Poem In Your Pocket Day
published: Fri, 30-Apr-2004 | updated: Sat, 14-Oct-2006
Today is Poem In Your Pocket Day in New York City. The idea is that you carry around your favorite poem in your pocket and share it with others you meet.
Normally, I'm not much of a poetry fan. Yes, at school we had English Lit. classes and we had to read, study, and discuss poetry as part of that, but that kind of dispassionate analysis never really gelled for me. For my O-levels, we had to read the War Poets, Sigfreid Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and the like, and I must admit that some of the poetry was extremely moving, but in the end it was all about learning enough to pass the exam and not about sitting down and enjoying the language and appreciating the poetry.
For our wedding, I read three poems to Donna as part of the service: The Passionate Shepherd to his Love by Christopher Marlowe (it starts with "Come live with me and be my love"), one of Shakespeare's sonnets (the one that starts "My love is like a red, red rose"), and a hilarious poem by Ogden Nash called The Wedding Whistle, complete with the made-up words he's famous for:
Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren't.Far and wide, far and wide,
I can walk with you beside;
Furthermore, I tell you what,
I sit and sulk where you are not.Visitors remark my frown
Where you're upstairs and I am down,
Yes, and I'm afraid I pout
When I'm indoors and you are out.But how contentedly I view
Any room containing you.
In fact I care not where you be,
Just as long as it's with me.In all your absences I glimpse
Fire and flood and trolls and imps.
Is your train a minute slothful?
I goad the stationmaster wrothful.When with friends to bridge you drive
I never know if you're alive,
And when you linger late in shops
I long to telephone the cops.Yet how worth the waiting for,
To see you coming through the door.
Somehow, I can be complacent
Never but with you adjacent.Near and far, near and far,
I am happy where you are;
Likewise I have never larnt
How to be it where you aren't.Then grudge me not my fond endeavor,
To hold you in my sight forever;
Let none, not even you, disparage
Such a valid reason for a marriage.
However, there was one poem I read way back when in my mid-teenage years that really struck a chord deep within me: The Mountain Lion by D.H. Lawrence. I even remember copying it out of whatever Eng. Lit. textbook I read it in, typing it up on my portable Smith-Corona typewriter so that I could keep it.
It's hard for me to say why exactly. On one level, the poem speaks of how man is ruining the Earth by colonizing the wild areas of the world, on another, Lawrence is bemoaning the loss of freedom and beauty embodied in a single mountain lion. At the time I read this poem I was reading the forceful apocalyptic SF novels of John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, etc) where he describes the world disintegrating through pollution, the squandering and depletion of natural resources, and population growth out of control. Did this rather sad quiet poem about the killing of a mountain lion resonate because of that?
Another reason I like this poem is that it is written in freeform, in blank verse. No structure, no rhyme, almost pure prose. At once you are liberated from scanning the meter and making sure that you are somehow reading it correctly. Although it has some slight structure, you are freed from the restrictions and conventions of rhyming poetry and able to concentrate on the emotion and the meaning.
And Lawrence paints such a vivid immediate picture of a lonely hike in New Mexico (with whom? the reader?), meeting the hunters with their illegal booty. The imagery of the dead mountain lion haunts him and us, and once the hunters have gone and he finds the lair with the view, the view of the world, he laments the lion's death and our part in its disappearance.
Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds
still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.Then we all advance, to meet.
Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of the dark and snow
and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are you doing here on this vanishing trail?What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?Que tiene, amigo?
Leon -
He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn't know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.
He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine eyes in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.Hermoso es!
They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave,
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow
flash of a mountain lion's long shoot!
And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more,
out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice
of the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees
motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion!
