Felt Poem Of The River Rar
Jahed Stetter
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Night Vision, winner of the 2017 New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared in Paperbag, PANK, Waxwing, Bennington Review, The Collapsar, Best New Poets 2015, Kenyon Review Online, and other journals. Her second collection, Redmouth, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2019. She lives and teaches in the Twin Cities. (Author photo by Daniel Lupton)
In the final stanza of the poem, it becomes clear that this entire time the poet was speaking to his sister, Dorothy. Dorothy is with him on the banks of the Wye and he has been attempting to explain to her why he is the way he is. He hopes that she will share in his joy and give her heart over to Nature as he has. The poet tells his sister that there is no risk in this choice and that she should allow the beauty of the world to move her. The poem concludes with Wordsworth telling his sister that Nature, and this moment that they have shared together, will always be there for her. Even when he is gone.
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
This pain I bare is my regret,
My pain continually dealt,
On pain, my mind is set,
I've lost all the comfort I've felt,
Now i only hope to pay off my debt to myself,
As i sit under a sky of raining stones,
Hoping to be buried alive.
Hoping For you to understand.
I am going to do this.
Yet you do not listen...
You bear on my sky's a thunder...
You care not..
So bury me six feet under,
And watch out for the gun,
It will be hot.
bury me away from the sun,
So even after death I might feel cold,
as you have dealt to me.
"The River-Merchant's Wife" is Ezra Pound's reinterpretation of an 8th-century poem by the Classical Chinese writer Li Bai. The poem's speaker is a young wife pining for her husband, a merchant off on a long journey. Her frank, sweet retelling of their lives together evokes both the joys of love and the pains of separation. Pound first published this poem in his 1915 collection Cathay.
Koening knew now there was no one on the river.
Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies
and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop
past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles
coated with coal dust. Staying aboard, he saw, up
in a thick meadow, a sand-colored mule,
untethered, with no harness, and no signs
of habitation round the ruined factory wheel
locked hard in rust, and through whose spokes the vines
of wild yam leaves leant from overweight;
the wild bananas in the yellowish sunlight
were dugged like aching cows with unmilked fruit.
This was the last of the productive mines.
Only the vegetation here looked right.
A crab of pain scuttled shooting up his foot
and fastened on his neck, at the brain's root.
He felt his reason curling back like parchment
in this fierce torpor. Well, he no longer taxed
and tired what was left of his memory;
he should thank heaven he had escaped the sea,
and anyway, he had demanded to be sent
here with the others - why get this river vexed
with his complaints? Koenig wanted to sing,
suddenly, if only to keep the river company -
this was a river, and Koenig, his name meant King.
They had all caught the missionary fever:
they were prepared to expiate the sins
os savages, to tame them as he would tame this river
subtly, as it flowed, accepting its bends;
he had seen how other missionaries met their ends -
swinging in the wind, like a dead clapper when
a bell is broken, if that sky was a bell -
for treating savages as if they were men,
and frightening them with talk of Heaven and Hell.
But I have forgotten our journey's origins,
mused Koenig, and our purpose. He knew it was noble,
based on some phrase, forgotten, from the Bible,
but he felt bodiless, like a man stumbling from
the pages of a novel, not a forest,
written a hundred years ago. He stroked his uniform,
clogged with the hooked burrs that had tried
to pull him, like the other drowning hands whom
his panic abandoned. The others had died,
like real men, by death. I, Koenig, am a ghost,
ghost-king of rivers. Well, even ghosts must rest.
If he knew he was lost he was not lost.
It was when you pretended that you were a fool.
He banked and leaned tiredly on the pole.
If I'm a character called Koenig, then I
shall dominate my future like a fiction
in which there is a real river and real sky,
so I'm not really tired, and should push on.
The lights between the leaves were beautiful,
and, as in that far life, now he was grateful
for any pool of light between the dull, usual
clouds of life: a sunspot haloed his tonsure;
silver and copper coins danced on the river;
his head felt warm - the light danced on his skull
like a benediction. Koenig closed his eyes,
and he felt blessed. It made direction sure.
He leant on the pole. He must push on some more.
He said his name. His voice sounded German,
then he said 'river', but what was German
if he alone could hear it? Ich spreche Deutsch
sounded as genuine as his name in English,
Koenig in Deutsch, and, in English, King.
Did the river want to be called anything?
He asked the river. The river said nothing.
Around the bend the river poured its silver
like some remorseful mine, giving and giving
everything green and white: white sky, white
water, and the dull green like a drumbeat
of the slow-sliding forest, the green heat;
then, on some sandbar, a mirage ahead:
fabric of muslin sails, spiderweb rigging,
a schooner, foundered on black river mud,
was rising slowly up from the riverbed,
and a top-hatted native reading an inverted
newspaper.
'Where's our Queen?' Koenig shouted.
'Where's our Kaiser?'
The nigger disappeared.
Koenig felt that he himself was being read
like the newspaper or a hundred-year-old novel.
'The Queen dead! Kaiser dead!' the voices shouted.
And it flashed through him those trunks were not wood
but that the ghosts of slaughtered Indians stood
there in the mangrroves, their eyes like fireflies
in the green dark, and that like hummingbirds
they sailed rather than ran between the trees.
The river carried him past his shouted words.
The schooner had gone down without a trace.
'There was a time when we ruled everything,'
Koenig sang to his corrugated white reflection.
'The German Eagle and the British Lion,
we ruled worlds wider than this river flows,
worlds with dyed elephants, with tassled howdahs,
tigers that carried the striped shade when they rose
from their palm coverts; men shall not see these days
again; our flags sank with the sunset on the dhows
of Egypt; we ruled rivers as huge as the Nile,
the Ganges, and the Congo, we tamed, we ruled
you when our empires reached their blazing peak.'
This was a small creek somewhere in the world,
never mind where - victory was in sight.
Koenig laughed and spat in the brown creek.
The mosquitoes now were singing to the night
that rose up from the river, the fog uncurled
under the mangroves. Koenig clenched each fist
around his barge-pole scepter, as a mist
rises from the river and the page goes white.
And maybe most importantly, Peter Bosshard, Deborah Moore, Monti Aguirre and Stephanie Jensen-Cormier all spoke so movingly and so well about our work. They told us about the huge difference that International Rivers and our global network have made over the past 30 years: More than 200 destructive dams stopped or delayed! Free-flowing rivers from Patagonia to Burma, from Africa to the Himalayas protected! Thousands of dam fighters and river activists brought together! Strong river protection mandates adopted from the US Congress to the World Commission on Dams!
By Kahlil Gibran. SEED QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: What does becoming the ocean mean to you? Can you share an experience of a time you faced the fear of losing who you were, only to enter into an identity that was much greater than you could imagine? What helps you shed your riverhood and embrace your oceanhood in every moment?
They came to me waterlogged, crumpled up in tight balls that were soaked through with the river. Sometimes the ink would be preserved enough so I could still read them as I carefully untangled the dripping paper and spread it out on the flat, dry rock on my side of the bank.
I was a barely adult nobody in a garbage-strewn trailer park. The only bit of the outside world I saw was the oily river that wound between the chain link fences separating my trailer park from another. But through that river, he gave me mountain breezes, ocean spray, and light filtering through dense evergreens.
This week has felt big. Raf, Ren and I all coming down with a mild cold, but a mild cold in a newborn means being up all night with the electric snot sucker so that he can breathe and feed. Plus 5 am wake ups to steam our faces in the shower before going back to bed to attempt another hour of sleep.
aa06259810