Friday Poetry: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Winter With the Gulf Stream

The boughs, the boughs are bare enough
But earth has never felt the snow.
Frost-furred our ivies are and rough

With bills of rime the brambles shew.
The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground
Because the sighing wind is low.

But if the rain-blasts be unbound
And from dank feathers wring the drops
The clogged brook runs with choking sound

Kneading the mounded mire that stops
His channel under clammy coats
Of foliage fallen in the copse.

A simple passage of weak notes
Is all the winter bird dare try.
The bugle moon by daylight floats

So glassy white about the sky,
So like a berg of hyaline,
And pencilled blue so daintily,

I never saw her so divine.
But through black branches, rarely drest
In scarves of silky shot and shine,

The webbed and the watery west
Where yonder crimson fireball sits
Looks laid for feasting and for rest.

I see long reefs of violets
In beryl-covered fens so dim,
A gold-water Pactolus frets

Its brindled wharves and yellow brim,
The waxen colors weep and run,
And slendering to his burning rim

Into the flat blue mist the sun
Drops out and all our day is done.

And a Lenten bonus:

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flash filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Little Saint Mary's, Cambridge

If you'd like to visit the setting for that Ash Wednesday sonnet, it's here. Like Richard Crashaw, metaphysical poet and former vicar, I'm no longer Anglican, but this, really, is where I learned my Catholicism.

Sonnet for Ash Wednesday

after a tomb in Little Saint Mary's Church, Cambridge


Here lyeth . . . (Sarah?) Drake beneath the floor,
a Persian carpet lapped across her stone
so all you read is -rah and Cambridgeshire
and that she was the cherished wife of someone
who caused her to sleep before the altar
like Samuel, consigned to night and God.

Mutely, being dead, she bears the thurifer
who stands on her, swinging his silver pod
of incense like a pendulum. What time
is it, six feet down? How long did they
tell her the wait would be? And is her name
written where it matters, legibly,
or will we all, given the same name -- Dust --
forget at last who was forgotten first?


With grateful acknowledgment to the editors of First Things, in whose pages this poem first appeared.

Posting this is a bit of a copout; it's an old poem, and I've probably posted it here before. But it's an artifact of what still stands as the best Lenten discipline I ever managed: to write a sonnet a day for the entire forty days of Lent. This was my discipline the first spring we lived in Cambridge, and when I look back on that spring I still see things as I saw them then, in terms of fourteen rhyming lines.

Last year I gave up blogging for Lent, which I'm not doing again, though I'll be posting only occasionally in order to work on some other projects. Later in the spring I'll be moving a lot of my blogging to another venue, though I'll still post here from time to time; more about that as things develop. In the meantime, part of my discipline for the season is to be more deliberate about "real," ie non-blog writing projects. I'm also trying to cut back my (considerable, lately) commenting on other blogs. I love the conversation, but right now it's amounting to avoidance writing . . . so much more fun to engage in witty banter than to slog through the article about assisted suicide . . .

Meanwhile, we've been studying sonnets in my online high-school English class. If you'd like to join us, or try your hand at some sonnet-writing for Lent, visit us here.

Friday Poetry: In Snow Weather

A falcon on a wire
Against the laden sky
Scanned his brown empire
With a black-ice eye.

Nothing beneath him stirred
In that sunless instant
But my heart, for a keen-eyed bird
Blind to me, or indifferent.

(I suppose this is kind of an anti-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins poem, although I harbor no anti-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins sentiments whatsoever . . . I would also welcome some better rhyme than instant/indifferent)

What You Say When You Don't Know What to Say

I received, the other day, the single most disturbing thing I think I have ever received in my life, via the mail at any rate. It was a package from a long-ago neighbor with whom I have remained in intermittent touch for the last twenty years, and of whom I have been very fond.

In 1988 and '89 I lived in an old house divided into a quadruplex, in one half of the downstairs. In the other half lived this man, a Dutchman, older than I by roughly my life again at that point. He was divorced, and his young son spent weekends with him. I was footloose, and he was lonely, and in the course of the year we were neighbors we became friendly and have remained so, albeit on a sporadic basis, with years intervening between communications.

So on Saturday I went out to read Tolstoy on the front porch, and I found this package, a big manila mailer containing a spiral-bound booklet. At first glance it seemed merely to be a lovely memoir and celebration of the life of this old friend's mother, who was a remarkable photographer, and who, as this memoir made clear, died last year in Holland at the age of 96. I was flipping through it, marvelling at the beauty of the photos (my friend also has quite an eye for things) and at this amazing woman's long and eventful life . . . until I began to realize that where the memoir was tending was towards her death by euthanasia, which of course has been fully legal in The Netherlands since 2001. My friend would go back to Amsterdam to see his mother; he would confer with the doctor; euthanasia would be discussed as a treatment option, in the same way that abortion is, in the event that the amniocentesis results aren't what you want. I kept reading, thinking, no, surely not. No. By the time the narrative describes my friend's last trip back, I'm praying that he returns to find his mother dead already. Anything. No. They did the assisted suicide. He and his brother sat there and watched the doctor do the lethal injection. Her last words to him: "You were a dear." She was lucid; she had been telling people, "I'll be dead by Sunday." Dear God.

So really, I'm not feeling quite so witty right now. I am never at a loss for words, at least written ones, though occasionally I find I'm at a loss for the right ones. I am writing a longer piece on this theme, an exercise that may be more an act of personal catharsis than witness, though clearly you have to say what you hold to be true, and not merely wink at the evil at work in the world or shove the evidence of it under the pillow and hope it stays there and doesn't haunt your nightmares (as if they weren't already nightmares). More intimidatingly, there's the matter of making some response to my friend. I wish with all my heart that I didn't know the whole story and could merely say, in ignorance, that I'm sorry for his loss. In fact, I'm sorrier even than I would have been, because the loss seems a loss of far more than a loved person, and not at all a gateway to the kind of freedom which he supposes himself to have found.

There's Commentary, and There's Commentary

After a morning spent deleting comments from about fifteen posts of various vintages, I'm going to put comments here back on moderation. So if you say something brilliantly witty, as I'm sure you will, and it doesn't show up right away, don't go away crying. I just want to be sure that you aren't a Malayan robot inviting me for a sleepover.

On the Trials of Being a Satirist in a Self-Parodying World

Here's a Malcolm Muggeridge anecdote too good not to share:

“The last Archbishop of Canterbury but one, Dr. Ramsey … to my amazement, at the end of a performance of Godspell … rose to his feet and shouted: ‘Long live God,’ which, as I reflected at the time, was like shouting, ‘Carry on eternity’ or ‘keep going infinity.’ The incident made a deep impression on my mind because it illustrated the basic difficulty I met with when I was editor of Punch: that the eminent so often say and do things which are infinitely more ridiculous than anything you can invent for them. That might not sound to you like a terrible difficulty but it is, believe me, the main headache of the editor of an ostensibly humorous paper. You go to great trouble to invent a ridiculous Archbishop of Canterbury and give him ridiculous lines to say and then suddenly he rises in his seat at the theatre and shouts out: ‘Long live God.’ And you’re defeated, you’re broken.”

HT: Strange Herring

Friday Poetry: Anne Stevenson

I'm still unpacking, shelving, and reuniting with my poetry library. These are the books which have gone with me truly everywhere, when other books have fallen by the wayside. When we moved to England in 1999, budget and space restraints meant that we had to get rid of books, and I culled mine as ruthlessly as I could bear to. Really, it wasn't as hard or as painful as I would have thought: I got rid of novels, chiefly, most of which I'd read once and haven't missed a minute since I gave them to friends or consigned them to the secondhand bookstore. When you get right down to it -- at least, when I get right down to it, there's an awful lot of contemporary fiction which simply doesn't stand up to a lot of rereading, and whose place on the shelf is too easily filled by something else which sounds just like it in a slightly different flavor. But I want to write about poetry, not fiction, so I'll save that conversation for another time.

My poetry collection isn't as extensive as it might be, I suppose -- I haven't bought many books in recent years for the simple reason that I haven't bought much of anything in recent years, besides houses. You buy it, you live in it, and when you've paid for that, there's not much left over, which is not the tragedy you might suppose it to be. Most of the poetry books I own date from my two rounds in graduate school, and they're a pretty fair mix of the contemporary and the tradition with which the contemporary converses. They are, largely, the books which I could not replace if I lost them: first editions in limited printings, which is pretty much how your average poetry book appears, a number of them by friends or teachers of mine. Among these books are ones I remember buying because I'd fallen in love with the words on the page -- not story, not characters, but words --and couldn't leave the bookshop without them. They are my old, my immeasurably beloved relations. Many of them fall open to particular poems which are by themselves the reason I take a book off the shelf. Random lines enter my mind without waiting to be invited -- "Is German a form of brain damage?" or "Sometimes the weather goes on for days," or, of course, "Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang" -- like family understandings, or inside jokes among friends.

A favorite book of mine isn't a book, but a pamphlet consisting of a single poem. It was a Christmas card, actually, sent me by Anne Stevenson, whom I met at a theology-and-arts conference at Mirfield in 2000, and with whom I corresponded probably over-avidly for several years. The card is beautifully simple, heavy textured off-white cardstock printed in an unfussy typeface, with a silver star sticker stuck on the front. The poem inside, however, is the real treasure, as is her inscription, "Love, Anne."

Here is the poem:

Wind, Sun and Moon
Pwllymarch, January 2001

For weeks the wind has been talking to us,
Swearing, imploring, singing like a person.
Not a person, more the noise a being might make
Searching for a body and a name. The sun
In its polished aurora rises late, then dazzles
Our eyes and days, pacing a bronze horizon
To a mauve bed in the sea. Light kindles the hills,
Though in the long shadow of Moelfre, winter
Won't unshackle the dead house by the marsh.
Putting these words on paper after sunset
Alters the length and asperity of night.
By the fire, when the wind pauses, little is said.
Every phrase we unfold stands upright. Outside,
The visible cold, the therapy of moonlight.

Anne Stevenson
clutag poetry leaflet no. 6


There's much to like in this poem, composed -- as I imagine it was -- as that year's "Christmas Card Poem," and therefore a looser composition, with the feel of a draft that's not as final as it might be. I admire that quality in this poem, as I admire sketches and studies for finished paintings: the suggestion has, in its own way, as much drama as the revelation in full. I like the voice, which ventures ideas and then corrects itself: "Not a person, more the noise a being might make/Searching for a body and a name." I love much of the language, particularly the "asperity of night" and the whole last line -- I'm always drawn to dissonances of the senses, so am pleased by the visibility of what in the ordinary way of things is only tangible. My mind keeps wanting to shuffle the lines around a little, so that they fall into what my haphazard ear would hear as a more regular pentameter -- I keep wanting to make this poem more like a sonnet, but that's only because I've got the sonnet disease, which makes it hard for me to write anything else. It is a fourteen-line poem . . . but although my mind's ear keeps wanting to push for more metrical regularity, and for some more trustworthy rhyme scheme throughout, at the same time I admire how the poem resists that readerly impulse of mine. It's very much a live thing somehow. And after all these years -- and it really has been years since we last exchanged letters, or saw each other -- I keep this pamphlet faced out on my shelf, so that I will always see it, always take it down and read the poem again.

Late-Night High-Q

Q. To what chain of restaurants in the United States are police most frequently called?













A. Chuck E. Cheese.

via Epiphany, who I think learned this from her father, who says he got it via Radio Derb

Reading and Rollerblading

For some time now the preferred, not to say the downright insisted-upon reading in our house has been the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. I've written about these books before; they're longtime favorites in our house, and I'm happy to see that Helier and Crispina enjoy them as much as Epiphany and Amicus did.

There's a kind of surface prosaic-ness about these stories which is offputting to some people: chapter after chapter of people doing nothing but puttering around with ropes and tents, and then making tea and eating corned beef out of tins. It's possible, too, in our era, to find Susan, the older-sister character, unsympathetic if not actually maddening, as her consistent function is to cook, clean up, and worry endlessly about whether the younger siblings, Titty and Roger, go to bed on time and keep their feet dry. And you know you couldn't write a book nowadays with a character called Titty, no matter how many times you tried to explain that really, it's short for Letitia (as I imagine it must be). Actually, it's hard to imagine being able to publish, now, a book about normal, everyday children doing what normal, everyday children do normally, every day -- or used to. Therein lies one problem. Children don't do nothing any more, even in their holidays. They take lessons. They play sports. They go to camps. What used to be thought of as free time is taken up, from morning till night, with what grownups believe are worthwhile things for children to be doing, in safe and supervised settings. Nobody turns children loose in sailboats to camp by themselves on islands in lakes -- for one thing, drug addicts have probably found all the lake isles already and littered them with used needles, just as they've done to the parks. For another, there's the specter of the CPS hovering over all our shoulders. If a mother can be arrested for leaving her child in a car, never out of her sight, for maybe three minutes on a freezing day in order to let her other children put money in a Salvation Army bucket -- well, I'm getting carried away here, but you can see, can't you, that if someone were to write a story, now, about children allowed to camp alone on an island, they'd have to have magic powers or inhabit another planet, and the story would be labeled "fantasy." There's not much premise left to ordinary real-world childhood.

All that aside, we've been reading these stories since just after Christmas. They've expanded our vocabulary in a particular direction: port and starboard, fore and aft, bows and stern and mainsail and sheets and shrouds. Much of Helier and Crispina's reading and writing instruction has come straight from these books. I write the words on the lined primary-school paper, and they trace and copy while I read aloud. Yesterday Helier wanted to write Goblin, the name of the boat in our current installment, We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, but instead of merely copying it, as I'd asked him to, he drew a picture of a sailing ship, complete with boom, portholes, and other authentic details, and wrote Goblin along her side, where her name would properly go. This was the first time I'd seen him draw anything not related to Star Wars, and I actually stopped reading -- I think I stopped breathing -- to watch him do it.

Meanwhile, we continue to unpack the boxes stacked in our glassed-in back porch, and yesterday Helier and Crispina dug out two pairs of skates: one pair of white lace-up boot-style skates, which used to be Epiphany's, and Amicus's old rollerblades. We don't have any pavement for skating, which is a mercy, given the proficiency level we're working with here, but I let them skate in the kitchen where about the only thing they can do is fall into the corner of the table or the counter and rip their faces open, so perhaps I should have thought more about that, but it's too late now. All day long they clattered around on the linoleum, falling down with noisy but harmless bumps and struggling up again, laughing like lunatics.

I was working on things and paying no attention to them, until I realized suddenly that at some point while I wasn't listening they'd moved on from the stage of mastering the skates (though I wouldn't say that "mastered" quite describes the relationship as it stands) to the stage of pretending with them. They were skating, clunkily, side by side along the kitchen floor, each with one arm stuck straight out to the side. "Stand by to go about!" Helier would say. Then together they'd shout, "Ready about!" and switch arms.

Eventually they caught me watching them. "We're being sailboats, Mom,"Helier said. "These are our booms. Stand by to go about!" Again they ready-abouted, switching arms. I thought of the opening to the first book in the series, in which Roger, seven years old, is pretending to be a sailboat, beating up a field against the wind to the gate where his mother stands holding the telegram which gives the children their father's permission to sail and camp on their own. At a subsequent moment in the book, Roger reflects on the change in himself, from a boy pretending to be a boat to a boy sailing in an actual boat -- doing the very thing he had only pretended before. To my mind that's a potent revelation about something in childhood: the way that a child's pretending both grows from and stokes a desire for some real action or experience. I wonder, actually, whether it's possible for a child to grow up knowing what it is that he desires, or that he can desire something -- something to do, that is -- without time and a certain amount of benign parental neglect in which to nurture some private imaginary vision.

Of course in these stories, the boys, John and Roger, have predetermined destinies: they're both bound for the Navy, like their father. They don't envision a limitless horizon of adulthood. They know what they'll be doing the rest of their lives (though in the early 1930s, when the stories are set, they can't know anything about the war in which -- if they weren't fictional characters -- they'd be almost certain to participate). Still, rather than a schedule of formal sailing lessons, and perhaps competitions, designed to groom them for success in later life, they're turned loose with a boat, on a lake, to do more or less what they want as long as they aren't "duffers." And so they have the freedom to fall in love with the real things of life, because they're doing real things on a small, safe scale, even as they invest them with larger imaginative significance. This seems right to me as a depiction of childhood and of what's possible in it and beautiful about it: the right proportion of the exotic to the mundane, of danger to safety. And because their parents trust them to keep promises, to be honest and good, and above all, not to be "duffers," they do, and they are, and they aren't, as much as possible, at any rate. All this to me is a far purer and sweeter, and an infinitely more real magical premise than that of a Harry Potter or an Artemis Fowl -- though we read those, too; we read pretty much everything. As Chesterton says, in Orthodoxy:

In short, oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal . . . You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world.

The world of Swallows and Amazons isn't a mad one. It's a child's world, quiet and sheltered and kind, but full of startling and unexpected things, some of them real and some of them made up out of the child's own head. A hero among imaginary dragons -- or pirates -- is still a hero; a hero sailing unexpectedly at night across a real sea, with a brother and sisters to keep safe, is a hero whose courage and resourcefulness ought to move us to tears of admiration. This is the answer which classical education, with its emphasis on "the good, the beautiful, and the true," offers to the charge that these things don't prepare a child for "life in the modern world" -- better learn to be a hero in the midst of madness, than to be a lunatic, and ordinary.

From Our School Morning: Richard Halliburton

By way of geography and history and developing-listening-skills and vocabulary and goodness knows what else, we have been reading Richard Halliburton's Royal Road to Romance. Today's stop: Leh, the capital city (roughly the size of our little town) of Ladakh, between India and Tibet on the Indus River.

Halliburton and his travelling companion wish to see Ladakh because, among other reasons, the people in 1925 still practice polyandry, and on arriving in Leh they manage to gain entrance to a polyandrous household, where they consume quantities of rice and unleavened bread, admire the turquoise headdress belonging to the lady of the house, and ask as many questions as possible, given their Kashmiri interpreter's limited English and even more limited Ladakhi.

"As a means of checking the birth-rate" in a country with little arable land and little rain, Halliburton writes,

it became customary centuries ago to practise polyandry, and this unique custom is now a firmly established institution. A woman of Ladakh should look twice before she leaps into matrimony, for she does not marry the choice of her parents' heart alone but all his brothers as well.

From his host family, however, he learns that although four brothers remain married to the one lady, a radical youngest brother had abandoned their joint household for a wife of his own choosing. He writes -- and this is the part I find most interesting for its parallels to circumstances in our own culture --

[T]he action of the radical brother who had reverted to monogamy was rapidly becoming the rule, rather than the exception, for the economic and moral problems of polyandry were making it more and more unpopular with the present generation. Family ties were being dangerously loosened by the habitual infidelity of younger husbands, while the large number of unmarried mothers and unsupported children was becoming a serious detriment to social order. Each year sees fewer polyandrous families, so that the day no doubt is not far distant when this abnormal custom will be relegated to the past, and every woman in Ladakh may have a husband.

I'm curious to know what commentary other people might offer.

More Adventures in Cold Hard Reality

The utility bills came, and the washing machine broke. The weekend was expended in a frenzy of replacing incandescent bulbs with long-life ones, licking our fingers in front of windows to determine which way the wind was blowing, and generally unplugging things. While Aelred was blow-drying sheets of that shrink-filmy stuff onto the big leaky windows in the boys' room -- which all winter long has managed to combine the charm of a third-world shantytown with the comfort of a walk-in freezer -- I went to do a load of laundry, only to discover the previous load clumped soddenly, and unpromisingly, in the bottom of the washer. Attempts to rerun the spin cycle confirmed what I already suspected: it wasn't dead, exactly. At least, not all of it. Some part of it, however, had clearly necrotized. In short, as Aelred put it, the washing machine toiled not, neither did it spin.

I dislike the fact that I have a Facebook page. I don't downright hate it, because in that case I'd delete it, but aside from spates in which people friend me, and I'm momentarily interested in the question of who else might be out there, I try to ignore the whole thing: only so many hours in the day, &c. Lately it's struck me that there's something funny in the way that the "status" function asks you, "What are you doing right now?" to which the honest answer can only be, "Well, I'm wasting time on Facebook again." The idea of thousands, if not millions, of people, all admitting what they know is true -- "Hey, I'm wasting time on Facebook, too!" -- entertains me mildly. I should start a group: "I Bet I Can Find 1,000,000 People Willing To Admit That All They're Doing Right Now Is Looking At Facebook."

But! And there's really going to be some connection between paragraphs one and two, because 1) I happened to go on Facebook this weekend, and 2) although I was honestly looking at Facebook, I was also honestly ready to weep because my washing machine was broken, and I said so. A friend, hearing my cry, sent me this link, adding that once when his own family's washer had gone out, his wife had fixed it herself before he got home from the office, using directions on a site like this. Before you jump to conclusions, let me just say that I wasn't the one who took the washing machine apart - it's sitting in several very large pieces in the laundry room even now -- and found the broken part. That was Aelred's work. It's also our great good fortune that our friend MM makes his daytime, non-English-grad-student living selling appliance parts, so we'll be chatting with him later this morning. If I feel triumphant about all this, it's only in a vicarious way, but I feel triumphant nonetheless, and not entirely sorry to have gotten sucked into Facebook. It is good for something.

I wonder if bad luck was visited upon our household because I didn't award that Premio Dardo blog award to fifteen people, but only four. My friend Kathryn at The Bookworm has tagged me for another award, for which of course I'm grateful to the point of disbelief -- me? really? -- but, well, I'm a hardened chain-breaker, and I'm afraid to think what's going to happen to us next. As long as I'm willing to admit to looking at Facebook, I might as well admit to being superstitious, too.

Meanwhile, for some real conversation, visit my new favorite blog, Light on Dark Water.

UPDATE: I am informed that the washing-machine part that went out is called a "motor coupling." MM has already shipped a new one out and refuses to accept my money. Last time we called the repairman: $200. This time, no repairman: $0, shipping and handling inclusive, which is a hard deal to beat.

Friday Poetry: Andrew Waterhouse

Alternative Endings

he gets the girl or some other mammal
or the mysterious stranger in the first scene
turns out to be his father, which explains everything
or it's the iceberg's turn to sink this time
or they give up looking for the leg
or the six pairs of twins in tights are reunited,
recognised, loved; also there is a final couplet
or the sheep dog forgets his trapped master,
tries to find a better flock
or a small brown dot appears on her face,
expands, collapses, and the film burns
or the baby is sung awake by the monster
or a naked surfer paddles into the sunset
or she says Ha and leaves quickly
or the cavalry dismount, grow their hair,
help around the teepees
or the alien decides to talk to the chimps instead
or the clouds part, that stumpy celestial finger points,
a choir begins and all our sins are forgiven
or the wooden boy stays wooden,
or the sub-titles fall from the screen
or the last tree is carefully wrapped
or it is not in fact a dream he is not dreaming
or the doctor runs out of heart stakes in the crypt
or there is accordion musique
and rain runs down a windowpane
or the camera pulls back slowly: two people,
beach, the eastern coast, full outline of our island,
our continent, our mainly blue planet, stars, the rest.

from The Rialto#50
Winter 2002

Andrew Waterhouse was a poet whose work I had read here and there and admired during our time in England. Tragically, the October before this issue of the magazine appeared, he committed suicide, and this was one of his last new poems. I didn't know him personally and was shocked to see the notice of his death in the newspaper, and so I wrote to Roy Blackman, another poet and editor with whom I'd been corresponding, to ask what had happened. He replied curtly, "He killed himself;" not too long afterwards, Roy killed himself, too, which I suppose demonstrates that we never really know what lies at the other end of our correspondences, and should tread always with gentleness and prayer.

At any rate, I was just thumbing through old issues of The Rialto, to which I subscribed while I lived in Cambridge, and to which I'd love to subscribe again, though I suspect the overseas postal rate would be prohibitive. The editor, Michael Mackmin, was kind enough to publish a handful of my poems, but more than that, he was, and is, that rare editor with an eye for excellence -- and I'm not talking about myself -- that transcends taste and trend. I've kept every literary journal which has ever come into my house, but honestly, I reread very few of them: The Rialto is one of those few. So few poems which appear in literary magazines really withstand being revisited, but many of these do, and I was delighted today to rediscover the one I've posted here.

Read more about The Rialto here. Also, I assume that Andrew Waterhouse's poem has long since been published in a book-length collection, but I haven't seen it; I would welcome the opportunity to give proper credit where it's due.

A View of the Piece

In the middle of Cambridge lies a flat open plot of land, roughly square and occupying twenty-five acres bounded by Regent Street and Parkside, Park Terrace and the Lensfield Road. It was owned until the seventeenth century by Trinity College, and named Parker's Piece for a college cook who was given the rights to farm it. The city obtained the land in 1613; over time it became a sort of all-purpose common, home to cricket matches and festivities of all sorts including, in 1838, a feast celebrating the coronation of Queen Victoria, attended by fifteen thousand guests. At one corner of the Piece rises the spire of the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady and the English martyrs, at another the cupolas of a luxury hotel. In the center, two footpaths intersect at Reality Point, marked by a lamppost. All day long, bicycles and walkers cross the expanse of tight-cropped grass; in warm weather students spread out blankets and read or kiss in the indecisive sun. At night drunkards stagger out of pubs to bellow at the open sky there, and to piss on the trees. Several times a year thirty thousand or so animal-rights protesters take over the Piece and howl imprecations through megaphones at the researchers vivisecting monkeys at Huntingdon Life Sciences, outside the city. A Dutch purveyor of custom bicycles sets up shop on the Piece for a day in the summer. Fireworks explode over it on New Year's Eve.

And lucky, lucky, lucky us, because of all the places in Cambridge where we might have lived, we inhabited a flat one flight up in a building on Parkside, and every one of our tall sash windows looked out on this field of drama.

In the winter, we could sit at our desks -- my husband's in the study window, mine by the window in the bedroom -- and watch the starlings swirl across the red sky like the dregs of some bitter black iced drink, draining their numbers systematically into the naked branches of a poplar. In springtime, the daylight hours opened out longer and longer, and the cricketers appeared in their whites to play in the chilly golden twilight. We watched them, I might add, for four seasons and never understood the first thing about the game. We watched them avidly for all that; it was like seeing a movie with the sound turned off -- something I like to do on airplanes, because I can't stand wearing headphones -- and trying, on the basis of body language and shifts of scenery, to make out the plot. If we asked friends to explain why, for example, all the members of one side suddenly and without any apparent provocation shouted, "Hah!" (or something like that) before carrying on with the game as if they had never interrupted it, we only got laughed at.

At the end of May, the university students sit exams, and after that, they celebrate having sat the exams and lived to lift another glass. Colleges host what are called "May Balls," though they happen the first week in June: extravagant parties which last from cocktails through breakfast and feature carnival rides, gondolas, acrobats, entire Shakespearean acting companies, camels, elephants, artificial snow, wave pools fringed with genuine beach sand, and heaven knows what else. May Balls are so lavish that a college couldn't possibly host one every year, so they take turns, and tickets to the best parties are coveted like Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets. During May Balls, in the evenings, we used to crowd the sitting-room window to watch the girls walking out in their shimmering dresses, gauzy shawls slipping from their bare shoulders, rhinestones glittering on the clasps which loosely caught their hair. Their escorts, too, were admirable in black or white tie, like the Drones out for an innocent preliminary amble before trying to pinch a bus.

What we liked best, however, was waking up the next morning in our tranquil flat, and opening the curtains. Sun flooded the sitting room; sun shone mildly down on the green and perfect flatness of the Piece, punctuated here and there by Drones of the evening before who had stopped to admire the stars and wound up staying whatever was left of the night. Here lay one, there another, stretched their various lengths on the sward -- as one would say if one were feeling poetic. Through breakfast we would watch them as one after another regained consciousness, swam to his feet, and tottered off in what to the best of his recollection was the direction in which his lodgings lay.

We had given up television when we came to England, and not out of moral rectitude, unless there's something moral about being too cheap to fork out roughly three hundred dollars a year for the privilege of watching Teletubbies on the BBC. The Piece, right outside our windows, was a twenty-four hour reality show -- not reality rigged for maximum ratings, but reality as it is, which is to say, reality which does not care whether you are watching it or not. At five on a November morning it was fog, and one bicycle taillight flickering into invisibility. In July it was the French market with its stalls of salamis and cheeses, and a bouncy castle for the kids. One January night it was the hotel directly across from us going up in a gush of flame. In the abbreviated afternoons of two autumns, it was my children learning to ride their two-wheelers. It was the friend who cycled home that way and looked up to wave at me as he crossed the street. It was the long shadows of summer. It was the unimpeded wind pouring around our building in the winter, which once tore the roses out of a vase I was carrying and sent them gusting halfway down the lane outside our garden gate. It was disembodied singing in the dark.

I sometimes think that I spent four years doing nothing but look out the window at strangers. Of course I did other things, some of them memorable. Actually, even the most mundane things were memorable, like grocery shopping every day across the street from Oliver Cromwell's head. To remember that now is to look down from a remote window, high in a tower, on my younger self plodding along pushing a stroller laden with bags, thinking thoughts which are as opaque to me as any stranger's. Who is that woman? Where is she going? And it comes to me now, watching her, that even she has no idea.

The Day the Ceiling Fell

Some years ago we were living in England, in a flat which occupied the entire middle floor of a bleak Georgian building. This flat consisted of the following: a long, very narrow hallway with casement windows down one side, and a series of doors down the other, opening into the sitting room, the children's bedroom, and the study. At one end of the hall was the kitchen, which was really just more of the hall, closed off by another door, furnished with cabinets, a refrigerator which fit underneath the counter, and a venerable electric cooker which wobbled when you put things on top of it. At the other end of the hall was our bedroom, which would have been the loveliest room in the entire flat if people other than ourselves had lived in it: the defunct fireplace had an enormous marble mantelpiece which cried out for more artistic ornamentation than the overflow of my books, while the entire room served not only as our sleeping place but also as my office and, like every bedroom we've ever inhabited, the dumping ground for laundry, half-unpacked moving boxes, stray toys, and an actual real-live baby which we didn't have space for anyplace else.

That was the whole of the flat. The front door opened from our hallway into a spectacularly gloomy stairwell, brown-carpeted and musty, its pockmarked walls a testimony to the efforts of previous neighbors to shatter all the laws of physics using only a couple of friends, tantalized into service with promises of lots and lots of beer, and a wardrobe. At least, I imagine this to have occurred more than once. I saw it happen not long after we had moved in, when the two girls living upstairs from us decided to move out. They were both finishing up their doctoral theses; one of them, I remember, was writing on the history of the ellipsis. Now that I think of it, she was a person of remarkably few words. At any rate, their method of moving was a novel one. They simply opened their own hallway window and tossed things out, in garbage bags, and abandoned the lot. We walked out one morning to discover the garden behind the building littered with their belongings, bags and bags of clothes, books, papers, kitchen utensils, and a working telephone, which Aelred salvaged and used in his study for the next four years. I myself still have a linen blouse rescued from the pile. As for the furniture, it was carried away by a couple of young men who were clearly undecided on the question of how much beer, exactly, was going to compensate them for staggering up and down three flights of stairs carrying chairs and futon mattresses and coffee tables. I happened to witness their attempts to remove a wardrobe: they got it down the stairs from the girls' front door to mine, and then had to maneuver it around the turn for the next flight of stairs. They turned it this way and that; they backed it up and brought it forward; they knocked a hole in the plaster and made black marks all up and down the walls. In the end they decided that no amount of beer was going to magic that wardrobe down those stairs, and they carried it back up again and left it.

The stairwell, not to mention the comings and goings of the other people who used it, was of great import to us, because directly across it, opposite our front door, lay our bathroom. Before we moved into the flat, when I was taken to see it for the first time, the jolly estate agent led us up the stairs, flung open the bathroom door, and chortled -- a word I despise, but he really did -- "Now, here's the one drawback." Disoriented, I thought for a moment that he meant that everyone who came to visit us would have to be admitted through the bathroom, which did seem like a drawback. When I realized that he merely meant that the rest of the flat was over there, disconnected from the bathroom, I laughed with relief. The estate agent, encouraged I suppose by my non-manifestation of horror, mentioned in a winky-winky-nudgy way that we might want to invest in some nice fluffy dressing-gowns, but we never did, opting instead for the more frugal strategy of listening for footsteps on the stairs, then making a dash for it. We almost never ran into anyone, and even in the wintertime this procedure was not nearly as painful as you might imagine.

We had lived there for a year, more or less, when the problems began. The first of these problems involved the toilet, which seemed continually to leak around the base. A small seepage of water where the base met the floor became, over time, a permanent puddle reaching halfway across the bathroom. The floor developed a certain squashiness, as if the vinyl had been laid on a layer of old sponges. Even more alarmingly, the toilet began to rock. As each of these issues -- that's the correct term for things like this, I am reminded; we don't ever have problems any more -- developed, Aelred would call up the assistant bursar's office, which handled all student-housing maintenance pr-- issues, and say that something was wrong, and would they please send someone over to have a look at it? Oh, yes, yes, they would say. Nobody ever came. Finally, when things reached the point at which the toilet actually thumped when sat upon, like a chair with one leg too short, they sent a workman over. Aelred suggested that the floor might be rotting. For evidence he pointed to all the standing water, and he indicated that it had been standing there for months. Oh, no no no, said the workman. Toilet's just loose. See? He rocked it. Tighten it up, the leaking will stop, problem -- excuse me, issue -- solved.

And so it seemed, briefly. Several mornings later, Aelred went out to take Epiphany to school, but returned almost immediately to report that the ceiling downstairs, in the entryway to the building, had fallen in. I went down to see for myself, and sure enough, there was the wet, plastery rubble all over the floor, and there, above our heads, was the slimy black underside of our bathroom floor, sprouting a prosperous crop of mushrooms. I forget whether or not Epiphany ever made it to school that day; what I do remember is the builder who arrived in response to Aelred's telephone call. The assistant bursar's office had dispatched him. When he rang at the back gate, I buzzed him in and, going down to meet him, found him gazing dumbstruck at the ceiling.

"They didn't say anything about this," he said -- Chris the Builder, his name was. I suggested that maybe the reason was that they couldn't possibly have had any idea,could they, not having responded to 99% of our requests to have someone come and look at the situation before. If they had, they could hardly have failed to notice, for a start, the water oozing down the entryway walls from above. I don't know how the toilet-bolter missed it. Perhaps it was just that he'd made up his mind that he'd been dispatched to bolt down a toilet, and water running down walls was above his pay grade.

"They didn't send anyone?" Chris the Builder said.

"Well, they sent a man who said the toilet was loose."

Whatever Chris the Builder said then, I've forgotten it now. He went away, and I thought I'd seen the last of him, but he surprised me by turning up an hour later with tools and a large sheet of Masonite. I began to feel about Chris the Builder the way I had felt about the anesthesiologist at my Caesarean section, who had sat by my head and patted my dry lips with a folded wet paper towel and talked to me about nothing in particular while the obstetrician delivering my baby quizzed the attending resident on the subject of life-threatening conditions of the lower abdominal region. I believe I might have proposed to the anesthesiologist, and I was ready to propose to Chris, too, when by the end of the day he had ripped out the rotten floor and the mushrooms, put in new joists and beams without mushrooms, replaced the toilet, now bolted down securely to something, and laid a Masonite subfloor.

"Now," he said as he packed up his tools, "you're all sorted. The vinyl man will be calling on you in a day or two to finish the job."

I was ready to propose to the vinyl man, as a matter of fact, when he showed up four months later with his book of samples. People who fix things have this effect on me, though I'm just as happy to send them away with bottles of champagne left over from our New Year's party. From the vinyl man's sample book I chose a bright-teal flooring flecked with tiny sparkles like mica. It was vivid. It cheered me up. It said, "This floor is going nowhere, sweetheart. This floor will hold you." Which is not true, of course, since all flesh is grass, and all things pass away. Still, as an illusion, even in memory, it pleases me.

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Population Bomb

Only, according to physicist Stephen Barr, the bomb is a mathematical dud:

A headline in the Sunday Times yesterday reads “Two Children Should be Limit, Says Green Guru.” The guru in question is Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the British government’s Sustainable Development Commission. According to the Times article, Porritt says that couples who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment.

I guess elementary math is not part of the training of green gurus. The idea of two children per couple is obviously premised on the notion that each generation should produce only enough children to replace itself. But even if one accepts that premise, the mathematics is wrong, for several reasons.

Read the rest here.
(via my satirical friend Anthony, whose own response I can't improve on)

Tagged

I'm overwhelmed -- really, I'm not being hyperbolic here. Compliments leave me almost, though never entirely, speechless.

My friend Pentimento, source of much excellentness herself, has tagged me for the Premio Dardo blogging award, which "acknowledges the effort of a particular blogger to transmit cultural, ethical, literary and personal values in his or her writing." "Premio Dardo," as Pentimento explains, means "first arrow." Having not myself sung much nineteenth-century Italian opera, which is to say that I haven't sung any at all, I'm grateful to her not only for the award, but for providing the handy translation. I'm beyond grateful for her kind words:

Mrs. T at Fine Old Famly, a poet, essayist, and homeschooling mother. There are so many reasons I would like to give the award to her blog, and I feel inadequate to the task of describing them all; you'll have to read her yourself to understand. Not only does she write superlatively, but the ethos of her blog combines a deeply compassionate humanity, a love for and ease within the intellectual life, and a devotion to God, her vocation, and her family that I greatly admire.

The rules of the game stipulate that the recipient of this award pass it on to fifteen other bloggers. Like Pentimento, I'm not sure that I know fifteen bloggers who fit this description -- that's not to say that they aren't out there, only that I'm afraid I do a lot less blog-reading than I do blog-writing, and that I don't remember more than a fraction of what I read online. Still, I'd like to recognize the following blogs and bloggers for their contributions to the great conversation:

1.Argent by the Tiber, a beautiful blog which I recently discovered in my travels around the web in search of music for our choir. I'd like to recognize my fellow Southerner (wherever she is, they got snow the same day we did, but a lot more of it) for her service to music and high Catholic culture.

2. The literate Lutheran Viking dudes over at Brandywine Books. I discovered them via Anthony Sacramone's Strange Herring, a blog which deserves its own award, though I haven't yet seen one which would quite apply -- some people just occupy their own indescribable category, and . . . well, that's a little like having one of those lovely but unusual names which never, ever show up on those personalized magnets in the Stuckey's gift shop (you can ask my firstborn about this -- her real name is just as unusual as her pseudonym). But I meant to talk about Lars and Phil, who write with verve and great geniality about books, politics, religion, art and culture, and whose conversation I appreciate no end.

3. My heroine, the DHM. The Common Room wins lots of awards, but you know, they deserve it. I'm continually in awe of the DHM's ability to keep abreast of current events as they unfold, and to write about them in a voice at once motherly and astringent, like the voice of your favorite loving-but-slightly-scary high-school English teacher. In fact, she deserves an award just for having the most perfectly-melded voice and persona in all blogdom. In terms of this award, she deserves recognition for managing -- and I do not know how she does it -- to write about recipes, politics, frugal living, books, hymns, and family life, at a pace which I think would kill a lesser mortal with children and a household to run. She also deserves recognition for having such intelligent, well-read, writerly Progeny, a number of whom are also contributers to The Common Room.

4. Regina Doman at House Art Journal. The author of a series of "young adult" novels which plumb fairy-tale archetypes for their inspiration, Regina deserves recognition as well for the ways in which she brings the ideals of art and culture to the level of everyday family life, and raises the often humdrum details of that life to the level of art.

I'm running out of steam, though as soon as I hit "post," I'll probably think of ten other blogs as deserving as the ones I've mentioned here. There are so many good ones out there, and even as I write, images of blogs I've visited and found beautiful are flitting across my mind, and I'm wishing I'd thought to bookmark them, or blogroll them, or return for the leisurely and attentive read I promised myself I'd take the time for, when I had the time. To everyone who sees in this medium an opportunity to push back the darkness, I hereby enroll you in the Order of the First Arrow.