The Blue Rail

Let’s begin with this poem by Jack Gilbert, IMO one of the best poets of the generation now in active retirement (which includes Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich). Gilbert is a poet of clear statements about what poetry tries to enter through language, and this poem is succinct:

BEYOND PLEASURE

Gradually we realize what is felt is not so important
(however lovely or cruel) as what the feeling contains.
Not what happens to us in childhood, but what was
inside what happened. Ken Kesey sitting in the woods,
beyond his fence of whitewashed motorcycles, said when
he was writing on acid he was not writing about it.
He used what he wrote as blazes to find his way back
to what he knew then. Poetry registers
feelings, delights and passion, but the best searches
out what is beyond pleasure, is outside process.
Not the passion so much as what the fervor can be
an ingress to. Poetry fishes us to find a world
part by part, as the photograph interrupts the flux
to give us time to see each thing separate and enough.
The poem chooses part of our endless flowing forward
to know its merit with attention.

-- from Refusing Heaven (2005)

***

Question: does poetry fish us to a realm beyond poetry, attempting to see into what washes behind it, a fourth realm which does not so much merit attention -- that perhaps is too willed and capable for minds so grooved as ours -- as demand it? Is there a poetry which must leave poetry behind in order to cohabit or inhabit that wilderness? I wonder ...


BLUE RAIL

No one taught me to
sing this way, no mortal
I mean I could pluck
from my writer’s history.
My profs all chanted
Compress! and Revise!,
ranting against getting
drunk on the nectar
of words gouted lush
and profuse, against
going outre on god-oomph
with postmodernistic
rooms now bereft of
beds which well whales.
Is this all a grand rebellion
against the folly of
the wise? Or have I
simply kept my ear
to the blue rail
I found between a
woman’s sighs
long ago (a girl’s
really), the most
subtle sighs I mean,
creamy yes and wide
as waves on a shore,
collapsing a wet
center ripe for
oohlalah it’s true,
but distant,
oh so distant, hidden
always behind the
peel’s rude rind
the way my God
is ripe and deep
exactly where worlds
sleep. I’ve sung
with mad fidelity
stripped of poetic
felicity exactly
what I heard
humming there,
a heavy low and
surgent sound
like an coming
train or nascent tide,
announcing an
epiphany I’ll never
find the true shore
of, much less in
exult frenzy ride,
though I try,
though I try.
I’m jammed between
two written breasts
-- call ‘em poetry
and prose, if you
please -- enrapt
with both, I suppose,
or needful of both
milks, praising two
encirling whorls
of well silver as I
work my membered
sense between.
My hand holds a
pen and writes
that strange
cartography across
and down a page
between margins
of doubt and certitude,
between a mad
and foolish rhetoric,
between the ocean
span which tides
twist You and me.
Jubilant I roust
my verbs, using two
ways of saying to
fuck well one sense,
inking there an inkling of
what the both are
trying to give birth in me.
Such words do not
so much arrive at
a knowledge fit to
print as describe
the fitness of what
heaves and crashes
in a collective spasm
of Yes -- mine, her’s,
God’s, maybe our’s
-- in foaming brute
emptiness. A boor of
the metaphor, savant
of foolish rhyme, the
helterskelter welder
of wild lines whose
toothiness is the
rail inside blue swoon,
lying hidden in
all these sweet
digressions like
a wolf inside
a grand mer’s empyreia
& tart delirium. Nipples,
naughty nooks and
damp sea smelling musk,
all of that are flora
of the red tusk which
drives all songs.
I’m just an old guy
droning on and on
of first and earlier
times, reliving those
red hours when
all was pure desire
inside a calyx of
soft suspire: my
mother’s voice above
the sea, the soft surf
sighing endlessly
& the way I was sealed
right then into one sort
of song -- a cast of mint
and mien -: A faery
dream perhaps in
a magic summer’s drone,
hardly the stuff of
serious verse, nor
of the proseman’s
straight discourse;
something which
returns ever and
again to the sense
of all amen’s --
not “the end” but
“it is so” -- truth
as that place where
the choir repairs
when a song exhausts
what it can’t know
but affirms anyway,
robes all at their
ankles getting wet
in brinous lees,
exposed & gentled
by a soft uteral breeze,
angels all around
holding wide the
covers of a book
that binds me to
glass pages blown
the day that I
was born, the
text inscribed there
precisely stating
the way that first
world looked to
me from this
vantage far away,
as far away as
an old man will get
having nothing else
to say & with direr
business just a
soft blue breath
a famished
tooth away.