Falling Water

Poems

John Koethe

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780060952570
• eBook ISBN: 9780062034861
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Falling Water is John Koethe's first book in eleven years. These are not rarefied academic poems, but beautiful, moving, accessible poems by a poet at the height of his powers and maturity. In other words, they are actually a pleasure to read. The themes that have been central to Koethe's previous work-time, memory, the soul-are returned to here with a freshness and maturity that is astonishing. The poems are elegant, but not in any way facile; they are personal, but are animated by a detached lucidity, almost a disinterested soul searching. And they are accessible, without in any way being simplistic or sentimental.

Falling Water

I drove to Oak Park, took two tours,

And looked at some of the houses.

I took the long way back along the lake.

The place that I came home to—a cavernous

Apartment on the East Side of Milwaukee—

Seems basically a part of that tradition,

With the same admixture of expansion and restraint:

The space takes off, yet leaves behind a nagging

Feeling of confinement, with the disconcerting sense

That while the superficial conflicts got resolved,

The underlying tensions brought to equilibrium,

It isn’t yet a place in which I feel that I can live.

Imagine someone reading. Contemplate a man

Oblivious to his settings, and then a distant person

Standing in an ordinary room, hemmed in by limitations,

Yet possessed by the illusion of an individual life

That blooms within its own mysterious enclosure,

In a solitary space in which the soul can breathe

And where the heart can stay—not by discovering it,

But by creating it, by giving it a self-sustaining

Atmosphere of depth, both in the architecture,

And in the unconstructed life that it contains.

In a late and very brief remark, Freud speculates

That space is the projection of a “psychic apparatus”

Which remains almost entirely oblivious to itself;

And Wright extols “that primitive sense of shelter”

Which can turn a house into a refuge from despair.

I wish that time could bring the future back again

And let me see things as they used to seem to me

Before I found myself alone, in an emancipated state—

Alone and free and filled with cares about tomorrow.

There used to be a logic in the way time passed

That made it flow directly towards an underlying space

Where all the minor, individual lives converged.

The moments borrowed their perceptions from the past

And bathed the future in a soft, familiar light

I remembered from home, and which has faded.

And the voices get supplanted by the rain,

The nights seem colder, and the angel in the mind

That used to sing to me beneath the wide suburban sky

Turns into dreamwork and dissolves into the air,

While in its place a kind of monument appears,

Magnificent in isolation, compromised by proximity

And standing in a small and singular expanse—

As though the years had been a pretext for reflection,

And my life had a been phase of disenchantment—

As the faces that I cherished gradually withdraw,

The reassuring settings slowly melt away,

And what remains is just a sense of getting older.

In a variation of the parable, the pure of heart

Descend into a kingdom that they never wanted

And refused to see. The homely notions of the good,

The quaint ideas of perfection swept away like

Adolescent fictions as the real forms of life

Deteriorate with manically increasing speed,

The kind man wakes into a quiet dream of shelter,

And the serenity it brings—not in reflection,

But in the paralyzing fear of being mistaken,

Of losing everything, of acquiescing in the

Obvious approach (the house shaped like a box;

The life that can’t accommodate another’s)—

As the heart shrinks down to tiny, local things.

Why can’t the more expansive ecstasies come true?

I met you more than thirty years ago, in 1958,

In Mrs. Wolford’s eighth grade history class.

All moments weigh the same, and matter equally;

Yet those that time brings back create the fables

Of a happy or unsatisfying life, of minutes

Passing on the way to either peace or disappointment—

Like a paper calendar on which it’s always autumn

And we’re back in school again; or a hazy afternoon

Near the beginning of October, with the World Series

Playing quietly on the radio, and the windows open,

And the California sunlight filling up the room.

When I survey the mural stretched across the years

—Across my heart—I notice mostly small, neglected

Parts of no importance to the whole design, but which,

In their obscurity, seem more permanent and real.

I see the desks and auditorium, suffused with

Yellow light connoting earnestness and hope that

Still remains there, in a space pervaded by a

Soft and supple ache too deep to contemplate—

As though the future weren’t real, and the present

Were amorphous, with nothing to hold on to,

And the past were there forever. And the art

That time inflicts upon its subjects can’t

Eradicate the lines sketched out in childhood,

Which harden into shapes as it recedes.

I wish I knew a way of looking at the world

That didn’t find it wanting, or of looking at my

Life that didn’t always see a half-completed

Structure made of years and filled with images

And gestures emblematic of the past, like Gatsby’s

Light, or Proust’s imbalance on the stones.

I wish there were a place where I could stay

And leave the world alone—an enormous stadium

Where I could wander back and forth across a field

Replete with all the incidents and small details

That gave the days their textures, that bound the

Minutes into something solid, and that linked them

All together in a way that used to seem eternal.

We used to go to dances in my family’s ancient

Cadillac, which blew up late one summer evening

Climbing up the hill outside Del Mar. And later

I can see us steaming off the cover of the Beatles’

Baby-butcher album at your house in Mission Bay;

And three years later listening to the Velvet

Underground performing in a roller skating rink.

Years aren’t texts, or anything like texts;

And yet I often think of 1968 that way, as though

That single year contained the rhythms of the rest,

As what began in hope and eagerness concluded in

Intractable confusion, as the wedding turned into a

Puzzling fiasco over poor John Godfrey’s hair.

The parts were real, and yet the dense...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• From the Porch
• The Constant Voice
• Sorrento Valley
• Songs My Mother Taught Me
• The Realm of Ends
• Argument in Isolation
• The Third Wish
• Friends
• The Secret Amplitude
• The Interior of the Future
• Morning in America
• A Pathetic Landscape
• Early Morning in Milwaukee
• Henrietta
• Falling Water
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Other Books by John Koethe
• Copyright
• About the Publisher