A very personal column this month, by way of a look at a pair of seemingly plain, simple poems that have meant a great deal to me over many years. 
 
Lee and I were married fresh out of college.  One of my college friends—I hadn’t known him that long—was also an aspiring poet, and as a wedding gift presented us with a small stack of paperback books of poetry.  I’m sure Lee raised an eyebrow or two at this choice, which wasn’t the usual gift for a couple starting out—not a set of dishes, a cutting board, or even a coffee table book of glossy photographs.  It was, in fact, a collection of translations of mostly Spanish language poets:  Lorca, Jiménez, Neruda, Vallejo, and others.  I immediately cherished them, and at least a couple of those books went with us on our honeymoon. 
 
So it was in that magical brief holiday that I first read the poems of Juan Ramon Jiménez, in Robert Bly’s translations.  One in particular moved me greatly, and has stayed with me ever since:
 

Oceans
 
 
      I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                 And nothing
happens!  Nothing. . .  Silence. . .  Waves. . .


 
--Nothing happens?  Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
 
It’s pretty obvious to me now, and was I think even then, that part of what I loved about this poem was its applicability to my own new life—fresh out of college, just married, lacking any job or specific career plans.  I knew only two things for sure:  that I loved Lee and wanted to spend my life with her; and that, whatever jobs wound up paying the bills, I also hoped to devote my life to the writing of poetry. 
 
I have no idea how I came to be so sure of these two things.  About most other aspects of life I was nothing but uncertain and more than a little anxious.  Looking back, I am still amazed at my own absolute clarity.  There were not one but two things that my little boat had struck, deep down under the water; and I was fascinated by the way Jiménez, in Bly’s rendering, described the feel of such major life changes:
 
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
 
As a matter of fact, most of our friends and peers were not getting married at such a young age.   In 1975, I think we struck many as quaintly old-fashioned, even naive.  (One friend on our wedding day was overheard saying to another, “It’ll never last.”  Lee and I have lifted a glass in toast to this ex-friend every year since on our anniversary.)  We were standing quietly, as it were, in our new life, which to most of our acquaintances probably seemed a bit staid, as if we were prematurely middle-aged.  But somehow I knew in my deep heart’s core (I can’t speak for Lee) that everything had happened to me.  Everything important, at least.
 
And so it still seems.  This month Lee and I celebrate our 42nd anniversary, and I am still scribbling lines of poetry in my journal daily. I remain committed as deeply as ever to this new life I chose (with Lee’s blessed consent and support) all those years ago. From any outside vantage point, I’ve no doubt that our life may still seem relatively unadventurous, but I cannot conceive of a better one. 
 
And I may as well confess that whatever adventures we have embarked on have been Lee’s idea, typically, often over my own mild or more strenuous resistance.  There’s no doubt she is more venturesome than I am. And she is, of course, almost always right to prod me out of my comfort zone.  This summer we’re also embarking on another big life change: newly retired, we’re moving a thousand miles away from the home we’ve made for thirty years in Wisconsin, far longer than any other place we’ve lived. It’s a bittersweet prospect, leaving behind so many friends and familiar habits, but one thing is certain: I would never have embraced this big move without Lee by my side. And I fully expect Jiménez’s poem will make the trip with us as well. Maybe any life is a play of tensions between change and routine, commitment and experiment, the rooted and the exploratory, the new and the old.  “Make new friends, but keep the old.  .  .” as we used to sing in Sunday School.  Isn’t it the old friends who make the new possible?  Maybe the “great thing” that your boat strikes against, deep under the water, is a rock that steadies and grounds you, mostly invisibly, as you go about the business of your life.
 
Which brings me to another poem I have loved for at least four decades, this one by William Stafford:
 

Passing Remark
 
In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don't like much to happen.
 
In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.
 
My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, "Then why did you choose me?"
 
Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.



There it is again, the tension of opposites, the mysterious interplay between what can and can’t be said.  Stafford’s quirky love poem, so plainspoken and casual, from its offhanded title to its open-ended conclusion, has always struck me as equally an ars poetica, and maybe even a statement of deep truth about art generally.  (I also relish its understated humor.) And if that interpretation doesn’t work for you, fine with me.  I’ll just lower my brown eyes and quote the last line again to myself.  I think that poetry, like love, is rooted deep, and beyond any need for explanation. 
 
So I’ll conclude with one of my own older poems—a love poem, naturally—that somehow seems related to all the above. But I won’t offer any interpretation.


Summons
 
The whole time we slept
raccoons stretched and batted
like dreamy cats on our roof.
Not five feet from our pillow
they gamboled, scritching the shingles,
brushing our windowscreen
with ardent fur.  Dew-christened
aerialists, they might as well
have sprouted from the dark
like sudden mushrooms, or dropped
on our porch roof by the moon.
 
I had no need to see
by their ironic masks
what they might think of our married
slumber, side by side like chunks
of firewood, while in the bright
spring air and moonwash this pair
frisked for their own cloudy benefit.
 
By the time the dog roused us
with his strangled growl, on point
before our common window,
I knew without a glance
what my flashlight would reveal
hissing and humming near at hand—
what else but love itself
somersaulting its antic way
all over our mended roof?
 
(Stutter Monk.  Flume Press, 2000.)

​© 2017 David Graham