to be warm and tired/without some impossible flame in the heart

I’m reading J.H. Prynne’s The White Stones for the first time and while enjoying it, I often find myself feeling lost. I don’t find that a negative response; I have often felt that way with works that have become favorites. There are themes and images that connect across the poems and I’m just barely getting an overall understanding of the work.

Like that joy and perplexity that exist together, sometimes I get baffled by winds of deep sadness and loss, seemingly without reason or at least a clear cause-and-effect. Anomie? Alienation? Having children also spins the psyche to extremes. Normally, I let that fuel writing. That usually works. Sometimes I need the words of others.

Prynne’s poem below, “The Common Gain, Reverted,” came at the right time. I can’t even say I understand the poem yet, but I had that deep response to it, a feeling of an inevitability and “rightness.” That sounds kind of silly, but it’s been one of the constants in my life since first reading Silverstein or Poe somewhere in elementary school.

Ah, Terence, thanks for your stupid stuff.

 

The Common Gain, Reverted

The street is a void in the sequence of man,

as he sleeps by its side, in rows that house

his dreams. Where he lives, which is the

light from windows, all the Victorian grandeur

of steam from a kitchen range. The street

is a void, its surface slips, shines and is

marked with nameless thoughts. If we could

level down into the street! Run across by

the morning traffic, spread like shadows, the

commingling of thoughts with the defeat we

cannot love

                                  Those who walk heavily

                                  carry their needs, or lack

                                  of them, by keeping their

                                  eyes directed at the ground

                                  before their feet. They are

said to trudge when in fact their empty thoughts

unroll like a crimson carpet before their

gentle & delicate pace. In any street the pattern

of inheritance is laid down, the truth is for our

time in cats-eyes, white markings, gravel

left from the last fall of snow. We proceed

down it in dreams, from house to house which

spill nothing on to the track, only light on the

edge of the garden. The way is of course speech

and a tectonic emplacement, as gradient it

moves easily, like a void

                                    It is now at this

                                    time the one presence

                                    of fact, our maze

                                    through which we

                                    tread the shadow or

                                    at mid-day pace

level beneath our own. And in whichever form

we are possessed the surface is sleep again and

we should be thankful. By whatever movement,

I share the anonymous gift, the connivance

in where to go as what I now find myself

to have in the hand. The nomad is perfect

but the pure motion which has no track is

utterly lost; even the Esquimaux look for sled

markings, though on meeting they may not speak.

                                   The street that is the

                                   sequence of man

                                   is the light of his

                                   most familiar need,

to love without being stopped for some im-

mediate bargain, to be warm and tired

without some impossible flame in the heart.

As I walked up the hill this evening and felt

the rise bend up gently against me I knew

that the void was gripped with concentration.

Not mine indeed but the sequence of fact,

the lives spread out, it is a very wild and

distant resort that keeps a man, wandering

at night, more or less in his place.

~J.H. Prynne