{"id":12876,"date":"2013-03-01T11:07:07","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T16:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=12876"},"modified":"2013-03-01T11:07:18","modified_gmt":"2013-03-01T16:07:18","slug":"clumsy-delights-deftly-managed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/clumsy-delights-deftly-managed\/","title":{"rendered":"Clumsy Delights, Deftly Managed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'Duck<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “Duck with Slinky- 1,” by user SteveTaint at sxc.hu<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

From\u00a0whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Afterlife<\/strong><\/p>\n

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
\nor riffling through a magazine in bed,
\nthe dead of the day are setting out on their journey.<\/p>\n

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
\neach according to his own private belief,
\nand this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
\nthat everyone is right, as it turns out.
\nyou go to the place you always thought you would go,
\nthe place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.<\/p>\n

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
\ninto a zone of light, white as a January sun.
\nOthers are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
\nwith a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.<\/p>\n

Some have already joined the celestial choir
\nand are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
\nwhile the less inventive find themselves stuck
\nin a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.<\/p>\n

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
\na woman in her forties with short wiry hair
\nand glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
\nWith one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.<\/p>\n

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
\nof animals — eagles and leopards — and one trying on
\nthe skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
\nready to begin another life in a more simple key,<\/p>\n

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
\nlittle units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.<\/p>\n

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
\nby a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
\nHe will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
\nguarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.<\/p>\n

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
\nwishing they could return so they could learn Italian
\nor see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
\nThey wish they could wake in the morning like you
\nand stand at a window examining the winter trees,
\nevery branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Billy Collins [note:<\/strong> first stanza not always included in quotations around the Web]<\/em>)<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It’s a weird thing, writing.<\/p>\n

Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.<\/p>\n

And that’s wonderful.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.<\/p>\n

And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.<\/p>\n

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.<\/p>\n

And that’s magic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Neil Gaiman [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Living is all clumsy delights. Sitting here in this room, for example, listening to you turn pages, overhearing you breathe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Seon Joon [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself,<\/strong><\/p>\n

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
\nflapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
\nacross the sky made me think about my life, the places
\nof brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
\nhas strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
\nthe leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
\nHope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
\nfor a brief while, then lose it all each November.
\nThrough the cold months, they stand, take the worst
\nweather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
\ncome April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
\nland on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
\nYou do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
\nshelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
\nAll we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
\nThey stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Barbara Crooker [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

The Missing Poem<\/strong><\/p>\n

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been
\nfairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child
\nsaying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter,
\nsomething strangely like what your daughter or sister said once
\nif you could remember. The child’s voice flies across
\na small parking lot where, in one of the cars,
\na man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them.
\nThe child’s voice probably hurts them momentarily
\nwith a sense of beauty apparently very possible
\nyet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is
\nimplied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said.
\nAnd it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field
\nafter a game—the last three or four players walk
\nslowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked,
\none player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls—
\nthe players seem to have known what it was all for
\nyet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there
\nat the field’s far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch
\nthe eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows
\nin each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall.
\nHours later the field is dark<\/p>\n

and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed.
\nIn the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much
\nwe must cherish life; the world will not do it for us.
\nThis idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy.
\nRemember when you got the news of the accident—
\nor the illness—in the life of someone
\nmore laced into your life than you might have thought;
\nthe cool flash of what serious is. Well,
\nthe missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like
\nan imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman!
\nYet not like just another Halliday thing either.
\nInstead it would feel like a new dimension of the world,
\nthe real world we imagine. With lightness!
\nWith weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio,
\nthat certain song you almost forgot to love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Mark Halliday [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

Picture a preoccupied genius who has walked from his bedroom first thing in the morning, eyes bleary, to the top of a flight of stairs which he must descend in order to get his breakfast and proceed to work. He stands there, places his hand on the railing, and suddenly recalls an\u00a0i<\/em> in his work which he forgot to dot, a\u00a0t<\/em> to cross, and now he can’t wait to get to his desk because crossing that\u00a0t<\/em> and dotting that\u00a0i<\/em> will make the work glitter, and he takes his first step down— He misses the step, misses it again with the other foot, bounces, staggers, grabs for the railing on the other side, leeeeeeeans<\/em> forward and trips, flips head over heels, knocks into a pile of books which join him in his tumble (hitting the stairs one-at-a-time perfectly in sync with his feet), bounces three more times, cartwheels, and somehow, somehow,\u00a0somehow<\/em> jesusmaryandjoseph\u00a0hits the floor standing straight up and down<\/em>, his hands raised over his head. Disbelieving, you look at him — his eyes still crusted with sleep, hair a mess — and think: “Did he actually just\u00a0do<\/em> that?!?” Meanwhile, all he’s thinking is:\u00a0Waffles. Coffee. The <\/em>i, that damned <\/em>t.<\/em><\/p>\n

That’s guitarist\u00a0Jon Gomm<\/a>. Here, he staggers, bounces, and sticks the landing in his version of Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody<\/a>.”<\/p>\n