Poems by Hilda Morley
MUSEUM POETICA: NEGLECTORINOS
Hilda Morley’s life and career read like a course in 20th century modernism. Born in New York City in 1916 into an educated Russian immigrant family (Isaiah Berlin was her cousin), she was a precocious child who wrote verse in her teens and corresponded with W. B. Yeats. As a university student in London, she met and befriended the poet H. D., a major influence on her work. Soon after the Blitz began in 1940, she returned to New York City and, through her marriage to the painter Eugene Morley, came to know and study the Abstract Expressionist painters of New York. Later in the 50s, she accompanied her third husband, the German composer Stefan Wolpe, to Black Mountain College, where she met and interacted with such major figures as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage.
Morley wrote poetry continuously throughout her life, was published in many of the most significant journals of the period, and received high critical praise. Her first collection appeared when she was sixty. She defined herself as a poet of organic form, one who, as she wrote, “molds” the poem’s “phrasing and spacing to conform to the pressures of the poetic content.” That molding, spontaneous and often joyous in its realizations, gives her work its precision and sheer gorgeousness of effect, as in these lines from “And I in My Bed Again”: “the sound of the rain took me / apart . . . breath caught in memory of / a deep sweetness/that sound / unceasing.” The anonymous “O Western Wind,” one of the pivot poems of the European imagination, plays in the background to these lines, reminding the reader of the psychic struggle embedded in lyric composition. Morley’s aesthetics of immediacy and organic form mirror that struggle, eliding the mythic or historical in favor of an indwelling in the wash of phenomena. Her eye and ear, always adventitious, are given more to alertness than to any preconceived design. Her method is word-by-word, deploying an array of techniques that she may have learned from absorbing the gestures of Abstract Expressionist painting and contemporary music’s break-up of tonalities and traditional forms.
Cadence and syntax drive her poems. One of her master strategies is her use of repeated phrases and words, each like a daub of paint added to a yet-to-be-realized composition. She is primarily a poet of awe and wonder, even when writing as witness to her husband’s suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Denise Levertov spoke of the “lucid, illuminated quality” of Morley’s poems, of her glimpse into the revelatory open “secrets” of nature and art that her craft allows her readers to experience. The poet and critic Geoffrey O’Brien remarks that she “speaks clearly and sparely of what is least sayable.” She is among a handful of contemporary poets whose work we can classify as restorative, as returning us to our world in all its splendor and variousness:
the light is
without calculation,
is a munificence now,
is justified.
—from “That Bright Grey Eye”
Hilda Morley. Black Mountain College.
And I in My Bed Again
Last night
tossed in
my bed
the sound of the rain turned me
around,
a leaf
in a dried gully
from side to
side,
the sound of the rain took me
apart, opened to what is it?
breath caught in memory of
a deep sweetness
that sound
unceasing
delicate, the wetness running
through my body
It might be nighttime
in a forest hut,
the rain constant
in little rivulets
splashing,
at times uncertain—
safe in each other’s arms,
the rain sheltering
us a depth opening
bottomless to a terrible sweetness,
the small rain
shaking us in our bed
(the terror)
whispering
End of a season,
wind from the west
New York, 1982
*
That Bright Grey Eye
The grey sky, lighter & darker
greys,
lights between & delicate
lavenders also
blue-greys in smaller strokes,
& swashes
of mauve-grey on the Hudson—
openings
of light to the blue oblong
off-center
where the door to the warehouse
shows—
the larger smearings darkening
deep
into blues
So alight that sky,
late August,
early evening,
I had to
gasp at it,
stand there hardly moving
to breathe it, using
whatever my body gave me,
at
that moment attending to it,
thinking:
Turner, he should have
seen it,
he would have given it
back to us,
not let it die away
And that other
evening, walking down Bank Street from marketing,
the sky fiery over the river,
luminous but
hot in its flowering also,
rich in color
as Venice seen by Guardi—more aflame even,
the sky moving in a pulse,
its fire breathing
in a pulse verging on danger—mane of a lioness
affronted.
That brilliance—the eye of the lion
filled to the lids with
flame
And his eyes, Turner’s, that bright grey eye
at seventy-six,
“brilliant as
the eye of a child”
who grew his thumbnail
in the shape of an eagle’s claw,
the better
to use it in painting
In Kirby Lonsdale, Yorkshire,
where Turner first drew mountain-landscapes,
I found Blake’s Marriage
of Heaven and Hell—sold for two guineas, 1821
& Turner aged 46 that year
& there I read:
“And when thou seest
an Eagle, thou seest a portion of genius.
Lift up
thy head,” says Blake.
These afternoons now,
late in September ’76,
the sky, the river are lit up
at the end of Bank Street, at Bethune.
The pavement
trembles with light pouring
upon it
We are held in it.
We smile.
I hold my breath to see if
the cashier in the supermarket
will be gentle with the old lady who cannot
read the price-tag on
a loaf of bread.
Then I breathe freely,
for yes, she is helpful, yes, she is
kind.
Outside on
the pavement, the light pouring itself away
is the light in the eagle’s
eye (or the eye of
a child)
(I saw it in a man’s eye once:
but he’s dead now more than
four years)
Drawing heat out of
surfaces,
the light is
without calculation,
is a munificence now,
is justified.
New York, 1977
*
For Creeley
Whatever “wandering minstrel” look in
the spring of ’54 (its wet beginning
in North Carolina)
& the hooded eye asking
really for nothing except to be
listened to
& then the extreme courtesy
so little
seen in that particular place,
with the passion for Miles Davis—intensity
withheld— & gentleness of manner
almost insidious: those marked you
at that time. Creeley, in Black Mountain.
Somehow I associate them with
your hands & feet.
After
that time only bits of news, glimpses, and
your voice on the telephone saying
before anything else: “What can I
do for you?” –without hesitation,
startling me with its goodness,
making
everything easy (no need to
ponder: how shall I say it?)
And always
your hands & feet like someone
mounting a wave
& descending
from it.
What in you was cognizant
of the man I lived with,
the depth he embodied,
that surprising
kinship I rejoiced in, wondering
how it was so, what side of you,
what aspect could reach toward him & listening
inwardly, hear him, watching,
see him, his outreaching truth.
I’m grateful that
you’re there, winding, unwinding
inside this coil of life,
grateful
that you can make me laugh when
I’m dismayed, that your insights
delight me, that you are able
to take in your stride whatever
befalls me, even
the strangest, most horrible.
I’m grateful
for the arc of you,
all that has emerged out of
that first image:
wandering minstrel.
*
Simone, Simone Weil
Simone, Simone Weil, we’re turning
to you again
forty-five years & more after
your death, you rise up in
us again,
in the ugliness,
the filth of our time—perhaps less
obvious than in yours.
What are we to do but
As you say hurl ourselves
upon it, upon that rock
in our path
with that intensity which
might make it disappear
and hope may
fail us, for at first,
at first
there is the downward movement,
before the upward.
Outside, the presence of the trees,
as
they mount upward, is enviable,
their life, their stillness which continues
after beginning with a downward movement.
Of those I have known
so many have not continued.
The sky above the trees and housetops
is thoughtful, grey.
Above the greyness
it flushes warmly, paler
than red tulips, redder than
ripened peaces, exists more actually
more clearly than we can.
For it is not in
order to find that we are here, but
to attend.
Than those “instants”
as Simone called them, may come
upon us in lightning flashes,
“when everything stands still.”
*
The Absence
There’s a great gap. Air.
Sea. Streets, people,
voices. Houses.
Everywhere I look you’re
turning a corner, looking
at something invisible, going
up steps to houses. The door
closes quickly behind you, for-
getting to signal. The back of your
coat, the back of your hair. I see them
clearly. There’s a certain
fuzziness over your head, your face an
indifference, a blind hand waving
through the air (a temperature
neither cold nor warm, a warning).
Your face is the face of a clock, a person
who “doesn’t know,” who prefers the
shadow. The minute hand stumbles
a little always. For each beginning,
a disappearance.
*
Fiesta, Ibiza
Warm crystal
of my little
city:
the fishes
swim over the bay,
rooftops swooping
with light,
the wreaths & garlands
bursting gently
in night’s element
the sunlit branches
exploding
softly,
the sea baring
its lights burning
the unshadowed joys.
*
Egret of the Gulf War
That time I wrote: “That snowy egret,
whiter than clouds, than foam,”
seen for the first time
And now
after those rocked nights, my body
coated with ashes, knowing
there is more & more ruin, devastation,
havoc wreaked
& more to come with
no cry of terror to be heard, no
sound of it except that woman screaming,
rushing at us on the screen: “We are
human beings also”
She is
caught there forever
Wordless,
unable to scream or speak, the grebe, the cormorant
& now the egret encased in
their own black death, the eyes only
alive still – plumes, delicate legs, feathers,
once lively claws are the black hooks on which
their flight dies, their still living coffins
stiffen.
*
In the Illness
In the illness
the fragments
we are
because of a lack of
what Hölderlin
called Nature
and you were
once,
once my health
whom at times
I cannot
recognize
but quicksilver
streaks of light
reverse themselves
*
This Could Be Where I Live
That I might find this place
my country: slopes curve and yet
the trees are straight,
a stretch of water lies
flat & risen above the horizon
There is a scouring
here of snows & clear airs
and a pale raspberry
color on the sky along
the bayside at evening.
There are firs & stubble
fields and a luminous
turn of hillsides scraped together
into hollows.
There are many other
kinds of trees & often
in the snow footprints
of birds & rabbits.
Much stillness
Here – no sound is wasted. The houses
are alert & quiet.
This could be where I live, for
the brilliance of the stars has depth,
sunrise
is very red & orange, immensely
confident.
What is clear are
the trees’ presences, strength in
their branches.
Stillness hums in
sudden lifts of earth,
peacefulness.
*
Autobiography
Staring, as once in the ten-year old’s bedroom,
so today,
this morning,
at a sea-creature, tail squirming
on the ceiling — an atom’s heartbeat
breathing: the eye measures it
& is measured in turn.
Staring as I learned to do
at 15 — the window
my outerspace,
hours when the blind hillsides,
stony in the sun, the scoop of bay,
a fig-tree
pointing green candles,
a donkey
clambering delicately on the rocks
set me
foundations for the season
& later (later)
what folds of hills,
sheep emerging
out of greenness,
nudging each other into
trusting.
Having learned finally what others
have made to be looked at —
I have been saved,
been resuscitated from near-dying,
by the window
of out-there,
the eyebeam taking
nourishment,
blazing
of the eyes’ inlet.