Keeping House

Oct 11 2016

The spare room

in the rented villa

where we once kept house.

A rough wooden table, salvaged chairs.

Your paintings

against white plaster walls

the nude above the headboard.

And at its glorious centre

all brass and feathers

an unmade bed.

Where we nested at night

and explored each other

in the heat of day.

It was all spare;

an open space

with no clutter or waste

and nothing to possess us.

Which is how we all remember love;

an island of two

in a simple house

absolved from time,

sharing sun-warmed olives

cheap red wine.

Getting by

with a few awkward words

in the local tongue.

Because the young

can afford to be ascetic

and are hedonists at heart.

It’s the old who accumulate,

bent under the weight

of all they’ve done

and didn’t.

Their desire, cooling like dusk.

Which comes surprisingly quick

in this southern latitude

its unfamiliar stars.

David Remnick has a piece about Leonard Cohen in the latest New Yorker. I was reading about his early years living in a simple villa on the Greek island of Hydra with his beloved Marianne. 

I admire Cohen’s ability to combine a rich inner life with a Zen-like asceticism. 

I admire how a ladies’ man and a lover of women can also be so modest and kind.

But he’s in his 80s now, and Marianne is dead, and his body is inexorably betraying him. 

This poem is a mood piece. It was inspired by this article, but is neither biography, nor autobiographical. It really started in language, which is where a lot of my poems start:  a word or sound or phrase that pricks up my ears. Here, you can see this in the opening stanza. First, it was the double meaning of spare room that stuck with me:  how the expression sounds like an afterthought, but also conjures up the ascetic beauty of spareness.  And second, it was that dated expression keeping house (or, in this case, kept house). I thought of two young adults giddily playing at being grown-up in a little doll-house starter home. But I also thought of “kept woman”. And thought, as well, of  the intense domesticity of infatuation, where the world recedes, leaving only eyes for this illuminated other.

The poem is also looking back. So while it’s presumably about the passion of young  love, it ends in a wistful reflection about  baggage, regret, and navigating the unfamiliar terrain of growing old.

 ...In the process of working on this poem, the announcement came of Dylan winning the Nobel in literature. I was shocked by this, and thought of him as unworthy. And I still think that, because I don't believe his lyrics stand up on the page unaccompanied by voice or music. Even knowing that poetry is primarily an aural, not a written, art form, I find that lyrics make bad poetry. But if a singer-songwriter had to be awarded the Nobel, I would have without hesitation chosen Cohen over Dylan. For this line, if nothing else: Ring the bells that still can ring. ...There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.