In Memory of W.B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.


II

-----You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
-----The parish of rich women, physical decay,
-----Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
-----Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
-----For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
-----In the valley of its making where executives
-----Would never want to tamper, flows on south
-----From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
-----Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
-----A way of happening, a mouth.


III

----------Earth, receive an honoured guest:
----------William Yeats is laid to rest.
----------Let the Irish vessel lie
----------Emptied of its poetry.

----------In the nightmare of the dark
----------All the dogs of Europe bark,
----------And the living nations wait,
----------Each sequestered in its hate;

----------Intellectual disgrace
----------Stares from every human face,
----------And the seas of pity lie
----------Locked and frozen in each eye.

----------Follow, poet, follow right
----------To the bottom of the night,
----------With your unconstraining voice
----------Still persuade us to rejoice;

----------With the farming of a verse
----------Make a vineyard of the curse,
----------Sing of human unsuccess
----------In a rapture of distress;

----------In the deserts of the heart
----------Let the healing fountain start,
----------In the prison of his days
----------Teach the free man how to praise.

-W. H. Auden, 1940

Traveller's Advisory
  (for Robert Kroetsch)

Wherever you go others are absent.
You feel the spaces they make
in every foreign landscape.

Some you placate with postcards.
The others, always in mind,
speak at unsuspected times.

Momentum takes you over borders
not shown on the old map
you study at every stop,

the paper thinning into space,
light riddling the cities,
roads, coves, memories.

Where is time taking you this
time? What distance will you make
before the past presents a shape?

No scales, no legends translate
voids to voices, empty reaches
into longed-for faces.

You always know who isn't there
and turn half expectantly
to where someone turning ought to be.

-Gary Hyland, 1996

Of Rain and Air

All day I have been closed up
inside rooms, speaking of trivial
matters. Now at last I have come out
into the night, myself a center

of darkness.
Beneath the clouds the low sky glows
with scattered light. I can hardly think
this is happening. Here in the bright absence

of day, I feel myself opening out
with contentment.
All around me the soft rain is whispering
of thousands of feet of air

invisible above us.

-Wayne Dodd, 1986

Try To Praise The Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

-Adam Zagajewski, 2001

Happy New Year! Here's a song.