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This short poem is representative of the turbulent life of its author, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). Until an auto accident left her in deep pain and dependent on morphine, Millay had lived an interesting and often promiscuous life.
Figs from Thistles: First Fig
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!
No doubt you’ve heard of those one-of-a-kind words in English that just won’t rhyme with any other words. Well, it seems that the Futility Closet has punked three of those unrhymable words: month, orange, and oblige. Let’s have a look-see at Willard R. Espy’s poem on the subject:
Procrustes
It is unth-
inkable to find
A rhyme for month
Except this special kind.
The four eng-
ineers
Wore orange
Brassieres.
Love’s lost its glow?
No need to lie; j-
ust tell me “go!”
And I’ll oblige.
In the meantime, I’ll go searching for those four engineers wearing orange brassieres.
We know him from The Doors, but he was also a decent poet. He had to be, particularly considering his original songs, particularly in his group’s initial album, The Doors (1967). I am not that much into rock music, but I did take the trouble to visit Jim Morrison’s grave at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris after he died of a drug overdose.
Here is one of my favorites among his poems:
The Celebration of the Lizard
Lions in the street & roaming
Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming
A beast caged in the heart of a city
The body of his mother
Rotting in the summer ground.
He fled the town.
He went down South
And crossed the border
Left the chaos & disorder
Back there
Over his shoulder.
One morning he awoke in a green hotel
W/a strange creature groaning beside him.
Sweat oozed from its shiny skin.
Is everybody in?
The ceremony is about to begin.
Wake up!
You can’t remember where it was.
Had this dream stopped?
The snake was pale gold glazed & shrunken.
We were afraid to touch it.
The sheets were hot dead prisons.
And she was beside me, old,
She’s, no; young.
Her dark red hair.
The white soft skin.
Now, run to the mirror in the bathroom,
Look!
She’s coming in here.
I can’t live thru each slow century
of her moving.
I let my cheek slide down
The cool smooth tile
Feel the good cold stinging blood.
The smooth hissing snakes
of rain…
Once I had a little game
I liked to crawl back in my brain
I think you know the game I mean
I mean the game called “Go Insane”
Now you should try this little game
Just close your eyes forget your name
forget the world, forget the people
and we'll erect a different steeple.
This little game is fun to do.
Just close your eyes, no way to lose
And I'm right here, I'm going too
Release control, we're breaking through
Way back deep into the brain
Way back past the realm of pain
Back where there’s never any rain
And the rain falls gently on the town
And over the heads of all of us
And in the labyrinth of streams beneath
Quiet unearthly presence of
Nervous hill dwellers in the gentle hills around
Reptiles abounding
Fossils, caves, cool air heights
Each house repeats a mold
Windows rolled
A beast car locked in against morning
All now sleeping
Rugs silent, mirrors vacant
Dust blind under the beds of lawful couples
Wound in sheets
And daughters, smug with semen
Eyes in their nipples
Wait! There’s been a slaughter here
Don’t stop to speak or look around
Your gloves and fan are on the ground
We’re getting out of town
We’re going on the run
And you’re the one I want to come!
Not to touch the earth, not to see the sun
Nothing left to do but run, run, run
Let's run, let's run
House upon the hill, moon is lying still
Shadows of the trees witnessing the wild breeze
Come on, baby, run with me
Let's run
Run with me, run with me, run with me
Let's run
The mansion is warm at the top of the hill
Rich are the rooms and the comforts there
Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs
And you won't know a thing till you get inside
Dead president's corpse in the driver's car
The engine runs on glue and tar
Come on along, not going very far
To the east to meet the Czar
Run with me, run with me, run with me
Let's run
Some outlaws live by the side of a lake
The minister's daughter's in love with the snake
Who lives in a well by the side of the road
Wake up, girl! We're almost home
Sun, sun, sun
Burn, burn, burn
Moon, moon, moon
I will get you soon...soon...soon!
I am the Lizard King
I can do anything
We came down the rivers and highways
We came down from forests and falls
We came down from Carson and Springfield
We came down from Phoenix enthralled
And I can tell you the names of the kingdom
I can tell you the things that you know
Listening for a fistful of silence
Climbing valleys into the shade
~~~
For seven years I dwelt in the loose palace of exile
Playing strange games with the girls of the island
Now I have come again to the land of the fair
And the strong and the wise
Brothers and sisters of the pale forest
Children of night
Who among you will run with the hunt?
Now night arrives with her purple legion
Retire now to your tents and to your dreams
Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth
I want to be ready
I have always loved the prose and poetry of George Mackay Brown, whom I met in 1976 in Stromness on the Orkney Mainland. (They call it the Mainland, even though it’s an island.) I have visited there twice, both times in bad weather, which I think is the only kind of weather prevailing there.
The Finished House
In the finished house a flame is brought to the hearth. Then a table, between door and window Where a stranger will eat before the men of the house. A bed is laid in a secret corner For the three agonies – love, birth, death – That are made beautiful with ceremony. The neighbours come with gifts – A set of cups, a calendar, some chairs. A fiddle is hung at the wall. A girl puts lucky salt in a dish. The cupboard will have its loaf and bottle, come winter. On the seventh morning One spills water of blessing over the threshold.
As I am re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for the second time, I thought I might reprint the words from one of the songs in the book—probably the most evocative of them all.
Far over the misty mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away ere break of day To seek the pale enchanted gold. The dwarves of yore made mighty spells, While hammers fell like ringing bells In places deep, where dark things sleep, In hollow halls beneath the fells. For ancient king and elvish lord There many a gleaming golden hoard They shaped and wrought, and light they caught To hide in gems on hilt of sword. On silver necklaces they strung The flowering stars, on crowns they hung The dragon-fire, in twisted wire They meshed the light of moon and sun. Far over the misty mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old We must away, ere break of day, To claim our long-forgotten gold. Goblets they carved there for themselves And harps of gold; where no man delves There lay they long, and many a song Was sung unheard by men or elves. The pines were roaring on the height, The winds were moaning in the night. The fire was red, it flaming spread; The trees like torches blazed with light. The bells were ringing in the dale And men looked up with faces pale; Then dragon’s ire more fierce than fire Laid low their towers and houses frail. The mountain smoked beneath the moon; The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom. They fled their hall, to dying fall Beneath his feet, beneath the moon. Far over the misty mountains grim To dungeons deep and caverns dim We must away, ere break of day, To win our harps and gold from him!
The following is from Sam Hammill’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching written some 2,500 years ago:
Beauty and ugliness have one origin. Name beauty, and ugliness is. Recognizing virtue recognizes evil. Is and is not produce one another. The difficult is born in the easy, long is defined by short, the high by the low. Instrument and voice achieve one harmony. Before and after have places. That is why the sage can act without effort and teach without words, nurture things without possessing them, and accomplish things without expecting merit: only one who makes no attempt to possess it cannot lose it.
The following poem by Stephen Crane is short and cryptic. But it sticks in one’s craw. And the last two lines were taken by Joyce Carol Oates as a title for one of her novels.
In the Desert
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
This is my last posting until I return from Las Vegas, probably on Thursday. I will leave you with a poem by Brenda McGrath entitled “Little White Chapel”:
Little White Chapel
When my husband and I were in Las Vegas, I had a great suggestion, To go to the Little White Chapel, and renew our vows in celebration. I thought it would be such a lark we wouldn’t forget. Having Elvis perform the ceremony would be the best thing yet! However we never made it to the chapel, he refused. To do such a silly thing did not leave him amused. Maybe that was an indication of what was to come. Divorce ensued, and sorrow beat its drum. I want to go to the Little White Chapel with a new man. We would have so much fun before our life began! We could play a slot machine on our way out. Then we would be man and wife with a payout!
I am always enchanted by poems based on paintings that I love. And my favorite painting of the Eighteenth Century is Antoine Watteau’s “The Embarkation for Cythera,” a promise of love in the offing, but no delivery for certain. Cythera, or Kythira, is an island off the Peloponnese. The following poem was written by another islander, from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, namely Derek Walcott. It is poem XX in the sequence of his collection Midsummer and called simply “Watteau”:
The amber spray of trees feather-brushed with the dusk, the ruined cavity of some spectral château, the groin of a leering satyr eaten with ivy. In the distance, the grain of some unreapable, alchemical harvest, the hollow at the heart of all embarkations. Nothing stays green in that prodigious urging towards twilight; in all of his journeys the pilgrims are in fever from the tremulous strokes of malaria’s laureate. So where is Cythera? It, too, is far and feverish, it dilates on the horizon of his near-delirium, near and then further, it can break like the spidery rigging of his ribboned barquentines, it is as much nowhere as these broad-leafed islands, it is the disease of elephantine vegetation in Baudelaire, the tropic bug in the Paris fog. For him, it is the mirror of what it is. Paradise is life repeated spectrally, an empty chair echoing the emptiness.
The following poem by Derek Walcott is from his collection entitled Midsummer. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, Walcott won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and passed away in 2017. The name of the poem is the Roman numeral LIII (not to be confused with Super Bowl LIII):
There was one Syrian, with his bicycle, in our town.
I didn’t know if he was a Syrian or an Assyrian.
When I asked him his race, about which Saroyan had written
that all that was left were seventy thousand Assyrians,
where were sixty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine?
he didn’t answer, but smiled at the length of our street.
His pupils flashed like the hot spokes of a chariot,
or the silver wires of his secondhand machine.
I should have asked him about the patterns of birds
migrating in Aramaic, or the correct
pronunciation of wrinkled rivers like “Tagus.”
Assyria was far as the ancient world that was taught us,
but then, so was he, from his hot-skinned camels and tents.
I was young and direct and my tense
was the present; if I, in my ignorance,
had distorted time, it was less than some tyrant’s
indifference that altered his future.
He wore a white shirt. A black hat. His bicycle
had an iron basket in front. It moved through the mirage
of sugar-cane fields, crediting suits to the cutters.
Next, two more Syrians appeared. All three shared a store
behind which they slept. After that, there was
a sign with that name, so comical to us, of mythical
spade-bearded, anointed, and ringleted kings: ABDUL.
But to me there were still only seventy thousand
Assyrians, and all of them lived next door
in a hot dark room, muttering a language whose sound
had winged lions in it, and birds cut into a wall.
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