Thursday, September 07, 2006
Poem for Today
The Passage by Robert Creeley
What waiting in the halls,
stamping on the stairs,
all the ghosts are here tonight
come from everywhere.
Yet one or two,
absent, make
themselves felt by that,
break the heart.
Oh did you know I love you?
Could you guess?
Do you have, for me,
any tenderness left?
I cry to hear them,
sad, sad voices.
Ladies and gentlemen
come and come again.
I read this poem earlier today at The Poets House which is a ridiculously cool and totally free resource-center that sponsors events and houses a 45,000 volume collection. I know, I know...sounds pretty lame for everyone out there save us few poetry-plucking pansies. Anyway, in the middle of the collection is this wonderfully relaxed reading room where people go about their business of reading, writing or napping in mutually-respected solitude. After reading some incomprehensible old-school San Francisco surrealism, I turned to a couple collections of Creeley's much more accesible work. For the record, accessibility is everything in poetry to me. I guess I'd rather write a single Beatle's song than a hundred Rachmaninoff concertos. Afterwards, I took the 6 train down to City Hall and from there a slow amble with many stops across the Brooklyn Bridge. Unsurprisingly, my mind was visited by Ghosts of Relationships Past, Present and Future. I was both gladdened and saddened by a procession of memories. Although a simple poem, there is such sincerity in the pain, such palpability in the speaker's remorse, that it has the hard feel of something undeniably authentic...say, an antique mahogany letter-writing desk as opposed to a particle-board and plastic computer station. So leave a window open for your ghosts tonight. They may no longer be here in person but they still have something to say.
(Oh, by the way, haters. I posted this yesterday, it just didn't publish for some infuriating reason.)
What waiting in the halls,
stamping on the stairs,
all the ghosts are here tonight
come from everywhere.
Yet one or two,
absent, make
themselves felt by that,
break the heart.
Oh did you know I love you?
Could you guess?
Do you have, for me,
any tenderness left?
I cry to hear them,
sad, sad voices.
Ladies and gentlemen
come and come again.
I read this poem earlier today at The Poets House which is a ridiculously cool and totally free resource-center that sponsors events and houses a 45,000 volume collection. I know, I know...sounds pretty lame for everyone out there save us few poetry-plucking pansies. Anyway, in the middle of the collection is this wonderfully relaxed reading room where people go about their business of reading, writing or napping in mutually-respected solitude. After reading some incomprehensible old-school San Francisco surrealism, I turned to a couple collections of Creeley's much more accesible work. For the record, accessibility is everything in poetry to me. I guess I'd rather write a single Beatle's song than a hundred Rachmaninoff concertos. Afterwards, I took the 6 train down to City Hall and from there a slow amble with many stops across the Brooklyn Bridge. Unsurprisingly, my mind was visited by Ghosts of Relationships Past, Present and Future. I was both gladdened and saddened by a procession of memories. Although a simple poem, there is such sincerity in the pain, such palpability in the speaker's remorse, that it has the hard feel of something undeniably authentic...say, an antique mahogany letter-writing desk as opposed to a particle-board and plastic computer station. So leave a window open for your ghosts tonight. They may no longer be here in person but they still have something to say.
(Oh, by the way, haters. I posted this yesterday, it just didn't publish for some infuriating reason.)
