Sunday Shuffle #1: 18 April 2010

I realized that I haven’t written about music yet. I do not intend for this to be a music blog, but, music being a central part of my life—one I get to share with family, friends, and students, I should come up with a way of getting to write about it here.

Enter the Sunday shuffle.

A friend recently accused me of getting esoteric, so I decided to go whole hog. One way of reading runes is to “throw”  three runes and do a past, present, and future reading. There are as many ways of reading runes as there are crazy people pretending to be rune-reading, thought-healing, super-prophets.

Enter the iPod shuffle feature.

On any given Sunday, starting today, I may call upon the iPod oracle to cast a reading. It’s important to remember that the three throws/tracks are a package deal; they only make meaning considered together; a theme must be seen before reading each track individually. The first track explains the past: where you are coming from; the second track interprets the present: what’s going on now; the third track predicts the future.

Here goes the first throw:

Track #1: “That Teenage Feeling” by Neko Case [from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood]

And nothing comforts me the same 
As my brave friend who says, 
"I don't care if forever never comes
 'Cause I'm holding out for that teenage feeling
 I'm holding out for that teenage feeling"

That Teenage Feeling - Neko Ca...

Track #2: “Living of Love” by The Avett Brothers [from Emotionalism]

Say yes we live uncertainty 
And disappointments have to be
And everyday we might be facing more 
And yes we live in desperate times 
But fading words and shaking rhymes 
There’s only one thing here worth hoping for 
With Lucifer beneath you and God above
 If either one of them asks you what your living of 
Say love, say for me love

Living Of Love - The Avett Bro...

Track #3: “Better Things” by The Kinks [from Come Dancing With The Kinks]

It’s really good to see you rocking out 
And having fun, Living like you just begun. 
Accept your life and what it brings.
 I hope tomorrow you’ll find better things.
 I know tomorrow you’ll find better things.

http://lala.com/zEtII

___________________________

Well, I can’t help/hope but think this is a good omen—a good first throw. It seems the theme is set by track two, by those brothers who write/sing of little else: love. Going backwards from there to Ms. Neko Case, spins her often bitter but not hopeless ballad toward hopefulness. When I met my wife I was no teenager, but I started to feel like one as we got closer and closer to one another and decided to drop the just friends. That was a dozen years ago.

As far as the brothers Avett are concerned, they have been the house band around our place for a year or so. We have grown to love their sappiness, but we prefer it with a healthy dose of banjo. Mr. iPod picked a good one to stand for today.

That leads us to track the last: an old standby, The Kinks. “Better Things” is not one of my favorite Kinks’  tunes, but the message of hope and happiness works great as a predictor of futures as far as I’m concerned. Ray Davies is now 65 and still “rocking out”. I hope that I and mine will be too, and music like this (truly “pop” music, that is) never goes out of style.

___________________________

I decided to add a fourth track. One that wasn’t selected but that is on the iPod right now and is on my mind this weekend. That song is: “However Many takes it Takes” by Vandaveer [from Grace and Speed].

Well, step outside into the sun 
Let it dry your eyes and run 
Around, feel the warm underneath your skin 
The clouds will soon move in again 
You can't expect to always win 
You've got to take it as it comes 
The marching bands and beating drums 
Play familiar songs for the alum 
We've all got scars, but we don't like to show them 
Sometimes it's better to be strong 
We all got to be moving on 
You've got to walk a million miles 
Ah honey, go walk 'em with a smile

However Many Takes It Takes - ...

Past, present, or future, that’s a damn good song. 

[If my Lala embeds are wrong, sorry, and if you don't have a free Lala account, get one.

The Triggering

I forget the names of towns without rivers.
A town needs a river to forgive the town.
Whatever river, whatever town –
it is much the same.
The cruel things I did I took to the river.
I begged the current: make me better.

The above lines comprise the opening stanza of Richard Hugo's poem "The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry with Us" written for his dear friend and fellow poet and struggler James Wright.


Two years after publishing the above stanza (which was also the year of James Wright's death), Hugo published his conversational poetry manual: The Triggering Town; he defines the title in following paragraph:

In this case I imagined the town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential.

We blogging poets or, in my case, poetasters know all too well this narcissistic obsession of following the triggers and getting the words and images, arriving like recurring dreams, down and dealt with. Here is a new poem (perhaps one day to better revised--I'd appreciate honest feedback) triggered by Hugo, my blogging friends, and mostly a recurring dream.


________________
The House


If I could smell in dreams (and whose to say that I cannot),
I imagine I would smell a river, train smoke, and fermenting barley.


A large plot is scattered with children's playthings:  trucks,
balls, a sandbox, and an aging but solid, metal swing-set painted green.


The grass, green & wet as mid-spring, gathers in neighborhoods
scattering the yard; clover & dandelion roads crisscross throughout.


But these I notice last, if you believe the waking imagination,
the thrust & grasp of memory after the dream's disappearing act.


It's the tall & wide, white house rising in the middle of the yard,
where the dream begins, inside, in any of a hundred rooms, all somehow familiar.


Always slightly different than the previous slumbering inhabitance,
once a vaguely yellow kitchen with nook and spiraling wooden staircase.


In another, a library of unmarked books, Victrola, console radio, miniatures hung upon the walls; an endless hallway's walls are perfectly spaced with black & white photographs:


Never a face I recognize, but each door, each room branching off has 
obvious inhabitants: brothers, sisters, roommates, friends but never mine.


I never make it to that room I'm searching for.  Stairways leading up, end back 
at the ground, steps turn to slides, secret passages open to whole new wings.


A green chair changes patterns in front of my eyes, a friend's suitcase packs itself and leaves.
A window opens, a breeze enters and a fraying feather floats in and I chase it through the house.


The house shrinks and I find myself on a patch of green looking back & forth between swings
and now the house sinks: a white window half in the ground takes the last bit of light down with it.


The dream ends before I decide what to do. Birdsong intervenes. 
My own house, small and less than quaint, lightens for morning.


Nothing is lost in dreaming, and yet a subtle haunting remains through the day.
Somewhere, a looming white house rises above a green yard and children's playthings.


There, in the half-light, another version of me considers the magnitude of making a move.

Birds (Three Stories)

Bird # 1: Clare's Hawk


The adjacent image is a selection from the text, The Poetry of Earth, New York: Atheneum Press, 1966. This selection pictured here (click to open larger copy) is from the "Nature Notes" of 19th century, rural English (no, not Irish) poet John Clare. Clare's first book of poems, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1920 by John Taylor, also a publisher of Keats. An article and readings of one of his most remembered poems, "I Am" can be found at The Atlantic's Soundings page. More Clare poems can be found at The Poetry Foundation including one of my favorites, "The Skylark." Sadly, Clare spent the last twenty years of his life in an asylum, which was the location of his death in 1864.


Clare's "Nature Notes" (to my knowledge and the aid of Jonathan Bate's biography of Clare) were from his personal journal around the year 1824. In this passage from the journal, which contains little punctuation, variant spellings, and the grammar of rural speech, Clare tells the story of a particular hawk that he describes saying: "not quite so large as the sparrow hawk their wings & back feathers was of a red brown color sheathed wi black their tails was long & barred with black & their breasts was of a lighter color & spotted their eyes was large & of a dark piercing blue their beaks was very much hooked with a sharp projecting swell in the top mandible ..." Clare's striking description of the birds is interesting in both its knowledgible birder's detail and its awkward, almost manic, syntax.  


However, what is most interesting in this passage from the journals is what comes next:

Clare's depiction of the relationship between the hawk and himself is quite compelling in that the hawk is both interested in and seemingly wary of Clare, in the end both are for good reason: Clare is exceedingly kind to the bird and yet it is the friendship with Clare that leads to the bird's demise. One can see in passages such as the above evidence of both Clare's potential as a different sort of English Romantic poet and his eventual mental disintegration and ultimate committing to an asylum.

________________

Bird # 2: St. Benedict's Raven

According to St. Gregory's Dialogues, Book II, Italian monk, later to be known as St. Benedict, writer of The Rule of St. Benedict, a raven that frequented the cave where Benedict lived, was charged by Benedict to remove a loaf of poisoned bread and take it "where it cannot be found." Eventually the bird did as he was told and returned. There is another story in which the bird rids the cave of a chalice of poisoned wine. Here again, a bird and an eccentric man are friendly and  engaged in a form of communication--and in both cases these hermetic men leave a written legacy behind them after their cloistered deaths.

________________

Bird # 3: Dad?

My father was an amateur birder, very amateur. In fact, actually, he liked looking at birds, owned binoculars (I now own them), and several bird-books (those are mine now too). He never went on outings, took notes, or did extensive research, but he passed on to me a real respect and interest in the feathered flyers of our neighborhood. In fact, just today during dinner I located our neighbor, a still-red male cardinal perched in one of the highest branches of the tallest tree in our back yard. I took a picture and made my oldest son look for him too; he found him more quickly than I thought he would. 

I do this a lot: look for birds. 

My dad died, fairly young (63), in 1995. I have been looking for him ever since: in dreams, in pictures, in letters, in hidden manuscripts in desk drawers ( I did find one once.). But mostly in birds. Interestingly, since January, I have had several interesting bird related experiences, three of which have involved bald eagles that are currently nesting North of Lawrence. 

The first had just captured a meal on the east side of 59 highway and allowed me to pull my car to the side of the road and watch him secure the prey, spread his wings, and fly, low above a still snow-glazed stubblefield before rising quickly to a perch in a far cottonwood. 

The second eagle was noticed by one of my creative writing students during class one afternoon flying circles above Lawrence High School, a very odd and rare sight that far into town. 

The third experience was a couple of weeks ago on my morning commute, again on 59 highway, heading south towards Lawrence and the eagle swooped across in front of my car and behind me, slowly gliding as I pulled the car over and turned around to follow him. He landed in a bare maple on the east side of the highway. There was a convenient farmers drive-in that allowed me to pull my car in off the highway and watch him sitting there in the tree, the still-winter sun rising, nearly white, behind the tree and above the pasture that stretched for miles to that place on the horizon where, eventually my two rivers (The Missouri and the Kaw) finally meet.

Though I spend a lot of time, alone, in my movable cell of a car, I am no eccentric, ascetic monk, and I have most of my sanity, most agree, but there is something about the continual connection that I feel with these birds that seems to to suggest that their closeness to me is important. That they carry some meaning or message that might just be the same thing that Clare and Benedict found in their birds and that I am always looking for in little legacies my father left behind. 

Maybe I am little more crazy that I give myself credit for. For now, I'm not too afraid, and I'm going to keep reading the bird signs that flutter and fly my way.

Web and Barn

                [Inspired by “Dwellings” a photograph by Angelia Perkins]

Relying on frame and curve,
knowing about impermanence
and loss,
the maker is a temporary tenant
dwelling within line and arc,
only as long as filament
can hold the heave
and sway.

Her abandoned dwelling,
not quite in ruins,
glistens with rainwater
in front of a fading relic,
depending on accident
and an imperfect geometry
that once set a whole
community to work.

Sharing more than geography
and season,
an acre’s ephemeral neighborhood
reminds: 
what lasts will not last forever,
and what goes away is worth noticing
before being lost.

The Pastoral of My Own Town

The Pastoral of My Own Town                        

                        (with many thanks to Ken Irby)

or rather,

between two:

one north

(home)

one south

(work)

between them

daily, twice

I fly, or

sometimes

linger

like today:

this cool

morning,

clearing

from a

cold spring

night,

two deer

winter

largeness

still about

them, haunch,

shank & torso

leaping

west to east

across a

quiet highway

or yesterday

after a long

build-up &

short storm,

a saintly

blue heron

near the pond

nearly hidden,

rising, bent

legged &

angled wing

up & north

to some day’s

nesting place

or, two days

before that,

this time

homeward,

with windows

lowered to

soak a smell

that is

a distillation

of April

promises:

grass clippings,

coming rain,

wind, & all

the piling shit

of spring

& three

spiraling turkey

vultures trying

to ruin it,

unsuccessfully

but most

or all of this

will fade

& soon,

even that

collected here

is already

vanished

or never was:

memory, a

palimpsest

of days

partially

removed,

scraped,

erased,

or cleaned

imperfectly,

being an

incomplete

chart of days,

drives &

dependencies:

what gets us

through each

day, from

one place

to the other,

through

one pasture

to another,

are those

gentle,

passing

thoughts

that correspond

to the space

between

a life lived

& one still

to come.

________________________________

The title of this poem comes from a poem by Ken Irby from 1964, republished in his Collected Poems last December. Ken is a great man and a fine poet. He was my professor in two American poetry courses at KU and was on my M.A. committee. He is an amazing storyteller whose knowledge of literature, language, music, and cultural history are unparalleled by anyone else I've met. He has recently been awarded the Shelley Memorial Award by the Society of American Poets, a very big deal for a poet who has been too much neglected by mainstream American poetry for too long. The above poem was inspired by a short section from a longer poem named after the Carter Family song, "It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Wearied Song". That section is quoted (from The Intent On) below:

Please consider looking at and/or listening to some of Ken's work. You can start with the links below:

Ken Irby Recordings at PennSound

The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006 - Google Books

Kenneth Irby - Poetry Society of America

Kenneth Irby - Poetry Society of America

Ken Irby, one of my gradute advisors at KU has won the 2010 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. A big deal! A great man and a fine poet. I'll post more later.

Oak & Ivy

"Parasitical"-the word is an interesting one. It suggests the image of "the obvious or univocal reading" as the mighty, masculine oak or ash, rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious twining around it of ivy, English or maybe poison, somehow feminine, secondary, defective, or dependent, a clinging vine, able to live in no other way but by drawing the life sap of its host, cutting off its light and air.

(J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host” 1977)

“Wyatt, you are an oak.” (Doc Holliday to Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, 1993)

I.

My friend, the oak, is not about to fall. In winter, not exactly skeletal, but showing strength and weakness at once.  A confidence that knows that soon birdsong, leaf, & bloom will return: the coming alive, again. And then, again, go. Meanwhile, he is content to stand alone. To let wind mock before it sings the branches that will not break. Then there is the temptation to give in to winter dreams. Does the oak dream? Does he consider the lady cardinal, hiding red with brown, as she flirts, with fickle foot & sleek song, all the while knowing he cannot compete with the red of early bloom and the ashy snow? Not to mention the blue flashes of spring, the guest beside the grain, the ivy in the hedgerow.

II.

In Old French:

          As in Camus:

“L'Hôte” implies

          A doubling;

Host is Guest;

Guest is Host.

The double bonds of hospitality:

                       Greet, eat, ask, answer, switch.

Story for story; performance per performance.

Tell you mine: show me yours.


              Remember: welcome the stranger; 
                                 speed the parting guest.


              Beware: some guests don't know how to go.

III.

In these numbered hostels that we borrow, guesting, we host them daily, performing the stories, the truth & the fictions. We remain open (before, during, after) to their apathy as well as their neediness. A place of lodging, even slumber, though the sitting uncomfortable, and the stories compelling—these travelers don’t always accept our strange currency, the best guest/host gift we have to give.

But they are the secrets that we keep that ghost these halls, these rooms, comme des hôtes des bois.

IV.

Respectability. That's what did it. I found out some time ago that it's idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities--contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures--eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun--than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it--oh, yes, she taught me that; she has marked me too forever--nothing, nothing.
[The Wild Palms, William Faulkner, 1939]

V.

What host of virtue, spent

nights without sleep, wondering which branch

might be the one to send the whole house finally crashing?

What truthful prayer: < nada y pues nada>>

might make it all clear once and for all:

I’ve staked nothing upon nothing and have nothing to show?

What guest of pleasure, tempting,

might arrive singing: <<There is a Balm…>>

suggesting that giving in is not giving up?

The difference between health & sickness,

fidelity & infidelity, enemy & friend, lost & found,

is felt by walking that thin line of a fragile faithfulness.

VI.

As a reminder of friendship Whitman twined a switch of live-oak with New Orleans’ moss, sitting it on a bookcase, in memory of the loved ones miles away. How much like ivy our attachments keep a hold on us. How much like ghosts, our smallest unrealized desires hang around our old haunts.

My friend, who fears God and seeks Glory, rises as an oak among us—a new string of ivy climbing slowly but steadily to some inevitable end.

"...and it's Eastertime too"

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez
And it’s Eastertime too
And your gravity fails
And negativity don’t pull you through

Bob Dylan, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"  Highway 61 Revisited









Charles Wright, Negative Blue, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000

I'm not sure why Charles Wright's title is not identical to the Dylan lyric. It might be an accident, typographically or a result of an imperfect memory, or it might be purposeful. Ultimately it doesn't matter. What does matter is the accident of juxtaposition that happened to me on consecutive days.

Yesterday evening, Easter Sunday, my oldest son, not quite four and a half years old, and I were listening to some music before bed. He loves listening to music, but he is only four and therefore he prefers short songs (loves the Beatles--especially early/middle Beatles) and sometimes likes to move quickly from one song to another. Well, as it was Easter I thought of “Tom Thumb’s Blues” and clicked on it in iTunes. He liked it for the first verse or two and then he wanted to read a book, but that was enough to have the tune in my head as I went to bed a hour or two later.

It was still there buried behind my morning’s commute when I checked my email when I got to school and The Academy of American Poets, via their Poem-A-Day project for National Poetry Month, had sent me today’s poem. On the sidebar of that post, they had a link to today’s audio poem. That link was incorrectly marked as Charles Wright’s poem above—a poem I had never read. (It was actually a great poem by June Jordan—but that’s another subject.) The incorrect link, however, sent me on a search to find Wright’s poem. Thanks to Google Books, I was successful, and quickly.

Now memory and imagination were fully incited. The tune, the poem, and the rain on an Easter Monday windshield all existed together. I’m not lost, this is certainly no Juarez, but Eastertime it is and, lost or found, I am reminded there is always searching to do. The rest of Wright’s poem suggests this:

One March, four of us searched for the house of a friend in the northwestern Colorado, we searched for the early hours of a misty Good Friday—a well-lit cross atop one of the mountains. We finally found the house, stalked it like the story we were told of the black bear that reached its deft/daft? paw inside a kitchen window and cupboard and stole the peanut butter and the chocolate. We did not find our friend and stole nothing but the view. We might have been listening to Dylan as we headed toward Denver and the poor car (Kansas to Southern Utah and back in six days) cried out and died on I-70 near Golden. Two of us spent the rest of Good Friday at a bus station in Denver and all of [not-so]Holy Saturday on a Greyhound bus, arriving in Kansas City before the sun rose on Easter morning. We did not attend the Triduum services, but what we searched, saw, and survived was very much a religious experience. As a result of which I am richer, and that makes these words ring the louder and longer:

“And your gravity fails / And negativity don’t pull you through…”

but

“Tonight, some miracle will happen somewhere, it always does.”

A Meditation on Teaching from a reminder by H. D. Thoreau

When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.   (H. D. Thoreau, “Walking” 1851)

That this could be a place to look forward to is not lost on everyone. To take for granted is not to hate, and, contrary to the belief of many of the famous among us, it is not worse. Of course, it would be better if they all arrived ready, daily, to be brilliant, to be brought to new heights, to be dropped, to fly.

No one counts the sunsets or sunrises seen, nor do they grieve the ones they’ve missed. Perfect attendance is no longer cause for award. But the days when the light streams for their eyes only, when the crowds disappear, ear-buds, iPods, and cell phones stay in backpacks and laptops remain unnecessary, when the blue sky of possibility does not fade to the starry false-night of day-sleeping but streaks with the color of new thought, then being awake, being alive, being here is worth more than the pieces of paper suitable for framing. The good days, hours, and minutes are worth counting one by one, and not crossed out like days on a calendar between paydays and until vacations.

There is much forgetfulness to be remembered and much to be memorized and then erased, but the moments of real learning remain constant; the rest cease to have existed. The good hours, landmarks between the monotonous minutes and are the frustrating weeks, are never passed over unnoticed. When the sleepers in those awkward desks are awakened by a miraculous moment they remain just a bit more awake, and that much closer to the path that inevitably leads to the glorious and perpetual glow of a lifetime of searching towards an education of their own. It is this daily ritual, often faked, ignored, or just plain missed, that gets us up early on a cold, winter morning, that keeps us from walking away on a bright, spring afternoon, and that makes summer’s never-quite-long-enough recovery only temporary. 

National Poetry Month: Entry #1: “drill imagination right through / necessity:”

The title of this post comes from a poem, “Play,” by A. R. Ammons, a poet I admire very much for his intensity and his playfulness. He is a poet for whom meaning is often at a hinge, the poetic word or phrase as a swinging gate.

In the case of the poem “Play” the swinging gate happens early in the poem (A. R. Ammons, “Play” Poetry #117, October 1970).
The poem begins:

Nothing is going to become of anyone
except death:
therefore: it’s okay
to yearn
too high:
the grave accommodates
swell rambunctiousness &

ruin’s not
compromised by magnificence:

The opening two lines appear to be straightforward: no one here gets out alive. And yet, if one considers the temporary rather than the eternal, many things become of everyone—something is always about to happen. Though death is the last becoming, life is not simply death, it is living—always becoming. However, Ammons’ point is that since there is no hope of surviving becoming dead, one should decide to live. Not simply be alive, but “yearn / too high.” In other words: feel free to fail. But here is where the gate swings.

The grave, obviously death itself, “accommodates” high hopefulness (“swell”) but also “rambunctiousness” (perhaps living without fear of dying). What is more of a swelling of ego than pretending to be deathless? So, “swell” is the hinge here.

The line reads at least two ways: one with a pause after “swell” and one that runs immediately into “rambunctiousness.”

a) “the grave accommodates / swell” : the grave hosts body and spirit (all that is not material): desire, hope, etc. (Note: I am purposely avoiding the body/spirit, material/immaterial, life/after-life discussion in this post.Though within the totality of Ammons' work it can be had with vigor.)

b) “the grave accommodates / swell rambunctiousness” : what the grave comforts is that happiness the grave negates: being alive and ornery, seeking thrills.

And then a third reading appears when the “&” is followed: “& / ruin’s not / compromised by magnificence:”

Is death, then, “ruin” or is it “magnificence?” If death is “ruin” then a carefree approach to life is magnificence—it still can’t stop death. Or, if death is “magnificence” then ruin is fearing death and not living. Of course there are many other ways of reading these lines as well; however, no matter which way the gate swings the final point remains: don’t worry about the dying but both live & die magnificently.

All of this serves to prepare the reader for the rest of the poem—which I have not yet provided in full. However, we do still have those lines mentioned in the title of this post that we have been moving towards. In fact, the forward momentum of the poem leads to them.

Here is the rest of the poem:

that cut-off point
liberates us to the
common disaster: so
pick a perch—
apple branch for example in
bloom—
tune up
and

drill imagination right through
necessity:
it’s all right:
it’s been taken care of:

is allowed, considering

Death, being the “cut-off point” not only between being and non-being, but also “ruin” and “magnificence” and perhaps passivity and activity, “liberates” humanity “to” not from “common disaster” (lack of material immortality). Humanity’s impermanence liberates—allows for the enjoyment of the temporary—the moment. From this point the poem suggests/reminds that location and perspective matter, urging: “pick a perch” and provides a specific perspective/location via a strong image: “apple branch […] in / bloom”.

Then, perched on branch—birdlike—“tune up”: sing. “Drill” (or drum, woodpecker-like) from the chosen point of view, though temporarily, “imagination right through / necessity". This image, auditory, visual, and yet still somewhat abstracted, suggests multiple, simultaneous bits of understanding. To “drill imagination” is to enter “necessity” by bisecting it, going all the way through, making a worm-hole through…dying, is it? Isn’t it? Imagination, instead of being wasted on mortality, should be used to cut through it, to make it transparent—at least in that one focused spot, that temporary location, perspective from which one still lives, somehow above death--still making noise.

There are also other obvious interpretations of this phrasing: for example, imagination is integral in overcoming necessity, all necessities. In fact, the rest of the poem encourages and explains this, assuring: “it’s all right” to imagine you are still alive, can sing, can climb to some higher place to view the world. Necessity (dying) has been “taken care of”; “yearning” “is allowed, considering” that this is the only internal agency against becoming dead.

And the imaginary gate swings back to the beginning of the poem: “it’s okay,” the “grave accommodates” that “swell” imagination causes.