The Secret of Poetry
January 9, 2009
I once was read this poem, sitting on the roof of Lindy’s, an opera record by a composer who met death in a gas chamber in ‘44, playing through the bedroom window. A night of strange encounters and a sadness thinly veiled. We draw certain people to us, we perpetuate certain circumstance until we can learn to stop. It seems farther away than it was.
When I was lonely, I thought of death.
When I thought of death I was lonely.
I suppose this error will continue.
I shall enter each gray morning
Delighted by frost, which is death,
& the trees that stand alone in mist.
When I met my wife I was lonely.
Our child in her body is lonely.
I suppose this error will go on & on.
Morning I kiss my wife’s cold lips,
Nights her body, dripping with mist.
This is the error that fascinates.
I suppose you are secretly lonely,
Thinking of death, thinking of love.
I’d like, please, to leave on your sill
Just one cold flower, whose beauty
Would leave you inconsolable all day.
The secret of poetry is cruelty.
Could he ever guess that his death would be the moment another man measured his own life by?
Can any of us know what impact we’re leaving behind? That there are always people that will pour over every word written,
looking for the passage that will grant them peace?
In Sepia
Often you walked at night, house lights made
Nets of their lawns, your shadow
Briefly over them. You had been talking about
Death, over & over. Often
You felt dishonest, though certainly some figure
Moved in the dark yards, a parallel
Circumstance, keeping pace. By Death, you meant
A change of character: He is
A step ahead, interlocutor, by whose whisper
The future parts like water,
Allowing entrance. That was a way of facing it
& circumventing it: Death
Was the person into whom you stepped. Life, then,
Was a series of static events;
As: here the child, in sepia, climbs the front steps
Dressed for winter. Even the snow
Is brown, &, no, he will never enter that house
Because each passage, as into
A new life, requires his forgetfulness. Often you
Would explore these photographs,
These memories, in sepia, of another life.
Their use was tragic,
Evoking a circumstance, the particular fragments
Of an always shattered past.
Death was process then, a release of nostalgia
Leaving you free to change.
Perhaps you were wrong; but walking at night
Each house got personal. Each
Had a father. He was reading a story so hopeless,
So starless, we all belonged.
-Jon Anderson
