Devotions upon Emergent Occassions, no. 17
John Donne
No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the
main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory
were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or
of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bells
tolls; it tolls for thee.
May 4th, 2007 at 4:44 am
Glenn,
I’d like to share this poem with you. It’s by the British American poet Nathaniel Tarn.
SECTION: THE INVISIBLE BRIDE (1)
Once in my life, in her life
Love looked at me a certain way with the look which doesn’t lie
and I saw she’d been burnished to her ultimate beauty:
I remember it was in the middle of something we were doing—
I looked up to say something light about some comment
and for some reason/ ah what reason on that night?
THERE WAS THE LOOK OF FIRE
As if she’d just achieved final illumination:
it was in the middle of something we were doing
but the details escape me—
Do not disturb this peace,
darkness of the world,
do not invade this house of bliss,
this happiness wrested from the moment of life,
do not disturb this hard-come-by,
laboriously won victory over restlessness,
don’t rummage around in the furniture
which has all become now one bed of peace:
last manifesto of love,
last chance on earth of this tradition:
and as I run out into the new, with eyes open into disaster,
scream of man turned to deer
boy to prey in the eagle’s beak
woman to laurel in the sun’s embraces
that scream of longing satisfied /
hiccup of satisfied desire / orgasmic cry
do not disturb this peace for the fee my words shall pay you!
In her garret above the city, love lies a’ dying
singing the arias she remembers one after another
waiting for her lover to show up
so she can rise and feel
the scald of love in her bones
the green trees calling where they live
and leaning on her elbow,
she sings she sings she sings
RINASCE! RINASCE! RINASCE!
(but is yet to perish),
From the century’s lips my wife speaks out in her own name,
crying the lost man of her youth and all her gardens in disarray,
my children melt in the sun of another country
which is the country I have left
to come to this beginning of the deaths we have to die
at the windows of this town
bursting with cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums
suddenly/ suddenly, in the middle of
in the middle of something we were doing,
the windows of the city full of petals and crying telephones!
They that have not learned the art of life
how shall they come to the art of thanatos
how start into the magnificent avenues of their dying,
opening out from the city into their childhood landscape,
and then, as shadows darken over eyes and ears,
begin into the alleys of death, turning aside from the highways,
wending their way from arteries into small veins,
dead-ends, cul-de-sacs, circular plazas,
where the dark rulers of the world sit on their golden stools,
drugs on their lips, pronouncing fates?
You are a region of my heart, death of the small entrances
you are the population of that province
with big round eyes like an owl’s, ringed with longing
and you run toward empire
as you would run to fat
your population grows apace
with a growl as of organs in churches
a bellow of morning choirs:
your population is growing
BEYOND ALL HEALTH