Poet's powerful words still endure

A poet died last week, a guy you’ve probably never heard of.
That’s not unusual. Most poets go through life unknown by the larger public. Most try to content themselves with the notion — or delusion — that their work will live on after them, that they’ll be read after their bones are crumbling in the grave.
Chances are, that won’t happen. But it provides a measure of comfort.
In our time, only a handful of poets have become household names: Robert Frost, to be sure, but after that the list gets pretty short.
For better or worse, most have never heard of — let alone read — Billy Collins or Donald Hall or Jane Kenyon or Howard Nemerov or James Fenton or James Dickey or Theodore Roethke, to name just a few of the dozens on my shelves.
But they’re out there, scribbling, trying to create something of lasting beauty or lasting impact with their words on the page.
They tend to make themselves felt not through mass audiences but via one-on-one connections with individual readers. That’s when the magic happens, when a solitary reader — separated perhaps by a generation or a continent from the poet — gets it, feels the spark the poet was hoping to kindle.
A poet died last week, a guy whose work sent that spark through me, lighting a fire, humbling me and inspiring at the same time.
His name was Galway Kinnell.
I first read his work as part of an assignment in college and liked his voice. While we were on our honeymoon I bought his fifth book of poems, and I’ve acquired more over the years.
But when I read of his death over the AP wire, two particular poems jumped into my memory vividly.
One was a piece called “The Bear,” which is stark and grisly in its imagery and vision. The other was a poem the title of which I couldn’t remember, but I remembered how it affected me.
It begins with a father at the crib of his crying infant in the nighttime, and its focus is on the fragile nature of our existence.
When I came home for lunch that day and put some soup on the stove, I started prowling through the bookcases in my study until I found it.
Then I read it again. And even though I hadn’t picked up that particular volume in decades, the lines were all familiar, like an old coat taken out of the closet that still fits.
“You scream, waking from a nightmare,” the poem begins. “When I sleepwalk/into your room, and pick you up,/and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me/hard,/as if clinging could save us. I think/you think/I will never die, I think I exude/to you the permanence of smoke or stars,/even as/my broken arms heal themselves around you.”
With words that still echo in my head, the poet talks of love and fear and mortality, “being forever/in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.”
The poet’s mortality, the infant’s mortality and the reader’s mortality are all just as fleeting and fragile and precious and worth savoring.
As the poem ends, the father puts the infant back in the crib and says, “when I come back/we will go out together,/we will walk out together among/the ten thousand things,/each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages/of dying is love.”
Galway Kinnell died last week.
The poems survive.