Galway Kinnell: "When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" [excerpt]

                 I

When one has lived a long time alone,
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing to slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the poisoned urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a long time alone.

 
"When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone" [excerpt] by Galway Kinnell. Text as published in When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (Knopf, 1990).

Art credit: Untitled photograph of a released swift by G. Kaiser (digitally altered by curator).

Galway Kinnell: "Wait"

in tribute
Galway Kinnell
1927-2014

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

 

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

 
"Wait" by Galway Kinnell, from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. © Houghton Mifflin, 1980.   

Curator's note: Galway Kinnell, one of our mindfulness poets, died this week from leukemia at the age of 87. Kinnell wrote this poem for one of his students who was contemplating suicide after a failed relationship. After describing the circumstances of its creation during an interview, he said, "I rarely write poems for a specific person. I don’t write them to unload my emotions. I write them because they come to me and they seem to embody something that I didn’t quite know before and I try to perfect them and if somebody asks me why are you doing all that work? I say, for beings." Click here to watch Kinnell read "Wait" for The New Television Workshop.

Art credit: Photograph by Richard Brown.

Galway Kinnell: "Prayer"

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.


[Curator's note: Today, instead of a photograph, let's enjoy a video of the poet performing his poem, then offering a very brief comment. Though, on second thought, "performing" seems not the right word. "Praying," in his own way, perhaps? Or "delighting in his craft?" Watch Galway's face with care. All the way to the end.

If you can't see the embedded viewer below, click here to watch the clip, less than a minute long. Unfortunately the clip can't be embedded in this website to its full width, but Kinnell's presentation is still a treat.]

"Prayer" by Galway Kinnell, from A New Selected Poems, Edited by S. M. Intrator and M. Scribner. © HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.

Video credit: Poetry Matters Now.

Galway Kinnell: "Saint Francis and the Sow"

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
     beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

"Saint Francis and the Sow" by Galway Kinnell, from Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. © Mariner Books, 1980.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).