Howard Nemerov's "The Makers"

THE MAKERS

Who can remember back to the first poets, 
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? 
No one has remembered that far back 
Or now considers, among the artifacts, 
And bones and cantilevered inference 
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets, 
So lofty and disdainful of renown 
They left us not a name to know them by. 

They were the ones that in whatever tongue 
Worded the world, that were the first to say 
Star, water, stone, that said the visible 
And made it bring invisibles to view 
In wind and time and change, and in the mind 
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world 
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers 
Of the city into the astonished sky. 

They were the first great listeners, attuned 
To interval, relationship, and scale, 
The first to say above, beneath, beyond, 
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine, 
Who having uttered vanished from the world 
Leaving no memory but the marvelous 
Magical elements, the breathing shapes 
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

--Howard Nemerov

Dear Deer, Come Here

Hernest is my library-spirit, my book-totem, even if he looks like a mere deer in a trenchcoat. Look closely and you'll see the spirit of the Horned Lords of myth and magic, of the Celtic Cernunnos, of Herne the Hunter, of . . . okay, a deer in a trenchcoat. I think he brings me luck, though he is given to Jungian pranks and hijacking my pints of Blarney Duck Ale. He's been known to invite jackalopes to dinner. As autumn gains strength, he prefers whiskey, mythic fiction, and rather melancholy nature poetry, preferably featuring does and fawns, or creatures of the forest in general. He enjoys William Cowper's 18th-century masterpiece The Task and Sir Thomas Wyatt's Renaissance lyrics, particularly "They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek" and "Whoso List To Hunt, I Know Where Is An Hind." Listen!

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, alas, I may no more.

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

I am of them that farthest cometh behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the Deer, but as she fleeth afore

Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,

Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who list her hunt (I put him out of doubt)

As well as I may spend his time in vain.

And, graven with diamonds, in letters plain

There is written her fair neck round about:

"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

--Sir Thomas Wyatt

Besides reciting such poetic laments, Hernest claims to be composing a comic burlesque and a woodland epic, Stag Party and The Herniad. My first real poem, according to my mother, was a song calling the deer closer at sunset in the town park of either Weed, CA, or Mount Shasta, CA; I was perhaps three or four. Dear deer, come here. And he has.

I can't help but think of better poetry than my doggerel couplet, of Shakespeare's mention of Herne the Hunter. These are Mistress Page's words, setting forth the legend and setting in motion a mighty prank for poor Sir John Falstaff:

There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,

Doth all the wintertime, at still midnight,

Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;

And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,

And makes milch kine yield blood, and shakes a chain

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know

The superstitious idle-headed eld

Receiv'd, and did deliver to our age,

This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

— The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act IV, scene iv, 26-36)

And then, my mind not being satisfied even by Shakespeare's verse--and resisting a full rereading of The Merry Wives just now, despite the evocative phrases I've quoted, despite the comic turns I'm recalling--I turn to another poem that I'd like to share with you. My "ragg'd-horn[ed]" fellow doesn't have the raw, eerie menace of the figure in John Montague's "The Split Lyre," but looking at my piece in clay somehow pulled me to this poet's piece in the following words.

THE SPLIT LYRE

On the frost held

field, Orpheus

strides, his greaves

bleak with light,

the split lyre

silver, hard

in his hands;

sleek after him

the damp-tongued

cringing hounds.

An unaccountable

desire to kneel,

to pray, pulls

my hands but

his head is not

a crown of thorns:

a great antlered

stag, pity

shrinks from

those horns.

--John Montague

Hernest: sculpture mix; brown glazes, layered.