Poet of the WeeK: Richard Wilbur
When I first started keeping a journal four years ago, I was writing the dumbest shit in it. At the time, I wanted to be writer, but I didn’t “believe” in myself, and I didn’t have any professional experience. The journal became the vehicle where I took a stab (violently) at writing wordy, “lyrical” crap which I hoped someone would eventually read, and be like, “holy shit, that’s poetic. You need a book deal.”
As an example, here’s what I scribbled regarding the poem “Galveston, 1961” by Richard Wilbur (below):
Doesn’t remind me of anything except for nostalgia for a time in which I never lived… To be young and watched, loved by a Texas man.
Dumbest. Thing. Ever. Written.
Fortunately for myself, I became sick of writing in the journal about three days after I began pasting things in it.
My own nonsense commentary, however, didn’t make me like “Galveston, 1961” any less upon a second reading today.
I mean, how could you not like something written by this man:
Who has got to be one of the cutest old men ever to live. I would love to be the woman who was once loved by him, whose memory visits him in the shade of the afternoon, while he sits in his armchair, reminiscing about the past.
Dumbest. Thing. Ever. Written.
Anyway, here’s the poem, accompanied by images from Respiro (2002), which is a gorgeous movie about a bipolar woman set in an impoverished village in Sicily. Rent it on Netflix.
Galveston, 1961
You who in crazy-lensed
Clear water fled your shape,
By choppy shallows flensedÂ
And shaken like a cape,
Who gently butted down
Through weeds, and were unmade,
Piecemeal stirring your brown
Legs into stirred shade,
And rose, and with pastel
Coronas of your skin
Stained swell on glassy swell,
Letting them bear you in:
Now you have come to shore,
One woman and no other,
Sleek Panope no more,
Nor the vague sea our mother.
Shake out your spattering hair
And sprawl beside me here,
Sharing what we can share
Now that we are so near—
Small talk and speechless love,
Mine being all but dumb
That knows so little of
What goddess you become
And still half-seem to be,
Though close and clear you lie
Whom droplets of the sea
Emboss and magnify.
