A Poet Reflects

We don’t know what life is, but we know
all who live on earth eat, sleep, mate, work
shit, and die.  Let us remember this is our home
and that we have become, we mad ones, its keepers.
Let us sit bent forward slightly, and be opened a moment,
as earth’s holy matter passes through us.

—Galway Kinnell, closing lines to “Holy Shit” from Imperfect Thirst (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)

 … only minutes ago my beloved may have
put down her book and drawn up her eiderdown
around herself and turned out the light—
now, causing me to garble a few words
and tangle my syntax, I imagine I can hear
her say my name into the slow waves
of the night and. faintly, being alone, sing.

—Galway Kinnell, closing lines to “‘The Music of Poetry’” from Imperfect Thirst (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)

Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

—Galway Kinnell, from section 4 of “Poems of Night” in Poems of Night (Rapp & Carroll, 1968)

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

—Galway Kinnell, from “Wait” in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Houghton Mifflin, 1980)

fluttering-slips:

Rapture

I can feel she has got out of bed.  
That means it is seven a.m.
I have been lying with eyes shut,  
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,  
I spoke about the hidden place in her  
which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,  
bending to a low drawer, picking over  
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends  
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east—what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.  
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.  
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,  
rummaging in the same low drawer.  
The clock shows eight. Hmmm.  
With huge, silent effort of great,
mounded muscles the earth has been turning.
She takes a piece of silken cloth
from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls  
of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,  
as if she will be, all day among strangers,  
looking down inside herself at our rapture.

Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2000)

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren’t after all, made
from the bird which flies out of its ashes,
that for a man
as he goes up in flames, his one work
is 
to open himself, to be
the flames?

—Galway Kinnell, section VII of “Another Night in the Ruins” from Body Rags (Houghton Mifflin, 1968)

“We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, ‘This is the problem I want to have.’”

—Galway Kinnell