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…and liked it. I’m very grateful! This was awarded the Kent Keeth Poetry Prize (a student literature contest award) at the 2009 Beall Poetry Festival at Baylor University:

Disclosure

If someone should speak Peace it will not be
	The silencing of voices all resolved,
		in pacification,
	Nor the pacific strain—stout Cortez or Balboa to the side,
		see the scene
	Of conflict, wide and warm, like blood, and salty—
It will not be with pax
	Or pace—non requiescat, lest we lie
	To rest, in cooling stillness, like the tomb—
Such pieces from the pavement form the stones
	We throw, the gore we touch, the road to
		all for your own good
		and we mean well—
	No,
If someone should speak peace, the word will be
	Some word I’ve left unspoken, unforeseen, foretold
		a revelation.

Hard to argue with this, really:

If, robbed of two fond old enormities,
Our being had no onward auguries,
What then were this great love of ours to say
For launching other lives to voyage again
A little farther into time and pain,
A little faster in a futile chase
For a kingdom and a power and a Race
That would have still in sight
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
Is this the music of the toys we shake
So loud,—as if there might be no mistake
Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still
About our share in it, and live and die
More quietly thereby.

(E. A. Robinson, “The Man Against the Sky“)

…and, of course, for the title reference, take a Journey to the music video world.

My sanity is borne on rivers,
meandering;
yet rivers know their course,
an end predestined,
not assured,
or not predestined but assured;
and yet in cities they are still, the same.
Four rivers, then; four that define
the cities where I loved them; for I know
I may be smoothed and worn, but I am coarse
like the stubble that scratches where I kiss,
and wakes the baby.

I

The first is Graytown, call it Dixon, home: the Rock; my namesake,
where I grew, a tribute to the old frontier, a ferry town, downtown
a treasure trove where library, and toys, and park were found—
the ground divided by the trains, the viaducts,
cut stone, old money, and the work gone elsewhere:
the trains cut past the river, and the trestle
(standing still, between downriver and the dam,
and parallel two bridges that connect
the bustle and the hassle of downtown)
inspired dreams and horror, like the quarry
every year some swam through, dived and drowned.
The dam, too, drew some fools to glory and disaster,
in canoes; I fished with dad, or restlessly
skipped stones to drive the fish away, impatient
for their biting, though mosquitoes
found dinner soon enough; and later, fireworks,
photography on riverbanks, a steady hand
required and found at last, though better film
had left a better picture; and poems, sitting, walking,
thinking with the churn
whose soundless noise, the sheer pent foaming force,
seemed symbol of itself enough for me; seen steaming from the pool
where last I battled asthma, living low
like catfish on the bottom.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Ferry

I kneel and bow and pray you come with me,
And we will dance beneath these scattered lights,
Concealed for days by dawn’s diviner rites,
Until each night unseals our wait and see.
Dance with me as I ask on bended knee:
Awash in ocean’s orchestrated nights,
Afloat in inky blackness that indicts
Another reason, no, another plea.
You must remember, we are parasites
Until we pray or prey, receiving all
We take for given, or mistaken call
Our contributions to these passing sights.
Some thing eternal feeds us, and we thrive,
Rejoicing through this passage none survive.

PGE 6-27-2008

Coleridge’s problems did not only come from his laudanum addiction. Look at one of the poems we most obviously identify with the ill-understood effects of withdrawal, and see if you cannot see here in the beginning the reason Coleridge woke from sleep with terrors–or, rather, as those pangs were probably drug-related, why his reaction was a poem which ended with the plaintive “But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? / To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.”

His problem was hard enough; his efforts to compose himself, however, were seriously defective:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees ;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication ;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep“)

“My spirit I to Love compose.” The “I” that is mine, the “spirit I” and not the gross one, the one that may be “compose[d]” by the efforts of the Imagination, “composed” by such efforts “to Love” as the concord of Will (which directs the Imagination) and Reason (which Coleridge cannot but identify with the Spirit speaking within “My spirit”) called Faith (conducing always to Love wholly thus defined), a concord identical with the indifference among “in me” and “round me” and “every where” that the “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” perdure in being. . . .

Yet do we not decompose when we see such action to “compose”? Read the rest of this entry »

Getting the Drift

Today I find my world in banking snow,
Accounting for this winter’s days, the cold
Within my heart, and costs still left untold
Until I settle down with one I owe.
In silent drifts I heap up all I know,
Accumulating here like Fafnir’s gold,
Sole hoard of things I’ve bought that never sold,
Investment in this winter’s window show.
In unrelenting ardor I confess
My love for silver moonlight and the days
Twice brightened, cloud and snowbank, and the haze
That spreads through world and mind at my address
To one who hears these secrets with a smile:
Who longs for spring, yet stays to talk a while.

PGE 2-6-2008

 …you’d have to think, wouldn’t you?

What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney;
Do thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life;
Is it making of love or counting of money,
Or raid on the jewels, the plans of a thief?
(W. H. Auden, November 1930)

(reading the rest of the poem would render the question academic.)
(of course, if you read the rest of the poem, you probably are. academic.)