Vox Populi
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Sean Sexton: Not
After Seamus Heaney
Not the listless woods these days,
their ongoing summer song
same as the year-round sound in my head.
Not the thick bottomless mud in gateways
hard as winter to cross, or the next
unbridling rain
wrung from any torporous hour—
dark, light, morning, night, nor
the suffocating breath
in the sun-soaked air, but you,
four years gone come September
like a whole calf crop one quick day,
with only us to say you were ever
here at all.
~~~~
Copyright 2019 Sean Sexton. From May Darkness Restore
Sean Sexton was born and raised on his family’s Treasure Hammock Ranch and divides his time between writing, painting, and managing a 700-acre cow-calf and seed stock operation. He is author of Blood Writing: Poems (Anhinga Press); May Darkness Restore: Poems (Press 53); and Portals: Poems (Press 53).
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So beautiful. So sad. I love it.
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I love it too, Lisa.
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Such a tender and poignant poem.
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Oh! Oh! That title. And all that not. And how the entire poem hangs on those two words, “but you.”
ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!! I feel it in my whole body, what isn’t and what is here in this poem. glorious.
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Yes, a glorious song of sorrow.
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Thankyou Rosemerry. I feel blessed by the responses today. I was inspired long ago by a “Not” poem in Heaney’s volume Field Work, a favorite in part because it also has “The Harvest Bow” which I’ve fairly memorized. It says: “The end of Art is peace, could be the motto of this frail device…”
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Oh, I love this little poem — this line today especially when the 95° heat has been broken by “unbridling rain / wrung from THIS torporous hour.”
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I love this poem too. Thanks, Dick!
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LOVE this poem – I enjoy all of Sean Sexton’s work. This is moody, whimsical, melancholy, torporous – full of summer. Love that last stanza especially. Here in Peru it’s winter, and murky and muddy it is. This poem gave me a moment of warmth.
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Thanks, Rose Mary!
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If one looks up “torporous” one is told it is not a word, but it is. This poem insists it into being. Torpid? Wrong note. Torpidity would work even less well; it possesses no musical torpor; it’s almost cute. This word–torporous–is the poet singing uniquely. Makes me read the passage and the poem again. And again. I love to encounter that. Bravo.
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Well-said, Bob. Poets are allowed to make up words, of course. But they have to be spot on, as this one is…
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Yes, Bob, you’re so right!
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I read this directly after meditating. Perhaps that contributed to the stop, the opening, the rush of grief, but this is a poem I will return to because it briefly allowed something heavy to release.
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Yes
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Such concision, acute missing, quiet but hard sorrow and elegiac imagery from season to season, dear Sean. What deeply solitary, moving and tender writing! Such deep grief.
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And only a day ago you wrote with concern about the stormy elements in our locale. Its a summer poem in every way and we’re in the thick of it. We lost Seamus and my Father that moment almost 9 years ago, and it seems losses join together as they happen. I’m so grateful for acquisitions of love that come to one’s life as well. Not one without the other! Not…
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Seamus Heaney is my favorite poet, the brightest star, and he would be proud, I bet, of this poem of Sean’s. Heaney knew much of grief, both personal and cultural. One great mystery of Sean’s poem, is whether he is alluding to Heaney in general, or has a particular poem from the Heaney galaxy of wonders at the front of his own poetic thoughts.
So many of us know grief. This poem gets at it wonderfully, as does Robert Cording’s brilliant phrase in the comments, as to how the poem: bring(s) back the loved “you” in the small resurrection of a well-made poem. That Cording-phrase seems a wise contribution to a poetics of grief.
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Jim: We lost both of them the year I wrote this poem, and in a certain way it is addressed or at least pertains to each. So easily gone, they who seemed they’d be here forever. We can’t think about the next things, or we couldn’t go on. Michael was so right on, placing this on another such summer morning.
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Yes
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Thanks, Jim. Your comments in VP are a wonderful gift to all of us.
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Perhaps because this poem is so “simply” and deftly constructed–the way the “not,” “not” gives way to “nor,” “but”–the emotional depth of Sean’s poem is “unbridled” and deeply felt. It packs a wallop, all those perfectly chosen particulars of “these days” that yield to what’s gone, who is no longer here. And that shouldered responsibility the speaker of the poem feels: to bring back the loved “you” in the small resurrection of a well-made poem.
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A beautiful piece of short critical writing, Bob. I agree, the poem is deftly constructed and points toward a profound experience.
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What a lovely response Robert. Its seems so much to be the moment all over again in these days of rain and heat and mud. My son and I picked up the yard together, burned piles from the ruin of an afternoon thunderstorm the day before that ransacked the yard. My brother jn law found a lightning struck heifer along a fence and reported her to me this morning. Its all here to happen, Life and the other thing as we stand in awe. I’m so grateful for poetry in my hand and heart, keeping me present.
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Sean, that is so heartfelt and beautiful.
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Thankyou Lola!
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