Stanley Kunitz and the Well-turned Phrase

Stanley Kunitz died at the age of 100 in May 2006. He had been named America's National Poet Laureate twice during his lifetime. Some snooty-poot critics dismissed his work as too conventional. Clearly, many others disagreed. For example, those who honored him with the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the National Medal of the Arts.

I have a bad reading habit of snatching phrases from their context--forgive me for indulging, once again, in this habit. Below are a smattering of Stanley Kunitz' well-turned phrases, lines or segments of lines lifted from various works. This is the kind of stuff I'd love to be able to pull out of my head at a moment's notice, to insert into breakfast conversation while munching on fruit, announce enigmatically to Baptists who visit my door, use as a non sequiter in awkward social situations, or whisper to the moon. They would also, I feel, make excellent cookie fortunes.

 

Dissolving in the chemic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.

In fierce decay I'll find a stripe
Of honey sweetening the tart
Old brain. But shall I know again such ripe
Beauty of the burst, dark heart?

I thought I heard
A piece of laughter break upon the stair
Like glass, but when I wheeled around I saw
Disorder, in a tall magician's hat,
Keeping his rabbit-madness crouched inside,
Sit at my desk and scramble all the news.

Cities shall suffer siege and some shall fall,
But man's not taken. What the deep heart means,
Its message of the big, round, childish hand,
Its wonder, its simple lonely cry,
The bloodied envelope addressed to you,
Is history, that wide and mortal pang.

...The night nailed like an orange to my brow.

...Rolling the grape of hysteria under her tongue.

You pluck a thread from your cuff: it winces
Straight to your shoulder.

There's an ooze
Of souls too virulent to die
Contagious on the baffling walls.

You sit and watch the ceiling crack;
Horror sifts through and softly falls...

I'll sing a little ditty to the ghost
That occupies this world of empty frames.

...something rare, macabre, a true
Invention of the time's insomniac wits.

"O Prince of  Counterfeits,
This is the Self I hunted and knifed in dreams!"

...what
This nymphomaniac enjoys
Inexhaustibly is boys.

...this is
The end of lies: my bones are angry with me.

Scholars of the fourth dimension
Claim they starve to death in three...

Heat. Cold. Craters of silence.
The Sea of Tranquility
rolling on the shores of entropy.

If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.

A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones....
You have become a ship for parasites.

A man with a leaf in his head
watches an indefatigable gull
dropping a piss-clam on the rocks
to break it open.
Repeat. Repeat.

Tempers could sharpen knives, and do; we live
In states provocative
Where frowning headlines scare the coffee cream
And doomsday is the eighth day of the week.

Things are not only what they are:
They pass beyond themselves to learn
The tears of the particular.

...the gray somnambulist
Creaks down interminable stairs,
Dreaming my future as his past.

Nature has reasons beyond true or false.

I come prepared, unwanting what I see,
But tied to life. On the royal road to Thebes
I had my luck, I met a lovely monster,
And the story's this: I made the monster me.

Peace to her bitter bones,
Who taught me the serpent's word, but yet the word.

...a war 
Against the great-grandfathers of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck and struck again,
And with each elm a century went down.

The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart.

Let any drop of poison
Grow legs and crawl and eat...

As always, where the text ends
Lurks the self, so shamed and magical.

There is a single theme, the heart declares,
That circumnavigates curriculum.
The letter in my pocket kissed my hand.
I smiled but I did not tell them,
I did not tell them why it was I smiled.

A shameless keyhole god
Keeps spying on my worst...

...the conversation of two worms
In the beam of a house,
Their mouths filled with sawdust.

...I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.