Poem of the Day

I love poems about historical subjects. It’s so interested to see what may have been going on in someone’s mind, especially someone gifted/heroic/inspirational/great. Beethoven may not have been all those things, but I don’t think it can be argued that he was passionate and created some beautiful music. I like Dove’s insight in this poem. P.S. This one was in my daily e-mail from poets.org for National Poetry Month. I feel like a cheater for posting it, but I really liked it.

Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Return to Vienna
By Rita Dove

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me…
The Heiligenstadt Testament

Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl’s careless hand. Into this stillness

I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward—
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning—
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.

At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I’d missed—
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd’s
home-toward-evening song—rushed in, and I
would rage again.

I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly—I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it… It is impossible

to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I’ve named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.

I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can’t you see that I’m deaf?—
I also cannot stop listening.

One of my poetry pals sent me this gem.

Describe Yourself in Three Words or Less
By Rita Dove

I’m not the kind of person who praises
openly, or for profit; I’m not the kind
who will steal a scene unless
I’ve designed it. I’m not a kind at all,
in fact: I’m itchy and pug-willed,
gnarled and wrong-headed,
never amorous but possessing
a wild, thatched soul.

Each night I set my boats to sea
and leave them to their bawdy business.
Whether they drift off
maddened, moon-rinsed,
or dock in the morning
scuffed and chastened—
is simply how it is, and I gather them in.

You are mine, I say to the twice-dunked cruller
before I eat it. Then I sing
to the bright-beaked bird outside,
then to the manicured spider
between window and screen;
then I will stop, and forget the singing.
(See? I have already forgotten you.)

I leafed through Rita Dove’s Selected Poems and this one jumped out at me. I love the images she creates.

Pearls
By Rita Dove

You have broken the path of the dragonfly
who visits my patio at the hour when
the sky has nearly forgotten the sun.
You have come to tell me
how happy we are, but I know
what you would and would not do
to make us happy. For example this necklace
before me: white eyes,
a noose of guileless tears.

I can remember my mother picking Japanese beetles off the roses and putting them in a jar with gasoline. Gross!

Roses
By Rita Dove

It’s time you learned something.
Halfway outdoors
he pauses, the flat dark fury of
his jaw, one eye, a shoulder in torn
blue cloth, the pruning shears
a mammoth claw resting
between meals.

                         I scramble
up, terrified and down
the drive, the gravel’s
brittle froth
and stand completely
helpless as he parts
a thousand pinkish eyelids
to find the beetles nested
at the root, teeming
disease.

They came from Japan, 1961.
They were nothing like the locusts
we hadn’t noticed until they
were gone, the husks
sheer tuxedos
snagged on bark, the rafters,
the dying bayberry.

                         It’s easy—
pop them between your nails.
In the tool shed’s populous
shadows, I hold the Mason jar instead
with both hands as he shakes
the flowers above
the kerosene which is shivering now
like the ocean I have never seen…

and I bear on a tray indoors
the inculpable, blushing prize.

I’ve become a bit sporadic with the PotD because my file has completely dwindled and I haven’t had any time to replenish it. So every day I go on a poem hunt (or not). Hopefully this weekend I’ll have time to relax and read some poetry. If not, I may go on hiatus with the PotD because I don’t want it to feel like a chore for me. I’d rather post a poem because I want to, rather than because I feel I have to, which is what it feels like when I cast around the internet aimlessly every day. That said, here’s one from a book I bought a few months ago.

Primer for the Nuclear Age
By Rita Dove

At the edge of the mariner’s
     map is written: “Beyond
     this point lie Monsters.”

Someone left the light on
     in the pantry—there’s
     a skull in there on the shelf

that talks. Blue eyes
     in the air, blue as
     an idiot’s. Any fear, any

memory will do; and if you’ve
     got a heart at all, someday
     it will kill you.

I love the last sentence of this one!

Anti-Father
By Rita Dove

Contrary to
tales you told us

summer nights when
the air conditioner

broke—the stars
are not far

apart. Rather
they draw

closer together
with years.

And houses
shrivel, un-lost,

and porches sag;
neighbors phone

to report cracks
in the cellar floor,

roots of the willow
coming up. Stars

speak to a child.
The past

is silent….
Just between

me and you,
woman to man,

outer space is
inconceivably

intimate.

I bought a book of Rita Dove’s poetry the other day. Heather immediately directed my attention to this one.

The House Slave
By Rita Dove

The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass
and in the slave quarters there is a rustling—
children are bundled into aprons, cornbread

and water gourds grabbed, a salt pork breakfast taken.
I watch them driven into the vague before-dawn
while their mistress sleeps like an ivory toothpick

and Massa dreams of asses, rum and slave-funk.
I cannot fall asleep again. At the second horn,
the whip curls across the backs of the laggards—

sometimes my sister’s voice, unmistaken, among them.
“Oh! pray,” she cries. “Oh! pray!” Those days
I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat,

and as the fields unfold to whiteness,
and they spill like bees among the fat flowers,
I weep. It is not yet daylight.

I came across this poem at the Palace of the Governors as well. I really need to read more Rita Dove anyway. She comes highly recommended by Heather.

P.S. I love being back in Austin, but it’s so freaking hot and humid! I’m going to melt!

Rosa
By Rita Dove

How she sat there,
the time right inside a place
so wrong it was ready.

That trim name with
its dream of a bench
to rest on. Her sensible coat.

Doing nothing was the doing:
the clean flame of her gaze
carved by a camera flash.

How she stood up
when they bent down to retrieve
her purse. That courtesy.

This was recommended by Heather and it’s right up my alley - depressing!

Demeter Mourning
By Rita Dove

Nothing can console me. You may bring silk
to make skin sigh, dispense yellow roses
in the manner of ripened dignitaries.
You can tell me repeatedly
I am unbearable (and I know this):
still, nothing turns the gold to corn,
nothing is sweet to the tooth crushing in.

I’ll not ask for the impossible;
one learns to walk by walking.
In time I’ll forget this empty brimming,
I may laugh again at
a bird, perhaps, chucking the nest—
but it will not be happiness,
for I have known that.