Yesterday I was headed to work early. It was dawn, the day still small along the eastern horizon outside the passenger window. I dropped off the skirt of Cedar Mountain and made my way down the rim of the bowl towards alfalfa fields still in darkness at the bottom, headlights picking up blades of rye and electrical poles along the side as I crossed the vast valley with scattered farm lights off in the distance holding onto the last sustenance of night as the world edged away from the deep morning towards smudgy detail.
NPR. A short bit, a mentioning, the poet Galway Kinnell has passed away.
Though a poet, not too many poets have touched my life. I'm not sure why. I can count them on one hand. A couple who I personally know. The others dead. Williams, Yeats. Now Galway Kinnell too.
It brings back memories. Poems that put me in places not too unlike this:
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying, Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
His poems touched my silent places--those moments from childhood, when though with friends, you're not really there, but instead stuck in a moment, the night growing tall, electric sounds--cicadas and crickets--stealing you away from present company and biting your subconscious with a venom which lasts forever--the eternal now.
I first read Kinnell in a class from Leslie Ullman at UTEP, and though I might not have known it at the time, his poems changed my life forever. Nothing big. I did return to my roots, and like him, I live on a farm (sort of). But, I would have done that anyway. Rock, night and soil are too much a part of who I am not to eventually pull me back.
But it's the sounds in his poems, the depth--the fusing of life and death, dark and light, thickly muddily, organically--that has changed me in some way.
Most of the students who were drawn to words then (which were not many) were drawn to Ginsberg, Brooks, Clifton or Plath, poets, who one way or another, pushed language--either neon-flashy, like Ginsberg or Plath; or homespun get-down-and-lay-it-on-the-line, like Clifton and Brooks.
Kinnell, I guess, pushes language too. But it's different. Whereas Ginsberg drives the sounds and images into you, it seems Kinnell sits on a worn, wood step and waits for them to arrive and then asks, "Did you hear that over there in the corn field?" Of course, he knows you did, he's made sure you have, but he does it so casually you're not aware he's led you away from the safety of the porch until it's too late, and you'll never view the world the same again.
One night, working late at an all-night copy center on Mesa Street in El Paso and needing a poem for class in the morning, I built the following from bricks from Kinnell's poems. It works primarily because of his words, not mine. I'm okay with that. I was young, yearning to be great. In him, I felt the depth and grandness of epic time--deep water, rich soil, rotting bodies, reaching roots--stories greater than one single self.
I don't yearn as much to be great anymore. I'd rather sit on my back step and watch the deer violate my flower beds. But I still believe in stories archaic deep--trilobites frozen in a limestone wall, blood in the veins, camphor in the night. And this poem takes me back to a time I was just discovering the language of my life.
Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks
I had been working so long,
until midnight I think,
but it felt like three.
I closed up shop,
dragged my weary eyes up the street to Village Inn
for a needle of coffee in each socket.
And then to,
there among the fat men with shiny badges,
read Galway Kinnell,
it was like a dream, dark growing tall,
two small boys bearing cornstalk violins
--I swear I saw them!--
outside the Circle K across the street.
Above the Franklin Mountains the moon ate itself out.
Two young lovers sat on the curb,
their tennis shoes in the dusty gutter.
Headlights and hum zipped past
like lion eyes after zebra.
The young just sat there, heads trailed
by the beginning of necks,
shivering in the guarantee they'd be bodies,
flesh rivered by blue erratic wanderings
of blood, saliva passed back and forth,
hands running stone saint smooth stone.
I laid down my tip and lit
a cigarette, a small fire against
the loneliness that I knew would rain
when I tore open my bed like a polar bear
and climbed in and closed her up
after, against the wind,
to sleep in blood
and pain.
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