Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
That Silent Evening
I will go back to that silent evening when we lay together and talked in silent voices, while outside slow lumps of soft snow fell, hushing as they got near the ground, with a fire in the room, in which centuries of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up, without a crackle, into morning light.
Not until what hastens went slower did we sleep.
When we got home we turned and looked back at our tracks twining out of the woods, where the branches we brushed against let fall puffs of sparkling snow, quickly, in silence, like stolen kisses, and where the scritch scritch scritch among the trees, which is the sound that dies inside the sparks from the wedge when the sledge hits it off center telling everything inside it is fire, jumped to a black branch, puffed up but without arms and so to our eyes lonesome, and yet also--how can we know this?--happy!
in shape of chickadee. Lying still in snow, not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing not to meet until heaven, but here and there treading slubby kissing stops, our tracks wobble across the snow their long scratch.
So many things that happen here are really little more, if even that, than a scratch, too. Words, in our mouths, are almost ready, already, to bandage the one whom the scritch scritch scritch, meaning if how when we might lose each other, scratches scratches scratches from this moment to that. Then I will go back to that silent evening, when the past just managed to overlap the future, if only by a trace, and the light doubles and casts through the dark a sparkling that heavens the earth.
About the Author
Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. For thirty-five years--from WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS to THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES to THREEE BOOKS--Galway Kinnell has been enriching American poetry, not only by his poems but also by his teaching and his powerful public readings.
Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note xi
FROM What a Kingdom It Was 1960
First Song 3
For William Carlos Williams 4
Freedom, New Hampshire 5
The Supper After the Last 9
The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World 12
FROM Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 1964
The River That Is East 29
For Robert Frost 31
Poem of Night 35
Middle of the Way 37
Ruins Under the Stars 39
Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock 41
FROM Body Rags 1968
Another Night in the Ruins 47
Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond 49
The Burn 51
The Fly 52
The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye
to His Poetry Students 53
How Many Nights 54
The Porcupine 55
The Bear 59
FROM The Book of Nightmares 1971
Under the Maud Moon 65
The Hen Flower 70
The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible 74
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight 79
Lastness 83
FROM Mortal Acts, Mortal Words 1980
Fergus Falling 91
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps 93
Saint Francis and the Sow 94
Wait 95
Daybreak 96
Blackberry Eating 97
Kissing the Toad 98
On the Tennis Court at Night 99
The Last Hiding Places of Snow 101
Looking at Your Face 105
Fisherman 106
52 Oswald Street 107
A Milk Bottle 108
FROM The Past 1985
The Road Between Here and There 113
Conception 115
The Sow Piglet's Escapes 116
The Olive Wood Fire 117
The Frog Pond 118
Prayer 120
Fire in Luna Park 121
Cemetery Angels 122
On the Oregon Coast 123
First Day of the Future 124
The Fundamental Project of Technology 125
The Waking 127
That Silent Evening 130
FROM When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 1990
The Tragedy of Bricks 133
The Cat 135
Oatmeal 137
The Perch 139
The Room 141
Last Gods 142
Farewell 144
When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 146
FROM Imperfect Thirst 1994
My Mother's R and R 159
The Man in the Chair 160
The Cellist 162
Running on Silk 164
The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson 166
Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West 168
Sheffield Ghazal 5: Passing the Cemetery 169
Parkinson's Disease 170
Rapture 172
Flies 174
Neverland 178