Haphazard agapanthus

On our morning walk, Mrs. R remarked that the agapanthuses (agapanthi?) in our neighborhood look more haphazard than usual. I was reminded of a poem I wrote a few years ago and could never get to work, so I post it in case anyone has useful suggestions. (Here's what an agapanthus looks like, and here's one emerging from its calyx.)



Calyx

Roots deep in midnight rain and chloroplasts
engorged with morning light, from its stained
straitjacket the agapanthus burst

violetly. The place you're headed's halfway up
not this hill, but the next, and everything
important in the world is happening here.

Sit cross-legged on the sketched
square of concrete this moment chose and feel
the dust brought by the wind and whoever

lives in these houses or somewhere
you've not yet seen - where were they? When
the calyx burst, what did you hear?

Not going into my canon

We just spent a few days in Austin, where Mrs. R was giving a talk. For the first time in a long while I spent a day the way I used to during my write-a-book sabbatical year: walking around looking at stuff and then writing a poem about it all. The following refers to a tree that Mrs. R associates with the city:


Austin

Zexmenia, and its grape jelly smell,
Call to the Tourette's in every poet:
Concord, radius, ulna, elbow, six
Degrees of anything and opposite,
The map of all minds' metrics a hopeless
Scribble, a knot of labyrinth threads.
The tree's purple blossoms rhyme, sort of,
The lavenderly iridescent slipcovers
On the chairs in the rough-hewn coffee house
Near the capital and its Confederate
War Memorial where you've stopped for a rest
On your first-time visit to the city
To see if you'd want to move here, a place
You'll probably soon leave, never to return.


We picked up the Latin name from a label in a garden exhibit of local and ecofriendly plants. The poem (or rather draft) certainly seems difficult, and it's unapologetically sonnet-like in its 6-8 construction, but it perhaps expresses something about how we live in our heads and our lives. Sadly, when I looked on the web for images of the described blossoms (and to think about "lilac" for "purple" and so forth), I discovered that Zexmenia is an orange-flowered shrub and the plant in question is actually the Texas mountain laurel, euphoniously linnaeusized as Sophora secundiflora.

Sometimes one starts a poem and it ends somewhere and one realizes it didn't arrive anywhere worth going. Sometimes a tweak in direction along the way will redeem the effort. Rather seldom have I written something to find that the first word is just wrong and the whole enterprise hopelessly muddled thereby. (Well, there's some of that here.)

Anyway, that's why the above draft is posted, not sitting in a drawer awaiting a rewrite and, hopefully, eventual submission somewhere.

If I'm Gilbert, where's Sullivan?

It's easy to make Jackmormon laugh. See the comments for the title.

A remark about the verse: Mrs. R and I saw a production of The Mikado recently, and I've had the tit-willow meter in my head. I used pure amphibrachs (weak strong weak) with iambic closes to even lines (as Lewis Carroll did in "The Hunting of the Snark" and elsewhere). The 8th line however is irregular - "adjacent" is an amphibrach displaced by the leading "The", and "wall" is stressed against the meter - so hopefully the line comes across as almost all stressed syllables, the tone intended to be espressed being "I'm going to say this slowly and with a lot of emphasis so you catch my drift, ok?" Beyond that one tricksy bit the whole thing's in the setup.

Mrs. R just read Connie Willis's To Say Nothing About The Dog, and the Victorian era's apparently on my mind.

The Watergaw by Hugh MacDiarmid

Ae weet forenicht i the yow-trummle
I saw yon antrin thing,
A watergaw wi its chitterin licht
Ayont the on-ding;
An I thocht o the last wild look ye gied
Afore ye deed!

There was nae reek i the laverock's hoose
That nicht - an nane i mine;
But I hae thocht o that foolish licht
Ever sin syne;
An I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.


Something like:

The Unclear Rainbow


A wet early evening
In a cold July after the shearing,
I saw that rare thing,
A faint rainbow in the shivering light
Beyond the downpour;
And I thought of the last wild look on your face
Before you died.

There was no smoke in the lark's house that night -
and none in mine;
But I've thought of that foolish light
Ever since then;
And I think that perhaps at last I know
What your look meant.



The business about the lark is apparently an expression for stormy and cold, and I gave up on the full translation of "yow-trummle", which means "a cold spell in July after the sheep shearing". Not knowing Scots (or Synthetic Scots [of which this poem is the first example] for that matter), I suspect that "yon" in line 2 suggests the speaker is seeing a watergaw as he says the poem. And I'd guess that "foolish" means (or is intended as) "deceptive" or "unimportant". Anyway, the poem is readable in the original after learning a few (wonderful) words (the discovery of which by the poet were a large part of the poem's genesis), so go back and try it.

I came across the above in Seamus Heaney's collection _Finders Keepers_, in the essay "A Torchlight Procession of One". Heaney's prose is not streamlined - I rather suspect that he likes to relax and bloviate after the tight craft of his poetry - but the collection has its moments.


Update, 25/3/06, from the comments: the poem read by the author.

How to identify Calvin Trillin

Not Calvin Trillin

Via Tbogg.



Actual Calvin Trillin


More actual Calvin Trillin (from 30 June 2003):


BUSH, CHENEY, RUMSFELD, AND, ALAS, POWELL TALK TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

They pushed the CIA to say
That nukes could quickly come our way--
Saddam might, with a finger snap,
Remove Chicago from the map.
They took a lack of proof in stride.
They simply lied.

Intelligence? The Pentagon's
Came straight from dorkish neocons
Employed to find Iraq in back
Of every terrorist attack.
When plain facts failed to serve their side,
They simply lied.

The war's opponents they'd deride
As wimps who'd like to run and hide
From threats we simply can't abide.
The Gulf of Tonkin was their guide:
They simply lied, and lied, and lied.

Morro Bay

In Morro Bay
There's one direction no one looks
It goes unmentioned in the tourists' books
A greater shock
Than the giant hemispheric rock
That cannot be
Is what you see
Before you learn to look away
In Morro Bay


In Morro Bay
The shops and houses face one way
They stare out at the blue
And keep just out of view
A sin God cannot pardon
In the garden
Behind the used bookstore's a chapel
Where someone might offer you Eve's apple
Ask you to stay
In Morro Bay


In Morro Bay
Where movie stars once came to play
A round of golf and dine
Just tourists drink the local wine
You don't need an illusionist
If you can make believe that bad things don't exist
There's much less altered flesh here on display
Than in LA


In Morro Bay
You feel ok
Once you have drowned your sorrow
The water tastes like sand
And isn't in demand
Here happiness is something you can borrow
Not keep for any pay
In Morro Bay


In Morro Bay
At end of day
Your heart turns cold
Your rear-view mirror turns to gold
But you'll be back someday
To Morro Bay

On hating sheep

I hate sheep. When I was a grad student at CERN, I had an office in a trailer beside a grassy knoll. When the grass got a bit long, a flock of sheep would be deposited on it. Sheep are, following millennia of human selection, just a smidge smarter than lawnmowers, and are an adequate automated substitute if you don't mind them walking into the side of your building headfirst and baaing in surprise. Over and over again, stinking the whole time.

Here's a sour little (believe it or not) love poem I wrote then:

Spring, Frühling, Printemps, Primavera


The sheep outside my window gnaw the grass down to the dirt.
Some of them wear cowbells; the others surely don't wonder
What they are saying to each other.
Sometimes they baa without inflection, their simple vocabulary
Well-matched to their lack of anything to say
Or ability to comprehend.
The songbirds blurt their programmed monologues -
The male birds, having absorbed and regrown the cells
In which they store their shrill spring come-ons.

I've been studying Italian, you know some - with English,
French, and German that's four languages we could talk in -
Your French is better, and my German, but in any case
We don't, or little - our border is clearly drawn,
We've little commerce and nothing to declare.
By treaty I will continue not telling you
What you know already, what you mean to me,
In four languages simultaneously.

So anyway, I'm able to set aside my love for the natural world in cases where humans have screwed species up and so take Schadenfreude from this updated link (this report is stale) about 3 gross of suicidal (I'd write "lemminglike" if that wasn't an urban [orban?] legend) sheep, via Billmon, who puts his usual english on it.

My New Bible, Book 0, Chapter 0

0. In the untime before Time,
   
1. God dreamt a Creation of unity and light.
2. And God saw that it was beautiful and good,
   
3. And Her joy was infinite.
4. And God saw this this Creation was empty of life,
   
5. And Her pain was greater,
6. So great it split Her Being.
   
7. And thence issued forth our Universe,
8. Its stars burning with unbearable light
9. Only to collapse into infinite dark
10. Or burst or fall into futility,
11. And between them stretched vast depths of cold
12. Still rippling with God's scream;
13. And scattered upon the deep were worlds
14. Where intelligence arose
15. To look upon God's pain and join Her suffering.
    

The word "wiser"

Mark Kleiman, in correspondence, suggested I write an occasional poem on Terri Schiavo's death (though in the meantime I see he's calling for a moratorium). I replied that elegies are long and difficult and bad at an even higher than normal rate. I've written one, for Sergio Vieira de Mello, but for someone who I think is lucky to have finally died, or has been dead for years, it's the wrong form. But...

Nine Lines On Terri Schiavo's Death

At 18, you weighed 250 pounds.
When you died, you weighed 110.
The last fire will leave much less.
And no scale is subtle enough
To weigh your soul.

How better to measure love
Than by the suffering of the living?
And no scale is capacious enough
To weigh a nation's pain.


Some comments on Terri Schiavo at Obsidian Wings starting here. In my private version of English "wiser" and "smarter" are synonyms, but writing in public I distinguish them, or pretend to. As hilzoy says in the thread, it would generally be wise to not talk about Mrs. Schiavo for a while, but I did learn something about what I think in the process of commenting.