V E R S E ❦ I M A G E

Think of the wren / and how little flesh is needed to make a song.

[poem by Galway Kinnell]

The storm of the commonplace, does it grumble louder these days? The daily downstream of task and grind and conciliation, when did it become all fierce foam, rapids, never a moment to look up from paddling and glimpse a tree swallow’s emerald benediction? When did everything get so damn hard?

This morning there is too much inner clangor for me to pick up a pen, much less face a blank page. No, nothing “worthy” of recording: Who would care to read the quotidian health bulletins of my nonagenarian parents; to join me in ticking off one hundred and one conditions that need to be met before we can gather in person at church this Sunday; to listen to my inner dialogue with vaccine refusers and wonder if Linda and I will ever again feel safe singing with our regional chorus? Why worry about a little heat exhaustion working on the Elkin Creek trail tomorrow when the whole west coast is desiccating and blowing away?

Meanwhile outside dank vapors of rumination, mud of gray matter, rigid constricting cranium; meanwhile outside in the press of North Carolina foothills summer afternoon, starting to sweat just thinking about it; meanwhile outside no matter how hot, how thorny, how dispiriting . . . in the neighbor’s yard a wren is singing.

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Why Regret?
Galway Kinnell – 1927-2014

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of a world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-parts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and then their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Why Regret? is from Strong Is Your Hold. Copyright © 2006 by Tom Galway Kinnell. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Galway Kinnell — Poetry Foundation

Galway Kinnell — Poets.org

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