The Dwindling Warmth and Compass of the Days*

[Bernie01]

Revised:

Birds, dented and off course.
Men on porches, rough as goats.
My face stern as a warden
guarding inmates.

Did I mention my wife died?
She loved Barcelona and painted
Under rain faded cork trees,
Bright colors of a child’s crayon.

Her touch wore white gloves,
She drank Dubonnet with me.
Her sundress clean and stiff
As a girl at first Communion.

I am not able to sleep at night.
Not that I sleep during the day.
The drifting clutter of low voices
like a poorly tuned radio.

Dusk comes on. Winter solstice
drops down.
Already I'm the oldest person
I know by first name.






Original

Birds, dented and off course.
Men on porches, rough as goat.
My face stern as a warden
With inmates.

Did I mention my wife died?
She loved Barcelona and painted
Under rain faded cork trees,
Bright colors of a child’s crayon.

Her touch wore white gloves,
She drank Dubonnets with me.
Men could not stop smiling at her
And I was one of them.

Her sundress clean and stiff
As a girl at Communion.
Dusk comes on. Winter solstice
drops down.


*Timothy Steele

[SivaVelliangiri]

Like the poem and the title.

[Billy]

I love: "Did I mention my wife died?"


Her sundress clean and stiff
As a girl at Communion. (this seems too predictable to me and easy, but it does follow in the steps of other poems of yours about lovers)


I imagine you will be changing this one a little.

[Bernie01]

Billy---

I'm sampling this revised verse:

Already I'm the oldest person
I know by first name.
The drifting clutter of low voices
like a poorly tuned radio.

Dusk comes on. Winter solstice
drops down.



thanks for the comment.



bernie

[Bernie01]

Siva---


my thanks...

boy are you poem busy these dog days of summer...


bernie

[SivaVelliangiri]

B

The activity in this board is inspiring.

S

[BobBradshaw]

This is gorgeous:

Already I'm the oldest person
I know by first name.
The drifting clutter of low voices
like a poorly tuned radio.

As for the poem, these are my favorite lines:
Did I mention my wife died?
She loved Barcelona and painted
Under rain faded cork trees,

The ending isn't strong enough...however...I'm sure you'll be revisiting it...best, Bob

[Bernie01]

Bob---

those lines you highlighted with your comments are part of the poem...i have assembled tha revised poem to see what you and other readers think...

thanks very much.


Siva---

I removed your line.

a great book about madness in Ireland---an aged inmate---big artistic hit in Europe.

a new york times book review:



Ordinary Madness

If Auden was right that “mad Ireland” hurt Yeats into poetry, then Yeats lucked out. It hurt Roseanne Clear into the asylum, for decades.

Roseanne is the central character in Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, “The Secret Scripture,” which charts her path through the violent upheavals of Ireland’s past century. Still institutionalized at age 100 and scribbling her life story on scavenged paper, she uses Auden’s very word — hurt — at the outset of her tale. It’s not the only sign that Barry has Yeats on his mind. Roseanne was a great beauty in her time, as was her mother; both lives are pitted by despair and quite possibly incarnate the “terrible beauty” Yeats saw born in the Easter uprising of 1916. Ireland’s national history — the Rising during the Great War, the war of independence following it, then a civil war following independence, all in quick, murderous succession — is the moil under the surface of Barry’s novels, and “The Secret Scripture” is no exception.

Despite her name, Roseanne Clear is hardly transparent. A wary reticence and sincere befuddlement tend to muddy her conversations with Dr. William Grene, senior psychiatrist at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, whose commonplace journal renders him a co-narrator of “The Secret Scripture.” Their interaction, complete with its silences, works its way into their respective self-searching accounts of life, forming the loose catechism of the novel.

Grene, nearing retirement, notes that he arrived at Roscommon 30 years ago and that Roseanne “was old when I got here.” Since the hospital is to be closed, it falls to him to determine which patients will be accepted at a new but smaller institution and which will be loosed on the world. Yet when Grene floats the possibility of “freedom” to Roseanne, she experiences “dread like a sickness, a memory of a sickness.”
Continue reading the main story
In Sebastian Barry’s ‘Secret Scripture,’ Old Battles Are Burnished by Time JUNE 23, 2008



“The gaining of freedom is always accomplished in an atmosphere of uncertainty,” Grene tells her. “In this country at least. Perhaps in all countries.”

“Murder,” she replies.

“Yes, sometimes,” he admits.

That exchange, which takes place early in the novel, typifies how personal fate and national fate are incestuously bound in Barry’s work, too closely — threateningly — for his characters’ serenity or safety. Roseanne well recalls the civil war, “how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst.” Indeed, the “very cleverness and spreadingness of murder” may have gathered her father within its compass; his death by hanging is a fate she has brooded over for more than 80 years, despite a priest’s assurance that “grief is two years long.”

Circumstances require that the doctor and his patient play cat and mouse. He is intent on assessing her competence and discovering her history, while she dissembles self-protectively, “a foul and utter lie being the best answer” when he asks about the circumstances of her admittance. She does wonder, “Why still in me, that dark dark shame?” yet when the impulse to divulge something arises, she balks: “He interprets things, which is dangerous, extremely.”


Even so, Roseanne and the doctor have a rapport. She looks on him with bemused affection: “The beauty of Dr. Grene is that he is entirely humorless, which makes him actually quite humorous.” Grene, bereaved for reasons of his own, questions the moral efficacy of his field — the “cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry” and “the come-around-the-back-of-the-house of it, oh yes, the deviousness” — as well as his own competence, fearful of “having done nothing for the inmates here, of sentimentalizing them.” Once, Roseanne notices “immaculate” tears in his eyes (religious words sprinkle the novel freely) and lays a hand on him, which the doctor experiences as “benign lightning, something primitive, strange and oddly clear.”

Roseanne is almost preternaturally happy, given the bleakness of her circumstances. She had a child out of wedlock whose whereabouts are unknown (revealed in her slant way: “I am not an entirely childless person”); her father may have been killed in reprisal for his own acts, a history she won’t acknowledge (“It is no crime to love your father”); and her husband’s family, in collusion with the local priest, nullified her marriage and committed her to the asylum (Grene’s investigations show the priest “sane to such a degree it makes sanity almost undesirable”). And yet, and yet. . . .

What accounts for her happiness? The secret scripture. Religious as that might sound, broadly it is Barry’s homage to the holiness of life, in which experience and narrative are inseparable, a concept manifold in what he has written in this novel and previously. “The Secret Scripture” is most closely aligned with his 1998 novel “The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty,” whose protagonist was exiled from Irish life in a very different way. Eneas, a brother of Roseanne’s husband, encounters her in both novels — most fatefully in “The Secret Scripture,” which was a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

Many angelic references and much religious imagery are to be found here (slaughtered lambs, for example), but at the root of it all is the lambent quality of experience, not religion per se. Much of the real joy of reading Barry is in the bobbing freshet of his language. A Quaker woman for whom Roseanne once worked “would give me her shy smile, and I would be jubilant, jubilant.” Despite the madness, you will be too.

THE SECRET SCRIPTURE

By Sebastian Barry



bernie

[FranktheFrank]

Ahh the radio fading in and out again
yes, I've seen that in one of your poems
and loved it, can't remember which one
I am begining to see recurring themes in my fellow poets' work
nothing wrong with that
that's what we are made of.

Prefer Dubonette
to Dubonnets.

I remember a television advertisement for Dubonette
in my youth, it went something like this:

Du

Du-boh

Du-boh-nay!

Marvellous wine made with heavenly smelling herbs
sweet and fortifying
a taste of ambrosia.

Keep the roll going Bernie.

[SivaVelliangiri]

B

I removed those lines because they were so personal and I was embarrassed at being so outspoken in a public place. Even the chaff is grit for a poet--is that how it goes?

S

[FranktheFrank]

Yes, all the Irish I ever met were quite mad, even the ones I loved.

Theyv'e always been mad.

[BobBradshaw]

Much better...good work..

[Bernie01]

Frank---

dubonette. Done. wish i had seen that commercial. thanks, mucho. it was the Ambrosia that attracted this poem.

voices like poorly tuned radio...it's a favorite, almost secret image for me personally. i've said----voices drifting like a poorly tuned radio. drifting off station, maybe. I like the passive nature of the image, perfect for a man recalling the death and life of his wife, but a man now alone and aged. the settling in of winter---winter solstice---the shortest day of the year.


- Poem by Bernard Henrie (1st verse)

The yellow bulb that covered our desire last night
still burning into the morning, disordered bedclothes,
the low clutter, the clack of the poorly tuned radio
and the scent of Turkish coffee strong enough
to make the lip quiver, to recall the pleasure
exchanged in the half-lit dark.

great line from you: all the Irish I've ever met were crazy, even the ones I loved.

let's use this line sometime, in some form.




Bob---

thanks for hanging with this pom.

and yes, yes, yes...that Sarah Jane Sloat. her blog: The Rain In My Purse.

[Bernie01]

Siva---

I think i've written a dozen poems based in India---or with Indian characters. I cannot say why this is so.



now, about sleep---

a very old poem of mine, notice the reference to sleep.


Speaking Sanskrit To Myself - Poem by Bernard Henrie

I sleep in the arms of Visnu,
plastic red sunglasses and white
American teeth that fail to bring
good luck,

my rinsed long hair
drying uncombed on the air.

I imagine myself perfumed
with marine minerals; a garland
like a groom, but your eyes close,
your pedi-cab disappears into India.

My night flight passes over Mumbai,
the downtown moody and glorious
as though the entire city sleeps
with the lights on.

[SivaVelliangiri]

I have read many of your Indian poems. Yes,I remember you gave me that line once--I sleep in the arms of Visnu. Brahma is not a very desirable god.

S

[FranktheFrank]

Sometimes poets tread heavily on reality Siva
but ahh the beauty of the poem makes us forget about reality.
Not always, but a lively poet can make us suspend judgement.

[Bernie01]

Siva---

OK, made that change. don't think you told me that way back then...but you know how we old folks are, confused, forgetful.


Frank---

you ole hound dog. you know everything.


another matter----

Her sundress clean and stiff
As a girl at Communion.

Billy finds this weak...i can't come up with a substitute image...frustrating.

i considered removing the image and just saying something else, but it bugs me.



bernie

[Kenneth2816]

Bernie. Maybe a girl at her first communion?

[Bernie01]

K---

Sold!

thanks, Ken. hope that helps Billy.


bernie

[FranktheFrank]

Her sundress clean and stiff
As a girl at Communion.

I like these two lines,
stiff with starch, stiff from ironing
clean, yes communion white,
purity, works for me, says enough
to evoke, quiet like that lovely girl.

Why not keep it.

[FranktheFrank]

Bernie
That line about the radio
I seem to remember something like this . . .

The drifting clutter of low voices
like a poorly tuned radio.

The fading in and out [of voices]
of an off station radio.

For me this has always been such an evocative moment in your poems
I have seen it in a number of films, some in sci-fi type films
when the autoprinter is working and news is drifting in
of terrible events yet no one but us to witness
the awfulnes of what is about to happen.

I found it also in hopeless situations,
severe illness, fever, alone, loneliness,
and the off-station noise reminding
of another world, a reverse image if you like to that above.
Where we are the hopeless case and the radio brings life
or the reminder that life goes on.

On something else:

I met an Irish lady,
too old for me, I mean far too old,
who had been beautiful once. And her dyed
black hair wasn't enough to hide her charm[s]
and she seduced me with her cooing
and her love for me and we who'd just that moment met.
Her love tranparent like a wisp of honey
enveloped me, cosseted me without
her touch embracing me. But I knew,
oh yes I knew.

And I escaped only for the fact
she was quiet mad,
oh yes and that.

[FranktheFrank]

Birds, dented and off course.
Men on porches, rough as [a] goat [or goats].
My face[,] stern as a warden
[guarding or herding] inmates.

[Billy]

Bernie, I've changed my mind and like the girl in the sundress. I think it's an excellent poem.

[meenas17]

A stream of critique, Bernie. I find myself nowhere in this circle of bards.
I would like to say, the poem is beautiful, short and intense.

Meena.

[BobBradshaw]

Just something to consider....this is the strongest stanza in the poem...so why not end on it?

I am not able to sleep at night.
Not that I sleep during the day.
The drifting clutter of low voices
like a poorly tuned radio.

And maybe replace the first stanza with the last stanza...'Dusk comes on....'