Yesterday, or Long Ago

Yesterday, or Long Ago

Wiley Clements

© 2002 by Wiley Clements


Cover Art: from Moa Museum, Japan


Published by The New Formalist Press


XHTML & CSS design by Leo Yankevich

Memento Mori

This maple has let fall three leaves, no more:
two yellow and a brown.
They lie upon the charcoal granite door
to your room in the ground.

This gray October afternoon lets down,
a trickle at a time, a little rain;
not as tears, you’d say, but freshening mist
for these two visitors from out of town
who thought to find more verse, but don’t complain
at this one line from all your leafy list.

How quiet, fresh and warm this upland glen
to stop within for sleep.
I think it must be warm here even when
the snow is drifted deep.

Wilde in Paris

To part forever with the futile hope
of somehow turning back the hopeless day
to live again while there was time to stay
        my foolish tongue—

In lust and drink to hurry life away
lest in some crowded scene a certain face
appear and find me out of time and place
        no longer young—

To rue the waste and so to find no grace
in further waste, nor in lament nor laughter,
nor anywhere unless in what comes after:
        oblivion—

And so, with absent look and aimless joke,
in tasteless cups to draw unto the lees
the final cask, with no last words but these:
        What’s done is done—

Ukiyo—The Floating World (1950)

Recall the night, warm after rain, in Tokyo;
a street in Shinjuku where beauty is for show
and sale; where teashops not for tea are lantern-lit.
At every doorway girls like silken flowers sit
or stand; kimonos scarlet, gold brocade, maroon—
so young, too young, they smile but do not importune
as you, by chance the only passer-by just then,
review their faces.
                             Bamboo flute and samisen
are playing softly somewhere out of sight—
You stop—
Your breath suspends, for there alone before a shop
A child so lovely tears come to your eyes unbid
is bowing toward you, small hands crossed, her face
                        half-hid
The image freezes: fixed forever is the night
the moment she looks up at you and smiles through fright.

What Can We Say?

On a day of rare beauty in June of nineteen-fifty,
sixty thousand North Korean kuns
poured down on Seoul. They rolled the roks and us
almost into the sea, the Sea of Japan.
But in Kyongsang we held, and beneath a red sunrise
one morning we dogfaces and gyrenes
landed behind them at Inchon. They fought
to keep a corridor, then ran like rats.

We harried them to the Yalu River, where
a quarter million chinamen came over
stealthily as Washington by night
across the Delaware. They drove us back
south of Seoul and Suwon where we turned.

Joined by tommies, aussies, turks and others,
we beat them north again and fought them there
two years and more on bloody hills and ridges
along the line where it all began, nor they
nor we allowed to win, but only die,
until the brass, at leisure as it seemed,
signed papers and we quit. And what it cost
was a million of theirs—soldiers and civilians;
of ours, nearly half a million roks,
poor bastards all of them, and women and kids.
And forty thousand of our boys, who wanted
only to go home again someday,
never came home, never came home
to Alabama nor to Red Wing, Minnesota;
nor yet to Dorset, Broken Hill, or Tire.

Since then we see on TV, the History Channel,
how all of it was caused by a stupid mistake
Dean Acheson made in drawing a line on a map.
If that is true, well then, what can we say?
He died in nineteen seventy-one—at home,
of natural causes, so I understand.

King August of Mokil Speaks

Over the starlit open sea we come
in canoes of white and blue to Ponape.
We mark Polaris’ height with upright thumb:
the only guide we need to keep the sea-way.

Mokil to Ponape is many miles;
but our craft are agile and as swift as gulls
who wing at will among these happy isles;
we’ve wider sails than most, and keen-carved hulls.

Outriggers skim from crest to white-lipped crest
and lift in speed on moonward flowing swells.
Throughout the night the mothering wind holds west;
at morning light we hear the mission bells

and sight, far off, the Sokhes sentry rock
arising from the sea’s sun-misted breath,
pandanus foresting his gibbous back
and silhouetted palms about his chest.

He’s lord upon the wide Pacific blue
that lays eternal siege to him, and roars
with furious foam on reefs deployed below,
then crawls to lick his mangrove-rooted shores.

The mission wall is crumbling under vines.
Good Father Costigan waits by the gate.
We come to have his blessing, tell our sins,
and hear how God’s love conquers, soon or late.

I come to pray for seven hundred souls
who call me king: Maria, queen of all,
protect my people; save our fragile atoll
when typhoons rage and atom fires fall.

Fredericksburg

See them there, in their ranks on the Heights of Marye in the morning,
riflemen ranged to repel any charge to the wall.
See him there, the gray chieftain, brooding, breast-burdened and quiet
in grief for the yesterday fallen, for those who will fall.

Hear them below in the town, the confident voices
of boys from the north and young officers new to their bars;
none knowing what scything awaits on the meadows above them,
what fecklessness reigns in the minds of their leaders with stars.

Come away, for the outcome we know from the pages of history,
how the rebels in rags took the victory that day at small cost;
but weep for the loyal and brave, the lives that were wasted,
and sigh for the chieftain whose struggle was already lost.

Chancellorsville

‘See that moving line of  mist;
it lies so long and low.’
‘Sir, that surely is the dust
where rebel columns go.’

‘Then Bobby Lee is headed south;
my plan has brought success.’
‘Sir, I wish it were the truth,
but Jackson’s marching west.’

‘Then Howard and his doughty men,
will fry his bacon there.’
‘Sir, Howard’s off the Rapidan,
and hanging in the air.’

‘Hear how my guns to eastward roar.
What can before them stand?’
‘Those are the rebel cannon, sir,
where Lee is in command.’

‘Send out my swiftest courier,
Have Howard bend his lines.’
‘Too late, too late , I greatly fear
that Jackson’s through the pines.’

‘Whose troops are these that fly pell-mell
and  in such disarray?’
‘The troops are Howard’s, General,
and we have lost the day.’

‘What was it made that awful blast?
Why am I lying prone?’
‘A cannonball broke through the post
that you were leaning on.’

‘We must fall back across the ford,
and save what force we’ve got.’
‘Wait, General, for I have heard
that Jackson has been shot.’

‘Bugler, bugler, call retreat!
The fate I fear the most
is on the battlefield to meet
with Stonewall Jackson’s ghost.’

San Francisco

Mewling.....the channel burbles birds;
red right returning bound the buoys,
and homing to the gate of gold
the sailor hears the harbor’s voice:
Stand off woofs the warning horn;
Welcome sings the harp that swings
windstrung from headland to the crags.
The city harmonizes in pastels;
the sea lion surfaces to bark off key;
and unforgiving in the midst of all
clamor and commerce, only Alcatraz
is dumb, unless to whisper ¡Ay de mí!
Yo, en tiempo pasado, verde era
más que Isla Ángel cualquiera.*

First Light

Out of sleep, from half-remembered dreams
composed of sweet and bitter memories long
    out of mind
we rise an hour before the city wakes
and walk through alleys, seeking unfamiliar streets.

These houses,  windows shuttered,  blinds and
    curtains drawn,
give heavy sense of people sleeping in dim rooms;
of one,  or two perhaps,  awake but still undressed,
who sit in gloom,  taste last night’s tea, and read again
the letter that came yesterday, or long ago.

Fall Epigram

Is it only the days of gold,
Only the days of brown,
That make you smile or frown
At growing old?
Or is it but your frown
At growing old
That turns to brown
The days your smile made gold?

Destroyers of Souls

Blast them for betrayal of the young;
Damn them for the devilment they spread. 
Fell teachers of free verse, may they be hung
From Tyburn tree till dead, dead, dead. 
May souls of sciolists who teach such stuff
Be bunged into the boiling pitch of Hell
Until the beggers bawl, “Hold, hold! Enough! 
Henceforth the roundelay, the villanelle!”
Then may Mephisto laugh and gig them each
On sooty tines and fling them from his door   
Into the world again. There may they preach
The gospel of Ed Guest and Julia Moore;
And may they labor thus until the call
Of Gabriel Rossetti wakes us all.

Autoepitaph

Now that I’m dead, indifferent to me
the grave, the urn or scattered on the sea. 
The body matters nothing now, so let it be
whatever suits the living best,
now that I’m dead.

Yet in this aftertime I think I would
have someone say “If he did little good
he did as little harm as, being himself, he could,
so let the fellow have some rest,
now that he’s dead.”

The Quiet Country

There is a quiet country in the mind
where hills are misted, green and cedar-browed,   
where fields are freshened by untroubled wind,
and brooks turn wooden wheels, but not too loud;
the populace entire would not make up a crowd.

Here is our village nestled underhill,
a dozen cottages, and small are they;
a granary, a church, a mumbling mill,
a schoolhouse standing by the grassy way,
and all of timbers made, whitewashed and roofed with hay.

A  boy of ten with book and slate in hand
has wandered from the village to the stream;
where dragonflies are drowsing on the sand
he sits in shade, and by his eyes there seem
to gather round him brighter dreams within our dream.

He knows a meadow where there comes no scythe,
where wing-wangs whistle and a keek replies,
where mourning doves are all the morning blithe,
and mists of silver-wingéd miggies rise,
so small they’re separately unseen by human eyes.

He knows a wold untangled and yet wild
where does and dappled fawns may safely dwell;
 he knows where apples fall and yellow plums are piled.

And now, in tones like sunlight, goes the bell;
it calls away to school the dreaming child—
 yet dream we on, to waking worlds unreconciled.

Nogiku no Haka

October comes but does not linger long:
‘The Later Moon’ we called this season years
ago, so many of them gone, yet strong
as yesterday such boyhood visions rise
before me that I cannot stop my tears.

It was as fair a moonlit night as this;
my nearest cousin, Tamiko, and I
descended from our garden on the heights. 
No wind disturbed the shadowing pines; the sky
was shimmering with sheer and silken lights,
and bright across the meadow-grass below
the wild nogiku scattered skeins of white.            

No sound but sandalfall as Tamiko,
her insubstantial shoulders basket-bowed,
trudged a step before me on the road. 
How gracefully her shining sidelocks fell
encircling her ears; her cheeks how fair;
her neck how elegantly formed and well
displayed beneath her dark and lustrous hair. 
Too greatly taken by the sight, I spoke,
or rather, like a nervous frog, I croaked;
and at so strange a noise Tamiko turned.
—Masao, what’s the matter?—
                                                    Though I burned
with shame I pled our burdens:
                                                —Let us rest
here by the road. From here the view is best.—
She shook her head; we would, returning late,
assuredly be questioned at the gate.
She feared their questions, and her eyes grew wide.
I said
            —What need have we, to such as they,
to give excuses? What have we to hide?—
    
She yielded, and on straw beside the way
we rested. Moonlight slanted through the trees
and on the open field shone full as day.
In honor of the scene she wished we might
sing together, for on such a night
even such illiterates as we,
she said, can still forget our misery.
We sang a simple song or two, embraced
artlessly as playmates do, enlaced
our fingers, leaned together; in which style
we grew distracted, silent for a while,
and in the passage of that while, nearby,
a line of calling geese traversed the sky
crying
            —Follow, follow us; beyond the straits 
the winds are warm and sweet; there comfort waits.—
But plucking up a flower with a sigh,
Tamiko said
                    —Look here, Masao; see
the spindly white nogiku: this is me:
almost too weak to stand, and cannot fly.—
   
Then we heard the crickets’ chilly chirr
and in our shrine of shadow felt the stir
of night winds. We had tarried far too late;
the splendid moon stood low upon the plain
before we reached the village and our gate,

whereat we breathed as one. A common pain
rose in our bosoms, for we guessed our fate;
and she, more wise than I, surmised it all:
the stern inquiry and the dread decree
of sundering, and that our childish plea,
of lingering to view the moon, must fall.

Again and yet again October’s come
and gone before I know it, but no more
on Tamiko’s bright face and brimming eyes
shines the Later Moon. Tamiko lies
these forty autumns in a mossy bed,
of forced marriage and of childbirth dead
on Chiba’s desolate and stony shore
attended only by the wild chrysanthemum.

About the author

Wiley Clements lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in retirement after a long career—first as a military journalist, later as a developer of health maintenance organizations (HMO’s). He was editor (1998-2002) of The Susquehanna Quarterly, an online magazine of formal poetry.

Comments on Wiley Clements’ poems:

Wiley Clements’ poems are rooted in deeply considered experience and deeply felt historical moments, and their language and movement are compelling. In a time of hype, when every other poet is compared to Homer or Dante, I hope I will be understood when I say simply that these are good poems.
—Robert Mezey