En el limón cortaron los cuchillos una pequeña catedral.
Cutting the lemon, the knife leaves a little cathedral.

Pablo Neruda, “Oda al limón” (1957)

For Andie’s birthday party tonight, each guest was directed to write a poem or bring one, then read it. I think only Andie’s Dad wrote one, and it was a clever and funny rhyme that she read from her iBook. Everyone else’s selections covered a wide variety, although Shel Silverstein and Charles Bukowski were favorites. We had some laughs over a D.H. Lawrence orgy of words, and Andie read a passage of Jeanette Winterson, prose like poetry. Red wine flowed freely, there was birthday cake and cupcakes, and the room was filled with flowers. The audience was a fine group of greatest-hits friends and family; here are Gary, Andie and Megan, conversing in a corner.

And here’s the arrangement that was on the living room table, which features a particularly rare specimen of an in-bloom Katieflower.

I was reading some Pablo Neruda poems tonight in a bilingual book, original Spanish on one side, English translation on the facing page, wondering why it is that Pablo doesn’t get translated to Paul on the cover.

The previous pope was known by Spanish-speaking people as Papa Juan Pablo, for example, so why wouldn’t it go the other way? Shouldn’t it be Paul Neruda, Paul Picasso, and so on?

Paul doesn’t have the same ring, not the least because it’s a blunt monosyllable, unlike the soothing trochee Pablo. Hey, and Pablo isn’t English, so it’s interesting and mysterious, right?

I suppose I don’t care either way, because I don’t want to become one of those tight-sphinctered fellows who argues whether Leonardo or da Vinci is the correct single-name way to refer to the Italian artist.

When the Senate voted today to add 370 miles of fencing to the U.S./Mexico border, the presenter of the amendment, Senator Jeff Sessions, explained that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Apparently as clarification, he added, “Fences don’t make bad neighbors.”

The first part of Sessions’ statement is of course from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the misinterpretation of which I’ve written about before. See, the narrator of that poem is quoting his next-door neighbor, who insists on rebuilding the mortarless stone wall between their properties each spring, when the thaw knocks rocks out of place. Why is the wall necessary? Why do fences make good neighbors, and what the hell does that even mean, the narrator wonders, adding:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

I question the effectiveness of extending physical barriers to crack down on illegal immigration. And although it’s clear what we want to wall out, perhaps we need to look more closely at what we may be walling in. At any rate, I’d like our elected officials to keep the argument Frost-free, unless they mean to suggest America is isolationist, driven by habit like an “old-stone savage” that “moves in darkness,” and not one to wonder why borders and boundaries were ever necessary to begin with.

It’s National Author’s Day and I’ve been reading Second Space, the final and posthumous book of poems by Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, who died last summer. There’s a lot of wrestling with Catholicism in these poems, but the best of them are ruminations on his life, sparked with crystalline details delineating his past (he survived World War II in German-occupied Warsaw), his loves and his misfortunes. As a relative youngster myself, I find it strange and beautiful to read a 90-year-old’s reflections on life, particularly in this excerpt from “I Should Now.”

I should now be wiser than I was.
Yet I don’t know whether I am wiser.

Memory composes a story of shames and amazements.

The shames I closed inside myself, but the amazements,
at a sun-streak on a wall, at the trill of an oriole, a face,
an iris, a volume of poems, a person, endure and return in
     brightness.

Such moments lifted me above my lameness.

It’s National Poetry Month and today in New York it’s Poem in Your Pocket Day. Hey, I got yer poetry right here, buddy.

Did you know that when e.e. cummings died in 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the U.S. after Robert Frost? I think both poets were probably oversimplified in the minds of their readers then, and probably still are now.

For instance, people recall cheery New England landscapes and “The Road Not Taken”, but forget that behind Frost’s carefully crafted self-image of a genteel countryman were mostly themes of darkness, death and despair. Last night, I watched The West Wing episode (“The Red Mass”) in which Josh and Donna talk about how a self-help guru has misinterpreted Frost’s “Mending Wall”:

Josh: Here he quotes Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Did he talk about that?
Donna: Yeah.
Josh: What’d he say?
Donna: Basically that if you stay within your personal space, you’ll end up getting along fine with everyone.
Josh: You had to study modern poetry?
Donna: Yes.
Josh: Is that what Frost meant?
Donna: No, he meant that boundaries are what alienate us from each other.
Josh: Why did he say “Good fences make good neighbors”?
Donna [testily]: He was being ironic.

Cummings, on the other hand, is often seen as a jumbled, simplistic word-doodler, whose lasting claim to fame, as former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins pointed out in a Slate article yesterday, is “most easily found in the pages of middle- and high-school literary magazines where rain, leaves, and snow are perpetually

f

a

l

l

i

n

g

from the sky.” Yet Cummings cut his teeth as a “formal” poet before breaking into the printed acrobatics he’s known for, and in fact was a master of the sonnet, a most rigid and ordered form of poetry; Collins points out that Cummings always included several in every collection he published.

So poets are misunderstood: boo-hoo. Since I’ve thrown up Frost and Cummings for comparison, I can tell you that I wholeheartedly select the latter as a favorite. He’s no less intelligent but much more fun than the cantankerous, annoyingly rhyming and formalistic Frost; Cummings contributed a forward to a collection of Krazy Kat cartoons, for Christ’s sake. I think that while Cummings was enjoying reading the comics on Sunday mornings, Frost was content to eat a bowl of high-fiber cereal, then go out to his front yard to kill some gophers with a spade.

Anyway, it’s Spring, it’s poetry month/day. Here ya go, some Spring-as-symbol-of-renewal poems that you’re probably unfamiliar with from the suspects in question. Make up your own mind. And read more poetry.

Spring Pools (1928), by Robert Frost
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods—
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

Spring is like a perhaps hand (1925), by e.e. cummings
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ezra Pound, 1926