Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

These Things, Hereafter

220 f r o m g o u r d s e e d t h e s e t h i n g s , h e r e a f t e r for James August Pennington I think the first poem I ever got was one by Edna St. Vincent Millay that Mr. Pennington read our eighth-grade Latin class in (Good Lord!) 1951. It’s called “Afternoon on a Hill.” I will be the gladdest thing Under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one. I will look at cliffs and clouds With quiet eyes. Watch the wind bow down the grass And the grass rise. And when the lights begin to show Up from the town, I will mark which must be mine, And then start down. I was fourteen at the time and had grown up as a kind of joyful solitary wandering the Baylor hill. I knew those cliffs and clouds, and I had looked with quiet eyes. For the moment, self and world came together in words. I still like the poem, though the first stanza seems inflated. Too sticky-sweet for my taste now. But O, I can still respond to the center of the poem, the grass and the wind part. There is a phenomenon in human experience that needs a name. Some have called it the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage, a kind of glistening in the consciousness. Calm, trembling times when we feel a deep sense of harmony with the soul. It is part of the work of artists to find images and expressive form for that. • • • 221 f r o m g o u r d s e e d I am happily snowbound in the north Georgia mountains as I write this (Sunday, April 5th, 1987) and hear suddenly the ten inches of snow slide off one whole side of the A-frame roof. A slow, undertowing sound, almost as though it’s inside me, but the dog has her ears up. Each of us discovers different ways of welcoming the universe into us, of being less and less defended against the warmth of the sacred marriage. Poetry became one of my ways. My brother Herb has riding the whitewater of the Chattooga as one of his. That is what the Greek term means. It is something essential and exciting, what I felt in Pennington’s class. Ecstatic, pure-being moments are not, of course, the whole story. There is irony and wit, reason and clear-eyed judgment, and the grounded ramble of an ornery human voice. There is Pennington’s mighty opposite in those years, Jim Hitt. But what I, and others, learned from Pennington were moments, and the way sometimes words and the world will sing together. Pennington could recognize those sacred-marriage, St. Vincent Millay grasses when he saw them shining in a Latin phrase, in the elegant condensation so possible in Latin. When Herb called and left the message on my machine that Mr. Pennington had died, I went to my old Virgil book and opened it at random. Now, there is some precedent for doing this. After Virgil’s death it was a common practice, called the Sortes Virgilianae, to consult the works of Virgil to learn the future. On and off the practice continued, even into this century. The British High Command consulted Virgil for advice in WWI! (Pennington would love this scholarly aside.) I open to page 474. It’s book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas is getting a glimpse of the other world. The only phrase circled on the page, in my 1955 scrawly pencil script, is Hac iter Elysium nobis, which means,“This way takes us to the Elysian Fields (the sixth heaven).” How wonderful and incredible. This is how it might have gone in the longago classroom. • • • 222 f r o m g o u r d s e e d “Which words did this guy Virgil choose to put next to each other?” Silence. “Iter and Elysium,” he screams. (“Iter” is our word “itinerary.”) “What is he saying?” Pennington climbs up and is now standing on his desk. More silence. Pennington descends and circles the room, prowling, pulling shirts up, untucking ties.“What is he saying?” “The trip feels heavenly.” Borisky feels brave. “You would.” Borisky’s shirt gets unbuttoned two buttons. “Go for the gold...