There is so much that clings to us, and wants to keep warm.
our faces jacked toward the blue.
Familiar things– the blue sky,
Spring sun,
some dark musician chording the sacred harp,
His spittle of notes
Pressed violets in his sitll darker book of revelation.
Why do they stay so cold, why
Do the words we give them disguise their identity
As abject weather,
perverse descriptions, inordinate scales?
The poem is virga, a rain that never falls to earth.
That’s why we look this way, our palms outstretched,
our faces jacked toward the blue.
—–CHARLES WRIGHT, “THINKING OF WALLACE STEVENS AT THE BEGINNING OF SPRING”
Because it’s been way too long since I’ve though about poetry and have forgotten how to do it in eloquent English prose, and because I’m still a fan of the Nick Hornby list genre, I’m going to make a list of all the things I love about this poem.
1) “Jacked.” Who has ever used this word so well? Our faces jacked toward the blue, as if some imaginary car jack forced it awkwardly up there and we’re just hanging out leaking and ready to be fixed. That’s what not writing has felt like these past few months. And the way he awkwardly juts that line out there? Damn.
2) “Why do they stay so cold”!!!!!! Thanks again, Rachel (seriously, you’re my poetry lifeline from way over here), for re-directing me to Stevens’s “The Snowman.” One must have a mind of winter/…And have been cold a long time…” and his perfect parallel structure, that amazing butt-rushing phrase: one must have been cold a long time. I love how Wright takes that anxiety, or that nihilism– whatever it is that Stevens gets from the Snowman that I could never even begin to attempt in an abstract word (!)– and throws it back. A poetry Snowball fight. Why do they stay so cold, why/ Do the words we give them disguise their identity/ As abject weather. They want “to keep us warm”… ah, so good the way he gives them the action here, like Stevens’s snowman that almost hears but can only listen, having been so cold for such a long time.
4)No longer a list but I still needs must lean on my crutch: it has just occured to me that “jacked” rivals Stevens’s “shagged,” and that I never would have thought that possible mumbling through those pretty words (junipers shagged with ice !!) in Henri Cole’s class in awe of the Davidson Spring and the poem and all.
5)It has also just occured to me that it is nowhere near the beginning of spring in Granada, but I’d like to keep on pretending it is, anyways.
There is so much that clings to us and wants to keep us warm.
6) I had to look it up, and check out the perfection of “virga”:
1. Mus. A symbol used in plainsong notation; the note designated by this (see quots.).
1925 Ibid. (ed. 4) 555/2
Virga (
L.) ‘A twig’. A square note with a stem or tail… The plainsong Virga is interpreted as a quaver.
1954 A. HUGHES Early Medieval Music xi. 380 The essential difference between the pre-Franconian mensural notation..and the modal notation which preceded it lies in the fact that there is a definite sign (..the
virga of plainsong) for a long note.
2. Meteorol. Streaks of precipitation that appear to be attached to the undersurface of a cloud and usually evaporate before reaching the ground. Also pl. in same sense.
.
1959 R. E. HUSCHKE Gloss. Meteorol. 611 Virga is frequently seen trailing from altocumulus and altostratus clouds.
(Oxford English Dictionary online). That ‘59 quote really makes me want to know what “altocumulus” and “altostratus” really means, and if I can apply these words, too, to the anxiety I have about the hard coldness of descriptions/the mere violets… or to, y’know, love, or something.
