Most stars form no agreed-upon constellation

I was back east when Gary Snyder visited friends of mine in Iowa City who were staying at my house. As a courtesy, he left behind for my absented hospitality an autographed SIX SECTIONS, which one day a few years later in an exchange more gentle than it sounds was given to a poet friend who left behind for me a Bill Puka LP. The friend in Iowa City had preceded me there by a year; two years before I had returned to my leafy green upstate New York undergraduate college from a summer in Ithaca to find that she had made a rather frightening erotic impression on two of my friends who did not then know each other; each told about the same tale of fearsome realization that this new force would be inflecting our dinners and lives and coquetteries throughout our last year in the village. As so surely she did. After leaving Iowa she changed her name to Kathy Krishna, and then to Shivanii. My friend Allan is a professor of botany in Israel, and he has lately remarked to me that, though he is a most sensitive reader of poetry, he didn't ever naturally have feelings for what everyone else recognizes as what we shall call the awful depth and peaceful wonder in Snyder. In Philip Whalen's exceptionally rich novel YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY, some of the characters have for one another the same sort of respectful and intrigued fear that my friends had for Kathy, and from which I have never - but to look - wholly escaped. In the way that Pound called ULYSSES an end, not a beginning, so Snyder's work might be understood to embody a last farewell to the possibility that the earth might have survived the variegated pestilences of people, parallel to the spirit of man that was forever broken in the trenches of Verdun and Passchendaele, and the invention, sometime in the 1920s, of a range of literatures and musics that perfected our vision of a sky filled with stars only clowns and deadbeats could convince their minds dead with boredom hid little bears and dopey crosses. What are the things I have to pretend to be to make her spend the night with me?

when beauty becomes extravagant

In these times of sadness and woe
as measured by remorse,
as on parlous seas,
imagine that you have lived on a tugboat
for many years,
on, say, Cayuga Lake, year-round,
for even when the lake freezes over,
there are many square miles of open water
in which
to sail and drift.
A woodstove within, by which
you drink coffee and read and write
and out the porthole espy
the hills that form your home Ithaca.
Port.

By which we know that once were written
novels of surpassing beauty:

"Joan’s martinis were made according to a recipe that no one else ever discovered. Even Bruce had never found out how she built them. They were better than any other drink that has ever been tasted by sea or land. They were freezing cold, they were strong, they were subtly scented, yet they did not, like so many special martinis, produce instantaneous paralysis or coma after one had imbibed the third glassful in succession. Instead, they produced euphoria, which in turn led into hilaritas, joyful contemplation and delight. They sprung each individual brain cell into something very like that “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” of which Professor Northrop has writer. Simply holding a glass which contained this fluid had an immediate effect upon the person holding it: he would smile, quite unconsciously, as if in anticipation of his coming translation."