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
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