Роджер Желязны: To Spin Is Miracle Cat

Poetry by Roger Zelazny

with a foreword by

Ursula Le Guin

UNDERWOOD-MILLER

San Francisco, California

Columbia, Pennsylvania

1981

Signed edition: ISBN 0-934438-49-8

Trade edition: ISBN 0-9344380-50-1

FIRST EDITION

To Jeanne and Ron Dobler

FOREWORD

by Ursula Le Guin

Henry Moore at eighty leafs through a book of sketches of his baby grandson and says, "I draw in order to know. I know Gus very much better after drawing these, you see." Later in the interview (aired on PBS) he shows us drawings of roots, trunks, branches. "I love trees nearly as well as I love Gus. I draw them in order to see them. ..." How shall we tell love from knowledge? How shall we tell the dancer from the dance? People assert the incompatibility of science and art as glibly as they insist upon a quarrel between science and religion, for the human craving for quarrels and compartments is insatiable; but as insatiable, and far more profitable, is the human craving for knowledge. If art is considered a form of knowledge, a means of learning to see, the quarrel evaporates and the compartments remain only as useful distinctions.

To very few artists is given the central, massive certainty of a Henry Moore, but all artists like to thumb their noses at the box-makers and dance with the buoyancy of Disney hippopotamuses across the boundaries drawn by anxious mapmakers of the mind.

Where a good many people are literate, poets may become the cautious members of this unruly chorus-line, keeping their elbows close to their sides, careful where they put their feet. Poets deal in words, and so do we all. People who won't dance, and won't paint, and won't act, and won't whittle, and won't sew. and wouldn't even put tissue paper on a comb and hum The Bear Came Over the Mountain to entertain the baby, do talk.

And they write. They write advertising copy, technical specifications, interoffice memoranda, newspapers, shopping lists, love letters, poison pen letters, postdeconstructionist exegeses, and FUCK on brick walls. And thus, being word-users, they kind of keep crowding the poets. Some of the poets quite rightly respond by saying: We have nothing, nothing whatever to do with you; our words are entirely different from your words: you speak English, more or less, but we speak Poetry, and you may think you can judge us, but you can't. Fortunately, however, writing is not the only activity involved in being literate, and lo! light as the Disney hippos, thumbing their noses gallantly, come the readers, pirouetting over the boundaries, bouncing on the boxes people, even poets, build to hide in. Boldly they read what the poets write. What for? In order to know. They want to know more, they want to know better, they want to see the world, because knowledge is love; or, as Keats put it. beauty, truth, truth beauty.

Keats said that was all we need to know, but he said nothing about the business being easy, or safe. In poetry, there's nowhere to hide. Not for the rash poet, not for the gallant collaborator, the reader. Every word's a UXB: the flash when one goes off can illuminate the whole landscape of a heart, and the light is merciless. As for the white stuff between the lines, that's totally unsafe. A Poem read is a risk taken. A poem read is a risk shared. The thing about collaborating at risk is, it makes us aware that we may be lonely but are not alone; we're all in this together,

often losing words to circle

and movement to other leaves

like trees to spin. . . .

To Spin Is Miracle Cat

Recent

LOCKER ROOM

You words damned well better do as you're told.

Get in line. Sound sweet. Stay on your feet.

When I need a pun I'll ask for it.

Match sound to sense, sense to sound.

Block that image of the wraparound

windshield's revealing/concealing in sun's glare.

Whatever's there needs care in the display.

Technical honesty's the note for the day.

Stop talking to each other. When I call,

you come. When I say shit

you say what color. Is that clear?

Get back here! Words can't walk out on

DANCE

Any minute now

the words will replay themselves

within the mind's ear:

The clown and the singer

fail at last,

juggler of hearts

and crier at the sticking place

falter,

footing lost, voice broken,

embracing in the downward spinning,

and clown take up the cry,

falling caller

catch the dark staccato

laughter, netless

in the minute's eye.

SONG

When I learned the other day

that everything Emily Dickinson wrote

can be sung to the tune

of 'The Yellow Rose of Texas"

I was crushed.

It was true.

I can no longer read Emily Dickinson

but Lone Star ghosts flit across the page,

the Alamo is not forgotten

and I hear the thundering hoofbeats

of the great horse Silver.

I wondered then

whether every person who pens a poem

has a tune,

a secret melody which will destroy him

if the word gets out.

A small thought, perhaps,

not quite as profound as it sounds;

and those who fool with vers libre

should be safer than most.

Yet the notion nags.

There's an awful lot of music in the world

To be trapped by John Cage

or crushed by Leadbelly

would be bad enough.

But I have this nightmare

of being done in by a hymn.

If Rock of Ages gets me in the end,

mocked Emily's diamond eyes

may sparkle like the dew

in stillnesses that lie

between the words and the Word.

SONNET, ANYONE?

Save for Berryman's, who wants the sonnet?

- A fusty hangover from ages dark.

Take a thought, hang fourteen lines upon it,

Prime it and crank it, force it to a spark,

Then halting rhyme in pattern archaic,

Play with the choke until the engine sings

(Wondering when you'll get that certain kick),

A stilted song of common imagings.

While the oldfangled buggy, pushed with pride,

Jolted to a motion, at times repays

Mechanic hands, mostly it's a rough ride,

With that Model T we drive on Sundays,

Bumping down twisted country roads, my love,

Where each must go who has something to prove.

SPRING MORNING: MISSIVE

Recently

I have escaped Legionnaire's Disease,

lost a day, gained one,

and learned that the Emperor penguin

gets laid only once a year.

I have also spent time wondering

for whom the galaxies wheel

and the oceans thunder.

It has been a fairly busy spring.

You ask after my health.

It is there.

I can go many lines without metaphor or moral

to show my stamina.

I shook my head at the disease at first,

but it is probably its own fault.

Like the penguins

it must have let opportunities slip by.

As for the days,

I cheated.

I dropped one Datelining,

did a double-take on the way back,

landed on my feelings for a beat.

As for the metaphor,

Life is a pair of doxies

leaning over a bridge rail

seeing who can spit farther.

As for the moral,

ask not for whom the galaxies wheel

and the oceans thunder.

After all, sailors steer

by pieces of the one,

crossing the others,

black-tie birds

do something similar,

spit in the ocean

is a popular hand,

spit in he hand

much less so,

London Bridge has fallen

to Havasu Lake,

days without number

are devilish for diarists,

Legionnaires are falling down

the oceans' wheel,

the galaxies' thunder;

the day is much too bright,

too warm for thought,