So many flags on so many graves.
So many holes left in the world.
A soft, warm breeze passes through them.
A cold, dry wind whistles through them.
I look to the horizon. More holes.
Crossposted from my poetry site, Writing the Day
It isn’t summer for another month, but it only takes a few hot days and things growing in the garden to put me into summer mode. Today I was lying on the couch outside in the Sun, feeling lazy and feeling good, and thinking about this poem by James Wright where he is “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
by James Wright, from his Collected Poems
“By my intimacy with nature, I find myself withdrawn from man.
My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening,
compels me to solitude.” – Henry David Thoreau
I came upon a collection of poems titled “Poems about Loneliness and Solitude.” My first thought was that they shouldn’t be combined – or confused.
Poets aren’t the only people who sometimes crave solitude. I find the solitude of isolation to be a good thing occasionally and I pursue it. Loneliness is not something I pursue, but sometimes it finds me.
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
Definitions
the state of being alone,
solitary,
by oneself;
a deserted place,
aloneness but not loneliness
which is a feeling of depression
from being alone
without companions.
a place or time devoid
of human activity.
And then there is
that obsolete meaning:
A desire to be alone;
a disposition to solitude.
Not obsolete to me.
I was dusting bookshelves today and as I went past my row of books by John Updike I had to pull a few off and look into them.
I really liked Updike’s stories and novels. My wife and I used to read the books together every summer for a number of years. I also admired Updike’s three pages per day writing requirement. He really worked at his writing. It paid off. He had a 50+ year career and has 67 books listed on his Wikipedia bibliography that includes 21 novels, 18 short-story collections, 12 books of poetry, 4 children’s books, and 12 collections of non-fiction. Many of my favorite pieces of his fiction are found among his 186 short stories.
I wasn’t reading Updike in 1960. That was the year he was 28 (I was 7) and he published his second novel, Rabbit, Run. The New York Times called the book a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion.” I would read it during the summer 0f 1968 after I had read a book of his stories, Pigeon Feathers, and then his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.
The stories especially appealed to me, since I saw myself as a budding short story writer and was reading Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and other story writers too. I would go on to read almost all the stories and novels in chronological order of their publication. I wanted to write little, perfect stories like his “A&P.” I was a high school boy and immediately identified with Updike’s boy working at the checkout counter in an A&P supermarket when three young pretty girls walk in wearing nothing but bathing suits. That little plot unfolds quickly and tragically.
In my freshman year of college as an English major, I was assigned to read his newest novel, Rabbit Redux. a sequel to the first Rabbit book.
I gave her my copy of the sexy Couples novel when we were dating, and we both read Marry Me when it came out and we were a few years from being married ourselves. Updike chronicles many marriages and many uncouplings, some based on his own life story.
Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for two of the four Rabbit novels. There is also “Rabbit Remembered” a long story (or novella) that came later. Those tales chronicle Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex- high-school basketball star who first deserts his wife and son and then explores sexuality, marriage, parenting and also the time he is passing through in America.
I heard an interview he did at the time of his fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which chronicles the end of Harry’s life. It is a sad book about grandpa Harry in his Florida condo, still dealing with his son, Nelson, and his wife, Janice, and an 1989 America that is a post-Reagan time of debt, AIDS, and President Bush 41. It won him another Pulitzer Prize. What interests me in the interview and book is his own thoughts about death. (He died of lung cancer in January 2009.)
I found a video that has John’s son, David Updike, interviewed about being the child of a writer. David was (is?) a teacher and also a writer and I have enjoyed reading his work. I have his children’s books and his books of stories and they are very good. It certainly must have been more negative than positive to be the son of John Updike if you wanted to be a writer. I like in this video David’s decision that he would give up writing a piece of fiction if it meant hurting someone he cared about. I don’t think his father held that belief.
John Updike received much praise in his lifetime for his writing. He also was pretty strongly disliked by some of his fellow writers and by feminists. He was, like too many famous men I admire, not a very good husband or father. But I think even some of those who are not fans concede that his prose is beautiful, often poetic.
I came to John Updike’s poetry much later than the books and stories. I love reading poetry, and I like some of his poems, but I feel like his prose had more poetry in it than many of the poems. I have used a few of his poems on my poetry blog
I took this passage from Updike’s wonderful story “Pigeon Feathers” and broke the sentences into more “poetic” line breaks using his punctuation most of the time. This “found poem” is about what it means to be dead as seen by teenage David as he walks at night across his farm home to the outhouse and imagines a grave. As I said, his prose is so often poetic, that it is easy to hear the sentences as lines in a poem.
A long hole in the ground,
no wider than your body,
down which you are drawn
while the white faces above recede.
You try to reach them
but your arms are pinned.
Shovels pour dirt into your face.
There you will be forever,
in an upright position,
blind and silent,
and in time no one will remember you,
and you will never be called by any angel.
As strata of rock shift,
your fingers elongate,
and your teeth are distended sideways
in a great underground grimace
indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.
The solstice came, the days lengthen and
winter blows colder winds, but tree man,
a gentle soul, not a horror legend,
holds on to his brown autumn coat,
guarding the creek, watching me grow old.
Reposted from writingtheday.wordpress.com
I was looking for a public domain photo on publicdomainreview.org to use in a post and I came across the sand photo that appears above.
I don’t know if I should attribute finding that photo to serendipity, synchronicity or artificial intelligence because I had just previously been looking at the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley online. It’s a poem that could certainly be illustrated with a photo of sand.
Here’s the poem:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare”
You might have read this in some literature class as it is often anthologized because it’s a classic and because publishers like poems in the public domain (no fees to pay).
It was the early nineteenth century when Shelley wrote this poem. Most people didn’t know Ramesses II, “Ozymandias.” This obscure Egyptian king was a tyrant, a megalomaniac. The statue he had built of himself was of immense size – a colossus.
The statue has fallen and Shelley’s view of it (probably in a photo) is of the legs remaining with the head and body fallen.
The inscription survives and tells us that Ozymandias had the statue erected to memorialize himself and his works. But not only has the state fallen but so has the empire he once ruled.
This sonnet is usually taught as a lesson on how power is temporary, Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, man’s hubris, and about the insignificance of human beings to the passage of time.
Weekends in Paradelle 