Evening Song
by Kenneth Fearing

Sleep, McKade.
Fold up the day. It was a bright scarf.
Put it away.
Take yourself to pieces like a house of cards.

It is time to be a grey mouse under a tall building.

Go there. Go there now.
Look at the huge nails. Run behind the pipes.
Scamper in the walls.
Crawl towards the beckoning girl, her breasts are warm.
But here is a dead man. A murderer?
Kill him with your pistol. Creep past him to the girl.

Sleep, McKade.
Throw one arm across the bed. Wind your watch.
You are a gentleman, and important.
Yawn. Go to sleep.

The continent turning from the sun is quiet.
Your ticker waits for tomorrow morning
And you are alive now.
It will be a long time before they put McKade under the sod.
Sometime, but not now.
Sometime, though. Sometime, for certain.

Take apart your brain,
Close the mouths in it that have been hungry,
They are fed for a while.
Go to sleep, you are a gentleman. McKade, alive and sane.
A gentleman of position.

Tip your hat to the lady.
Speak to the mayor.
You are a personal friend of the mayor’s, are you not?
True. A friend of the mayor’s.
And you met the Queen of Roumania. True.

Then go to sleep.
Be a dog sleeping in the old sun.
Be a poodle drowsing in the old sun, by the Appian Way.
Be a dog lying the meadow watching soldiers pass on the road.
Chase after the woman who beckons.
Run from the policeman with the dagger. It will split your bones.
Be terrified.
Curl up and drowse on the pavement of Fifth Avenue in the old sun.
Sleep, McKade.
Yawn.
Go to sleep.

I don’t find it boring, actually. I’m just tired because I’ve been up since 5 a.m. That was almost 2.5 hours earlier than I normally get up. Hear me when I say, “I AM TIRED.”

Still, I got home, ate some soup, took some photos, refilled the windshield washer fluid receptacle under my car’s hood and debated installing new wipers (but then read the instructions. Not tonight. These yotches are silicone ones from PIAA and they require some prep work. This is a project for another night.)

And now, le foto.

And below, a close-up from the first photo and a reason I love my camera. This is without a macro lens and it’s not the sharpest ever (a lens would help), but you can see the fine “hairs” around the edges of a CLOVER.

Hungry insects make quick work of leaves.

More on this last photo tomorrow…

No comments

I subscribe to the Poetry Daily RSS feed and this was the poem from March 7th. It’s by B.T. Shaw—about whom I know nothing. But I will investigate further.

We End, Like Galileo

With years came diminishing ability to focus
on objects at hand. Pen nib. Collar stud.
Ruby nest of squab bones on a dinner plate.

Behind, then, the distance failed.
Northern hills and eastern olive groves
lost ground until the vineyards vanished
in soft wash of green chintz and gold silk.

He charted each loss in its sidereal arc.
Until the tipped stars, too, emptied the glass,
opening the curtain on everyday dark.

I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood’s fiction and only recently noticed that she’s a poet, as well. Here’s one I just discovered:

Night Poem

There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father the thunder
your mother the rain

In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim, where the moss grows
on all sides of the trees
and your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection,

your true parents disappear
when the curtain covers your door.
We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.

We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whimpers.

You rock in the rain’s arms
the chilly ark of your sleep,
while we wait, your night
father and mother
with our cold hands and dead flashlight,
knowing we are only
the wavering shadows thrown
by one candle, in this echo
you will hear twenty years later.

Margaret Atwood

[Preface: I am functional, but sitting up makes me nauseated and dizzy. That's the wonder of Percocet. The left side of my face is fine - only one tooth was removed from that side. The right side of my face is swollen swollen swollen. Two teeth from that side and one involved a little more "bone work" in the words of the doctor. All in all, the procedure yesterday was absolutely PAINLESS. Amazing, I know. And I was awake - nitrous oxide and lidocaine only. Only around 5 p.m. last night did I begin to feel some soreness and pain. So, not bad. I think today will be the worst day and then things will get better... more later.]

I love the poems of our current poet laureate, Billy Collins. I hope to attend the next Dodge Poetry Festival (which takes place not too far from my home in NJ in late September) since the current poet laureate usually takes center stage on the main stage at this event and reads and signs books. Yay! Mr. Collins even wrote a little piece about attending the festival.

This is my absolute favorite from his book, “Picnic, Lightning.” It’s called “Marginalia.”

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

Billy Collins

Sigh. Lovely. His writing is so accessible and “friendly” and lovely.

[Admission: Apparently, my UNIX shell programming skills are too weak to program the little

crontab

feature I need to edit to make the future posting thing work. Why can't Movable Type make this automatic? Why even include the menu on the admin panel if you can't use it until you edit via SSH? Grrrrr!! Well, something for me to learn in the next week or so...]

Entry #1 in absentia:

It's too bad that this poem is best known for being in the film, Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-- W.H. Auden

It's one of my favorite W.H. Auden poems - the details about the gloves and muffled drum just hit me somewhere in my solar plexus. It's good when a piece of writing does that.