Sally's Hair

Poems

John Koethe

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780061176272
• eBook ISBN: 9780061979910
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

Let me stay there for a while, while evening

Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,

Hiding behind this stock of images, this language

Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.

John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."

Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."

I

The Perfect Life

I have a perfect life. It isn’t much,

But it’s enough for me. It keeps me alive

And happy in a vague way: no disappointments

On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt;

Looking forward in anticipation, looking back

In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day.

I heed the promptings of my inner voice,

And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance

For my own powers and innate superiority—the fake

Security of someone in the grip of a delusion,

In denial, climbing ever taller towers

Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom

With a secret smile, while all the while

Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now

Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful

And strong becomes an object of indifference

Reaching out to no one, as later middle age

Turns old, and the strength is gone.

Right now the moments yield to me sweet

Feelings of contentment, but the human

Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name

To be forgotten soon, as the things I know

Turn into unfamiliar faces

In a strange room, leaving merely

A blank space, like a hole left in the wake

Of a perfect life, which closes over.

Eros and the Everyday

as when emotion too far exceeds its cause

ELIZABETH BISHOP

A field of unreflecting things

Time is passing by: inert,

Anonymous beyond recall, the deflected

Objects of a self-regarding gaze

Untouched by the anxieties of proximity or love.

I tried to find those passions in the sky,

In moments when the heart surveys itself

As if from above, and wonders at the

Sight of something so particular and small.

A day brings language and a hint of what it means,

Of some presence waiting in the wings Beyond the stage, beyond the words that

Gathered in the night and stayed

And through whose grace I find, if not quite

What I wanted, then everything else:

The contentment of each morning’s

Exercise in freedom, freedom like a wall

Enclosing my heart; the disjunctive thoughts

Gesturing at some half-imagined whole;

A continuity that on the surface feels like love.

What is this thing that feels at once so nebulous

And so complete, living from day to day

Unmindful of itself, oblivious of the future

And the past, hovering like a judgment

Above the future, the present, and the past,

Floating in the distance like the eyes of love?

Call it “experience”—that term of art For time in an inhuman world

Indifferent to desire, the history

Of one who one day wandered off from home

Along a road that led from here to here:

These sidewalks and these houses, city streets

And suburbs and a highway flowing west

Through fields and quiet streams, uncharted

Trails descending to a farmhouse in a glen and

Nothing in myheart or in the sky above my heart.

And then from somewhere in that wilderness inside

I hear the murmur of a low, transforming tone

That fills the field of sight with feeling,

And that makes of blind experience a kind of love.

Let me stay there for a while, while evening

Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

There’s something in the air, something I can’t quite see,

Hiding behind this stock of images, this language

Culled from all the poems I’ve ever loved.

I don’t believe a word they say, a word I say,

But it isn’t really a matter of belief:

As ordinary things make up the world,

So life is purchased with the common coin of feeling,

Feelings deferred, that flower for a day

And then retreat into the language. And later,

When the hours they’d filled are summoned by a name,

It’s as if they’d never been, as if that tangible

Release could never come to me again.

I came here for the view, and what is there to see?

The place is still a place in progress

And the days have the feeling of fiction, of pages

Blank with anticipation, biding their time,

And ever approaching the chapter in the story

Where it ends, and my heart is waiting.

The Middle of Experience

My fear and my ambition: that my life

Remain the same, unchanging in its versions,

Constant as the street I lived on where the

Houses bode their dreams beneath a California sky.

That place is at the heart of what I mean,

Yet when I ask myself when I’ll return to it again

The question seems more urgent than the answer,

Coming, as it does, at the end of something—poetry?—

Composed of endless summer afternoons

I can’t imagine anymore, and fictions that created

Fictions of their own, yet somehow told

A story of a life indefinite as life,

Happening as it passes, leaving in its wake

An ease of mind and clarity of heart

Like a beautiful day. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Praise
• Other Books by John Koethe
• Copyright
• About the Publisher