Interview with Gregory Orr in this issue
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Gregory Orr Photo Credit: Trisha Orr.
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Works from CONCERNING THE BOOK THAT IS THE BODY OF THE BELOVED (Copper Canyon, 2005), HOW BEAUTIFUL THE BELOVED (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) by permission of Copper Canyon Press
Gregory Orr
From CONCERNING THE BOOK THAT IS THE BODY OF THE BELOVED (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)
“What is life?”
When you first
Hear that question
It echoes in your skull
As if someone shouted
In an empty cave.
The same answer each time:
The resurrection of the body
Of the beloved, which is
The world.
Every poem different, but
Telling the same story.
And we’ve been gathering
Them in a book
Since writing began
And before that as songs
Or poems people memorized
And recited aloud
When someone asked: “What is life?”
---
The things that die
Do not die,
Or they die briefly
To be born again
In the Book.
Did you think
You would see
The loved one again
In this world
Or in some other?
No, that cannot happen.
But we have been
Gathering, all of us,
The scattered remnants
Of the loved one
Since the beginning.
In Egypt, the loved
One is not in the pyramids
But in the poem
Carved in stone
About the lover’s lips
And eyes.
In the igloo
The poem gathers
The dark hair of the beloved.
All the poems of the world
Have been gathering the beloved’s
Body against your loss.
Read in the Book. Open
Your eyes and your heart;
Open your voice.
The beloved
Is there and was never lost.
---
When Sappho wrote:
“whatever one loves most
is beautiful,” she began
the poems of heart’s praise
which comprise the Book
of the body of the beloved
which is the world.
Everything in the Book
Flows from that single poem
Or the countless others
That say the same thing
In other words, other ways.
----
The world comes into the poem.
The poem comes into the world.
Reciprocity—it all comes down
To that.
As with lovers:
When it’s right you can’t say
Who is kissing whom.
---
Now the snow is falling
Even more than an hour ago.
The pine in the backyard
Bows with the weight of it.
Two years ago, my father
Died. What love we had
Hidden under misery,
Weighed down with years
Of silence.
And now,
Maybe the poem can free
Us, maybe the poem can express
The love and let the rest
Slide to the earth as the snow
Does now, freeing the tree
Of its burden.
---
To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but...
If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?
---
Calm down, calm down.
But why calm down?
When I’m dead and only
A poem in the Book
Read by someone
Not yet born,
Then I’ll be calm.
Then I’ll tell them
In a quiet voice
What a miracle it is
To be alive. I won’t
Shout and jump around.
I’ll whisper it in her ear.
And if I’m lucky
She’ll shout and jump
Around; her heart
Will beat a little faster.
From HOW BEAUTIFUL THE BELOVED (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
If to say it once
And once only, then still
To say: Yes.
And say it complete,
Say it as if the word
Filled the whole moment
With its absolute saying.
Later for “but,”
Later for “if.”
Now
Only the single syllable
That is the beloved,
That is the world.
---
The Book said we were mortal;
It didn’t say we had to be morbid.
The Book said the beloved died,
But also that she comes again,
That he’s reborn as words.
The Book said: everything perishes.
The Book said: that’s why we sing.
---
How beautiful
The beloved.
Whether garbed
In mortal tatters,
Or in her dress
Of everlastingness—
Moon broken
On the water,
Or moon
Still whole
In the night sky.
---
Not many of them, it’s true,
But certain poems
In an uncertain world—
The ones we cling to:
They bring us back
Always to the beloved
Whom we thought we’d lost.
As surely as if the words
Led her by the hand,
Brought him before us.
Certain poems
In an uncertain world.
---
Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.
Catastrophe? It’s just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.
Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.
All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.
---
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.
From RIVER INSIDE THE RIVER
Note to self: remember
What Emerson said
Of Thoreau—
That he loved the low
In nature:
Muskrats
And crickets, suckers
And frogs.
Not stars.
Songs of the carnal,
Songs of what we are.
*
When the coffin closed at last,
When flames consumed it,
Your eyes were useless—
What tears could put out
That fire?
And so, you shut them.
So, you let the lids of your eyes
Close over the beloved’s body.
For a while now—darkness.
And what you see will be inside you.
*
First, there was shatter.
Then, aftermath.
Only later and only slowly
We gathered words
Against our loss.
But last was not least,
Last was not least of these.
*
Lead of the heart;
Gold of song.
Alchemy of grief
The poem performs.
*
Bald, high-domed Taoist sage
Holding the Peach of Immortality
In one hand, a hiking staff in the other.
I like to think he’s reciting a poem,
One that begins: “To eat a peach...”
One that stresses its succulence,
And how the sticky, delicious juice
Dribbles down your chin.
He’s fresh from a rendezvous
With the beloved. Peach
And poem—both are her tokens.
*
River inside the river.
World within the world.
All we have is words
To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures.
