Written by
Hayden Carruth |
"Form follows function follows form .
.
.
, etc.
"
--Dr.
J.
Anthony Wadlington
Here I am writing my first villanelle
At seventy-two, and feeling old and tired--
"Hey, Pops, why dontcha give us the old death knell?"--
And writing it what's more on the rim of hell
In blazing Arizona when all I desired
Was north and solitude and not a villanelle,
Working from memory and not remembering well
How many stanzas and in what order, wired
On Mexican coffee, seeing the death knell
Of sun's salvos upon these hills that yell
Bloody murder silently to the much admired
Dead-blue sky.
One wonders if a villanelle
Can do the job.
Granted, old men now must tell
Our young world how these bigots and these retired
Bankers of Arizona are ringing the death knell
For everyone, how ideologies compel
Children to violence.
Artifice acquired
For its own sake is war.
Frail villanelle,
Have you this power? And must Igo and sell
Myself? "Wow," they say, and "cool"--this hired
Old poetry guy with his spaced-out death knell.
Ah, far from home and God knows not much fired
By thoughts of when he thought he was inspired,
He writes by writing what he must.
Death knell
Is what he's found in his first villanelle.
Credit: Copyright © 1995 by Hayden Carruth.
Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.
coppercanyonpress.
org
|
Written by
Hayden Carruth |
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and
rearing.
One can hear it always.
Earthquake, starvation, the ever-
renewing field of corpse-flesh.
In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in
our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the
snow-clad trees
So graceful in a dream of peace.
In our new bed, which is big
enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in
the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time.
"Snowbound," we say.
We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the
mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of complete cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and
snow fell for many months across the mouth
Of the pass and drifted deep in the vale.
In our kitchen the
maple-fire murmurs
In our stove.
We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo
Spanish olives
That have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and
garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that
makes us smile and sigh.
For a while we close the immense index of images
which is
Our lives--for instance, the child on the Mescalero reservation
in New Mexico in 1966
Sitting naked in the dirt outside his family's hut of tin and
cardboard,
Covered with sores, unable to speak.
But of course the child is
here with us now,
We cannot close the index.
How will we survive? We don't and
cannot know.
Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable.
The
machine
May break through and come lurching into our valley at any
moment, at any moment.
Cheers, baby.
Here's to us.
See how the curtain of snow wavers
and falls back.
Credit: Copyright © 1995 by Hayden Carruth.
Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.
coppercanyonpress.
org
|
Written by
Charles Simic |
for Hayden Carruth
If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.
She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.
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