Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Nature; General; Poetry; Adult; Fiction; Poetry Plays; American; Women Authors
Description: Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s newest collection of poems, seeks meaning in an ever-connected world. In part evocative of Neruda’s Odes to Common Things and Mary Oliver’s poetic guides to the natural world, Le Guin gives voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological. As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of
Publisher: PM Press
Rights: All rights reserved

Late in the Day

© 2016 Ursula K. Le Guin

This edition © 2016 PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

“Crossing the Cascades” first appeared in These Mountains That Separate Us: An East/West Dialogue Poem, Traprock Books, 2012.

“The Small Indian Pestle” appeared in Windfall as “The Small Yoncalla Pestle” in 2014.

“Hymn to Aphrodite” appeared in Prairie Schooner in 2015.

“Whiteness” appeared in The Los Angeles Review, issue 17, Red Hen Press, 2015.

“The Canada Lynx,” “Disremembering,” and “California Landscape

Paintings” appeared in Milk: A Poetry Magazine, issue 3/4, Bottle of Smoke Press, 2015.

ISBN: 978–1–62963–122–6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930905

Cover design by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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Contents

FOREWORD

RELATIONS

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Incense

Kitchen Spoons

Earthenware

Kinship

Western Outlaws

The Canada Lynx

The One Thing Missing

CONTEMPLATIONS

In Ashland

My House

Contemplation at McCoy Creek

Constellating

Hymn to Time

Whiteness

Geology of the Northwest Coast

Hymn to Aphrodite

MESSENGERS

Element 80

The Story

Arion

Messages

The Dream Stone

Hermes Betrayed

FOUR LINES

The Salt

March

Harney County Catenaries

Artemisia Tridentata

Ecola

Written in the Dark

Song

Night Sounds

WORKS

Orders

The Games

To Her Task-Master

Definition, or, Seeing the Horse

Dead Languages

California Landscape Paintings at the Portland Art Museum

My Job

TIMES

New Year’s Day

Seasonal Lines

October

Sea Hallowe’en

Between

Writing Twilight

THE OLD MUSIC

The Old Music

Disremembering

Crossing the Cascades

Sorrowsong

The Old Mad Queen

The Pursuit

2014: A Hymn

ENVOI

The Mist Horse

AFTERWORD

POSTSCRIPT

FOREWORD

Deep in Admiration

Given at the conference “Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” at UC Santa Cruz, May 2014, this short talk sums up ideas that many of my poems of the last few years have expressed or have been groping toward.

I heard the poet Bill Siverly this week say that the essence of modern high technology is to consider the world as disposable: use it and throw it away. The people at this conference are here to think about how to get outside the mindset that sees the technofix as the answer to all problems. It’s easy to say we don’t need more “high” technologies inescapably dependent on despoliation of the earth. It’s easy to say we need recyclable, sustainable technologies, old and new—pottery-making, bricklaying, sewing, weaving, carpentry, plumbing, solar power, farming, IT devices, whatever. But here, in the midst of our orgy of being lords of creation, texting as we drive, it’s hard to put down the smartphone and stop looking for the next technofix. Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.

Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to non-living beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things.

Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back-and-forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything—all beings—including what we generally class as things, objects.

Descartes and the behaviorists willfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feeling a similar arrogance?

One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources,” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk.

I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.

What tools have we got to help us make that reach? In Romantic Things Mary Jacobus writes, “The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things—to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or the insentient standing of trees.”

Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for.” A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

By replacing unfounded, willful opinion, science can increase moral sensitivity; by demonstrating and performing aesthetic order or beauty, poetry can move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings, waste and cruelty.

Poetry often serves religion; and the monotheistic religions, privileging humanity’s relationship with the divine, encourage arrogance. Yet even in that hard soil, poetry will find the language of compassionate fellowship with our fellow beings.

The seventeenth-century Christian mystic Henry Vaughan wrote:

So hills and valleys into singing break,

And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,

While active winds and streams both run and speak,

Yet stones are deep in admiration.

By admiration, Vaughan meant reverence for God’s sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. By admiration, I understand reverence for the infinite connectedness, the naturally sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. So we admit stones to our holy communion; so the stones may admit us to theirs.

RELATIONS

The Small Indian Pestle at the Applegate House

Dense, heavy, fine-grained, dark basalt
worn river-smooth all round, a cylinder
with blunt round ends, a tool: you know it when
you feel the subtle central turn or curve
that shapes it to the hand, was shaped by hands,
year after year after year, by women’s hands
that held it here, just where it must be held
to fall of its own weight into the shallow bowl
and crush the seeds and rise and fall again
setting the rhythm of the soft, dull song
that worked itself at length into the stone,
so when I picked it up it told me how
to hold and heft it, put my fingers where
those fingers were that softly wore it down
to this fine shape that fits and fills my hand,
this weight that wants to fall and, falling, sing.

Incense
for H.F.

The match-flame held to the half-inch block
catches, and I blow it out.

The flame grows and flashes
gold, then shrinks and almost dies
to a drop of spectral blue
that detaches, floats,
a wisp of fire in air, dances
high, a little higher, is gone.

Now
from the incense smouldering
sweet smoke of cedar rises
a while like memory.

Then only ashes.

Kitchen Spoons

New

My spoon of Spanish olive wood
from the Olive Pit in Corning,

Tehama County, California,
just off the I-5,
is light but has a good heft.

Short and well rounded,
the right size to stir with,
it’s at home in my hand.

Matte brown of olive meat,
dark streaks like olive skin,
its grain is clear and fluent.

The grain of a wood
is the language of the tree.

I oil the spoon with olive oil
and it tells me grey-green leaves,
brief fragrant blossom-foam,
tough life, deep roots, long years.

Spain that I have never seen.

California, and summer, summer.

Old

My plated steel mixing spoon
is from our first apartment,
on Holt Avenue in Macon,

Georgia, in 1954, the downstairs
of widow Killian’s house, furnished
with her furniture and kitchenware.

An ordinary heavy tablespoon,
plain, with a good balance,
the left side of the end of the bowl
misshapen, worn away
by decades, maybe a century,
of a right-handed person
mixing and beating with it.

First Mrs Killian, then me.

I liked it so well that when we moved

I asked her could I take it.

That old thing? My goodness, yes,
with a soft laugh,
take it if you want it, child.

Earthenware

Old clay pot
stained brown
cooked a lot
used to be
full of beans
in the oven
over and over
washed clean
time and again
baked clay
some day
had to crack
bones words
pot-shards
all go back

Kinship

Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.

Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

Western Outlaws

I celebrate sagebrush,
scrub-oak, digger pine, juniper,
the despised and rejected
or grudgingly accepted
because nothing else grows here.

They’re the ones who won’t give in
to us, ornament our garden,
be furniture, or food,
and firewood only in a pinch
because nothing else grows here.

Theirs is the dour hardihood
of growing on serpentine and hardpan
with little or no water but what you steal
from your nextdoor neighbors,
so that nothing else grows here

I celebrate the gnarled cranky stem,
grey-green pungent leaf or scaly needle,
heavy cone, bitter berry, tiny blossom,
and the grand, rank smell of cat-spray,
since nothing else grows here.

Citizens of a hard and somewhat toxic land,
unsociable, undocile, willful,
they share nothing, yet they clothe
a naked indigent soil with life,
growing where nothing else grows, here.

The Canada Lynx

We know how to know and how to think,
how to exhibit what is known
to heaven’s bright ignorant eye,
how to be busy and to multiply.

He knows how to walk
into the trees alone not looking back,
so light on his soft feet he does not sink
into the snow. How to leave no track,
no sound, no shadow. How to be gone.

The One Thing Missing

Finally the fireflies came across the Rockies, drifting
on damp, soft breezes blowing westward
that lifted them over the salt and poisoned deserts
and the terrible white-toothed Sierra
to the quietness of California valleys
where I saw them in a dream from the verandah
of Kishamish, all the little airy fires
coming and going in the summer dusk nearby
and farther in the forests toward the mountain
glimmering in the darkness ever finer, fainter,
meadows of innumerable motes of silver.

CONTEMPLATIONS

In Ashland

Across the creek stood a tall complex screen
of walnut and honey-locust branch and leaf.

In a soft autumn sunrise without wind
my daughter in meditation on the deck
above the quietly loquacious creek
observed a multitude of small
yellow birds among the many leaves
coming and going quick as quick
into sight and out of sight again.

She said to me, they were
like thoughts moving in a mind,
the little birds among the many leaves.

My House

I have built a house in Time,
my home province. Up in the hills
not far from the city, it looks west
over fields, vineyards, wild lands
to the shore of the Eternal. Many years
went to building it as I wanted it to be,
the sleeping porches, the shady rooms,
the inner gardens with their fountains.

Above the front door, a word in a language
as yet unknown may perhaps mean Praise.

Windows are open to the summer air.

In winter rain patters in the courtyards
and in the basins of the fountains
and gathers to drip from the deep eaves.

Contemplation at McCoy Creek

Seeking the sense within the word, I guessed:

To be there in the sacred place,
the temple. To witness fully, and be thus
the altar of the thing witnessed.

In shade beside the creek I contemplate
how the great waters coming from the heights
early this summer changed the watercourse.

The four big midstream boulders stayed in place.

The willows are some thriving and some dead,
rooted in, uprooted by the flood.

Over the valley in the radiant light
a raven takes its way from east to west;
shadow wings across the rimrock pass
as silent as the raven. Contemplation
shows me nothing discontinuous.

When I looked in the book I found:

Time is the temple—Time itself and Space—
observed, marked out, to make the sacred place
on the four-quartered sky, the inwalled ground.

To join in continuity, the mind
follows the water, shadows the birds,
observes the unmoved rock, the subtle flight.

Slowly, in silence, without words,
the altar of the place and hour is raised.

Self is lost, a sacrifice to praise,
and praise itself sinks into quietness.

Constellating

Mind draws the lines between the stars
that let the Eagle and the Swan
fly vast and bright and far
above the dark before the dawn.

Between two solitary minds
as far as Deneb from Altair,
love flings the unimaginable line
that marries fire to fire.

Hymn to Time

Time says “Let there be”

every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.

And the gnats’ flickering dance.

And the seas’ expanse.

And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

Whiteness

Meditations for Melville
i

Whiteness crossed the continent
a poison fog and where it went
villages were vacant
hearths and ways forsaken

Whiteness with greed and iron
makes the deep seas barren

Great migrations fly daylong
into whiteness and are gone
ii

Whiteness in its righteousness
bleaches creatures colorless
tolerates no
shadow
iii

People walk unseeing unseen
staring at a little screen
where the whiteness plays
an imitation of their days

Plugged in their ears white noise
drowns an ancient voice
murmuring to bless
darkness

Geology of the Northwest Coast

The little towns, the driftwood fires
all down the beaches burning …

It will be dark in that night when
the deep basalt shifts and sighs,
headlands collapse, cliffs fail.

Then
the tumult of the sea returning.

And silence.

The slow drift of stars.

We want it to be a sentence on our sin,
our greed, our thriftless wars,
we claim the fault as warning.

But what to them is any act of ours,
the new shores at the dark night’s end,
the beautiful, remorseless morning?

Hymn to Aphrodite

Venus solis occasus orientisque, Dea pacifica,
foam-borne, implacable, tender:

war and storm serve you, and you wear
the fiery tiara of the volcanoes.

Young salmon swimming downriver
and the old upstream to breed and die
are yours, and the fog-drinking forests.

Yours are the scattered emerald half-circles
of islands, the lost islands. Yours
are the sunken warships of the Emperor
and the slow swirl of pelagic polymers.

The moon is your hand-mirror.

Mother of Time and daughter of Destruction,
your feet are light upon the waters.

Death your dog follows you down the beaches
whining to see the breakers break
into blossom, into immortal
foam-flowers, where you have left
the bright track of your passing.

Pity your fearful, foolish children,

O Aphrodite of Fukushima.

MESSENGERS

Element 80

Shifty, elegant Hermes, guide of the traveler,
god of the stockbroker, dealer in margins,
thief and errand-boy, heel-wing’d, swiftest of messengers,
trusted with truth, yet lord of the liars:

Hermes, holding the snake-wreathed staff of the healer,
beautiful poisonous quicksilver element,
silent Mercury, moving lightly, implacably
ahead of us, showing the way into darkness:

peaceful and clear are your eyes, O kindest of con-men.

The Story

It’s just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories,
the part where the third son or the stepdaughter
sent on the impossible errand through the uncanny forest
comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap
or little sparrows fallen from the nest
or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water.

He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest,
they get the ants safe to their ant-hill.

The little fox will come back later
and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned,
the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden,
the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them
from the heap of sand before the fatal morning,
and I don’t think I can add much to this story.

All my life it’s been telling me
if I’ll only listen who the hero is
and how to live happily ever after.

Arion

Arion, my dark-crowned guide
through the long dream, your name

I knew when I was waking
in the dark today before dawn.

Through dark seas the dolphins glide.

Dreams are and are not what they seem.

All that’s made is in the making:

achieved, completed, gone.

Kind, silent presence at my side,
was our way away, or home?

Am I forsaken or forsaking,
brother, lover, stranger, Arion?

Messages

The Serrano Indians knew that earthquakes in high valleys of the Sierra Nevada caused changes in the level of the pools of the Oasis of Mara, far down in the Joshua Tree Desert.

The waters of these quiet pools are troubled
suddenly, sink away into the ground,
shrink down to mud, and then flood upward, turbid,
disturbed; the desert palms all round
shiver in the hot silent air. A hundred
miles away in hills a mile higher,
a valley shudders with subsonic thunder,
an impulse of the earth’s intrinsic fire
moving through lightless arteries to bear
the message of the abyss, the underplaces,
to those far ranges shining high in air
and desert Mara’s shadowy oasis.

The shadowy springs of thought sink down or flow
obeying impulses as deep and strange
from the body’s inwardness, and shaken, we know
the imminence of mystery and change.

The Dream Stone

Seeking the knowledge I only know I lost,

I take the intangible into my hand
to pay the price of what is past all cost.

It is a grey stone lying on my palm.

Its even substance deepens to a mist
and in it moves a fire, contained and calm,
as in a cloudy opal or a hummingbird’s
rose-turquoise breast. These soft, colored flames
speak in their motion without sound or words,
to tell me what it was I knew and lost.

By this remembrance blest, I understand
that I am free, and have come home at last.

I wake to find that I have paid the cost.

I wake to look into my empty hand.

Hermes Betrayed
hommage à R.M.R.

When a god grieves
the deep stones
at the four corners
of the world tremble.

Of all gods, that one!

Lighter than Iris even,
airy, jaunty—the feathered
flutter at cap and ankle,
the quick eyes, the acumen,
the cool aplomb—equally
at home in mid-air,

Olympus, or the underworld—
fleetest of messengers,
wheelerdealer, thief
when a thief was needed,
persuader, trickster.

His greatest charge
was to meet the mortals
who stood bewildered
on the doorstep of their death,
and, silent, reassuring them
with his quicksilver smile,
gently to guide them
on the only way,
the way down
to the long fields of shadow.

And to this task, this trust,
he was always faithful.

Holding his slender wand
with the thin playful snakes
curling round it, he led
his flock like any shepherd.

He never missed a soul.

Always he took them all
into the darkness,
on the one path, down.

Once, once only, was his task
allowed to change,
wonderfully reversed.

That once, a girl’s hand
in his hand, he could follow,
not lead; could go up,
not down; up to the light.

And his heart was light.

The burden of his deathlessness
weighed ever less
at every step of that
brightening way with her.

And then the fool,
the poet he followed,
broke the promise, betrayed her,
betrayed him—turned.

The only time
in all his endless being
that he might learn
what being mortal was:

and it was gone,
the one chance
stolen from him by one
who didn’t even need it.

His hand was empty,
the girl already
gone into shadow.

She knew the way down.

He would not grieve.

He leapt up to the light,
airborne and airy.

But the deep stones shook.

FOUR LINES

The Salt
para Gabriela

The salt in the small bowl looks up at me
with all its little glittering eyes and says:

I am the dry sea.

Your blood tastes of me.

March

What opens day’s eye slowly to the

Spring?

Sun-tiger. Solstice wheel.

Vast holy engines of violet and willow.

The planet in the pale sky.

Harney County Catenaries

Aloof and noble, the great buttes
rear up their rimrock, let
their slopes slide motionlessly down
in the necessary curve from heaven.

Artemisia Tridentata

Some ruthlessness befits old age.

Tender young herbs are generous and pliant,
but in dry solitudes the grey-leaved sage
stands unforthcoming and defiant.

Ecola

I walked by the sea-creek side.

The wind laughed, the gulls cried.

Sweet water lapped on salt sand
between the deep sea and the deep land.

Written in the Dark

The lionesses of the mind are dangerous.

Big sinuous dun bodies range
the plains of sleep. The fangs are sharp.

The fire-yellow eyes fix on my heart.

Song

Untongued I turn to still
forgetting all I will.

Light lies the shadow
on the way I go.

Night Sounds

The bell in Iera

No mercy was in that Tuscan bell.

The hard discordant fist of sound
struck each small hour—paused—struck again
in the stone silence of the mountain town.

The trains in Portland

Greedy of sleep, the city has decreed
the grand, companionable travellers must be dumb,
distance and darkness desolate of those voices
crying at far crossings, I come, I come.

The owls in Forest Park

On the remotest edge of hearing,
like the first star uncertain to the eye,
a small trill trembling in tree-shadows.

The wait. The fainter yet reply.

WORKS

Orders

Andromache if you’d known
of the ragged carrion thing
to be dragged round day
after day the walls of Troy
by order of Achilles and had seen
yourself in shame on some gaunt

Greek island Pyrrhus’ slave
when in the windy sunlight
with you Hector laughing on the battlement
lifted up your little son
soon to be thrown to death
from that high wall by order of Ulysses
and the child frightened
by his father’s helmet cried a little
and you laughed again together
in that moment if you’d known
all as we who read Homer know it
what would you have done differently?

The Games

The crowds that cheered me when I took the Gold,
who were they then? Where are they now?

It’s queer to think about. Do they know how
you look at the hurdles, long before you’re old,
and wonder how you ever ran that race?

I’m not sorry, now all’s said and done,
to lie here by myself with nowhere to run,
in quiet, in this immense dark place.

To Her Task-Master

Let me go out and in the door
of your great hall,
serve in your kitchen, sweep your floor.

Old as I am, let me before

I get too old to work at all,
work for you a little more.

As in the past, by owning me
you set me free.

Command my whole obedience,
use my little strength and sense
to shape the end I do not see,
your mystery, my recompense.

Definition, or, Seeing the Horse
i. Dickens’ Hard Times

“Girl Number Twenty, define a horse.”

But Cissie the circus rider
can’t say what a horse is
to the schoolmaster so blinded by abstractions
he can’t see a horse.

ii. Delacroix’s Drawing

This line of ink isn’t around the horse.

It ropes and bridles a certain
thing seen from a certain angle
on a piece of paper, once.

Something’s caught but nothing’s kept.

iii. Judith’s Fear of Naming

She fears that definition will destroy
the secret thingness of the thing,
as if a dictionary could contain
the rhythmic hooves, the nostril widening,
the great hard-beating heart.

To define’s not to confine,
words can’t reach so far.

Even the poet’s line can only hold
a moment of the uncontainable.

The horse runs free.

Dead Languages

Dreadful, this death, dragging
so many lives and lively minds along
after it into unmeaning,
endless, imbecile silence.

The more ways there are to say Mother
the wiser the world is.

Never are there enough
words for Well done! or Welcome!

A line of verse revives lost Aprils.

In the name for Home lie whole nations.

The unused word may be the useful one.

Old nouns are in no hurry.

Old verbs are very patient.

The water of life is learning.

May elders ever tell the mythic origins
in the almost-lost old language
to children cheated of knowledge
of their own holy inheritance.

May myopic scholars scowl
forever at fragments of inscription,
so that the young may yawn
long over grim grammars, learning
to speak the tongues unspoken
and hear a human music otherwise unheard.

California Landscape Paintings at the Portland Art Museum

This big one is called “Mountain Silence,”

but it’s the one beyond it, “The Sierra

Divide,” that holds silence
the way a grey stone bowl holds water.

Looking into the painting

I think how it is itself
silent. How we move in silence
among these painted skies and mountains.

How the charity of a painting,
its gift I will carry out of the museum,
may be its silence,
full and quiet as a bowl of water,
that I can hold later in my soul’s hands
and look into and see how light falls on granite.

My Job

Since keeping house and raising kids
don’t count as jobs, I only ever had one.

I started out as a prentice
at five years old, and at near eighty-five
in most ways I still am one,
being a slow learner. And the work
is quite demanding.

The boss who drives the shiny yellow car
and those nine sisters up there by the spring
are tough, but fair. There’s times
you can’t get them to listen,
but they’ve always got their eye on you.

They don’t let botched work pass.

Sometimes the pay is terrible.

Sometimes it’s only fairy gold.

Then again sometimes the wages
are beyond imagination and desire.

I am glad to have worked for this company.

TIMES

New Year’s Day

An eagle anger with a broken wing
struggles inside my body and strikes blind
to break the iron bars with iron beak.

Far too late now for cure or soft healing.

To such deep injury no hand is kind.

Within me is the way the bird must take,
in this cage all the sky she can attain,
the wide, clear, patient silence of the mind
where flight goes far and fierce thought can forsake
words and seek distances out past all pain,
ache, and heartache.

Seasonal Lines

July, August
high over the uplands of summer evening gold stretches on long after Venus has followed the sun down
and the silver of Vega is only longing and guesswork till always it seems all at once the bright wings
shine out to carry the Swan in silence across the river of midnight to the warm dim shore where the first
bird
will speak

November, December
down from
the high
hill of Fall
a road goes
through dark
to cold
past a ring of great grey-shouldered stones that keep the secret of the moment when the unseen sun
stops
and turns

October

A slight, white drift
of high mist down the river
and all blue goes grey.

The sun turns silver.

Summer’s honey drains away.

Dry cottonwoods shiver.

Sea Hallowe’en

Three-quarter moon outshines
stars around her, slides
west to the tide rising,
cold, cold and wild.

October’s last night goes
lone to the day of souls,
a ghost on a north wind blowing
wild, wild and cold.

Between

Between the acts, the interval.

The leaves were late to fall, this fall.

Between the verdict and the doom,
a whisper in the waiting-room.

A non-event between events
holding a secret and a sense.

A winter wind just whispers where
two winter trees stand tense and bare.

Writing Twilight

Ashland, Oregon, 2014

On August thirtieth
on the deck above the deck
above the little leaf-hidden river
where old raddled hippies
smoke pot and shout fuck at each other
in the small city
that thrives on Shakespeare’s language
in the late evening
of the late summer
of the late, late age we’ve come to

I sit and hear the crickets chorusing
and a far crow caw
and I want to write a poem
that says late twilight
and the very end of August,
my golden August,
and all summer
and I guess I’ve written it.

No not quite yet.

Here:

wind of the end
of summer, wind
of the end of day
softly
play
in the leaves, in the many
leaves
softly softly
from all the air
gather, evening,
everywhere

THE OLD MUSIC

The Old Music

The form is from Goethe’s “Nachtgesang.”

I sought a newer music,
but it rang false and wrong.

I’d find a tune and lose it,
hearing an older song.

I’d find a tune and lose it,
and always, all day long,
among my thoughts and doings
half heard some older song.

Among my thoughts and doings
a tune would ring out strong,
yet change when I pursued it,
lost in that older song.

The tunes of my own choosing
all sounded false and wrong.

I sought a newer music,

I found an older song.

Disremembering

In Alice’s wood where things forgot their names
and fawn and child walked together fearless,
a stone might flower, a spring burst into flames,
a heavy human soul go light and careless.

But through the forest of the failing mind
where words decay like leaves, and paths long trodden
are lost, the soul plods onward to no end,
fawns, children, flowers, flames forgotten.

Crossing the Cascades
words for a country song

Coming down the cloudy side
leaving the bright behind us
isn’t any place to hide
where the rain won’t find us

Driving down so low so fast
all the sunlight in the past

Coming down the cloudy side
to another weather
got to be a place to hide
and try to stay together

The world looks so cold and wide
coming down the cloudy side

Sorrowsong

Come with me my sorrow
come away with me
where the road grows narrow
westward to the sea
where the waters darken
slow as evening falls
where no winds waken
and no voice calls

The Old Mad Queen

I

The Queen of Spain, Grown Old and Mad,

Writes to the Daughter

She Imagines She Had with Christopher Columbus

Most beautiful,

I disclaim you.

You are not my new found land
nor my Hesperides
nor my America.

You are not mine
and I do not name you.

I tear up the map
of the world of you
that had your rivers
in the wrong places,
imaginary mountains,
false passes leading my expeditions
to quicksands,
cannibals, jaguars.

Most truthful,

I disown you.

I do not own you.

Truly I have never known you.

When you tell me
who you are

I will call you by that name.

When you tell me
where you are
my compass will point there.

When you tell me
of your prairies, your sierras,

I will see them in the blue air
above the western sea.

O golden Peru,
treasure never mine,
most beautiful, most true!

Between us
is neither forgiveness
nor reparation
but only the sea waves, the sea wind.

If ever you send
across the sea,
bells will be rung
in the old towers
and the Te Deum sung.

Crowned, jeweled, furred,

I will come forward:

Tell me, my Lord Ambassadors!

From the New World
what word, what word?

II

The Queen Despairs

A dark water flowing deepening
till there is nothing but dark water
and dark air and the wind blowing

At the far side of the sea the sea
falls over the end of everything
in a wide smooth silent stream forever

Three ships on silent water
and nothing else ever but the wind
blowing and blowing to the west

O my daughter my secret daughter
unborn and borne away into the west
over dark water never to come to me

III

The Queen’s Ballad

He was the sailor of my heart,
but I was Queen of Spain
and so I could not follow him
when he sailed away again.

He took our daughter with him
and she was all I had.

Clear to the River of Paradise
he sailed, and there went mad
with drinking of that water
that runs from Heaven to earth
and back to Heaven forever
through the hills of death and birth.

His soul came weeping to me
from the Isles of the Unblest:

“Our daughter rules in far Cathay
and all the utmost West:

she rules a land of savages
who have no god or priest.

Oh, call her to come back to you,
back to the pious East!”

But she is far too far to hear
across the ocean’s plain.

No captain now will sail for me
though I am Queen of Spain.

So I have built a secret ship
of moonlight and the wind
and ordered his soul to sail with me
west to the Isles of Ind.

And there the Queen my daughter
will take and hold my hands,
and we will dance the night away
on those unblessèd sands.

The Pursuit

A Moral Ballad

It laughed and sang, it leaped and ran,

The gleeful Happy Beast,

And swift it raced from East to West

And back from West to East.

And close behind in hot pursuit,

Fearless of feint or fall,

Sir Thomas rode, to catch and keep

That gladsome animal.

But ever the Beast ran on and laughed

And giggled and cavorted,

Until Sir Thomas’ steed, forespent,

Hung down its head and snorted.

Then cried Sir Thomas, “Gallop on!

On oats tonight you’ll feast,

My brave Content, when I have caught

The fleeting Happy Beast!”

He spurred his horse and whipped it sore

To gallop bravely after

The cheerful prey that fled away

In gales of merry laughter.

The horse ran hard, it burst its heart,

It fell and could not rise.

And as it lay it turned to look

Its master in the eyes.

“O faithless one,” Sir Thomas cried,

“You have betrayed and shamed me!”

Then as it died, the horse replied,

“Remember what you named me.”

Over his horse’s grave he raised

A marble monument,

And on it carved a single word,

The horse’s name, Content.

Yet still Sir Thomas’ ghost must run

From East to West on foot,

And West to East, behind the Beast

That laughs at his pursuit.

2014: A Hymn

Our prophets lead our people on

Fast to the promised land,

And where we pass, the green of grass

Turns to bare brown sand.

So high our cities’ towers soar

Above the deep-set fault,

Immense they rise into the skies,

Pillars of cloud and salt.

Impatient with the patient day,

We rush to gain tomorrow.

Our ships that plough the seas with nets

Leave a long, empty furrow.

Our quick inventions spend our time

Faster and ever faster,

While kind and unforgiving Earth

Endures our brief disaster.

For all we do is nothing to

Her bright eons of days.

So let my dark tune turn and end

As all song should, in praise.

And in the hope of wisdom yet,

I’ll sing the hymn that praises

Earth’s greater life that gives us life,

The grace that still amazes.

ENVOI

The Mist Horse

O daughter of November
come riding, come riding
on the red dun mare
the wise dun mare
blind in one eye but sure-footed
across the sunlit lands, the uplands
of the standing wheatstraw
down to these cloudy lowlands
of crowded alders.

Come riding, O my autumn daughter,
come riding and dismount
here where I may watch you dance
almost unmoving with the mist horse
the young white mare
among the rainy alders
in silence, almost unmoving,
the wild white mare of Iceland
and the daughter of autumn, dancing.

AFTERWORD

Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts

A poem that rhymes, has a regular meter, or follows a particular pattern is said to be “in form.” If it has no regular pattern, it’s “free verse.” Some poets get entrenched behind form, some behind free verse, and these days many caper about in the minefield between the two extremes.

I’m one of the caperers. I’m at home in no-man’s-land. In this matter, I have no theories, no lasting preferences, not even many opinions. So long as a poem works, it makes no qualitative difference to me what its form is or if it has no discernible, describable shape but its own.

As a kid writing poetry, I wrote in rhyme and meter because the poetry I heard and read was in rhyme and meter. Also, I think, because most kids respond naturally, physically, to a drumbeat, the soundplay of language, and the kinetic dance of regular change and repetition.

As I got a little older I began to read poetry without regular meter and with only hidden rhymes or subtle echoes, and began writing that way too. I felt the ease and independence of not having to think about how many beats per line, what rhymes with the word at the end of the line … the freedom of free verse.

But then sometimes a poem as I wrote it would begin to seek a pattern of its own, and I would follow it.

For the last ten years or so, I’ve met regularly with a small group of poets who write (if we feel like it) to assignments we give one another. Some of these assignments have to do with form, others with content. Challenged to write in some complex classic patterns I’d never tried before, I became aware of certain aspects or effects of writing in form that I hadn’t thought about before.

My most revealing discovery was that a form can give me a poem.

I don’t mean that if I write a formally correct sonnet, fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with one of the obligatory rhyme schemes, I’ve written a poem. Simple diligence can produce an example of any form. Being given a poem by the form is quite another matter.

Free verse is individualistic: the entire poem is entirely up to you. Every aspect of it is your choice, your decision. You make it all. In a sense, every free-verse poem reinvents the poem.

Writing in form, you agree to use a certain conventional pattern. It may be simply a stanza, a meter, a rhyme scheme, or it may be one of the classic named forms with a set of technical requirements. Whether it’s as simple as a rhymed quatrain or as complex as a villanelle, only part of it is up to you: the words. The shape your words go into was chosen and decided, was made, by other people, often long ago and somewhere else.

A form has rules, and to write in form is to obey the rules. So why would you choose to obey arbitrary rules? Isn’t freedom an absolute good?

The conventional patterns of English verse, and the rules of a formal poem, are matters that the general community of poets and their readers agree on, much as the general community of musicians agree on what the scales are. When you use these forms you’re not entirely on your own. You’re an individual working within, as part of, a community, within a consensus. So what you have to say is no longer totally and entirely up to you. It has to find how to say itself not only within this pattern, these set confines, but through them. The words must fit themselves into the pattern, and the form must express the content.

When you’re working in a strict form sometimes a certain magic takes place. You realize that the content is finding itself through the form. The form gives you your poem.

“Form follows function,” engineers say. Evidently it can go the other way round. Following form, you find function.

You begin saying things you didn’t know you had to say. The rhyme-pattern forces you to find it, or the meter demands it, or the required repetition of a line leads you further than you knew you were going. Your poem is more than you intended or envisaged.

This doesn’t by any means always happen. But when it does, it is impressive and mysterious. Enough to explain why poets write in form.

Enough that I’d like to encourage any young poet who hasn’t tried writing in form to give it a try.

For those interested in the mystery of form but unused to recognizing it or unfamiliar with its technical terms, Lewis Turco’s New Book of Forms is an almost obsessively exhaustive but quite reliable source-book. Like all crafts, formal verse has a jargon vocabulary. It looks formidable, but is easy to learn by doing the things it describes.

Some poets make very free with the classic names; having written a poem that in some ways or even in only one way does what a sonnet does, they call it a sonnet. This seems rather arrogant. For me, the specific power and vigor of a set form lie in the observance of the form. A game’s good only if you play by the rules. And writing a poem in a strict, complex form such as the villanelle can be a terrific game. It requires both caution and daring. It beats solitaire all hollow.

One may feel that a form has been pretty much worn out by time and unsurpassable example (as indeed I find the sonnet), in which case there’s good reason to change the rules, make up your own. But since the result isn’t a sonnet, give your variation its own name—as G.M. Hopkins did with his Curtal Sonnets, the greatest of which is “Pied Beauty.”

This brings us close to the large region between form and free verse now inhabited by poets writing in what I call “free form.” (It may have other names, but I don’t know them.) By free form I mean a discernable pattern—involving a regularity, repetition of stanzas, line lengths, metric beat, end-rhymes, inner rhymes, whatever—that is unique to a certain poem. The result has no name and description in the Book of Forms, yet it is a describable, essentially rhythmic, pattern.

Some poets invent such free forms, either spontaneously or following a theory, and then use them repeatedly. Sometimes other poets think “Hey, look at that, I wonder if I can make that work?” and borrow the technique. This must be the way all the classic forms got started.

The fact is that having been long freed from a tyranny of conventional forms, we have no need to shun all regularity, all pattern, in obedience to a tyranny of formlessness. We can use rhyme, meter, repetition, however and whenever we choose—in conventional forms, or semi-conventional forms, or in once-only patterns we discover or invent at need. This, I think, is true freedom of verse.

A good many poems in this book are in free verse, a good many are in free form. The free-form poems include:

Kinship, The Canada Lynx, Contemplation, Hymn to Time, Geology of the Northwest Coast, Element 80, Hermes Betrayed, The Games, To Her Task-Master, Definition, Dead Languages, California Landscape, Seasonal Lines, October, Sea Hallowe’en, Crossing the Cascades.

Two poems are transitional:

Writing Twilight begins as free verse, then deliberately changes into a more rhythmic, rhymed, but still irregular pattern.

The Old Mad Queen: The first poem is in free verse with an increasing tendency to end-rhyme. The Queen Despairs is free verse, but grouped in triads. The Queen’s Ballad is in traditional ballad meter and rhyme.

These poems are in a more or less conventional pattern or a classic form:

The Small Indian Pestle: iambic pentameter

Constellating: iambic quatrains, rhymes abab baba

Whiteness: quatrains of rhymed couplets

Arion: “rima dissoluta” in quatrains (full and slant rhymes abcd, abcd, abcd)

This unusual rhyme pattern—end-rhymes repeated from stanza to stanza—can be extended to any length of stanza, so that the rhymes may be very far apart. I usually use it in quatrains, where the echoes are audible but not insistent. I have found it a most intriguing and suggestive form.

Messages: iambic pentameter in alternate rhyme.

The Dream Stone: Petrarchan sonnet

The section “Four Lines” is all separate quatrains, unrhymed or variously rhymed.

I’m stymied by haiku or tanka, but have found the quatrain amazingly roomy, versatile, and satisfying. For me, the master of its endless subtleties is A.E. Housman.

The Games: iambic, rhymed abba, cddc

New Year’s Day: curtal sonnet

Between: tetrameter, rhymed distichs

The Old Music: Goethe’s poem haunted me till I could work out this imitation of its pattern in English. It’s not a translation.

Disremembering: iambic quatrains in alternate rhyme

The Pursuit: ballad meter and rhyme

2014: ballad meter and rhyme

Sorrowsong: trochaic trimeter, quatrains in alternate rhyme.

POSTSCRIPT

Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters,

November 2014

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long—my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this—letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

ABOUT PM PRESS

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The Wild Girls

Ursula K. Le Guin

ISBN: 978-1-60486-403-8

112 pages

Ursula K. Le Guin is the one modern science fiction author who truly needs no introduction. In the forty years since The Left Hand of Darkness, her works have changed not only the face but the tone and the agenda of SF, introducing themes of gender, race, socialism, and anarchism, all the while thrilling readers with trips to strange (and strangely familiar) new worlds. She is our exemplar of what fantastic literature can and should be about.

Her Nebula winner The Wild Girls, newly revised and presented here in book form for the first time, tells of two captive “dirt children” in a society of sword and silk, whose determination to enter “that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice” leads to a violent and loving end.

Plus: Le Guin’s scandalous and scorching Harper’s essay, “Staying Awake While We Read,” (also collected here for the first time) which demolishes the pretensions of corporate publishing and the basic assumptions of capitalism as well. And of course our Outspoken Interview which promises to reveal the hidden dimensions of America’s best-known SF author. And delivers.

“Idiosyncratic and convincing, Le Guin’s characters have a long afterlife.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Her worlds are haunting psychological visions molded with firm artistry.”

—The Library Journal

“If you want excess and risk and intelligence, try Le Guin.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Her characters are complex and haunting, and her writing is remarkable for its sinewy grace.”

—Time

Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology

Edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer

ISBN: 978-1-62963-035-9

352 pages

Sisters of the Revolution gathers a highly curated selection of feminist speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more) chosen by one of the most respected editorial teams in speculative literature today, the award-winning Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Including stories from the 1970s to the present day, the collection seeks to expand the conversation about feminism while engaging the reader in a wealth of imaginative ideas.

From the literary heft of Angela Carter to the searing power of Octavia Butler, Sisters of the Revolution gathers daring examples of speculative fiction’s engagement with feminism. Dark, satirical stories such as Eileen Gunn’s “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” and the disturbing horror of James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Screwfly Solution” reveal the charged intensity at work in the field. Including new, emerging voices like Nnedi Okorafor and featuring international contributions from Angelica Gorodischer and many more, Sisters of the Revolution seeks to expand the ideas of both contemporary fiction and feminism to new fronts. Moving from the fantastic to the futuristic, the subtle to the surreal, these stories will provoke thoughts and emotions about feminism like no other book available today.

Contributors include: Angela Carter, Angelica Gorodischer, Anne Richter, Carol Emshwiller, Eileen Gunn, Eleanor Arnason, Hiromi Goto, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Karin Tidbeck, Kelley Eskridge, Kelly Barnhill, Kit Reed, L. Timmel Duchamp, Leena Krohn, Leonora Carrington, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Pamela Sargent, Rose Lemberg, Susan Palwick, Tanith Lee, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Vandana Singh.

“The VanderMeers are a literary power couple.”

—Boing Boing

My Life, My Body

Marge Piercy

ISBN: 978-1-62963-105-9

128 pages

In a candid and intimate new collection of essays, poems, memoirs, reviews, rants, and railleries, Piercy discusses her own development as a working-class feminist, the highs and lows of TV culture, the ego-dances of a writer’s life, the homeless and the housewife, Allen Ginsberg and Marilyn Monroe, feminist utopias (and why she doesn’t live in one), why fiction isn’t physics; and of course, fame, sex, and money, not necessarily in that order. The short essays, poems, and personal memoirs intermingle like shards of glass that shine, reflect—and cut. Always personal yet always political, Piercy’s work is drawn from a deep well of feminist and political activism.

Also featured is our Outspoken Interview, in which the author lays out her personal rules for living on Cape Cod, finding your poetic voice, and making friends in Cuba.

“Marge Piercy is not just an author, she’s a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence.”

—Boston Globe

“As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism.”

—Adrienne Rich

“One of the most important poets of our time.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Piercy’s writing is as passionate, lucid, insightful, and thoughtfully alive as ever.”

—Publishers Weekly

Report from Planet Midnight

Nalo Hopkinson

ISBN: 978-1-60486-497-7

128 pages

Nalo Hopkinson has been busily (and wonderfully) “subverting the genre” since her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won a Locus Award for SF and Fantasy in 1999. Since then she has acquired a prestigious World Fantasy Award, a legion of adventurous and aware fans, a reputation for intellect seasoned with humor, and a place of honor in the short list of SF writers who are tearing down the walls of category and transporting readers to previously unimagined planets and realms.

Never one to hold her tongue, Hopkinson takes on sexism and racism in publishing in “Report from Planet Midnight,” a historic and controversial presentation to her colleagues and fans.

Plus …

“Message in a Bottle,” a radical new twist on the time travel tale that demolishes the sentimental myth of childhood innocence; and “Shift,” a tempestuous erotic adventure in which Caliban gets the girl. Or does he?

And Featuring: our Outspoken Interview, an intimate one-on-one that delivers a wealth of insight, outrage, irreverence, and top-secret Caribbean spells.

“A genuine vitality and generosity … one of the more important and original voices in SF.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Out-of-the-ordinary science fiction.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“The plot and style get an early grip on you, the reader, and you don’t let go till story’s end. Hopkinson is a genuine find!”

—Locus