8. Three poems, by Li-Young Lee, George Bilgere, Sharon Olds

I considered posting the first of the poems here yesterday, but then thought, nah, enough poetry already. In the meantime, this morning I was reminded of the second poem as I walked on the beach with a friend and our dogs and we talked about the beauty (and necessity) of being in the moment as a way to tune out the awfulness that swirls about us now—a skill that dogs and children demonstrate so well. As for the third poem, it showed up on FB, also this morning, in a post by Rebecca Solnit, who called it "one of the most memorable poems I've ever read."

What binds these three poems together is that they were all read, and discussed, in the Poetry Space podcast I wrote about yesterday, about what makes a poem interesting. I couldn't resist the coincidences. (And in terms of accessibility? I might go with #2, #3, then #1. But I'm not going to rearrange them. You can do the work.)

I will try to stay away from poetry next week. But forgive me if I fail. I am finding poetry awfully comforting and/or invigorating just now.

Big Clock

by Li-Young Lee

When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker,
and my father’s body kept filling up with time.

I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar.
We slept under the stopped hands of the clock
until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder.
He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key.
No one but he knew what he saw.

Below him, the mortal faces went on passing
toward all compass points.
People went on crossing borders,
buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another.
Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back,
waiting room to moving train and back,
war zone to safe zone and back.

Crossing between gain and loss:
learning new words for the world and the things in it.
Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.
And collecting words in a different language
for those three primary colors:
staying, leaving, and returning.

And only the man at the top of the ladder
understood what he saw behind the face
which was neither smiling nor frowning.

And my father’s body went on filling up with death
until it reached the highest etched mark
of his eyes and spilled into mine.
And my mother’s hair goes on
never reaching the earth. 

Palimpsest

by George Bilgere

We’re bicycling through the Tiergarten
on a summer morning in Berlin,
my wife and I, our son in his bike seat,
and it really is a lovely day, except
someone has spray painted in red,
dripping cursive on the marble pedestals
of the statues of the great poets
and composers scattered around the park,
Juden Raus, Jews Out, and my first thought
is, hey, my German is getting better,
I figured that out right away,
even though the handwriting is poor,
but of course the author was working
in the dark, and under a certain pressure,
so really, you can’t blame him, and besides,
the quality of the handwriting isn’t
the point here, nor is my progress
in German, which in most respects
has been disappointing. The point
is that we have a bottle of wine
and some ham and cheese sandwiches
and we’re going to make the best of it,
we’re going to spread the blanket
and have a picnic here in the not entirely
new Germany, that bad last century
still bleeding into this one, blood
still soaking the feet of the poets,
while our little boy, new to history,
runs laughing under a blazing sun
through the green illiterate meadows.

 

I Go Back to May 1937

by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the   
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   
I want to go up to them and say Stop,   
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,   
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,   
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   
take them up like the male and female   
paper dolls and bang them together   
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.