Sunday, August 6, 2017

Islands of Maine Fading




Frog Pond, Baxter State Park, yesterday. We did a short mile and a half out, mile and a half back, then drove the 46 mile park road from south to north. Bought maps, reconnoitered. Conclusions? Our fat asses couldn't be dragged over the big mountains - we'll be ready next year. With lots of Deet. Lots of Deet. That short hike taught us well, and we had Deet.

Two more things confirmed about Maine. The vast nowhere between somewheres exists. The worthiness of crossing that nowhere to get to somewhere is true. Oh, a third: Maine always whispers, careful, I can kill you if you're not wary. I believe it.






I'm sitting in the breakfast lobby of a Comfort Inn in Bangor Maine at 630 in the morning. Earthgirl is still sleeping. We got one of the last rooms available in Bangor yesterday evening. There is a Fitz and the Tantrums concert on Bangor waterfront, IT'S A BIG DEAL. If I remember correctly, Fitz and the Tantrums are a current Hall and Oates rip-off band. Could verify; fuck that. But the breakfast lobby is full of the elderly. I'm elderly - I'll be 58 in three weeks - and I'm the youngest here. I don't think the elderly in the lobby are in Bangor for Fitz and the Tantrums, so there must be a convention of some sort too. So have links.








 

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

Muriel Rukeyser

These roads will take you into your own country.
Seasons and maps coming where this road comes
into a landscape mirrored in these men.
   
Past all your influences, your home river,
constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood,
parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes.
   
What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
cough in the theatres of the war.
   
What two things shall never be seen?
They : what we did.     Enemy : what we mean.
This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.
   
What three things can never be done?
Forget.     Keep silent.     Stand alone.
The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.
   
The facts of war forced into actual grace.
Seasons and modern glory.     Told in the histories,
               how first ships came
   
seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds
lining the west horizon with their white
               shining halations;
   
they conquered, throwing off impossible Europe—
could not be used to transform; created coast—
               breathed-in America.
   
See how they took the land, made after-life
fresh out of exile, planted the pioneer
               base and blockade,
   
pushed forests down in an implacable walk
west where new clouds lay at the desirable
               body of sunset;
   
taking the seaboard.     Replaced the isolation,
dropped cities where they stood, drew a tidewater
               frontier of Europe,
   
a moment, and another frontier held,
this land was planted home-land that we know.
               Ridge of discovery,
   
until we walk to windows, seeing America
lie in a photograph of power, widened
               before our forehead,
   
and still behind us falls another glory,
London unshaken, the long French road to Spain,
               the old Mediterranean
   
flashing new signals from the hero hills
near Barcelona, monuments and powers,
               parent defenses.
   
Before our face the broad and concrete west,
green ripened field, frontier pushed back like river
               controlled and dammed;
   
the flashing wheatfields, cities, lunar plains
grey in Nevada, the sane fantastic country
               sharp in the south,
   
liveoak, the hanging moss, a world of desert,
the dead, the lava, and the extreme arisen
               fountain of life,
   
the flourished land, people with watercourses
to California and the colored sea;
               sums of frontiers
   
and unmade boundaries of acts and poems,
the brilliant scene between the seas, and standing,
               this fact and this disease.
                       ______________
   
Half-memories absorb us, and our ritual world
carries its history in familiar eyes,
planted in flesh it signifies its music
   
in minds which turn to sleep and memory,
in music knowing all the shimmering names,
the spear, the castle, and the rose.
   
But planted in our flesh these valleys stand,
everywhere we begin to know the illness,
are forced up, and our times confirm us all.
   
In the museum life, centuries of ambition
yielded at last a fertilizing image:
the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman
   
carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove,
on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist
cross to her feet, a pointed human crown.
   
This valley is given to us like a glory.
To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands
that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face.
   
All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet,
and art to see after the change of heart;
all the belligerents who know the world.
   
You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners,
you workers and hope of countries, first among powers;
you who give peace and bodily repose,
   
opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands
physical peace, flooding old battlefields
with general brilliance, who best love your lives;
   
and you young, you who finishing the poem
wish new perfection and begin to make;
you men of fact, measure our times again.
                    _____________
   
These are our strength, who strike against history.
These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness
               to our diseases;
   
these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
               drilling their death.
  
These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death on the lips and with their warning
               glow in their graves.
   
These weaves and their eyes water and rust away,
these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,
               these farm and starve,
   
all these men cry their doom across the world,
meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,
               find every war.
   
Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers,
fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid
               lines of defense.
   
Defense is sight; widen the lens and see
standing over the land myths of identity,
               new signals, processes:
   
Alloys begin : certain dominant metals.
Deliberate combines add new qualities,
               sums of new uses.
   
Over the country, from islands of Maine fading,
Cape Sable fading south into the orange
               detail of sunset,
   
new processes, new signals, new possession.
A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory
               deep in these powers.
   
Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,
to photograph and to extend the voice,
               to speak this meaning.
   
Voices to speak to us directly.     As we move.
As we enrich, growing in larger motion,
               this word, this power.
   
Down coasts of taken countries, mastery,
discovery at one hand, and at the other
               frontiers and forests,
   
fanatic cruel legend at our back and
speeding ahead the red and open west,
               and this our region,
   
desire, field, beginning.    Name and road,
communication to these many men,
as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

  

4 comments:

  1. maine and music

    1)most people haven't heard andy pratt's "deer song" - and reading the lyrics gives you less than half of the experience, i assure you - the minor guitar chords, the mandolin, the wind sound effects -

    Deer run all over the forests of Maine,
    And the snow is all white on the pines;
    and the sad laughing cry of the seagull dies
    just like mine;

    I walked all over these dark windy woods,
    with my hunting spear and disguise;
    But the green trees all groaned
    at the sight of the wound in my eyes;

    Soft is the voice that I hear in my heart,
    And cold as the steel traps outside,
    As I stare in the ember,
    it's you I remember,
    my sweet summer bride;
    You.

    (Andy Pratt, 1973, Columbia Records)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0IgI9Zt-3g

    2)appearing in bangor last night - fitz and the tantrums - yes, there is a daryl hall-esqueness about them, a ny times story about it, various performances with daryl on youtube, their appearance at daryl's house - finding these are left as an exercise to the reader

    3)appearing TONITE in bangor - dark star orchestra, a chicago-based grateful dead cover band - is this why all the oldsters are filling up the rooms in bangor? maybe

    elderly

    1)58 is elderly? you should go visit people in senior housing

    2) victor hugo: 40 is the old age of youth, 50 the youth of old age

    3) bob newhart - 60 feels just like 30, as long as you're sitting down

    4)50 is the new 40; 60 is the new 58

    5)halt, passenger!
    as you are now, so once was i
    as i am now, so you shall be
    prepare for death, and follow me

    6)bop til you drop

    7)One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment. But first you must learn how to keep it in mind. [this last one is from https://www.gurdjieff.org/aphorisms.htm]

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  2. how poetry works

    i've just enjoyed reading the chapter on albert goldbarth's "A Wooden Eye. An 1884 Silver Dollar. A Homemade Explosive. A Set of False Teeth. And a 14-Karat Gold Ashtray"

    in

    The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them
    by Stephen Burt (2016)

    my local county community college owns a copy of burt's book, but i read the essay at

    http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_burt_goldbarth.php

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  3. Beautiful photos. There's a painting in the one of Frog Pond.

    Muriel Rocks. As always, thanks for the Kind.

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  4. I agree with Mongo. Those are some great pictures, some nice creativity there. Regarding hiking, some people just don't get it. When I told one person I really enjoyed hiking he said it was a waste of time because you either go in a circle or go and come back the same way. He said I should get an ATV (I hate those things) and I told him it was a waste of time to go in an ATV because you either go in a circle or go and come back the same way.

    Though I have enjoyed hiking with other people my favorite is going solo. Those are the times that I see more wildlife. You take friends and they can't stop talking so animals hear you coming a mile away. Going solo I've had encounters with bobcats, coyotes, and other animals because I don't make a lot of noise. Plus the peace and quiet enables you to appreciate the natural world in a different way. Looks like you had a great time on your hikes and I enjoyed the pictures and your comments.

    ReplyDelete