THE BUILDING OF THE SKYSCRAPER
The steel worker on the girder
Learned not to look down, and does his work
And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
There are words that mean nothing
But there is something to mean.
Not a declaration which is truth
But a thing
Which is. It is the business of the poet
'To suffer the things of the world
And to speak them and himself out.'
O, the tree, growing from the sidewalk --
It has a little life, sprouting
Little green buds
Into the culture of the streets.
We look back
Three hundred years and see bare land.
And suffer vertigo.
( George Oppen, from This in Which, 1965 )
---
If It All Went Up In Smoke
that smoke
would remain
the forever
savage country poem's light borrowed
light of the landscape and one's footprints praise
from distance
in the close
crowd all
that is strange the sources
the wells the poem begins
neither in word
nor meaning but the small
selves haunting
us in the stones and is less
always than that help me I am
of that people the grass
blades touch
and touch in their small
distances the poem
begins
( George Oppen, from Primitive, 1978 )
---
For the moment I'd simply like to give these poems to read, without commenting on them or on Oppen, for it would make for a very long post; I hope to return to them in another post. However, comments from others are -- needless to say -- welcome.
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