Loving Mark Strand Poem by Deborah DeNicola

Loving Mark Strand



It's as if he knows how close he's always been to Spirit.
As if your hand might pass through the numen of his voice
and a little shadow shiver on the auditorium wall.
If you asked I bet he'd glance away with a half smile and husky
whisper ... Everything ages... We get old... Everyone disappears...
and this with a hissing sigh: ... Love fades... But his eyes
would twinkle like wild dice and you'd know underneath
that haunting still lives a romantic, why else would he
strike us so humble, so droll? One could do worse
than scribble ethereal desires as years slip by

like pages lifted by wind. Maybe he sees something
we can't imagine beyond this earthly timeline. Always
his quavery moans purr like a couple of mongrels,
wounded but playful. Oh Strand! Oh handsome Strand!
Your towering gaze taught us tricks that held out mystery,
ships made out of words, lifelines we almost grasp
as we hear the poems built of vowels, poems mocking
themselves, poems so pleased to be poems, bemused
at the range of their pain, consumed with their own toiling
well into twilight— elusive, mewing poems whose feet

never touch ground. And here in the pin-drop quiet,
ten deep in the standing-room-only of his vapory breath,
we're almost splay-legged in rapture while there
at the podium, he's merely mouthing the syllables
of light and air and glass in the perfectly stitched font
of The New Yorker. We could sail the rictus of his cryptic
grin, its crescent aisle, while we cling to his piper's cape
and flow from the building up a Bread Loaf embankment
where wind blows color out of the gloaming and the smoky

poems dissolve, deliquescent as rain, beclouding
the synchronous rise of birds. And Strand,
with the bittersweet smile, glad to have touched our lives,
never giving a hoot who mimicked him, he just keeps moving,
holy over the fields, an Aquarian Orpheus, one with his head
intact, toes dangling over the edge of our good green planet
into the mythic skies of poetry-history, taking his place beside
Homer, Virgil... Demosthenes' stones under his tongue,
back to the first bicameral tribe, the blue mother cave where
he first dreamed in silence the tender language of the born.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014
Topic(s) of this poem: Poetry
POET'S NOTES ABOUT THE POEM
Mark Strand was my first mentor at Breaadloaf in 1977. I returned there in 1993 as a Scholar and he was there again reading from 'Dark Harbor.' In the years between i'd seen him come and go in Maine and Cambridge. Always the elegance. Always the voice of a master. He knows he's amusing and he knows how serious he is, and delivers that knowledge to us.
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
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Deborah DeNicola

Deborah DeNicola

Richland, Washington
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