A revision of one of my earliest extant poems. Gloomy adolescent infatuation, ah!
HAWKFLIGHT
The place I fell in love
with you was not a place at all:
it was a chasm whose entryway
was two black eyes.
I fell there and found you, Hawk.
When, after many refusals
you finally permitted me to hold you,
your wings were laden with nettles.
Perhaps you needed me to remove them,
to speak comforting words, to assure you
of a beauty you did not know you possessed.
Still your feathered breast resisted me,
aspired to the dark flight
against a sky of no stars --
You flew, o into blackness,
infinity your satellite and silhouette.
The same moment I rejoiced in possessing you,
I saw you move away in sadness.
Each time my hand,
was permitted to caress you,
your wings stirred skyward
at the hint of dawn.
My arms,
acquired wings, too, a mantle of despair
that only let me plummet downward.
Striving to reach you,
I fell deadweight at the black limn'd
treetop.
You soaring,
I a world-bound Leonardo
tracing the the arc of your envied ascent
as I sank into my own abyss of longing.
You circled. You returned.
One thunderstruck night
you thrust your beak
into my open window,
fluttered as though by right
to the foot of my bed.
Assuming that native form
that could always seduce me,
you pressed yourself against me
and offered everything
if I would forsake all
to follow you. And yes, I said yes,
for the proof of love is this:
if you love someone
you will go anywhere
to be with him. Anywhere.
I was this foolish once.
I have been this foolish each time
beauty coins words
it thinks I want to hear.
Somewhere, amid the mountains
that separate us, you have your eyrie,
the lone crag of your solitude.
Your days have been busy.
You have your pride, and your prey.
I do not think of you much.
I have my pride,
and five hundred poems.
The original of this poem was written during the Vietnam War. It fell under my pen again tonight for a touch-up, as fresh as ever.
SENTENCES
the army came home,
to parade on the soft graves
of the war dead.
the general faced the orphan child
with his little folded flag
and had nothing to say.
the universe stopped
while something that called itself god
pondered the full implications of his beliefs.
in January, a fresh-baked doughnut
crystallizes in the cold air
before you can finish eating it.
the stringy-haired girl who told me
“just pray and God will grant your wishes”
made me laugh as I thought
of my stepfather eaten by oversized rats.
does the great eagle know
that its eggs will not hatch?
yes we will over your dead body.
Marge Piercy came to Providence last April to judge the Philbrick Poetry Prize and to read from her work. I had the honor of introducing her, but did not know, to my regret, that she hates being introduced by people who quote from her work. So, my sincere and well-prepared remarks about this significant poet were somewhat curtailed. I just came across the text and thought I would share it, since Marge Piercy's work is truly outstanding. I know that our devoted poetry audience in Providence had gone out to the local bookstores and gobbled up every Piercy book they could find in anticipation of the event. So should you.
When I said, again and again to our judging committee and to various friends, “Marge Piercy.” I was told, “Watch out! She’s fierce! She has three husbands, lives on a compound with 120 cats and a pride of lions. She’ll snap your head off.” I said, “Now that’s the kind of poet I want to meet!” back in the early 1970s, when I started my little press in New York City, I published mostly women poets, and all of them, young and old, were always carrying Marge Piercy books around with them. They connected with her in an intense way: a female writer who, at an early point in her career, had “arrived” in a way that women accepted and admired, and which men acknowledged with the grudging admission that she did everything as well as, or better than, they did.
Along the way, Marge Piercy moved from being “that poet that women read and cling to” to a poet everyone read, and a novelist whose books you couldn’t put down. She rip-roared into science fiction, a veritable boy’s club, and made her mark there, along with Ursula LeGuin and the woman who called herself “James Tiptree, Jr.”
The poet is always the outsider. “When I flirt I feel like an elephant/ in a pink tutu balancing on a beach ball,/ a tabby wearing a doll’s dress.” Elsewhere she describes herself as a young girl:
I did not want to be a boy. Most
of them were imbeciles, I thought,
nor did I want to be a girl or woman.
Maybe I would grow up to be a cat.
Maybe I was an alien, a changeling.
She is a satirist worthy of the Roman Juvenal, often at her best when turning her focus on her own gender. She can mock women with giant purses, “women who hang leather hippos from their shoulders” but there is self mockery when she Whitman-lists the purse’s contents: “Ten pens, because the ink may run out … maps, a notebook in case” Of course only a writer would say this! “Women like kangaroos with huge purses bearing hidden / our own helplessness and it s fancied cures.” When she mocks “The Beauty Myth” she describes “hair like a museum piece, daily/ ornamented with ribbons, vases,/ grottoes, mountains, frigates in full/ sail, balloons. Baboons, the fancy/ of a hairdresser turned loose” and reminds us “It is not for male or female dogs ... that poodles are clipped … to topiary hedges.” “If I had a $400 haircut,” she asks, “would people buy calendars just me on every month grinning?” Satire is an unlicensed firearm. When she writes about horrible gifts no one wants to receive and which no one can get rid of, she might have inspired,or may have been inspired by, the wicked Edward Gorey cartoon that shows Edwardian ice skaters hurling wrapped objects into a hole in the ice. The caption: “FRUITCAKE.”
Those wonderful flarings-up, as she confesses “but oh, oh, in me/ lurks a tyrant with a double-edged ax who longs/ to swing it wide and shining, who longs to stand/ and shriek, You Shall Do As I Say, pig bastards”. She can say, on spying an ex in a supermarket, “Now I could walk through him like smoke/ and only sneeze.” On the arrogance of America invading everybody: “The harder you push, the harder what you never bothered to notice pushes back.” On same-sex marriage: “In earlier times and different cultures and tribes, men married men and women married women, and the sky never fell …” On the Patriot Act, which results in an FBI interrogation, “collected receipts from your/ restaurant meals for the past five years. You have ordered hummus six times, falafel twice and lamb four times. … Welcome to the Inquisition!” In a poignant little grouping called “No one came home,” she recalls the horror and emptiness of never knowing what become of a loved one, from a single lost cat, to the thousands in Argentina “disappeared” by their own government. Her poem, “Buyer Beware,” on the cost of war, should be pinned to the lapels of certain former government officials should anyone have the god fortune to arrest them.
I love her poem about opera, the most artificial and intense of all art forms. No skinny blonds here, she tells us: “The heroine is fifty and weighs/ as much as a ’65 Chevy with fins. She could crack our jaw in her fist. She can hit high C lying down.”
But who also comes to the peace and calm of rituals, of the year’s turning points, to the outer skin of ancestry we all wear and cannot really put off, coming home to her own Jewish heritage but in her own words, who can invert the old rabbinic saying of “Thank God I was not born a woman,” with “Thank God I was.”
A social poet too, able to compress the evils of society into just a few words. Leaving urban Detroit, her family sold the house to a black family. The consequence, Piercy writes: “my old boyfriend next door poisoned/ my cat … It took him all night to die.” She writes of a women working in a women’s clinic,. Threatened with murder every day by an anonymous phone caller. Our penchant as a species to invent tortures made her write “We could erect a Smithsonian of pain’s / little helpers, racks, prods, all the mechanical, electrical, computerized/ vehicles for imposing hostile will.” When Piercy recalls, in detail, a Detroit neighbor who brutally beat his wife and children every payday, and how no one did anything about it because half the other neighbor men did the same, or worse, she packs the poetic payload of the poem into the title, “Family Values.”
She is a nature poet, proving that poets see, and know the names of things. “I can get drink on color, lured like a bee/ to drench myself in reds and blues and purples,” she says. She writes of Cape Cod, her adopted home since 1971, with the enraptured eye of the newcomer, the naturalist, the seeker. “Voice of the Grackle.” “A Long and Busy Night” “Tracks” “Crow Babies.” Her poem, “The Rush at Equinox”, free as it is, is as compressed and cogent as the best of Robert Frost. Yet she does not flinch at nature’s cruel side. She knows her cat has gone to the coyote’s dinner, that life eats life, and that animals do not run about in Disney costumes. Writing of our mammal cousins, the great whales, she says “Each is a poet, a composer, a scholar of the roads/ below. They are always singing, and what they know/ is as alien to us as if they swim past Sirius.”
Writing of her mother’s death, she makes no claim to prophecy or premonition, an uncanny modesty for a poet. “That day,” she recalls, “opened like any ordinary can of tomatoes. … I was caught by surprise/ like the trout that takes the fly/ and I gasped in the fatal air.” Death seems repeatedly to arrive by surprise in Piercy’s poems, as when she encounters a wounded and drying deer, “the thing that strikes in the middle of the morning.” Even the Holocaust, which many of us feel compelled to document from its obscure origins to the last detailed survivor’s memory, sweeps across her poems like a whirlwind:
I remember my grandmother’s cry
when she learned the death of all she had
remembered, girls she bathed with,
young men with whom she shyly
flirted, wooden shul where
her father rocked and prayed…
Piercy resists death: “I go to charm death like Sheherezade / with stories I refuse to end until my wish is granted.”
There are some poets we know, and whom we trust to take us through pain and anger and loss, because they come to tell truth, to shed light on the dark inside us, ultimately, to heal. Piercy’s older brother, her Everyman, refused to read her poems of childhood memories. We can and must. What does she tell us when she recounts the Detroit father beating his wife and children, and everyone looking the other way?
That so long as we do so on the minutest level – person to person, man to woman, parent to child – then we shall continue to do as much, or worse to anyone we deem the Other.
If Piercy were only a social and political poet, we would owe her a great debt, but I am glad that she dwells in a place where sea and sun and all of nature fill her palette as well. Like Robinson Jeffers on the west coast, she embraces the long arc of geologic and ocean time and sees us a part of an animal spectrum.
Seldom it is that a poet knows, at the beginning of a career, the solemn mission ahead. Marge Piercy wrote,sometime before 1969, the last lines of her collection, Hard Loving:
It is time to loosen and make new.
We are sacs of mad cells that have forgotten how to grow.
It is time to close ourselves to the steel probes
of the corporate generals and devisers.
It is time to open ourselves to the other with respect …
Time to learn we are part of one wave and each other.
I found this poem in an old journal, a fragment. In its new reworking I suddenly found myself recalling the terrifying scene in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein when Victor Frankenstein unexpectedly encounters the monster while hiking alone on a glacier -- a sublime and terrifying place in and of itself -- so that found its way into the poem as well. This was another obsessive, self-absorbed love poem, in language unabashedly hyperbolic, but I hope it is now redeemed. It is as true to me as a "Howl" was to Ginsberg.
A YEAR AND A DAY
A year since last I saw you. No: a year and a day.
The round red sun struck an octave falling,
rung out the interval as turning earth
returned to the self-same place in its orbit:
and what should happen, but nothing at all.
Nothing, or rather, another day void
to add to a year of days without you,
the same fields dressed up in the same green trees,
the same indifferent sky accepting bursts
of egomaniacal seedpods
attempting escape velocity.
During the year, I fled the quotidian,
twisting with maple propellers,
out and upward to the highest cirrus.
I sought the place of your waiting
somewhere in orbit beneath the Dog Star.
All too soon I fell, repelled
by a single graze of your cheekbones.
I thought the sun, unbent by atmosphere,
would melt your cold heart ;
the rain that came
we mistook for a sign of advent —
o roots, o tendrils, o new shoots twining,
abandoned as abruptly
to summer’s drought,
to hoarfrost cold,
and now, to this barren anniversary.
Each height I sought
you had already abandoned.
Each bloom thrust up —
whether the frail violet or the tight-fisted peony —
beautiful to me only
in some resemblance, passing,
to some aspect of you,
fell petal by petal to cindered ash.
Earth’s autumn hecatombs
were burned in vain at your altar.
I know you were always there,
just one horizon beyond me,
hurrying on, pursued, and pursuing
(I dread to name whom or what!)
Must I follow you to desert rim,
the unforgiving edge of the glacier,
the Mere de Glace where Monster
and Maker (for what else are lover
and beloved?) meet once,
soliloquize and part, sworn enemies?
For a year and a day you have fled me —
(Ah! it is a year and a day, times thirty now!) —
and still the secret lives, as flowers shriek
in fields the winds italicize with longing,
in wan birch forests that topple and fall
at your departing slant. The secret lives;
the long count of calendar days resumes,
and we (myself and all things living)
tread on in quest of that one contrary wind
that would be harbinger of your return.
I will not die waiting, but you will wait
’til your own death to plumb regret’s full sea.
Green things will bloom, mute, melancholic, doomed,
beneath a kettle of iron-gray storm-clouds.
Life will go on somehow, though gods are fled
and I, of words and love, am but a ghost.
that drives it and sets its course.
Are the shutters half-drawn?
Are they nailed against sunrise?
Do spiders spin in the tenantless rooms?
Who lives there? Ahab and his mono-
Moby madness? Emily with her dry-
leaf poems like money under a bed?
Or no one at all? Does no one hear
as each flaked shingle falls,
as varicose ivy beards up, as sun
and sag gray-wash the porch beams
and lintels? Something there is
in the attic that drives it and
sets its course. Whose will? An old
man’s will? A boy’s? A loud-mouthed
betrayer of dreams? A dreamer
paralyzed? Why does this house
not fall, but stand at elmward avenue,
accusing all, begging a moon,
a clean sweep, a neighbor’s knock,
a letter? Something there is
in the attic that drives it and
sets its course. This house is
Ahab’s ship, Usher’s manse, Lovecraft’s
infirmary, a witch house, feast
hall, love nest and chapel, sanctum
of Solitude, the Capulets’ tomb.
If every human body is a haunted
house, shall we not choose
these ghosts? Can I not summon
a typing poltergeist, a coloratura
howler, a phantom raconteur
to teach me all dead languages,
a gourmet chef insomniac,
someone for whom the 1812 Overture
has not (as for me) ever lost its charm,
a friend who hovers over Batman comics
and knows every line poor Bela Lugosi
was ever made to utter? Room enough,
and beds, and food and tea, for them all!
In October this house is avalanched,
as leaves, and ghosts of leaves
from every tree that ever crisped
in the tug between slant-sun and frost,
pile high in ziggurats of oak,
maple and sumac, hawthorne and willow,
each with a tale of hope and sorrow
waiting its turn for harvest.
They almost obscure the house, so high
that one lone cupola, the poet’s watch,
stands apex at its pyramid,
as one mad vane whirls at the whim
of indecisive winds, as lightning rod
trembles for discharge of the weighted sky
into the attic haunter’s cranium.
I am that attic Something: I drive
this house unchanging, wall-to-wall
with mad cargo. My gambrel roof
is an upside-down Mayflower
as I sail against the leaf-tide. Monsters
would block my passage: great whales
of Doubt breach above a maple current;
the baleful skyward eye and tentacles
of the giant squid of Loneliness float by
in a sea-tide of weeping willow.
Yet something there is in the attic
that billows the sails, and drives me on.
The madness that fills these pages
is self-sustaining: some days
these scratchings seem meaningless,
unmusical; some days I read and gasp
and shudder to think that somehow I wrote
or was written through, to reach this apogee.
Alone? Well, lacking the guests
I crave, I must split and become them.
Books, cat and bed, a galaxy of music,
teapot that fills as fast as I empty it:
it is not a bad life,
to be the haunter of one’s cobwebbed self.
if not exactly blessing the ground they stood on,
grateful at least to have escaped the whip
or starvation where they came from.
The railroads webbed out to meet them,
branch lines and sidings eager to take
the crates and bundles from their gates.
Without them
the towns have forgotten the reason
of their founding.
What did they make?
cotton and calico prints,
steam engines and locomotives
parts of machines uncountable
and the tools to make other machines
and their parts uncountable,
rope walks, brass foundries,
lace- and jewelry-making,
lightbulb assembly lines,
refrigerators and fountain pens,
and glory! a piano factory –
all now only names in peeling paint
checkered on bricks and falling signs.
The nearby houses are humbled now
with torn clapboards,
rot beneath the stage paint of shingles,
the cheap bluster of aluminum siding,
walls bloated, foundations shifted,
split into rat-cell studios for commuters.
Many are boarded-up, foreclosed.
No one remembers when mansard slate
and gable and cupola gleamed new,
when a smokestack with a man's name on it
was a place arrived at as a good sign
of a continued paycheck.
Things that got made here,
kept getting made.
Now these sad brick temples accuse us:
their plywood-covered windows,
their undecipherable placards,
the weed trees on their loading docks,
the mystery of abandonment.
Like unburied dead they haunt the roadside,
sombre in daylight, shunned and abhorred
when their shadows grow long at dusk.
They will not burn, their wearing away
protracted by fences and guardians.
(Heirs living on compounded interest
preserve them like Chinese puzzle boxes
they cannot open or understand.)
At night, another commerce lights up
the sidewalks along the chain-link fence
as women sell the only thing they have
from the pavement, and men in cars
circle, circle, hands offering dollars,
other hands offering, and taking small
envelopes of powders and crystals.
Some midnights, the ghost machines awaken,
their ungreased axles screaming,
drive shafts spinning of their own accord.
A dynamo turns, furnace mouths flickering
in cool blue flame of St. Elmo's Fire.
The power looms weave an invisible shroud:
it is long enough to enclose a city.
Tombs without occupants,
they wait for the rites that no one will pronounce.
I am dry. A circle of bark
peels stiffly from my crumbling limbs.
The itch of mold and termites
gives me no rest from entropy.
Leaves have not come this year.
It is rough everywhere:
parched earth has matted straw for hair
and desperate creatures huddle, homeless.
What the hot wind implies, I follow:
push out my roots to where the rains have gone,
deep, deeper, search for new rhythms
in crack and crevice, beyond the worm-world.
Dead to the wind above, bare-boned and tall,
I weave no banner poems in air, no seeds
fly out that other green may imitate:
making another like me is not the answer.
Mine is a secret growth, a sunless tree,
a new thing never seen before.
I plummet toward earth’s mantle,
sprout from the roofs of caves,
make roost for the lightless chatterers,
the bats, my only friends in this sightless
and nearly soundless chasm.
Through the bottom and beyond, I grow.
Above, my seeming corpse, that monument,
betrays no life to deadly air. The dead things
around me are truly dead. I sway
in secret winds of magma, magnetic,
I drink salt waters from the hearts of geodes.
I bloom in the dark heart of everything,
that place, not Hades, but equally dreaded,
to which everything wants to, but cannot
fall. I have more branches now
than I ever could have imagined.
Squid sing to me in the ocean trenches,
plates moan tectonic as I wrap new rings
of iron and nickel around myself.
If leaf and blossom come to me now,
who shall see them? No one.
If seeds, or something like them,
issue from my branch-ends, where
will they go? Volcano-vented upward?
Or hoarded here in darkness?
The tree above seems only a dream now,
but so long as no one cuts it
and no storm dares to topple it,
I am only its bad dream. Pray
I do not awaken.
Among my suppressed poems from the 1970s, I found a draft of this poem, which was inspired by my reading of the crackpot book, "Worlds in Collision," by Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Venus and Mars had a near collision within human memory before Venus settled into its current orbit. Velikovsky claimed that the Biblical Flood occurred because of this planetary catastrophe. Under the bizarre spell of this book I encountered Lucretius's great scientific poem, De RerumNaturum ("The Way Things Are," or "Concerning the Nature of Things,") which begins with a hymn to Venus the goddess. I never published the poem, as any reader would assume that I subscribed to Velikovsky's theories, even though it was more a whimsical piece asking "How would you address the goddess/planet if it really had done us that much harm?"
This revision includes an epigraphic opening verse that recounts the Velikovksy ideas so that the poem pretty much self-explicates, and then the mock-hymn commences. I think it's fun now, and I am happy to welcome this poem into my garden of little monsters and blasphemies. Lord knows, Venus has never done me any favors, anyway.
I. EPIGRAPH
Unfair to Luna to call mad Velikovsky a lunatic,
so let us call him merely a madman. In Worlds In Collision this self-taught astronomer declared fair Venus
a cosmic interloper, whose gravity-war with Mars
and brush with Earth produced the Biblical Great Flood
and a race memory of planetary dread. Nonsense
of course, but argued with passion and the paste-pot
of history and art, psycho- and anthro- pology:
Planets as billiard balls; humans remembering
the cataclysm as a universal shriek of “Ia!”.
Under its spell, I rewrote the hymn of old Lucretius
who commenced The Way Things Are with Aphrodite-praise.
II.
Not to you, o shining ascendant world,
morning and evening the brightest of all
in the cold night sky, not to you, Venus,
do I bring my praise and supplication.
I know from what dark nebula you came,
an apple of discord sent hurtling on
by One resenting our sweet yellow sun.
I know that man’s love is not your care
for does not loveless marriage fill the earth
with more than enough starving progeny?
Young men befooled, and maidens, may worship
and make offerings at your temple door,
while in the sad garden out back, old maids
sit in a line for whoever takes them,
the last and least bargain you offer them
before they’re only fit for winding sheets.
Seen from far off, so close to horizon,
your distance blinds us to your jagged teeth
which once unskinned the rock-strewn globe and sent
men howling back into ancestral caves;
nor can we see your fiery white tresses
which once ripped through our virgin atmosphere,
your poison breath of naphtha upon us,
oceans ripped into a tidal tumult,
a watery death that spared no lovers.
Your palpitations were not welcome then,
fair Venus, and even less welcome now.
Mars kicked you sunward; Earth lay in ruins
from just one passing toss of your girdle.
Meanwhile, we humans have outgrown panic.
Outward we look to the far suns, the blackness
nearly infinite between the galaxies.
We yearn to find our place of origin,
the place from which the oldest life blew down
athwart the wind between worlds, as we yearn
to endlessly invent new poems and songs,
vast fugues and operas and symphonies,
inwardly big as the outwardly vast.
We no longer backward-looking, blinded
no more by the sun we orbit, are winged.
That we yet live, upon a bleeding earth,
and dream such wide-eyed dreams, I do rejoice.
And you, Cytherean Venus — stay put!
Rest here
the still-born poems that sputtered and died
Rest here
the prose, amphibious, grasping for land
Rest here
the vague allusions, thrice explained
Rest here
the early draft abandoned, orphan child
Rest here
the art-pride wounded, neatly healed
Flown from here
the finished poems — not here but risen
to a better life.
He has the haunted look
of one bereft of Muses.
The trees conceal from him
their secret names;
the messenger ravens
no longer light
upon his lintel;
his curtains are drawn
against the pale white hands
that formerly beckoned
his insomniac scribbling.
Soundlessly and dreamless
he passes his nights.
The ink inside
his favorite pen
dry as Pompeian ash,
no longer yearns
to bleed itself
into a living poem.
The old journal
sits in a box
in an antique cabinet,
untouched as a mummy
in an undiscovered tomb.
How did he come to this?
Did he seek his Muse
in women,
bequeathing her gifts
to his children,
to his students,
or did he lose her
among the lawyers
and governing boards
that so consume
his hours?
“I used to leap
from peak to peak
like Shelley,”
he tells me.
But now he looks
before he leaps —
backwards and downwards,
calculating the risks,
the possible collisions
with other dreamers,
the futility of it all,
the caution of a muskrat
at water’s edge.
Shall I tell him the secret,
that everywhere he walks,
his Muse is waiting —
in the mica that glints
from his granite buildings,
in the shadowed space
beneath the dowager skirts
of the weeping beech,
in the unknown book
opened at random
for inspiration?
Or that she waits,
a scarf tied tight, a book
(the same book always
open to the same page,
where he left off),
unnoticed on a wooden bench
in sight of his office.
He has only to sit
with a blank sheet before him
and to call her name.
“Tell him,” she told me,
as I passed out of our meeting.
“I will,” I promised.
You are the First One.
Once, your unity
was the Only Thing.
A hot blast of protons,
sperm stuff of the cosmos,
jostling your jillion
identical twins, up, down,
in a vibrant scream
of creative urges,
partnering in ions,
H dating H
(no law against it),
H2 self-bonding,
converging in gas clouds,
gobbling stray neutrons,
dreaming of empire
yet eluding all,
stuff of the Ether,
the Bifrost stream
between galaxies,
ball lightning
and balloon flight,
ever at the edge
of an explosion
if oxygen is near,
holding your
secret of secrets dear:
the self-annihilating
self-fusion, the flame
at the heart of stars.
Without you, nothing;
with you, more questions
than ever answers,
light as a whisper,
Hydrogen.
This poem answers two questions that came to me from readers. The first was, "Don't you ever write love poems with girls in them?" The second was, "What is your oldest surviving poem?" I started writing some little verses soon after discovering Poe, then, under the guidance of Mrs. Van Kirk, my high school Latin teacher, I composed a few poems in Latin and then translated them into English. One of the Poe-esque poems has survived and is in my "Whippoorwill Road" collection. The other is here.
At age fifteen or so, I was hospitalized for a few days after a nearly-fatal nosebleed. I lost two-and-a-half pints of blood and was declared dead by an intern since I had no pulse while sitting up. After transfusions, I recovered. Sitting in my hospital bed, whose windows faced a cemetery lit up by a steel mill's red glow, I was given a little AM radio, on which I heard the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for the first time. The radio announcer spelled out the program of this daring 1827 symphony. In the first movement, a young artist falls hopelessly in love, and the music depicts the storm of his passion, and his hopelessness when he isn't noticed. In real life, Berlioz was smitten with Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress who came to Paris to perform in Shakespeare. Of course she played Juliet.
My first "real" poem was written that night: lines written in response to the music and its program. What survives my later editorial destruction is marked as my Opus 16, and only two parts of the five survive. I cast the love affair of the first movement literally, as the starving young student in love with the famous artist. The third movement, when the poet is off in the mountains trying to forget his love, includes imitations of lonely shepherds playing their pipes, interrupted by thunder rolling off the Alpine mountains.
As an "ekphrastic" poem relating impressions of the Berlioz music, I think it conveys that adolescent ardor, so I offer it in response to the challenge question about whether I had any boy-girl love poems that didn't involve witches, goddeses or vampires. I wish that my efforts to describe the "March to the Gallows" and the "Witches' Sabbath" that end the symphony were printable, but they were truly dreadful, consisting of jingling rhymes in very short lines.
[Note since the first posting: I just discovered another revision of this poem that has more details corresponding to the outline of Berlioz' music. Alas, it also includes a grimmer ending to the Pastorale movement, in which our hero decides to go back to Paris and strangle his beloved. Well, that is where Berlioz takes it next, with a March to the Gallows for the hero. The text below is now the expanded, darker version of the poem.]
By the way, I still love the symphony as much as I did then.
So here is young Berlioz, as told by teen-aged Rutherford:
SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE
(After the Symphony by Berlioz)
1
First Movement: Dreams, Passions
I did not plan this passion.
Your voice intruded on my consciousness,
its foreign lilt, its strange inflections,
the way your meter’d tongue dropped pearls
of Shakespeare, Poe and Baudelaire,
the way your eyes implored me
as though it were my destiny
to grapple with some hooded Darkness
to win you for myself.
But what am I?
What is my frail embrace
to beauty such as yours?
All eyes are chained to you.
See how the students crave your neck,
the soldiers admire your slender waist,
the old men yearn for your kisses —
an army would not suffice for you!
I am your unknown conqueror.
I am the one who sends you violets,
a myrtle wreath, a sonnet.
Others impress you with jewelry,
offer to garb you in silk and velvet.
I stood at the fringe of the stage door crowd.
Strong ones pressed in toward you--
oh, the broad-shouldered ones,
the lion’s-mane heroes, the uniforms!
I was the shadow at the edge of gas lamp.
You smiled, touched hands,
absorbing their love like a thirsty plant,
rose blush rising on your ivory cheek.
You never noticed me —
not tonight, nor on all the other nights.
But then my heart rose up
a double timpani of triumph.
You entered your carriage,
one hand enfolding a billet doux
(still in its envelope, unread perhaps),
the other protecting a fragile bouquet —
my violets! my violets! oh god,
tonight you will read my poems,
tonight you will know that I love you!
I walk the streets all night,
chilled by the Seine
on half a dozen crossings.
I pause before the gray cathedral,
look up into the knowing clouds
that hurtle eastward
to the sunrise.
The rosette window is dark,
for all the candles
and their attendant prayers
have guttered out.
This night my angel, good or ill,
is absent. I am resigned.
The heavens will do nothing.
My words alone shall win you.
iii
Third Movement: Scene in the Fields
You shepherds, play!
You know not what your fluted night
does to the haunted.
You wind, rising in harmony,
I think you plowed great ships
across some sea,
you tasted salt not of tears only.
Look how you grapple
with the landlocked cedars,
birch staffs taut as ropes,
leaf sails tattering.
The trees snap back, you drown
the frail reed pipes
and rage with your own voice
among the mountain pines.
The shepherds flee. Now double thunder
rolls from peak to valley,
a mournful rumbling
of discontent, as though the gods
had lovers just as oblivious
as she to me.
If these vast and terrible beings
can gain no solace, then what of me?
Would I were dead and gone, would that
bare earth and unabating wind
outlived me, sole dwellers
of an everlasting night!
If I were left
to wolf and vulture,
to eagle, crow and carrion —
if only these pages (made orchestral by a hand unseen that guides my hand!)
remained, spun down
to the valley, the river, the sea.
If one day decades hence, this poem falls from an opened book
into your startled view, or,
passing the concert hall
you hear the corresponding melodies
and discern your name in them,
would you recall me then, knowing the one who loved you
left a bleached skull on a granite mountain a heartbeat petrified into a stony silence the thunder punctuates?
My solitary end is pointless unless its iron-black pole
can draw you to it.
I will live on, and draw new breath;
I will return to you, unwelcome
as my love has been, not loving,
but as the Messenger of Death.
The pale throat I love,
Another in my series of poems in the manner of the Greek poet Anakreon. It really takes place in Providence, but that's another story.
Anakreon, to Hyllus:
Last night I followed you, to the foot
of your street, to that Dionysian ruin
where men and youths commingle 'mid
broken columns and pedestals.
I saw you, "virgin” Hyllus
in quadruped surrender
to a popular chariot driver.
I watched and heard it all
from the anonymous shadows:
the brutal, pathetic beauty of it,
the animal moans,
the false starts,
the invoking of gods,
the simultaneous gasps,
the hurried redress of tunic and belt,
the counting out of three small coins,
I almost laughed at how, departing,
you brushed aside my friend Harmodius
with that most wonderful line:
"Only the hand that has held a whip
can ever hold mine!”
Small wonder that I have never possessed you,
slave as I am of scribbling,
more fond of vowels than hard-edged consonants,
my only rod the stylus. How strange
when beauty seeks not its merited worship,
leaving its pedestal for the dust,
kneeling for the promise of certain pain
and its negotiated, small price.
