Old Wives' Tales and Richard Wilbur

Jenni on Chanticleer asked the other day what old wives' tales we remembered most--mine was if a bird flies into your house, someone near you is going to die. The idea of a bird flying into a house nagged and nagged at me--till I remembered this poem. What beautiful metrics this poem has--and how profound are the love for the daughter, the struggle with writing...Lovely poem by a wonderful poet.

The Writer--Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where the light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

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I've not been posting much because I've been having severe back and arm pain--went to the doctor yesterday and am going to have a series of tests including an MRI. (For some reason the clanking MRI scanner reminds me of the song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer.") Wish me well.

It also reminds me of castanets, and I dug up this attempt--when I tried to re-cast a fiction exercise as a poem exercise, just breaking the lines and seeing what happens. It's funny how this fell into 10-syllable lines.


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This exercise really made me question what's a line--and what's a prose poem, and what's just fiction.