Eden Park Meditation

i
How odd that the days lengthen; the hours
braced against a brittle sun that sears
the lip of ice at the base of the black oak.
                                         The ice and the sun
are opaque and impenetrable,
a sealed world. This world. The days don’t dwindle

into twilight but linger so silently
we hardly notice the future
in these perplexed angles of
light.                         Later, at the feet

of the boxwood, night rustles anxiously, or is it
merely the wind. No, there are certain tensions.
The night wants what it is owed.

ii
Mornings, I walk the circular pond and the pond stares back.
I won’t go near enough to see
the distorted reflection staring up at me
                                                         The sky is there;

clouds shunt past, rapid as recognition, the sky a blank
eye as is the sun. I stand at the edge, I am
                                                                 a poor…

A hundred years ago, in June of 1917, the small Egoist Press in Bloomsbury, London, issued a book of poems by the American expatriate, T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations. Much like trying to read the Bible after a religious upbringing, it is almost impossible now to read especially the first four poems—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”—without reference to the veneer, reputation, and sometimes repudiation, that have attached themselves to Eliot in the century since. (And many of the remaining poems make you wonder why that reputation took hold at all.) But here are all twelve of them. What an odd bird the book was then, and how strange so much of it still seems now.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock