What ever became of the place,
Of your remains? The dark topsoil
Sustains a cornfield nowadays.
All summer the stalks raise
Their leafed ears to the clouds,
Which haul by in silence.
I know it was there—
There’s the sign with its name
And No Trespassing.
Enforced by a lone straw man
Who looks crucified.
My, how the crows scatter
When a swift gust
Shrugs his shoulders!
Soon the farmhouse light
Will give way
To fireflies, whose flicker
Will not subside
Until the nighttime stars
Have a mind to arrive.
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4 comments:
I'm confused how you are talking and yet it is your remains in the cornfield. If you said "your remains" I think it would makes sense how you can have a view from above. Plus it makes it sad. I like sad...
I absolutely love the lines "Until the nighttime stars/Have a mind to arrive" and the clouds which "haul." yay for poetry!
i meant remains that are owned by us collectively, like the remains of our family members and ancestors. i did want to imply that they were the speaker's and the reader's as well, though. the implication is evident in the name "All Souls" Cemetery. i will think about how making it "your" would change it--i might use that.
yay for it. thanks, Beth N.E.D. Masie!
it's so interesting what you're doing with this one and the bowl poem--the subject matter is so much like that of haiku, but it's all expanded. it makes me laugh that you're using more words now, but still manage to be just as cryptic as before.
the part that confuses me is how the farmhouse lights give way to the fireflies. should i picture a video camera panning over from the circle of light coming out of the farmhouse to open fields with fireflies--a spatial giving way? or is it a temporal giving way, with the light of the farmhouse somehow turning into fireflies?
haha, yes--i considered doing something with a scarecrow as its own haiku. i got The Haiku Anthology from the library--a collection of contemporary American haiku, including several with scarecrows.
i thought the farmhouse lights made sense: the light would be on in the early evening, and would probably be turned off while the fireflies are still lighting up. so it is a temporal shift, from farmhouse to fireflies to finally the stars. the flickering fireflies are a transition between those two sources.
Charles Simic's poems considered chronologically undergo a kind of evolution: his early ones are populated mostly by inanimate objects, then cockroaches and insects enter, then other animals and finally people... my choice of subject matter imitates his, but he's able to create more complex relations and narrative structures to break out of the haiku format (but not the cryptic format...incidentally, his newest book has a set of short haiku-like image poems he calls "Eternities"). with relation to his object poems, here's a snippet from his notebooks in the seventies (in the article "Wonderful Words, Silent Truth", published in the eponymous book):
Every object is a mirror...
-They're not really object poems.
-What are they then?
-They are premonitions.
-About what?
-About the absolute otherness of the object.
-So, it's the absolute you've been thinking of?
-Of course.
and here's a passage from "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy", in the same book:
There is a major misunderstanding in literary criticism as to how ideas get into poems. The poets, supposedly, proceed in one of these two ways: they either state their ideas directly or they find equivalents for them. What is usually called philosophical poetry seems to be either a poetry of heightened eloquence or some variety of symbolism. In each case, the assumption is that the poet knows beforehand what he or she wishes to say and the writing of the poem is the search for the most effective means of gussying up these ideas.
If this were correct, poetry would simply repeat what has been thought and said before. There would be no poetic thinking in the way Heidegger conceives of it. There would be no hope that poetry could have any relation to truth.
IN A HEAD THIS OLD THERE'S A BLIND HEN THAT OCCASIONALLY FINDS A KERNEL OF CORN AND HER NAME IS LOVE
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear.
These objets trouves of poetry are, of course, bits of language. The poem is the place where one hears what language is really saying, where the full meaning of words begins to emerge.
That's not quite right! It's not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather, what they show and reveal. The literal leads to the figurative, and inside every poetic figure of value there's a theater where a play is in progress. The play is about gods and demons and the world in its baffling presence and variety.
In its essence an interesting poem is an epistemological and metaphysical problem for the poet.
...
Plus, all genuine poetry in my view is antipoetry.
In my defense, I am not intentionally cryptic. Charles Simic says he has too high a regard for readers to spoonfeed them. I as a reader want to be permitted to think like a poet, so I try to write in a way that makes that possible.
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