4th quarter

Ethics

Linda Pastan

(b. 1932)

In ethics class so many years ago

our teacher asked this question every fall:

if there were a fire in a museum

which would you save, a Rembrandt painting

or an old woman who hadn’t many

years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs

caring little for pictures or old age

we’d opt one year for life, the next for art

and always half-heartedly. Sometimes

the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face

leaving her usual kitchen to wander

some drafty, half-imagined museum.

One year, feeling clever, I replied

why not let the woman decide herself?

Linda, the teacher would report, eschews

the burden of responsibility.

This fall in a real museum I stand

before a real Rembrandt, old woman,

or nearly so, myself. The colors

within this frame are darker than autumn

darker even than winter – the browns of earth,

though earth’s most radiant elements burn

through the canvas. I know now that woman

and painting and season are almost one

and all beyond saving by children.

Aubade

Philip Larkin

(1922 – 1985)

I work all day, and get half drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

--The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused – nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

the sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

The vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a sanding chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realization of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

.

Curiosity

Alastair Reid

may have killed the cat; more likely

the cat was just unlucky, or else curious

to see what death was like, having no cause

to go on licking paws, or fathering

litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious

is dangerous enough. To distrust

what is always said, what seems,

to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,

leave home, smell rats, have hunches

do not endear cats to those doggy circles

where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches

are the order of things, and where prevails

much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity

will not cause us to die—

only lack of it will.

Never to want to see

the other side of the hill

or that improbable country

where living is an idyll

(although a probable hell)

would kill us all.

Only the curious

have, if they live, a tale

worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,

are changeable, marry too many wives,

desert their children, chill all dinner tables

with tales of their nine lives.

Well, they are lucky. Let them be

nine-lived and contradictory,

curious enough to change, prepared to pay

the cat price, which is to die

and die again and again,

each time with no less pain.

A cat minority of one

is all that can be counted on

to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell

on each return from hell

is this: that dying is what the living do,

that dying is what the loving do,

and that dead dogs are those who do not know

that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

Vergissmeinnight

Keith Douglas

(1920-1944)

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone,

returning over the nightmare ground

we found the place again, and found

the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun

overshadowing. As we came on

that day, he hit my tank with one

like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil

the dishonored picture of his girl

who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht

in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content

abased, and seeming to have paid

and mocked at by his own equipment

that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see to-day

how on his skin the swart flies move;

the dust upon the paper eye

and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled

has done the lover mortal hurt.

A Study of Reading Habits

Philip Larkin

(1919-1985)

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes

To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook

To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:

Me and my cloak and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark

The women I clubbed with sex!

I broke them up like meringues.

Don’t read much now: the dude

Who lets the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who’s yellow and keeps the store,

Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap.

.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

Walt Whitman

(1819-1892)

A noiseless patient spider,

I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launched forth filament, filament, filament, filament,

out of itself

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the

spheres to connect to

Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile

anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O

my soul.

i thank you god

e e cummings

(1894-1962)

i thank YOU God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Nightclub

Billy Collins

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

to be in love with you

is a theme that keeps coming up

in songs and poems.

There seems to be no room for variation.

I have never heard anyone sing

I am so beautiful

and you are a fool to be in love with me,

even though this notion has surely

crossed the minds of women and men alike.

You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool

is another one you don't hear.

Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.

That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon

I am listening to Johnny Hartman

whose dark voice can curl around

the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness

like no one else's can.

It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette

someone left burning on a baby grand piano

around three o'clock in the morning;

smoke that billows up into the bright lights

while out there in the darkness

some of the beautiful fools have gathered

around little tables to listen,

some with their eyes closed,

others leaning forward into the music

as if it were holding them up,

or twirling the loose ice in a glass,

slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,

borne beyond midnight,

that has no desire to go home,

especially now when everyone in the room

is watching the large man with the tenor sax

that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.

He moves forward to the edge of the stage

and hands the instrument down to me

and nods that I should play.

So I put the mouthpiece to my lips

and blow into it with all my living breath.

We are all so foolish,

my long bebop solo begins by saying,

so damn foolish

we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

Some Shakespeare sonnets:

Bedtime Story

George MacBeth

(b. 1932)

Long long ago when the world was a wild place

Planted with bushes and peopled by ages, our

Mission Brigade was at work in the jungle.

Hard by the Congo

Once, when a foraging detail was active

Scouting for green-fly, it came on a grey man, the

Last living man, in the branch of a baobab

Stalking a monkey.

Earlier men had disposed of, for pleasure,

Creatures whose names we scarcely remember—

Zebra, rhinoceros, elephants, wart-hog,

Lion, rats, deer, But

After the wars had extinguished the cities

Only the wild ones were left, half-naked

Near the equator: and here was the last one,

Starved for a monkey.

By then the Mission Brigade had encountered

Hundreds of such men: and their procedure,

History tells us, was only to feed them:

Find them and feed them;

Those were the orders. And this was the last one.

Nobody knew that he was, but he was. Mud

Caked on his flat grey flanks. He was crouched, half-

Armed with a shaved spear

Glinting beneath broad leaves. When their jaws cut

Swathes through the bark and he saw fine teeth shine,

Round eyes roll round and forked arms waver

Huge as the rough trunks

Over his head, he was frightened. Our workers

Marched through the Congo before he was born, but

This was the first time perhaps that he’d see one.

Staring in hot still

Silence, he crouched there: then jumped. With a long swing

Down from his branch, he had angled his spear too

Quickly, before they could hold him, and hurled it

Hard at the soldier

Leading the detail. How could he know Queen’s

Orders were only to help him? The soldier

Winced when the tipped spear pricked him. Unsheathing his

Sting was reflex.

Later the Queen was informed. There were no more

Men. An impetuous soldier had killed off,

Purely by chance, the penultimate primate.

When she was certain,

Squadrons of workers were fanned through the Congo

Detailed to bring back the man’s picked bones to be

Sealed in the archives in amber. I’m quite sure

Nobody found them

After the most industrious search, though.

Where had the bones gone? Over the earth, dear,

Ground by the teeth of the termites, blown by the

Wind, like the dodo’s.