Koethe - The Swimmer

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. TO MARK STRAND The twentieth century was the century of physics: The physical world came close to being tamed By understanding, making it harder to understand Or even imagine, on the scale of the cosmos And on the order of the very small: time passes As your twin ages, while you remain perpetually young Though a lot of good it does you, existing as you do At no place in particular, smeared out everywhere Until someone sees you and your wave packet collapses. It was also the century of poetry, modern poetry And the question it engendered, which it keeps repeating: Are you just going to go on writing poems like this, Writing for posterity? Posterity isnt interested Unless you are, because instead of a quaint immortality, It offers merely intermittent moments of attention Before moving on, maybe to return, but probably not.

You cant displace your heroes in the pantheon, Because there isnt one: just this giant, happy band Of suppliants, each one knowing what the others know. I realize this isnt what youd hoped for, but please, Dont get discouragedcelebrate temporality instead. So here I am, sitting in a park thirty years after writing In the Park, a poem Id hoped might last forever. They finally discovered the Higgs boson, which means that Physics is still on track, though no one knows to where. I still believe in it, of course, though its so removed From everything I think I think theres nothing to imagine Beyond equations, which is fineit was equations all the way, Until I came to poetry and knew that it was what I had to do. And now look where I am, what Ive become: a marginal observer Of a universe of my own devising, waiting on a dnouement that never comes, But that continues through an afternoon thats wider than the sky, whose Mild, unearthly blue conceals an emptiness resounding like a gong Tolling for no one, while I sit here in the safety of my song.

Like the hedgehog, I still know what I know, although it matters not at all: I labor over it, And yet its written in a different idiom, full of sound and fury, Signifyingwhat? It cant be nothing, though it might as well be If it cant be rendered in the language of the stars. I want to Speak to something far away, beyond the confines of the page, But it wont listen, and to everything I say it answers No. Go, get you home, you fragments! CORIOLANUS You start at home, and most of your life Elaborates a first idea of home: a place youve Been and think youll always be, a place You know you can return to, full of comforting Presences like rural or domestic buildings, So abstract it isnt even real. I began there, And now it all seems strange to me: The stories that it tells, the stories I told, Seem discontinuous and small, as though theyre No ones stories anymore, those of an author Whod lost interest in them, and was old. A sudden Breeze sweeps through the vacant lots, scattering leaves And cellophane, the miscellaneous detritus of a life. Like scraps of paper carried by the breeze from home To here, and then a figure walking towards me Across an open field, coming from the vast distance Things tend towards, they come at last to me: the quick, Unmediated thoughts, secure in their final home, That have their say and stand apart and make no sense.

Ive spent my life like this. Im sick of it, and tired. Why cant I say what I mean? I saw a movie That felt this way: an open field, a breeze that blew From nowhere, trash collecting on a fence. It was Another persons, though I took it for my own: The scenes that had immured me silently dissolved As the credits unrolled, leaving an almost empty screen And a highway leading somewhere off the page. I tried to picture anywhere but here, a place Beyond the indifference and infirmities of age, But there was nothing, nothing I could see. I felt elated for a moment, and complete.

But then I knew it was where I had to go. Lets fly away! Who knew? All Ol Blue Eyes signified to me Was Sinatra at the Sands, Come Fly with Me, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and the Rat Pack And Pvt. Angelo Maggio dying in From Here to Eternity. My tax guy came this week. His hobby is collecting Model trains, and since he does my girlfriends taxes too I mentioned her new job at Kalmbach Publishing, Publisher of Model Railroader (as of course he knew).

Hed just bought some of Johnny Carsons trains In an online auction, and told me Neil Young And someone I cant remember were collectors too, And that the Holy Grail of model train collecting (It blew me away) was Frank Sinatras Lionel trains, Whose whereabouts since his death no one knew. It resonates with me. Model trains and music Were my (part-time) hobbies too: I loved that minor League Sinatra, Bobby Darin, and I still do, And even though my trains all vanished long ago, Like those thrilling returning trains of Nick Carraways Youth or Frank Sinatras, sometimes the acrid Smell of artificial smoke drifts back to me Across the yearsmy Rosebud or my madeleine And Im twelve again, here in the warm September of my years. Its funny how we go from nowhere in particular to home, And from a past implicit in the present to the minor Dispensations of these hours, or from eternity to here Waiting for an accountant, browsing through some Magazines about toy trains or stereos, while all the while The adolescent possibilities are lingering somewhere In the dark, biding their time, waiting to be inhabited again. Up the lazy river, where the songs keep rolling past And where the trains come round the plaster mountains Down in the basement, on the road to Mandalay. Sometimes I strain to hear the music through the traffic, But its always there, like death and taxes.

Why cant life be a hobby, filled with jokes and poems, And poems like jokes, instead of the encounter With eternity we make it out to be? I like to think of Lil Blue Eyes in the basement, working the controls While in the background you can hear the lyrics of Brazil, With friends and Cokes and chips and someones father Looking proudly on at what hed made. I like to make things up, As though remembering at last some long-ago cacophony Of clangs and whistles and the distant smell of artificial smoke. I was a rock-and-roll child. I saw Elvis Truncated by Ed Sullivan, listened to Fats Domino Sing Blueberry Hill and loved Sixteen Tons, Which was protorock and roll. I still love it, But since you cant remain a child forever, I cast my net wider, and thanks to my Japanese Integrated amp, saxophones wash over me each night. It started with Paul Desmond, who aspired to sound Like a dry martini, and went on to bring to life The celebrated and obscure alike: Spike Robinson, Whom I heard at the Jazz Estate a few blocks away In 1992; Frank Morgan, who had Milwaukee ties And whom I wanted to nominate for an honorary degree, A scam set up for local businessmen; and Coltrane Of course, that endless aural rope that curls upon itself And then uncoils.

And it wasnt simply saxophones: Chet Bakers trumpet, plangent and permanent as he fell from Young and beautiful to wrecked and toothless; and Bill Evans, Still perfecting Autumn Leaves at Top of the Gate, While downstairs in the streets the 60s boiled. Von Freeman Died last week at 88. I hadnt heard of him until he died, And now here he is, filling up my room with Time After Time. He believed in roughness, and on leaving imperfections in So his songs wouldnt lose their souls, which is how I think of poems. Philip Larkin loved jazz tooa great poet, though disagreeable But I dont know if other poets on my radar do. Maybe they Think its easy, I say to myself as I put on a record of Mal Waldrons, To whom Billie Holiday once whispered a song along a keyboard In the 5 Spot and Frank OHara and everyone stopped breathing.