|
|
Classic and Contemporary Poetry
AN EPISTLE TO ROBINSON JEFFERS, by MARGARET FERGUSON GIBSON Poet's Biography First Line: Sick at heart, I want poor bitch cassandra Alternate Author Name(s): Gibson, Margaret Subject(s): Jeffers, Robinson (1887-1962) | |||
Sick at heart, I want poor bitch Cassandra, your hawk-faced girl, to mutter in my stead truth to power. Close on the cusp of the new century, Jeffers, the public cant appalls -- but we will test our warheads, eat poisoned meat, breed armies of indolent self-congratulation, and the greed . . . no wonder I pack off to the hills, to hermitage, Appalachian and eastern, a towering headland, stone that overlooks a valley silence so milk-blue it could be an inland ocean roiled by wind. At the monster's feet, there are left the mountains, you wrote, one season of kettling hawks and blood in the leaf. In raw, early spring I've seen red-tails share a common branch, the larger female only then less contentious. What follows that calm, you knew, was appetite -- airborne, fierce and free, sheer as fire. Were it so with our kind, we'd use no rootless words -- our lives would be our words. I, the song, I walk here, the Modoc prayer, would be prelude to passion and plenty. You'd have us embrace and relinquish -- no more scheming, hoarding things, no more believing their occult power will protect us from ourselves. Just yesterday, awkward and afraid, I clambered down the rockface and came to rest at the root of its towering bulk. Alone beyond wanting, I looked up the rough walls of that native stone, sure I could feel it, the quiet thundering within the sheath of stone. There was no shining forth and fearful symmetry, no glory passing by that cleft of rock, no mystery of God, that imagined rapture of patience and passion younger I hungered to see. Oh, but there were massive storm clouds, a great wild shining, bridled -- naked power compressed to stone. I reached out and touched the simple truth of stone, and my body trembled, as if met by a lover, summoned into pain and darkness by an intrepid joy. The massive mysticism of stone, you wrote, having looked at it directly, worked with it, built house and tower with it, hauling each stone from the Pacific shore up the cliff, each stone cradled, cursed, too, perhaps -- stone on stone piled toward hawks overhead and the trade winds and the stars. Pain can shine, you wrote. Beautiful, intolerable God, you wrote, turning outward into the whole splendor of things, wings and wave-worn skerries, stars in the ocean of night, even the treacheries of empire, and the greed, part of it. There is in me, you wrote, older and harder than life, and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was ocean -- before stone, too. Bite the lip, then. Mountain and sea, granite cliffs, fire and the thunder of stone, the kearing of wild hawks in the wind -- be faithful, you tell me, to these. Look on what is, and be faithful. Tell no lies, however splendid. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE RETURN OF ROBINSON JEFFERS by ROBERT HASS WORD BASKET WOMAN by GARY SNYDER THE POET IS DEAD by WILLIAM EVERSON FAILED TRIBUTE TO THE STONEMASON OF TOR HOUSE, ROBINSON JEFFERS by JAMES TATE UNA JEFFERS TO HER HUSBAND, ROBINSON by BARBARA BRENT BROWER POET IS DEAD by WILLIAM EVERSON RETURN OF ROBINSON JEFFERS by ROBERT HASS TO ROBINSON JEFFERS by CZESLAW MILOSZ EPISTLE TO THE FIELD IN ELDRED, PENNSYLVANIA by MARGARET FERGUSON GIBSON |
| |