Issa's Untidy Hut: All Hallows (poem)

Friday, August 2, 2013

The Hollow Tree: Bowie, Glück, & Bly

On any given day or in any given week, I am usually reading 4 or 5 books, to say nothing of the many I randomly consult. At the same time, music is the soundtrack of my life: I am listening whenever I can.

So, the many connections that pop up between books and music find there way into these posts, most frequently on The Sunday Service, but often in other, less focused posts.

Lately, I've been listening to David Bowie's fantastic new album, The Next Day, somewhat compulsively. Also, I've been preparing for some poetry meetings this fall related to my day job, one of which is a discussion of the work of Louise Glück. Here is a haunting poem by her I ran across during my preparations:

All Hallows by Louise Glück

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been
Picked clean, the sheaves
Bound evenly and piled at the roadside
Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
Of harvest or pestilence
And the wife leaning out the window
With her hand extended, as in payment,
And the seeds
Distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

During my many listenings to the new Bowie, after discovering the Glück poem, suddenly the lines in the chorus of the title song jumped out at me.

The Next Day by David Bowie

"Look into my eyes", he tells her
"I’m gonna say goodbye", he says, yeah
"Do not cry", she begs of him goodbye, yeah
All that day she thinks of his love, yeah

They whip him through the streets and alleys there
The gormless and the baying crowd right there
They can’t get enough of that doomsday song
They can’t get enough of it all

Listen

"Listen to the whores", he tells her
He fashions paper sculptures of them
Then drags them to the river‘s bank in the cart
Their soggy paper bodies wash ashore in the dark
And the priest stiff in hate now demanding fun begin
Of his women dressed as men for the pleasure of that priest

Here I am, not quite dying
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the next day,
And the next,
And another day

Ignoring the pain of their particular diseases
They chase him through the alleys chase him down the steps
They haul him through the mud and they chant for his death
And drag him to the feet of the purple headed priest

First they give you everything that you want
Then they take back everything that you have
They live upon their feet and they die upon their knees
They can work with satan while they dress like the saints
They know god exists for the devil told them so
They scream my name aloud down into the well below

Here I am, not quite dying
My body left to rot in a hollow tree
Its' branches throwing shadows on the gallows for me
And the next day,
And the next,
And another day.

While musing on the idea of the related imagery (the hollow tree & the soul in the tree) of Glück and Bowie and thinking what I might make of it in passing here, I started to read Robert Bly's This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (which I'll have more to say about in a later post).

And, of course, what did I run across but this, the first verse to his poem "Women We Love Whom We Never See Again:"

There are women we love whom we never see again.
They are chestnuts shining in the rain.
Moths hatched in winter disappear behind books.
Sometimes when you put your hand into a hollow tree
you touch the dark places between the stars.

So, I pulled up: there it is, three pieces that reference a hollow tree (two directly, one, perhaps, allusively), a shared image from something like the collective unconscious. I haven't quite got my mind around this, it may just be too large for that type of feat for me (though one can find citations for heroes hiding in hollow trees, children being found in hollow trees, king's escaping pursuit in hollow trees, all in Stith-Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature), but I do feel, in some ways, that the image is seeking me out.

Either that or I certainly am paying better attention than usual.

Or maybe, in my selection of materials, I am seeking out the hollow tree? It has something to say, doesn't it?

What might it be?

What might it be?