Late May

Now the mock orange sprawls in white blossom
over the white fence collar, leaning at ease, unshaven:
the June rain has not yet imposed its punishment
for extravagant foliation and flower. It will come

– or not, as the new gods ordain. Once I knew
the weather in the seeds of my bones: not now.
now there are steps missing, as I trip downstairs
to death’s cluttered basement: whoops! I land

too hard amid the unfinished projects, a jolt,
a hint of whiplash. Too soon! But it’s always like that,
I guess, so the old books say. Nobody says:
“Oh! Death! Right on time, I was expecting you!”

Wheel, wheel, old gray sky, wheel over my head,
ask for one more day of daily bread,
my intercessor, my old protector,
my forgiver and my inspector,
wheel once more: and then to bed.

On First Looking into Fitzgerald's Homer

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

The Ghost of Odysseus Arrives in Rivendell

So. Begin when all the rest had left behind them headlong death in battle or at sea…

Yah, yah. Okay. We are going to be gentle with the grandiosity, yes? Because it is at once fragile and formidable. Go carefully. It’s okay. Every man in his own mind gets to play Odysseus, no? 

But at the moment, last night and this morning, I seem to be completely unstrung. A guitar turned into a not very useful percussion instrument: all you can do is thump on it. It’s a sound, I guess. But it’s not what guitars are meant for.

Now. A day is too precious a thing to throw away. Take council: take council, my Lord.

All right then. I call the Sun who walks all day through Heaven.

---

Sun: I am here, in plain fact. You do have to call me, though. I can’t come on my own. To call me a god is a bit of an extravagance. Divine, perhaps. Immortal, possibly. But the distance between me and the Yahweh who created the heavens and the earth is much much farther than the distance between you and me, between any of you and me. So you have to call me, not because I have some weird celestial fetish, of “wanting to be asked,” but just because I can’t come, I can’t even be, without a call. Enough. Tell me what is worrying you. Anyone?

Ghost: what if it all comes apart next week? What if sex is the thing that unravels everything? It has been before.

Sun: it has always been the most undigested thing, maybe. Despite, or because of our focus on it. It’s hard to look directly at it and see it clearly. But come. What could unravel?

Ghost: Freud hovers here: the fear I guess partly at least is that all our motives are really disguised versions of wanting soft-focus Cindy from the March 1971 Oui Magazine, and we don’t want anything else, and everything – God, beauty, justice – is just crap I fiddle with because I can’t have Cindy.

Lieutenant: Cindy who crouched by the stream and smiled at us, as if she saw us, as if she knew us, and all would be well.

Captain: somewhere there was, or there would come to be, a country where we were at home and all the seventeen year old girls were mature adults who loved us.

Rat: and would trace divine characters on our flesh with slender fingers.

Ghost: I mean, yes, it resonates all the way forward with Tolkien’s Galadriel. The roots of this are deeper than any of ours. 

Captain: But MY job was going to be to make the divine earthly and the earthly divine, right? I was going to make it all happen.

Lieutenant: Except that we were a pudgy, easily confused eleven year old boy, yes. I guess thirteen by the time we were gazing at Cindy, and mistaking some photographer’s vision for a vision of reality. So we stepped sideways into fantasy, when we could. 

Sun: which was the right thing to do, at the time, and not to be scoffed at. Losing everything we wanted and aspired to would have been much much worse. It was a way of preserving things that were threatened by the reality of Springfield, and bullies, and people who weren’t interested in anything difficult to understand. We do still live on the outskirts of a brutal and uncomprehending people. We still rely daily on certain deceptions and elisions. Dear friends we are still spies, in important senses, and always will be. It’s not that we’ve arrived in paradise and can lay our burdens down. I’m sorry: I wish it were: but we are still in the thick of it.

Rat: But we need not any longer pretend to anyone near and dear that the case is any different than that. And the poor Captain here need not complete the repair of the world within ten business days. We have our eighteen years (if we have them) and I at least want us to get along and help each other.

Ghost: is what we have enough?

Sun: to make us live forever in the golden sunlight of the new Atlantis? No. We will die, we are dying now, and we will vanish entirely, But we have answers to all that. And right now I think we are more distracted, and confused, than we are confronting mortality. We are absorbing a lot of Martha’s anxiety, for one thing. Another instance of second-hand smoke. We don’t need to be worried about this trip, either for her or for us. 

Ghost: Well you know, what it is, is grief: grief at all the waste of days, all the hiding and sneaking, all the time spent under the domination of Ahriman. Grief and anger. It’s nobody’s fault, really, but such a life of loss! So much skulking. And we are still skulking, and we’re tired of it, and we’re afraid that at the very worst moment we’ll suddenly break everything for no reason and every reason. Because…. It shouldn’t have been this way. It shouldn’t be this way. 

Sun: yes. I can’t fix this, you know. I can’t make the world other than it is. 

Ghost: [grins] No. No, and we’re like those disappointed Christians who are so angry at God for not existing. 

Sun: But what we can do… is not blame each other for the way of the world, not expect each other either to make it right or to make us fit comfortably in it. The problem is not that we are in rebellion against the world. The problem indeed is that we are not resolute and cohesive enough in our rebellion, Not committed enough to it. We hide for good reasons. The hostility of the world is not a figment our our imagination, which will vanish when achieve an adult vision. We need to pull together and really be on our own side, wholeheartedly, though. And we can do that. And we can both do that and grieve, and honor the struggle, and have compassion for the times we have been defeated and caved in and let ourselves down and let others down. We can do both those things. In fact, we have to do both those things, they are actually the same thing. 

Ghost: …. Actually the same thing. I’ve traveled a long way to come and hear that.

Sun: A very long way. This has not been easy, and it’s not going to be easy. But take your seat with us, here. We need you.

A Compost Prayer

The knotted candyflower and the bleeding hearts
were supposed to like the shade: perversely
they are flourishing now in the bright sun
around the trunk of the cut down maple;
a surging lace skirt for the dragon lilies.
Nothing is as it was supposed to be, this year.
The lilies lift their horns, and their throats
are thick with flies. Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.
Well. Lift the black target of the compost bin,
upend the glass pan. Down falls the onion skin,
the flakes of garlic paper,
the potato that rotted on the shelf.
Down roll peels of bananas and oranges
from Costa Rica; the bamboo sleeves of
coffee grounds from the Eje Cafetero:
nymph, in thy orisons be all my words forgot.