This morning, when the sun was streaming in the south livingroom window, and the leaded glass on the door was laying crystalline pattens across the yellow walls, I found myself wanting to commune again with the poetry of Harvey Hix.
One poem in particular stood out. I had the urge to put it up here and say, look, isn’t this amazing? – Just the way last night, when I came off the freeway into Lynnwood and saw the moon rising over trees, orange and looking too large to embrace in both my arms, I had to call my husband and say go outside, see if you can see the moon.
I imagined the different lines of the poem and what I would say about them. I thought of the joy the poem as a whole still brings me. I decided to try it. Here’s the second part of the poem:
list your desires, I’ll assert your sorrows,
glossed by geese in whose v grief is given,
the marred, moored one-note chorale they compose,
those lost children named again and again,
by the unbreakable fractal code
ferns signal not to us or to each other
but to what means mushroom, what suggests shade
and spring, the abstract will that maths feathers,
that occasions the blue-shade-layered hills,
the dread red-shouldered hawk’s shagged, haggard head,
missing moss-loosened tiles in the tunnels,
wind-washed sand-white bark-bare branches long dead
the goose-shade of clouds any breath-blue calls
the luminous fate coding me, dust-red.
H.L. Hix
from Legible Heavens, c. 2008
My delight pushes me beyond the lameness of talking with other words about the perfect words. First the meaning as a whole: this poem speaks to me of the wonder of life and the fact that its wonder is often beyond our designs – that if we desire something of our own concocting it probably will be to our sorrow, since we are designed by what designs everything, not by ourselves, and we reflect the same beautiful, fractal code that we see in everything else.
Now to the sounds: when you say out loud, “the marred, moored, one-note chorale they compose” it sounds amazingly like geese calling from the sky – try it! (The again and again in the next line does a similar thing) And “the dread red-shouldered hawk’s shagged, haggard head” – it’s just fun to say. And I love the way the sometimes use of half rhymes keeps the sonnet from becoming too sing-song, but then at times the full rhyme pulls the reader into the rhythm. So in the first four lines he has sorrows coupled with compose, the difference of accent making the rhyme subtle, and also the same relationship between given and again. In the next four lines he has the partial rhymes of code and shade, and other and feathers. Then in the last six lines he has one set come out in clear straight rhyme – head, dead, red, which gives the poem momentum, pulling it towards its conclusion. In between are partial rhymes – hills, tunnels, calls (whose vowels progress from higher to lower in articulation).
I believe the dust-red in the last line is a reference to the Biblical Adam, as that is the meaning of the name.
The first part of the poem, which places the second part as the then portion of an if-then sequence, lends the whole poem a certain lightness of heart, though not of meaning. You need to read the whole thing in context – the whole poem and the whole series. You’ll find it in Legible Heavens, to which there’s a link to the right in my blog (sorry it’s hard to see – haven’t figured out how to change that yellow color.) But you can find it there.