Saturday morning in too

and more Epstein.  Well, less Epstein, than Epstein’s prompting, as today I’ve been thinking about Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird’.  Epstein refers to stanza V, but I’ve been  caught up in stanza XIII:

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

 

Last night, I listened to Joan Armatrading, which is both the flat overlooking a graveyard and the flat near a large park: two lives I loved but no longer live. Both were music and laughter; both were brimful of running, and ramshackle dinners for dozens of people.  One is also summer afternoons stretched out on worn tombstones; the other, all-night conversations in a mustard coloured kitchen, sitting on green wooden seats stolen from the park, fuelled by pots of coconut tea.   One distils to a night in the front garden. There were daffodils.  We’d opened the bay window in the living room and put speakers on the windowsill, and were sprawled on blankets on the grass, listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  There were three of us to start with, then someone we knew climbed the steps from the street to join us. More and more people came. By ‘Winter’ there were twelve.  The essence of the other: Jen is describing Ian White’s affront at being made to wear olive trousers as part of his urban ranger uniform, and I am laughing too hard to drain spaghetti.

Both lives are irretrievable.  Since, now, no one lives without a phone, the randomness of gatherings in the first won’t occur - people no longer set out ‘to see if someone’s in’.  The second died with Jenny – and this makes Joan Armatrading dangerous.  The mustard kitchen too easily dissolves and I’m running along the Tay shore, my dogs before, beside and behind me, when suddenly I jacknife with grief. 

The pain of a death differs each time it occurs.  It is as if the one who has died takes some part of you with them; it, like them, becomes only a memory.  This translation is universally recognised if not truly understood for some kinds of parts.  For example, that I can now be my father’s  daughter only in memory is recognised, and I have no need to explain further, even to those who did not know my father.  The translation of the part that was Jenny’s friend was not, and is not recognised.  Now I as the niece of someone who tap-danced on the beach have also been translated. I’m struggling because this, too, is both unrecognised and inarticulable. 

And here, I think, is why I braved Joan Armatrading last night. 

And here, too, at last,  is the real reason why I re-read the story of the mustard seeds,