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This year, for the first time in quite a while,
I've lived in the South, and I thought
I would write a long sequence of poems about the South.
But I found I really didn't have that much to say about this now
that I--
and I found myself wishing others hadn't had quite so
much to say either, frankly.
But I did write a couple of sonnets, of all things,
about the South that seemed-- if the South is a little old
fashioned as-- let's face it, it still tries to be--
then I felt it was appropriate enough
to use a somewhat old fashioned form to say something
about the South.
I like the South, with reservations,
and I hope these poems show that.
The first is, at least, tentatively--
I'm still thinking about these poems-- is still,
it's called, right now, "Reverence
for the Grandfather."
It's hard for me to read all the little revisions written,
and that's why--
"Reverence for the Grandfather."
"There used to be a way the sunlight caught the webs
of caterpillars and the pecans.
The boy's shadow would lengthen to a man's, out
towards the tree rows then.
And if he thought some sleepy god had dreamed it all up,
well, there was the grandfather Lincoln, tall and solemn,
tapping his pipe out on a white, flaked column, all broodingly,
as the pipe stars flared and fell.
And this with the air of someone at his job.
The quiet would hold then, till some far train broke it,
and the great silver watch rose from his pocket.
Almost on time, he nodded, and from his fob,
the watch hung, gleaming like a little moon.
It would be evening soon then, very soon."
The second begins with a long epigraph, a long quotation
from Henry James' notebooks, which he scribbled down
in Canada--
Coronado Beach, California-- in the same hotel,
I understand that The Stunt Man was mostly filmed at.
Did you see that movie?
Imagine that scene.
He's just come from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where
he saw for the first time the monument dedicated
by his brother William to their dead sister Alice,
where he was very much moved, and he
writes this in his notebooks.
"But why do I write of the all unutterable
and the all abysmal?
Why does my pen not drop from my hand
on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past?
It does-- poor, helpless pen--
with what it meets of the ineffable,
what it meets the cold Medusa-face of life,
of all the life lived, underlined on every side--
Basta, Basta.