October 5, 2010

Journal & Essays

Tuesday.

 

It is so easy in a sense to be confessional, so difficult to write on more general themes. I borrow the idea, in part, from something I read in passing at the bookstore, from an introduction to Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love. My own tendency is to wander into personal daydream and get lost in the navel-gazing pursuit, without there ever being much girth to my thought. It is the more undisciplined state: when I try to think on something else, something big – political stories in the news, for example – I notice my brain straining, making an effort, feeling like the cogs that creep in a poem by Theodore Roethke. But then it is premature to call thoughts of this kind small or vain or coquettish. Of course they can tend toward idleness (mine surely do), but then sometimes you can see something of the universal in the narrow moments of a domestic life. Consider the novels of Jane Austen, and you will find that some very great and serious themes – love and family and morality – come out of pages of balls and romantic missives and strolls through the garden. And then Blake speaks of a world in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild flower.

Nonetheless, I do not shake my fear. My concern probably treats of a slightly different question, really, and there is the rub. Smallness is not the same as selfness, and the thing I fear is a junction of the two. It is hard to dismiss suspicions of small-mindedness when, sitting down to write, my impulse is to begin every new phrase with I. Let this last sentence be judged a direct rejoinder to that vexing whim.

Folk Song in Unknown Key

Poems

(Also included in the post entitled “The Entertaining Adventures.”)

—

(Refrain)

Blue moon rising in the
Blue moon rising in the
Blue moon rising in the sky

A bearded man in button suit
Renounced his right to die
His mother’s lost her cotton glove
His father’s lost his eye

Refrain

A moppet dressed in yellow lace
Forgot the way to cry
Her sweetheart’s left no note again
And she can only sigh

Refrain

A linnet looking at a tree
Despaired it was too high
He’s lost his wings to sharper things
His song goes me oh my

Refrain

Flash Fiction

Short Fiction & Prose

(Also included in the post entitled “The Entertaining Adventures.”)

—

The boy was sitting silent in the gray corner of the room without a table or a chair for resting. He was promised to a girl, a lovely girl some months younger than he, and she had come wearing a flower in her hair earlier that evening. He had received her warmly then, and the night was filled with a constant hum of noise as they kept themselves always in the company of people, perpetually moved here, moved there, with the simple understanding that the mouth must never pause for too long, since silence was judged an unfashionable thing. And when the hours were finished, the boy escorted the girl to her door and without looking even once at the moon, kissed the flower in her hair and said his goodnight.

Now in the middle of the night he was left to solitude, that lonely and throat-closing state where man converses with his truths in a distractionless white-walled room.

Oldies 2

Poems

From thine own partner in tomfoolery. Please pardon the mess while we relocate to our new office just down the street.

————

I am halfway dead, and it hardly matters a whit. Whatever comes to my head is lousy in logic and only a vain attempt at enlightened thought – oh vanity of vanities…. Let us go to sleep now.

————

Little atoms wander wayward, alas!

O little atoms wayward striving!
Thy distant thought rejects the lonely heart
A-tower’d in the highest crib, a bulb
That teeters with a proof, a colder sigh
A man aloof – and the little girl
A-slumber here! Is she goodly, is she fair?
She slips to God a quiet prayer, but soon
She’s falling fast asleep, a long and silent
Sillion-sleep. A pretty sleep she sleeps.

————

The swallow by my glass was a small bird and I said, Small bird, won’t you keep your spirits? There is mightiness in being small. And he made reply by flying to a distant bough.

————

Five-and-twenty men
Went walking glen to glen
All thick with overheat
And dreaming of sweetmeat
When in the russet afternoon
A long-bottom named Sargeant Loon
Barked orders to the sky:
GIVE RAIN OR THOU SHALT DIE!
And all the five-and-twenty men
Stood waiting on an ancient glen
Until the sky obliged
But, Sir, by then
The ancient glen
Had turned halfway to clay
And Sargeant Loon,
The great buffoon,
Had nothing more to say.

————

This is no good
no good at all
I am headed
I am headed for the fall.

————

Elizabeth fell
and it was -ell

————

Excellent she said
and I forgot the sense
it is wrong the tense
but bowdlerize and all is swell
in this scooper of a town
where all the purple-
headed ladies
hack and smack and spit and frown
to find I cannot spell.

Oh how shall I tell
how far I’ve lost my mind?

————

I don’t know many things, like all of Newton’s laws how to mortgage a house the proper way to say good-bye the trick to making immaculate proofs whether I am guileless and if this is bad how to handle the telephone the names of all the songs on the radio that I meant to record in a book of notes how to journal absent pretense how to work in the real world the technique of buffering critics which reactions make household names if I am holding my pencil the goodly way how to whistle like my father when formality is out of place how to heal a cut and even well all-right always what to write.

————

A blustery day I walked to town,
Passed the people going by,
Stopped inside an old tea room,
Doffed my hat and hung it high
Upon a molded wooden beam
And nearly hit my head –
Poor luck that I escaped the blow,
I’d rather I were dead.

————

Once upon a time there was a small girl with long, brown hair and large, brown eyes and she was the most sensitive little girl this side of the Mississippi. At Christmastime, when her family brought her through the downtown streets to peer in at the city windows, all festooned with lights and garland and cotton snow, she looked long at the tired men on the sidewalk with scraggly hair and nubby coats and she closed her eyes and prayed to God that she would find a penny or a dime as she walked along so that the men would have something to put in their paper cups. And, lo! She always did find a coin or two – lots of people traveled these streets and were too busy to notice the drop of copper at their feet – and …

Mirabel

Short Fiction & Prose

(Also included in the post entitled “How Many Roads.”)

—

Mirabel buttoned the top button of her woolen coat and stepped lightly out the door into the falling snow. It was the coldest day of the year and not many people would be about, but the solitude of the occasion was precisely the thing that stirred Mirabel’s heart. She wended down the white road and when a bird flew overhead against the thin grey sky, she would stop, wave a mitten at him, and then continue on her way. The road had a narrow path for walking, for the snow had not fallen too thick through the night, and the narrowness of the path contrasted with the wideness of the sky, but yet they ran parallel, the road and the sky, one always looking at the other and continuing on, on, on.

Mirabel was not aware of the passing of time, only of the heaviness or lightness of her feet, and so long as her boots could carry her one step after another with no pang to the heel, she would proceed with her walking. She did not think any thoughts in particular, but when she passed by a flagpole, she sang a song of her country; and when she passed by a nest in a tree, she sang of a bluebird; and when she passed by a mailbox, she sang of a faraway friend; and so on and so forth in this way. She had a pretty little soprano voice, clear and straight in the winter air. If she did not know the words, she hummed, and her humming was even prettier than her singing, for the sound came from deeper down, and it buzzed with the joy of saying something without ever parting the lips.

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