Small Rain by Greenwell Garth

Author:Greenwell,Garth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

4

I still couldn’t read. But I could stare at a poem, a short poem, letting my eyes focus and relax, my attention come and go; and there was one poem in particular I stared at hour after hour, in the book I had asked L to bring to the hospital. It wasn’t a special poem, or not to anyone I knew of but me. I had thought of it because it was about a sparrow, it had come to mind every time I saw the sparrow outside my window, or the several sparrows; there was never more than one, but it couldn’t have been the same bird every day. The poem was by George Oppen, a poet I had come to love in graduate school, though I found him hard, even when I wasn’t in a hospital bed, drugged and groggy; I seldom felt I understood him, not in a way that I could package or paraphrase, reduce to propositions. They were hard poems to teach, though I kept trying to teach them; they were gnomic, almost impenetrable sometimes, abstract. He liked to play with the little function words of English, participles and prepositions; words were like gravel for him, little stones he sifted through his fingers. I liked that about him, I liked that his poems were less psychological than the poems I was usually drawn to, less shifting moods than blocks of light or sound, tonalities; I liked how different they were from the poems I wrote. And I loved how, among the abstraction, his images became luminous, shards of the real, non-abstract world, occasions for wonder. He had a poem about deer that was one of my favorite things; I had read and taught it so often it felt internal to me, like a bit of my consciousness that had somehow stumbled into the world, a prosthetic consciousness—which is something poems can be, they can create new spaces in our interiors sometimes, not just giving language to something that was mute before but generating something new. Poetry is the accoutrement of the self, one of my professors liked to say. That they are there! the poem exclaims, the one about deer, a line that came to me every time L wore his pijama de ciervos; when he came to bed and I put my arms around him it was just the expression I wanted of wonder, making no claims, demanding nothing, postulating no predicate, a wonder at sheer being.

I taught the sparrow poem less often, and it never went well, as it hadn’t gone well when I tried to write about it in graduate school; I found I didn’t have anything to say, or nothing that captured why it was wonderful. A fragment would come, surprising me, each time I saw the bird at the window, a line like a nursery rhyme, Little sparrow round and sweet, and I remembered the next two words, Chaucer’s bird, but nothing else, which was why I made L search the house for Oppen’s Collected, because I wanted the whole poem.

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