the poem revised if not yet completely

September Songs: Three Poems of Early Autumn

For which, my thanks to a woman I shall never meet


I. September First, Two Thousand Nine

…the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
—W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the—no, that is not the direction we are going,
even though today’s news portends Afghan apocalypse.

It is first autumn; or what the Church calls its new year
in the not so mystic East. (But “The Mystical Life of the Orthodox”
was the name of a leaflet I kept in my wallet for a decade.)
In any case: soft drizzle and a gentle air temperature.
Lawrence’s “slow sad Michaelmas” is a month or so away.
“A day,” I wrote once long ago, “for the gas wall heater,
earl grey tea, and Vivaldi. I listen to a Leonard Cohen album
and drink coffee.” These days, I tend to drink single malt Scotch
and listen to whatever happens to be playing tonight on NPR.

Actually, at the moment I am listening to Marissa Nadler,
another newer singer not unlike the ones I worshipped
when not listening to Cohen or Dylan or Robert Hunter—solo.
It is thirty years later, but the songs apparently keep arriving.
The songwriting and guitar chords and the recording, anyway.

Inside, my heart remains the same.
The rock lyric from Wenders’ Wings of Desire
is as true as anything else. Mein Herz,
mon coeur, hélas: la meme.
Only the beat has sometimes gone uneven.

Starbucks has become the marker for the shifting seasons,
pumpkin spice lattes appearing on September first
tinged with rich magic and poetry, like the 2010 calendars
that began to fill Barnes & Noble shelves in early August.

So I think of Li Po, watching the moon in the clear autumn,
and feel more like Meng Chiao by his gibbon-haunted gorges,
a classic hermit exile, and alternately approving
and setting down self-dramatizing lines in which,
as much as—or is it more than?—Tu Fu ever did
the man meant every single metaphor he invented.

Mist and a hidden moon. Darkness visible
enfolds the asphalt, and the small wooden footbridge
and the green hill where a lone goat grazes, violating
fearlessly an unknown number of zoning ordinances.







II. September, and not 1913


Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They went about the world like wind,
Yet little time had they to pray
—W. B. Yeats


After three days or so, most weather systems dissipate.
In this season and latitude, rapid reminders of wet air
arrive to contaminate early autumn’s would-be purity.
“Nothing abides,” as the Jewish and Christian Scriptures
instructed some of the South’s earlier immigrants.
For the Mahayana Buddhists, nothing but emptiness
was there to start with. The air is still far from drenched,
but late sunlight sifts through different-looking clouds.

The weather repeats itself annually, and Dr. Freud
reminds us that human behavior does likewise.
This cyclical form of continuous repetition
gave mythic generations the Sense of a Never-Ending.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but desire and self-deception still cloud our visions.

All things fall and are built—a crash
once interrupted my professor’s talk on Yeats
as a student’s equipment essayed catastrophe.
The prof got a laugh with the “Lapis Lazuli” quote.
That’s the thing you remember for decades after,
that, and maybe “The Second Coming.”

The same professor once went to a redneck bar
and offered, many beers later, “A toast to Wallace Stevens!”
The good old boys obliged and, as he told us later,
“We drank straight through the Norton Anthology.”

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man
whatever cynical thing it was he said, and though I remember,
most do not, except for those interested in Irish history
or bothered by the social immobility of stonebreakers.

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, all right,
and the Celtic Tiger successor isn’t doing too well, either.

The clouds drift closed and open. The last light fades, as usual.
On the hill, the pair of goats graze facing each other
like some hackneyed New Age emblem of yin and yang
though not quite in the Tibetans’ sexual postures.
A toast to old and new delusions. A high passing jetliner,
thus not one stuck in a holding pattern, evokes inevitably
entirely too many tropes and bad metaphors.
A near-full moon is rising, but I know of this lovely fact
only through the day’s meteorological predictions.






III. Directive: or, the Pleasantries of the Incredible

Under a spell, so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
—Robert Frost


Mornings dawn clear whether you want them to or not.
Cloudy fall gives way again to persistent, sticky summer
and never mind all those tales of temporal inevitability.
On the other hand, winter arrives sooner or later,
and seasonable weather will always win, eventually.

Blessed are those permitted to prevaricate.
The rest of us have to learn how to handle half-truths,
the lesson of Hermes, as transmitted once by a teacher:
“Old father, I promise always to communicate your truth,
but I cannot pledge that it will ever, ever be all the truth,
and I have no power to say that men will read it rightly.”
The oracle at Delphi, yeah. The Greeks were always already
practitioners of the school that takes its name from the god.

A favorite moment from My Dinner With Andre:
“You see, he hosts these things he calls beehives.
He brings together these people who don’t know each other,
and they have no agenda except what he decides right then,
and whatever happens next, well then, that’s a beehive.”
That isn’t at all what Andre said, but it suits my purpose.

At a reading in California, the late Richard Brautigan
performed his “Every girl on earth should have a poem
written for her, if we have to tear the world apart to do it.”
Or words to that effect. Afterwards, a beaming young woman
demanded that he write hers for her right then, on the spot.
He couldn’t do it. Neither could I have, for that matter.
Poems for specific people, whether lovers or strangers,
are harder by far than poems about weather and history,
and require, at the least, thought and emotional distance.
Elegies are easier to write than love poems, but then
the exigencies of verse on demand are said to explain
predictably prosy lines by some of the U.K. Laureates.
Better, perhaps, the sincerely amateur productions
such as the one by an unknown Commonwealth writer
who said of deceased Victoria, “Earth to earth,
ashes to ashes, Into the grave the great Queen dashes.”
For heartfelt grief, we can forgive a misallocated verb,
even if we have to tear this world apart to do it.

The first part is always the pure gift of the god,
the middle is a mix of joy and anxious intellect
and by the end you can hear the machinery creaking.
The quiet repetition of a perennial mystery
that may or may not have been there to start with.
Our own poet of inconclusive quest is Leonard Cohen.

We shall not, spoken resonantly—but we always do—
“cease from exploration,” that is to say,
like those masters on the seeming verge of finding something
who run out of time, or money, or luck, or physical energy.

We shall not cease from the wish for exploration. T. Shah
crashing through the jungle, or traversing upcountry Ethiopia,
unlike the guy who has found the Lost Ark and the Holy Grail,
both of them just a few miles up the road, and right in England.
Watch for his ITV special this upcoming August.

Well, I stood once by the casket that was not the tomb of Jesus,
and pondered the glass vessels and the carved stone cups
that were what they really drank from in Gentile Galilee.
A Roman city was just a few miles away from Nazareth.

That was a museum show, conveniently arranged
a few miles from my apartment. As Kafka put it,
more or less: “You do not even need to leave your room.
Be silent. Wait. The mystery you long for will arrive,
it will have no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
And you still won’t understand it. When you’re squeezed,
the Master Poet wrote, for information,
that’s when you’ve got to play it dumb
and the end of that message has been invariably restricted
by the overly zealous defenders of intellectual property.
Waiting for the miracle to come.

“The books together,” another father said, “are my successor.”
The sons who learned to farm by digging up fields for treasure.
Why are you asking for another piece of wisdom,
when you haven’t learned at all what to do with the first one?

The day is painfully sunny. The goats, it appears, are still asleep.
And the bridge? It crosses a creek turned into a drainage culvert.
But it all looks lovely in photos, and we can be extremely happy
at the richness given by digital after the demise of Kodachrome.

And an underground river? That remains a real source of poetry,
or at least it will be until or unless the parking lot collapses.

Jerry Cullum
September 1 – 9, 2009