How To Do Things With Tears Pa

by Grossman,Allen

• ISBN13: 9780811214643
• ISBN10: 0811214648
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-05-17
• Publisher: New Directions

Summary

The award-winning poet's newest book of poems is heroic and of mythic proportions, showing the compassionate side of men. How to Do Things with Tears is a book of poems brought forth by the Sighted Singer, the poet who holds the central place in Allen Grossman's newest poetic work. "This is a how-to book," Grossman explains. "The heroic singer of tradition is blind. A new singer in this present must be sighted. In this book the poet intends to say something, insofar as a poet can, about the common sadness of living and dying in the world." Like the blind bard of old, Grossman's Sighted Singer conjures visions both high and low, in mythopoetic resonances that excite the sorrows and the laughter of the gods and men.

Table of Contents

What these poems undertake to do	xii
Part One HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS	1	(26)
How to do things with tears	3	(2)
Enough rain for Agnes Walquist	5	(5)
Elsie Young, aged pensioner, on Purgatory Mountain	10	(2)
Truluv the sailor	12	(13)
Brighter than glass	25	(1)
Epistola	26	(1)
Part Two WHITE SAILS	27	(36)
White sails: Notes toward the autobiography of an American poet	28	(1)
Dedicated to Irene on the threshold of the world	29	(2)
Hello!	31	(1)
Luth.Sch.	32	(2)
The Chinese pot	34	(1)
White sales	35	(2)
The kiss-stone of the Fate	37	(1)
Winter road to the Cities	38	(2)
John the leaping deer	40	(1)
Cure	41	(2)
Marriage	43	(2)
Wallace Stevens entertains a sex worker	45	(2)
In the incomprehensible house	47	(2)
Stain	49	(1)
Her torn afghan	50	(3)
A woman and a girl feed pigs at sundown	53	(2)
A great jolt to start	55	(1)
Think again	56	(7)
Not all wanderers are lost	57	(6)
Part Three DO NOT BE CONTENT WITH AN IMAGINARY GOD	63	(28)
Weird River	65	(1)
Flora's ABC: 6 Perseid sonnets, meteors of late August	66	(3)
Shazam!	69	(9)
Reason for eating pig	78	(1)
Latch: bespoke coffin-maker in purgatory	78	(3)
A Grand caprice	81	(3)
Thunderstruck	84	(2)
X-rated	86	(1)
Your laughing lover	87	(2)
Crow	89	(1)
Star Asper	90	(1)
Part Four THREE NOTES ON COMMON CONCERNS UNDER STAR ASPER	91	(2)
Stanzas on pots	93	(1)
Stanzas on poetic realism	94	(4)
Ilona's letter	98

Excerpts

Chapter One

How to do things with tears

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels

of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.

Whack . Dying. And then death. Whack . Learning. Learned.

Whack . Breathing. And breath. Whack . Gone with the wind.

I am old. The direction of time is plain:

as the daylight, never without direction,

rises in a direction, east to west,

and sets in a direction, west to east,

walking backward all night long, underground;

so, this bright water is bent on its purpose--

to find the meadow path to the shore and then

the star ("Sleepless") by which the helmsman winds

and turns. Zion of the mind! This is the way:

toward nightfall the wind shifts offshore, north by

northwest, closing the harbor to sail,

and it stiffens, raising the metal water

in the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.

The water shines. In the raking light is

towed the great ship home, upwind, everything

furled. And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

a castaway, in the body alone,

under the gates of Erebus--the meeting

place of daylight under ground and night wind

shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

raveled banners streaming to the southeast

like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind

shifts and rises and the light fails in the long

schoolroom of the setting sun. What is left

to mind but remembrances of the world?

The people of the road, in tears, sit down

at the roadside and tell stories of the world.

Then they rise in tears and go up.

The mill sits in the springs. The Water wheel whacks

round: Alive. Whack . Dying. Whack . Dead. Whack . Nothing.

How then to do things with tears? --Deliver us,

Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

Enough rain for Agnes Walquist

(five little fits of tears)

We are all given something precious that we lose irrevocably.

                                                      Caproni

1.

It happened at midnight.

--What I possessed and lost

or what I never possessed

and have nonetheless lost,

or what in any case I

was not born possessing

but received from another's mouth:

--a smooth stone

passed in a kiss from the mouth

of a Fate into my open mouth

amidst odors of metal

and slamming doors

at the dark end of a railway car

as the train was leaning

on a curve and slowing

to stop--is lost. Lost

in that dark! -- Dilectissima ,

the Fate showed me two ways,

male and female. Also a third:

Gessert's midnight path

to the wild iris ,

an escaped garden among

thickets of poison oak

where rolls the stony Oregon

and hears no sound

except stone on stone.

2.

What, then, shall I give YOU?

My kiss-stone is lost.

But look! The vast world,

energetic and empty,

glows in the dark.

On the strip between the road

--gravel or macadam,

or an earthen path

(but in this case gravel)

and the settlement

or the side-hill field or forest

or other tangled right of way

for jews, gypsies, ghosts

(outcasts in any case)

there among weeds

springs up Gessert's

wild iris tenax , violet or pale yellow,

the bloom 3" to 5" across.

Gessert asks, "How in the world

did they come here?"

Then he says, "If you must

take these iris ,

use a shovel. Root them

in your garden

and let them go to seed.

Gather the seed

in Fall

--October or November.

Drive out into the countryside.

Plant the seeds

on any half-sunny,

slightly eroded, roadside bank.

3.

Sow Gessert's iris, dilectissima ,

Violet or ghostly yellow,

in the wild, universal garden

named "Shadowy Agnes Walquist,"

her midnight body

from which wild iris

and lilies grow.

To whom better entrust

pure loss?

To what breasts other

than the breasts

of Agnes Walquist!

--"Agnes! (Can you hear?)

when a man dies,

or a woman dies,

the whole world of which

he is the only subject

dies without residue

(or the whole world of which

she is the only subject

dies without residue).

`DID I EVER LIVE?'

NEVER, NEVER .'

The world of each person,

man or woman,

is a dependency of the world

of another one.

When a man dies or a woman

the reason for confidence

with respect to any world

is diminished. (Weep! Weep!)

When the last person but one

dies, the last person,

though he continue to live,

ceases to exist!"

Agnes Walquist sighs.

Then she says,

YES!

4.

In my sleep I say, "Agnes! I will

give you rain

from my mystery store

of rain. The dead have buried

the dead and are forever

burying the dead.

But the dead do not remember

as the living do not know

the heart." I wake

in the hour before dawn

to the huge hammer of the rain

(hammer of sex

as the poet makes it)

which thunders enough, enough, enough."

Earth shudders and springs.

The East grows bright.

And Agnes Walquist whispers,

"Thank you."

5.

Sweet youth, sweet youth

( dilectissima mea )

go!

Punish thy pillow.

Your kiss-stone is among the stones

the stony Oregon rolls

and hears no sound

but stone on stone.

Blond Fate, the honey-blond,

no longer knows which one

is the stone of witness.

What follows is the wearing

out to dust.

The water mill deep down

in ocean grinds out salt

(truth, troth, death).

But sweeter than the body

of a man or a woman

(sweetness of that sweetness,

song of all those songs)

is the midnight garden

of Agnes Walquist.

Her breasts are sweet.

The huge hammer is an ancient memory

of water falling into water.

There is lightening all night

on distant mountains,

strike after strike

(violet, blue, red, ghostly yellow,

indigo).

And along the mountain paths,

asleep or dead,

are sprawled

nocturnal mountaineers.

Elsie Young, aged pensioner, on Purgatory Mountain

1.

Then we came upon a woman with a black cat

on her knees. Among its many noticeable defects

one was that it was dead. Of what did the cat die?

The cat died of desire which is a relentless disposition

to solve hard problems--as one might say,

to get to the other side of the road despite the

trucks. The woman says, "Let there be nothing left out."

"B ut if nothing is to be left out," replies the dead cat,

"nevertheless one must not cross the road in traffic."

He has learned from his experience. As for the woman,

at the inquest traces of no fatal mistake

will be detected anywhere on her body. Dilectissima ,

our business is to wander up the footpath

hand in hand, telling one another what there

is to see on Purgatory Mountain. "There's

the gate," we say. "On it everything possible

2.

to be arrived at, and seen, by passing through any gate

is inscribed. This gate is called MORNING LIGHT.

We must agree, you and I, not to be kind to ones

who darken the way with secrecy. But to those others

who say our name and tell a good story we turn

and say in reply, `It is well to start early, in the hour

before dawn and in the silence of seeing nothing

while things are still wrapped in their nature and night,

the limit of our eloquence, is toward the end of its patrol.'"

--The first person we met on the mountain, after the material

sun (the sun itself, not its reflection in the mind) appeared

above the horizon like the soul of water rising in the eye

of one who has thought upon water a long time, was Elsie

Young, pensioner--eyes like bright water. She arose,

brushing the dead cat from her lap, which had replied

as I have told you, about "desire", etc.--a long gab,

but now it is finished . Elsie holds a glass of water up,

the work of a lifetime, to the morning light. She says,

triumphant: "I am as a sparrow alone on a housetop."

3.

The wind rose and Elsie Young vanished with a cry

like a leaf blown upward. --" Tell me, kid . Among all lives

which is the admirable life?" Owen Barfield asked me

that question long ago--a Steinerian, an anthroposophist,

one who KNEW. (He is dead, I presume. Shall we

see him, then, on this mountain in his rough shoes,

good for walking the uneven earth?) Owen Barfield loved

and married Alice, a woman much older than himself.

He saw what others cannot see : the inmost sentiments

of certain persons, which appeared to him like colored

scarves, or gaudy snoods or veils--fountainous red

for utter thought and, for desire, watery blue. Listen,

up here the sound of many waters speaks as a god

speaks out of his synclinal fold, feeding

willows, leathery amaranth, insatiable bamboo--and also

(their stainless 18-wheelers idling on the beach below)

4.

among these cooling rocks the slaughtering gangs....

--Beyond the gate called MORNING LIGHT, beyond gate ZENITH,

and gate AFTERNOON there looms, mysterious and austere,

gate CREPUSCULE, high up, crowned with a gibbous moon.

See how, among dark waters, soaked through by streams,

they sit, done with the Great Work now, all four: stylish

Owen Barfield, sporting the cerulean voiles of his desire;

blushing Alice, always in her wedding gown; and Elsie,

aged pensioner, whose income's (as you know) secure.

On her lap the dead cat, overdressed as usual, in fur,

having thrown caution to the winds, stares back ha rapture

over its left shoulder, starry eyed, at Elsie Young, heroine

of the admirable life, and whispers sotto voce (under its breath),

"`Take pleasure as your guide.' But remember, feed the pet!

And always, dead or alive, my sparrow, carry a knife."

Copyright © 2001 Allen Grossman. All rights reserved.