#198

https://books.google.com/books?id=2o9-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA197&dq=the+terraces+alive+with+magical+rain&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIneqRn-vfxgIVyxGSCh2pLwoy#v=onepage&q=I%20held%20all%20solid%20then%20I%20let%20some%20jangle&f=false

 If one thing I’ve noticed is the attention of the artist to his writing and legacy at the expense of the vitality of his actual living life, this one turns that over. Not that his living life is all that lively—broken, sick, not strong. But the readers and critics swarming in to “untangle / the riddles of my little wit” are treated with impatience at best, and they’re regarded as “tiresome.” “How few followed / the One or both”—for all their numbers they don’t really get it anyway. But at the writing of the poem it doesn’t matter, because the poet is writing out of physical pain, which is overwhelming everything else. Pain will do that, makes it so that “I cannot think.” His broken left arm reminds him “the whole body can come to harm; / will.” Here’s the lesson finally creeping in?: Take care of your body, because none of the other stuff matters if it’s not in good working order. At the very least it gets more difficult because too often it takes more than you’ve got to work through the pall that descends on the mind and body when pain swells too acutely. Randall Jarrell fell into the same pit that B. is getting sucked down—addiction, illness, and the subsequent degradation of the higher kinds of productivity, poetry being the main one in question. Jarrell’s wife, like all of us, is left with the empty hole of her grief.

 

Posthole 

I’m done

for the work

on a hot morning

has taxed my over-

heated body

past endurance

my heart muscle

clanking like the shovel

against the rock

that stopped

progress on the last

posthole

let me rest and let

my sweat glands—

hysterical with their own

humid work—refill

and close

after I’ve read

for awhile I’ll

find an iron bar

use its point to shatter

the ignorant rock

book and bar

tools that keep us

digging

building

KZ