Thanks Doug. Glad we're still kicking ✍️
Andrew
Sent from my iPhone
> On 20 Mar 2019, at 5:07 am, Bill Wootton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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 they are withdrawn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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