A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

The superb American poet Galway Kinnell, who was also a sweet, generous, gallant, much-beloved man, died peacefully in Sheffield, Vermont this past Tuesday. When The Book of Nightmares, long considered one of his best, was published in 1971, fellow poet John Logan wrote, “Each generation looks about to see who the great ones are in the arts, and in our time we can single out Galway Kinnell as one of the few consummate masters in poetry.”

His Selected Poems, published in 1982, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and shared the National Book Award that year with Charles Wright’s Country Music: Selected Early Poems. The reception of the book was extraordinary, exemplified by the praise of Richard Tillinghast in The Boston Review, “This book is proof that poems can still be written movingly and convincingly, on those subjects that in any age fascinate, quicken, disturb, confound, and sadden the hearts of men and women: eros, the family, mortality, the life of the spirit, war, the life of nations.” After September 11^th, The New Yorker published his profound meditation, When the Towers Fell, which he read from the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to a public aching for poetic witness. A friend who was there told me, “Fighter jets flew overhead, the sky was as blue as it had been on 9/11, and it was as intense a civic moment as one could have. Or, put another way, the civic became intensely personal.” Up to the moment the magazine was to be printed, Galway’s revisions were sliding through the fax machine at a tremendous clip. The consummate master was a consummate reviser, too, which inspired the legions of students he taught over the decades.

“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” by Galway Kinnell (1927-2014):

For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.

In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.