The Aura And The Coming On

      I don't know how this blog managed to miss this, but it seems that the American poet Donald Justice passed away two weeks ago. You can check out a smattering of his poems at this site, despite their infernal pop-up windows.   (There's also a few more at Plagiarist.) A minor favourite of this blog's is this poem, though its title is a bit cumbersome:

Love's Strategems

But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.

Stronger medicines are needed.
Already they find
None of their strategems have succeeded,
Nor would have, no,
Not had their eyes been stricken blind,
Hands cut off at the elbow.

Oh, so familiar-- and yet so far, far away.

      Check out, too, this interview with Justice with the Poetry Society of America, in which Justice says just what I expected he would say (though, all in all, he seems rather terse in the interview):

What do you see as the consequences of "political correctness" for American poetry?

Disaster.

I'd encourage you also to read "The Evening of the Mind," another very fine poem, indeed.   Rest in peace, Mr. Justice.

The Evening Of The Mind

Now comes the evening of the mind.
Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;
Here is the shadow moving down the page
Where you sit reading by the garden wall.
Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,
Shudder and droop. Your know their voices now,
Faintly the martyred peaches crying out
Your name, the name nobody knows but you.
It is the aura and the coming on.
It is the thing descending, circling, here.
And now it puts a claw out and you take it.
Thankfully in your lap you take it, so.

You said you would not go away again,
You did not want to go away -- and yet,
It is as if you stood out on the dock
Watching a little boat drift out
Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish ...
And you were in it, skimming past old snags,
Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky
As soundless as a gong before it's struck --
Suspended how? -- and now they strike it, now
The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats,
And you must wake again to your own blood
And empty spaces in the throat.