209 Nostalgia poems

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood and you are passing a crumbling mansion completely hidden behind old willows or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks and giant firs standing hip to hip, you know again that behind that wall, under the uncut hair of the willows something secret is going on, so marvelous and dangerous that if you crawled through and saw, you would die, or be happy forever.

For Micah Ruelle We were not green in judgment or cold in blood like Cleopatra in her youth who still was ordering chopped radish in her bowls back then, the hearts all gone to pieces next to the winter greens that in our days we never had use for so smitten were we with fire and ovens that I was gravy in judgment, which might not mean much unless you’ve taken a spoon of it and poured it back over a dumpling shaped like your heart so that it became even softer, something you could not have thought possible. It’s all happening now, you liked to say, and I agreed, though it was not the news from the outside I relished, but the daily Extra! Extra! the light of the morning brought to my attention every time we woke in your house or my house and my heart — salty, risen — was warm again in a way it hadn’t been for years. Organ of passion, organ of righteousness that has never had a single flavor cross its lips, how could you know how much I would miss the honey of those days, her drizzle of it on the turkey bacon, my cracking pepper up and down the pan, the sweet meat of happiness I would no longer let pass between our teeth.

Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes! No longer leave thy wistful flock unfed, Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropp'd herbage shoot another head. But when the fields are still, And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, And only the white sheep are sometimes seen Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch'd green. Come, shepherd, and again begin the quest! Here, where the reaper was at work of late— In this high field's dark corner, where he leaves His coat, his basket, and his earthen cruse, And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves, Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use— Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the corn— All the live murmur of a summer's day. Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field, And here till sun-down, shepherd! will I be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep; And air-swept lindens yield Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid, And bower me from the August sun with shade; And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers. And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book— Come, let me read the oft-read tale again! The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore, And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deem'd, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more. But once, years after, in the country-lanes, Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew, Met him, and of his way of life enquired; Whereat he answer'd, that the gipsy-crew, His mates, had arts to rule as they desired The workings of men's brains, And they can bind them to what thoughts they will. "And I," he said, "the secret of their art, When fully learn'd, will to the world impart; But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill." This said, he left them, and return'd no more.— But rumours hung about the country-side, That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray, Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied, In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey, The same the gipsies wore. Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring; At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors, On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock'd boors Had found him seated at their entering, But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly. And I myself seem half to know thy looks, And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace; And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks I ask if thou hast pass'd their quiet place; Or in my boat I lie Moor'd to the cool bank in the summer-heats, 'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills, And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats. For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground! Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe, Returning home on summer-nights, have met Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, As the punt's rope chops round; And leaning backward in a pensive dream, And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream. And then they land, and thou art seen no more!— Maidens, who from the distant hamlets come To dance around the Fyfield elm in May, Oft through the darkening fields have seen thee roam, Or cross a stile into the public way. Oft thou hast given them store Of flowers—the frail-leaf'd, white anemony, Dark bluebells drench'd with dews of summer eves, And purple orchises with spotted leaves— But none hath words she can report of thee. And, above Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here In June, and many a scythe in sunshine flames, Men who through those wide fields of breezy grass Where black-wing'd swallows haunt the glittering Thames, To bathe in the abandon'd lasher pass, Have often pass'd thee near Sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown; Mark'd thine outlandish garb, thy figure spare, Thy dark vague eyes, and soft abstracted air— But, when they came from bathing, thou wast gone! At some lone homestead in the Cumner hills, Where at her open door the housewife darns, Thou hast been seen, or hanging on a gate To watch the threshers in the mossy barns. Children, who early range these slopes and late For cresses from the rills, Have known thee eyeing, all an April-day, The springing pasture and the feeding kine; And mark'd thee, when the stars come out and shine, Through the long dewy grass move slow away. In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood— Where most the gipsies by the turf-edged way Pitch their smoked tents, and every bush you see With scarlet patches tagg'd and shreds of grey, Above the forest-ground called Thessaly— The blackbird, picking food, Sees thee, nor stops his meal, nor fears at all; So often has he known thee past him stray, Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray, And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall. And once, in winter, on the causeway chill Where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go, Have I not pass'd thee on the wooden bridge, Wrapt in thy cloak and battling with the snow, Thy face tow'rd Hinksey and its wintry ridge? And thou has climb'd the hill, And gain'd the white brow of the Cumner range; Turn'd once to watch, while thick the snowflakes fall, The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall— Then sought thy straw in some sequester'd grange. But what—I dream! Two hundred years are flown Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls, And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe That thou wert wander'd from the studious walls To learn strange arts, and join a gipsy-tribe; And thou from earth art gone Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid— Some country-nook, where o'er thy unknown grave Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave, Under a dark, red-fruited yew-tree's shade. —No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours! For what wears out the life of mortal men? 'Tis that from change to change their being rolls; 'Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls And numb the elastic powers. Till having used our nerves with bliss and teen, And tired upon a thousand schemes our wit, To the just-pausing Genius we remit Our worn-out life, and are—what we have been. Thou hast not lived, why should'st thou perish, so? Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire; Else wert thou long since number'd with the dead! Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire! The generations of thy peers are fled, And we ourselves shall go; But thou possessest an immortal lot, And we imagine thee exempt from age And living as thou liv'st on Glanvil's page, Because thou hadst—what we, alas! have not. For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. O life unlike to ours! Who fluctuate idly without term or scope, Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives, And each half lives a hundred different lives; Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope. Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day— Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too? Yes, we await it!—but it still delays, And then we suffer! and amongst us one, Who most has suffer'd, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne; And all his store of sad experience he Lays bare of wretched days; Tells us his misery's birth and growth and signs, And how the dying spark of hope was fed, And how the breast was soothed, and how the head, And all his hourly varied anodynes. This for our wisest! and we others pine, And wish the long unhappy dream would end, And waive all claim to bliss, and try to bear; With close-lipp'd patience for our only friend, Sad patience, too near neighbour to despair— But none has hope like thine! Thou through the fields and through the woods dost stray, Roaming the country-side, a truant boy, Nursing thy project in unclouded joy, And every doubt long blown by time away. O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife— Fly hence, our contact fear! Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood! Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern From her false friend's approach in Hades turn, Wave us away, and keep thy solitude! Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, With a free, onward impulse brushing through, By night, the silver'd branches of the glade— Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue, On some mild pastoral slope Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales Freshen thy flowers as in former years With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, From the dark tingles, to the nightingales! But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest; And we should win thee from thy own fair life, Like us distracted, and like us unblest. Soon, soon thy cheer would die, Thy hopes grow timorous, and unfix'd thy powers, And thy clear aims be cross and shifting made; And then thy glad perennial youth would fade, Fade and grow old at last, and die like ours. Then fly our greetings, fly our speech and smiles! —As some grave Tyrian trader, from the sea, Descried at sunrise an emerging prow Lifting the cool-hair'd creepers stealthily, The fringes of a southward-facing brow Among the Ægæan Isles; And saw the merry Grecian coaster come, Freighted with amber grapes, and Chian wine, Green, bursting figs, and tunnies steep'd in brine— And knew the intruders on his ancient home, The young light-hearted masters of the waves— And snatch'd his rudder, and shook out more sail; And day and night held on indignantly O'er the blue Midland waters with the gale, Betwixt the Syrtes and soft Sicily, To where the Atlantic raves Outside the western straits; and unbent sails There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam, Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come; And on the beach undid his corded bales.

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts, and I’d like to quit the committee for naming tornadoes. Do you remember how easy and sad it was to be young and defined by our bicycles? My first was yellow, and though it was no Black Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone, chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear family in a television show totally unaffected by a distant war. Then we returned to the green living room to watch the No Names hold our Over the Hill Gang under the monotinted chromatic defeated Super Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building on K Street NW where a few minor law firms mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers and Meat Cutters. A black hand already visits my father in sleep, moving up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will never know a single thing anyone feels, just how they say it, which is why I am standing here exactly, covered in shame and lightning, doing what I’m supposed to do.

How did the valentines age so fast? Most of the names are forgotten. Billy, Billy, Billy, Jill I think strangers sent them out like advertising hoping I'd surrender. But Jill, Jill, Jill and Billy Bill, shared memories aren't easily kept. Secrets wash out of the ocean blank all over. I am sitting on a beach chair somewhere in the middle of the century, pretending I remember a garden of broken banjos and butterflies, old movies. Valentines from Valentino, Notes from Norma. Worms and spiders thrown at waves. Box of my names, shut up.

Held in a late season At a shifting of worlds, In the golden balance of autumn, Out of love and reason We made our peace; Stood still in October In the failing light and sought, Each in the other, ease And release from silence, From the slow damnation Of speech that is weak And falls from silence. In the October sun By the green river we spoke, Late in October, the leaves Of the water maples had fallen. But whatever we said In the bright leaves was lost, Quick as the leaf-fall, Brittle and blood red. For Kenneth Rexroth, 1950

This is my past where no one knows me. These are my friends whom I can’t name— Here in a field where no one chose me, The faces older, the voices the same. Why does this stranger rise to greet me? What is the joke that makes him smile, As he calls the children together to meet me, Bringing them forward in single file? I nod pretending to recognize them, Not knowing exactly what I should say. Why does my presence seem to surprise them? Who is the woman who turns away? Is this my home or an illusion? The bread on the table smells achingly real. Must I at last solve my confusion, Or is confusion all I can feel?

Cutlery clatters into the sink. But always the characters, uniquely themselves, only some decades older. They search for their coats. You were, she reminds him, our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos: Morningside Heights, one of your lives. Thirty years since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes— East Africa his beat, Germany hers—he’ll visit the nephew, the namesake in Boston who drives a cab, sends a pittance each month to a wellhead in—we’ll call it Sudan. He explains how it works, this drip feed of cash to Sudan from the United States: cheap, fast. She’s not clear about this—he jots her a website: it’s a place she can go. So they won’t meet again...suddenly Can you forgive me? he blurts— a classmate’s apartment, Upper West Side, the grown child’s room, bears in tidy shrines, scrum of sloughed coats. In the kitchen friends wash up. Sound of laughter. Sound of water flowing out of a tap.Yes, she replies, shocked by the twinge, then ache, of remorse. She “forgot”? And him—thirty years— the place still hurts?It’s myself I can’t forgive, she knows later. Right now, vague shame. End of March. Maybe April. Street trees are trying to bloom. The irretrievable sits on the table, white as a plate. He holds her her coat.

Beside a spreading elm, from whose high boughs Like knotted tufts the crow’s light dwelling shows, Where screened from northern blasts, and winter-proof, Snug stands the parson’s barn with thatched roof; At chaff-strewed door where, in the morning ray, The gilded motes in mazy circles play, And sleepy Comrade in the sun is laid, More grateful to the cur than neighbouring shade. In snowy shirt unbraced, brown Robin stood, And leant upon his flail in thoughtful mood: His full round cheek where deeper flushes glow, The dewy drops which glisten on his brow; His dark cropped pate that erst at church or fair, So smooth and silky, showed his morning’s care, Which, all uncouth in matted locks combined, Now, ends erect, defies the ruffling wind; His neck-band loose, and hosen rumpled low, A careful lad, nor slack at labour, show. Nor scraping chickens chirping ’mongst the straw, Nor croaking rook o’erhead, nor chattering daw; Loud-breathing cow amongst the rampy weeds, Nor grunting sow that in the furrows feeds: Nor sudden breeze that shakes the quaking leaves, And lightly rustles through the scattered sheaves; Nor floating straw that skims athwart his nose, The deeply-musing youth may discompose. For Nelly fair, the blithest village maid, Whose tuneful voice beneath the hedgerow-shade, At early milking, o’er the meadows borne, E’er cheered the ploughman’s toil at rising morn: The neatest maid that e’er, in linen gown, Bore cream and butter to the market town: The tightest lass, that with untutored air, E’er footed alehouse floor at wake or fair, Since Easter last had Robin’s heart possessed, And many a time disturbed his nightly rest. Full oft, returning from the loosened plough, He slacked his pace, and knit his thoughtful brow; And oft, ere half his thresher’s talk was o’er, Would muse, with arms across, at cooling door: His mind thus bent, with downcast eyes he stood, And leant upon his flail in thoughtful mood. His soul o’er many a soft rememberance ran, And, muttering to himself, the youth began. ‘Ah! happy is the man whose early lot Hath made him master of a furnished cot; Who trains the vine that round his window grows, And after setting sun his garden hoes; Whose wattled pales his own enclosure shield, Who toils not daily in another’s field. Wheree’er he goes, to church or market-town, With more respect he and his dog are known; A brisker face he wears at wake or fair, Nor views with longing eyes the pedlar’s ware, But buys at will or ribbands, gloves or beads, And willing maidens to the alehouse leads; And, oh! secure from toils which cumber life, He makes the maid he loves an easy wife. Ah, Nelly! canst thou, with contented mind, Become the helpmate of a labouring hind, And share his lot, whate’er the chances be, Who hath no dower but love to fix on thee? Yes, gayest maid may meekest matron prove, And things of little note may ’token love. When from the church thou cam’st at eventide And I and red-haired Susan by thy side, I pulled the blossoms from the bending tree, And some to Susan gave, and some to thee; Thine were the best, and well thy smiling eye The difference marked, and guessed the reason why. When on a holiday we rambling strayed, And passed old Hodge’s cottage in the glade; Neat was the garden dressed, sweet hummed the bee, I wished both cot and Nelly made for me; And well methought thy very eyes revealed The self-same wish within thy breast concealed. When artful, once, I sought my love to tell, And spoke to thee of one who loved thee well, You saw the cheat, and jeering homeward hied, Yet secret pleasure in thy looks I spied. Ay, gayest maid may meekest matron prove, And smaller signs than these have ’tokened love.’ Now, at a distance, on the neighbouring plain, With creaking wheels slow comes the heavy wain: High on its towering load a maid appears, And Nelly’s voice sounds shrill in Robin’s ears. Quick from his hand he throws the cumbrous flail, And leaps with lightsome limbs the enclosing pale. O’er field and fence he scours, and furrows wide, With wakened Comrade barking by his side; Whilst tracks of trodden grain, and sidelong hay, And broken hedge-flowers sweet, mark his impetuous way.

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!