phillip crymble

Loved him as O'Reilly the builder in Fawlty Towers.

UNFOLDING If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history, No gradual growth of consciousness Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations, The bought elections, the betrayal of trust By party faction in the name of progress- What about spirit in the personal realm Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly That our best days seem like a holding action? Seasons repeat themselves, but the tree Shading the yard keeps growing. Don't be chagrined that the sadness you felt This evening beside the bed of a friend Who's growing weaker wasn't more profound Than the sadness of yesterday, that you still Can't imagine a fraction of what he's feeling As the world he loves slips from his grasp. No progress from your perspective, But who's to say what you might notice If the scroll of the last few months were unrolled On the table before you, how clear it might be That your your understanding of all you're losing In losing him has been slowly deepening? Another day, you say to yourself, at dusk As you climb your porch steps, which you notice Could use some scraping and painting this weekend, A fresh coat that with luck will last a year. --Carl Dennis

SO many great poems in these old issues of The New Yorker

I don't, but my mum might. You know the area?

The Keel Bay Guest House. I often wonder whatever became of it.

GINSBERG When Ginsberg (always tolerant and kindhearted) wanted to help a starveling young poet he might close his letter by saying: take my letter to the Phoenix Bookshop in Cornelia Street, they may give you as much as $25 for it.

James Laughlin's entry on Allen Ginsberg in The Way it Wasn't (2006)

Small world. My father's sister lives in a house on New Park Road. They bought it new. Something like this one.

Amazing. My parents owned and operated a guesthouse on Achill in the mid-60s.

Happy to. We have two new poems of hers in the winter issue.

A MARRIAGE His paintings were small, suggestions of houses, pinpricks of green for trees. She'd set her glass down, say, Paint like you're blind, from memory and passion— two words he especially didn't care for. She'd say, Paint like you're on fire. But their house was already burning, and he was going blind and deaf. So he'd carry the painting back down to the basement, resume with his thinnest sable brush. He would never touch her the way she wanted, though she kept asking him to, like this, in front of everybody. — Julie Bruck

A heartbreaking poem by one of Canada's finest

NIGHTGOWN A cold so keen, My speech unfurls tonight As from the chattering teeth Of a sewing machine. Whom words appear to warm, Dear heart, wear mine. Come forth Wound in their flimsy white And give it form.

James Merrill, born 100 years ago today

🙏

THE SECRET OF THE YELLOW ROOM Sloth's best. Lolling on a sofa In a Chinese dressing gown With the windows open in the heat, The breeze rousing the leaves. The flies dozing on the ceiling. The silky hush of a summer afternoon, Like floating on one's back With eyes closed in some pond Clogged with water lilies, Inhaling their scent as they nuzzle close. The light and shade dillydallying, The leaves sighing again. Afterward, not even that. Majestic stupor. Stirring only at midnight To click on the yellow table lamp.

Charles Simic, for your late-winter blues

Fragment Christ, may I die at night with a semblance of my faculties, like the full moon that fails.

Robert Lowell was born on this day in 1917. According to Frank Bidart, this is "[t]he final stanza of an unfinished poem that Lowell was working on the week before he died."

Honestly, if you check your local classifieds I'm sure you could find a vintage turntable in decent shape for the price of a new LP. Doing this also comes with the added advantage of providing you with a spare once you've repaired the one you already own. Anyway, something to consider.

🙏

CAR COVERED WITH SNOW Before I clear the windows, I sometimes sit inside. And the stillness is such that I lose how the day works. It soaks up all the steely details: March ripped out of February, a raw thing. Sometimes my son has patience. And we sit a few minutes like this in the weird half-light. He says: we're in a closed fist, Mama. Or, it's like the car's eye is closed. We're deep in the brain then, seeing as the blind see, all listening. Outside, the cardinal tinks tinks his alarm call, his scared call. I hear it: the snow so terribly white. And he is brilliant, conspicuous.

March / ripped out of February, a raw thing.

Marianne Boruch

Yes! You'll note that they also italicized "Lester's." The copy editor was asleep at the switch that day.

Thank you, my friend. The more things change ...

Quality Sixteen Disaster films are in again: zombies and apocalyptic nightmares--nature as the enemy. Our culture's appetite for science and catastrophe projected now on several screens at once. Abbot & Costello meet the Mummy scared me half to death, but like a gateway drug it led me on to harder stuff: Earthquake, Lester's Juggernaut and Jaws--the purest angel dust of features. Psychologists believe our deepest fears are rooted in the memories we share. Historians might disagree--this turning outward is a wartime theme. So's naked tyranny. PHILLIP CRYMBLE

A poem of our moment as it first appeared over 20 years ago in the pages of The Stinging Fly

How It Happens I want to staple myself to a passing cloud, so I am blameless for war.

Victoria Chang

SUGAR MAPLES, JANUARY What years of weather did to branch and bough No canopy of shadow covers now, And these great trunks, when the wind's rough and bleak, Though little shaken, can be heard to creak. It is not time, as yet, for rising sap And hammered spiles. There's nothing there to tap. For now, the long blue shadows of these trees Stretch out upon the snow, and are at ease.

A mid-winter miniature by the venerable Richard Wilbur

My pleasure, Susan. Love your poems.

CONVALESCING I spend the days deciding on a commemorative poem. Not, luckily, an epitaph. A quiet poem to establish the fact of me. As one of the incidental faces in those stone processions. Carefully done. Not claiming that I was at any of the great victories. But that I volunteered.

Jack Gilbert

It's not often you see umbrella used as a verb.

The scene with the red pickle dish is next level Wharton.

Susan Robertson After the Flood Trees full-leafed in the wooded lot at the end of the street. Limbs pendant with damp umbrella the path. Drops still fall from the sodden leaves. I can't see the houses. It's May and northern forests are burning. A red-eyed vireo calls and calls.

From our winter issue, a new poem by Susan Robertson

Something really satisfying about getting this one out there.

LATE We are not ever lost and nothing delays us. We carry the sun on our backs and cover such ground as you would not believe. We are the colonists of dark, the cousins of radiance, who shall bloom among you. Listen, do not move in your hard beds; we enter your rooms and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, memories of the moon, warm bouquets of air. . . Listen, even now the breathing begins. --MARK STRAND

Another by Mark Strand from The New Yorker, this one for the completist. An early version of "The Coming of Light" (one of his most celebrated poems), "Late" was never collected, and hence, has been relegated to the dustbin of literary history. Enjoy!

Amazing. One of Canada's finest, no question.

Doing what I can. Responses like these make it all worthwhile.