| Contemporaries and Ancestors by John Koethe | ||
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Sure, some words were spelled differently, And the clothes and customs weren't the same. Maybe some of the pets were different too —The polecat-ferret, the parakeet— Yet behind the blizzard of appearance From whence those first impressions came There was always something constant, and shared. The stars came out at night, the pale moon rose To a plaintive melody of care, and what was meant by Virtue had the virtue of a name —"Aromatic rose spurred by illusion"— Like an extended sonnet, whose turn Seems inexplicable now. I pull them to myself That where was once unfurled a glittering display Of language written like the stars, A small and truer semblance might unfold. Let brilliance fall from my consideration, That the fragrance of some long-forgotten air Might seize me with a sudden rush, as from a thicket Birds erupt, and startle through the air, And vanish in the bright confusion of their cries. And let the cloak of anonymity descend Over my heart, upon that bordered, public space Wherein the figure of the human soul awaits And in its waiting flourishes and dies, O bear me From these visions of our common suffering! —But the answer is a pond In which one's face is barely visible. The sullen clouds hang low above the trees. The fields stand as empty as the skies. Something marvelous is gone— The intonations of a different form of life That beckoned from the pages of a prayer book And the cadences of hymns one heard a century ago. It was a stronger mode of feeling, A stranger way of being in the world That vanished for the sake of an appearance, A garland of forget-me-nots. Things fall away, And fall away so quickly. Think of the Ink Spots— "Whispering Grass" was almost sixty years ago, But to me it's still a song in high school. Whitman died how many years before my father's birth? Eighteen? And Tennyson? There was a common grace, Sustained by the illusion of a common good, That shook the souls of fools and geniuses alike. And though I realize that none of this is true, The motives seem ingenuous enough: To place an incoherent dream of aspiration In the context of an argument I thought I'd understood— As though the reasoning I'd sought lay dormant In the dark recesses of some half-forgotten books, Whose premises were residues of feeling Tracing out the movements of the intricate Detritus of a spent imagination, until the clouds lift, And the sunlight filters through the thin Venetian blinds, And narrows to this small, irreferential space. __________________________________________________________________________ JOHN KOETHE'S most
recent books of poetry, both from HarperCollins, are "Contemporaries and Ancestors" first appeared in The New Republic.
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