Barbara Blatner's Blog
December 2, 2012
a poem to return to/that returns you
The poem below is one I return to; it turns me toward what I love, toward the essence, the joy and the terror, the career and the crater of life.
When I read this poem, I hear the snakes moving in the garden. They are moving not only through the shrubbery of his garden - they are moving through the written lines, sleek and quick and sure.
They are the erratic beat of the poet's hours among the flowers, they are animate shadow arriving and disappearing. The signal that flashes from the hedgerow is none other than the signal of life lit with itself, lit from within.
This poem makes me want to rhapsodize beyond my abilities, because it is full and complete in itself, so of itself, its short lines coursing and spinning their magic. All great poems enact in their music the story that the poem tells. The snakes in this poem are threaded into the inhalation and exhalation of vowels and consonants.
The poem is a blessing and a readmitting to the garden of creatures who have been defamed by the authorities of the punishing mind, cast to the ground as blasphemer and destroyer of Eve and her consort. In the poem, these creatures are naturalized, taken out of Biblical myth, but held in myth that is made fresh and relevatory in the poet's sight.
The poet makes a "covenant" with the creatures - they are "co-signers" with him, co-creatures of the land they live on and are part of. Rather than implicating the snakes in "the curse/that spoiled another garden," Kunitz redeems the snakes and in the end finds in union an uncannily decorous beauty, the "wild/braid," made of freedom and form (entanglement) simultaneously.
I am blessed every time I read this poem. It is alive to me, so I am alive to myself. The poem darts here and there, comes to rest in the "wild braid" of scared language, and I am turned again, re-turned to exultation.
Religion comes from the Latin re-ligio, which means to lead back, re-connect. I don't got any formal religion but I got this poem and others, and they lead me back to the earth which is myself.
THE SNAKES OF SEPTEMBER
—Stanley Kunitz
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
When I read this poem, I hear the snakes moving in the garden. They are moving not only through the shrubbery of his garden - they are moving through the written lines, sleek and quick and sure.
They are the erratic beat of the poet's hours among the flowers, they are animate shadow arriving and disappearing. The signal that flashes from the hedgerow is none other than the signal of life lit with itself, lit from within.
This poem makes me want to rhapsodize beyond my abilities, because it is full and complete in itself, so of itself, its short lines coursing and spinning their magic. All great poems enact in their music the story that the poem tells. The snakes in this poem are threaded into the inhalation and exhalation of vowels and consonants.
The poem is a blessing and a readmitting to the garden of creatures who have been defamed by the authorities of the punishing mind, cast to the ground as blasphemer and destroyer of Eve and her consort. In the poem, these creatures are naturalized, taken out of Biblical myth, but held in myth that is made fresh and relevatory in the poet's sight.
The poet makes a "covenant" with the creatures - they are "co-signers" with him, co-creatures of the land they live on and are part of. Rather than implicating the snakes in "the curse/that spoiled another garden," Kunitz redeems the snakes and in the end finds in union an uncannily decorous beauty, the "wild/braid," made of freedom and form (entanglement) simultaneously.
I am blessed every time I read this poem. It is alive to me, so I am alive to myself. The poem darts here and there, comes to rest in the "wild braid" of scared language, and I am turned again, re-turned to exultation.
Religion comes from the Latin re-ligio, which means to lead back, re-connect. I don't got any formal religion but I got this poem and others, and they lead me back to the earth which is myself.
THE SNAKES OF SEPTEMBER
—Stanley Kunitz
All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.
November 26, 2012
a poet's hello
Hello to poets and poet lovers out there.
This weekend, on a Thanksgiving trip to my brother's outside of Trenton, New Jersey, my husband and I walked along a road and suddenly: a peregrine falcon perched in a large tree. The two of us had just been through a difficult discussion which, blessedly, opened out at the end into a new and airy perspective on a difficult issue that I have struggled with my whole life.
And then the falcon: she flew a little, then lighted on a new branch of little ahead of us, let us catch up, flew again, lighted again. She drew us on, she was a revelation. Why did she come to us at that moment?
Poetry seems to me to offer revelations - every day is full of them. They can be very small, usually are, humble, unostentatious: a coin glinting in the sun on the sidewalk, the musical laugh of a man on the street, the depth of my cats eye. Poetry is a living thing.
What revelations have people spied in recent days?
These darkening days seem to have their own charge and magnetism. I welcome the darkness and it's turning, at the beginning of this holiday time.
This weekend, on a Thanksgiving trip to my brother's outside of Trenton, New Jersey, my husband and I walked along a road and suddenly: a peregrine falcon perched in a large tree. The two of us had just been through a difficult discussion which, blessedly, opened out at the end into a new and airy perspective on a difficult issue that I have struggled with my whole life.
And then the falcon: she flew a little, then lighted on a new branch of little ahead of us, let us catch up, flew again, lighted again. She drew us on, she was a revelation. Why did she come to us at that moment?
Poetry seems to me to offer revelations - every day is full of them. They can be very small, usually are, humble, unostentatious: a coin glinting in the sun on the sidewalk, the musical laugh of a man on the street, the depth of my cats eye. Poetry is a living thing.
What revelations have people spied in recent days?
These darkening days seem to have their own charge and magnetism. I welcome the darkness and it's turning, at the beginning of this holiday time.
