The Heliolatry Longing

The first day of summer has officially been marked and here in Seattle it feels like we RSVP’d to the wrong party. We got all dressed up, only to find out it wasn’t time to start sloshing down the ‘ritas. Instead, the gray sent us indoors, where we gargled whiskey and continued to write away while the umpteenth person updated their Facebook status with “Juneuary.”

It may be gray here, but this day is the longest of the year. (No p(s)un intended). In addition to long daylight, we love summer blackberries, the word ‘longing’, and the sparkly, gorgeous way Robert Hass uses it here:

Meditation at Lagunitas

by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

We also love long bridges, the long sea, long silences — much like the silence we hear in that Robert Hass poem. And did you know there’s a long poem by James Dickey about a bridge? Oh. It is filled with birds in long flight, an underworld long abandoned:

At Darien Bridge

by James L. Dickey

The sea here used to look
As if many convicts had built it,
Standing deep in their ankle chains,
Ankle-deep in the water, to smite
The land and break it down to salt.
I was in this bog as a child
When they were all working all day
To drive the pilings down.
I thought I saw the still sun
Strike the side of a hammer in flight
And from it a sea bird be born
To take off over the marshes.
As the gray climbs the side of my head
And cuts my brain off from the world,
I walk and wish mainly for birds,
For the one bird no one has looked for
To spring again from a flash
Of metal, perhaps from the scratched
Wedding band on my ring finger.
Recalling the chains of their feet,
I stand and look out over grasses
At the bridge they built, long abandoned,
Breaking down into water at last,
And long, like them, for freedom
Or death, or to believe again
That they worked on the ocean to give it
The unchanging, hopeless look
Out of which all miracles leap.

We bring you these poems after many long searches into the bookshelves for words of the right timbre. So yes, we love long poems and even longer essays about The Longing of The Long Poem. Our friends over at Jacket Magazine have a few long things to say:

Modernist long poems resist the support institutions of poetry. Expensive to print; tricky to handle digitally; too long to be read in their entirety at poetry readings; too big for anthologies; much too big for little magazines to be able to publish anything but short sections; almost always too long to teach within the constraints of a timetable; exorbitantly demanding of a reader’s time; and sometimes barely readable until extended scholarly labours have provided guides and critical readings. And yet the long poem continues to represent the peak of poetic achievement just as early epics did. What accounts for the persistence of the modern long poem given its apparent drawbacks? To try to answer this question we would need to gain some idea of what makes for a long poem and one place to start is with endings.

The long of it: that which is linear, considerable, lasting. The longest day of the year is now gone. The days get shorter now… summertime rolls.

– Lori Huskey

Video: Summer is Glossy