monday poem #54: Hayden Carruth, "Auburn Poem"
Life must be getting back to normal; I'm posting a monday poem. Feels good.
I can't remember whether Hayden Carruth ended up on my list because of the National Book Award or the Lenore Marshall Award, but whatever. I still want to pick up the Collected Shorter Poems, especially since I quite enjoyed the more recent Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.
Lots of poems about aging, lots of poems about landscape. A sense of humor that is sometimes quite broad and sometimes sneaky. And several poems for other poets, including "California," which is for Adrienne Rich.
But I've chosen this one instead.
Auburn Poem
A book I was reading this morning
by Milan Kundera contains this: "In the algebra
of love a child is the symbol of the magical
sum of two beings." And now that child
is thirty-nine years old; she is suffering
from a cancer which we are told is incurable
and will become fatal. You have been married
for thirty years to another man, and I
have been married to three other women
and have lived with six whom I did not
marry-a disgrace but there it is, done
and irrevocable. We are old. You are
sixty-nine and I am seventy. It would be
sentimental folly to say I can see in you,
or you in me, the lineaments of our
loving youth. Yet it is true. Your voice
especially takes me back. We are here
because our daughter, whom we conceived
one fine April night in Chicago long ago,
is crucially vulnerable. We meet in agony,
in wordless despair. We meet after years
of separation and mildly affectionate
unconcern. But it's true, true, this child
who is a mature, afflicted woman
with children of her own, is still a symbol
of that magical sum we were, and in this
wretchedness, without word or touch or hidden
glance, I hold myself out to you, and I know
I am accepted without word or touch or hidden
glance. This, so late, the crisis of our lives.
- Hayden Carruth
from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey
I can't remember whether Hayden Carruth ended up on my list because of the National Book Award or the Lenore Marshall Award, but whatever. I still want to pick up the Collected Shorter Poems, especially since I quite enjoyed the more recent Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey.
Lots of poems about aging, lots of poems about landscape. A sense of humor that is sometimes quite broad and sometimes sneaky. And several poems for other poets, including "California," which is for Adrienne Rich.
But I've chosen this one instead.
Auburn Poem
A book I was reading this morning
by Milan Kundera contains this: "In the algebra
of love a child is the symbol of the magical
sum of two beings." And now that child
is thirty-nine years old; she is suffering
from a cancer which we are told is incurable
and will become fatal. You have been married
for thirty years to another man, and I
have been married to three other women
and have lived with six whom I did not
marry-a disgrace but there it is, done
and irrevocable. We are old. You are
sixty-nine and I am seventy. It would be
sentimental folly to say I can see in you,
or you in me, the lineaments of our
loving youth. Yet it is true. Your voice
especially takes me back. We are here
because our daughter, whom we conceived
one fine April night in Chicago long ago,
is crucially vulnerable. We meet in agony,
in wordless despair. We meet after years
of separation and mildly affectionate
unconcern. But it's true, true, this child
who is a mature, afflicted woman
with children of her own, is still a symbol
of that magical sum we were, and in this
wretchedness, without word or touch or hidden
glance, I hold myself out to you, and I know
I am accepted without word or touch or hidden
glance. This, so late, the crisis of our lives.
- Hayden Carruth
from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey