MindSpinner

In Barnes and Noble over the weekend, I passed the time among books while dark-haired daughter and a friend shopped in nearby stores for black skinny pants. In the poetry section, I thought I would buy Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing as summer’s last treat, but it was Stanley Kunitz’s last book I carried to the counter instead: The Wild Braid.

I wanted it for the photograph of the poet’s pale, aged hands folded behind him, his fingertips still black with garden dirt.

I who have never seen a wild owl up close wanted it for the story of five owls so at ease with an ever-patient Kunitz that they perched on his arm.

I wanted it for wisdom:

Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature’s tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a thing. It becomes landscaping.

It must be said that my garden is not in danger of being tamed into landscaping. My neighbors probably think it in more danger of tending toward minimally ordered wildness of the sort not often seen in subdivisions. It moves from garden to meadow to forest. I want to be a part of the living world when I walk there.

I wanted it for all the poems and especially for six lines of “The Testing Tree”:

In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.

Kunitz’s wife, artist Elise Asher, died in 2004, at 92.

Kunitz writes movingly of feeling her presence in dreams; he would sometimes dream that she still held his hand. I wanted it for this, too, and for the pages I haven’t yet read.

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.