The world is very dusty
May. 22nd, 2021 02:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
Road work here combined with our annual drought (no measurable rain since May 5 ... and for the first time since we've been here, there wasn't enough snow melt this spring for the vernal pools to form at all in the bush behind our house) has us living in a steadily worsening dustbowl--and so I have this line from Donald Justice's "There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings" echoing in my head with increasing frequency: "The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work." That poem is the one I have paid by far the most attention to over the last year, and I've written a few poems following its identity-rhyme scheme (which I really like, maybe oddly because I don't seem to generally like sestinas, although I really like this identity-rhymed sonnet by William Meredith, too). The last stanza in its entirety goes:
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
How about that, eh?
(I first heard of that poem in the New Yorker poetry podcast with Stephen Dunn (who is a leading contender to be my favourite interviewee out of all the poetry interviews I've listened to and read over the last couple of years). Dunn and Paul Muldoon dwell a bit on the line that goes "At least he had seen once more the beloved back" as an imperfection in an otherwise masterful poem. I tripped over that line a bit at first too (and there's a typo in it on the Poetry Foundation site, an extra space, so maybe the transcriber tripped over it too!), but after coming back to it again and again, I think I like it maybe? I think the only question is, do you want "beloved's" rather than "beloved", and is the only reason to have "beloved" that it reads more smoothly than "beloved"? Of course there are some lines that you can't think of a good way to improve them but still aren't great because the poem has boxed itself into a spot where it needs to do a thing, and it will be worse or will fail altogether if it doesn't do it, but there aren't any great ways to do it. It needs to be the beloved's back Orpheus sees, it needs to be the beloved that has turned her back on him, the still beloved beloved who will not turn back to him. But the lack of apostrophe makes the back itself beloved, which maybe adds an enriching ambiguity, maybe.)
The first swallowtails of the year showed up today, a tiger swallowtail and then maybe a giant swallowtail out of the corner of my eye.
--
Currently under my porch: 26.8. Currently at Belmont Lake: 24.2. Got up to 31.1 there yesterday, and 30.9 in both Peterborough and Bancroft.
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
How about that, eh?
(I first heard of that poem in the New Yorker poetry podcast with Stephen Dunn (who is a leading contender to be my favourite interviewee out of all the poetry interviews I've listened to and read over the last couple of years). Dunn and Paul Muldoon dwell a bit on the line that goes "At least he had seen once more the beloved back" as an imperfection in an otherwise masterful poem. I tripped over that line a bit at first too (and there's a typo in it on the Poetry Foundation site, an extra space, so maybe the transcriber tripped over it too!), but after coming back to it again and again, I think I like it maybe? I think the only question is, do you want "beloved's" rather than "beloved", and is the only reason to have "beloved" that it reads more smoothly than "beloved"? Of course there are some lines that you can't think of a good way to improve them but still aren't great because the poem has boxed itself into a spot where it needs to do a thing, and it will be worse or will fail altogether if it doesn't do it, but there aren't any great ways to do it. It needs to be the beloved's back Orpheus sees, it needs to be the beloved that has turned her back on him, the still beloved beloved who will not turn back to him. But the lack of apostrophe makes the back itself beloved, which maybe adds an enriching ambiguity, maybe.)
The first swallowtails of the year showed up today, a tiger swallowtail and then maybe a giant swallowtail out of the corner of my eye.
--
Currently under my porch: 26.8. Currently at Belmont Lake: 24.2. Got up to 31.1 there yesterday, and 30.9 in both Peterborough and Bancroft.
