On Hearing Her Song
Those final years in the clapboard house on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, Walt Whitman took the time to look back, indeed reflect, especially about those early stirrings, when a poet found its way into the lifeblood of a lad, often alone, navigating through life, those seminal years always for him, this strangest everything. Nowhere is he closer to the truth, though, of these incipient lyrical promptings than he is in a brief autobiographical memoir called, "Sea Shore Fancies," that found its way into his Specimen Days, published in 1882, these "impromptu pencil jottings" that would go on to comprise "the most wayward book ever written." Possibly so, but if we indeed listen to the speaker in "Sea Shore Fancies," we will be privy to the making of a poet:
Even as a boy, I had the fancy, the wish, to write a piece,
perhaps a poem, about the sea shore...Hours, days in my Long
Island youth and early manhood, I haunted the shores of
Rockaway to Coney Island, or away east to the Hamptons
or Montauk. Once at the latter place (by the old lighthouse,
nothing but sea-tossings in sight...as far as the eye could reach),
I remember well, I felt I must one day write a book expressing
the liquid-mystic theme. Afterward it came to me that instead
of any special lyrical or epical of literary attempt, the sea-shore
should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for
me, in my composition.
There is a dream, a picture...that has come noiselessly up
before me - entered into my writings, shaped and colored them.
It is of interminable, white-brown sand, hard and smooth and
broad, with the ocean perpetually, grandly, rolling in upon it...
making a thump as of low bass drums.
One need only listen, read Whitman's poems with the creel of the ear, and hear these very sea-surges, his long lines and cadences like crashing waves. Reason, then, that his Civil War, Washington D.C. friend and early biographer, Willian D. O'Connor wrote in The Good Gray Poet:
"To get to Walt's poems, first get to the Long Island in them," as Whitman's poet's voice was culled from the very "white-brown sand" huddled along the tideline and the sea-swell rhythms of his early Long Island formative days of endless shoreline rambles, along his beloved Paumanok, indeed, as he would say in a major poem, his "cradle endlessly rocking."
Now, as I too write my end-of-life pieces, this sweet "summing up": all these good years teaching and writing, and teaching writers, like my spiritual father Walt Whitman - Those years as a trustee at Walt's Birthplace at West Hills, Long Island, I would sit at the very desk he used, a young schoolmaster, teaching his "scholars" summer of 1840 at Woodbury, and write in Girl in a Yellow Caboose, a volume "Remembering Writers," how "I swear I feel his arm around my shoulder" - indeed, I too look back to my boyhood and discover "a pervading gauge and tally," the very inspiration for my writing.
The revelation, strangely, a recent one, is of a frail, young woman, who first appears in my earliest attempt at writing poems, the summer I was sixteen, working as a farm cadet in Upstate New York, reading Selden Rodman's 100 Best American Poems. One morning, pausing in the farm's hayloft, I witnessed the birth of a calf in the stall below, the birth itself a miracle, so much so, I believed I felt an angel kiss my lips. Now I know. I was indeed "kissed" by the young woman I first encountered mornings, singing to fledglings in a slanting linden tree, from her bedroom window, as I, a thirteen year old walked to John J. Pershing Jr. High School in Brooklyn. I was to learn much later that she was housebound, suffering as she did from a rare terminal illness, one that would claim her life, just before her twenty-third birthday. She is, then, this same young Woman-Muse, who surfaces in my latest poem, "On Hearing Her Song"; and who, I now realise, appears in poem after poem, over a span of thirty-five years, indeed the very "forcing house" of my own moral compact with this writing life.
If it is, then, as Thoreau writes in an early Journal entry that "Every man so tracks himself in life," let me isolate a handful of poems, in which that infirm, tragic young woman appears. Although she is often clothed in many guises, now, my own winter-time, I come to see her as my steady and unswerving companion, with me since my thirteenth year, a boy walking endlessly through those Brooklyn streets, looking for, what I now know to be, our future. Yet my sacred Muse remains with me and is just as comforting, here in Sag Harbor, this elbow in things, where I've found that place for the heart to rest, Roethke's "imperishable quiet at the heart of form."
The Boy, The Dropped CalfThe pitchfork
at rest in hay
dreams in afternoon grain-dust.
I am 16
a Fresh-Air kid
on loan from the city,
and see for the first time
a barn owl in the hickory beams,
the loft a cathedral
I will never leave.
In the stall below,
the placenta broken,
birth-vapors rise
from the mother's teats.
I hear the calf drop
see its vein's blue-light
fill the barn's darkest corners,
feel an angel kiss my lips:
her breath
smells
of jasmine.
This is the final version of a poem, my first, I scribbled on the flyleaf of the Rodman anthology I carried in my hip pocket that entire summer, on a farm miles from anywhere, a book I'm pleased to report I still have, the poem sputtering and derivative and so much juvenilia. Yet, the incident is clearly there, to be harvested at a later time, and, of course, she is the "angel," anointing the boy "poet." But why--"her breath / smells / of jasmine"? I see now how the white and yellow jasmine vine blossoms are not unlike those clinging to the heartshaped leaves of that solitary linden tree, the one that bent as if to cradle her bedroom window, the one in which the fledglings nested and to whom she sang early mornings, as I hid below her window in shadows and wept, feeling what I would discover many years later in the poetry of John Hall Wheelock, the neglected poet and House of Scribner's editor I knew and write about to this day, how the poet must be, "One with the pain and the glory, / the heartbreak at the heart of things." Such "heartbreak" : dead at 23!
And that linden tree emerges in a poem I wrote just two years ago, never realising it was a paean to my childhood Muse, for the tree that held her song. My wife and I and daughters spent most of our lives in Stony Brook, recalling Jack Wheelock again, "In an old house on a dark star / In the wilderness of heaven." Mornings, I'd rise at six, before meeting classes at Suffolk Community College, and then those final years at Stony Brook University. My morning walks found me staring into the Stony Brook wetlands; then along Porpoise Channel, where in 1838, a young schoolmaster, Walter Whitman Jr., on foot from Smithtown, fished for blue; ahead to the Harbor and east to West Meadow Beach; finally back along Main Street and that sloping linden, where I would pause, prayerful in its presence, sensing there was something between us.
So Sweet the LindenSo sweet the linden,
why enough to lift it
from the sky, caress
its yellow blossom and leaf.
It clings
like the arm
of a lover,
waking
from a fretful sleep,
and delicate as the pulse
beneath a quivering
philtrum, or
sacred
hollow
along the valley
of a woman's thigh.
I must ask, then: why
does love come
to us, from such
chaste, fortuitous things?
Of course, her song was as "delicate as the pulse / beneath a quivering / philtrum," and the tragic young woman, for the boy, Buddy, always this "chaste, fortuitous thing": her song, indeed a cry from Heaven.
One of the first poems I wrote in Stony Brook, possibly thirty-five years ago, has as its setting the Mill Pond, where some mornings I'd walk along its rim, a true "sauntering of the eye." She is here too, however, in a clapboard house, her bedroom window, "like a heart / thrown open":
Two Morning Walks
Along the PondNothing stirs,
then a lone wood duck
through lily pads,
and beyond Brown's hill
in the clapboard house
a window, like a heart
thrown open, rose-glow
of lace curtains
shimmering.
A girl brushes her hair
stroke after stroke
in motions like the sea.
I pause, hear myself pray:
Dear God, if only
she'd notice me.
I'm sure, all those lives and years ago, secure in the shadows of the solitary, soulful linden, under "a window, like a heart / thrown open," I said much the same thing, and just as reverential.
Now, part of my own, "this strangest everything": I've four poems wedged in the Winter 2005 initial issue of the Welsh publication, The Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine. The volume, which includes the work of Welsh, English and American poets, is edited and published by Peter Thabit Jones, who is a Welsh poet.
Reading through the four poems just this week, I've discovered that my wistful, evanescent Muse appears in three, "Dreaming Little Africa," "In the Furrow of the Sun," and "Waking in a Barn" - and, of course, she returns to us in many "guises."
In "Dreaming Little Africa," that forest of a hallowed island in Stony Brook, just above Porpoise Channel, "once a solemn burial ground for the Algonquin tribes," the guidebooks remind us, she appears as "Always the same doe / always the same dream," waiting for me "in the forest's nave.../ scraping her wounded flank." The
poem concludes:
I cannot remove the arrow.
I must cradle her in my arms,
ask her, forgive me
forgive me, forgive me.
She is a doe; she is wounded, certainly about to die - and I cannot save her, ask only that she "forgive me," as I was also unable to help in any way the Spirit in my songs, one dying piecemeal.
"In the Furrow of the Sun," her parents' Borough Park, Brooklyn apartment becomes "A leaning cottage on a strip of beach": and I find her washing "her hair / in a rain barrel," singing a melody only "the shorebirds know," her lilt so poignant, "I must turn away." The poem ends:
Then darkness,
end of day:
Shall I light the lamp now?
I hear myself say.
"Light the lamp": it is only now I understand, and with the scar-
tissue of memory, the very "darkness" welling in her, and just beneath the ribcage, indeed, "Death come for me too," I say in another poem about her; and her morning song to the fledglings, a carole to Life, a canticle, really, its entreaty: Not yet, not yet, not yet.
In "Waking in a Barn," we are back where it began, to first things: to the "angel" in "The Boy, the Dropped Calf." I understand now, it is a love poem, yet one of chaste longing, as the "gelding," whose neckplate the young woman soothes, caresses, is indeed a "castrated" horse, one erotically neutered. The speaker would simply like "to take her in my arms / then wake in the morning / the gelding above us / leaning in a stall." This, too, a final embrace, and like the linden tree is "chaste and fortuitous." And as the poem ends, the two wake, transformed by the innocent gelding, whose "eyes race along / our trembling bodies, / fragrant with timothy / with oh, showering / petal-fall." And the "petal-fall," I'm certain, must be the yellow and white blossoms of the linden tree, of the jasmine vine, braiding the boy's first divine kiss. And I must add, how like Caedmon, the angel there to place a poem on his lips, to become this very "Song of Creation": Nu we sculan herian heofonrices Weard, as an addled Caedmon intoned.
In "White-Cloud Heart," a poem completed in England, she is for the speaker, "a woman I once loved / will never see again." Yet, he hears her, "scraping her skirt, deftly, / along the worn floorboards." And the speaker, a time-worn, possibly dying man, concludes:
Why do I remember such things,
alone with my white-cloud heart
in a mountain hut somewhere,
drifting in the orchards of the spheres.
And she is a steadfast companion in "A Cabin in Maine," the young woman, who wakes at sunrise for a mountain walk, and returns hours later, "singing a favorite country air, / pasture rose and alpine violet in your arms, / juniper berries pleaching your flaxen hair."
And again, "In a Cabin at Night," it is she in that place where "floorboards buckle / as you scamper to bed: / your lithe body smells of birch leaves and pine resin." The speaker, finally sees her as the holy fount of his childhood Catholic church, the one, as he left after Sunday Mass, he imagined himself, devout as he was at the time, immersed, firm in God's eternal clasp. The speaker, then, in a moment, whose truth is as certain as grace is certain, declares:
I will lose myself in you forever,
never to be found again: no,
never, never to be found again:
your body, a sacred fount
to drown in.
In a real sense, he has come home, secure again in the amnion of his primordial birth ascent.
I must add, I write as a man happily married to the same woman for over forty years, whose monk-sworn life includes both vows of pre-marital abstinence and marital fidelity. (I spent the summer of my nineteenth year in a Benedictine Monastery.) Yet, in another recent Sag Harbor poem, "I Will Find You," the speaker reaches for what is forever beyond him, only now aware that he addresses the dying girl, in that Brooklyn flat, her threnody of song, now his:
I will find you in the dappled sunlight
of recall, in the way the leaf
folds into itself, end of day
after a searing heat, in the way
the river runnels languidly
before it finds its headwaters,
in the way the day bolts
above the pond, leaving behind
a single rowan bush,
the first wingbar of dusk.
Heart of my heart,
you are there
and in such ways
as only silence knows.
"As only silence knows": yet miraculously there after a lifetime of separation and unrequited longing, there as the passacaglia of my song. In fact, in another recent poem, once included, along with a painting by the modern Long Island master Ernesto Costa, I ask, "What is this breathing in me?" Now I know; it is she, and "in the dappled sunlight / of recall," indeed, her voice, my song's very life-breath.
"On Hearing Her Song" was completed just days ago; this too, however, has had "a long foreground," culled as it is, from our English years, living in Richmond, in a "tilting house above the Thames," not far from Virginia Woolf's cottage on Red Lion Street, where in 1917, she founded the Hogarth Press. My morning walks through the village, I would pass that cottage.
Of course, it is my childhood Muse at the window, where "her delicate breasts / cradled the sill"; but I find her in England's Lake District, possibly at Grasmere, Wordsworth's boyhood home - and not far from Winander, where the boy, hugging the rim of lake just before sunset, "Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth /...as though an instrument, / Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls / That they might answer him," we read in The Prelude. And after a pause, the natural world that both circled the lake and one to engage forever the poet of Dove Cottage, "Would enter unawares into his mind/With all its solemn imagery." And at this very moment, the rural lad with hands cupped was consecrated Poet, what he called all his life, this "priestly calling."
Again, writing the poem at the time, it never occurred to me, the frail, about-to-die-young woman, her very song above a Brooklyn street, would become for me, as Winander, with the "mimic hootings to the silent owls," was for Wordsworth, the Long Island shoreline for Whitman, what John Hall Wheelock described as "the cradle and grave of my poems."
The speaker in "On Hearing Her Song," grows to realize, it is the same voice out of his boyhood, candling the deep shadows of the arching linden tree, and is "all the heaven / I needed then, as I do, now, these my winter-days, / journey's end." (I must add, only after our early years in Rome with my wife, our daughters in local Italian elementary schools, and my teaching Italian university students, that those years in England, have so tinctured my days, indeed watermarked me for life):
Tell me, please, does she
still throw open the window, morning
come, to sing to the fledglings
far beyond the hill?
If so, as I know she does, you,
shy very, hiding
in the meadow rue, pity
this old man, me.
Carry home her song, sweetly,
the one I heard a lad
kneeling in shadows,
prayerful before her lilt.
She was frail, so frail then,
yet her voice pleached the valley
below the village, where even
weary hearts wept, that voice
and the way her delicate breasts
cradled the sill was all the heaven
I needed then, as I do
now, these my winter-days,
journey's end.
Yes, I must say again, and in hushed-chapel tones, "...was all the heaven / I needed then, as I do / now, these my winter-days, / journey's end." What more may we ask of a life in poetry - indeed "all the heaven" one may need!
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