Two Lorries - Seamus Heaney
It's raining on black coal and warm wet ashes.
There are tyre-marks in the yard, Agnew's old lorry
Has all its cribs down and Agnew the coalman
With his Belfast accent's sweet-talking my mother.
Would she ever go to a film in Magherafelt?
But it's raining and he still has half the load
To deliver farther on. This time the lode Our coal came from was silk-black, so the ashes Will be the silkiest white. The Magherafelt (Via Toomebridge) bus goes by. The half-stripped lorry With its emptied, folded coal-bags moves my mother: The tasty ways of a leather-aproned coalman!
And films no less! The conceit of a coalman... She goes back in and gets out the black lead And emery paper, this nineteen-forties mother, All business round her stove, half-wiping ashes With a backhand from her cheek as the bolted lorry Gets revved and turned and heads for Magherafelt
And the last delivery. Oh, Magherafelt! Oh, dream of red plush and a city coalman As time fastforwards and a different lorry Groans into shot, up Broad Street, with a payload That will blow the bus station to dust and ashes... After that happened, I'd a vision of my mother,
A revenant on the bench where I would meet her In that cold-floored waiting room in Magherafelt, Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes. Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman Refolding body-bags, plying his load Empty upon empty, in a flurry
Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry Was it now? Young Agnew's or that other, Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt... So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman, Listen to the rain spit in new ashes
As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt, Then reappear from your lorry as my mother's Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes
Notes: I was also listening to Seamus Heaney recite (this poem begins at 21.15 minutes) this sesitina earlier this morning. Appropriate I think, to add it to the Big Book on a day when many others are "filmed in silk-white ashes".
Big Book Of Poetry
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Lending Out Books - Hal Sirowitz
You're always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she'll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn't have the time
to read them, & she's afraid if she sees you again
you'll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.
Comments: I found this pithy poem in "Good Poems", an excellent anthology put together out of poems Garrison Keillor reads on NPR's "The Writer's Almanac" everyday. It goes into the Big Book because it nearly sums up my minor forays into the "dating and mating" game. Only in my case, the books weren't lent but gifted.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Diving into the Wreck - Adrienne Rich
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it's a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.
I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me. the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.
First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black and I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crennelated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed
the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.
This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Big Book Of Poetry
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