The Beautiful Anthology (15 page)

And this would seem to be the natural consequence of the twentieth century. What was beauty under the diamond sky of LSD? What was beauty after we’d nuked the Bikini Atoll? It’s not as if there are no more fears left to us. What is beauty under threat of terrorism or environmental collapse or climate change? What was beauty once we’d visited the black desert of the moon and watched the iconic Earthrise? Once we’d for the first time had a chance to see the blue-white abstraction of our own planet from afar?

Around the same time as Pound’s fierce reaction, a Persian poet was assembling ranged banalities that would later prove so concordant with the hippie mind, touching on beauty among other things.

And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,

But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,

But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.

It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,

But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.

But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

But you are eternity and you are the mirror. [
17
]

Diversity needn’t mean diffuse thinking. The slop is what you see from a million miles away, but what we actually use will be immediate and clear. I think these coming generations will demand more concrete expressions of beauty, without necessarily collapsing to the old absolutes. As in so many modern trends in poetry, Hopkins is still exceptionally relevant in how he shows how the language of such things can be intensely personal without losing the breadth of its expressive power.

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. [
18
]

And one day, around 2050, a young girl will be sitting in an eco-diverse canopy forest (preserved despite all the dire warnings of environmental apocalypse), admiring all the components of her leaf-shadowed scene, and she’ll turn on her wrist-top computer and tune in for poetry to match her sentiment. And she will find a paean composed by an earlier poet who happened to be sitting a decade earlier in the very same location, and she’ll savor the poem, with her thrill of discovery and her satisfaction in its aptness. And maybe, as she clicks on “related poems,” she will stumble across “Pied Beauty.” And spreading across her face in that moment perhaps the enigmatic smile of
La Joconde
. And even Plato, I’m sure, would not be able to begrudge her the moment.

Endnotes

1. From “Our Eunuch Dreams,” by Dylan Thomas (1934).

2. From “Presencia y fuga,” by José Gorostiza (1939), translated by Uche Ogbuji.

3. I might also mention Emerson’s “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue,” against which we can balance Tolstoy’s calling a delusion any connection between beauty and goodness.

4. From “A Hymn in Honour of Beauty,” by Edmund Spenser. “empight:” placed.

5. Epigram xxxv, by Rufinus. For “Aphrodite” Rufinus uses her epithet “The Paphian,” but I substitute the common name of the goddess.

6. From “Letter from a Contract Worker” in
When Bullets Begin to Flower
, by Antonio Jacinto (1972), translated by Margaret Dickinson. “Macongue”: henna dye. “Maboque”: wild orange.

7. From “Exotic,” by Suheir Hammad, from
Born Palestinian, Born Black
(Harlem River Press, 1996).

8. From “A Mixed Message,” by Tara Betts (1999).

9. From “Femme Noire,” by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977), trans. Uche Ogbuji.

10. “Eres la tierra verdadera, el aire / Que siempre quiere el pecho respirar.” from “Patria,” by Roberto Fernández Retamar (1974). “You are the true land, the air the breast ever yearns to breathe.”

11. From “Kublai Khan,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816).

12. From “Mulata-Antilla,” by Luis Palés Matos (1950), trans. Uche Ogbuji.

Agua sensual y lenta de melaza,

puerto de azúcar, cálida bahía,

con la luz en reposo

dorando la onda limpia,

y el soñoliento zumbo de colmena

que cuajan los trajines de la orilla.

[…]

Con voces del Cantar de los Cantares,

eres morena porque el sol te mira.

13. From “An Hymn of Heavenly Beauty,” by Edmund Spenser, a different poem from the earlier cited.

14. From “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” by Ezra Pound (1920).
τὸ καλόν
(“TO KALON”) means “the beautiful.” Samothrace is the Greek island, ancient host to a cult of beauty, and excavation site of the famous Nike statue at the Louvre.

15. “Only one poem for the implosion of Capital,” by Uche Ogbuji,
The Nervous Breakdown
, April 2009.

16. “Etsy is a social commerce Web site focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies. These items cover a wide range, including art, photography, clothing, jewelry, edibles, bath & beauty products, quilts, knickknacks, and toys. Many individuals also sell craft supplies like beads, wire, jewelry-making tools, and much more.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etsy.

17. From “Beauty xxv” in
The Prophet
, by Khalil Gibran (1918).

18. From “Pied Beauty,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877).

CATHERINE TUFARIELLO

MEDITATION IN MIDDLE AGE

Beauty is youth, youth beauty; that is all,

A truth that you can straight-arm or embrace

When eyes slide past you, and your mother’s face

Looks from the mirror, mirror on the wall.

With or without knives, needles, lasers, dyes,

You’ll lose this war. But losses can be freeing,

And there were things you missed while locked in seeing

Yourself, in your mind’s eye, through others’ eyes.

Intent now, you’re startled by the shimmer

Of stars and landscapes swimming from a blur

Of burned-off fog. And you’re the child you were,

Intent and self-forgetful. See her curled

Unnoticed on a window seat in summer,

Lost in the dew-sharp garden of the world.

This poem was also published in the e-zine
Mezzo Cammin
, Summer 2011.

RONLYN DOMINGUE

MILKWEED AND METAMORPHOSIS

She knew what she was doing, that quirky native-plant lady at the farmers’ market.

Every weekend, she stood behind her table filled with exotic-looking flowers and shrubbery. Never mind that they grew in untouched profusion in various parts of the state. Few nurseries carried hearty Louisiana swamp irises, American beautyberry, or Joe Pye weed. Unfamiliar to so many eyes, most plants in the containers had laminated signs with photos of mature blooms and foliage, sun requirements, soil preferences, and peak bloom months.

For years, I cultivated a traditional sense of aesthetics, what a proper garden should look like, what familiar plants belonged in groups together. My perception of beauty shifted when I saw my first Indian Pink. Clusters of crimson throats with yellow screams. I desired that wild exuberance, that fierce unexpectedness of color and texture, that proper nourishment for insects and animals. The plant lady fed my fix and my soul.

I coveted some native milkweed to add to our butterfly garden. Our neighbors, one block away, had a non-native patch in their front yard that had been devoured to the stem bases two years prior. That year, it was making a comeback. Prancing groups of monarchs brought delight at a distance, but the caterpillars would require closer proximity.

On the plant lady’s table that morning, I spied a lone milkweed plant, home to two tiny yellow-and-black-striped caterpillars. One was the length of an almond, the other stumpy as a kidney bean. The emotional manipulation was genius. Who could resist something
that
cute?

“Look,” I said to my partner, Todd, “two caterpillars.”

The sight of them triggered an old memory. I had read a book when I was little about a girl who watched a monarch caterpillar become a butterfly. She had a milkweed field outside of her house (I recall … ) where the butterflies twirled, fed, and laid their eggs. She placed a caterpillar in a glass enclosure, gave it as much milkweed it could eat, and witnessed its topsy-turvy disappearing act into a chrysalis. Days later, the green jewel split open. She released the monarch into the field.

Deep down, I never forgot my envy of what she saw.

My adult hands grabbed the milkweed. I asked for more information about soil needs, to which the plant lady replied it would live in almost anything. Good, because the butterfly garden’s soil structure was evolving from barren to adequate, with the potential for fertile.

That morning, I set the milkweed in the ground and gave it plenty of water. The caterpillars twitched their black antennae, kept their feet firm on the undersides of leaves. Leaves. Food. Oh no.

In my glee and enthusiasm, I failed to realize the one twelve-inch plant could not possibly sustain two ravenous caterpillars until they were ready for their next life stage. The following few hours of my life were a mission to save the babies.

I knew monarch butterflies fed on the nectar of many flowers but that their young ate only one thing – milkweed. Although I’d decided to go native in our yard – restoring a balance and beauty progress had thwarted – it would be impossible to get more of the native variety in time to spare the caterpillars.

Plan A. Contact neighbors. With luck, they might have a couple of plants to dig up and sustain our little friends. No one answered when I called, so I left a message that bordered on crazy, certified as eccentric.

“Hi, A – and J – , this is your neighbor, Ronlyn Domingue. You know, the one in the modern house. I’m calling because I just bought a milkweed plant with two baby caterpillars on it, and I realized they don’t have enough to eat. So I’d like to know if you have some extra milkweed growing this year and if I can stop by to dig up a little bit. Please give me a call when you get a chance. Thanks.”

I half-seriously pondered a quick visit, shovel in hand, whether or not they were home. No, that was likely criminal – and bizarre.

Plan B. Buy more plants. A few minutes online yielded a list of milkweed species that were monarch host plants. One had a common name – butterfly weed – which I recalled seeing in local nurseries. Gas prices and time being at a premium, I began to call around town. None in stock here, shipment late there, finally – success. My garbled Latin name pronunciation, with accurate spelling, matched what a nursery staff person thought they had out on tables at that moment.

Todd and I drove across town to find a stash of plants that looked like the one we’d put in the ground. The containers had the name of the nursery where the plants were propagated, located less than a two-hour drive from where we lived. I wondered whether the milkweed was native – that would have been a boon – but right then, all I cared was that the plants were healthy and large enough to survive their inevitable defoliation.

We had our own little milkweed patch by early afternoon. The caterpillars munched unaware of the drama, content to doze and grow, eat and eliminate, crawl and shed their too-small skins.

May rained purple plums from the solitary tree. A twice-daily harvest, gathered off the ground, kept the rot under control. Morning and afternoon, I picked plums. Morning, afternoon, and several times in between, I checked on Cater and Fatter Cater.

Clever names, I know. Cater must have been a day or two younger than Fatter Cater, who clearly outpaced its sibling or cousin in length and width. They consumed their original milkweed, leaving only a pencil-thick green stalk behind. Each had chosen its own host plant to continue its binge.