Five Lines / Issue 11
Mutemath's changes, Milosz's histories, Baker's neighbors, and Brandi's abbot. Also: how to tell time with a map.
Hello friends. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. “And how like a field is the whole sky now”
“Neighbors in October”
David Baker
All afternoon his tractor pulls a flat wagon
with bales to the barn, then back to the waiting
chopped field. It trails a feather of smoke.
Down the block we bend with the season:
shoes to polish for a big game,
storm windows to batten or patch.
And how like a field is the whole sky now
that the maples have shed their leaves, too.
It makes us believers—stationed in groups,
leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters
over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone,
bagging gold for the cold days to come.
I like this poem because it captures a very specific feeling that I know from many autumns past: that of preparation. I have friends who dread the coming of winter, but as the years have gone by I have begun to enjoy the process of it. I look at the winter prep we do in colder climates (described so well by David here) as something of a celebration of all the work that's gone into the land to produce a harvest. The chopping and clearing of crops and lawns and leaves is part of that celebration.
The words he chooses are simple, sturdy, generally monosyllabic things: bales, flat, barn, field, chopped, smoke, block, shoes, rakes — bend, patch, shed, lean, look, rub, stand. The tractor is an extension of the neighbors raking their yards, not just a commercial entity. We are with one another, if not in a group, then in concert with the season and the evening described here. There is industry here, but not so much of the mechanical variety; more the sort that creates blisters and smoke, the sort that relies on thrift and the satisfaction of a clean field.
What David is doing in this poem is snapping a picture of a scene: call it agrarian, call it pastoral, call it what you will. The picture doesn't stop with the images — it shrouds the simple actions of a community on the cusp of winter with deeper meaning. Yes, we believe in something. Something is coming, so we prepare.
2. “I did not want to love so. / That was not my design.”
“In Warsaw”
Czeslaw Milosz
(Warsaw, 1945)
What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins
Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny
Day in spring?
What are you thinking here, where the wind
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the rubble?
You swore never to be
A ritual mourner.
You swore never to touch
The deep wounds of your nation
So you would not make them holy
With the accursed holiness that pursues
Descendants for many centuries.
But the lament of Antigone
Searching for her brother
Is indeed beyond the power
Of endurance. And the heart
Is a stone in which is enclosed,
Like an insect, the dark love
Of a most unhappy land.
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything; five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
It's madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the
Only two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.
I'm struck in my reading of Czeslaw's works (which has only just begun...) how significant a time he lived within — not only that he was seven years shy of 100 (1911-2004), but that over these years he was in the thick of some of the most massive conflicts of our day and age. The scope of what he has seen and understood throughout his life is staggering: working during WW2 for the underground presses in Warsaw, then for the new government following the war, and then abroad following his break with that same government.
I'm also struck by his intense love for the ordinary people of his country. He is decisively in their court, against whatever government set itself up (right or left), beyond the cultural vagaries he and his fellow Polish writers encountered. His biographical sketches of writers and poets during this time are eye-opening and prescient to our own era. He sees what's going on, y'all. He sees through what's going on.
The agony in this poem is that of a man who can see what is afflicting his nation, who is haunted by the flow of history through him and his people. In the midst of some of the most horrific things our world has seen, he allowed his pen to be overtaken by the people who couldn't speak for themselves. He did not remain silent.
I think there is a difference between poems that seek to say something political, and poems that tap into the reality of being human in a particular current moment. The first skates over the surface of history. The second dives beneath the surface and seeks to understand something ultimately distant and incomprehensible. The first is poetry of grievance, or personal vendetta (as Li-Young Lee says); and the second poetry of grief, a selfless outward posture.
The first does not last. The second echoes beyond itself.
3. “only fall if you’re sure / that you fall forward”
Stay where you like
They won't care
You pay for the right
But what is there?
When every place in the world
Is all built up
Every space in the herd
Is all filled up[Pre-Chorus]
I can hear all the obsolete
From a landfill, singing out
[Chorus]
I'm just suffering from changes
Locked outside for good
Paper cut by turning pages
Sitting under dust cause
I'm not understood
[Verse 2]
Monuments blush while rising
In the ashes and dust horizon
When everything has to turn
And march onward
Only fall if you're sure
That you fall forward
[Pre-Chorus]
I can hear pallid choirs sing
From their headstone hymnals now
[Chorus]
I'm just suffering from changes
Locked outside for good
Paper cut by turning pages
Sitting under dust cause
I'm not understood
In casting about for some analysis on this particular jam from Mutemath’s same-titled remix album, I noticed that a number of articles written in attempts to explain it were generated by AI. I found that ironic given the subject of this particular song.
I first encountered this song during a time in life when I was fighting for something I was convinced was right, but nearly everyone else thought was backward thinking. To this day I remain convinced that the "backward" route was the right one. The sense that I had in meeting after meeting at the time was of being ignored, left behind, misunderstood... and it's all in this song. The lyrics carry this sense of loss with them, thick with themes of perceived stagnation and death, of being left behind in the wake of the push for changes. You music peeps will notice the callback to a funeral march built into the bass line from the start (more noticeable here in Paul Meany's debut of the song).
There's a sense in which Paul's words come from a place of aging, particularly in an industry that prizes the next flashy thing above long-term growth and hard-won artistry. The pressure to change suggests that there is no other pathway, and there's no option to opt out without being punished for doing so. The only falling you are allowed is falling forward.
Mutemath never did strive to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but instead opted for stuff like "Changes" — interwoven images, doom-and-gloom vibes, and heady lyrics (who uses "pallid choirs" and "headstone hymnals" in a pop song, after all?) But damn, that chorus drop. The synths are strong with this one.
I'm particularly intrigued by the bridge woven into Paul's early version of the song that was dropped for the final version. It's hard to tell what the words really are, but the last line (as far as I can tell) sounds something like: "Some roads are woven with no end in sight."
The basic gist is simple: change is never only positive; in fact, it can cause significant suffering and loss. In my situation, that is exactly what happened. Nobody won in the end, despite their dependency on the popular change to save them. I don't regret the paper cuts I received along the way. The work doesn't lose value because it didn't win the day. What are we really doing as poets and Christians, if we're not fighting the long defeat?
4. “laughter / the fuel for flying, the change defying / the change”
how to tell time with a map
Chris Wheeler
Something distant, like a curling cloud
that one only knows in motion
by how it changes when you look
away, by how it stays so very much
the same when you watch over it.
That is how your life looks to me
from this place, where I try to
unfold the question at the compass
of it, the blossoming wind rose
of your days, and where you go
when you are watching our horizons,
nestling your eyes in the clouds,
releasing burdens to the waves.
Far is a fathom of water so clear you
cannot see through it, a league of air
so empty you cannot fill it any fuller.
And you, only elements away from me,
are spilling into the next square
with the levity of liquid, laughter
the fuel for flying, the change defying
the change, the sameness only
stillness. How is it we are We,
and not only you and I? How is it
we intersect? Why couldn't it all
become, or at least be — forgotten
and found again in the unlikely moment,
these atlased lines that lead only
to the edge of a grievous, gracious joy?
We are not so very far from falling over
the endless reeling edge of the world.
Most of the poetry I've written over the summer has had some wrestling with time at its core: the speed with which it works, invisibly and inevitably, on everything and everyone around me. I get impatient with my own passage through time, and yet I want it to stop anytime I think about my kids growing up. And of course, I had just finished reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to the kiddos, so Reepicheep was on my mind.
Within this poem I found myself circling themes of distance and proximity, stasis and change, knowing and unknowing, time and eternity. All of these have to do with relationships, of course, and how we interact with these other blindingly beautiful eternal beings who inhabit our lives as we inhabit theirs. Our perspectives are rarely wide enough or long enough to pin anyone down the way we always try to do. Why are we always bucking against living in time anyway? Is it control? Guilt? Love? Grief? I wanted to peel back things to get at the why and how of it all, and found it very slippery. I kept losing sight of things just when they were flashing into comprehension. And I suppose that's a bit like trying to live in time and eternity in the same moment. I hope someday to understand it all a little better, past "the endless reeling edge of the world."
5. [the whole poem is the line]
“fallen leaves”
John Brandi
fallen leaves
the abbot sweeps
around them
Isn't this a jewel of a poem?
There's a real art to tiny poetry. Every single word counts. You have to distill it down and down to the essence of meaning in a single image, and this poem does that expertly.
You are placed immediately in time and space (autumn at a monastery) with only four words. You are given a direct window into who this character is in the remaining three words, and this not by explaining his background or physical description or anything else, but by describing a single action of his. He is in tune with larger forces than himself, and gentle to the least and the lowly. He is inherently whimsical, intent on enjoying the nature around him in its undisturbed state. He is not a father, or a priest, or a pastor, or even a friar — he is an abbot.
This specific word conjures up a wholly different image for me than any of the other choices; I don't know about you, but I see a jolly, stout figure with cheeks as red as apples and twinkling eyes. The sound of the word itself — “abbot” — is what brings this to mind. That specificity matters!
We are left in the wake of this tiny poem to consider how we approach tiny things. Do we observe and enjoy them as they are, undisturbed? Do we hold them as precious? Or do we sweep them aside in favor of the next thing on our to-do lists?
I wish you many delightful encounters with tiny things today, and all autumn long.
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
Another beautiful collection, as always Chris. Re: Milosz- stab me in the heart! My gosh. Another poet I need to read more of.
Re: Mutemath. They have sung me through many hard times in my own life. I used to go on long runs and they were one of the only bands that actually helped clear my head. Esp their Armistice record. Your reference to "paper cuts" reminded me of their "Pins and Needles" song.
Re: your poem. Love the imagery and tension in this one. Especially at the end. I feel that too.
Happy Fall, and best of luck prepping for the winter. :)
It's crazy to juxtapose your poem with the last poem, because yours is weighty and simultaneously effervescent, and Brandi's is... the same. Just different. Few words can say so much.