BERNEVAL

For the sheer gorgeousness of the title (which are also the concluding lines of a poem), Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Towards the Distant Islands … but also for the one line that turns upon spelling out a length of vowels.

He made no answer for a time, squinting out at the ancient ellum
That rose and descended again on the knob of pasture

I have hunted for the meaning of “ellum” and can only come to the conclusion that Hayden Carruth is hearing the word “elm” through the Latin “ulmus” and is inviting the reader to carry the eye through the apprehension of the tree that rises straight-trunked into the air to its canopy which falls back towards the earth like an open umbrella, a large open umbrella, a very large open umbrella.

For elm, OED does attest 19th century dialect form – ellum.

And so for day 311
21.10.2007

Blest in its cussedness.

there’s a woman who tires
of picking up after her lover
so she nails his underwear
to the floor

From Barbara Carey “Routines Are Your Life” in The Ground of Events.

This might be remembered as simple anecdote. But the line endings make one mindful of the poetry. The exhaustion hangs there in the first line and by the third you can sense the frustration banging away.

And so for day 310
20.10.2007

Michael V. Smith has a suite of poems in What You Can’t Have that is based on black and white photographs by William Gale Gedney of “dirt-poor families in 1960’s Kentucky”. Smith has a sharp and keen appreciation of plot — where the story might go — and it is this turn to possibility that provides his closing moments with poignancy. Take for example the closing lines of “Play” which sums up the life faced by playing girls.

On the line: an undershirt,
a dishrag, a diaper.

The metonymy traces out a life course. If in this case the girls are assigned a trajectory destined to a drudge-like motherhood, in a poem a few pages on in the series one encounters the figure of the girl yoked to the life of the mind whose destiny is hitched to sort of escape from circumstance. “Intellect” too ends with a vision of a future. But mark the individualism of the solution.

One night her mother woke to her shadow
beyond the door frame, walking away
her daughter, the girl with ideas.

It is not as if nonconformity is being celebrated; an other path is simply being noted.

And so for day 309
19.10.2007

We have planted a burning bush at the base of a smoke bush. We appreciate the horticultural joke even more as the blossoms of the smoke bush appear well before the autumn-turn of foliage sets the burning bush ablaze.

Imagine my pleasure in coming across a description of a smoke bush in Hayden Carruth’s Asphalt Georgics [the last poem in the book — “Shake, Well Before Using”]. The voice at work in the poem calls them, the blossoms, “smokers” and will at some point compare them to tumbleweeds.

bout this time every year, the last
     week in August, them
things, whatever they are, them bunch-
     es, like they say resem-

ble smoke, see, them little smokers,
     they bust off and the wind
blows them every whichway over
     the whole street like some thinned-

The poem is about way more than Cotinus coggygria. It is also about pondering ephemerality. But done in this voice, like all the others in the poem-portraits of Asphalt Georgics, bringing a certain vivid character to the fore. As only a unique take on language and botany can yield the moniker “little smokers.”

And so for day 306
16.10.2007

Barbara Carey. Undressing the Dark. “weighing it up”.

This poem begins with a detail that within a few lines morphs into a huge size.

One fingernail
from the Statue of Liberty
weighs 100 lbs.,
a little less than me.

And the next stanza continues the comparisons

but twice the weight
of a sack of No. 1 Northern
wheat, and two hundred times
the standard jar
of rich-blend Nescafé

And the poem continues through some meditations on the nature of faith in the computations of judgement to conclude

and the faith
that it all adds up,
like multiplication
tables or prayers

something meant
for the believer in us,
something we raise
monuments to

The enjambement and the short lines are a key to the enjoyment of this poem. They lend their support to the tension between the monument and the everyday and together underscore the progression of accumulation that raises out of the mundane, the monumental. And the belief is not in some metaphysical force but in the ordinariness of drinking coffee and living our lives.

And so for day 305
15.10.2007

Roo Borson describes in “Kensington Market,” collected in A Sad Device, in a quasi-hallucinogenic fashion, bunches on display.

They glow, violet marbled with green,
and the bees dance over them
like boxers in a ring.

They are nipples engorging before your eyes.
They are eyes.

There is more to this poem but the kernel quoted here is indicative of the many turns the poem takes not allowing you to settle in any given perspective for too long keeping you alert for the coming black eye…

And so for day 302
12.10.2007