Morning Glory Pancakes and the Leopard's Spots

Edie mentions the Chinese poet Yuan Chen in a comment about one of her paintings at Annotated Life. Here is a poem by Yuan Chen taken from the excellent Crossing the Yellow River translated by Sam Hamill.

Retirement

Life is lovely in seclusion
near tall pines in remote mountains.

I wander with clouds all day,
all night I follow the moon.

A world in a teapot:
fame is a silly dream.

Across the sea,
the thousand-year-old crane

lingers in the city,
but one day may return.

I have some poetry in my library, most of it bought during two periods of my life when I read nothing but poetry and went kind of crazy over it. During the first period I bought the collections of great American poets from Whitman to Plath. The second period was a time when I was crazy in love and looked for the odd book containing poems that spoke to my craziness.

A friend from a while back was fond of reminding me that a leopard never changes his spots. That’s true as far as it goes. Some spots are more visible than others though and it is difficult to predict when they will show themselves.

The poem I read today is not the same poem I read fifteen, ten, or five years ago even though the words are the same.

I was thinking about poetry last night around midnight when I went to Tempo on State Street for a stack of Morning Glory pancakes covered with strawberries, bananas, and blueberries, slathered in butter, and drenched with syrup. After I finished eating, I recalled the time back when the restaurant was El Ranchero and I would inhabit it on a Sunday afternoon to drink margaritas and study Euclid and Newton and watch the snow swirl about State Street on a cold afternoon.

I took my copy of Capital from my bag and read for a spell and drank coffee. The restaurant emptied until I was alone with my memories. I felt as though I was back at El Ranchero. It seemed as if only the book had changed over the years and not me. I was Descartes who found something of which he could be certain.

I noticed when I left the restaurant the wind was blowing from the southwest. I felt it a good sign of warmer days.

For some reason it seems important that I have gotten to sit in that warm restaurant on cold days and nights, and read a few great books. I suppose it is the ultimate haughty indulgence for me. It’s my way of flaunting my material condition. I announce to the world, “I am idle because I can afford to be idle. I can be alone because I can choose not to be alone.”

It is always a mistake to believe that one’s good fortune is caused solely by one’s ability rather than chance. The best thing that can happen to a person in life is to get lucky at the beginning and stay lucky through the end. Some of my fortune has rested happily with being content to read a good book.

And love? Why not, as long as it does not make you crazy? And if it does make you crazy, read some poems and don’t forget to cry.

But enough of these musings. Let’s have a Raymond Carver poem before closing time from his beautiful All of Us: The Collected Poems.

The Pen

The pen that told the truth
went into the washing machine
for its trouble. Came out
an hour later, and was tossed
in the dryer with jeans
and a western shirt. Days
passedwhile it lay quietly on the desk
under the window. Lay there
thinking it was finished.
Without a single conviction
to its name. It didn’t have
the will to go on, even if it’d wanted.
But one morning, an hour or so
before sunrise, it came to life
and wrote:
“The damp fields asleep in moonlight.”
Then it was still again.
Its usefulness
in this life
clearly at an end.

He shook it and whacked it
On the desk. Then gave up
on it, or nearly.
Once more though, with the greatest
effort, it summoned its last
reserves. This is what it wrote:
“A light wind, and beyond the window
trees swimming in the golden morning air.”

He tried to write some more
but that was all. The pen
quit working forever.
By and by it was put
into the stove along with
other junk. And much later
it was another pen,
an undistinguished pen,
that hadn’t proved itself
yet, that facilely wrote:
“Darkness gathers in the branches.
Stay inside. Keep still.”

I like the material world.