“Late Fragment”
Raymond Carver
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
It was the year of tufted grasses. It was the year of questions. It was the year of fog over the vineyard. The year you started falling. A damaged year. It was the year of sails in the distance and knots here. It was the year without refuge. It was the year of bog orchids, early runoff, unaccountable swelling. It was the year of sweet peppers in August and patience, a year without diagnosis. It was the year of storms on both sides of the window, of your pain. It was a year without skin. A year of testing. It came without warning or instructions. It was the year of swallows caked under the bridge, of difficulty swallowing. It was the year of small foxes, white pelicans, one brown pelican far from its coast. Outside, the war deepened but we couldn’t turn our faces to it. It was a year of drought. It was a year without syntax or punctuation. It was the year of disarray. It was the year of mountains looking away, seeming to look away.
(Source: exceptindreams.livejournal.com)
Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball’s chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so—go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry—without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:
We got dressed and showed the house
You live well the visitor said
The slum must be inside you.
If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most ‘stunned by existence,’ the most determined to redeem the world in words.
Imagine if suffering were real.
Imagine if those old people were afraid of death.
What if the midget or the girl with one arm
really felt pain? Imagine how impossible it would be
to live if some people were
alone and afraid all their lives.
(Source: exceptindreams.livejournal.com)
This unnatural hour that I have slept in still
hungry from an unfinished early meal, you appear
with your full body and voice and ask me to write again. I
am sitting in a car, running late for my piano lesson, and you
are leaning at the door, telling me the trees have stopped
growing where you live. That you’ve walked across
two continents but the moon still refuses to leave you.
**
I hear you’ve started praying now—cut your hair
and stopped wearing blue. They say you suffered
for my art, for desire and despair. I suffered
for my quietude, for I thought freedom
meant something grander. Thankfully, our inequities
were even: clear and simple, the way horses grieve.
After a while, it became harder to realize I was
not talking to my refrigerator. I was, in fact, suffering.
**
In the dream, we are now climbing a staircase.
I am walking behind you, watching your milky calves
stroll in and out of your summer skirt. “What do you understand
of love?” you ask. “Nothing,” I say. “And loss?” “Nothing.”
“Then why do you write about either?”
“I don’t.”
**
“I write about you.” You pause for a moment,
but do not turn back. Outside the window,
birds are turning into stone. Around the world, everyone
is entering a conversation.
(Source: exceptindreams.livejournal.com)
there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.
