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The moon was like a full cup tonight, too heavy, and sank in the mist soon after dark, leaving for light faint stars and the silver leaves of milkweed beside the road, gleaming before my car. Yet I like driving at night in summer and in Vermont: the brown road through the mist of mountain-dark, among farms so quiet, and the roadside willows opening out where I saw the cows. Always a shock to remember them there, those great breathings close in the dark. I stopped, and took my flashlight to the pasture fence. They turned to me where they lay, sad |
and beautiful faces in the dark, and I counted them–forty near and far in the pasture, turning to me, sad and beautiful like girls very long ago who were innocent, and sad because they were innocent, and beautiful because they were sad. I switched off my light. But I did not want to go, not yet, nor knew what to do if I should stay, for how in that great darkness could I explain anything, anything at all. I stood by the fence. And then very gently it began to rain. |
“Mostly Love, Now” and “The Cows at Night”
by Deborah J. Brasket
http://deborahbrasket.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/mostly-love-now/
Since posting the speech by George Saunders I’ve been searching, without success for the poem he mentions by Hayden Carruth, who late in life claims he’s “mostly Love, now.” [Poem found since posting this! A kind reader copied it into the comments below]
But in that search I discovered some of the poetry which makes that proclamation so believable.
J.D. Garversaid:
I think Saunders may have been referring to a line in the following poem by Carruth.
The line reads: “Now I am almost entirely love.”
Testament
So often has it been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away – I’m sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDS, IRAS, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I’ve made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can’t go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow’s mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I’m no financier doing
the world’s great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
Maybe the tulips I planted under
the lilac tree? Or our red-bellied
woodpeckers who have given us so
much pleasure, and the rabbits
and the deer? And kisses And
love-makings? All our embracings?
I know millions of these will be still
unspent when the last grain of sand
falls with its whisper. its inconsequence,
on the mountain of my love below.