Good poems are instantly recognizable. They startle, shock new life into old ideas, impress on the mind patterns of beauty and truth previously unnoticed. Often, as John Keats wrote, they “strike the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Every year, birthday to birthday, I chose a poem of my year. I have been doing this since my 38th birthday so I now have 52 of them and I am thinking of publishing in a very small edition for family and friends an anthology of these poems for my 90th birthday next year. They all must be good poems because they have stood the hard test of time and I like none of them less than I did at the time of choosing and some of them even more. Good poems reveal themselves fully only after many readings.
My favorite poem of one year was “Body and Soul” by Charles Wright which he wrote for a friend, Coleman Hawkins. As with all good poems it needs to be revisited often to listen again to its voice and meanings. I keep such poems in the leaves of my diary and move them on week by week so that I often re-read them and find they are never the same.
Body and Soul
by Charles Wright
The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music
together,
Is faith, it appears – faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind.
April, and anything’s possible.
Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
And back – on horseback, on camelback, on elephantback
and on foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645,
Mountains and deserts,
In search of the Truth,
the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
And he found it.
These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbour’s back-porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.
Every true poem is a spark,
and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be reengendered by.
Shooting stars.
April’s identical,
celestial, wordless, burning down,
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination’s our own, its hope is the hope we live with.
Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate
on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of this life.
He never traveled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
in failure, he thought, and suffering.
Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small
Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp
edges of isolation.
Don’t just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
The seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.
As the year passes I choose poems that especially strike me and at the end of the year I consider the folder of selections and make the award. It is never easy and that is all to the good since it means sorting out the richest from the rich, the best from the very good. It is a good part of life to spend time with Poems.
