Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Jennifer Michael Hecht

I

“Promises to keep,” was a lie, he had nothing. Through

the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict’s

talk of quitting as she’s smacking at a vein. He was always

going into the woods. It was he who wrote, “The only way

around is through.” You’d think a shrink, but no, a poet.

He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds

promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill

with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers

his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard

is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm,

lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go

deeper, sky gets darker. It’s the darkest night of the year.

II

He had no promises to keep, nothing pending. Had no bed

to head to, measurably away in miles. He was a freak like me,

monster of the dawn. Whose woods these are I think I know,

his house is in the village though. In the middle of life

he found himself lost in a dark woods. I discovered myself

in a somber forest. In between my breasts and breaths I got

lost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I’ve got promises

to keep, smiles to go before I leap. I’m going into the woods.

They’re lovely dark, and deep, which is what I want, deep lovely

darkness. No one has asked, let alone taken, a promise of me,

no one will notice if I choose bed or rug, couch or forest deep.

It doesn’t matter where I sleep. It doesn’t matter where I sleep.

si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est.
If you reflect well on it, life is a shipwreck everywhere.

from Petronius' Satyricon



"The library in Bridgeport has big stone steps and high pillars. It's what he first thought of when he heard that Samuel was serving the Lord in the temple of Shiloh. A temple is different from a church. Jews go to temple and Christians go to church. But Catholics go to Catholic church. And everybody goes to the library."

-Steven Millhauser, "The Voice in the Night"




I am a very bad airplane and can only
play dangerous, unwinnable games
with the other anxiety machines.

-Marc McKee, "Child Recruit" from _What Apocalypse?_




The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

-Joseph Conrad, _Lord Jim_




Tis Miracle before Me--then--
Tis Miracle behind--between--
A Crescent in the Sea--
With Midnight to the North of Her--
And Midnight to the South of Her--
And Maelstrom--in the Sky--

-Emily Dickinson 721

Crime and Punishment - I'm about 3/4 done.

“Or renounce life altogether!” he suddenly cried out in frenzy. “Accept fate obediently as it is, once and for all, and stifle everything in myself, renouncing any right to act, to live, to love! Do you understand, do you understand, my dear sir, what it means when there is no longer anywhere to go?” he suddenly recalled Marmeladov’s question yesterday. “For it is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go …”

It had not occurred to him as he was going upstairs to Razumikhin’s that he would therefore have to come face-to-face with him. But now, in an instant, he realized from his earlier experience that he was least of all disposed at that moment to come face-to-face with anyone in the whole world, whoever it might be.

You see, I don’t have any lessons either, and to hell with it, but there’s a bookseller in the flea market named Cherubimov, and he’s a sort of lesson in himself.

We have to make a human being out of you, after all.

An economic idea is not yet an invitation to murder.

“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed one not too young passer-by, who had been standing with him near the barrel-organ and looked like an idler. The man stared at him wildly and with amazement. “I do,” Raskolnikov went on, looking as if he were not talking about street singing at all, “I like hearing songs to the barrel-organ on a cold, dark, and wet autumn evening—it must be a wet evening—when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces; or, even better, when wet snow is falling, straight down, with no wind—you know?—and the gaslights are shining through it …”

He went down slowly, unhurriedly, all in a fever, and filled, though he was not aware of it, with the new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life. This sensation might be likened to the sensation of a man condemned to death who is suddenly and unexpectedly granted a pardon.

“Polechka, my name is Rodion; pray for me, too, sometimes: ‘and for the servant of God, Rodion’—that’s all.” “I’ll pray for you all the rest of my life,” the girl said ardently, and suddenly laughed again, rushed to him, and again held him hard.

It sucks you in, it’s the end of the world, an anchor, a quiet haven, the navel of the earth, the three-fish foundation of the world, the essence of pancakes, rich meat pies, evening samovars, soft sighs and warm vests, heated beds on the stove—well, just as if you died and were alive at the same time, both benefits at once!

“That’s what I love him for!” whispered Razumikhin, who exaggerated everything, turning energetically on his chair. “These sudden gestures of his!…”

There was something tense in this whole conversation, and in the silence, and in the reconciliation, and in the forgiveness, and everyone felt it.

Again it suddenly became perfectly plain and clear to him that he had just uttered a terrible lie, that not only would he never have the chance to talk all he wanted, but that it was no longer possible for him to talk at all, with anyone, about anything, ever.

Why do you demand a heroism of me that you may not even have in yourself? That is despotism; that is coercion!

It’s the same outside as in a closed room.

Never, never had she felt anything like this. A whole new world had descended vaguely and mysteriously into her soul.

I left you yesterday at the most interesting point. Who won?” “No one, naturally. We got on to the eternal questions, and it all stayed in the clouds.” “Just imagine what they got on to yesterday, Rodya: is there such a thing as crime, or not? He said they all lied themselves into the blue devils.”

“And what if one reasons like this (come, help me now): ‘Ghosts are, so to speak, bits and pieces of other worlds, their beginnings. The healthy man, naturally, has no call to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly of men, and therefore he ought to live according to life here, for the sake of completeness and order. Well, but as soon as a man gets sick, as soon as the normal earthly order of his organism is disrupted, the possibility of another world at once begins to make itself known, and the sicker one is, the greater the contact with this other world, so that when a man dies altogether, he goes to the other world directly.’ I’ve been reasoning it out for a long time. If one believes in a future life, one can believe in this reasoning.” “I do not believe in a future life,” said Raskolnikov.

For a minute they looked silently at each other. Razumikhin remembered that minute all his life. Raskolnikov’s burning and fixed look seemed to grow more intense every moment, penetrating his soul, his consciousness.

She stood before him in reality.

The murderer and the harlot strangely come together over the reading of the eternal book.

“Accept suffering and redeem yourself by it, that’s what you must do.”

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;

Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?

Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?

Do you think I am trusty and faithful?

Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?

Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

-Walt Whitman

Stellar Furnace, by Marc McKee

The labels and label makers come later,
the lofty prerogatives, the philosopher
despising indulgences of the body and thus

unequal to an ordinary refrigerator, sheets
with high thread counts.  What comes first
is the size of a fist and 30 seconds later

it’s out of the reach of any other fist ever.
Archers, gentles, others:  supreme architectures
demand superior catastrophes.

Guilty of desolations birds flew above,
the first robot demanded a robot queen
and a story about how his side hurt

and even now it is unclear how
this story grew into every other one,
but birds flew above, and later paint

to the rescue, and quills.  The lute
was invented.  Sometimes a number
of people must die for those remaining

to agree upon the meaning
of reaching consensus.  The story
is a story of poison, of love, of knavery

and battering rams and delicate
baked goods.  So much to complain about,
so much to perish by while enamored of.

The story is of pangs with no cause
and no remedy.  Meadow into pothole,
cauldrons of committees.  Reparations?

Reparations can never be made.
And we will never give full account
of our peculiar and tenacious joy.

my fav poem by her

The Eye-Mote, by Sylvia Plath

Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.

Your Catfish Friend
by Richard Brautigan

If I were to live my life 
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers 
at the bottom of a pond 
and you were to come by 
   one evening
when the moon was shining 
down into my dark home 
and stand there at the edge 
   of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful 
here by this pond.  I wish 
   somebody loved me,"
I’d love you and be your catfish 
friend and drive such lonely 
thoughts from your mind 
and suddenly you would be
   at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder 
if there are any catfish 
in this pond?  It seems like 
a perfect place for them.”

And here's a story you can hardly believe, but it's true, and it's funny and it's beautiful. There was a family of twelve and they were forced off the land. They had no car. They built a trailer out of junk and loaded it with their possessions. They pulled it to the side of 66 and waited. And pretty soon a sedan picked them up. Five of them rode in the sedan and seven on the trailer, and a dog on the trailer. They got to California in two jumps. The man who pulled them fed them. And that's true. But how can such courage be, and such faith in their own species? Very few things would teach such faith.

The people in flight from the terror behind - strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

The film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building, had greater depth, and more solidity than in any daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual- a post was more essentially a post, set off from the earth it stood in and the field of corn it stood out against. All plants were individuals, not the mass of crop; and the ragged willow tree was itself, standing free of all other willow trees. The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.

The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be part of an organization of the unconscious. They obeyed impulses which registered only faintly in their thinking minds. Their eyes were inward and quiet, and their eyes, too, were lucent in the evening, lucent in dusty faces.


The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

"An' I got thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin, it was deeper down than thinkin'. I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin' together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that's right, that's holy. An' then I got thinkin' I don't even know what I mean by holy."

He paused, but the bowed heads stayed down, for they had been trained like dogs to rise at the "amen" signal. "I can't say no grace like I use' ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all." 

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck