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[with 3 poems by Hilde Weisert, plus Wilfred Owen]
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Imagination Itself
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++++ To the eyes of a man of imagination,
++++ Nature is imagination itself.
++++ ++++ — William Blake
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Who needs half a million unpronounceable forms of life
Half a world away? Ah, you do, they say,
And enumerate the ways:
++++ Glues, dyes, inks,
++++ Peanuts, melons, tea,
++++ Golf balls, paint, and gum,
++++ Mung beans, lemons, rice,
++++ And a fourth of all the medicines you take,
++++ And a fifth of all the oxygen you breathe,
++++ And countless life-prolonging secrets their wild cousins know
++++ to tell the Iowa corn and the garden tomato.
++++ And if that’s not enough, think of rubber —
++++ and where we’d all be, rattling down the interstate
++++ on wooden wheels.
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And that’s only the stuff we know how to use,
And that’s only the half-million species we know how to name.
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And in the time it took to tell you this
Five thousand acres more are gone.
And by the time that this year’s kindergarten class
is thirty-five, most of what is now alive —
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But wait. What if — what if this deluge of mind-boggling
statistical connectedness were, true as it is,
only the least of it? What if the real necessity
were of another kind, the connection
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Not with what you consume, or do, but who you are?
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With your own imagination, the necessity there
of places that have not been cleared to till,
of the luxury of all that buzzing in the deep,
of a glimpse of feather or translucent insect wing
a color that’s so new it tells you light and sound
are, indeed, just matters of degree, and makes your vision hum
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And makes you think the universe could hum
in something like the wild, teeming equilibrium
of the rain forest.
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Hilde Weisert
from The Scheme of Things, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH, © 2015
++++ originally published in THE SUN, Chapel Hill, NC
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Semi trailer in the right lane, speed almost matched, I can’t see green flashing past its far shoulder and the close cropped median is no consolation. Another morning driving to Winston to care for my parents, often a highway hour of calm & reflection, but today none of that. The hugeness of the truck, how much steel and rubber son to squat corroding and stinking in a back lot; the miles of asphalt and concrete, how much of the world we have eaten and smothered; myself no better than any, spewing carbon, cranking high this premature heat of summer – what is this world we have so mangled?
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Linda and I caught a whiff of dead thing two days ago. Cool morning leaving for church then on to Duke Gardens for an outing, just a faint premonition of amines and putrefaction. Pre-stench. That night stronger when we returned too tired to seek its source near the driveway. Yesterday pungent but impossible to pinpoint. I didn’t want to find it. The bluebirds all weekend had been fretful and flighty around the birdhouse, bringing insects less frequently although chirping still audible inside. No chirping yesterday morning. Had the fledglings flown? Or . . .? I didn’t want to see what I feared in the nest.
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This morning the dead scent is a shroud of grief. I need to leave for Winston right now but first I walk the drive’s margin sniffing like a reluctant hound. It comes from everywhere. The compost heap? Down the hill, a dead rabbit or squirrel? I’m avoiding the birdhouse. When I reach it, though, I suddenly know. We couldn’t see from the porch but at the back of the post in webbing I tacked up to deter snakes is one. A large black rat snake.
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So to save the eggs, the nestlings, I’ve killed a beneficial serpent. One just like all those I’ve swerved to avoid running over, one that no doubt has contributed to the absence of copperheads on our property. One I should thank, not destroy. The bluebird parents we saw were mightily upset by him even though he could never reach them. No feathered visitations this morning, no chirping. Have the young ones flown? Or for fear of the snake did the parents abandon the nest?
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I will know when I clean out the birdhouse. But I can’t make myself do it this morning.
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Ars Poetica
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“I learned to talk from my mother,” I said,
and was startled: Doesn’t everyone?
But “learned from” –
as if it were playing the piano,
or making the sylsalat at Christmas?
But it was: Her speech,
invented for me, her patience
letting my mouth and tongue
work the vowels, open
and open, then clench consonants
hard in my teeth, all nibbled edge,
and me still making of it a gibberish,
a babble; a glottal soup,
a drool;
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My answering nothing but a rhythmic rumination
of nonsense syllables. But she kept on,
now a whisper, now a song, and in a while
the words became words: Epitome
and punctilio, modicum
and masterly; plenty of slang
like vamoose and delish, and play
in the “Ditto” that either one
could say, and smile, (our secret).
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This language of the days
of our small world, dangled from,
rolled in, colored and toddled,
and finally slept on , a pillow,
the sun,
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Is now so many vocabularies ago, fields
of cultivated speech –
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But with this odd sentence I remember
what came first,
the ravishing world she made
me take, word by hungry word,
and how much more there is to tell
in our original language.
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Hilde Weisert
from The Scheme of Things, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH, © 2015
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As Hilde Weisert read from The Scheme of Things recently at McIntyre’s Books near Chapel Hill, I was captured in the net of imagining that she cast over her audience. For those few minutes I lived in new places and thought new ideas. Now reading her book straight through has expanded and reinforced that experience. I find it remarkable that poems that criss-cross so many years and so much distance can feel entirely local and present.
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Each of the five sections – Three Stars; The Truth of Art; Skylark; Away; Where We Were and What We Were Doing – is a book unto itself. Each section weaves threads to create an entirety. Three stars: New York, Paris, Budapest, and the family relations that occupy them. The truth of art: language, science, learning to speak. Skylark: jazz, baby, jazz! Away: youth and age, what we lose, whom we lose. Where? This earth, this world, this stumbling life and all we might miss and all we might claim.
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Hilde has lived many lives, it seems. Thanks to writers of books, thanks to poetry, you and I may live many lives as well.
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More about David Robert Books and The Scheme of Things HERE
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Finding Wilfred Owen Again
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Our college love affair was doomed
like all the romance I outgrew at twenty;
trench warfare’s mad embrace be damned
along with Buffy Sainte-Marie and Nietzsche.
++++ And anyway, the war in Vietnam was ending.
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For decades he lay silent in a book,
moved from Brooklyn to St Louis and LA
with curling snapshots, silver rings turned black
the mildewed albums I will never play.
++++ I left him to his war; our war had ended –
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Until I call, the offhand way you do old flames
(as if you hadn’t kept their trail of numbers)
when something big has changed, or Armageddon looms.
(Shamed moment: Was it Rupert I remembered?
++++ Romance imagined?) Not now: War has descended –
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distant and mine. I”m dazed, feckless, as lost
as my lost country. So I come here,
to find myself standing on shattered ground he blessed
with full eyes ninety years ago and hear
++++ him tell another time how war must end
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in this fell field, on this dark page. The night
opens, closes, opens, a swinging sulphur rhythm in the flare
igniting each line end, the faces lit
and then eclipsed,
but always bright the names.
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Hilde Weisert
from The Scheme of Things, David Robert Books, Cincinnati OH, © 2015
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Anthem for Doomed Youth
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What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
++++ — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
++++ Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
++++ Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
++++ And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
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What candles may be held to speed them all?
++++ Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
++++ The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
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V E R S E ❦ I M A G E 