There Is No Sadness
- There Is No Sadness
(after reading James Wright: A Life in Poetry, by Jonathan Blunk)
There is no sadness like today's sadness—a spring day so achingly alive I want to breakout of my body. But somebody already said that.I want to join the host of dandelions on the lawn.Somebody almost said that too. Are we nothingbut reproductions? I want to join the fledglingleaves on the maples, the last straggling catkinson the birch limbs, the ravens rubbing theirthree toes in the sun-warm garden, the greenbeetles hauling pebbles over bluestone.Enough already with description, some surlyyenta yells from a lower East Side tenementwindow in my head. She doesn't know a seedfrom a shiksa from a sonnet but she claimssome part of me, too. I think she uses the samenest as phoebes under the eaves that shiton my crime-lights, necessary or unnecessarybecause the nearest neighbors are miles off.Minus a shotgun, a crime-light does the trick,pushing back the margins of the ominous. And now,fear has crept in over the dandelions and ravens.My eyes are filled with light this morning and stilldarkness crowds the edges where rods conquercones. Or is it the other way? Knowledge dogsus, turns us out of the garden, over the biting-fly pastures, and into the ticked-infested woods.And on into the world where generations begatand beget and there is no ending, is there, exceptfor something self-defeating as elegy in whichwe inherit no sadness like today's sadness. [End Page 531]
neil shepard's latest book, How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018. His sixth and seventh books of poetry were Hominid Up, and a full collection of poems and photographs, Vermont Exit Ramps II. His poems appear in Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, Southern Review, and Sewanee Review. He founded and directed the Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center and the literary magazine Green Mountains Review.
