Second Childhood: Poems Read online

  Note to the Reader on Text Size

  Don’t worry. You didn’t have to tell me about the bulge in the circumference.

  We recommend that you adjust your device settings so that all of the above text fits on one line; this will ensure that the lines match the author’s intent. If you view the text at a larger than optimal type size, some line breaks will be inserted by the device. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a small indent.

  Second Childhood

  Books by Fanny Howe

  POETRY

  Eggs

  Poem from a Single Pallet

  Robeson Street

  The Vineyard

  Introduction to the World

  The Quietist

  The End

  O’Clock

  One Crossed Out

  Selected Poems

  Gone

  This of Thee

  On the Ground

  The Lyrics

  Come and See

  Second Childhood

  FICTION

  Forty Whacks

  First Marriage

  Bronte Wilde

  Holy Smoke

  In the Middle of Nowhere

  The Deep North

  Famous Questions

  Saving History

  Nod

  Indivisible

  Economics

  Radical Love: Five Novels

  The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where

  Something Got Broken

  What Did I Do Wrong?

  ESSAYS

  The Wedding Dress:

  Meditations on Word and Life

  The Winter Sun:

  Notes on a Vocation

  Second Childhood

  Fanny Howe

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 2014 by Fanny Howe

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-682-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-917-1

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2014

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013958013

  Cover design: Kapo Ng

  Cover art: Maceo Senna

  Contents

  For the Book

  The Garden

  Parkside

  My Stones

  Evening

  Xing

  Between Delays

  For Miles

  Loneliness

  The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams

  Second Childhood

  Progress

  Why Did I Dream

  Flame-Light

  The Cloisters

  Angelopoulos

  Sometimes

  A Child in Old Age

  Born Below

  The Coldest Mother

  Dear Hölderlin

  A Vision

  Alas

  Fear & hope are—Vision

  WM BLAKE

  Second Childhood

  For the Book

  Yellow goblins

  and a god I can swallow.

  Eyes in the evergreens

  under ice.

  Interior monologue

  and some voice.

  Weary fears, the

  usual trials and

  a place to surmise

  blessedness.

  The Garden

  Black winter gardens

  engraved at night

  keep soft frost

  on them to read the veins

  of our inner illustrator’s

  hand internally light

  with infant etching.

  Children booked

  on blizzard winds

  and then the picture

  is blown to yonder

  and out of ink:

  the black winter verses

  are buds and sticks.

  Parkside

  Stone walls and chalk scratches

  for different ages.

  None of us could be sure now

  how many we were or where.

  There were hurtful pebbles,

  cracked windows

  and bikes. We cut the butter

  and the day’s bread evenly.

  We were children and a metal bed.

  Twelve loaves

  and five thousand baskets.

  Five baskets,

  twelve pieces of dough.

  Twelve times five and butter

  for a multitude.

  Bread made—that is—

  with twelve thousand

  inhalations of leaven.

  My Stones

  A pebbled island

  is a kind of barge:

  seaweed blackened

  another glacial strand.

  White quartz.

  Some green mermaid’s tears.

  (A cask of bottles shattered.)

  That home of mine

  lost four inches

  to erosion and great white sharks

  but we kept floating.

  I even found bedside stones

  to play with in the night.

  A colorful set to pretend

  I could now see Ireland

  from Boston.

  Evening

  Christmas is for children

  on an English hill.

  Simple, dismal,

  and blissful,

  a few little balls and crystal.

  Dark by 4 p.m.

  but you can ride your scooter

  up the hill and down

  in the arctic rain

  each drop a dimple

  on a—

  and a silver handle

  in a drain and a boy

  can stand beside your hand

  at the window

  of a store full of cribs

  and tinsel

  before an icon

  of the infant

  with the news

  rolled in his hand.

  Xing

  Odense is in Denmark and where are we now?

  In a flying sleigh en route to Odessa.

  The Black Sea is steaming below.

  We sweep like snow-crystals every which way.

  We who? My baby and me.

  Off to the left, the sky is fleece.

  In our warm sleigh and north of Norway,

  away, away, what fun we are having!

  More snow coming, more souls.

  Baby lashes the dogs with a strand of her hair.

  Her round face is circled with ermine.

  Between Delays

  You’re like someone crossing a border daily

  a person who is to itself unknown.

  You’re like a fragment that can’t find what has lost it

  or illuminate

  what’s going on or what it’s seeing through.

  Are we a child or a name?

  John, John, John and John,

  you’re all so far from me.

  Each like a walking stick inert

  until picked up.

  A person, the first I—

  with few verbs left.

/>   Vertical even when you laugh.

  For Miles

  Sunset in DC comes at 4:56.

  This is nearly the same time as sunset in LA

  when the El Royale sign lights up.

  Sunset in Shannon comes several minutes earlier in the day.

  Sunsets in Hong Kong and Havana are just about the same but far away.

  Sunset in Chile and sunset in New Zealand

  are only six minutes apart on different days.

  The length of today in Boston is nine hours and fifty-one minutes.

  The length of today in DC is ten hours and seven minutes.

  I knew there was a difference between cities.

  Don’t worry. You didn’t have to tell me about the bulge in the circumference.

  If the light is shining in the House, Congress is still in session.

  Of course the shape of earth is an oblate spheroid

  wider in the middle by very few miles.

  Even here on 21st Street, I can feel the sun moving in Vancouver.

  There are twelve hours of light on one day in October.

  I only needed to exist to know that the sun turns around the earth

  and everything else at the center of the universe.

  Loneliness

  Loneliness is not an accident or a choice.

  It’s an uninvited and uncreated companion.

  It slips in beside you when you are not aware that a choice you are making will have consequences.

  It does you no good even though it’s like one of the elements in the world that you cannot exist without.

  It takes your hand and walks with you. It lies down with you. It sits beside you. It’s as dark as a shadow but it has substance that is familiar.

  It swims with you and swings around on stools.

  It boards the ferry and leans on the motel desk.

  Nothing great happens as a result of loneliness.

  Your character flaws remain in place. You still stop in with friends and have wonderful hours among them, but you must run as soon as you hear it calling.

  It does call. And you climb the stairs obediently, pushing aside books and notes to let it know that you have returned to it, all is well.

  If you don’t answer its call, you sense that it will sink towards a deep gravity and adopt a limp.

  From loneliness you learn very little. It pulls you back, it pulls you down.

  It’s the manifestation of a vow never made but kept: I will go home now and forever in solitude.

  And after that loneliness will accompany you to every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema, and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near your hand like a habit.

  But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.

  It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself against you.

  You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you made finally, when it was unnecessary.

  If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would you ask it to go?

  How would you replace it?

  No, saying good-bye would be too embarrassing.

  Why?

  First you might cry.

  Because shame and loneliness are almost one.

  Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.

  Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.

  The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams

  The monk is a single

  and so am I

  but which kind?

  All of them

  from young to wild

  and the boyish one

  (mine) cared for the weak

  until there was no one

  to care for him

  besides an old woman

  who lived as a she.

  I became a penitent

  sequentially:

  first in sandals

  then in boots

  then with a hood

  and bare feet.

  Now night-bound, now nude, then old.

  Another brother and I took a train with a view of mountains

  floating in water

  out of Limerick Junction

  to Heuston Station where Wittgenstein

  tried to discover emotion.

  He hit a horizon.

  “Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”

  In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards

  for time has ceased its labors

  and no cattle tremble.

  You can contemplate the peripheries

  and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.

  Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.

  Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.

  Towards a just

  and invisible image

  behind each word

  and its place in a sentence

  we must have been sailing.

  Scarcely defended, best

  when lost from wanting perfect sense.

  But still, recognizable.

  Be like grass, the phantom told us:

  lie flat, spring up.

  Our veils were scrolls

  you couldn’t walk into

  but only mark the folds.

  I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.

  We will never come back to that hour.

  Let me write about the place again the path so sandy

  and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.

  It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched

  and headed out on the train.

  Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals

  were hard to identify so many copies.

  Let me concentrate on ancestral faces

  and I will recognize hers

  before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared

  on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons

  and replicated, sucked or kissed into the lips of strangers.

  I have to pass through the estuary

  to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings

  at the beginning of everything.

  Scrapes like threads seeking holes.

  It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.

  This one did:

  its blue led to the edge.

  Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman

  who sews and passes it along?

  So I ran with it in my hands.

  A kind of eucharist.

  No break in its material from the first day on earth

  to the Sabbath where all are equal

  and the cows covered in sackcloth.

  Where has my mind gone?

  The bloody thieves

  are very quick.

  You may have noticed I’m naked

  and sliced by glass.

  Soon words will be disappeared

  and then the Celtic church

  and seven friends

  I will not name.

  One word that contains

  so many:

  dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and

  I must examine each part

  then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.

  The slide downhill on my back to a ledge

  and the sea out there and a city

  to the left of the mud.

  The place they call an area

  preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds

  of hungry old people lining for bread.

  One woman collapsed on her side

  and another helped her up

  and I was let into the bunker

  by the best kind of communist.

  There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.

  The hills! No b
ells.

  I went down for what reason.

  Not to enter a cell.

  Luckily no one was white.

  We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days

  that I indicated pleased me

  because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.

  I paused long enough to encounter

  a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.

  The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.

  The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.

  But there was a huge blast from the building beside us

  And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what

  was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.

  A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.

  We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss

  our love of failures, every one of us.

  I hauled so many children after me

  with ropes and spears and nets

  like sea-creatures that others would eat

  without them I have no purpose.

  As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief.

  But now there would be what? For he, the little one,

  was kneeling and saying, You must run.

  The lover I still loved stayed near the door

  so I raced off, you stood, when the police came

  seeking coherence in everything.

  The total machine of retribution presses on.

  Regardless of a prayer or what a person did.

  This is incredible.

  We’re breaking up.

  A Trappist led me around as one of him

  to a ship heading for the country where they edit the best films.

  There was a city on deck: residential with pleasing evening trees

  and then a downtown area until we couldn’t tell the suns

  from the portholes on board.

  The ship would transport us to a staging dock in Iona.