lament

As Moody concedes, somewhat reluctantly, not every reader is a genius, and this can lead, in Pound, to many conundrums.

— Louis Menand, “The Pound Error,” The New Yorker, June 9, 2008

the explosion of things as they are

In anticipation of the start of a new school year here in Cambridge (always unjustifiably coincident, in my mind, with the unusually comforting coming of a crisp cold New England autumn; unjustifiably, because it stays relatively warm here until October), Eamon Grennan’s “Pause” — which does an excellent job of distilling that solemn profundity which lurks beneath the appearance of things:

The weird containing stillness of the neighborhood
just before the school bus brings the neighborhood kids
home in the middle of the cold afternoon: a moment
of pure waiting, anticipation, before the outbreak of anything,
when everything seems just, seems justified, just hanging
in the wings, about to happen, and in your mind you see
the flashing lights flare amber to scarlet, and your daughter
in her blue jacket and white-fringed sapphire hat
step gingerly down and out into our world again
and hurry through silence and snow-grass
as the bus door sighs shut
and her own front door flies open and she finds you
behind it, father-in-waiting, the stillness in bits
and the common world restored as you bend
to touch her, take her hat and coat from the floor
where she’s dropped them, hear the live voice of her
filling every crack. In the pause
before all this happens, you know something
about the shape of the life you’ve chosen to live
between the silence of almost infinite possibility and that
explosion of things as they are—those vast unanswerable
intrusions of love and disaster, or just the casual scatter
of your child’s winter clothes on the hall floor.

festive, clear, crowded with delight

The title of this post comes from the last line of Irving Feldman’s poem “The Handball Players at Brighton Beach,” an allegorical meta-commentary on the poem itself:

And then the blue world daring onward
discovers them, the indigenes, aging,
oiled, and bronzing songs of immigrants,
the handball players of the new world
on Brooklyn’s bright eroding shore
who yawp, who quarrel, who shove,
who shout themselves hoarse, don’t
get out of the way, grab for odds,
hustle a handicap, all crust,
all bluster, all con and gusto all
on show, tumultuous, blaring,
grunting as they lunge. True,
their manners lack grandeur, and
yes, elsewhere under the sun legs
are less bowed, bellies are less
potted, pates less bald or blanched,
backs less burned, less hairy.
                                    So?
So what! the sun does not snub,
does not overlook them, shines

and the fair day flares,
the blue universe booms and blooms,
the sea-space, the summer high, focuses
its great unclouded scope in ecstatic
perspection — and you see it too
at the edge of the crowd, edge of the sea,
between multitudes and immensity:
from gray cement ballcourts under
the borough’s sycamores’ golden boughs,
against the odds in pure speculation
Brighton’s handball heroes leap up half
a step toward heaven in burgundy, blue,
or buttercup bathing trunks, in black
sneakers still stylish after forty years,
in pigskin gloves buckled at the wrist
to keep the ball alive, the sun up,
the eye open, the air ardent,
festive, clear, crowded with delight.

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.

as the real in the unreal undone

tonight, the expected absurdist panoply of irreconcilable personalities on the train: just across from me the young, tired black couple with an eleven-month-old infant in a faded pink stroller; to my right, an unadmittedly lonely old unshaven white man, half-drunk and contradictory, his menacing otherness fixing the child’s attention despite his urgings that she shut her eyes and sleep; and at the opposite door a self-indulgent twenty-something contemporary urban dandy playing narcissus the solipsist, admiring hair flips in the window, flicking his wrists and shuffling his feet to unheard music in an inaccessible world of his own — “everything as unreal as real can be,” stevens wrote — not altogether unlike keats’s piping unheard melodies to the spirit ditties of no tone. a cold pastoral, the somber and arresting image of a nineteenth-century invention recapitulated in twenty-first-century form: the, our, paradoxical city of strangers.