The Other Anne Sexton: It Is A Spring Afternoon

I've spent the summer very slowly reading through the complete poems of Anne Sexton for the 3 Poems By discussion group, which will be meeting this Thursday at my other job. I recently posted about this over at a different blog and, in that post, I talked about one of her lesser known poems, "Young," and how it highlighted an aspect of Sexton that one doesn't often hear about. I continue to slowly read through her work, a poem or two at most per day, because frankly it is all I can absorb.

Last week I ran across this poem, again emphasizing an aspect of Sexton not often discussed:

It Is A Spring Afternoon

Everything here is yellow and green.
Listen to its throat, its earthskin,
the bone dry voices of the peepers
as they throb like advertisements.
The small animals of the woods
are carrying their deathmasks
into a narrow winter cave.
The scarecrow has plucked out
his two eyes like diamonds
and walked into the village.
The general and the postman
have taken off their packs.
This has all happened before
but nothing here is obsolete.
Everything here is possible.

Because of this
perhaps a young girl has laid down
her winter clothes and has casually
placed herself upon a tree limb
that hangs over a pool in the river.
She has been poured out onto the limb,
low above the houses of the fishes
as they swim in and out of her reflection
and up and down the stairs of her legs.
Her body carries clouds all the way home.
She is overlooking her watery face
in the river where blind men
come to bathe at midday.

Because of this
the ground, that winter nightmare,
has cured its sores and burst
with green birds and vitamins.
Because of this
the trees turn in their trenches
and hold up little rain cups
by their slender fingers.
Because of this
a woman stands by her stove
singing and cooking flowers.
Everything here is yellow and green.

Surely spring will allow
a girl without a stitch on
to turn softly in her sunlight
and not be afraid of her bed.
She has already counted seven
blossoms in her green green mirror.
Two rivers combine beneath her.
The face of the child wrinkles
in the water and is gone forever.
The woman is all that can be seen
in her animal loveliness.
Her cherished and obstinate skin
lies deeply under the watery tree.
Everything is altogether possible
and the blind men can also see.

Anne Sexton

I see this poem as a companion piece to "Young," portraying a time in a young woman's life when she is on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. Though both these poems have slightly portentous undercurrents, both also emphasize a youthful promise the idea of which Sexton obviously cherished.

The loss for her of this innocence and for us of Sexton herself is almost too much to bear.



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This week's featured back issue is #164, from July 2008. And the war drags on ...

turned back & got lost.

John Martone

The Numbers of the Dead

which appear in the headlines
to be perfectly round
like the planets

aren't really round.
They only appear that way
when seen from a great distance.

Up close they bulge.
They are gouged, pocked, frigid,
infinitely lonely numbers

divisible only by themselves and one.

Paul Hostovsky

war$pin
war$oil
war$hip
war$ink
war$end
war$aid
war$hit
war$hot
war$how
war$own
war$old
war$pun

LeRoy Gorman

Muddy ditch water,
& dimples beneath
waterspider's feet–

---------tenuous, this life.

Hosho McCreesh

in the footprints
of the warrior...
poppies

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

Jack Gilbert: The Dance Most of All

Just as Jack Gilbert has a weakness for Greek landscape, women, Japanese culture, and memories of Western Pennsylvania, I have a weakness for Jack Gilbert. His new book, The Dance Most of All, is packed with top notch poetry. He just seems to get better and better and, though the timing may be a bit off, next year's Pulitzer folks should start paying attention now.

That's how very good this volume is. Here's a little sampling, to give you a taste. Buy it, check it out at the library, steal your friend's copy: whatever you have to do, just get it done. You won't regret it (though your friend will be mighty pissed).

After Love

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
To having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

Jack Gilbert

The Abundant Little

We have seen the population of Heaven
in frescoes. Dominions and unsmiling saints
crowded together as though the rooms were small.
We think of the grand forests of Pennsylvania,
oaks and maples, when we see the miniatures
of blue Krishna with farm girls awkwardly
beside a pond in a glade of scrub trees.
The Japanese scrolls show mostly Hell.
When we read about the Christian paradise,
it is made of gold and pearls, built on
a foundation of emeralds. Nothing soft
and rarely trees, except in the canvases
of Italians where they slip in bits of Tuscany
and Perugino's Umbria. All things
are taken away. Indeed, indeed.
But we secretly think of our bodies
in the heart's storm and just after.
And the sound of careless happiness.
We touch finally only a little.
Like the shy tongue that comes fleetingly
in the dark. The acute little that is there.

Jack Gilbert

Going Home

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

Jack Gilbert

Tomorrow's Writer's Almanac will feature a poem by Paul Hostovsky, whose work has found its way into the pages of Lilliput Review on occasion. As a few of you know, I have a huge blind spot when it comes to poetry about baseball; these are two things I love which I sincerely believe shouldn't be in the same room together, ever. However, this poem, "Little League," is very enjoyable.

Congratulations to Paul.

Today is also the anniversary of the passing of Muddy Waters. Muddy, along with Willie Dixon, was my ticket to Chicago blues, which turned out to be good for a transfer all the way down to the Delta. A quiet wired punk-nosed white kid in the early 60's received it all in reverse, from the British invasion backwards, but better half-assed than no ass at all. I've lived with Muddy's music for over 40 years and it has never for a single moment ceased being vibrant, scintillating, and important. If it wasn't for music, there'd be no poetry. The 12 bar blues form is the haiku of American popular culture; for me, nothing is richer, resonates deeper, and challenges a staid world view better than some roadhouse blues or an Issa haiku. In the following laid-back version of the classic "Got My Mojo Workin," Muddy graciously gives lots of room to Sonny Boy Williamson II on the harp, resulting in a one-of-a-kind rendition of this signature tune. And, oh, yeah, that's Willie Dixon on bass and back up vocals.

Dig it.

billowing clouds--
have the pine trees
shrunk a bit?

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don