April is national poetry month, so a memory and a poem about poetry.  I'm not sure who designated April to celebrate poetry; whoever it was obviously preferred Chaucer to Eliot.  (I used to have a cartoon on my office door called "Beavis and Butthead Meet T.S. Eliot."  Beavis (I think) was bent over a piece of paper, brow furrowed, writing, "April sucks."  I had a couple of other literary cartoons: one showed Hester Prynne wearing her scarlet letter on a backwards baseball cap.  Another showed Hester meeting a woman who was wearing a scarlet A+.  But I digress from my digression.)

The memory: many years ago, I had a friend from France who came for a six-month visit.  Michel was an artsy, Bohemian type (i.e., he never held a job) who was in a photography phase.  I had an idea for a coffee table book after I had realized how many wonderful American poems there were about animals--fish, flesh, and fowl.  I selected 100 of these poems, and we decided we'd pair them with photos of the animals that Michel would take.  I wanted to use the title of Denise Levertov's beautiful poem "Come into Animal Presence" as the title of the book.  Although you can't copyright titles, so we didn't need her permission, I wrote her and got her approval.  We went to zoos in several states, taking photos.  It was amazing how often we were allowed in the animal enclosures.  The most memorable experience (and best photo), however, came at a farm north of Topeka, where a woman rehabilitated injured animals for the Fish and Game Commission.  I wasn't prepared for what we encountered: running loose and living in a surreal peaceable kingdom were a bobcat (it wandered in and out of the house), a coyote, a deer, a raccoon, and other animals.  Unbidden, the raccoon climbed up my pant leg and shirt and sat on my shoulder.  It was thrilling, though I couldn't quite relax and let go of the feeling that the raccoon might decide to Van Gogh me.

One of the poems I had selected was Robinson Jeffers' "Hurt Hawks," a poem about the narrator's reaction to putting down, giving the "lead gift" of a bullet to a wounded hawk that could no longer fly free.  In a cage on the farm was a magnficent hawk which had flown into a car windshield and had a wing severed.  In the photo he stares at the viewer, full on, and one is struck and held by his gaze.  The hawk fills the frame, but it is the eyes that hold our own.  It's only, I think, later that the viewer notices that there is a gash and the hawk's wing is missing.  The photo and poem made a perfect pairing.

Unfortunately, it was the only professional quality photo we got.  And there is just too much incredibly detailed and beautiful nature photography for our efforts to measure up. 

There are, of course, lots of poems about poetry--what it is and what it does.  One of my favorites is "Juggler" by Richard Wilbur:

               A ball will bounce; but less and less. It's not
               A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
               Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
               So in our hearts from brilliance,
               Settles and is forgot.
               It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

               To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
               The balls roll around, wheel on his wheeling hands,
               Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
               Grazing his finger ends,
               Cling to their courses there,
               Swinging a small heaven about his ears.

               But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all
               Than the earth regained, and still and sole within
               The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
               He reels that heaven in,
               Landing it ball by ball,
               And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.

              Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's
              Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
              On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
              The boys stamp, and the girls
              Shriek, and the drum booms
              And all come down, and he bows and says good-bye.

              If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
              In the dust again, if the table starts to drop
              Through the daily dark again, and though the plate
              Lies flat on the table top,
              For him we batter our hands
              Who has won for once over the world's weight.

What a perfect last line!  All but 'over' a one-syllable word, five syllables alliterating, and no way to read the line quickly.  In the last post, I mentioned Frost's poem "For Once, Then, Something."  The 'for once' for Frost, the subject of epiphany, was nothing but a pebble, the poet's cynical comment on our search for wisdom.  Wilbur is much more optimistic; his 'for once' a true, if brief, moment of celebration.  Whee!  Happy Poetry Month!