January 29, 2011

On my way home in the late afternoon, despite five years of living here in Canada, it still surprises me that evening twilight starts pulling across the sky before 4. The dark comes too soon, over and over. Crowds of crows—a murder I suppose—black and delicate, swirling with their wingtips in the streaky pink and gray indigo. The colors are stretched, a tympanum, immeasurably vast and immeasurably thin, hiding the depthless empty black behind. I am listening to the crow-like squall of The Tallest Man On Earth, who appears to have no self-doubts about his pinched, gravelly, nasal twang of a voice. I tend to doubt my bleating volume when I blare out my lectures on Dylan Thomas or Elizabeth Bishop or ‘Westron Wind’. The Tallest Man doubts not. I press on home. Even though I have Greta and Ev and Silas waiting in a discombobulated house, a mess of Mexican dinner, and dozens of student emails asking stultifying questions (I think, also, large groups of students’ emails should be called a ‘murder’ like the crows), I am alone and cold slender fingers rasp at my pericardium, lifting layer by layer it all away; with their filigreed and iron grip, they clutch my trachea. This desolation is all anatomical. The branches of nearby trees groan with the heavy black bodies of the birds; the dark figures against the fading light like an exploded Rorschach. New York is buried in white blank heavy snow and New York is far away: nothing is not there and nothing is. It is not just another day, and I am really terribly sorry.

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I usually laugh, seeing as this poem is a villanelle, and Hein and Schmeer used to mock such a pretentious form, shouting after Gerry Foote’s class (which Karen wasn’t even in): ‘Vee Yah Nay Yah!’ in a terrible fake French accent.

The Tallest Man on Earth – ‘A Lion’s Heart’ and ‘Kids on the Run’