Expect change, / Nothing is strange.
1) I’m taking a Dene language course. It is in a basement of a building serpentine in layout, once a dorm, now the departments of Anthropology and Sociology. Last week I left by a side door and climbed up the mossy stairs; I looked north and saw the Pacific Ranges lit blinding vermillion in the sunset. The Ranges are high and steep and vast, and currently covered in snow. Where seams of raw tree and rock ran through the snow, pale indigo light shone dark instead.
2) After dusk, across the Inlet, the same Pacific Ranges obscured by clouds like bruises, heavy with northern darkness flowing down Vancouverwards in the wake of the weak, southern-tilted sun, a daystar, only, in the winter. This roil of bruising, fog, and blackness was pinned back against the mountains’ feet by many freighters’ bridges, lit towers of molten gold. The suburbs on the slopes were a gridwork of carnelian. No: a gridwork of sodium, neon, and argon–no: marine ash, new air, rare, and ab-active influence on filaments encoiled, fiery, and fine. In the language of Vancouver City, street lighting poles are nodes; conduits, ducts. Abandoned conduits and boxes for the junctions moulder in tusks of ivy tangled, rain-slimed, and shot through with parabolae of thorny blackberry canes.
3) Robinson Jeffers died today, in 1962. His poetry is grotesque and sublime, it is vivid and viscid in detail, sometimes grandiloquescent, sometimes sheer and understated. Apparently he died alone; it must have been hard. Una, his wife, died before him. I have winced at some of his sentimental and condescending letters to her, but here is a poem about her, or at least for her, that I like. I like it because although it is likewise sentimental, it expresses very well the tension between love of life and love for death that becomes complicated when you love someone and live with them for years and years, knowing all the while that it ends, and is always ending.
For Una
I
I built her a tower when I was young—
Sometime she will die—
I built it with my hands, I hung
Stones in the sky.
Old but still strong I climb the stone—
Sometime she will die—
Climb the steep rough steps alone,
And weep in the sky.
Never weep, never weep.
II
Never be astonished, dear.
Expect change,
Nothing is strange.
We have seen the human race
Capture all its dreams,
All except peace.
We have watched mankind like Christ
Toil up and up,
To be hanged at the top.
No longer envying the birds,
That ancient prayer for
Wings granted: therefore
The heavy sky over London
Stallion-hoofed
Falls on the roofs.
These are the falling years,
They will go deep,
Never weep, never weep.
With clear eyes explore the pit.
Watch the great fall
With religious awe.
III
It is not Europe alone that is falling
Into blood and fire.
Decline and fall have been dancing in all men’s souls
For a long while.
Sometime at the last gasp comes peace
To every soul.
Never to mine until I find out and speak
The things that I know.
IV
To-morrow I will take up that heavy poem again
About Ferguson, deceived and jealous man
Who bawled for the truth, the truth, and failed to endure
Its first least gleam. That poem bores me, and I hope will bore
Any sweet soul that reads it, being some ways
My very self but mostly my antipodes;
But having waved the heavy artillery to fire
I must hammer on to an end.
To-night, dear,
Let’s forget all that, that and the war,
And enisle ourselves a little beyond time,
You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine
While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,
And sometime after midnight I’ll pluck you a wreath
Of chosen ones; we’ll talk about love and death,
Rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea,
Admit nothing more timely, nothing less real
While the stars go over the timeless ocean,
And when they vanish we’ll have spent the night well.
