I knew Reginald ages ago in Iowa City. As my mother’d say (hi Mom!), he was quite a character. In this poem and in others, I admire his use of assonance, alliteration, internal near rhyme and…botany. In his first book, Some Are Drowning, doesn’t he use the names of flowers to describe Kaposi’s sarcoma blossoming on someone’s skin?
You, Therefore
For Robert Philen
You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name
Find this poem and more about the poet Reginald Shepherd here. Read Reginald’s Harriet blog here.
Wonderful to see this poem here, Cathy, especially since Harriet meant so much to Reginald. The Harriet posts you link to here are the basis for his second book of essays, forthcoming in the Poets on Poetry series.
Oh that I were a blogger for Harriet. Someone needs to write a post about Michael Jackson. I am the man to do it.
This hour, I am sad.
My favorites were ‘Man in the Mirror’ and ‘Black or White’.
Jeez…it seems like he’s been around singing for us all our lives, hasn’t he?
He has been, in my case. I just listened to Thriller front to back for the first time in years. A towering work.
Quincy Jones.
How long ago it seems now when his daughter was Jim’s girlfriend…
Whiter Shade of Michael
He sang the rough falsetto,
Moon-walked across the floor,
He was a kid but very famous
but the crowd called out for more,
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away;
When he called out for another drink,
the waiter brought a tray
And so it was that later
as his agent told his tale
that his face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
She said, ‘If you want Motown,
then I’ll give you ‘ABC.’
But I wandered through my records
and would not let her be,
The Beatles changed the picture
But there still was Quincy Jones,
and although his eyes were open
they might have just as well’ve been closed
And so it was that later
as his sister told his tale
that his face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
He said, ‘I’m home on shore leave,’
though, in truth, on MTV
so I took him by the video
and forced him to agree
saying, ‘You must do the robot
and forget the Jackson 5.’
But he smiled at me so sadly
that my anger straightway died
And so it was that later
as the child told his tale
that his face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
If Thriller was our answer,
The revenge against the queen
and the British Invasion whiteys,
whose dirt was mostly clean,
His mouth by then sought children,
seemed to slip straight through our head
So he crash-dived straightway quickly
To Elizabeth Taylor’s bed
And so it was that later
as the public told his tale
that his face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
I was going to blog about Sky Saxon… Wonder if Reginald listened to The Seeds, ever; possibly so. “Pushin’ Too Hard” was his kind of song, I bet.