Friday, October 2, 2009

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Worm digging

Your way in
To the mind’s eye
In earnest—

No hemming,
No hawing,
Till death—

Do us asunder.

2 comments:

  1. Wow! A top-of-the-head-off poem, Vassilis. The way line 4 takes us back to the title, back to that July in Idaho, when I was 11; or the way the last line ironizes the marriage ceremony for the purpose of revelation. Terrific stuff....

    By the way, you probably know this poem but I thought I'd pass it along—Archibald MacLeish's elegy for Papa:

    Hemingway

    “In some some inexplicable way an accident.”
    —Mary Hemingway

    Oh, not inexplicable. Death explains,
    that kind of death: rewinds remembrance
    backward like a film track till the laughing man
    among the lilacs, peeling the green stem,
    waits for the gunshot where the play began;

    rewinds those Africas and Idahos and Spains
    to find the table at the Closerie des Lilas,
    sticky with syrup, where the flash of joy
    flamed into blackness like that flash of steel.

    The gun between the teeth explains.
    The shattered mouth foretells the singing boy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Joe,

    Thanks for the comments and for reminding me of MacLeish's elegy; so you were all of 11 in the summer of '61, eh? I was an old-timer, all of 17! Still remember my shock upon hearing of Hemingway's suicide--incomprehensible to me at that time. No longer.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...