Fanny Howe appears here in The London Magazine’s series of contemporary New England poets. She was born in 1940 and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father was Mark De Wolfe Howe, Professor of Law at Harvard, and her mother the Irish writer Mary Manning, known for a brilliant film adaptation of Finnegans Wake. She has published many books of poetry and several novels, five of which were collected in one volume Radical Love. She raised her three children in New England and travelled between there and her teaching job in Southern California for years. She is Professor Emeritus in writing and American literature at the University of California at San Diego. Her most recent collection Second Childhood, from which her two poems are chosen, was a Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. She spends part of each year in Ireland. I have known and revered her work for more than forty years. Together with John Ashbery, she is the American poet whose work I anticipate most impatiently.
– Grey Gowrie
Dear Hölderlin
(for Maureen Owen)
Years ago in a migration
we each carried our own
rug and pillow,
telescope and strings.
Our tent was portable and able
to be dismantled.
It could be rolled
and stuffed very fast.
Flowers and grass
still grew freely and sea-lilac
had already cracked
the tarmac. So there was sustenance.
At the estuary nearby
two continents had split apart
and a curlew
flew alone and crying.
Carefully a book
would be buried
with iodine and wine
and food that doesn’t rot.
The cross is a good marker
for an avenue and white clover,
trampled where little
sweet pea is growing higher.
Down the hill comes a poet
with ginger hair, he puts
violets inside his hat,
herbs and water and says:
There was once music here,
a round table
and gang prayer,
and an exploding glacier.
Women kept each tent clean
until one cried,
I’m going to take care
of myself.
We heard her packing
the woods into her tote
like a nymph
managing a shipwreck.
After that, for us all
empathy was our only hope.
A Vision
Some old people want to leave this earth and
experience another.
They don’t want to commit suicide. They want to
wander out of sight
without comrades or luggage.
Once I was given such an opportunity, and what did
I find?
Mist between mountains, the monotonous buzz of
farm machinery,
cornstalks brown and flowers then furrows
preparing to receive seeds for next year’s harvest.
A castle, half-ruined by a recent earthquake still
highly functional.
Computers, copying machines and cars.
It was once a monastery and home for a family
continually at war.
Cypress trees and chestnut and walnut trees. A swing
hanging long from a high bough,
where paths circle down, impeding quick escapes by
armies or thieves.
I was assigned the monastic wing that later became
a granary.
Brick-red flagstones, small windows with hinged
casements
and twelve squares of glass inside worn frames.
From the moment I entered the long strange space,
I foresaw an otherworldly light taking shape.
Scorpions lived in the cracks.
I came without a plan, empty-handed except for my
notebooks from preceding days.
This lack was a deliberate choice: to see what would
be revealed to me by circumstances.
I took long walks that multiplied my body into
companionable parts.
Down dusty roads and alongside meadows,
and pausing to look at the mountains and clouds,
I talked to myself.
Mysticism “provides a path from those who ask the way
to get lost.
It teaches how not to return,” wrote Michel de Certeau.
*
One day I had the sense that there were two boys
accompanying me everywhere I went.
I could not identify the boy on the left,
but the one on the right was overwhelmingly himself.
Someone I knew and loved.
The other one was very powerful in his personality,
an enigma and a delight.
His spirit seemed to spread into the roads and
weather.
Silver olive trees and prim vineyards.
Now a rain has whitened the morning sky but every
single leaf holds a little water and glitter.
*
Mirror neurons experience the suffering that they see.
A forest thick with rust and gold that doesn’t rust.
I saw a painting where the infant Jesus was lying on
his back
on the floor at the feet or Mary
and his halo was still attached to his head.
And another painting where there were about forty
baby cherubs
all wearing golden halos. Gold represents the sun as
the sun represents God.
Outside wild boars were still roaming the hills.
Maize, sunflowers, honey, thyme, beans, stones,
olives and tomatoes.
Rush hour in the two-lane highway.
Oak tree leaves curled into caramel balls.
A Franciscan monk sat on a floor reciting the rosary,
a concept borrowed from Islamic prayer beads
centuries before.
Figs, bread, pasta, wine and cheese.
These are not the subconscious, but necessities.
People want to be poets for reasons that have little to
do with language.
It is the life of the poet that they want, I think.
Even the glow of loneliness and humiliation.
To walk in the gutter with a bottle of wine.
Some people’s lives are more poetic than a poem
and Francis is certainly one of these.
I know, because he walked beside me for that
short time
whether you believe it or not. He was thirteen.
That night I drank walnut liqueur, just a sip, it tasted
like Kahlua.
The inner wing of a bird is the color of a doe.
And the turned-over earth is the color of a nut, and
a bird,
but soon it will be watered for the green wheat of
spring.
Flying up the hill on the back of the motorbike in the
warm Roman air was like drinking from the fountain
of youth.
Umbrella trees along the Tiber.
I walked on the rooftops across Rome, including a
grassy one, and one where a palm grew out of a crack
in the rocks.
I was carrying an assortment of envelopes containing
paintings and notes for my Mass but they could not be
managed easily because their shapes were irregular.
Some had juttings, some were swollen, the color red
was prominent. They depicted divided cities, divided
into layers, not all in a line. A layer cake sagging under
the weight of accumulated dust, dirt and now grass.
Each layer had been purchased at the cost of decades,
even centuries of hand-hurting, back-breaking slave
labour. Caveat emptor!
Broken columns, mashed marble friezes and faces. The
triumph of greed
was written across my storyboard. The city was a
mighty and devouring creation,
a creature with a crusted skin.
Even in the city you look for a place that welcomes
you. You actually want to be found!
Being found is the polar opposite of making a vow.
You are a pot of gold and not the arc of the rainbow.
When you sit down on a stone, face up to the sun, you
can’t help but think, Mine, mine.
And you don’t have to promise anything to anyone
in time.
You may be called to a place of banality or genius,
but as long as it is your own happiness that responds
to it,
you are available to something inhuman.
Mozart sat at the piano for the better part of every day.
All over the world monks have lived in desert hovels
as scribes, prophets, mendicants.
They are the extreme realization of one aspect of
human personality
that tends towards lack of possession and solitude.
There was a hole in the roof of the Pantheon where
we were told
that the snow fell through onto the relics of Catherine
of Siena
the mystic and onto the porphyry.
A man in Rome told me that a monkey climbed down
a wall
holding an infant in his arms and in remembrance
there is a statue of the Madonna
on the very rooftop where he began his descent.