Tag Eugene Oregon

* refreshing via lisel mueller

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

Train_stuck_in_snow The Wikipedia page for Snow, under the heading “Effects on human society,” features the image here of a snow blockade in southern Minnesota in 1881. While awe is something I’ve always associated with snow – at least for the first ten minutes of a downfall, then I just get cranky – there’s something altogether new and refreshing experienced with this image. And here, I mean refreshing as in the “refresh” button on your computer screen that makes everything *new.*

There’s the sheer daunting presence of the snow in the image, how there’s essentially more snow than train. There’s the fact the train continues to push forward, it’s engine stubborn and pushed. Then there’s the human figure standing on the train who maybe doesn’t believe what they see, as I don’t; or maybe does, as the above circumstance may have been an everyday occurence for trains.

I look at the lone figure and think: Well, there’s a poet. Not in the sense that I would impose any romantic notion upon them, but rather there’s a situation a poet seeks. Everyday snow and everyday train, but how often from this perspective?

This week’s poem by Lisel Mueller takes into a similar, refreshing perspective. The intimacy of the lyric charges the snow imagery with a tone that evokes both the lightness and light of snow. Snow becomes a way to see and feel ourselves anew.

Snow – Lisel Mueller*

Telephone poles relax their spines;
sidewalks go under. The nightly groans
of aging porches are put to sleep.
Mercy sponges the lips of stairs.

While we talk in the old concepts –
time that was, and things that are –
snow has leveled the stumps of the past
and the earth has a new language.

It is like the scene in which the girl
moves toward the hero
who has not yet said, “Come here.”

Come here, then. Every ditch
has been exalted. We are covered with stars.
Feel how light they are, our lives.

*

Happy lighting!

José

*from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

* sequencing with galway kinnell

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

As I work out of the echo of last week’s exams, I continue to have thoughts along the lines of fragmented narratives and ways of making use of what’s called in media res, which translates roughly as “into the middle of things.” It’s a phrase I picked up while reading Shakespeare: we first meet Romeo as he is in between relationships (I always forget that some serious moping opens up that famous play about love: kind of foreshadowing, no?).

I also see the term in media res as summing up how we understand ourselves. We are born into the middle of our parents’ lives; we read poems in the middle of different stages of our life; we eat, uhm, sandwiches in the middle of the day – and from these moments begin to cobble together the narrative pieces that make up who we are.

One of the ways this concept is worked with in lyric poetry is the sequence, and one of the great practitioners of which was Galway Kinnell, whose lines do the careful and exacting work of establishing moments and threading them together towards a greater whole.

Coming back to this week’s poem, there’s some sonic repetition (flop; feathers; flames) throughout the piece I hadn’t noticed before, and it’s telling how those sounds are absent from section 5. The difference, while subtle, does much to make the feeling of that section stand out against the rest. Each stanza, ultimately, plays image and moment against each other powerfully through such distinctions.

flames_of_faces_2nd_version_by_serge1965-d3i7xer

Another Night in the Ruins – Galway Kinnell

1
In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

2
Nine years ago,
in a plane that rumbled all night
above the Atlantic,
I could see, lit up
by lightning bolts jumping out of it,
a thunderhead formed like the face
of my brother, looking down
on blue,
lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

3
He used to tell me,
“What good is the day?
On some hill of despair
the bonfire
you kindle can light the great sky—
though it’s true, of course, to make it burn
you have to throw yourself in …”

4
Wind tears itself hollow
in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute
of snowdrifts
that build out there in the dark:
upside-down ravines
into which night sweeps
our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

5
I listen.
I hear nothing. Only
the cow, the cow of such
hollowness, mooing
down the bones.

6
Is that a
rooster? He
thrashes in the snow
for a grain. Finds
it. Rips
it into
flames. Flaps. Crows.
Flames
bursting out of his brow.

7
How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

***

Happy flames!

José