that whirls me from
My partner’s arms into dimming air.

The Faience Hippopotamus

I

The turquoise glaze
worn to earthenware
between the eyes-
the scrawled lotus

break up
the broadness of back,
flare the brow,
decorate a massive

rump: Duchamp's
mustachioed Mona Lisa
glossed this image
four thousand years

later. "Egyptian,
Middle Kingdom, 12th
Dynasty, Circe 1940
B.C." reads the

authentication;
"accoutrement of tombs,"
premium paid
gods of the hunt, sent

into unknown lands
with habitat tattoo,
surrogate blossoms
should there be none.

II

Fecund Thoueris,
upright walking
pregnant hippo
leaning on a magic

knot, you are not;
nor Seth, the evil
one, enemy of Re.
Despite the lotus,

you're clearly
what you are,
piglike, grown to
majesty of size, but

piglike,
wallower, muncher
of riverslop,
boundless shitter,

unchallenged,
mountainously meek,
as Roethke wrote,
a yawner.

III

Popular, a faience
reproduced
in pourable stone,
improvement on

the original
because
we take it home.
Artifact of

an artifact,
it is that
and nothing.
A gift I bought

and didn't give, dear
at fifty-two fifty;
a paperweight or
mantelpiece

piece, borrowed
for this writing,
breakable as bone.
It is that

and nothing,
neither hollow nor
flesh and blood, not
quite up to Eliot.

IV

What is not a form
of exhaustion in
our minds, dreaming
in its own multi-

plicity of meaning?
Rivers of hippos
map each thought.
The brutes swim past

eroded shorelines,
submerged except
for snout and peepers,
winking doe-eyed or

staring like horses,
picking up snatches
of song to croon in
cavernous throats.

The Blue Jirl

Here's another from my long sequence about women, "Frissons".


The Blue Jirl

She is neither cold nor hard and her dog
Is just as blue as she is. The color blue.

She is more conscious of her blueness
Than aware of her own nekkidness, her

Long and boney nose, her four fingers
On her left hand and six on her right, or

The little potbelly she rubs like a magic lamp.
Blue light and blue water and burnt orange

Beach beyond her canted hips; the dog’s
Head bars my eyes from seeing their darkened

Wedge or what I must only assume is dark.
She has a tiny moue of a mouth and no eye

Lashes; a scar runs from her chin to her
Left breast in a graceful curved smile.

Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing not
The perfection of the odalisque tradition.

She simpers and whines, though, quite
Out of keeping with her stateliness, her

Sang-froid, her attention to the moment,
Which is keen as any Zen priest’s

In its sucking up of all that she creates.
She rises, she walks, and her dog follows.

Her rump glitters gold and a white star
Floats between those two cupped crescents.

She turns and says, “My wit-dream, you.”
And for the first time all is clear and all

I have ever wanted of love smashes her
Out of all memory, leaving only her blue.

The House

The house in dreams is always the same,
Though its rooms, like lungs, bulge and contract
And sometimes the rain
Bends ceilings and bursts through in cataracts,
Frightening as spitting your teeth down the drain.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The old trees, too, are still the same.
We rake and burn leaves in the driveway
And recall legendary Claire,
Who caught fire leaping on a dare, they say,
Whose ghost still turns on the faucet upstairs.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The stairway in the front hall is the same.
I find my mail stacked on the newel post,
Though I don’t live here.
Though I am still alive, I am a ghost
The others cannot touch or see or hear.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The ways we use each room are still the same,
But the television is black and white
And the kitchen is a mess.
We feel no urgency, no physical delight
In being where there is no light, no darkness.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The river runs through our backyard just the same.
Memories of trysts and laughter, beneath the willows,
Though vivid, never intrude.
The river is a dark chalice threatening to overflow,
Or frozen as stone, dead, supine, nude.
Dad’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

My bedroom and closet still seem the same.
While the window no longer looks out on the trains
On the trestle beneath the moon,
The closet door mirror no longer refrains
From showing me what has come only too soon.
Mom’s gone, and that house will never be the same.

The attic and the basement are both the same.
We hide in one or the other with our fear—
Of life, or of death—
The attic when all that we hold dear
Disappears; in the basement holding our breath.
They’re gone, and that house will never be the same.

Of a Blackbird Looking at Thin Trees Sway

1.
The trees move and I am
Not moving.

2.
My eye is not the only eye.
There is one other.

3.
I fly between the branches
But do not find a perch--too many leaves falling.

4.
I am alone as a blind eye. I was once
Not alone. I have forgotten why.

5.
The wind whistles in the branches
And I whistle--the sounds exactly the same.

6.
Ice on the grass this morning. Soon the snow
Will catch my shadow as I pass from tree to tree.
I know exactly why I am here.

7.
I watch for the one with talons.
I cannot chase him like the little ones.
I think of him, at night, huddled on the opposite
Side of the black bole.

8.
I know all the inflections of birds and of branches.
They know
That I can sing louder than the moon.

9.
From above, the trees look like black suns
Against the dying grass. There is no
Perch at the center of a sun.


10.
My fellows cry out as they pass.
They see these trees with my eye
And do not want them for their own.


11.
I do not fear anything
And nothing fears me
Except the trees.


12.
I must be going soon--
Once the river and the trees
Stop moving.


13.
The dark grows long as day
And there are no more leaves.
The snow stings my eye.
I have already left
Before I fly.

The Vietnam War Memorial

At night it seems a hole in the earth,
until you walk down; the black wall veers
to eye level and higher; the names multiply.
The hole becomes a precarious ledge
on a darkened corner of the world.
At the vertex, the shock descends,
like the percussion of monstrous hands:
the enormity, if not horror, of war dead.

I'm surprised to find a humane memorial
in spite of all that's been said.
Each name has a voice we can touch,
trace with fingers, pronounce in the solemn
field of the mind; courage, death, stupidity,
are not reduced to three anonymous soldiers
no one ever mentioned in a prayer.

Who are these people at 11 p.m.?
I lose count at thirty, when I'm pushed
by a skinny youth, drunk, high perhaps,
stumbling up to the wall: "You taught me to smoke,"
he says, forehead pressing the black granite,
"I'm trying to quit. You'd want me to by now."

I kneel, touch a poppy wired to a wreath,
strike a match to read a letter, typed, unsigned,
taped to the stem of the flower:
"I can't forgive you for going but I
won't forget I was your wife who let you."

Lottery number three hundred and twelve
the year they took the first fifty-two,
I never had to choose, to go, or anything else:
this wall of names reproaches understanding.

My Dear Udnie, Part 1

"My Dear Udnie" is one of what I call my "voices poems." Each stanza is a separate voice, though not necessarily a separate person. It was written in 1986 after a number of visits to great museums, including the Hirshorn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the National Gallery. I bought postcards of great paintings I'd seen at each museum and these stacked up on my writing desk. Eventually, I composed this poem with each stanza prompted by a single painting. The poem was published in 1987, but this is the first time it has appeared with the artwork that inspired it. (Part Two is here  , Part Three is here  .)

                                                   MY DEAR UDNIE

I

Your face is energy beauty expends

in the gilded bust green in blue lamplight.

Molded by thumbs, the lumpish moon ascends

to fright the sky and hush the dream of night.

Steeple, cornice, dome, gable, pyramid—

today I must speak to you in flat roofs,

simple boxes, as to a crown amid

capitals, monumental and aloof.

Who did these paintings in my studio?

I’ve kissed that flesh, rubbed it raw as roses.

Who did these paintings?  Do you know?

You’ve sat for me in similar poses?

II

It’s one thirty.  We should go to our homes.

Maybe next time we won’t just walk these streets,

adding to the shadows.  We’ll talk in poems,

let them distinguish the truth from deceit.

Lovers stare at themselves through a window—

faces motionless behind glass and frame.

Blinking unseen, they’re bored by what they know.

Either might break a smile and nothing change.

You are my private demon in this hell,

my love.  A lady who carries a fan,

soothingly forever saying farewell.

Give the fan to me and wave your hand.

III

All thought of you is memory in abstract—

congeries of blades and thudding saps.

A nice nose, long-licking tongue: discrete facts

hold harmless stupid phrases, futile haps.

You are like to god as stones multiplying arcs.

I don’t say this to anger you, but explain

the hard singularity of your remarks,

which leave me faithless on a pebbled plain.

We all dreamt deserts in rainbow clothes,

wanderers following mirages of love.

A lioness breathed on me, whispering oaths—

the moon’s kiss a slap of a limp glove.

IV

You see a candle in the mirror, cry

tears of a skull couched in a maiden’s lap.

Her breasts grow white and rigid, calcify—

orgasms crack in the cranial gap.

The life inside my soul is a black crow

kissed and stroked by flesh I can’t control.

No old boy, no new man is not my foe.

I give myself to each to char his soul.

New crystal, blown white hot from inside—

cool simplicity, single purposes.

It changes when faceted, like a bride—

innerness revealed in spectral surfaces.

My Dear Udnie, Part 2

V

She’s flat-chested and bald between her legs,

just like me.  Not exactly.  More tummy.

But she has three boys who moon and beg,

who don’t even care if she’s a dummy!

Sister says reflections off pump and pearl

will make a window of a girl’s dress.

I know boys who laugh with their eyes, so sure

of success—if not I, then others undress.

Yeah, they were naked all right, the whores,

jiggling, cooing, squatting, touching themselves.

About as exciting as two-by-fours.

I took a big one—boobs like swinging bells.

VI

I stretch every minute looking to see

that we’re still here beneath this crooked butte.

A short nap has creased my unworthy dreams.

Alone, she’d trade the sun her red suit.

I wonder what he’s like on trapeze?

She locks her legs about his waist and must

feel it.  That and the way he grabs her knees

And dives between them, flying with lust!

Later, she said, Lover, you are a top,

spinning madly.  Clear the floor and drill

the points of the compass until we drop

down blurred dimensions, dizzy, almost ill.

VII

Holding hands, the five dancers circle

on rippling grass, naked in spirit.

As the dance turns each dancer’s miracle,

the virgin breaks the ring without regret.

The truest is the dawn dream.  Fair bodies

bathe in cool waters, or pluck roses

for the golden basket.  Stirred, she flees

the crescent-moon-crowned bull’s hypnosis.

The King has said, “Her love is food for war.”

A slut fattens him daily for the job.

How they walk!  Their genitals must be sore.

In the tower, his Queen gives birth to sobs.

VIII

Pregnant, your belly grew longer, then round.

Your breasts too.  Painful for you.  Not for me.

I watched you sleeping nude and listened, found

a new life swimming in an ancient sea.

If there’s nothing but eyes to justify

her expense, what is all this darkness?

She ignores the child.  When I get mad, she cries.

Mother laughs, thinking, poetic justice.

Our breakfast room is a chapel of light

where my husband prays to the newspapers.

It has been years.  We no longer fight.

I serve him currant jelly with capers.

My Dear Udnie, Part 3

IX

I’m in diamonds.  I do my best to provide.

But last night my wife acted out a strange scene.

God knows she was absolutely pie-eyed.

Dressed only in a bow, she grabbed my thing!

Solitaire sprawled on the rug with the dog—

goddamned loneliness, card game, my burnt knees,

the wallpaper samples in that catalog!

He says he’s good when he isn’t with me!

I buy this bird.  It’s dead but soft.  Nice.  Soft.

My woman could make nothing of these others.

So many birds you’ve brought down from aloft.

Shut up!  I don’t bargain with her lovers.

 X

 These women never let us get things done.

It’s such a basic thing to hang a man

on a cross.  And he’s not even their son.

I suppose they must do what they can.

The women weary of calling their men

to lunch they’ve made in the golden hay fields.

Harvest is a working madness for them.

They eat, to the sound of scythes, poverty’s meal.

Hurry!  The night finds the darkness.  The sea

will empty before our lamps are lit!

The fish peck eyes that can no longer see.

Hungry, we work to milk our mother’s tit.

XI

 She is the only woman left who has her hair.

Alone, in that shattered window, she sits,

nourished by food she gets from god knows where,

while I lug starving corpses to the pits.

Come, Perfect Fool!  I’ll tell your fortune,

while my girls cut your purse, pick your pocket.

I predict a fall in self-satisfaction.

You have a brain, but your actions mock it.

The sockets in the skull have been worn to

pinholes.  The jaw is a flower of flakes

in a desert stretched from red hills to blue

lakes, blooming for a dead man’s dead wife’s sake.

XII

See?  Here she is.  No man held her life.

Barbed wire and bullets were to no avail.

How swift a bird to fly above the knife.

Her body is still warm.  Her eyes are pale.

Trees are a curse on the moon, which is far

and updateless, while they stand here and grow.

My eyes stir a whirlpool of dim stars;

Diving for death, I see her and follow.

Udnie, my dear one, I see you idealized—

A fervent virgin staring at a house.

You were more than that, I realize—

A god my fervent prayer could not arouse.

Here Are More We Missed

What follows was written in 1978 and '79 by my grad school roommate (and still best friend) Michael Antman and myself. At the time, I was working as a PR assistant for a machine tool company and Michael for the Chicago Board of Trade. Over the course of several months, we composed these haiku and many others, mostly at work, and mailed them to each other. Collaborative haiku has a venerable history in Japan, but for us it was probably therapy as much as anything else -- two aspiring writers wondering how we'd suddenly found ourselves in the business world. I have left the poems and their clumsy introduction entirely unedited and intact. Posting them now, which I do with Michael's permission, comes about in part because of his fine recent piece on "Poetry, Patience, and Rage" in the culture blog When Falls the Coliseum.



HERE ARE MORE WE MISSED

100 HAIKU

By Michael Antman and Christopher D. Guerin

FOREWORD

Haiku has not fared well in America. That there are “haiku magazines” (I know of none for sonnets or sestinas) is proof of this. Haiku is seldom printed elsewhere.

Admittedly, American haiku is not always what it could be. It is often aphoristic, cute, or merely photographic. But unfortunately, its failure is judged (often simultaneously) the consequence of its being a poor imitation of Japanese haiku, and too precise an imitation of Japanese haiku; sometimes it’s condemned for being nothing at all like Japanese haiku.

Perhaps the problem is not (as so often stated) that we are not blessed with a sensibility subtle enough (whatever that means) to say a lot in a little space, or that, English being too economical a language compared to Japanese (if you are counting syllables), American haiku seem but limp translations; the problem may be that we think of our haiku in terms of the Japanese at all.

We call it “haiku,” and I think rightly, if for no other reason than in recognition of the origins of the form. But, what matters ultimately is the succinct and precise capture and evocation of a moment. Beyond this first understanding, oriental aesthetics and philosophy need have nothing to do with an American’s writing haiku. Which, of course, is not to say that it must not.

By this reasoning, one might argue that our haiku might be twenty or a hundred lines long. Yet, to experience a moment fully, mustn’t one experience it within a moment? Thus economy and compression is key. What happens next – the brooding, the questions, or the nod of recognition – is not the poem, is not in the poem. It is only the reaction of the imagination to a small cloud. The images suggested by a cloud are not the cloud, only the cloud’s progeny. Good haiku will engender many such images before it – being, after all, only two or three short lines long – dissipates in the attention and floats off. And, just as clouds unmindfully and naturally attain their own peculiar forms (I mean in the larger, generic sense of, for example, cirrus appearing quite different from cumulo nimbus), so each writer evolves a form best fitted to his manner of perceiving the world. Hence the differences between those of Michael Antman and myself.

Christopher D. Guerin


Waxwings
Gobble berries –
Twilight.

The huge oak
Thinks leaf, leaf, leaf
Of nothing.

A cottonmouth jabs
Dry branches
A million miles off.

Autumn rain
Falls from leaf to leaf –
Ah, childhood!

An October wind
Arriving on foaming waves
Closes my eyes tight.

A full moon
Rises huge and red
Just for us.

Gold leaves darken
In the trees and then in fires.
The cold green grass.

A snapshot
Taken as I laughed
Explains death.

A flock of starlings
Perched in bare maple branches –
The loneliest leaves.

Autumn, empty
Sky – birdcall – am I
Missing something?

The harvest
Moon and 1,000,000 stars –
Did I sneeze?

Falling leaves –
Shadows of the sun
Going down.

A sparrow
Frozen in the grass –
Where am I?

Wait longer?
Snowflakes softly break
The window.

Winter sun –
A icicle drips
Cold water.

Not crouching,
A white cat stalks mice
In the snow.

On the wall,
Shadows of a tree
Moved by wind.

Shooting stars
Falling someplace else
Scratch scratches.

The snow falls
On a thick oak limb,
A sparrow.

A vicious snowstorm
On the last night of the year.
Where to, old woman?

January wind –
Right below my window
Bodies pile up.

Snow drifting
Beneath pine trees sheathed in ice –
My cap itches.

A bare tree –
Nowhere in its branches
A right angle.

Orderly,
The geese wing north.
‘V’ for vane.

Haiku dance a jig
On the cracks in the sidewalk,
The air between leaves.

Snow in May
Depresses us both,
Mere lovers.

Haiku come
To mind, raindrops fall
Into pools.

Greeting spring,
I climb a willow.
Droop, spirits!

The loon dives;
Ripples soon fade.
He’ll never come up.

Waves crashing
Against a seawall.
I give up!

Cardinal
Flits from bush to shrub.
Red is rare.

The spring air
Comes in through my door.
Welcome, meal!

Two bobolinks
Light on the fence, singing –
My paintbrush falls.

Crazy
Old man laughs,
Suns rise.

Two blackbirds
Dive at a crow…
Stop blinking!

The sun’s limited –
Between a willow’s branches
Spider’s stretched his web.

Drops of blood on sand;
The child runs to his mother;
Glass glints in the sun.

Cicada’s murmur
Under evening thunder.
Fly, crazy fireflies!

A nighthawk
Dives after insects.
Ah, sweet beer!

The girl’s wet black hair
And ankles covered with sand.
My sunburnt skin peels.

Barefoot, I
Fish a mountain stream,
Ravens hop.

At nightfall –
The wink of an owl
I can’t see.

“Firefly”
Has three syllables:
The thing, one.

Chips of wood
Float in on a wave,
Brush the sand.

Rainbow trout
Shimmers in the stream
Playing me.

The cobra snaps
At a tail-chasing dog.
You talk of order!

I reel in
A wriggling sunfish
Worm in jaw.

September –
Green leaves carve
The sunlight.

Harvesttime –
A sunflower droops,
Flinging seeds.

_______

On Buson’s Portrait of Basho

Old grinner,
What’s under that skyblue cap?
Not haiku!


Christopher D. Guerin



FIFTY HAIKU
Michael Antman


AUTUMN

Unlucky from first
To last, the bright leaf plunges
Through the autumn night.

The lost calf bellows.
A hundred cows, eyes bulging,
Lift their heads and low.

In the yard – a hawk,
Wings torn, cornered by a dog.
Why wasn’t I told?

Asphalt lot. Children
Catch none of the leaves that fall
From the giant oak.

The sunset’s last light
Tints with orange the rising moon.
It doesn’t, really.

Waiting in the car:
Weed shadows on the windshield,
Crickets in the springs.

Playing touch football:
The ball soaring the sky,
Up there with my head.

Does she know the world
Will end tomorrow, that girl
Who walked right by me?

All night, howling wolves,
Gibbering monkeys: I live
Too near the school yard.

Old Wisconsin road –
Stillness, and clear autumn air.
Not a poem in sight!

That crow’s brittle cry –
It reminds me of something,
But I can’t say what.

Poetry’s a joke.
I walk boldly down the street,
Confident I’ll die.


WINTER

Chipping sound, far off:
Otherwise, the woods are still.
A few snow flakes fall…

A gap in the trees –
Black winter sky, or a lake?
The moon is confused.

Oysters and lemons –
Gulls call in the winter dusk –
On a blue platter.

A few footprints mark
That gleaming expanse of snow,
The still shining moon.

That squirrel, back again
To scrape my window for food:
The winter twilight.

The stench of lilacs.
The old woman behind me
Looks behind her, too.

Loaded down with ice,
The power lines faintly hum.
Over them, the stars.

Dear little rabbit! –
What are you doing gnawing
Through snow at tree bark?

An abandoned farm.
A dog lopes the icy yard
Under runny skies.

Sparrows flock about
Stalks frozen in the dark ice,
Slide when the wind blows.

The family poses
For a photograph, waist-deep
In the sparkling snow.


SPRING

Five months of winter
Forgotten, I sniff the breeze.
Leaping…lingering!

The kitten’s afraid
To let its paws touch the grass
Its first time outdoors.

The starling soars, loops,
Holding in its beak its prize:
A bit of french fry.

A silver-haired bum
Plucks a cigar from the curb,
Carefully dusts it.

As I leave for work,
A squirrel scampers for his tree.
I can’t take his life!

A walk after rain.
Mirrored in puddles, one grey cloud –
You should be ashamed!

Robins tear at worms.
Bodies shine in the spring light
Just before they snap.

The oily puddles
Spark on the midnight road: lights
Of refineries.

In the mists and rain,
Red lights by the switching yard.
The warehouse trembles.

The small town in spring –
The huge elms never still, tossed
By birds and crickets.

Eyes tearing, cheeks damp,
The evening cool and windy,
Sidewalks black and slick.

The whole block flooded.
Men hauling pumps and hoses,
Children, plastic boats.

Eating sweet oranges
On a warm night: My tooth throbs
And my fingers burn.


SUMMER

All along the tracks
To the grain elevator,
Little corn plants sprout.

Imagination
Lacking, that cow swats at flies
Like all the others.

Remember? We’d chase
Fireflies all summer long.
Here are more we missed.

What is lovelier
Than this glass of cherry pop
In the summer light?

Chirps from the garden.
My cheek against the window,
The glass faintly scratched.

Waking before dawn
I see the trees are swaying –
Because I’m watching?

Coffee in the cup
Trembles as she takes her seat:
Her loose-fitting dress.

By the old factory,
The air is always humming –
Locusts in the trees.

Is life worth living?
When she bends over like that,
You still have to ask?

A summer picnic:
The air is clear and sparkling,
Fresh-sliced cantaloupe.

Who let the firefly
Loose in the dark theater?
Our twilight movie!

Hot summer morning.
My cat pretends not to see
As I scratch myself.

In the green meadow
The brightest thing is the mirror
On a rusted truck.

Late summer twilight
Prickles the back of my hand.
How will the snow melt?

Flowering Crab

Scarlet unopened, the buds of flowering crab
bleach out in sunlight, go pale pink and drab.

After the third day, the wind loosens the petals,
and one flutters to the grass and settles.

It works its way through grass down to the soil—
air and water rub it thin as foil.

Then, between each cell, oxygen convenes,
until the petal of itself is rendered clean.

It dissolves into pattern everywhere;
if grown again to petal it won’t know or care.

My Dear Udnie

I

Your face is energy beauty expends
in the gilded bust green in blue lamplight.
Molded by thumbs, the lumpish moon ascends
to fright the sky and hush the dream of night.

Steeple, cornice, dome, gable, pyramid—
today I must speak to you in flat roofs,
simple boxes, as to a crown amid
capitals, monumental and aloof.

Who did these paintings in my studio?
I’ve kissed that flesh, rubbed it raw as roses.
Who did these paintings? Do you know?
You’ve sat for me in similar poses?


II

It’s one thirty. We should go to our homes.
Maybe next time we won’t just walk these streets,
adding to the shadows. We’ll talk in poems,
let them distinguish the truth from deceit.

Lovers stare at themselves through a window—
faces motionless behind glass and frame.
Blinking unseen, they’re bored by what they know.
Either might break a smile and nothing change.

You are my private demon in this hell,
my love. A lady who carries a fan,
soothingly forever saying farewell.
Give the fan to me and wave your hand.


III

All thought of you is memory in abstract—
congeries of blades and thudding saps.
A nice nose, long-licking tongue: discrete facts
hold harmless stupid phrases, futile haps.
You are like to god as stones multiplying arcs.
I don’t say this to anger you, but explain
the hard singularity of your remarks,
which leave me faithless on a pebbled plain.

We all dreamt deserts in rainbow clothes,
wanderers following mirages of love.
A lioness breathed on me, whispering oaths—
the moon’s kiss a slap of a limp glove.


IV

You see a candle in the mirror, cry
tears of a skull couched in a maiden’s lap.
Her breasts grow white and rigid, calcify—
orgasms crack in the cranial gap.

The life inside my soul is a black crow
kissed and stroked by flesh I can’t control.
No old boy, no new man is not my foe.
I give myself to each to char his soul.

New crystal, blown white hot from inside—
cool simplicity, single purposes.
It changes when faceted, like a bride—
innerness revealed in spectral surfaces.


V

She’s flat-chested and bald between her legs,
just like me. Not exactly. More tummy.
But she has three boys who moon and beg,
who don’t even care if she’s a dummy!

Sister says reflections off pump and pearl
will made a window of a girl’s dress.
I know boys who laugh with their eyes, so sure
of success—if not I, then others undress.

Yeah, they were naked all right, the whores,
jiggling, cooing, squatting, touching themselves.
About as exciting as two-by-fours.
I took a big one—boobs like swinging bells.


VI

I stretch every minute looking to see
that we’re still here beneath this crooked butte.
A short nap has creased my unworthy dreams.
Alone, she’d trade the sun her red suit.

I wonder what he’s like on trapeze?
She locks her legs about his waist and must
feel it. That and the way he grabs her knees
And dives between them, flying with lust!

Later, she said, Lover, you are a top,
spinning madly. Clear the floor and drill
the points of the compass until we drop
down blurred dimensions, dizzy, almost ill.


VII

Holding hands, the five dancers circle
on rippling grass, naked in spirit.
As the dance turns each dancer’s miracle,
the virgin breaks the ring without regret.

The truest is the dawn dream. Fair bodies
bathe in cool waters, or pluck roses
for the golden basket. Stirred, she flees
the crescent-moon-crowned bull’s hypnosis.

The King has said, “Her love is food for war.”
A slut fattens him daily for the job.
How they walk! Their genitals must be sore.
In the tower, his Queen gives birth to sobs.


VIII

Pregnant, your belly grew longer, then round.
Your breasts too. Painful for you. Not for me.
I watched you sleeping nude and listened, found
a new life swimming in an ancient sea.

If there’s nothing but eyes to justify
her expense, what is all this darkness?
She ignores the child. When I get mad, she cries.
Mother laughs, thinking, poetic justice.

Our breakfast room is a chapel of light
where my husband prays to the newspapers.
It has been years. We no longer fight.
I serve him currant jelly with capers.


IX

I’m in diamonds. I do my best to provide.
But last night my wife acted out a strange scene.
God knows she was absolutely pie-eyed.
Dressed only in a bow, she grabbed my thing!

Solitaire sprawled on the rug with the dog—
goddamned loneliness, card game, my burnt knees,
the wallpaper samples in that catalog!
He says he’s good when he isn’t with me!

I buy this bird. It’s dead but soft. Nice. Soft.
My woman could make nothing of these others.
So many birds you’ve brought down from aloft.
Shut up! I don’t bargain with her lovers.


X

These women never let us get things done.
It’s such a basic thing to hang a man
on a cross. And he’s not even their son.
I suppose they must do what they can.

The women weary of calling their men
to lunch they’ve made in the golden hay fields.
Harvest is a working madness for them.
They eat, to the sound of scythes, poverty’s meal.

Hurry! The night finds the darkness. The sea
will empty before our lamps are lit!
The fish peck eyes that can no longer see.
Hungry, we work to milk our mother’s tit.


XI

She is the only woman left who has her hair.
Alone, in that shattered window, she sits,
nourished by food she gets from god knows where,
while I lug starving corpses to the pits.

Come, Perfect Fool! I’ll tell your fortune,
while my girls cut your purse, pick your pocket.
I predict a fall in self-satisfaction.
You have a brain, but your actions mock it.

The sockets in the skull have been worn to
pinholes. The jaw is a flower of flakes
in a desert stretched from red hills to blue
lakes, blooming for a dead man’s dead wife’s sake.


XII

See? Here she is. No man held her life.
Barbed wire and bullets were to no avail.
How swift a bird to fly above the knife.
Her body is still warm. Her eyes are pale.

Trees are a curse on the moon, which is far
and updateless, while they stand here and grow.
My eyes stir a whirlpool of dim stars;
Diving for death, I see her and follow.

Udnie, my dear one, I see you idealized—
A fervent virgin staring at a house.
You were more than that, I realize—
A god my fervent prayer could not arouse.

Time Is Not Time

Time is not time

A reader in a library

Making each book real

For the moment it is read

 

And what remains unread

Remains unwritten

 

The swimmer in the sea

A thousand miles from boat or shore

The mountainous cascading sea

The fear that vivifies each muscle

Each drop of blood

Only that life

At that moment

In that sea

Anecdote

I set a pebble on a table by a spoon

And tried to tell the difference between

My mind and the surface of the table.

 

Evening stole the light and soon

The rest of the rest of the room seemed

As far as the spoon was from the pebble.

 

It was not the pebble or the spoon

That took the center of the scene

But the impulse engendering this fable.

 

There is no finer thought than this,

That what could be is not what is.

 

STOPPAGES

       1

 

I am seduced by the stoppage of time,

like Bruckner with his endless symphonies

pushing back the inevitable

silence of the unattended moment.

For the next ten seconds nobody dies.

 

Late afternoon—the maple goes darker,

cell by cell darker in the slant sunlight.

I can’t be sure the leaves were just as red

ten years ago, or that John Milton’s blood

wasn’t a fraction thicker than my own. 

 

                               2

             I wield shears

                beneath honey locust—

            tenant-neglected,

                grown to ground—

            scissor and step back,

                watch the fluttering

            stem-bound leaves

                follow the branches down.

 

            I bundle new deadwood;

                three green needles,

            like fangs, guard each twig;

                black bark thorns,

            driven by the gathered droop

                of leaves being lifted,

            pierce through leather

                the flesh of my palms.

 

            My mind, cuspidate

                in my fingers, moves

            through the patterns of thorn

                proliferating pain.

       

                               3

            The sound of somebody

            dropping the doorknocker

            just once . . . I flee

            unremembered phantasms,

            hold eyes closed tightly—

            tongue like paper—reach

            for the glass of water, see

            the glass in the dark

            and dilate waking.  Setting

            the glass off the table

            edge, grope, settle it on

            the corner.  More sleep.

            Go to sleep.  Eyelids pinch

            a thread of sunlight spinning

            through the curtain dust.

            The radiator knocks . . .

            just once.  Vagueness spreads

            an exit through counted time

            past another me I meet

            fading, questioned in sodden

            stillness and crepuscule.

            Quick manufacture of deep

            inconsequence—someone not

            I overhears singing I have

            not composed, conversation

            rendered without regret,

            the voice of the homunculus

            at the core of the blood cell

            and metaphor.  I’m billiard-

            brained!  Blood and ivory balls

            percuss on clipped green

            and blue crystal; in each

            sphere a ray is loosed

            to sublimate the ricochet.

            The angel’s share offered

            and unattained (air breathed

            in sleep), a rarification

            of spirit I can’t sniff, taste,

            pour into existence, but

            think is a wonder of wines.

 

                              4

 What interior thing sleeps with memory,

knows the certain locus of nothing

and the time of any new thing only

in the night-light of its circumscription?

 

What does this slumbering watcher feel

waking beside a lover of years past

who’s discovered herself under wild skies,

in a land contoured by the height of sand?

 

His eyes pinched, his ears stopped,

his dream-worn senses insinuate

the wonder of that endlessness

and expatiate like a ticking clock

 

on what he thinks he knows of his own death.

Seeking out the reality three

dimensions deep within himself, his mind,

that strict lump that can explain a bird,

 

that cagey bastard, calmly discourses

on phantom and fading gods, while his warming

beauty evaporates and mingles with his breath

ecstatically generating weather.

 

                                    5

         It was perfectly smooth, the earth

        I woke to—featureless, without

        mountain, grass, sand, bird, lion—

        skin-tight, a bald head.

           

        Balloon on which plaster is packed,

        this world before a world; I stood

        in dark after moonless dusk, and

        said, nonetheless, this is my world.

 

        I recognized the horizon,

        the leavening of gravity,

        the proximity of sky.

        A fit of rain sprayed my face.

                      

        The lazy Susan landscape threw me

        down.  My first sweetheart limped

        up on the brace of her polio.

        Naked, I rolled on my belly.

 

        I woke, the nixie gone, salt water

        on my lips.  The moon rose, pulling

        water back into a great wave,

        holding it back above my head.

 

                               6

             Johann Sebastian Bach is

                        walking

                                    into this room.

            Buddha croaks

                        and Bach

                                    still

                        walks into this room.

            Walk the road,

                        stop, cough,

                                    crack the bone

                        of sound—

            Bach is walking

                        into this room

                                    whirling

                        a grager.

            Through stained glass,

                        scan

                                    berry trees

                        and sun swizzle—

            Bach is waltzing

                        into

                                    this

                        room.

            Clap your eyes!

            Johann Sebastian

                        Bach is

walking

                        into

            this room.

                                                                                   

                               7

         A creaking ecstatically extended

        wakes me early in the night.

        Winter air binds board in stone (a

        hairline runs down the façade,

        splitting bricks, parting mortar from its

        hold) one more fraction of an inch.

        Prone, I imagine the house shift

        off its load-bearing edge

        and topple into the basement.

        When will it stop, the house grind

        out its antagonism of stress and nail

        to silent, unlevel motionlessness?

        Or will I stop waking to this house?

 

                            8

             Water on the beach

            and the pebbled surf—

            the air is full

           

            of milk.  A hand

            touches me; there

            I hate, but not

 

            the hand.  Nature

            is the second

            displeasure, when

 

            the first tips

            the world and drinks.

            Round, hard, the pebble,

 

            and black.  Not

            much else.  Wet,

            it shines.  Dry,

 

            dull.  I keep it

            in a dish of green

            water.  The blunted

                                

            shard of glass,

            the charred stick,

            the aluminum bent

 

            to a coin, the

            dimensionless dream

            of sand, calm

 

            if I look at them.

            As I age it is not

            that I like people

 

            less, but have less

            to do with them.

            I can say the one

 

            thing—about the pebble—

    but the other comes

in white noise,

water on the beach.