John Ciardi

The morning that the world began The Lion growled a growl at Man. And I suspect the Lion might (If he’d been closer) have tried a bite. I think that’s as it ought to be And not as it was taught to me. I think the Lion has a right To growl a growl and bite a bite. And if the Lion bothered Adam, He should have growled right back at ’im. The way to treat a Lion right Is growl for growl and bite for bite. True, the Lion is better fit For biting than for being bit. But if you look him in the eye You’ll find the Lion’s rather shy. He really wants someone to pet him. The trouble is: his teeth won’t let him. He has a heart of gold beneath But the Lion just can’t trust his teeth.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations It is old school custom It is old school custom Regarding the title, “trenta-sei” is Italian for the number “thirty-six.” Ciardi uses the number in the title to give name to a new poetic form for a 36 line poem he himself created. In a letter to Vince Clemente, Ciardi defines the poetic form when discussing an earlier poem titled “A Trente-sei for the Boat People”: “A trente-sei is six six-line stanzas, the second of which begins with the second line of stanza one, the third with the third line, the fourth with the fourth line, etc. Them Eyetralian troubadors forgot to invent it, but I did it because it is a natural form and because it just came out that way. I may even try it again.” to pretend to be sad when we think about the early death of Keats the early death of Keats English Poet John Keats died in 1821, from tuberculosis, at the age of 25. . The species-truth of the matter is we are glad. Psilanthropic Psilanthropic A word Ciardi makes up here, meaning something like ‘merely human,’ taken from the Greek psilos(mere) and anthropos(man)” among exegetes exegetes People who interpret scripture; skilled interpreters , I am so moved that when the plate the plate The collection plate in which church goers may drop a monetary offering for the church and pass along to others comes by I almost think to pay the God—but why? When we think about the early death of Keats we are glad to be spared the bother of dying ourselves. His poems are a candy store of bitter-sweets His poems are a candy store of bitter-sweets Echoes John Keats’ sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”: “once more humbly assay / The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (lines 7-8) . We munch whole flights of angels whole flights of angels An echo of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Following Hamlet’s death, Horatio says, “Now cracks a noble heart.—Good-night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 359-360) from his shelves drooling a sticky glut glut An excessive, abundant supply; a surplus , almost enough to sicken us. But what delicious stuff! The species-truth of the matter is we are glad to have a death to munch on. Truth to tell, we are also glad to pretend it makes us sad. When it comes to dying, Keats did it so well we thrill to the performance. Safely here, this side of the fallen curtain, we stand and cheer. Psilanthropic among exegetes, as once in a miles-high turret turret A castle tower spitting flame, I watched boys flower through orange winding sheets and shammed shammed Faked, pretended a mourning because it put a name to a death I might have taken—which in a way made me immortal for another day— I was so moved that when the plate came by I had my dollar in hand to give to death but changed to a penny—enough for the old guy a penny—enough for the old guy A Greek mythological reference to the fee for the boatman Charon, ferryman of Hades, to transport the dead to the underworld was two pennies, one for each eye. The line also echoes T.S. Eliot’s epigraph to “The Hollow Men”: “A penny for the Old Guy” (1925). , and almost enough saved to sweeten my breath with a toast I will pledge to the Ape of the Divine Ape of the Divine Possible reference to Hanuman, a Hindu monkey deity. The god of death, Rama, protected him and prevented him from the experience of death. in thanks for every death that spares me mine. I almost thought of paying the God—but why? Had the boy lived, he might have grown as dull as Tennyson Tennyson The English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) . Far better, I say, to die and leave us a formed feeling. O beautiful, pale, dying poet, fading as soft as rhyme, the saddest music keeps the sweetest time the saddest music keeps the sweetest time Echoes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark”: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought” (line 90) .

There is no widening distance at the shore— The sea revolving slowly from the piers— But the one border of our take-off roar And we are mounted on the hemispheres. Above the waning moon whose almanac We wait to finish continents away, The Northern stars already call us back, And silence folds like maps on all we say. Under the sky, a stadium tensed to cry The ringside savage thrumming of the fights, We watch our engines, taut and trained for sky, Arranged on fields of concrete flowered with lights. Day after day we fondle and repeat A jeweler’s adjustment on a screw; Or wander past the bulletins to meet And wander back to watch the sky be blue. Somehow we see ourselves in photographs Held in our hands to show us back our pride When, aging, we recall in epitaphs The faces just behind and to each side. The nights keep perfect silence. In the dark You feel the faces soften into sleep, Or tense upon the fraught and falling arc Of fear a boy had buried not too deep. Finally we stand by and consciously Measure the double sense of all our talk, And, everyman his dramatist, anxiously Corrects his role, his gesture, and his walk.

I Machine stitched rivets ravel on a tree Whose name he does not know. Left in the sky, He dangles from a silken cumulus (Stork’s bundle upside down On the delivering wind) and sees unborn Incredible jungles of the lizard’s eye: Dark fern, dark river, a shale coliseum Mountained above one smudgepot in the trees That was his surreal rug on metered skies And slid afire into this fourth dimension Whose infinite point of meeting parallels He marks in ultra-space, suspended from The chords of fifty centuries Descending to their past—a ripping sound That snags him limb by limb. He tears and falls Louder than any fruit dropped from the trees, And finds himself in mud on hands and knees. II The opened buckle frees him from his times. He walks three paces dressed in dripping fleece And tears it off. The great bird of his chute Flaps in the trees: he salvages its hide And starts a civilization. He has a blade, Seventeen matches, his sheepskin, and his wits. Spaceman Crusoe at the wreck of time, He ponders unseen footprints of his fear. No-eyes watch his nothing deep in nowhere. III He finds the wreck (the embers of himself) Salvages bits of metal, bakelite, glass— Dials twisted from himself, his poverty. Three hours from time still ticking on his wrist The spinning bobbins of the time machine Jam on an afternoon of Genesis And flights of birds blow by like calendars From void to void. Did worlds die or did he? He studies twisted props of disbelief Wondering what ruin to touch. He counts his change (“Steady now, steady ...”) flips heads or tails and sees The coin fall into roots. An omen? (“Steady ...”) He laughs (a nerve’s slow tangling like a vine) Speaks to himself, shouts, listens, hears a surf Of echo rolling back to strand him there In tide pools of dead time by caves of fear, And enters to himself, denned in his loss, Tick-tick, a bloodbeat building on his wrist, Ratcheting down the dead teeth of a skull (The fossil of himself) sucked out of sight Past heads and tails, past vertebrae and gill To bedrocks out of time, with time to kill.

I In a detachment cool as the glint of light on wet roads through wet spruce, or iced mountains hailed from the sea in moonfill, or the sea when one horizon’s black and the other burning; the gulls are kissing time in its own flowing over the shell-scraped rock   a coming and going as of glass bees with a bubble of light in each running errands in and out of the sunset. Over the road and the spruce wood, over the ice, and out the picture of my picture window, the exorbitant separation of nature from nature wheels, whirls, and dances on itself. Now damn me for a moral. Over and out, over and in, the gulls drift up afire, screaming like hinges in the broken air of night and day like two smokes on the sea. And I do nothing. A shadow three feet under my window in the light, I look at light in one of the years of my life. This or another. Or all together. Or simply in this moment. II Lead flags of the sea. Steel furls of the surf. Day smoke and night smoke. Fire at the smoke’s top. A passion from the world in a calm eye. A calm of the world in the eye of passion. The day that sank birdless from staring Calvary was another. And only another. And no other than the clucking calm of Eden fussed to rest from the black bush afire in the first eye. A calm-in-violence like Aegean time. Day smoke and night smoke over the palled sea tensed for a clash of tridents. Far ashore, a staring army camped beside a temple, the base of the temple black with powder stains, the pediment flashing wild in light above. —A day of the world in which a part of the world looked at another, two parts of a mist. At Cassino the dusty German wetting his lips, his eyes crashed in his face like unhatched birds’ eggs splashed from their nest, looked East from the burning night. There was no West. Light came from nowhere behind him, slanted, flowed level, drained. He looked out, waiting. Where had it come from, the light of his terrible patience? A dead man waited to die on the shell-scraped stones of another God, dust of the stones caked to his body, rivers of blood within him ran to their dusty sea beside the world. Calm in his changes, risen from his changes, he looked his life out at the smoking world. III I have no more to do than what I wait for under the changing light and the gulls afire in rays of rose-quartz. Holy ghosts of the sea, they rise in light from behind me. The light lifts long from the edge of the world and juts away over the top of the dark. My life sits visible to itself; and I sit still in a company of survivors and the dead. Jew. Greek, German, man at the edge of himself in the long light over the worlds he ran to to save unsaved. I practice the man in all, clutching the world from the world to praise it.

—Now let me tell you why I said that. Try to put yourself into an experimental mood. Stop right here and try to review everything you felt about that line. Did you accept it as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe, for your private anthology of Telling Truths? My point is that the line is fraudulent. A blurb. It is also relevant that I know at least a dozen devoutly intellectual journals that will gladly buy any fourteen such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and compound the felony by calling that a sonnet. —Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for the record, let me add that I am a cynic with one wife, three children, and other invest- ments. Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a pack for the fun of it? It won’t really do I’m something else. Were I to dramatize myself, I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting the devil as a master of make-up, and that among his favorite impersonations he appears, often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks, tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.” I guess what the devil gets out of this—if he is the fool he seems to be—is the illusion of imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced and we are all damned. For all of us, unless we are carefully warned, will accept such noises as examples of the sound an actual mind makes. Why arc we damned then?—I am glad you asked that. It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question. (Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.) In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer I have memorized: We are damned for accepting as the sound a man makes, the sound of something else, thereby losing the truth of our own sound. How do we learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.) —by listening to what men there have been and are —by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning Law)—and by reading what we read not for its oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into your heads and you will know what tones to exclude. — if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings, and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear that has listened enough to be a listener. As for the devil—when he has finished every imp- ersonation, the best he will have been able to accomplish is only that sound which is exactly not the music.

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds. Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean. Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss I am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we make the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

I did not have exactly a way of life but the bee amazed me and the wind’s plenty was almost believable. Hearing a magpie laugh through a ghost town in Wyoming, saying Hello in Cambridge, eating cheese by the frothy Rhine, leaning from plexiglass over Tokyo, I was not able to make one life of all the presences I haunted. Still the bee amazed me, and I did not care to call accounts from the wind. Once only, at Pompeii, I fell into a sleep I understood, and woke to find I had not lost my way.

There are diagrams on stilts all wired together Over the hill and the wind and out of sight. There is a scar in the trees where they walk away Beyond me. There are signs of something Nearly God (or at least most curious) About them. I think those diagrams are not At rest. I think they are a way of ciphering God: He is the hugest socket and all his miracles Are wired behind him scarring the hill and the wind As the waterfall flies roaring to his city On the open palms of the diagram. There is Shining, I suppose, in that city at night And measure for miracles, and wheels whirling So quick-silver they seem to be going backwards. And there’s a miracle already. But I Went naked through his wood of diagrams On a day of the rain beside me to his city. When I kissed that socket with my wet lip My teeth fell out, my fingers sprouted chives, And what a bald head chewed on my sick heart!

A boy came up the street and there was a girl. "Hello," they said in passing, then didn’t pass. They began to imagine. They imagined all night and woke imagining what the other imagined. Later they woke with no need to imagine. They were together. They kept waking together. Once they woke a daughter who got up and went looking for something without looking back. But they had one another. Then one of them died. It makes no difference which. Either. The other tried to imagine dying, and couldn’t really, but died later, maybe to find out, though probably not. Not everything that happens is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is.