Like a lot of people, I first started reading poetry in anthologies. The only problem with that is you don't have the surrounding poems to help enrich the poems that are selected. Sort of like the difference between seeing one painting and an entire series. With that said, this first poem would have been written when Kinnell was in his mid 30's. The portion of the second, written to his daughter while an infant, in his mid 40's.
Poem of Night
--Galway Kinnell
1
I move my hand over
Slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that gave way so easily
It's a shock to feel under them
The indifferent smile of bones.
Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.
2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand-- and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.
3
A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.
4
Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.
You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.
5
And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.
I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave toward the emptiness.
And now from Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight:
5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a cafe at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine finds its shapes in upward opening glasses,
and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be a memory,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come-- to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
The still undanced cadence of vanishing.
3 comments:
I've wrestled with this issue myself, reading 19th century literature. I've deliberately tried to read at least some "original" books - of Browning, Whitman, and so on. Often, I have to reconstruct them from big Collected Poems volumes.
The downside is, I have sure read some poor poems by these guys! Dated, impenetrable, or simply lost amidst the better poems. But I think the effort is usually worth it.
I've been enjoying the Kinnell poems. I've never read more than the few that I found in anthologies.
I have a collected Wordsworth poems, so I know what you mean about having to wade through a lot of mediocre materials. But, it does provide more insight into the writing. I think even more so with modern poets due to the increase abstraction.
I felt this so strongly reading through Emily Dickinson recently, an author with no book, no fixed arrangement. Every fragment seemed necessary, every shading of a word potentially important.
Not that I claim to have actually read the poems that well.
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