BERNEVAL

Emily Dickinson

I was first attracted by this evocation of a decisive moment in the English-French struggle over Canada: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, 1759 … The similarity of the general’s responses to death is belied by the contrast in the syntax of their utterances. One serves a collective enterprise; the other is focused on the individual.

678

Wolfe demanded during dying
“Which obtain the Day”?
“General, the British” — “Easy”
Answered Wolfe “to die”

Montcalm, his opposing Spirit
Rendered with a smile
“Sweet” said he “my own Surrender
Liberty’s beguile”

The parallelism and the ellipsis in the last two lines trip me up.

This is how I read the lines:

“Sweet” said he “my own Surrender [i.e. to death]
Liberty’s [surrender] [may] beguile”

I take that last verb to be in the subjunctive mood.

I do like the construction:

surrender “to” to avoid surrender “of”

It is a sentiment I believe found in other poems by Dickinson. Time to hunt. Like a bee.

And so for day 2639
05.03.2014

Crystal Williams
“For the Woman Who Didn’t Know My Name”
Kin

Like a grain of dirt a letter rises

In some old men there is a softness
in voice a hint of dust y Alabama

a bit of grit

And later in the book we come across this appreciation of dirt (and an equal art of spacing)

When I die
my manicured hands,
which have always been plump
and found keyboards necessary,
will have a fine layer of dirt under their nails,
and will be known for their slow and gentle touch.

         I have planted cosmos, asters.

from “At 25, I Have Already Begun to Like Lou Rawls”

In case you missed it, there is a kinship between Kin and dust …

And so for day 2637
03.03.2014

Gathered from different renga, displaced in time and space and yet united between the same covers.

Alison Strumberger and Gillian Sze
Redrafting Winter

from “A Grip on the Stars”

Reflected by snow
the sky cradles my impressions,
a new footprint for each step.

        As if even snow were discrepant, disordered, suspect;
        as if it were mild, papery, and fell to the sky instead.

from “Foolish Fire”

A lifetime of print is in my wake,
and I am left reading my palms —
fiend, vagabond, voyeur, brute.

        I learn to subsist on a diet of mimesis,
        creating equations with beachy, stormy residue.

I like the enumerations that partake of the passing prints…

And so for day 2636
02.03.2014

Because you as reader supply the link, it’s more devastating. Two examples, though not sonnets, exhibiting the volta.

26

Each week
  on network television
  hundreds of terrorist attacks
  are thwarted
  by members
  of the Actors Guild.

Perhaps they could visit
  schools
  when they’re not
  on set.

Thomas King
77 Fragments of a Familiar Ruin

****

John Berryman
“The Captain’s Song”

[after recalling the memory of being a child and leaping streams…]

You crippled Powers, cluster to me now:
Baffle this memory from my return,
That in the coldest nights, murmuring her name
I sought her two feet with my feet, my feet
Were warm and hers were ice and I warmed her
With both of mine. Will I warm her with one?

in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and other poems

****

“January” by Charles Simic
Paris Review, Issue no. 212

Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

An empire, I read somewhere,
Maintains itself through
The cruelty of its prisons.

And so for day 2632
26.02.2014