The Secretary of Peace, maybe, and other notions

including the noisy clatter of destruction,
and grief according to Dylan Thomas,
and Palestinian grief according to Mahmoud Darwish

It's hard to tell whether Rita Dove is bearing witness on behalf of the people about whom she writes, or whether she is placing them beyond our reach, leaving us unable to do anything about what is happening to them. I want her to be clearer--to tell me what to do--after she shares with us the reflections of a slave or of, say, a Benjamin Banneker, who himself seems to have lived with only one foot in this life and one foot out.

Still, Banneker promoted the idea of a cabinet-level Secretary of Peace. And earned the devotion and respect of others. I guess it's fair to say that Dove, a former U.S. poet laureate has done the same.

And she writes some haunting and beautiful poems, too.

"Where his frail hands paused
breath lingered, so that I am now

"restless, a perfumed fan,"

Dove writes in "The Kadava Kumbis Devise a Way to Marry for Love," which appears to involve first marrying a gentle man with a loving touch, although perhaps lacking the robustness to endure, and then marrying another, maybe,

"that ragged man on the hill,
watching from a respectful distance."

And who are the Kadava Kumbis, anyhow? Perhaps a people out of African history, out of African-American lore. Dove's poems may be emotionally rich; they are certainly shrouded in mist, and call for careful exploration, maybe more care than I can muster.

Though Dove may be difficult, Dylan Thomas is more so, but also sonorous as a single bass note.

"And she who lies,
Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
Brand of the lily's anger on her ring,
Tugged through the days
Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
On field and sand
The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
Engraving going."

Well.

The stanza is from Thomas' "A Grief Ago," which, I suppose, is a grief one manages to get over, but almost everything Dylan Thomas wrote seems to carry multiple meanings. I would have thought she who lies could be lying or dead, maybe, or maybe simply lying down, but then there's the rest of the poem to contend with or, even, the next sentence, which is clearly a biblical reference, but even so is quite ambiguous, though I did find a guy writing on something called Insane Journal, who appears to believe the lying is actually "having a shag in  the middle of the garden," which is "the most romantic fucking thing you can think of," which I guess makes sense, given what went on in Eden.

One has difficulty imagining a lily's anger. It's hard to see how that could be the worst part of tugging a burden "of heritage" (family trauma survived for which she seeks absolution?) behind. But it seems also that most people who love Dylan Thomas "hear" his meaning, not think it. One should maybe focus on grokking Thomas' work.

Joy Harjo isn't very prescriptive, either. In fact, in "Who invented death and crows and is there anything we can do to calm the noisy clatter of destruction?" Harjo wants to know what we think. And so she asks,

"What do you make of it?"

A guy I know once stood by the side of a road, hitchhiking, and also tripping (on acid). He watched a whole lot of cars go by during a long wait for a new ride, was asked exactly the same question by a companion. "What do you make of it?" He is reported to have responded, "a potholder," which made no sense at the time, and does not do as an answer to Harjo's question, either.

For relief from ambiguity, we might turn to Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, who was both poet and PLO official. His "Earth Poem" is no call to go green. It concludes:

"And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains"

This message does not have the virtue of lifting our spirits, but it is truth-telling and there is something uplifting about that. Solidarity with Darwish and the Palestinian people also leads me to my own version of truth as I tried to spell it out (no ambiguity here) in my poem Always Jewish, Lately Palestinian, which can be found in its entirety on Outdoor Poetry Season:


"I am Jewish because I am a child of Abraham;
Palestinians, therefore, are my brothers and sisters.
We are all children of Abraham.
I am Palestinian because Jews, too, have been homeless.
I am Palestinian because we have a future together or none, at all.
I am Palestinian because Palestinian yearning is so like Jewish yearning.
I am Palestinian because Jews have been uplifted by the love of Palestinians.
I am Palestinian because peace in Arabic and in Hebrew bestows the same gift.
Although Sarah and Hagar are our separate birth mothers,
I am Palestinian because we all live in the embrace of one mother,
and will return to her.

"If you summon one of us for cruel judgment, there will be no telling us apart. "

The Force That Through the Green Fuse...

Nate muscles up a metaphor

I left our family home when Nate was 14 and Julie was nine. My separation from their mother ended in divorce about three years later, about the time that I moved down to Dayton to live with Marrianne. But working for the American Friends Service Committee I travelled a lot and being the noncustodial parent, I wasn't as present in Nate and Julie's life as I wanted to be. A frequently absent father is not a good thing, but kids do a lot of adapting and find ways to compensate. Nate certainly did, finding a number of different adult males to guide and mentor him.

One such man, Jack, the father of Nate's high school girlfriend, worked as a therapist. He took a real interest in Nate and they developed a friendship that outlasted Nate's relationship with his girlfriend. A couple of days ago, in a long phone call, Nate talked about Jack for a bit. In trying to describe aspects of Jack's outlook on life, Nate grasped for a line, the first line, from a Dylan Thomas poem. "I can't remember it exactly," he said, "but it's something about 'the power rushing through a green fuse.'"

Nate's comment excited me; I've been a Dylan Thomas fan since high school when I actually decoded, if only briefly, some of Thomas' complex metaphors. That experience of sudden comprehension thrilled me, and seeking to recreate the rush, I've frequently returned to Thomas' poems over the years. And then there's Thomas' voice (you can hear a recording of him here), for me the most sonorous and elegant and compelling (and Welsh) of all voices, with the possible exception of James Earl Jones (except for the Welsh part) in his prime.

So, forgetting for the moment that Nate was trying to make a point about Jack, I dug out my copy of Thomas' Collected Poems, while Nate lingered on the line. Though it is a digression of fairly significant dimensions, I cannot resist observing that my hardcover copy, published by New Directions and in its 23rd printing when I bought it, sold for $3.80, discounted by the now defunct University Cellar Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Mich. from its cover price of $4.25. The Cellar, a nonprofit bookstore established by the University of Michigan regents in response to student demands for cheaper text books, is a whole other story, but not for now. This digression must conclude.

At any rate, after the second scan through the table of contents, the poem, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," turned up. And as it did, I remembered that Nate was making a point about Jack and quickly understood that he was saying that Jack believed in a pervasive spiritual presence, a "god force," which inhabited all things. Though I had to look up the line to understand what Nate was trying to say, it turned out that he could hardly have been more economical or more vivid in characterizing Jack.

But here's the point: In paraphrasing Thomas, Nate connected two separate ideas that ended up illuminating each other and providing me with the rush of an "aha!" moment; one in which I suddenly understood a good bit of the poem and a whole lot more of it than I had been able to grasp previously.

I haven't been writing poetry much lately, confining myself most often to blogging about politics and the need for social change, And, when I do write poetry, I'm not in the same league as even ordinary Welsh poets, let alone Dylan Thomas. But sometimes reading poetry satisfies some of the same urges that motivate writing poetry. Either way, one frequently wrestles metaphors uphill and gets flattened by runaway tropes, if one's stores of energy run out before reaching a safe place to rest.

But here is the Thomas poem. Read it and see if a decent understanding of the first line doesn't help to unlock the meaning of much of the rest of the poem. And thanks to Nate, also, for somehow always finding a way to teach me something new.


The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.