With Our Great Pleasure

FINAL AUTUMN Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard. Light drives lower and one bluejay crams our cold memories out past the sun, each time your traces come past the shadows and visit under my looking-glass fingers that lift and block out the sun. Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn, and you can trace your last homecoming into the snow or the sun.

A lovely poem about give and take. THE THRUSH When Winter's ahead, What can you read in November That you read in April When Winter's dead? I hear the thrush, and I see Him alone at the end of the lane Near the bare poplar's tip, Singing continuously. Is it more that you know Than that, even as in April, So in November, Winter is gone that must go? Or is all your lore Not to call November November, And April April, And Winter Winter—no more? But I know the months all, And their sweet names, April, May and June and October, As you call and call I must remember What died into April And consider what will be born Of a fair November; And April I love for what It was born of, and November For what it will die in, What they are and what they are not, While you love what is kind, What you can sing in And love and forget in All that's ahead and behind.

James Wright , Pulitzer Prize winning poet was born in Martins Ferry in 1927. He suffered from bipolar disorder and alcoholism and died in 1980. AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO In the Shreve High football stadium,  I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,  And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,  And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,  Dreaming of heroes.  All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home,  Their women cluck like starved pullets,  Dying for love.  Therefore,  Their sons grow suicidally beautiful  At the beginning of October,  And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

THE BLACK BEACH (Skogarstrand, South Iceland) Nobody told us it was going to be black. Day at the beach, see the puffins, fine and there it was,    black.    Not streaked with coal, nor shaly, nor polluted; just pure ash as fine as sand, running through our hands and leaving no mark where we looked to see a sooty smudge; uncanny like a man without footprints. The sea creamed in, bone-white, startling; edging with lace the black velvet. You could have sat down, but no one did: no-one picnicked or made sand-pies of the stuff. It was beautiful, really beautiful, that stretch of darkness, but people trod it as if they were walking  iver their graves. A seal's shining head surfaced close; seemed to look, then sheered off. LOVE Bjarni drive the bus through fields of black volcanic lava crusted with new moss for visiting Americans who see his country through the newest Leica lens. Bjarni's eyes are never on the road; at every momen...

From the 1937  'Letters from Iceland'  by Auden and Louis MacNeice based on their visit to Iceland the year before. And here is Auden  reading it. Journey To Iceland And the traveller hopes: “Let me be far from any  Physician”; and the ports have names for the sea;         The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;         And North means to all: “Reject”. And the great plains are for ever where cold creatures are hunted,  And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt;         Under a scolding flag the lover         Of islands may see at last, Faintly, his limited hope; as he nears the glitter  Of glaciers; the sterile immature mountains intense         In the abnormal day of this world, and a river’s         Fan-like polyp of sand. Then let the good citizen here find natural marvels:...

Another poem that has lasted the course: first read in my 1967 copy of the 'Oxford Book of English Verse', it never fails to create a sense of optimism and purpose. FANFARE FOR THE MAKERS A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what? To the small fire that never leaves the sky. To the great fire that boils the daily pot. To all the things we are not remembered by, Which we remember and bless. To all the things That will not notice when we die, Yet lend the passing moment words and wings. So fanfare for the Makers: who compose A book of words or deeds who runs may write As many who do run, as a family grows At times like sunflowers turning towards the light. As sometimes in the blackout and the raids One joke composed an island in the night. As sometimes one man’s kindness pervades A room or house or village, as sometimes Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes At midnight means to share them, as one man In ol...

A few hours after publishing my  last post - a poem by John Burnside  the Saturday postman brings me the new 'London Review of Books' - and naturally there are two brand new poems by John. Both are very good; this is the most striking, returning as if by compulsion to the notion of the anima, 'the eternal feminine'; its plasticity and protean nature in the affairs of poets - and men. SILKIE At midnight when I rise, insomniac, and go down to the kitchen, for a glass of water (bars of moonlight in the blinds, the wall clock  halted months ago, at 7.10) I know that, by the force of some new geography that I have yet to learn, a woman will be standing at the sink, gutting a bowl of codfish, the broken scales stick on her fingers, her eyes a blue, in this light, that no one has seen before; and this is where the cruelty begins, in cleverness and lust and frayed desire, not for this creature, who runs from the ache of the sea, then fritters away the...

From John's 2007 collection, 'Gift Songs'.  I am not sure that recovering Catholics ever believe that the body is more than an obstruction to the passage and welfare of the soul: it is good, if salutary, to be reminded of the imperial power of flesh and blood, with its own agenda, demands and destiny. THE BODY AS METAPHOR We only imagine it ends like childhood, or rain: fever, the purl in the bone, the amended lustre of the self, all shell and glitter, as if it had long been decided that flesh is a journey, something immense in the blood, like a summer of locusts, or something not quite visible, but quick as birchseed or the threading of a wire through sleep and rapture, gathering the hand that reaches from the light, to close or open.