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  #1  
Unread 02-11-2023, 07:43 PM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is offline
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Default “Evening” (mystery poet)

I feel myself undergoing a conversion to free verse. Do you know the poet who’s working this wonder? (Hint: Christopher Isherwood, having read some of his poems, told him, “I have an idea you would write good prose.”)

Evening

          Evening is her name.
She is waiting for you at the breathless height of the stairs,
and to admit you she draws the door soundlessly open
before you’ve had time to remove the doorkey from your pocket.
She is not Oriental and yet she’s acquired the graces of the Far East.
They go with the skin exposed by the whispering poppy kimono,
that artfully careless permission of a breast’s ivory satin
to be glimpsed as she draws the door further open with flickering eyes
and cool smile, suggestive of, “Yes, your touch I’ll know later.”
Why does she lift a finger to her lips, always as if the room,
          spacious and cool,
contained a music which is too delicate for a word to intrude upon it
or audible footsteps to fall?
There is an unspoken admonition, “Shoes off at the door, please.”
And other silent gestures.
                                    She indicates all about her
those many little enchantments which make the room safe to enter.
And terror is suspended at the threshold …

          Les points de suspension: Evening’s ways of saying
that what you’re about to say does not need saying.
All day you’ve been gone, and what has she done in your absence?
A number of leisurely things, accomplished with a quiet grace.
She has bathed in cool, scented water and dusted herself with rice powder,
          prepared herself for your return as a jewel
                     for a birthday
is enclosed in gift-wrapping.
          Marvelously the window seems enlarged
                     to three times its true size
and you feel that, leaning out of it,
                     she has inhaled
          the freshness of a great distance:
then turned from the window to release it into the room’s atmosphere
a moment before your return.
          She has made fragrant tea.
It is in pale blue bowls set on saucers, with crescents of lemon
cut so thinly they’ll float on the pale amber surface,
lighter than liquid, than anything but the beginning of dusk.

Oh, she has long known how you love to stretch out on the floor
with your head resting on her lap that’s softer than a silk cushion!
          And what else has she done in your absence?
All of the heavy furniture which offended you has been removed
          from the room, on the wide bed she has spread
fresh linen’s landscape of snow.

Another mysterious marvel: she has widened
the table beside the bed to accommodate Rilke’s stone angels
          and the daring aerial leap and outcry of Crane
over Brooklyn’s bridge and shipyards.

          It is Evening’s room prepared for your return.
Yet something now draws you toward the mysteriously enlarged window.
                     You look out.
You see five stories below the level which took your breath
          an apparitional youth.
He is standing directly below you and looking up at you
as you look down at him.
          Then all of Evening’s enchantments are dissolved
in that luminous upward look, innocent, but an enticement.
And he is Evening, then, instead of she who was Evening
          and descending the stairs takes your breath
                     more completely
than did ascending.
          Is He there when you rush from the entrance?
          Angelic, inquiring, inviting?
          Not even the mist that seemed to envelop his gleam.
And what a long breathless climb back up the five flights to —
          she is Evening again.
Again She receives you, a finger to her lips, meaning no word.
Rest your head on the pillow softer than silk, among these little enchantments, and drink
          the forgetfulness tea.
          I am Evening: He only pretended to be.

Last edited by Carl Copeland; 02-11-2023 at 07:59 PM.
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  #2  
Unread 02-12-2023, 09:16 AM
Jim Ramsey Jim Ramsey is offline
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Hi Carl,

There is an almost southern charm to this, a lingering gentility in the setting and the voice and yet also a stranger form of titillating kindness that captures both the attractive antipathy of gender, and its feral blending. (I am trying to be dramatic!) Glad to see you enjoying free verse!

My own discovery recently is John G. Neihardt, who I am hoping sends me in the opposite direction from your new path, to take me toward a better grasp of metric verse. He seems to be a cowboy poet of old who wrote a "Cycle of the West," as his life's work. I have no idea how posterity or modernism views him but his writing seems a better template for me than nursery rhymes for ingraining rhythms in my head.

Jim R

Last edited by Jim Ramsey; 02-12-2023 at 01:25 PM.
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  #3  
Unread 02-12-2023, 04:34 PM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Ramsey View Post
There is an almost southern charm to this ...
Jim, the poet does indeed have ties to the American South, so I think you’re on to something. I’ve never read Neihardt, but the subjects he’s known for make me think you’d enjoy this by my mystery poet (though I could’ve done without the romanticized “Indian-fighters”):

Inheritors

I

We were the pioneers
the long-haired men in coon caps
the clear-eyed
who saw dusk coming slowly
like bitter smoke out of the hills
     We were the cavaliers
     the Virginians
     who came down through Cumberland Gap
     into East Tennessee
We were the quiet-spoken men who knew weather
and ways of the woods
who heard twigs snap at midnight
and woke at the sound trigger-quick
grasping steel
who leapt out of blankets
and rushed to the flaming stockade
     We were the ones that eked out a lean season
     with handfuls of grain
     ate roots when the grain gave out
     and slept in our boots to keep warm
     Broke ice at morning
     to wash the sleep from our eyes
     and took the trail westward again
For we were the ones that known lands
were not large enough to contain
the adventurers
the ones that must have something new

II

     What has become
     of our deer-skinned, moccasined race?
Were all of them lost
in crossing the Isthmus
in rounding the Strait of Magellan?
     Did none get past
     the tortuous ridge of the Rockies?
Did these hold them fast?
     Did the Santa Fe Trail
     through glittering death-strewn desert
     lead nowhere at last?
Where are the Indian-fighters
the young pioneers
who flat-boated down the Ohio
past Cumberland Gap
with women and horses and guns
to make a new world?

III

     The towns have taken them
The cities have done their best to make whores
of our sweet-limbed daughters
our sons have grown round
with unwholesome accretions of fat
with muscles well-covered, disused
and the softness of wealth
     The western acres have turned our flesh into bread
     our bone into wood to build houses
     our blood is caught up
     in the churning motion of wheels
We move with the tide of a people
we are lost in a crowd
we teem with the teeming of millions
producing our kind
and a kind that is not our kind
and the spawn of the millions increase
and move closer about us
in slowly constricting embrace

IV

     Sound the horn, sentry!
     When will we move out again?

Waking at dawn, starting early
going down the new trail
clear-eyed and alert
fresh with the freshness of morning
coffee-warmed and exhilarated with movement
striking out into day
our guns bearing lightly before us
arms wielding the axe with keen vigor
firm-muscled, easy, relaxed
     Going down the divide into valley
     or climbing steep hill
     with the blue mist curling around us
     our feet on bare rock
     our nostrils appraising the weather
     conjecturing rain
     our thighs straining upwards
     our sweat-rivered backs to the sun
     the adversative stone
     consenting by perilous inches
And then dropping down
among the sweet pines and the cedars
to ford the clear stream
Wading in waist-deep
swimming out with a strong sure stroke
against the fierce pull of the current
and reaching the shore
     And then pressing onwards
     still onwards
     with the sun now declining before us
     with the glare in our narrowing eyes
     and the plains sweeping round us
Then stopping for night
for night and for rest and for food
and the woodsmoke rising again blue and bitter
and the jug passed around the quiet fire

V

     Sound the horn, sentry!
     We break camp at dawn!

Our feet will remember the trail
our feet will climb up through the foothills
or cross the wide plains
through glistening white clouds of morning
     Our women will follow behind us
     clear-eyed and deep-breasted
     bearing our sons in their loins
     And the earth will divide at our coming
     the hills flatten out!
Sound the horn, sentry!
The time has come to move on!


*

I haven’t sparked a lot of interest with my mystery, so I’ll let the cat out of the bag—the same cat that was on a hot tin roof. The poet is Tennessee Williams.

Last edited by Carl Copeland; 02-12-2023 at 06:05 PM.
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Unread 02-12-2023, 07:48 PM
Jim Ramsey Jim Ramsey is offline
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Hi Carl,

I didn't know who wrote the poem based on knowledge but after exact phrase searches of the first and last lines found it was by Tennessee Williams. I wanted to keep your mystery going so I hinted with my comments alluding to kindness of stranger(s) and drama(tic) and my somewhat weird comments about gender as further hints that I had solved the puzzle—I have always thought he was especially good at showing the gender issues of the time in which he was actively writing.

Jim

Last edited by Jim Ramsey; 02-12-2023 at 07:51 PM.
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  #5  
Unread 02-13-2023, 04:43 AM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Ramsey View Post
I wanted to keep your mystery going so I hinted with my comments ... that I had solved the puzzle
Jim, thanks for your discreet efforts to keep the mystery going. I thought you were just exceptionally perceptive. Nothing stays secret for long in the age of the Internet.

Carl
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  #6  
Unread 02-21-2023, 06:58 PM
R. S. Gwynn's Avatar
R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
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Neihardt was on tv at least once in the 70s, possibly the Dick Cavett show.

Tom's final soliloquy in TGM can be printed as blank verse.
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