“Murray Gell-Mann” – John Koethe

He was my idol when I was seventeen
And keen on physics. I had breakfast with him
At a math contest in 1963, in a hotel on Mission Bay
In San Diego. I was too star-struck to remember
What we talked about, but I remember his seersucker jacket
And how young he seemed. I wanted to be like him,
Think like him, know what he knew, discover
What he hadn’t discovered yet, and now look at me:
Reading his obituary in the Times today
I wondered where that life that used to seem so
Clear to me had gone, sitting here in our dining room
In Milwaukee (which to me in 1963 was just a baseball team
Somewhere in the middle of the country), a minor poet
Light years away from physics, inhabiting his poem.

He saw the patterns in the chaos of cascading particles
Floating in from nowhere like the quarks in Finnegans Wake
To fill the openings in some Lie group that he dubbed the Eightfold Way,
That had no reason to exist beyond those slots—yet there they were,
As if those patterns were what made them real. What does make anything real?
I used to think I knew and now I don’t. It isn’t us, though we’re the ones
Who can’t stop talking about it since we don’t know what it is. I used to think
That physics knew, yet now it makes no sense, not for the usual reasons—
It’s strange, shut up and calculate—but since it can’t be true
Unless there’s nothing there. I could go on, but let me leave it there at
Breakfast with Murray Gell-Mann on Mission Bay in 1963.
Nothing ever came of it, though I remember writing to the president
Of MIT to ask if I should go there first and then Caltech,
Or vice versa. He wrote back to say that either way was fine.

Some things are hidden from us, not because we don’t know what they are,
But because they’re inconceivable until they happen, like the future.
The morning light in our dining room has the inevitability
Of the ordinary, and yet fifty-seven years ago it was as unreal
As I was then, as unimaginable as that life I had is now.
Sometimes I think the past is all there is. Sometimes I think
It’s the other way around, that only now is real. The future though
Remains an abstraction, even when we know what’s going to happen, like death,
Especially death. There was supposed to be a different person in this chair.
Where did he go? That universal destination, nowhere? It isn’t a real question,
Though it sounds like one. It’s merely a feeling of perplexity
And calm at the memory I had this morning of someone
I had been and someone I was going to become as I was reading
Murray Gell-Mann’s obituary here in our dining room in Milwaukee.

—John Koethe (b. 1945) “Murray Gell-Mann” appears in Poetry (March 2020).

“Domes” – John Koethe

for John Godfrey

1. Animals

Carved—indicated, actually, from solid
Blocks of wood, the copper-, cream-, and chocolate-colored
Cows we bought in Salzburg form a tiny herd.
And in Dr. Gachet’s etching, six
Or seven universal poses are assumed by cats.

Misery, hypocrisy, greed: A dying
Mouse, a cat, and a flock of puzzled blackbirds wearing
Uniforms and frock coats exhibit these traits.
Formally outlasting the motive
Of their creation with a poetry at once too vague

And too precise to do anything with but
Worship, they seem to have just blundered into our lives
By accident, completely comprehending
Everything we find so disturbing
About them; but they never speak. They never even move

From the positions in which Grandville or some
Anonymous movie-poster artist has left them,
A sort of ghostly wolf, a lizard, an ape
And a huge dog. And their eyes, looking
At nothing, manage to see everything invisible

To ours, even with all the time in the world
To see everything we think we have to see. And tell
Of this in the only way we really can:
With a remark as mild as the air
In which it is to be left hanging; or a stiff scream,

Folded like a sheet of paper over all
The horrible memories of everything we were
Going to have. That vanished before our eyes
As we woke up to nothing but these,
Our words, poor animals whose home is in another world.

2. Summer Home

Tiny outbursts of sunlight play
On the tips of waves that look like tacks
Strewn on the surface of the bay.
Up the coast the water backs up
Behind a lofty, wooded island. Here,
According to photographs, it is less
Turbulent and blue; but much clearer.
It seems to exercise the sunlight less
Reflecting it, allowing beaten silver sheets
To roam like water across a kitchen floor.
Having begun gradually, the gravel beach
Ends abruptly in the forest on the shore.

Looked at from a distance, the forest seems
Haunted. But safe within its narrow room
Its light is innocent and green, as though
Emerging from another dream of diminution
We found ourselves of normal, human size,
Attempting to touch the leaves above our heads.
Why couldn’t we have spent our summers here,
Surrounded and growing up again? Or perhaps
Arrive here late at night by car, much later
In life? If only heaven were not too near
For such sadness. And not within this world
Which heaven has finally made clear.

Green lichen fastened to a blue rock
Like a map of the spot; cobwebs crowded with stars
Of water; battalions of small white flowers.
Such clarity, unrelieved except by our
Delight and daily acquiescence in it,
Presumably the effect of a natural setting
Like this one, with all its expectations of ecstasy
And peace, demands a future of forgetting
Everything that sustains it: the dead leaves
Of winter; the new leaves of spring which summer burns
Into different kinds of happiness; for these,
When autumn drops its tear upon them, turn.

3. Domes

“Pleased in proportion to the truth
Depicted by means of familiar images.” That
One was dazed; the other I left in a forest
Surrounded by giant, sobering pines.
For I had to abandon those lives.
Their burden of living had become
Mine and it was like dying: alone,
Huddled under the cold blue dome of the stars,
Still fighting what died and so close to myself I could not even see.
I kept trying to look at myself. It was like looking into the sun and I went blind.

O, to break open that inert light
Like a stone and let the vision slowly sink down
Into the texture of things, like a comb flowing through dark,
Heavy hair; and to continue to be affected much later.
I was getting so tired of that excuse: refusing love
Until it might become so closely mated to its birth in
Acts and words of love; until a soft monstrosity of song
Might fuse these moments of affection with a dream of home;
The cold, prolonged proximity of God long after night
Has come and only starlight trickles through the dome;

And yet I only wanted to be happy.
I wanted rest and innocence; a place
Where I could hide each secret fear by blessing it,
By letting it survive inside those faces I could never understand,
Love, or bear to leave. Because I wanted peace, bruised with prayer
I tried to crawl inside the heavy, slaughtered hands of love
And never move. And then I felt the wound unfold inside me
Like a stab of paradise: explode: and then at last
Exhausted, heal into pain. And that was happiness:
A dream whose ending never ends, a vein

Of blood, a hollow entity
Consumed by consummation, bleeding so.
In the sky our eyes ascend to as they sweep
Upwards into emptiness, the angels sing their listless
Lullabies and children wake up glistening with screams
They left asleep; and the dead are dead. The wounded worship death
And live a little while in love; and then are gone.
Inside the dome the stars assume the outlines of their lives:
Until we know, until we come to recognize as ours,
Those other lives that live within us as our own.

—John Koethe (b. 1945) “Domes” from North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002); originally published in Poetry (November 1970).

John Koethe

“The Proximate Shore” – John Koethe

It starts in sadness and bewilderment,
The self-reflexive iconography
Of late adolescence, and a moment

When the world dissolves into a fable
Of an alternative geography
Beyond the threshold of the visible.

And the heart is a kind of mute witness,
Abandoning everything for the sake
Of an unimaginable goodness

Making its way across the crowded stage
Of what might have been, leaving in its wake
The anxiety of an empty page.

Thought abhors a vacuum. Out of it came
A partially recognizable shape
Stumbling across a wilderness, whose name,

Obscure at first, was sooner or later
Sure to be revealed, and a landscape
Of imaginary rocks and water

And the dull pastels of the dimly lit
Interior of a gymnasium.
Is art the mirror of its opposite,

Or is the world itself a mimesis?
This afternoon at the symposium
Someone tried to resurrect the thesis

That a poem is a deflected sigh.
And I remembered a day on a beach
Thirty-five years ago, in mid-July,

The summer before I left for college,
With the future hanging just out of reach
And constantly receding, like the edge

Of the water floating across the sand.
Poems are the fruit of the evasions
Of a life spent trying to understand

The vacuum at the center of the heart,
And for all the intricate persuasions
They enlist in the service of their art,

Are finally small, disappointing things.
Yet from them there materializes
A way of life, a way of life that brings

The fleeting pleasures of a vocation
Made up of these constant exercises
In what still passes for celebration,

That began in a mood of hopelessness
On an evening in a dormitory
Years and years ago, and seemed to promise

A respite from disquietude and care,
But that left only the lovely story
Of a bright presence hanging in the air.

—John Koethe (b. 1945) “The Proximate Shore” from North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002).

John Koethe

“In the Park” – John Koethe

for Susan Koethe

This is the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.
And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart
Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.
And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come
It would be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home
In a small suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly
In an endless light, and a lake shining in the distance.

Eventually, sometime around the middle of your life,
There’s a moment when the first imagination begins to wane.
The future that had always seemed so limitless dissolves,
And the dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade.
The years accumulate; but they start to take on a mild,
Human tone beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes
Pouring into the past its hymns of adoration and regret.
And then gradually the moments quicken into life,
Vibrant with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene;
And then the park is empty and the years are still.

I think the saddest memory is of a kind of light,
A kind of twilight, that seemed to permeate the air
For a few years after I’d grown up and gone away from home.
It was limitless and free. And of course I was going to change,
But freedom means that only aspects ever really change,
And that as the past recedes and the future floats away
You turn into what you are. And so I stayed basically the same
As what I’d always been, while the blond light in the trees
Became part of my memory, and my voice took on the accents
Of a mind infatuated with the rhetoric of farewell.

And now that disembodied grief has gone away.
It was a flickering, literary kind of sadness,
The suspension of a life between two other lives
Of continual remembrance, between two worlds
In which there’s too much solitude, too much disdain.
But the sadness that I felt was real sadness,
And this elation now a real tremor as the deepening
Shadows lengthen upon the lake. This calm is real,
But how much of the real past can it absorb?
How far into the future can this peace extend?

I love the way the light falls over the suburbs
Late on these summer evenings, as the buried minds
Stir in their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth
And the soul settles from the air into its human home.
This is where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending
In a great dream of contentment, where all night long
The children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms
And the past is still, and suddenly we turn around and smile
At the memory of a vast, inchoate dream of happiness,
Now that we know that none of it is ever going to be.

Don’t you remember how free the future seemed
When it was all imagination? It was a beautiful park
Where the sky was a page of water, and when we looked up,
There were our own faces, shimmering in the clear air.
And I know that this life is the only real form of happiness,
But sometimes in its midst I can hear the dense, stifled sob
Of the unreal one we might have known, and when that ends
And my eyes are filled with tears, time seems to have stopped
And we are alone in the park where it is almost twenty years ago
And the future is still an immense, open dream.

—John Goethe (b. 1945) “In the Park” from North Point North: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers, 2002).

John Koethe