Thursday, February 28, 2019

February 29 -- Howard Nemerov







Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920 – July 5, 1991) was United States Poet Laureate on two separate occasions: from 1963 to 1964, and from 1988 to 1990. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. He was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus.



"I got the idea that you were supposed to be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times, but civilization has ended so many times during my brief term on earth that I got a little bored with the theme."  -- Howard Nemerov 



"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time." -- Howard Nemerov 
   


A Spell before Winter
   
After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. 




The Blue Swallows
   
Across the millstream below the bridge 
Seven blue swallows divide the air 
In shapes invisible and evanescent, 
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s 
Or memory’s power to keep them there. 

“History is where tensions were,” 
“Form is the diagram of forces.” 
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, 
While gazing down upon those birds— 
How strange, to be above the birds!— 
Thus helplessly the mind in its brain 
Weaves up relation’s spindrift web, 
Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs 
Dipped in invisible ink, writing… 

Poor mind, what would you have them write? 
Some cabalistic history 
Whose authorship you might ascribe 
listening do To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost, 
You’ve capitalized your Self enough. 
That villainous William of Occam 
Cut out the feet from under that dream 
Some seven centuries ago. 
It’s taken that long for the mind 
To waken, yawn and stretch, to see 
With opened eyes emptied of speech 
The real world where the spelling mind 
Imposes with its grammar book 
Unreal relations on the blue 
Swallows. Perhaps when you will have 
Fully awakened, I shall show you 
A new thing: even the water 
Flowing away beneath those birds 
Will fail to reflect their flying forms, 
And the eyes that see become as stones 
Whence never tears shall fall again. 

O swallows, swallows, poems are not 
The point. Finding again the world, 
That is the point, where loveliness 
Adorns intelligible things 
Because the mind’s eye lit the sun. 



Fugue by Howard Nemerov
                               
You see them vanish in their speeding cars, 
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done before
This time of time speed distance, random streams
Of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
Was there never a world where people just sat still?

Yet they might be all of them contemplatives
Of a timeless now, drivers and passengers
In the moving cars all facing to the front
Which is the future, which is destiny,
Which is desire and desire's end - 
What are they doing but just sitting still?

And still at speed they fly away, as still 
As the road paid out beneath them as it flows
Moment by moment into the mirrored past;
They spread in their wake the parading fields of food,
The windowless works where who is making what,
The grey towns where the wishes and the fears are done. 




The View From An Attic Window 
                                              
Among the high-branching, leafless boughs 
Above the roof-peaks of the town, 
Snowflakes unnumberably come down. 

I watched out of the attic window 
The laced sway of family trees, 
Intricate genealogies 

Whose strict, reserved gentility, 
Trembling, impossible to bow, 
Received the appalling fall of snow. 

All during Sunday afternoon, 
Not storming, but befittingly, 
Out of a still, grey, devout sky, 

The snowflakes fell, until all shapes 
Went under, and thickening, drunken lines 
Cobwebbed the sleep of solemn pines. 

Up in the attic, among many things 
Inherited and out of style, 
I cried, then fell asleep awhile, 

Waking at night now, as the snow- 
flakes from darkness to darkness go 
Past yellow lights in the street below. 


I cried because life is hopeless and beautiful. 
And like a child I cried myself to sleep 
High in the head of the house, feeling the hull 
Beneath me pitch and roll among the steep 
Mountains and valleys of the many years 
That brought me to tears. 

Down in the cellar, furnace and washing machine, 
Pump, fuse-box, water heater, work their hearts 
Out at my life, which narrowly runs between 
Them and this cemetery of spare parts 
For discontinued men, whose hats and canes 
Are my rich remains. 

And women, their portraits and wedding gowns 
Stacked in the corners, brooding in wooden trunks; 

And children’s rattles, books about lions and clowns; 
And headless, hanging dresses swayed like drunks 
Whenever a living footstep shakes the floor; 
I mention no more; 

But what I thought today, that made me cry, 
Is this, that we live in two kinds of thing: 
The powerful trees, thrusting into the sky 
Their black patience, are one, and that branching 
Relation teaches how we endure and grow; 
The other is the snow, 

Falling in a white chaos from the sky, 
As many as the sands of all the seas, 
As all the men who died or who will die, 
As stars in heaven, as leaves of all the trees; 
As Abraham was promised of his seed; 
Generations bleed, 

Till I, high in the tower of my time 
Among familiar ruins, began to cry 
For accident, sickness, justice, war and crime, 
Because all died, because I had to die. 
The snow fell, the trees stood, the promise kept, 
And a child I slept. 




-- Cat