Literary Preoccupation

"Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

--William Gibson, Zero History

Face in the Mirror

I once went on a camping trip to Fish Lake and didn't shave for a week, which meant I didn't look at my face in a mirror for a week.  We were in the woods, so no shop windows to check my hair, no car windows to glance at my reflection.  Sure, I could have looked at my face in the surface of the lake, just as Eve did after God had created her--and she saw an absolutely beautiful creature, so beautiful that Adam was a real let-down when she first saw him--but I didn't think to look at my face in the water while fishing.  I don't think I would have had an Eve-like experience anyway.

Instead, I was surprised when I got home at the end of the week, staggered into the bathroom, exhausted from a long day hiking, swimming, and fishing and from an 8 or 9 hour drive, and stood in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, reaching for my toothbrush and toothpaste.  (And yes, I'd been brushing all week long; don't get distracted from my story.)  So, a week away from a mirror and when I looked I saw a stranger.  I saw myself as I guess I really am.   I saw the wideness of my jawbones, the narrowness of my chin, the skinny roundness of my nose, the shaggy eyebrows, the bright blue eyes.  I saw all that and the rest from a different perspective, a perspective not governed by my own ideas of myself, not governed by the way I'd always thought of my face (unremarkable, but mine).  

I looked in that mirror, and I saw myself, but only for a moment, a flash of sight, and then there was just me, just Matt, looking back at me, a slightly quizzical look on my face as if that reflected self were amused by all that had passed so swiftly through my brain.  'Thinking too much again,' Mirror-Matt said, 'It's just you and me here.'  

I looked frankly at myself in that mirror, and I laughed.

--entry found in an old notebook back in 2014

(lightly edited)

Robert Graves' "Apple Island"

APPLE ISLAND

Though cruel seas like mountains fill the bay,
Wrecking quayside huts,
Salting our vineyards with tall showers of spray;

And though the moon shines dangerously clear,
Fixed in another cycle
Than the sun’s progress round the felloe’d year;

And though I may not hope to dwell apart
With you on Apple Island
Unless my beat be docile to the dart —

Why should I fear your element, the sea,
Or the full moon, your mirror,
Or the halved Apple from your holy tree?

— Robert Graves

Galley-Work: Poetry From Robert Graves

THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

Grey haunted eyes, absent-mindedly glaring

From wide, uneven orbits; one brow drooping

Somewhat over the eye

Because of a missile fragment still inhering,

Skin-deep, as a foolish record of old-world fighting.

Crookedly broken nose — low tackling caused it;

Cheeks, furrowed; coarse grey hair, flying frenetic;

Forehead, wrinkled and high;

Jowls, prominent; ears, large; jaw, pugilistic;

Teeth, few; lips, full and ruddy; mouth, ascetic.

I pause with razor poised, scowling derision

At the mirrored man whose beard needs my attention,

And once more ask him why

He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption,

To court the queen in her high silk pavilion.

--Robert Graves

THIEF

To the galleys, thief, and sweat your soul out

 With strong tugging under the curled whips,

 That there your thievishness may find full play.

 Whereas, before, you stole rings, flowers and watches,

 Oaths, jests and proverbs,

 Yet paid for bed and board like an honest man,

 This shall be entire thiefdom: you shall steal

 Sleep from chain-galling, diet from sour crusts,

 Comradeship from the damned, the ten-year-chained --

 And, more than this, the excuse for life itself

 From a craft steered toward battles not your own.

--Robert Graves

Robert Graves, New Collected Poems,
Introduction by James McKinley,
Doubleday & Company, Inc.: Garden City, New York.
1977.

The mask?
Triton: sculpture mix; nutmeg/brown and blue glazing.

"In A Long Rage": More Poems By Louise Bogan

I've been reading around  again in Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923- 1968--The Noonday Press: New York, 1968--and I have four more poems I'd like to share.

I've quoted four other poems by Louise Bogan here.

Read aloud, please, and listen:


MAN ALONE


It is yourself you seek
In a long rage,
Scanning through light and darkness
Mirrors, the page,


Where should reflected be
Those eyes and that thick hair,
That passionate look, that laughter.
You should appear


Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in the silvered glass;
Into all other bodies
Yourself should pass.


The glass does not dissolve;
Like walls the mirrors stand;
The printed page gives back
Words by another hand.


And your infatuate eye
Meets not itself below:
Strangers lie in your arms
As I lie now.




BAROQUE COMMENT


From loud sound and still chance;
From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
The kelp-disordered beaches;
Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:


Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the buttress;
The named constellations;
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains; foreheads, under weather-bleached hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.




PACKET OF LETTERS


In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve--
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.


There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in the murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.




SOLITARY OBSERVATION BROUGHT
BACK FROM A SOJOURN IN HELL


At midnight tears
Run into your ears.