Untethering

Every Thought...

Week 23: Denouement

Every poem spins its own creation, yet every would-be poet begins by observing and unfolding the given world. Denouement is another simple prayer poem, this one spun for my daughter’s middle school graduation.


06/03:

TWL, Lines 94-110: Withered Stumps Of Time

94     Huge sea-wood fed with copper
95     Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
96     In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
97     Above the antique mantel was displayed
98     As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
99     The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
100   So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
101   Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
102   And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
103   “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
104   And other withered stumps of time
105   Were told upon the walls; staring forms
106   Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
107   Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
108   Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
109   Spread out in fiery points
110   Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

98. THE SYLVAN SCENE: Eliot: “Sylvan scene. V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140.”

See John Milton, Paradise Lost 137-142 (1667), where Satan is describing Eden:

“...and over head up grew
Insuperable highth of loftiest shade,
Cedar, and Pine, and Firr, and branching Palm
A Silvan Scene, and as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woodie
Theatre Of stateliest view.”

Compare the “sylvan landscape” of Frazer and Turner (note 0.2).

99. THE CHANGE OF PHILOMEL: Eliot:

“V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela.”

This is a rape and revenge tale from Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.635-1053.  Procne, far from home, had longed for a visit from her sister Philomela, so the girls’ father let Philomela sail home with Procne’s husband Tereus:

“Now Philomela, scarce receiv'd on board,
And in the royal gilded bark secur'd,
Beheld the dashes of the bending oar,
The ruffled sea, and the receding shore;
When strait (his joy impatient of disguise)
We've gain'd our point, the rough Barbarian cries;
Now I possess the dear, the blissful hour,
And ev'ry wish subjected to my pow'r.
Then, before bringing her home,
the false tyrant seiz'd the princely maid,
And to a lodge in distant woods convey'd;...”

and there with “rude haste” he raped her.  She cried out to her sister and father in vain but then promised:

“...Tho' I'm prison'd in this lonely den,
Obscur'd, and bury'd from the sight of men,
My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
And my complainings echo thro' the grove...”

This provoked the king to cut off her tongue, but she still later told her sister what had happened by weaving the episode into a wall tapestry (compare note 8 and lines 97 and 104-110); she fulfilled her promise further by filling the forest air with a song of her story after they were all changed into birds, Philomela and Procne into a nightingale and a swallow (sometimes interpreted vice versa), Tereus into a hoopoe.

103. THE NIGHTINGALE’S SONG: Eliot: “Cf. Part III, l. 204."

This refers us forward to the nightingale at lines 203-206.  See also note 198, where nightbirds are likened to prostitutes.  For the song itself, see John Lyly, Alexander and Campaspe (1584):

“Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu,’ she cries,
And still her woes at midnight rise.”


06/04:

Hawk Diode

You are predator, defined by what you eat
And how you singularly look for food,
Your every feature focused, unsubdued
To rightly seize the daily running meat:
Head down, tail flared and talons out for blood,
Lean muscles tensed and dinner in your eyes
With mercenary sense to recognize
Your victims from afar, and yet you would
Toll from your scythian beak a curling call
And let your ancient raptor’s feathers cast
Their moving shadow on the ground. We earthly
Creatures feel the shadow’s chill and pall
And all that it foretells; our hearts beat faster
Still as you pronounce our mortal worth.

You are pacifist, designed to fly above
The fray, to find your spirit in the sky
On wings extended and uplifting, high
Above the inevitable chaos of
Our gravity, beyond our battlegrounds
And burial grounds, intractable and free.
Your revolutions of serenity
Enlist us all to tarry out of bounds,
To turn aside from where we find ourselves
If only to appreciate the strength
Of heavenly peace and how you always seem
So far away from where you ought to be:
There you are, a predator at length,
And here are we, lost in our mortal dream.


06/05:

Ramadan

The rock behind the rock we're on
was hidden from our point of view
until it caught the setting sun
and nothing but a sliver to
paint shadows on our faces and
give us a dusky hint of who
we are at night:  we're all the same,
imperfect sinners turning to
the stars, a cross, a crescent moon
and taking time for penance: you
have Lent and we have Ramadan
and each of us is hoping to
make it to heaven somehow and
get through life on this rock we're on.

I don't pretend to understand
the purpose of the fasting or
the reason we should watch the moon.
I guess it meant something before
they called it Lent or Ramadan,
before we rested faith upon
the Prophet's revelations or
the resurrection of the Son,
but this is what we're looking for:
salvation past the ceremonies,
focus in our daily worship,
sustenance beyond the sunset,
anything to make us more
at peace and not at odds upon
this hot, dry dessert rock we're on.


06/06:

Another Introduction

Denouement.

That's a fancy French word for untangling, and in literature it applies to the point of the story where everything turns towards the final resolutions.

In most stories, we might expect this to happen on the final pages or in the final chapter, but in a good story you might start to see this even from the beginning.  I like the way John Ylvisaker puts it in his song, Borning Cry, which begins:

I was there to hear your borning cry.
I'll be there when you grow old.
I was there the day you were baptized
To see your life unfold.

Unfolding: Untangling: Denouement

I thought of this about four years ago when my daughter crossed the stage for her eighth grade graduation. And I'll be thinking of it all over again this June as she graduates from high school, and I have had, and will have, the same thoughts at my son's graduations.

As parents, we'd like to think that we have so much to do with the plots of our children's lives, but we really don't, and when it comes down to it, we are just fortunate - blessed - to be in the audience, cheering them on.


06/07:

Denouement

For my daughter

If I were the falconer
I might never let go;
I’d hold on to the tether

and you’d learn how to fly
in small circles around me:
I’d want you to know

the spirit of freedom,
so I’d give you the sky
in gradual increments,

ever so slowly
releasing you outward
and upward, and I

would remain in the center

within and below you,
the turn of your wild
and the ground to your sky,

the tame of your will
and the stage for your show,
but the one who allows you

the power to fly
is the one who eventually
has to let go.

I am not the falconer;
I don’t rule your sky,
nor would I deny you

the winds of your freedom,
but I will stand fast
in the fields you came from

calling your name out
and watching you fly.


06/08:

Hawk Block

A Palinode to an Earlier Draft

Effectively I killed my poem
like a hawk that kills the weak, the sick, the old;
Defined it by the second line
as a predator that seizes stumbling souls;
Declared its features unsubdued
like shrieks across a universal sky;
Discovered Death in stanza two
as a bird reflecting dinner in its eye,
Foreshadowing the obvious,
the destiny of creatures great and small
And celebrating the irony
of grace within three pounds of caterwaul.
Repeatedly analogies
went flying through the predatory air
Pronouncing the mortality
of all who are alive, awake, aware.


The sad thing is, I love this bird:
I watch it catch the kettles high above
On muscled wings, remote controlled,
in the spirit of the words I’m dreaming of
But never grasp: I watch it soar
untethered to the world till all I see
Is the distance of its silhouette
becoming an enigma over me:
A mystery, yet clearly made
of more than Death compressed onto a page
Of whiteness, more than irony
observed within an origami cage,
And more than all my heavy paint
can capture.  Now, beyond all odes, this bird
That let me love it from afar
lives on but flies away without a word.


06/09:

Moleskin 3.5: Scrabble Days

Meanwhile we always had our dad’s living arrangements to remind us to be thankful. In the course of two years, before finally leaving the Chicago chapter of his life story, Dad lived in a series of three gritty, minimalist spaces, mirroring a temporal nightshift existence. The series showed gradual improvement, from the third floor inner city SRO with wire mesh in the windows and boilerplates across the ceilings to, eventually, the suburban arrangement with a roommate who was singularly record-obsessed, with wall to ceiling milk crates full of vinyl. My brother Dan and I (Josh at four and five stayed with Mom more) spent weekends at each of these places, but it was the middle one, the Dolphin Motel, I remember most. It was a small room with water stains and signs of rodents and a bar/lounge off the lobby, but it had a pool! And it was here at the Dolphin that my dad taught me to enjoy the simple pace of a Saturday game of Scrabble —with an eleven year old allowance to use the dictionary as much as I needed.