Beautiful. Thanks, Doug. Learning to live without words.
Bill
On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 at 2:42 am, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> In this year of poetic losses, here’s Denise Levertov’s great poem on
> another such year:
>
> September 1961
>
> This is the year the old ones,
> the old great ones
> leave us alone on the road.
>
> The road leads to the sea.
>
> We have the words in our pockets,
> obscure directions.
>
> The old ones
>
> have taken away the light of their presence,
> we see it moving away over a hill
> off to one side.
>
> They are not dying,
> they are withdrawn
> into a painful privacy
>
> learning to live without words.
>
>
> E.P. "It looks like dying"-Williams: "I can't
> describe to you what has been
> happening to me"-
> H.D. "unable to speak."
>
> The darkness
>
> twists itself in the wind, the stars
> are small, the horizon
> ringed with confused urban light-haze.
>
> They have told us
> the road leads to the sea,
> and given
>
> the language into our hands.
>
> We hear
> our footsteps each time a truck
>
> has dazzled past us and gone
> leaving us new silence.
>
> One can't reach
> the sea on this endless
> road to the sea unless
> one turns aside at the end, it seems,
>
> follows
> the owl that silently glides above it
> aslant, back and forth,
>
> and away into deep woods.
>
> But for us
> the road
> unfurls itself, we count the
> words in our pockets, we wonder
>
> how it will be without them, we don't
> stop walking, we know
> there is far to go, sometimes
>
> we think the night wind carries
> a smell of the sea.
>
>
> (I took this off a web site, & am not sure if the stanza breaks etc are
> fully correct.) It’s from what I still think of as Levertov’s finest book,
> O Taste and See!
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
> https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations
> 2 (UofAPress).
> Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
> Listen. If (UofAPress):
>
>
> The outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your
> apartment into a taxicab.
>
> Fran Lebowitz
>
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