Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2024.
Mother’s Day, More or Less, poems by Richard W. Halperin.
Blue Sky, Breeze off Lake Michigan
I’ve been thinking of my mother lately,
how before she started putting on a little weight
she loved wearing her friend Frank’s
from-the-war pea jacket and sailor trousers
which he, no longer in the navy, could
no longer wear. She loved dresses and in fact
designed them, but nothing gave her the freedom
that those garments did, for a walk in Lincoln Park
with tiny me. The way she could move, I think.
The Bamboo Cutter
I am not he. He is in a prose tale
of old Japan. Illustrated scrolls
of his story are at the Chester Beatty.
Like him, I also cut stories.
Some are luminous on the inside.
I have nothing to do with that.
Once when the bamboo cutter
cut a shoot, a tiny luminous being
was within. She grew into
a quiet good-humoured beauty
whom many wished to marry.
She was not interested.
Eventually, she wanted to go
back home and did; back home
was the moon. Any poem is that.
Also at the Chester Beatty,
are papyrus fragments, third century,
on which are written parts
of Luke and of Revelation.
One sneeze, and they would fall apart.
I think they hold the world together.
On My Island
What happened. I am on my island,
the one my friend was to show me before
he died. I, for the moment, am, which is
different from thinking or doing; which is
very like love. Clouds, sea, birds, rocks.
When seen for one second, or less than
one second, they, too, are. There should be
a word – there isn’t – for what is the opposite
of ruins. When light hits ruins, and light
does, the ruins are there, but will not always
be there. Light will always be there. I remember
that today is my friend’s birthday. April. I had
forgot. I am glad to remember it,
on my island.
Interval
The interval is over for Jack.
It is not yet over for me.
And after it, what? Some books,
some words people have spoken,
ignite a thought, a certitude,
which I guard preciously.
In this my privacy, science
distracts me, although science
rests entirely on the invisible –
mathematics, proportions.
In this, also, philosophy
distracts me. It paws at reality
which, like China, knows
how to wait.
Pentimento 2
I wrote a poem a few years ago
about my friend Dennis which related him
to Haworth Parsonage. Shortly after his death,
I wrote another, which related him to
St. James Infirmary. The same Dennis.
It was I who had changed. With time,
I see better; or poorer; or as I wish things
had been; or as I wish I had been.
This is why I live with all three memoirs
of Lillian Hellman. She entitles one of them
Pentimento, but the title applies to all three.
Pentimento means repentance:
the phenomenon by which the outer layers
of a painting begin, with age, to fade
and become transparent, revealing
an earlier version or an entirely different painting
of which the artist has subsequently repented.
She repents each of the portraits she paints
in her private gallery – Sophronia, Helen,
Willy, Bethe, Julia, Arthur W.A. Cowan,
Dashiell Hammett, Hellman herself.
At the outset and throughout she says
she will do her best, but that the medium
through which she writes is her unreliable self.
Other writers whom I live with say the same thing,
Berkeley, Henry James, T.E. Lawrence,
among them. Would that more historians
said it. Rembrandt doesn’t say it, he paints it.
His ‘Christ at Emmaus’ begins to disappear
as soon as one begins to look at it.
© Richard W. Halperin
Richard W. Halperin holds U.S.-Irish dual nationality and lives in Paris. Since 2010, he has seen four poetry collections published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher, and sixteen shorter collections published by Lapwing/Belfast. His work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. Mr. Halperin’s next reading will be on 4 May, Achill Island, as part of the Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend. The launch of his Selected and New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, is anticipated by Salmon for early June, Dublin.