John Hollander - Selected Poetry

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Copyright 1993 by John Hollander All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Poems from the following collections are used by permission of The Johns Hopkins University PressBlue Wine, copyright 1979 by John Hollander
In Time and Place, copyright 1986 by The Johns Hopkins University Press The remaining poems in this collection were originally published in the following books:A Crackling of Thorns, copyright 1958 by Yale University Press
Movie-Going and Other Poems, copyright 1962 by John Hollander
Visions from the Ramble, copyright 1965 by John Hollander
The Night Mirror, copyright 1971 by John Hollander
Town and Country Matters, copyright 1972 by John Hollander
Tales Told of the Fathers, copyright 1975 by John Hollander
Spectral Emanations, copyright 1978 by John Hollander
Powers of Thirteen, copyright 1983 by John Hollander
Harp Lake, copyright 1988 by John Hollander Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hollander, John.
[Poems. Poems from the following collections are used by permission of The Johns Hopkins University PressBlue Wine, copyright 1979 by John Hollander
In Time and Place, copyright 1986 by The Johns Hopkins University Press The remaining poems in this collection were originally published in the following books:A Crackling of Thorns, copyright 1958 by Yale University Press
Movie-Going and Other Poems, copyright 1962 by John Hollander
Visions from the Ramble, copyright 1965 by John Hollander
The Night Mirror, copyright 1971 by John Hollander
Town and Country Matters, copyright 1972 by John Hollander
Tales Told of the Fathers, copyright 1975 by John Hollander
Spectral Emanations, copyright 1978 by John Hollander
Powers of Thirteen, copyright 1983 by John Hollander
Harp Lake, copyright 1988 by John Hollander Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hollander, John.
[Poems.

Selections]
Selected poetry / John Hollander.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80515-7
I. Title.
PS3515.03485A6 1993 92-54789
811.54dc20 CIP v3.1 Again, for Harry and Kathleen

Notes on many of the poems will be found beginning As the dry, red sun set we sat and watched Them bring the fish in from the harp-shaped lake. At night my life, whose every task is botched, Dreams of far distant places, by mistake. They tunnelled through the mountains to connect The raging ocean with the inland sea. Dreaming of you, I wander through some wrecked Historic region of antiquity.

We played unknowing for the highest stakes All day, then lost when night was drawing nigh. The dark pale of surrounding hemlocks makes Stabs at transcendence in the evening sky. Out on the lake at night one understands How the far shores more distant than a star. The music playing right into my hands, I took the measure of my dark guitar. Beauty? the dolphins leap. But for the truth, The filtering balein of the great whale.

Age? its more gullible than flashing youth: The ending swallows the beginnings tale. Far from the freeway and its hoarse, sick roaring, He can still listen to the wildwoods sigh. Across the world the shattering rain was pouring: Tears merely glistened in my childhoods eye. Out of the depths I call for you: the water Drowns it, as if that sound were its own name. Enisled in height, she learned what had been taught her: From closer up, the sky was more of the same. Her thought was silent, but the darkness rang With the strong questions of a headlights beam.

He walked around the lake: the water sang An undersong as if it were a stream. The wind was working on the laughing waves, Washing a shore that was not wholly land. I give life to dead letters: from their graves Come leaping even X and ampersand. Below, the dialect of the market-place, All dark os, narrowed is and widened es. Above, through a low gate, this silent space: The whitened tomb of wise Maimonides. Only a y, stupidly questioning, Separates what is yours from what is ours.

Only mute aspiration now can sing Our few brief moments into endless hours. The merest puddle by the lowest hill Answers the flashing sunlight none the less. I harp on the two flowing themes of still Water and jagged disconnectedness. I lay in a long field; eleven sheep Leapt from a barge onto the grass, and fed. She cleared the wall and leapt into my sleep, Riding her piebald mare of night and dread. Dressed like their foes, nomadic and unkempt, The emperors legion crept across the stream.

Only as her great rival could she attempt The soft parapets of her lovers dream. The voice of the Commander rang in us; Our hearts in stony ranks echoed his shout. The cold, bare hills have no cause to discuss What the thunder among them is about. Musing at sundown, I recall the long Voyages across shoreless seas of sand. Shuddering at dawn, I call out for your song, O isle of water in the broad main of land. What speck of dust fell on my page of strife And mixed its coughing with the prose of breath? The pensive comma, hanging on to life? The full stop that sentences us to death.

From his blue tomb the young sun rises and The marble whitecaps pass like dancing stones. A boy, somewhere in an old, arid land, Sat carving spoons out of his fathers bones. Windward, the sun; a galley on our lee Rolls gently homeward; now its sail is gone. This miracle the moonlight once gave me: The sky lay still; the broad water walked on. What cannot be seen in us as we stare At the same stretch of ordinary bay? Her constant dreaming of the Immermeer, My half-lost moment on the Harfensee. In bright, chaste sunlight only forms are seen: Off-color language gives the world its hue.

Only in English does the grass grow green; In ancient Greece the dogs were almost blue. The bitten-into fig does, without doubt, Show forth that blushing part of which weve heard. Resemblance turns our language inside-out: Pudenda is a self-descriptive word. He fought Sloth in her arbitrary den, And grew bored long before he could defeat her. I stopsomething is too pedestrian About the iambs in this kind of meter. Footsore, his argument gave out and slept In the unmeasured vale of meditation.

In marked but quiet waves the water kept Time with the heartbeats of an old elation. This night in which all pages are the same Black: the Hegelians must shut up shop. It seemed when, smiling, you called out my name The humor of the noon would never stop. He parsed his schoolboy Greek, the future more Vivid, where rich, strange verbs display emotion. My glass of dark wine drained, from the dim shore I scan the surface of a sparse, gray ocean. They built beside a chilly mountain lake The prison of particularity.

The sun is blind now; only the stars awake To see the whole world mirrored in the sea. The seas a mere mirror wherein you see Something of the gray face of the high sky. Far from shore, the dark lake relays to me The lie of the old, silent land nearby. The everlastingness of childhoods summer Evenings itself skyrockets and is gone. As if great age would evermore become her The far-lit winter night reigns on and on. Snows on the far, long mountain in the north, Seen from the lake, are never reflected there.