Miraculous Trash

 

Poem #1: Miracles

by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of

the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night

with any one I love,

Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer

forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so

quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with

the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

 

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—

the ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

 

 

Poem #2: The Cigarette, the Beers, the Trash

by Alejandro Murguía

 

Everything is good for something

Even the trash, the ugly and the dirty,

What we throw away we can put in a poem,

Make art of our rejections, our defeats

All of it just grist for the mill of our songs.

 

It’s too bad that sometimes we want only the pretty,

That which makes us believe we’re saints, or holy,

Or some kind of artiste, for hell’s sake.

 

Send me storms when I’m walking home

Locusts in the harvest season

I’d rather go hungry than

Stuff my gills at some catered banquet

Where everyone is neutered by Martha Stewart.

 

Look outside your frigging window,

What you see is what it is—that’s all there is.

I see abandoned cars, newspapers, a beer bottle

Propped up against a half-dead tree

And I’m going to put them in this poem

Because that’s all I’ve got tonight.

 

Then I’ll smoke a cigarette, stare at the night clouds,

Let the wind whip my face

And that’s it, at least I’ll know I didn’t cheat,

Didn’t fake what’s in my life.

 

 

We sat in the car waiting for a miracle. On that clear and cold March evening we had a chance, said the meteorologist, a small chance of seeing the Northern Lights at sundown. My friend and I had been waiting years to see the Northern Lights—she’s an ardent fan of extreme weather and starry phenomena, and I’m an ardent fan of the movie Local Hero, my introduction to the Northern Lights back in the early 80’s.

 

Sitting in a school parking lot, the widest open space we could come up with on short notice, we felt like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin. As hope for the miraculous display dwindled, I dashed out in the wind to put these two poems in a tree by some athletic fields.

 

Even then, before I had read the two poems closely, “Miracles” and “The Cigarettes, the Beers, the Trash” seemed to be talking to each other on their respective tree branches.

 

–See the just-barely buds on these bare trees—said the Whitman poem—a miracle!

-Yeah but look down at how the snow melt’s uncovered trash, said the Murguía poem.

-The wind is tossing us about! Another miracle!

-That wind’s going turn you into trash.

 

Which it did, a moment after I took the picture.

 

Originally I paired the poems together together because they seemed opposites. Whitman’s poem is so cheerful it’s all but wearing a curly red wig and nuzzling a dog named Sandy. The tone of Murguía’s poem is decidedly less sunny:

 

Look outside your frigging window,

What you see is what it is—that’s all there is.

 

But the poems have more in common than I thought at first.

 

Both poems start in the city. Whitman is in Manhattan, Murguía presumably in San Francisco. And even though Whitman travels from the city to beach, to woods, back to city and Murguía stays put, they’re both completely engaged with their surroundings. They see what others don’t.

 

Or maybe it’s not so much that they see what others overlook, as it is that they re-name what they see so that others can see things in a new way. Whitman re-names everything he sees a miracle, especially the everyday things: Strangers opposite me riding in the car; the wonderfulness of insects in the air.

 

Murguía, who sees the ugly and the dirty, calls his trash poetry. Or inspiration for poetry. His poem is like a recycling bin, full of discards that he finds new uses for. Like a poetic version of the Heidelberg Project in Detroit.

 

Both poems are not just about seeing and re-naming, but also about the creation of self. In listing what he sees, Whitman creates a persona who is childlike, full of wonder. He’s the master of the artless art, of spontaneous expression of feeling, Murguía not only sees the underbelly of what Whitman sees, he wants to see the underbelly:

 

Send me storms when I’m walking home

Locusts in the harvest season

 

Seeing “what’s really there” separates the artistes from the artists, and Murguía is definitely in the artist camp. He’s proud of being authentic, of not having been neutered by Martha Stewart.

 

(Neutered by Martha Stewart. That’s a phrase to tuck away for future use. It would be a great bumper sticker and an even better support group. Overeaters Anonymous in room 12, Neutered by Martha Stewart across the hall.)

 

I hadn’t heard of Alejandro Murguía until a friend gave me a book of his poems for my birthday last year. He was born in 1949 in California. After his mother died when he was two, he was moved to Mexico City, where he lived until he was six. He writes in both English and Spanish and has been called “the activist voice of refugees and exiles.” He’s written two novels, a history of the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement in San Francisco’s Mission District, two books of poetry. He’s professor of Latin American literature at San Francisco State University. In 2012 he was named the Poet Laureate for San Francisco, the first Latino poet to be given the honor.

 

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was born in Long Island to a family of nine. At various times throughout his life, he worked as a journalist, a newspaper editor, a teacher, a volunteer nurse in the Civil War, a government clerk. Although he struggled to earn a living, he shared any money he earned with his ailing mother, his sick brother, and wounded soldiers.

 

I’ve written about Whitman before, so I’ll copy commentary from previous posts:

 

Walt Whitman sure has a lot of laudatory titles :  “poet of democracy,”  he’s called, “father of free verse,” “America’s poet,” to name a few.  Critic Harold Bloom proclaimed Whitman’s importance in his introduction to the 150^th anniversary edition of Leaves of Grass:

“If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse. You can nominate a fair number of literary works as candidates for the secular Scripture of the United States. They might include Melville’s Moby-Dick, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Emerson’s two series of Essays and The Conduct of Life. None of those, not even Emerson’s, are as central as the first edition of Leaves of Grass.”

 

And no, we never did see the Northern Lights. If you are a lucky person who has, post a comment and tell me when and where.