the longest day!

MIRACLES

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of
nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs
of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me
riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness
of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light
and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior
swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—
the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

Walt Whitman

MIRACLE FAIR

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it's backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer
than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle,
as everything is additional:
the unthinkable is thinkable.

Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

oops... almost forgot

from Song of Myself

1

I CELEBRATE myself;
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

Houses and rooms
are full of perfumes—
the shelves are crowded
with perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself,
and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume—
it has no taste of the distillation—
it is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—
I am in love with it;
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
I am mad for it to be
in contact with me.

2

The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice,
words loos’d to the eddies
of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides; The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much?
have you reckon’d
the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long
to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud
to get at the meaning
of poems?

Stop this day
and night with me,
and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—

(there are millions of suns left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me;
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.

3

I have heard what the talkers were talking,
the talk
of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception
than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age
than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection
than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and
increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction,
always a breed of life.
To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure,
plumb in the uprights, well
entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.

Walt Whitman

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

by Edward Hirsch

The poem would address an unseen listener, an unseen audience. It does so through the rhetoric of address since the message in the bottle seems to be speaking to the poet alone, or to a muse, a friend, a lover, an abstraction, an object in nature. . . . It seems to be speaking to God or to no one. Rhetoric comes into play here, the radi- cal of presentation, the rhythm of words crea- ting a deep sensation in the reader. Rhythm would lift the poem off the page, it would bewitch the sounds of language, hypnotize the words into memorable phrases. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. It differentiates us; it unites us to the cosmos.

Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said in ABC of Reading. It is the combination in English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability. Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic. I would say with Robert Graves that there is a rhythm of emotions that conditions the musical rhythms, that mental bracing and relaxing which comes to us through our sensuous impressions. It is the emotion — the very rhythm of the emotion — that determines the texture of the sounds.

I like to feel the sea drift, the liturgical cadence of the first stanza of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” It is one sentence and twenty-two lines long. It always carries me away.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting
as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of
briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,

From those beginning notes of yearning and love
there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,

From the word stronger and
more delicious than any,
From such as now
they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising,
or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears
a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand,
confronting the waves,

I, chanter of pains and joys,
uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

The incantatory power of this is tremendous as the repetitions loosen the intellect for reverie. It seems to me that Whitman creates here the very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind, out of the sea waves and the rocking cradle, out of all the undifferentiated sensations of infancy, out of the myriad memories of childhood, out of all possible experiences the formative event of a boy leaving the safety of his bed and walking the seashore alone, moving “Out,” “Over,” “Down,” “Up,” “From,” exchanging the safety of the indoors for the peril of the outdoors, facing his own vague yearnings and the misty void, mixing his own tears and the salt spray of the ocean, listening to the birds, understanding the language — the calling — of one bird.

He walks the shore on the edge of the world, the edge of the unknown. He has entered the space that Emerson calls “I and the Abyss,” the space of the American sublime.

In this region: out of all potential words, these words alone; out of all potential memories, this memory alone. It is the emerging rhythm itself that creates the Proustian sensation of being in two places at once, “A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, / Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves.”

Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth. He splits himself off and moves seamlessly between the third person and the first person. And as the bird chanted to him (“From the memories of the bird that chanted to me”) so he chants to us (“I, chanter of pains and joys”). This is a poem of poetic vocation.

It is telling that Whitman builds to the self-command, “A reminiscence sing.” He memorializes the memory in song. There is an element of lullaby in this poem, the lulling motion of the waves, the consoling sound of the sea. But this is a lullaby that wounds (as García Lorca said about Spanish lullabies), a lullaby of sadness that permeates the very universe itself, a lullaby that moves from chanting to singing. Paul Valary calls the passage from prose to verse, from speech to song, from walking to dancing, “a moment that is at once action and dream.” Whitman creates such a moment here. He would spin an enchantment beyond pain and joy, he would become the poetic shaman who authors that reminiscence for us, who magically summons up the experience in us.

this glorious essay is from here.
the poster at the top is for this.
the image from which that poster was taken is on the other side, and really does not seem to exist outside of the bnf's copy. the bnf, who has also brought us this.

japan, a water-draped nation.
is it any wonder so much art is about fish? and so much rhythm.

what do you hear?

from Salut au Monde

What do you hear,
Walt Whitman?

I hear the workman singing, and the farmer’s wife singing;
I hear in the distance the sounds of children, and of animals
early in the day;
I hear quick rifle-cracks from the riflemen of East Tennessee and Kentucky,
hunting on hills; 25
I hear emulous shouts of Australians, pursuing
the wild horse;
I hear the Spanish dance, with castanets,
in the chestnut shade, to the rebeck and guitar;
I hear continual echoes from the Thames;
I hear fierce French liberty songs;
I hear of the Italian boat-sculler the musical recitative of old poems; 30
I hear the Virginia plantation-chorus of negroes,
of a harvest night, in the glare of pine-knots;
I hear the strong baritone of the ’long-shore-men of Mannahatta;
I hear the stevedores unlading the cargoes, and singing;
I hear the screams of the water-fowl of solitary north-west lakes;
I hear the rustling pattering of locusts, as they strike the grain and grass with the showers of their terrible clouds; 35
I hear the Coptic refrain, toward sundown, pensively falling on the breast of the black venerable vast mother, the Nile;
I hear the bugles of raft-tenders on the streams of Kanada;
I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule;
I hear the Arab muezzin, calling from the top of the mosque;
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches—
I hear the responsive bass and soprano; 40
I hear the wail of utter despair of the white-hair’d Irish grandparents, when they learn the death of their grandson;
I hear the cry of the Cossack, and the sailor’s voice,
putting to sea at Okotsk;
I hear the wheeze of the slave-coffle, as the slaves march on—
as the husky gangs pass on by twos and threes,
fasten’d together with wrist-chains and ankle-chains;
I hear the entreaties of women tied up for punishment—
I hear the sibilant whisk of thongs through the air;
I hear the Hebrew reading his records and psalms; 45
I hear the rhythmic myths of the Greeks,
and the strong legends of the Romans;
I hear the tale of the divine life and bloody death
of the beautiful God—the Christ;
I hear the Hindoo teaching his favorite pupil the loves, wars,
adages, transmitted safely to this day,
from poets who wrote three thousand years ago.

(from 'leaves of grass,' published 1900.)

solitaire

Yet, O my soul supreme!
Know’st thou the joys
of pensive thought?
Joys of the free and
lonesome heart—
the tender, gloomy heart?
Joy of the solitary walk—
the spirit bowed yet proud—
the suffering and the struggle?
The agonistic throes,
the extasies—
joys of the solemn musings, day or night?


walt whitman
leaves of grass
1900

(genjiro ito,1901;
shotei hiroaki, 1930;
toulouse-lautrec, 1892;
henri boutet 1895)