Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
They flee from me that Sometime did me Seek
“Courtiers, like Henry, wrote love lyrics in pursuing a woman’s sexual favours, but once seduced, unmarried women lost their power. Few men would complain, in lyrics, about being rejected by someone they had successfully bedded because they usually were fully prepared to move on to new sexual partners…”
October 26, 2009
Gangotri (The place where The Ganges flows to earth from heaven)
Posted by jessicarrot under writingLeave a Comment
In the thin air at Gangotri, I hover like a ghost.
Every breath is poison.
I fall through a sky of fire
and fade from view.
You hover over me like a halo of mercy.
Palaces, and legacies of
civilizations pass through my eyes
to yours.
Together we purify these bones.
Together we burn and scrape them clean.
And when the stars align,
we shine.
October 13, 2009
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Dylan Thomas
The first time I read those words, it was like they were emblazoned on the shield of the absolute warrior-hero of my dreams. Anyone who could put rage and gentle together in a lyrical poem to his dying father was a ROCK STAR in my book. Imagine my heartache when my 12th grade English teacher snidely remarked that this man, the one who so earnestly plead with his dying father to fight and rage against death walked into the White horse tavern on November 9th 1953 and drank himself to death. It wasn’t enough to stop me from adoring this poem, but I was so utterly disappointed that the rock star went out that way. That he just gave up.
Poetry is important to me at the moment, so I’m revisiting all the masterpieces of my youth. I decided to look up my old flame and a quick Google search may have restored my admiration of the rock star who was Dylan Thomas. What if he didn’t drink himself to death? What if he was sick before he went in to the bar? I am so bored of celebrity who-done-it access Hollywood exclusives about the doctors responsible for killing off celebrities. Yeah, doctors screw up, they are human. When they screw up with someone famous, we all get to hear about it. But according to author David Thomas the personal physician of Dylan Thomas likely misdiagnosed a bronchial infection and proceeded to administer the worst possible drug, morphine, assuming that Dylan Thomas’ condition was the result of his heavy drinking.
People have to take responsibility for their actions, I was appalled at this BBC article that lays blame for DT’s alcoholism at universities for not giving him a fellowship, or at the BBC for not giving him a job as a reporter, or on his reliance on American lecture circuits that kept him away from his wife and family. Nope, I don’t buy the whole celebrity=victim thing. Dylan Thomas was most likely an alchoholic, he had only himself to blame for that. And his poor diet, heavy drinking and sleeplessness contributed to his poor health. But I do take comfort in the new evidence. I guess it isn’t that new, 5 year old evidence that the poet of my dreams did not lay his life down in a fit of drunkenness in a bar. He arrived in New York feeling ill, cheated on his wife with the assistant of his agent and had some drinks. After complaining to his physician that he couldn’t breath, his doctor gave him some morphine, which had the affect of further hampering his breathing. He then colapsed and was admitted to the hospital where he lay comatose until his death. His genius brain was deprived of oxagen and he died of swelling to the brain.
I feel assured that he lived, he strained against his poverty, he met his obligations (if not to his wife) with all the rage he could muster, he used up his life until it he intersected with a fatal series of mistakes, and learning too late, I think he must have grieved on his way to the dying of the light.
I guess it is strange to take comfort in that. But I do.
October 1, 2009
I babysat a lot when I was an early teen… and younger. I got a regular gig with this sweet family for bowling night or something, basically I just put the kids to bed and waited. Usually I watched tv. One night I started leafing through the set of Harvard classics on the bookshelf and fell in love with Alfred Tennyson. I just remembered this recently. My first favorite poem, was of course “The Lady of Shallot.” An incredible poem in verse, I don’t think I really understood it but it was powerful, it was magic to me. The Lady of Shallot is a magical creature who sits and watches in her mirror the goings on of Camelot. And as she watches, she weaves a tapestry. For some reason she is forbidden to actually look out the window. (Medusa-esque? I don’t know) Anyway, everyone is aware of her, and she is aware of them. But then, one day Lancelot comes riding in to town. The Lady can not help it, she has to look at him after seeing him ride so confidently, like a shining Adonis. And this of course, is her un-doing. My favorite lines from the poem (remember I was an early teen and melodramatic was an understatement, then.)
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.…
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shalott.Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turn’d to tower’d Camelot.
For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.Under tower and balcony,
By garden-wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
And around the prow they read her name,
The Lady of Shalott.Who is this? And what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they crossed themselves for fear,
All the Knights at Camelot;
But Lancelot mused a little space
He said, “She has a lovely face;
God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott.”
Do I have to explain why such a poem would appeal to an insecure adolescent girl? Oh how vital every feeling was back then. You could die from feeling something, admiring a handsome man… Knowing he’d never notice you. Oh, and of course he’d notice if you did die. And of course, Lancelot thought she was pretty. Of course, now that it was too late. I had forgotten Tennyson’s Lady until just the other night. What a gem. What a treat to find a lost love.
October 1, 2009
My first husband was a narrowly-escaped disaster. Walking in my sleep all hours of the day, I wandered. Moments of content, interrupted by the chaos of rationalization for continuing to watch my body torn to shreds. Each holy space invaded, ransacked and destroyed. Deconstructing to the molecules until there was no hope of rebuilding.
My first husband was obliterated in the light of my second husband. Gone in an instant. Only shadows and echoes sometimes flash in the mounting darkness.
My second husband was my salvation. He rose up from the ash and rubble of my soul.
(Just to clarify, this is fiction. It came about after I read some obscure biblical refference about being married to sin first and then being married to Christ…)
August 29, 2009
A glut of consuming fire has engulfed all of us.
Instead of producing, we consume and consume
Until the blistering rivulets of engorged excess
have strangled and burned our insides.
So pinched and perplexed are we
That there could ever be a consequence to holding a flame.
The fantasy ends abrupt.
The chains are malignant with peculiar force.
The dreamworld is cracked wide open
and a fury of ugliness rushes in.
Wings peeled, eyes ignited
It tears our flesh, ripping lacy networks,
devouring our thick shining internal parts
Leaving us empty until they regenerate anew.
Over and over again.
How systematically our pride is dashed,
Pulverized into a million shiny bits.
We take shameful comfort watching the eagles’
wings beat down on top of strangers.
Strange comfort in destruction.
Humiliation
Emptiness.
It takes our minds off of the agony of immortality.
August 20, 2009
Bereft of travail, I dripped out so gelid, so winged.
Naked.
I entered you through your cold hollow gaps
Your cold soul, so empty.
In palaestra, I stood, shoulders glistening
I fought you.
Achilles straining, you succumbed.
Alongside my brothers, I hunted.
I fell in and out of love, like a child.
I slipped in and out of life, like a dream.
And so did you.
Sword raised and fierce, in livid elation
your crippled lily gaze beseeched me.
My robe slipped from my shoulder and you knew…
You were no match for me.
With a metallic thud, you dropped your sword.
Was it love?
Was it injury?
How could we ever know?
I was never yours.
August 18, 2009
Your veins sing so softly
a whisper your lips deny
cradled in your bones,
deep down to the marrow,
you know.
All the secrets you keep there
are furious with the need
to be spoken.
Slowly, carefully, they stealthily plot against you
One rogue cell divides,
and divides again.
Happily, a cancer grows
drawing blood and food
to feed itself.
Eventually it finds the surface
as your equal.
Your mortal enemy.
Before you are ready, its a duel.
A fight to the death.
Winner
takes
all.
August 17, 2009
I hate the gaudy smell of perfection
It stares me right in the face
knowing I won’t make eye contact
the thought makes me itch and fret.
I’ve gone down, chased down that path
grasping, coming so close to the mirage.
Failure is like a bruise,
an injury that can’t reach the surface.
It just settles there under the skin
Swollen, sore and ugly.
I hate the gaudy smell of perfection
I make myself worthless in its shadow…
muddling around in passionate shame.
If I could just exist here, where would I go,
what would I be?
I hate the brooding illusiveness of my intentions.
The picture is always clearer in my mind.
It loses potency in my hands, in my mouth,
in my eyes.
I’m abandoned and torn by my intentions.
The thick and fertile turns to dust.
July 4, 2009
For no particular reason, I just felt like my (late) 4th of July post should include William Butler Yeats Poem, The Second Coming:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It is easy to understand why this is one of the most anthologized poems in the English Language. I just revisited this after reading a short story that quoted the line “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned” I don’t know that I ever really appreciated the power of that phrase. I don’t mean to harp on Iran, but I have never seen something like a revolution unfold. And its facinating to me how social networking tools on the internet have brought the revolution to my family room. I watched a clip of the moment a woman died. It didn’t show the fatal injury happening, just the woman lying on the street and you saw the moment her eyes went from living to dead. Dying is one of the most sacred moments, so out of respect I don’t want to link that video. But I felt so privilaged to see that, and I understood I think more after seeing it the trauma in the words of Yeats in the aftermath of WWI, how it could easily feel that a blood-dimmed tide was drowning the ceremony of innocence. I love writing that gets me to feel emotions, even if they are dark ones. Especially if those dark emotions give me a glimpse of what it is to be caught up in the historical momentum of the “widening gyre” of freedom, peace, apathy, war, freedom. Why doesn’t the center ever hold? And why is it that war is always so awful, we assume it must be signaling the second coming?
I remember so many years ago when the first Iraq war broke out hearing people talk about the inevitability of the Second Coming. And look what else has happened since then. Men have shot at innocent women and children trying to get food. People flew airplanes full of innocent men women and children into the world trade center. A war is being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan that doesn’t seem to have an end in sight. The financial structure of this country is co lapsing on itself. Things can get a lot worse. There are many more ways for the ceremony of innocence to drown…
So I guess the point of bringing all this up is that… its been almost 100 years since Yeats wrote that poem. I probably don’t understand it, but it feels like someone in shock from a horror to me. But I think that innocence is reborn every day. It has not been one long show of bloodshed and dispair for 100 years. And yet, I think every era in-between can relate to this poem. So I guess the beauty of it is that we can come back from the horror of seeing death come over innocense. We can come out every July 4th and watch the wonder in our children’s eyes as they watch the colorful lights flash in the firework displays. There is something that makes this all worth it. There is something that makes us all keep going. And there must be something that makes a soldier keep on fighting. People keep signing up for it every day. Not just the military, but parenthood. Marriage. Building famlies. All these things that push humanity forward. When I think about th 4th of July, I think about the contrast of overcoming horror and the beauty of rebirth. The idea that things could get a lot worse does not thrill me. But I’m not going to allow myself to be horrified either. Every night brings the dawn. If things get worse, than at some point the rising of the Son will be all the brighter.
Happy Belated July 4th, to everyone who appreciates freedom.
