Koethe - Falling water : poems

Above a coast that lies between two coasts Flight 902 turns west towards San Diego. Milwaukee falls away. The constant passenger, Removed from character and context, resumes His California story, gradually ascending, Reading Farewell, My Lovely for the umpteenth time, Like a book above the world, or below the noise.

I recall some houses half-way in the desert, And how dry the trees all seemed, and temporary Even the tallest buildings looked, with bungalows Decaying in the Santa Ana wind. And finally Just how small it was, and mean. Is it nostalgia For the limited that makes the days go quickly, Tracing out their spirals of diminishing concern? Like all the boys who lived on Westland Avenue, I learned to follow the trails through the canyon, Shoot at birds with a BB-gun, and dream of leaving. What are books? To me they seemed like mirrors Holding up a vision of the social, in which people, Beckoning from their inaccessible preserves Like forgotten toys, afforded glimpses of those Evanescent worlds that certain minor writers Raymond Chandler say, or even Rupert Brooke Could visualize somehow, and bring to life again. And though these worlds were sometimes difficult to see, Once having seen them one returned to find the words Still there, like a part of the surroundings Compliant to ones will. Yet these are attitudes, And each age has its separate store of attitudes, Its store of tropesIn Grantchester, in Grantchester! That filter through its dreams and fill its songs.

Hume tried to show that sympathy alone allows The happiness of strangers to affect our lives. Yet now and then a phrase, echoing in the mind Long after its occasion, seems to resurrect A world I think I recognize, and never saw. For what was there to see? Some houses on a hill Next to a small stream? A village filled with people I couldnt understand? Could anyone have seen the Transitory sweetness of the Georgians England And the world before the War, before The Waste Land ? Years are secrets, and their memories are often Stories of a past that no one witnessed, like the Fantasies of home one builds to rationalize The ordinary way ones life has gone since then. Words seem to crystallize that life in pictures In a postcard of a vicarage, or of a canyon Wedged between the desert and an endless ocean But their clarity is fleeting. I can nearly See the coast from here, and as I hear the engines And the bell chimes, all those images dissolve.

On a hillside somewhere in Sorrento Valley, My aunts and uncles sat in canvas chairs In the blazing sun, facing a small ash tree.

On a hillside somewhere in Sorrento Valley, My aunts and uncles sat in canvas chairs In the blazing sun, facing a small ash tree.

There was no wind. In the distance I could see Some modern buildings, hovering in the air Above the wooded hillsides of Sorrento Valley. I followed the progress of a large bumblebee As the minister stood, offering a prayer, Next to the young white California ash tree. Somewhere a singer went right on repeating When I Grow Too Old to Dream . Yet to dream where, I wonderedon a hillside in Sorrento Valley, Half-way between the mountains and the sea? To be invisible at last, and released from care, Beneath a stone next to a white tree? As though each of us were alone, and free, And the common ground we ultimately shared Were on a hillside somewhere in Sorrento Valley, In the shade of a small ash tree.

There was nothing there for me to disbelieve .

RANDALL JARRELL

Dvoraks Songs My Mother Taught Me, From the cycle Gypsy Melodies , anticipates The sonorous emotions of the Trio in F Minor, Though without the latters complications. The melody is simple, while the pieces Mood looks backwards, carried by the sweet, Sustaining rhythms of the mothers voice Embodied in the figure of the violin, until, Upon the second repetition of the theme And on a high, protracted note, it suddenly Evaporates, while the piano lingers underneath. The world remains indifferent to our needs, Unchanged by what the mind, in its attempt to Render it in terms that it can recognize, Imagines it to be. The notes make up a story Set entirely in the kingdom of appearance, Filled with images of happiness and sadness And projected on a place from which all Evidence of what happened once has vanished A deserted cabin on a lake, or an isolated Field in which two people walked together, Or the nondescript remains of someones home. The place endures, unmindful and unseen, Until its very absence comes to seem a shape That seems to stand for somethinga schematic Face that floats above a background made of Words that someone spoke, from which the human Figure gradually emerges, like a shifting pattern Drifting through a filigree of flimsy clouds Above the massive, slowly turning globe. Beneath the trees, beneath the constellations Drawn from the illusions sketched by sight, The tiny figures move in twos and threes To their particular conclusions, like the details Of a vision that, for all it leaves to see, Might never have existedits conviction spent, Its separate shapes retracing an ascending Curve of entropy, dissolving in that endless Dream of physics, in which pain becomes unreal, And happiness breaks down into its elements.

I wish there were an answer to that wish. Why cant the unseen worldthe real world Be like an aspect of a place that one remembers? Why cant each thing present itself, and stay, Without the need to be perfected or refined? Why cant we live in some imaginary realm Beyond belief, in which all times seem equal, And without the space between the way things are And how they merely seem? In which the minor, Incidental shapes that meant the world to me That mean the world to meare real too? Suppose that time were nothing but erasure, And that years were just whatever one had lost. The things that managed to remain unchanged Would seem inhuman, while the course life took Would have a form that was too changeable to see. The simple act of speech would make it true, Yet at the cost of leaving nothing to believe. Within this field, this childs imagination, An entire universe could seem to flicker In the span of ones attention, each succeeding Vision mingling with the rest to form a tapestry Containing multitudes, a wealth of incident As various as the mind itself, yet ultimately Composed of nothing but its mirror image: An imaginary person, who remained, within that Seamless web of supposition, utterly alone. All this is preface.

Last May my mother died And I flew back to San Diego for her funeral. Her life was uneventful, and the last ten Years or so had seemed increasingly dependent On a vague and doctrineless religiona religion Based on reassurance rather than redemption Filled with hopes so unspecific and a love so Generalized that in the end it came to seem A long estrangement, in the course of which those Abstract sentiments had deepened and increased, While all the real thingsthe things that Used to seem so close I couldnt see them Had been burnished away by distance and by time, Replaced by hazy recollections of contentment, And obscured beneath a layer of association Which had rendered them, once more, invisible. And yet the streets still looked the same to me, And even though the incidents seemed different, The shapes that still remained exhibited the Reassuring patterns of a natural order The quiet rhythms of a world demystified, Without those old divisions into what was real And what was wishful thinking. In a few days Everything had altered, and yet nothing changed That was the anomalous event that happened In the ordinary course of things, from which the Rest of us were simply absent, or preoccupied, Or busy with arrangements for the flowers, The music, the reception at the house for various Cousins, aunts and uncles and, from next door, Mr. Palistini with his tooth of gold. At Length the house was empty, and I went outside.