Kinnell - Imperfect thirst

Copyright 1994 by Galway Kinnell

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kinnell, Galway, date.
Imperfect thirst / Galway Kinnell.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-71089-8 ISBN 0-395-75528-x (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS 3521.1582146 1994
811'.54dc20 94-27044 CIP

Book design by Anne Chalmers

Printed in the United States of America

VG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

The poems in this book originally appeared in the following
publications:
The American Poetry Review: The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson, My Mother's R&R, The Night, The Pen, Showing My Father Through Freedom, The Striped Snake and the Goldfinch.
Antaeus: "The Music of Poetry."
The Boston Review: Telephoning in Mexican Sunlight.
Brick: Holy Shit.

The Hungry Mind Review: Sheffield Ghazals (which appeared in early form in the works-in-progress issue of Ploughshares under the title Sheffield Pastorals), Trees
The Atlantic Monthly: The Cellist.
The Paris Review: Lackawanna.
Poetry: Neverland.
Princeton University Library Chronicle: The Road Across Skye.
The New Yorker: Flies, Hitchhiker, The Man in the Chair, Parkinson's Disease, Picnic, Rapture.
The Threepenny Review: Running on Silk.

TO BOBBIE

If your eyes are not deceived by the mirage
Do not be proud of the sharpness of your understanding;
It may be your freedom from this optical illusion
Is due to the imperfectness of your thirst.

Sohrawardi

Its work is memory.
It engraves sounds into paper and fills them with pounded nutgall.
It can transcribe most of the sounds that the child, waking early, not
yet knowing which language she will one day speak, sings.
Asleep in someone's pocket in an airplane, the pen dreams of paper,
and a feeling of pressure comes into it, and, like a boy
dreaming of Grace Hamilton, who sits in front of him in
the fifth grade, it could spout.
An old pen with unresilient ink sac may make many scratches before
it inks.
The pen's alternation of lifts and strokes keeps thoughts coming in a
rhythmic flow.
When several thoughts arrive together, the pen may resort to
scribbling "blah blah," meaning, come back to this later.
Much of what pens write stands for "blah blah."
In the Roman system, the pen moves to the right, and at the margin
swerves backward and downwardperhaps dangerous
directions, but necessary for reentering the past.
The pen is then like the person who gets out of the truck, goes
around to the rear, signals to the driver, and calls, "C'mon
back."
Under increased concentration the pen spreads its nib, thickening the
words that attempt to speak the unspeakable.
These are the fallen-angel words.
Ink is their ichor.
They have a mineral glint, given by clarity of knowing, even in hell.
The pen also uses ink to obfuscate, like the cuttlefish, by inculcating
the notions that reality happens one complete sentence after
another, and that if we have words for an event, we understand
itas in:

How's your pa?
He died.
Oh.

When my father died, leaving my mother and me alone in the house,
I don't know even now what happened.
What did Rilke understand on the death of his father, who by then
had become a speck in the distance?
Did his mother suddenly become larger?
It seems that soon after she married him, Rilke's wife also began
turning into a speck.
He told her in eloquent letters it was good for his artistic development
for them to live apart; meanwhile women arrived from all over
Europe, to spend their allotment of nights in his bed.
I called it "my work" when I would spend weeks on the road, often in
the beds of others.
This Ideal pen, with vulcanite body, can't resist dredging up the
waywardness of my youth.
Fortunately pens run out of ink.
Villon had to cut short the bitter bequests of Le Lais when his inkwell
froze and his candle blew out.
Like a camel at an oasis with stomachs completely empty, the pen
thrusts itself into the ink and suctions in near-silence.
Filled, it starts again laying trudge marks across the paper.
Yesterday, when trying to write about my sister Wendy, my little
mother in childhood, I couldn't find the words in the ink.
Then I had a visit from a poet a few years widowed, who talked about
her husband and how she felt thwarted in her writing and
had lost her waythough in the rhythmical tumbling forth of
her words she seemed to be finding it.
I wished I had collected some of the mascara-blackened fluid on her
cheeks to mix into my ink.
But when I started writing about Wendy again, the ink had
replenished its vocabulary, and from the street came the bleats
of a truck in reverse gear and a cry, "C'mon back, c'mon back."

She lay late in bed. Maybe she was sick,
though she was never sick. There were
pink flowers in full blossom in the wallpaper
and motes like bits of something ground up
churning in sun rays from the windows.
We climbed into bed with her.
Perhaps she needed comforting,
and she was alone, and she let us take
a breast each out of the loose slip.
"Let's make believe we're babies,"
Derry said. We put the large pink
flowers at the end of those lax breasts
into our mouths and sucked with enthusiasm.
She laughed and seemed to enjoy our play.
Perhaps intoxicated by our pleasure,
or frustrated by the failure of the milk
to flow, we sucked harder, probably
our bodies writhed, our eyes flared,
maybe she could feel our teeth.
Abruptly she took back her breasts
and sent us from the bed, two small
hungry boys enflamed and driven off
by the she-wolf. But we had got our nip,
and in the empire we would found,
we would taste every woman and expel
each one who came to resemble her.

His steps rang in the end room
of the henhouse of ten rooms in a row
someone had lent my father as a place
to put the family for the summer
while he stayed behind doing his odd jobs.
This would be his one visit, and I ran
through the dark of the empty rooms
until he bent down out of the gloom like a god
and picked me up and carried me back into the lamplight.
The next day my mother and I showed him through Freedom.
The strawberry ice cream in the Harmony Tea Shop,
which my mother called the Patisserie, was pink
with red bruises. Lettie the postmistress
said, with her sweet regretfulness, perhaps acquired
from palping whatever billets-doux passed
in or out of Freedom, as she said nearly every day
to one or another of us children, "Nothing today, dear."
John, who pumped gas probably no more
than a dozen times a day, sat back in his chair
under the sign of Pegasus. I ran to him,
to get on the knee where he put me
whenever my mother and I came by, happy
that my father would see this full-grown
man was my friend, and would respect me.
But after he greeted us, John turned and, when he sat again,
leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees.
The three of them conversed. My father did his best.
"Yes, it has been," of the wet summer.
"They are sudden," of the lightning storms.

I lingered at the knee. My sitting on it,
and my mother and John talking while I sat,
was that a secret? Suddenly I was like
somebody propped up in a hospital bed,
who can see, hear, almost understand,