Poetry Tuesday: Ode to Anne Carson
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, professor, and translator, among her many identities. Her writing is spellbinding to me, and also intimidating - I think she is a genius, and have been collecting her various books of poetry, prose poetry, essays and other writings over the years. On this gloomy Tuesday, after an arduous day of work and in the effort to keep up Nablopomo, I thought I would share some excerpts of her writing with you. While some may find her words obscure and full of cryptic classical references, there are moments when something shining rises up from beneath and surfaces. I read with delight, surprise, and rapture.
From Men in the Off Hours:
Lazarus (1st Draft)
Inside the rock on which we live, another rock.
So they believe.
What is a Lamb of God? People use this phrase.
I don’t know.
I watch my sister, fingers straying absently about her mustache,
no help there.
Leaves stir throughout the house like souls, they stream
from the porch,
catch in the speaking holes, glow and are gone.
Remember
what Prince Andrei said when they told him Moscow had burnt
right down to the ground.
He said Really?
A man who had been to the war! had seen our lives are just blind arrows
flying.
There he sat
on his cot all the same, trying to get the string to the bowhorn.
Actions go on in us,
nothing else goes on.
While a blurred and breathless hour
repeats, repeats.
Also from Men in the Off Hours, selections from “Appendix to Ordinary Time”:
It grows dark as I write now, the clocks have been changed, night comes earlier - gathering like a garment. I see my mother, as she would have been at this hour alone in her house, gazing out on the cold lawn and turned earth of evening, high bleak grass going down to the lake. Or moving room by room through the house and the silverblue darkness filling around her, pooling, silencing. Did she think of me - somewhere, in some city, in lamplight, bending over books, or rising to put on my coat and go out? Did I pause, switch off the desklamp and stand, gazing out at the dusk, think I might call her. Not calling. Calling. Too late now. Under a different dark sky, the lake trickles on.
…
Reading this, especially the crossed-out line, fills me with a sudden understanding. Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts. they are like death: by a simple stroke - all is lost, yet still there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of. Death is a fact.
…
Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times. It may be a stage of grieving that will pass. It may be I’ll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way. It has changed me. Now I too am someone who knows marks.
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