Voices of the Dying
by Mathew Paust
The giants are not going gentle,
their Paleo legacy's doing the Welshman proud--
combustibility of kindreds,
raging on road and page.
I hear them both this chilly morning, as I stroll through town,
the rising sun friendly on my back. Ahead,
cries of ancient behemoths reach through legions
of sycamore, oak, poplar, and pine left to buffer us
from asphalt bedlam. This morning the trees seem complicit,
as if recognizing a kinship, relaying what they hear
as warnings, tilting leaves for acoustic advantage,
limbs waving urgent decibels my way.
And what reaches my ears does bespeak an inordinate passion,
almost a desperation—little guys pushing unmuffled snarls
to boundaries of hysteria, embarrassing the giants to crescendo
their rumbling growls into bellows of terrible, wrenching irony.
I hear a double poignancy in these voices celebrating extinction
past and future. Oblivion's abstracted, denial and defiance
hold the center. And why not? Not going gentle affirms instinct—
the other demands resolve, and to what end? What satisfaction?
Nay, to rage against the dying of the light in one final tantrum!
One last curse at the inevitable! Ego's ultimate rejection of
ending with a whimper! Dammit,
rev the fucking engine!
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Author's Note
Going negative...can't help it.
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Actually this is a quite gentle and moving poem until the last stanza which both it and I could have done without. Listen to the art not the artist was Lawrence's wise advice. But save for that stanza( IMHO) this is high among your best work, Mathew, and a very good piece indeed.
You are kind, David. Not sure what Lawrence would say about the grain of sand in the oyster, but that's how I see it.
****
To me, this is furious and appropriately so. I hear the trucks (the traffic, the roar) and I love the description of the trees tilting their leaves like ears, and the word "urgent" describing the message from both. Love wrenching irony, tantrum, curse, the rejection of Frost's whimper. It's perfect combustion, "these voices celebrating extinction past and future" and no longer "Gentlemen, start your engines." It's fucking rev 'em. Very effective Dylan Thomas touch too. Wonderful poem.
I feel like I haven't made myself clear. Let me try some more. To me, this is about a poet on a morning walk and he can hear, beyond a buffer of trees, all the awful sounds highways make rushing stuff we don't really need to market, the false urgency of that. I get that dinosaurs are involved and the trucks to me are like dinosaurs too. The "double poignancy" made me think of a tandem trailer. (Maybe I've been in way too many English classes?)
I'll give it another try, too, Dianne. To me the poem until the last stanza says we live in the uneasy alienating balancing act of contradiction--the trees, the asphalt bedlam--until the end which seems to push the poem away from truth toward the forced resolution of rage. But more kudos to Mathew for writing a poem that engages us thusly,
I'm flattered by your attention to this poem, Dianne and David. Despite Disraeli's instruction to never complain and never explain, I want to give you a little background of this poem's genesis. I live on a busy street, having moved from a rural home about five years ago, and I've not yet gotten used to the sound of motor vehicles that for some reason always seem to race their engines going past my place (maybe they read my poetry). Anyway, I've become taken by the notion that these vehicles are an extension of the dinosaurs via their petroleum remains, and from there I saw irony in the sounds of their engines, imagining them to be ghost voices of these long dead creatures. I've just started reading Michael Gorra's "The Saddest Words," an academic look at Faulkner and his literature in the context of slavery and the Civil War. Faulkner's characters accept without question that history never ends, that the consequences of actions and attitudes continually evolve but always retain something of their inauguration at their core.
The duality I'm seeing that links the Mesozoic extinction with the one we seem to be hellbent to bring upon our own species, embodied by the dinosaurs and the internal combustion engines that feed off their remains, is generating a subtle-yet-growing, almost unacknowledged rage I hear expressed thru those vehicles. Once I started examining that rage, Dylan Thomas's sonorous voice cued up in my head, reminding me of one of the first poems I ever posted here, a parody of Do Not Go Gentle, saying something like Why not go out easy...just float...tell your ego to shut the hell up? I tried to address this contradiction in the final stanza. I still believe dying peacefully without pain or some ghastly remorse would be the best way to go. But because this poem was flying on wings of irony I felt it natural to carry it to an ironic conclusion. I see this poem as addressing rage with irony, and as I mentioned in responding to David's first comment, the notion of a grain of sand in the oyster was intended to bring together (as a pearl of recognition?) the individual and collective rages we're experiencing as a foretelling of what our instincts already know is the approaching end. The last stanza's essentially a throwing up of the hands as if to say, "I know it's too late. It's not my jam, but don't let me spoil your fun."
Here's the parody poem I mentioned above: Titled Doubting Thomas
Do not go raging into that bleak night,
Old age should know frustration's not the way;
Float, float when all about you's losing light.
Wise men at their end know it be quite
Demeaning to our dignity to bray,
Do not embarrass others with your fright.
Bad men blame the universe with spite
For taking their proud fantasies away,
Float, float when all about you's losing light.
Dreamers at last see what's wrong and right,
And know that what they wanted would not stay,
Do not embarrass others with your fright.
Brave men, dying, who're forced to quit the fight,
Realize then there's nothing left to say,
Float, float when all about you's losing light.
And you, my friend, with verbiage so bright,
Remind me now as darkness comes my way:
Do not embarrass others with your fright.
Float, float when all about you's losing light.
I like the eloquence of language and images. "sun friendly on my back," "tilting leaves." Having just recently finished The Overstory, this resonates.*
The Overstory woke me up to that sensibility, Beate. It came to mind in this poem. Thank you.
What comes must go. Vivid with sight and sound.
"This morning the trees seem complicit,
as if recognizing a kinship, relaying what they hear"
Enjoyed the poem, Mathew.
"This morning the trees seem complicit,
as if recognizing a kinship, relaying what they hear
as warnings, tilting leaves for acoustic advantage,
limbs waving urgent decibels my way."
So beautifully said. Love the shared complicity.
Many thanks, Erika and David. You obviously have fine taste in imperfect literature!
Such good writing! Deserves to be read over and over. Tremendous.
Kind of you, Darryl. Many thanks.
"This morning the trees seem complicit,
as if recognizing a kinship, relaying what they hear
as warnings, tilting leaves for acoustic advantage,
limbs waving urgent decibels my way."
this cuts me to the quick.*
Thanks, Tim.
*
Many thanks for the recognition, Gary.
Main Street, Mathew?! :)
Yes, ma'am, but them damned dinosaur voices are EVERYWHERE!
You've assembled a fine piece of writing here. To me, it's larger than the page it's given. Colossal *
Thank you, Foster. That's more than kind.