The Untouchable

by John Banville 

In a letter to his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou in 1649, Poussin, referring to the execution of Charles I, makes the following observation: "It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort." The remark is expressive of the quietism of the later Stoics, and of Seneca in particular. There are times when I wish I had lived more in accordance with such a principle. Yet who could have remained inactive in this ferocious century? Zeno and the earlier philosophers of his school held that the individual has a clear duty to take a hand in the events of his time and seek to mould them to the public good. This is another, more vigorous form of Stoicism. In my life I have exemplified both phases of the philosophy. When I was required to, I acted, in full knowledge of the ambiguity inherent in that verb, and now I have come to rest -- or no, not rest: stillness. Yes: I have some to stillness.

         Today, however, I am all agitation. The Death of Seneca is going for cleaning and valuation. Am I making a mistake? The valuers are very dependable, very discreet, they know me will, yet I cannot suppress the unfocused doubts that keep flying up in me darkly like a flock of restless starlings at the approach of night. What if the cleaners damage it, or in some other way deprive me of it, my last solace? The Irish say, when a child turns from its parents, that it is making strange; it comes from the belief that fairy folk, a jealous tribe, would steal a too-fair human babe and leave a changeling in its place. What if my picture comes back and I find that it is making strange? What if I look up from my desk some day and see a changeling before me?

          It is still on the wall; I cannot summon up the courage to lift it down. It looks at me as my six-year-old son did that day when I told him he was to be sent to boarding school. It is a produce of the artist’s last years, the period of the magnificent, late flowering of his genius, of The Seasons, of Apollo and Daphne, and the Hagar fragment. I have dated it tentatively to 1642. It is unusual among these final works, which taken together form a symphonic meditation on the grandeur and power of nature in her different aspects, shifting as it does from landscape to interior, from the outer to the inner world, from public life to the domestic. Here nature is present only in the placid view of distant hills and forest framed in the window above the philosopher’s couch. The light in which the scene is bathed has an unearthly quality, as if it were not daylight, but some other, paradisal radiance. Although its subject is tragic, the picture communicates a sense of serenity and simple grandeur that is deeply, deeply moving. The effect is achieved through the subtle and masterful organisation of colours, these blues and golds, and not-quite-blues and not-quite-golds, that lead the eye from the dying man in his marmoreal pose -- already his own effigy, as it were -- through the two slaves, and the officer of the Guard, awkward as a warhorse in his buckles and helmet, to the figure of the philosopher’s wife, to the servant girl preparing the bath in which the philosopher will presently be immersed, and on at last to the window and the vast, calm world beyond, where death awaits.

         I am afraid.

(pp. 180-182)

Four by Fargas

Translated Either As 'Experience' Or 'Suffering'

In the Agamemnon, wisdom comes dripping

like saline on a cancer ward.

Approaching what is merciless in us with mercy,

following pain back like a red thread toward its source.

Some say it's matter of noticing we're already inside.

Pathei mathos. Something teaches us. The moth at the lamp,

the lesson braided in the wick.

  

At Poplar Pond

There are angels right there between those trees.

Don't be frightened, I'm not seeing things.

The spaces we call empty are full of—

not tree, not sky, but us. We station our angels

aloft to mark our place in the holy ordinariness.

So these simples—chalky water, poplar,

moth-flown light—are that blind, sacred flesh.

A Little Champagne Music

Should there be a poetry of men? "Why do you suppose
everyone's writing about God these days?"
Taffy-colored hair and damselflies, amaryllis
vulgar as a flatted horn, clavicles and happenstance.
We should be coupling and uncoupling like the Atchison,
Topeka, and the Santa Fe. Our daily bread
and foxtrot. And a-one and a-two . . .

If There Is A

If there is a God, he has a lot to answer for.
Crocuses, purple cups that bloom through snow.
Cerulean, cornflower, azure, turquoise, ultramarine.
Mist of round haybales along the Sand Road
just after 5 a.m., when the foxes go to ground.
Not only the obvious evils, but also these other things
we should not mistake for easy.

by Laura Fargas

AN ANIMAL OF THE SIXTH DAY

Love

EVERYONE WAS IN LOVE

Galway Kinnell

One day, when they were little, Maud and Fergus
appeared in the doorway, naked and mirthful,
with a dozen long garter snakes draped over
each of them like brand-new clothes.
Snake tails dangled down their backs,
and snake foreparts in various lengths
fell over their fronts, heads raised
and swaying, alert as cobras.
They writhed their dry skins
upon each other, as snakes like doing
in lovemaking, with the added novelty
of caressing soft, smooth, moist human skin.
Maud and Fergus were deliciously pleased with themselves.
The snakes seemed to be tickled too.
We were enchanted. Everyone was in love.
Then Maud drew down off Fergus’s shoulder,
as off a tie rack, a peculiarly
lumpy snake and told me to look inside.
Inside that double-hinged jaw, a frog’s green
webbed hind feet were being drawn,
like a diver’s, very slowly as if into deepest waters.
Perhaps thinking I might be considering rescue,
Maud said, “Don’t. Frog is already elsewhere.”

SMALL POEM ABOUT THE HOUNDS
AND THE HARES
Lisel Mueller

After the kill, there is the feast.
And toward the end, when the dancing subsides
and the young have sneaked off somewhere,
the hounds, drunk on the blood of the hares,
begin to talk of how soft
were their pelts, how graceful their leaps,
how lovely their scared gentle eyes.

Polyphemos

POLYPHEMOS
               Diane Blakely Shoat

Bones litter this grass. The moon grows
full and rises like my mother's eye,
though milk-white and blind as hers never was.
She knew my secrets: I remember waking
from a childhood dream to find her beside me,
her gigantic palm drawn back to erase
what I'd seen there and wanted to sail toward
forever, my mouth tasting salt breeze. Moonlight
streamed through our cave. Her breasts
shown white in the flash of her gesture;
I took the bright nipples for stars.

But even she's gone. I'm tall as my brother;
when I was twelve he set out in a ship
half as big as this island, crafted
from the timbers of wrecks. Gulls wheeled
around sails so enormous they must have thought
they'd flown too high, were beating their wings
against clouds. Some panicked and died
in the wind-tautened mainsheet; from short
I could see the shimmer of hundreds of feathers.
Halfway to the western horizon, my brother threw
a survivor to me, my feet sinking in wet sand.
Although I was still small, I heard my mother's
wails and knew I'd need patience, not wings.

The years have flown by, and Mother taught me
the folly of travel, a man's hunger
for something not home. I'm happy enough here,
counting my goats and each season's stars,
tracing maps in the sand and now dreaming
whatever I want. Other pleasures we shared,
one at this table. I've built a fire:
at dusk I watched a ship mount the horizon;
it will founder by dawn among rocks.

Green

          Avete in voi li fiori e la verdura
                            Guido Cavalcanti

You have in you the flowers and the green grass:
And what is shining or is fair to see:
Light of the sun your own light doth surpass:
Who has not seen you, worthless wight must be!

And in this world of ours, no creature is
So full of pleasure and delightfulness:
If any man fear love, new courage his,
Seeing your face, so much himself to bless!

The ladies all, that bear you company,
For your dear sake, are pleasing to my sight,
And I would beg them of their courtesy,

To do you honor, each to strive her best,
And in your sovereignty to have delight
Since of them all you are the loveliest.
                                          Trans. G. S. Fraser

 

Avete in voi li fiori e la verdura,
    E ciò, che luce, o è bello a vedere.
    Risplende più che'l Sol vostra figura;
    Chi voi non vede, mai non può valere.

In questo mondo non ha creatura
    Sì piena di beltà, nè di piacere:
    E chi d'Amor temesse, l'assicura
    Vostro bel viso, e non può più temere.

Le donne, che vi fanno compagnia
    Assai mi piacen per lo vostro amore;
    Ed io le prego per lor cortesia,

Che, qual più vi faccia onore,
    Ed aggia cara vostra signoria,
    Perchè di tutte siete la migliore. 


 * * * * * * * * * *

 Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra 
                      Dante Alighieri 

To a short day and a great ring of shadow

have I come alas! and a whitening of hills,

as they lose color with the clouded grass.

And still my passion does not change its green,

so fast it is in the hard soul of stone

that looks and speaks and heeds me like a woman.

 

And in the same way this springtime woman

stands frozen like the snow in shadow'

because she is not moved, no more than stone

is, when the sweet weather warms the hills

and turns them back again from white to green 

to cover them with little flowers and grass.

 

When she wears her hair in a garland of grass,

our minds are charmed away from every woman

save her who mingles curled yellow and green

so neat that Love comes to stand in shadow,

Love who fixes me between small hills

more firmly than mortar fixing stone.

 

Her beauty dearer than a precious stone

works a wound not cured by healing grass,

and I have fled through plains and past the hills

with hope to save myself from such a woman;

yet her dazzle gives no rest in shadow

cast by wall or knoll or leafy green.

 

I have sometimes seen her dressed in green

so made she might have then provoked in stone

the love I suffer even for her shadow:

therefore in the fairest meadow grass

I craved to see her lovesick as ever woman

was -- and bounded by the highest hills.

But rivers will return to run uphill 

sooner than, for me, this damp green

wood take fire, as should a pretty woman

so could I bring myself to sleep on stone

a lifetime and roam and feed on grass

only to watch her garments set a shadow.

And when the hills throw their darkest shadow,

under such green beauty this young woman

melts it, vanished like a stone in grass.

                                 Trans. Sonia Raiziss and Alfredo de Palchi.

 

 

Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra
son giunto, lasso!, ed al bianchir de’ colli,
quando si perde lo color ne l’erba;
e ’l mio disio però non cangia il verde,
si è barbato ne la dura petra
che parla e sente come fosse donna.

Similemente questa nova donna
si sta gelata come neve a l’ombra;
che non la move, se non come petra,
il dolce tempo che riscalda i colli
e che li fa tornar di bianco in verde
perché li copre di fioretti e d’erba.

Quand’ella ha in testa una ghirlanda d’erba,
trae de la mente nostra ogn’altra donna;
perché si mischia il crespo giallo e ’l verde
sì bel, ch’Amor lì viene a stare a l’ombra,
che m’ha serrato intra piccioli colli
più forte assai che la calcina petra.

La sua bellezza ha più vertù che petra,
e ’l colpo suo non può sanar per erba;
ch’io son fuggito per piani e per colli,
per potere scampar da cotal donna;
e dal suo lume non mi può far ombra
poggio né muro mai né fronda verde.

Io l’ho veduta già vestita a verde
sì fatta, ch’ella avrebbe messo in petra
l’amor ch’io porto pur a la sua ombra;
ond’io l’ho chesta in un bel prato d’erba
innamorata, com’anco fu donna,
e chiuso intorno d’altissimi colli.

Ma ben ritorneranno i fiumi a’ colli
prima che questo legno molle e verde
s’infiammi, come suol far bella donna,
di me; che mi torrei dormire in petra
tutto il mio tempo e gir pascendo l’erba,
sol per veder do’ suoi panni fanno ombra.

Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra,
sotto un bel verde la giovane donna
la fa sparer, com’uom petra sott’erba.

 

 

From An Anthology of Medieval Lyrics, ed. Angel Flores (1962). 

Baudolino crosses the Sambatyon

It was indeed the river of stone, as they realized when they arrived at its banks, dazed by the great din that almost prevented them from hearing one another's words. It was a majestic course of rocks and clods, flowing ceaselessly, and in that current of great shapeless masses could be discerned irregular slabs, sharp as blades, broad as tombstones, and between them, gravel, fossils, peaks, and crags.

       Moving at the same speed, as if driven by an impetuous wind, fragments of travertine rolled over and over, great faults sliding above, then, their impetus lessening, they bounced off streams of spall, while little chips now round smoothed as if my water in their sliding between boulder and boulder, leaped up, falling back with sharp sounds, to be caught in those same eddies they themselves had created, crashing and grinding. Amid and above this overlapping of mineral, puffs of sand were formed, busts of chalk, clouds of lapilli, foam of pumice, rills of mire.

       Here and there sprays of shards, volleys of coals, fell on the back, and the travelers had to cover their faces so as not be be scarred. . . . By then, for two days, they had seen above the horizon an impervious chain of high mountains, which loomed, almost blocking their view of the sky, crammed as they were in an ever narrower passage, with no exit, from which , way, way above, could now be seen only a great cloud barely luminescent, that gnawed the top of those peaks.

       Here, from a fissure, like a wound between two mountains, they saw the Sambatyon springing up: a roiling of sandstone, a gurgling of tuff, a dripping of muck, a ticking of shards, a grumbling of clotted earth, an overflowing of clods, a rain of clay, a gradually transformed into a steady flow, which began its journey towards some boundless ocean of sand. . . . Then, more and more impetuous, the Sambatyon subdivided into myriad streamlets, which penetrated among mountainous slopes like the fingers of a hand in a clump of mud; at times a wave was swallowed by a grotto, then from a sort of rocky passage that seemed impassable, it emerged with a roar and flung itself angrily toward the valley . . .

       There were cataracts that plunged down from dozens of rocky eaves arranged like an amphitheater, into a boundless final vortex, an incessant retching of granite, an eddy of bitumen, a sole undertow of alum, a churning of schist, a clash of orpiment against the banks. And on the matter that the vortex erupted towards the sky, but low with respect to the eyes of those who looked down as if from the top of a tower, the sun's rays formed on those silicious droplets an immense rainbow that as every body reflected the rays with varying splendor according to its own nature, had many more colors than those usually formed in the sky after a storm, and, unlike them, seemed destined to shine eternally, never dissolving.

       It was a reddening of haematrites and cinnabars, a glow of blackness as if it were steel, a flight of crumbs of aureopigment from yellow to bright orange, a bluness of armenium, a whiteness of calcinated shells, a greening of malachite, a fading of liothargirium into saffrons ever paler, a blare of risigallam, a belching of greenish earth that faded into dust of crusocolla and then transmigrated into nuances of indigo and violet, a triumph of aurum musivum, a purpling of burnt while lead, a flaring of sandracca, a couch of silvered clay, a single transparence of alabaster.

Umberto Eco, Baudolino: A Novel.  Translated by William Weaver. (from pp. 357-360)

Three American sonnets to be read aloud

from American Sonnets: an anthology

David Bromwich, editor.

Robert Frost

Never again would birds' song be the same.

He would declare and could himself believe

That the birds there in all the garden round

From having heard the daylong voice of Eve

Had added to their own an oversound,

Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Admittedly an eloquence so soft

Could only have had an influence on birds

When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as it may, she was in their song.

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed

Had now persisted in the woods so long

That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds' song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

Delmore Schwartz

The Beautiful American Word, Sure.

The beautiful American word, Sure,

As I have come into a room, and touch

The lamp's button, and the light blooms with such

Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

As I care for what I do not know, and care

Knowing for little she might not have been,

And for how little she would be unseen,

The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.

Where the light is, and each thing clear,

Separate from all others, standing in its place,

I drink the time and touch whatever's near,

And hope for day when the whole world has that face:

For what assures her present every year?

In dark accidents the mind's sufficient grace.

William Meredith

The Illiterate

Touching your goodness, I am like a man

Who turns a letter over in his hand

And you might think this was because the hand

Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man

Has never had a letter from anyone;

And now he is both afraid of what it means

And ashamed because he has no other means

To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,

Or his parents died before he sent them word,

Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.

Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.

What would you call his feeling for the words

That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?