jack_babalon | "April is the cruellest month (Reply)

The Waste Land
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

Fragments of this poem have been flowing down the river of my consciousness lately. Ghost ships of thought, sailing out of the fog of awareness, a sudden voice in the back of my head- "April is the cruellest month". I remember when I first moved down here and called out sick from my job and found myself holed up in the liabrary downtown. Cops strolled through the various floors waking up the homeless, who made pillows out of stacks of encyclopedias. I rummaged through all those things a young 20 something thought was cool. I read Burroughs 'The Western Lands', jotting down notes on the sev3en souls that I would never use. Skimmed through some history, taking in the images of sepia colored photographs of the Great War, grainy faces looking at me with dead mans eyes, sometimes I would sit there and write horrible, horrible poetry - "He dreams immortality/ She dreams the arrows flight across the cave walls"- brrr. I think it was Bukowski who gave the advice that "Young man you can brush your teeth with gasoline/ just don't write poetry". Anyway I found a book on the greatest 100 poems of mankind. I wanted to see who the competition would be- being but 21 and having a lover who didn't wince when she read my work but me in a less than modest headspace. I found the Wasteland in the slow scavenger hunt for genius. I stopped reading it and actually READ it. I stepped out for a smoke, shivered in the wind and then I came back in and did it again. "Beware death by water". Ahh I thought here is a man worthy of pillaging, here is a work worth stealing from. Of course i've indulged in a lot of bad habits since, and my memory, short term or long, have been shredded up a bit. It faded as I found other works to pirate and shifted from verse to prose (much to many of my Flist's horror). But the opening of the 'Wasteland' came back to me flying home Monday night. Somewhere beneath the stars and above the world, sipping Jack Daniels and sneaking glances outside the portal windows- "The burial of the dead"- opened back up, stanza stance and happenstance. It never left, I never forgot, all these years later it was still waiting there, waiting to be chosen, waiting to be plucked of the bookshelves of the brain. Pick it back up. And then put it down. Read it again. The symbols are a little clearer. The words don't stir envy but a significance I have trouble conveying here, which hurts the more because that's exactly what I want to do here. Pick it up and put it down. Pull back and look again. Alright lemme shut up now and get some work done.