Robert Sargent's Poems
The Things of the World
I would like to say something for things as they are, in- themselves,
In their fleeting exactitude,
Fashioned in intricate and exclusive ways, individual,
Each like nothing else precisely. I am speaking
Of observable things, this chair,
This leaf, that slab, the sun, dust, a fly,
Sometimes interacting, sometimes not, depending
On the nature of each, but always
And ever changing, coming into being, vanishing;
May be observed or not; beautiful or ugly
Only as someone’s opinion;
Neither right or wrong; neutral; concerned only with
Their presence here, enduring their given span:
The manifold things of the world.
Faulkner
With Faulkner, the way he was thought of,- back home in the 30’s:
in somebody’s living room, everyone having a drink,
and a cultured, pontifical voice telling us
what we should think of our author. "Of course we know
most of it’s trash. Here’s a description, though,
of a country road leading down to a nigger’s still.
He’d be familiar with that, of course." Titters.
We were being enlightened. "I will say, though,"
reading, "this is a good description. Too bad
there aren’t more pearls like this among the filth."
I was the youngest there, held my tongue.
I first read Faulkner in his early books,
not knowing what I was reading.
But late one night, in a third floor hideaway
of Old Lee Hall, I began The Sound and the Fury.
I struggled some, at first: "I could see them hitting,"
Caddy becoming Candace. But gradually,
as the night wore on, the campus becoming quiet,
under the yellow lamp, with the turning pages,
I knew that here were people I grew up with,
black and white, the turn of their talk like mine,
the invented, familiar country. Benjy and Jason,
Dilsey, Candace and Quentin, attained their depth,
like Cezanne portraits. Not in France! Here!
And Yoknapatawpha County, as he named it,
not distant like Joyce’s Dublin, the Paris of Proust,
but just down the road apiece! It was almost dawn
when I closed the book. I walked back to my room,
across the dark and peaceful campus, exultant.
Of course we can’t know exactly how he did it.
But we can speculate.
In Faulkner’s study, where Go Down Moses was written,
the various tales covering over a hundred years,
with tens of characters, illegal ties of blood,
there must have hung on the wall a family tree
of all the McCaslin kinfolk. Now picture Faulkner,
say in an easy chair, ready for work.
Perhaps a glass of whiskey in reaching distance.
He starts to write, then looks up at the chart,
Hmm. I thought that Cass was older than Ike
by 16 years. And Ike born ’67.
But this shows Cass born 1850. Still,
could be. A small boy with his uncles. Hmmm.
They’d be about 60 and Cass 9. O.K.
Bends to his writing.
- When he and Uncle Buck ran back to the house
from discovering that Tomey’s Turl had run
again, they heard Uncle Buddy cursing and
bellowing in the kitchen, then the fox...
Trimeters
In closing, let there be trimeters!Consider the old masters, how they ended their books:
- walked back to the hotel in the rain
each in its ordered place
yes I said yes I will yes
And the King James translators in the passage from Exodus,
working on the Fourth Commandment:
"For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea...,"
did not end the phrase with
- and all that is in them,
but rather a luscious powerful trimeter:
- and all that in them is.