Truthfully, I like noise, dissonance,
blistering beats and bangs, cacophony of all sorts, screaming guitar solos,
atonal saxophone pirouettes, collision prone drum work, pianistics imposing
order onto uncontainable randomness. The scrape and scratch is the cadence of
the urban life, due to either traffic congestion, jackhammers on every corner,
crimes in progress, or downtown music’s ranging from industrial grate to loft
jazz to post-vinyl hip hop; abrupt, big shouldered, bullying, the Futurist
dream (or nightmare) of jettisoning the Present and blasting a tunnel through
the mountain of complacency towards an unknown future. Or maybe even destroying
the mountain altogether; what we can surmise, though, is that it
isn’t the
future that is the matter of concern for anyone making this kind of noise, but
the noise itself, the badgering, persistent barrage that will not give you a
minute of quiet time. There is no room for reflection or regret, there is only the task of making
this existence so unlivable that we
will all eventually rise and demand Eden now, or at least aid in the
destruction of those technologies,
customs and accumulated culture that makes the question concerning the quality
of life a Moot Point.
But there comes the moment when I
have to take a breather from being the frontlines of my combative aesthetic and
seek tunes, poems, movies that provide respite from the grind; sometimes I wake
up and think clearly for a moment that existence is already noisy and that my
abrasive taste in tunes accelerates no inevitable dialectic.Fun as it may be,
no universal good is being served. In fact, I am only adding to the clutter, in
essence, becoming part of the problem. Sanity, for the time being, prevails ,
balanced on a thin sting, and my premature jitters seek , for a change, succor,
not assault. The quiet side appeals to me as well, much as I love abrasive
post-bop jazz improvisation ala Cecil Taylor or the raucous cacophony of
Charles Ives; there are those moods when
what I need from art—and art is something which is a need—is a short harmonica solo,
a small water color in a simple frame, or a lyric poem that dwells comfortably,
musically on it’s surface qualities. One loves grit, but that doesn’t exclude finesse.
Mark Strand’s poem here won me over with it’s surely played music.
My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer
by Mark Strand
1.
When the moon
appears
and a few
wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed
hills
and shine with a
light
that is veiled
and dust-filled
and that floats
upon the fields,
my mother, with
her hair in a bun,
her face in
shadow, and the smoke
from her
cigarette coiling close
to the faint
yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the
house
and watches the
seepage of late light
down through the
sedges,
the last gray
islands of cloud
taken from view,
and the wind
ruffling the
moon's ash-colored coat
on the black
bay.
2.
Soon the house,
with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of
lampglow
into the haze
and the bay
will begin its
loud heaving
and the pines,
frayed finials
climbing the hill,
will seem to graze
the dim cinders
of heaven.
And my mother
will stare into the starlanes,
the endless
tunnels of nothing,
and as she
gazes,
under the hour's
spell,
she will think
how we yield each night
to the soundless
storms of decay
that tear at the
folding flesh,
and she will not
know
why she is here
or what she is
prisoner of
if not the
conditions of love that brought her to this.
3.
My mother will
go indoors
and the fields,
the bare stones
will drift in
peace, small creatures --
the mouse and
the swift -- will sleep
at opposite ends
of the house.
Only the cricket
will be up,
repeating its
one shrill note
to the rotten
boards of the porch,
to the rusted
screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that
keeps to itself.
Why should my
mother awake?
The earth is not
yet a garden
about to be
turned. The stars
are not yet
bells that ring
at night for the
lost.
Mark Strand is someone who often
works overtime to make the small things he chooses to write about into subjects
that are poetically overpowering. Though he wouldn't be guilty of some fever
pitched overwriting that makes the work of Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott
seem like a riotous thicket of over simile’d commonplaces--it has been said that the prize
winner has never met a qualifier he didn't fall in love with and promise a home
to--Strand has always seemed to fall just short of adding an item too many to
his verses.
He does have a leaner, more
genuinely lyric movement than does Walcott, whom I find more ornate than
satisfying. Strand , to his credit , doesn't
obscure the emotion nor the place from which is figurative language is
inspired, arch as it occasionally reads. Walcott the poet, the world traveler,
the cultivated Other in the presence of an Imperial Culture, reads like someone
how is trying to have an experience. Strand
convinces you that he has had one, indeed, but that he over estimates the
measure of words to their finessed narrative.
That said, I like this, in that
Strand trusts what his eyes sees, a series of things his mother was doing in a
wonderfully framed triptych that might have been conveyed by Andrew Wyeth. It
is a little idealized--the lyric spirit is not interested in the precise qualifier,
but that adjective or verb , that rather, that both makes the image more
musical and reveals some commonly felt impression about the objects in the
frame--but Strand here has a relaxed
confidence that is very effective. Brush strokes, we could say, both
impressionistic and yet exact.
Soon the house,
with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of
lampglow
into the haze
and the bay
will begin its
loud heaving
and the pines,
frayed finials
climbing the
hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders
of heaven.
And my mother
will stare into the starlanes,
the endless
tunnels of nothing,
and as she
gazes,
under the hour's
spell,
she will think
how we yield each night
to the soundless
storms of decay
that tear at the
folding flesh,
and she will not
know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner
of
if not the
conditions of love that brought her to this.
This is the image of someone
going about there daily chores and fulfilling their obligations thinking they
are out anyone else's view, or better, the agenda of someone who hasn't interest
in impressing any set of prying eyes. The mother seems less a figure in
solitude than she does to contain solitude itself, comfortable and with
intimate knowledge of the grain of the wood the floor is made of, the smell of
the changing weather, the different pitches of silence and what the nuances of
small sounds forecast for that evening and the following day. Most of all, this
is about watching the world, the smallest world , both grow up, grow old,
become frail and die, finally, aware of the seamlessness of going about one's
tasks and the preparation for the end. This is a poem about preparation, I
think; we, like the Mother, come to a point in their life when the gravity of
things are finally felt through accumulated experience, as one's responsibilities
have been added too over the years, and one develops a sense that what one does
isn't so much about setting ourselves up for the rest of our lives, but rather
in preparing the ground for what comes next, who comes next.
Somewhere in the work , toil , the
bothersome details we get to rest and earn an extra couple of hours to keep our
eyes close. The change happens slowly, unperceived, but it does happen, and the
planet is a constant state of becoming, of change, and what changes too are the
metaphors one would use to determine their next indicated jobs.
Why should my
mother awake?
The earth is not
yet a garden
about to be
turned. The stars
are not yet
bells that ring
at night for the
lost.
It is much too
late.
