The Thread - Vagabond Reading Habit

Here is how it all unravels together for me.

A few months back I was reading Sam's Book by David Ray.

Bertrand Bonhomme,who's opinion I trust, recommended the book for the poems dealing with the death of the poet's son, Sam. A theme achingly near and dear to my heart.

In many of the poems, there are lines from or allusions to a great many of Robert Frost's poems - the poems not taken you might say; that is, not the first poems that pop into my mind when I think of Frost. The lines and fragments were powerful enough that I went back to my Collected Frost (see post below) and read the poems in their entirety.

This is typical of my reading MO. One poem leads to a name which leads to an essay which leads to a story which leads to a death which leads to a song which leads to a lake which leads to a ... you get the picture. How impossible it is to stay with a book when I come across a reference that grabs me, an epigraph that's so right I must read more of that writer. It is no surprise I feel as though I have never finished any one book of mine.

I follow the threads. I leave one unfinished book for the next and jump off at the first exit. A name, a place, an event. I go where the thread goes. In this sense, all books are one book, eh? one book that each of us cobbles together on the path to knowing.

I wish I had thought to keep track of where different books took me. I mean, know the books at my bedside, Ruefle, Edwin Muir, Frost, Charlotte Mew, but I can no longer remember how they got there. If you get my drift.

Heavenly Lostness

Here is a favorite poem of mine, sparks nicely with the Frost that follows.

The Unforeseen

Lord never grant me what I ask for.
The unforeseen delights me, what comes down
from your fair stairs; let life
deal out before me all at once the cards

against which I must play. I want the shock
of going silently along my dark street,
feeling that I am tapped upon the shoulder,
turning about, and seeing the face of adventure.

I do not want to know where and how
I shall meet death. Caught unaware,
may my soul learn at the turn of a corner
that one step back it stilled lived.

By Conrado Nale Roxlo (Argentina, 1898 -?)


I have been rethinking Frost lately and going back through the collected poems, and falling for a lot of poems that never caught my ear and eye before. This is one of them, and it makes a nice companion to Roxlo's. I'd go so far as to say the close reminds me of Rilke.

Lost In Heaven

The clouds, the source of rain, one stormy night
Offered an opening to the source of dew ;
Which I accepted with impatient sight,
Looking for my old skymarks in the blue.

But stars were scarce in that part of the sky,
And no two were of the same constellation —-
No one was bright enough to identify ;
So 'twas with not ungrateful consternation,

Seeing myself well lost once more, I sighed,
"Where, where in Heaven am I? But don't tell me
Oh, opening clouds, by opening on me wide.
Let's let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me.