SPIDERWEB
From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.
-Kay Ryan
ABSENCES
Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.
Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.
Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!
-Philip Larkin
Andrew Swarbrick of the Philip Larkin Society tells us:
“Larkin claimed a special affection for ‘Absences’, perhaps because he knew that in matter and manner it works in ways which might take his readers, and himself, slightly by surprise: ‘I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet than myself,’ he wrote of it. ‘Absences’ was one of the poems from The Less Deceived that we O level schoolboys of the early 1970s didn’t much bother with; not when there were so many other poems which seeemed to say so much more. Now, the poem’s not-saying, the absorption in emptiness, the thrill of self-forgetting seem more fundamental to Larkin’s imagination as a kind of half-submerged, almost-secret longing.”
THE VALLEY WIND
Living in retirement beyond the World,
Silently enjoying isolation,
I pull the rope of my door tighter
And stuff my window with roots and ferns.
My spirit is tuned to the Spring-season;
At the fall of the year there is autumn in my heart.
Thus imitating cosmic changes
My cottage becomes a Universe.
-Lu Yun
I heard this last fall on The Daily Poem podcast and listened again and again…. Unfortunately that reading seems not to be online any longer. Note: The repetition of “lost hours” is not a typo.
It’s a beautiful description of a quiet woodland scene in autumn, contrasted with the poet’s indecision and restlessness. He inserts his own feelings into the drama of sunlight and dead leaves, thirst and rest. While in nature nothing is lost, and renewal always comes, it’s not easy for humans, with our conflicted souls, to receive the blessing.
AUTUMN IDLENESS
This sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be over-run.
But with a blessing every glade receives
High salutation; while from hillock-eaves
The deer gaze calling, dappled white and dun,
As if, foresters of old, the sun
Had marked them with the shade of forest-leaves.
Here dawn to-day unveiled her magic glass;
Here noon now gives the thirst and takes the dew;
Till eve bring rest when other good things pass.
And here the lost hours the lost hours renew
While I lead my shadow o’er the grass,
Nor know, for longing, that which I should do.
-Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gladsome Lights 