Private and Profane
From loss of the old and lack of the new
From failure to make the right thing do
Save us, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
From words not
the word, from a feckless voice
From poetic
distress and from careless choice
Exclude our
intellects, James Joyce.
From genteel angels and apostles unappalled
From Hollywood visions as virgins shawled
Guard our seeing, Grünewald.
From calling a
kettle an existential pot,
From bodying
the ghost of whatever is not,
John save us,
O most subtle Scot.
From pace without cadence, from pleasures slip-shod
From eating the pease and rejecting the pod
Wolfgang keep us, lover of God.
Couperin come
with your duple measure
Alter our
minds against banal pleasure.
Dürer direct with strictness our vision;
Steady this flesh toward your made precision.
Mistress of
accurate minor pain,
Lend wit for
forbearance, prideless Jane.
From pretending to own what we secretly seek,
From (untimely, discourteous) the turned other cheek,
Protect our honor, Demetrius the Greek.
From ignorance
of structural line and bone
From passion
not pointed on truth alone
Attract us,
painters on Egyptian stone.
From despair
keep us, Aquin’s dumb son;
From despair
keep us, Saint Welcome One;
From lack of
despair keep us, Djuna and John Donne.
That zeal for free will get us in deep,
That the chance to choose be the one we keep
That free will steel self in us against self-defense
That free will repeal in us our last pretense
That free will heal us
Jeanne d’Arc,
Job, Johnnie Skelton,
Jehan de
Beauce, composer Johann,
Dark John
Milton, Charter Oak John,
Strike deep, divide us from cheap-got doubt;
Leap, leap between us and the easy out;
Teach us to seize, to use, to sleep well, to let go;
Let our loves, freed in us, gaudy and graceful, grow.
Anniversary
The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall
all scattered by my shoes, not crying
I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled
opens out in my hands a purse of golden
salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled.
The dancing doll split in an anguish and all
the cords of its elegant limbs unstrung; I
stumble whistling; the bones of my skull
marvelously start to sing, the whole shell
of myself invents without peril and contains a court
aubade.
I hid the dovesmall doll but something found it.
Frightened
I gave the fire what was left. Surrounding, it mulled
dulcet over the melting jeweled two blue eyes.
That night our hearth was desolate, but then its
stones
sprung flowered and the soaring rafters arched.
Now all the house laughs, the sun shouts out clearly:
dawn!
the sea owes us all its treasures; under the soft the
riotous
explosion of our waking kiss or gift, a stone plucked
or shorn
free of gravity falls upward for us, slow, and lies
there, quietly.
A visit
"Fine bitches all, and Molly Dance . ." Djuna Barnes
Come for duty's sake (as girls do) we watch
The sly very old woman wile away from her pious
And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.
She pours big drinks. We think of what
Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in
And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young,
Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower
Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite,
Collapsed to this keen dame moving among
Herself. She hums, the plays with used bright
Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here
My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger
Shows how hot the oven is.
(Also she is alive with hate.
Also she is
afraid of hell. Also, we wish
We might,
illiberal, uncompassionate,
Run from her
smell, her teeth in the dish.)
Even dying, her life is in her. We stand stock still
Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable
smiles.
We manage to mean well. We endure, and more
We learn time's pleasure, catch our future and its
cure.
We're dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near
kin
To any after this of those our mirrors tell us
foolishly envy us,
Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind,
and sure.
Anti-Romantic
I explain ontology, mathematics, theophily,
Symbolism and Aristotelian logic, says the tree.
I demonstrate perspective's and proportion's ways.
I elucidate even greyness by my greys and greys and
greys.
Gravity's laws, the four dimensions, Sapphic imagery,
Come from contemplating me,
Says the tree.
I perfectly exhibit the functions of earth and air:
Look up, at and through, my branches, leaved, budded,
or bare
Laid in their luminous degrees against lustrous
infinity:
Your seeing relates you to all of space, through me.
Here's aesthetics, too. No sight's nearer to perfectly
fair.
I am mediate and immediate, says the tree.
I am variable, exquisite, tough,
Even useful; I am subtle; all this is enough.
I don't want to be a temple, says the tree.
But if you don't behave, I will be.
For
Elizabeth Bleecker Averell, D. 20 June 1957
Abrupt
as that blessing gesture you always made
When we
met or went our ways, you've bravely fled
Lonely
as ever, and no more than usual afraid,
Beyond
us, Elizabeth, abruptly dead.
Outside, bird-sharp songs sprinkle the
sea-green grass;
Small-leaved
trees sparkle with birds in June light, in sea air.
You're not kneeling here. This is your Requiem
Mass.
We
kneel. You triumph. Your absence strains our sight.
Even
later, your sons, even grown, won't know how fair,
How tall
as bridal, vivid, their young young mother was.
Your
hard grace, your handsome, hurt-taught
Body
that made much of much delight,
Your
flashing, sun-bound head,
With
you, are dead.
In life
you were merciful, loved
All
degrees of subtle enemies, I
Among
them who, sure I loved you, did
Not
cherish you, and so now cry.
Elizabeth,
who living was courteous, was merry day by day,
Glorious
friend, befriend me beyond death;
Show us
who do not love or know love enough or go love's way
Your now
love without limit, please, Elizabeth.
Springing
In a
skiff on a sunrisen lake we are watchers.
Swimming
aimlessly is luxury just as walking
loudly
up a shallow stream is.
As we
lean over the deep well, we whisper.
Friends
at hearths are drawn to the one warm air;
strangers
meet on beaches drawn to the one wet sea.
What wd
it be to be water, one body of water
(what
water is is another mystery) (We are
water
divided.) It wd be a self without walls,
with
surface tension, specific gravity a local
exchange
between bedrock and cloud of falling and rising,
rising
to fall, falling to rise.
Winter
I don’t
know what to say to you, neighbor,
as you
shovel snow from your part of our street
neat in
your Greek black. I’ve waited for
chance
to find words; now, by chance, we meet.
We took
our boys to the same kindergarten,
thirteen
years ago when our husbands went.
Both
boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in
to
separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent,
but your
boy killed himself, six days dead.
My boy
washed your wall when the police were done.
He says,
“We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head,
“I told
him it was great he had that gun,”
and
shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you.
You have
a path to clear, and so you do.
Autumn
Clean-Up
There
she is in her garden
bowing
& dipping, reaching
stretched
with her shears --
a Ceres
commanding forces
no one
else any more fears.
The
garden's not enclosed.
It
encloses her. It helps her
hold her
joy. (She is
too shy
for transports.)
It helps
keep her whole
when
grief for unchangeable reasons
waits to
gnaw a tunnel in her
to run
around wild in,
grinding
its little teeth,
eager to
begin.
Matins
& Lauds
Excited
as a sophisticated boy at his first
Passion
of intellect, aware and fully free
Having
lost title to full liberty; struck
Aware,
for once, as I would always be;
It day
and I still shaken, still sure, see
It is
not ring-magic nor the faithing leap of sex
That
makes me your woman; marks our free
And
separate wills with one intent; sets
My each
earlier option at dazzling apex
And at
naught; cancels, paid, all debts.
Restless,
incautious, I want to talk violence,
Speak
wild poems, hush, be still, pray grace
Taken
forever; and after, lie long in the dense
Dark of
your embrace, asleep between earth and space.
Pre-Text
(for
Douglas, at one)
Archaic,
his gestures
hieratic,
just like Caesar or Sappho
or
Mary’s Jesus or Ann’s Mary or Jane
Austen
once, or me or your mother’s you
the
sudden baby surges to his feet
and
sways, head forward, chin high,
arms
akimbo, hands dangling idle,
elbows
up, as if winged.
The
features of his face stand out
amazed,
all eyes as his aped posture
sustains
him aloft
a step a step a
rush
and he
walks,
Young
Anyone, his lifted point of view
far
beyond the calendar.
What
time is it? Firm in time
he is
out of date—
like a
cellarer for altar wines
tasting
many summers in one glass,
or like
a grandmother
in whose
womb her
granddaughter
once
slept in
egg inside
grandma’s
unborn daughter’s
folded
ovaries.
What
Would You Like To Be When You Grow Up?
1
Here I
am in the garden
on my
knees digging
as if I
were innocent,
gloveless
in island soil—
sandy,
unstable,
hardly
soil at all,
very
sharp and mineral.
Planted
to temper the heat,
this
garden has trees & fruit trees.
After a
stormy spring
it's a
low-walled well of green
bouncing
into blossoming.
Already
it turns me
toward
autumn crocus now in leaf,
chrysanthemum,
feverfew,
white
& gold after the pears drop.
It's at
its best in winter,
free of
me, as I imagine it-
its six
wonderful places to sit
(next to
the tarragon and sage,
under
the dogwood for breakfast,
on a log
beside the speedwell).
It has
taught me
planning
which is essential
is
impossible.
Mistakes
(bittersweet, honeysuckle)
come
back every year
hugely
bountiful. So do
the
peonies, lilies, & daylilies,
&
grandma's rampant rose.
Dear
garden of my making
stuffed
with my ideas & sweat,
you are
reasonable.
Your
pleasure
is, like
me, physical.
So,
behave.
I can't
keep counting on my fingers
to make
sure all your parts are on hand.
I head
for the kitchen, to cook.
I have
no other plans.
You were
not what I needed after all.
2
The
reason for the garden is
this
rooming house, this tidy
body's
heart, my minded body
where I
now rent only
the
attic regularly,
and the
kitchen, on odd nights.
It is
the shabby residence
or
sidereal repeat
of
recurrent astonishment.
And it
has known in every room
the
othering bliss of child,
my
child, each child different
for each
other's sake, each
blessing
me blind,
tenant
& ceaseless & tiresomely
teaching
me
relentlessly
to reach
joy by choosing
to love.
I so choose, I think.
Only the
rich can choose to be poor.
There
must be something I can do.
I think
I've got whatever I need
in the
overhead compartment.
Northampton
Style
Evening
falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style,
on the porch out back.
Its
voice touches and parts the air of summer,
as if
it swam to time us down a river
where we
dive and leave a single track
as evening
falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
that
lets us wash our mix of dreams together.
Delicate,
tacit, we engage in our act;
its
voice touches and parts the air of summer.
When we
disentangle you are not with her
I am not
with him. Redress calls for tact.
Evening
falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
still. A
small breeze rises and the leaves stir
as
uneasy as we, while the woods go black;
its
voice touches and parts the air of summer
and lets
darkness enter us; our strings go slack
though
the player keeps up his plangent attack.
Evening
falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer;
its
voice touches and parts the air of summer.
Old Mama
Saturday
“Saturday’s child must work for a living.”
“I’m
moving from Grief Street.
Taxes
are high here
though the
mortgage’s cheap.
The
house is well built.
With
stuff to protect, that
mattered
to me,
the
security.
These
things that I mind,
you
know, aren’t mine.
I mind
minding them.
They
weigh on my mind.
I don’t
mind them well.
I
haven’t got the knack
of kindly
minding.
I say
Take them back
but you
never do.
When I
throw them out
it may
frighten you
and
maybe me too.
Maybe
it will
empty me
too
emptily
and keep
me here
asleep,
at sea
under
the guilt quilt,
under
the you tree.”
Pathetic
Fallacies Are Bad Science But
On reading Susanne K. Langer’s Mind
If
leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed,
reach
for rock-bottom as you rake
the muck
out. Let it slump dank,
and dry
fading, flat above the bank.
Stand
back. Watch the water vault ahead.
Its
thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris,
as it
debrides its stone path to the lake,
clarity
carrying clarity.
To see
clear, resist the drag of images.
Take
nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.
Act in
events; touch what you name. Abhor
easy
obverts of natural metaphor.
Let
human speech breathe out its best poor bridges
from
mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.
Yet, I
admit the event of the wood thrush:
In a footnote Langer (her book
rapids-clean
like the spring-water aired over sleeked
rock)
says she witnessed an August bird in shock
when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched,
rushed
notes fluting two life-quotas in one
flood,
its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the
keen
calls, pumped out as the heart pumps
blood,
not in twilight or warning but noon &
wrong,
its old notes whistled too fast but
accurate.
I read
this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-
fusing
loss all song, all loss; that loss mine
awash in
unanswered unanswered song.
And I
cannot claim we are not desolate.
Imagining Starry
The place of language is the place between me
and the world of presences I have lost
—complex country, not flat. Its elements free-
float, coherent for luck to come across;
its lines curve as in a mental orrery
implicit with stars in active orbit,
only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.
The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite
air of imagination that stirs immense
among losses and leaves me less desolate.
Breathing it I spot a sentence or a name,
a rescuer, charted for recovery,
to speak against the daily sinking flame
& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.
Thank
Gerard
Cascade:
rain torrential rain
waterfalls
down our stone facade.
Our
fields lately fire-parched
now
glossy cross the flat rise
you
ploughed earlier. The whole
length
of one sillion-streak gleams
Gerard
cut-stroke
the sillion the gash
we have
in mind is your mind
lifting muck-life
turned
sunstruck to each side
silvershot
at low sunset after the rain
every
drop cataract
is not
this the rain
you and
I have longed for.
God to
you
hold
him close-folded
above
his sillion
Loft
him Halo him
Prize
him high, pen in hand
his
two uprooted feet
flailing
awkward rain-streaked
below
his healing blooded knees.
Out of
Water
A new
embroidery of flowers, canary color,
dots the grass already
dotty
with aster-white and
clover.
I warn,
“They won’t last, out of water.”
The
children pick some anyway.
In or
out of water
children
don’t last either.
I watch
them as they pick.
Still
free of what’s next
and what was yesterday
they
pick today.
Among
Women
What
women wander?
Not
many. All. A few.
Most
would, now & then,
& no
wonder.
Some,
and I’m one,
Wander
sitting still.
My small
grandmother
Bought
from every peddler
Less for
the ribbons and lace
Than for
their scent
Of sleep
where you will,
Walk out
when you want, choose
Your
bread and your company.
She
warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”
She
looked fragile but had
High
blood, runner’s ankles,
Could
endure, endure.
She
loved her rooted garden, her
Grand
children, her once
Wild
once young man.
Women
wander
As best
they can.
Marie
Ponsot was born in Queens, New York, on April 6, 1921. She received a BA from
St. Joseph’s College for Women and an MA from Columbia University. On a trip to
Paris soon after World War II, she became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
the founder of City Lights Books. He published Ponsot’s first poetry
collection, True Minds (City Lights Pocket Bookshop) in 1956.
While in
Paris, Ponsot met the painter Claude Ponsot, whom she married. Together, they
had seven children, whom she raised alone after their divorce in 1970. During
this time, she also translated over thirty books from French to English.
Twenty-five
years after the publication of True Minds, Ponsot published her second book,
Admit Impediment (Alfred A. Knopf), in 1981. Since then, she has written
several books of poetry: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Easy (Alfred
A. Knopf, 2009); Springing: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); The
Bird Catcher (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the National Book Critics
Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and
The Green Dark (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
On the
importance of poetry, Ponsot said, “There’s a primitive need for language that
works as an instrument of discovery and relief, that can make rich the cold
places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for
us.”
About
her work, poet and critic Susan Stewart has said:
What she
has written of her relation to the night sky—‘it becomes the infinite / air of
imagination that stirs immense / among losses and leaves me less
desolate’—could be claimed by her readers as a description of her own work,
which pulls us always to forms of thought and attention that surprise and
enlarge and cheer us.
In a New
York Times review, Dinitia Smith writes, “A Marie Ponsot poem is like a little
jeweled bracelet, carefully carved, with small, firm stones embedded in it. Her
subjects are domestic life, marriage and sometimes swimming.”
Ponsot
taught at Beijing United University, Columbia University, New York University,
the Poetry Center of the YMHA, and Queens College. Her honors include the
Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Arts, the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern
Language Association.
Ponsot
served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014. She
lived in New York City. She died on July 5, 2019.
PoetsOrg
Also of interest :
Undersung : Marie Ponsot : Wandering Still. By Julie
Larios. Numéro Cinq , January 2014.
Two interviews:
Marie
Ponsot with Sally Dawidoff and Jean Gallagher. The Brooklyn Rail , October 2008
Between
Riddle and Charm. By Anna Ross . Guernica,
July 15, 2010
Remembering
the life and poetry of Marie Ponsot. By Benjamin Ivry. America Magazine , July 16, 2019
Collected
Poems by Marie Ponsot. Reviewed by Sarah
Kafatou. Harvard Review online, September
17, 2019.
