My memories of nights spent pacing the silent suburban streets of Florida were complemented today when I opened a book of Elizabeth Jennings poems and found Curtains Undrawn. This work describes the poet’s times spent catching near-voyeuristic glimpses of “modest lives”.
Curtains Undrawn Looking in windows down a night-time street In Winter, I don't feel A voyeur, no, I only seem to meet Lives lived with love's good will. There is a student with an angle-poise Lamp. He's hard at work In happy concentration. There's no noise As yet and nothing's stark Or ugly. I've a sense of neighborhood, Of being near yet keeping A proper distance. Now I find it good To think of children sleeping With night-lights on. No doubt their parents will Later go up to bed And make love without speaking. There's a still Design within my head As if I were about to write a score To fit these modest lives Where there are quarrels sometimes but no more Than small ones which arrive Because we are imperfect. I walk on Under a full moon's stare, Knowing that elsewhere crimes are done - Not here, no, never here, And 'here' is much more usual, I believe, Than war and hate and dread Since here are still lives where the trust of love Will never be quite dead. Say I am sentimental. I don't care. The rooted tree of trust I know is always flowering somewhere Where people still are just. Maybe they could not tell you what they think Their lives are all about. Philosophies grow cold, most dogmas shrink Here where hope's not in doubt.
I only know Jennings for having read several dozen of her poems these last weeks. I feel a presumption of decency from her, a tranquil foundation wrenched gently asunder by her travels through poetry, the Bible, writings about the Bible, and philosophy. In Curtains Undrawn I expected a foreboding rumble under the placid presumptions, but I am biased by my natural inclinations toward emotional slosh. The line “Not here, no, never here” teased me into thinking she was taking this to a level of dismay or conflict, but she stayed the course of equilibrium.
I agree with her when she says “‘here’ is much more usual, I believe, Than war and hate and dread”, though I am skeptical that “the trust of love Will never be quite dead.” She finds pockets of decency, these paradises summoned from absence created by her voyeur-like glimpses into neighbors’ lives. Calmness at the base of things is foreign to me.
Another poem, A Chinese Sage, describes a poet who whittles away his excesses and obscurities of cleverness by making a peasant woman his mentor. Anything she did not understand was excised from his work and the result, presumably, was of serene universality. I like the poem but ask: Was serenity common among ancient peasants? Is it common among today’s homeless?
A Chinese Sage A Chinese sage once took every word distilled, altered and perfected In private till for him it seemed a poem, yes he took this to a peasant woman, Read it to her softly and slowly and waited for her rough-voiced assurance that Certain words she could understand, others were meaningless to her. Very discreetly But decisively, and with no arguments, this sage crossed out every word that was foreign to A woman of simplicity who knew labours of the soil and the house, who had no Dealings other than this with poetry, art of any kind, yet by his Magnanimity, more, his humility, became his mentor, guided him Out of all obscurity, not with wearying argument or even quiet coaxing, but by the fact That she was a world he could only enter through her. Hay, beds, crude meals, lust Subdued his wit, bodied out his verse, cancelled cleverness. And, I ask, was he Most poet or most philosopher in this uncrowned wisdom, writing In the reign of Charlamagne, paring simplicities to a peace no Emperor was ever enticed by or even dreamed of?
∞
A breeze off the lake–petal-shaped
Luna-park effects avoid the teasing outline
Of where we would be if we were here.
Bombed out of our minds, I think
The way here is too close, too packed
With surges of feeling. It can’t be.
The wipeout occurs first at the center,
now around the edges. A big ugly one
With braces kicking the shit out of a smaller one
Who reaches for a platinum axe stamped excalibur:
Just jungles really. The daytime bars are
Packed but night has more meaning
In the pockets and side vents. I feel as though
Somebody had just brought me an equation.
I say, "I can’t answer this–I know
That it’s true, please, believe me,
I can see the proof, lofty, invisible
In the sky far above the striped awnings. I just see
That I want it to go on, without
Anybody’s getting hurt, and for the shuffling
To resume between me and my side of the night."
John Ashbery
