In mid-life I began to buy old stuff From the stupendous flood that swirls around Our days and strands its flotsam in church bazaars And yard sales: old tools, knackery, clocks and art. I love the mind that needs no furnishing But itself—St Benedict, whose monks Have just two robes, a blanket and a cot; And Thoreau, who mocks the farmer self-condemned To push a house and barn down the road of life— But the sad truth? Their light has not transformed me: I set them as stars of unusual clarity In the nebula of salvages and wisdoms I want to adorn my life with, as if the self Were a black hole pulling bright bodies to it.
It seems a trait mostly of tiny creatures, This drive to ornament one’s self and lair. Some birds will weave a nest with bright yarn, pleased As I would be to sit an embroidered throne; And there’s the packrat—surely purloined buttons Are magic acorns against a deeper cold Than winter, which it can’t imagine But I can. Time passing, my finds grow sad Or remind me I am sad. I turn on them Like a peevish queen exiling her old favorite. Sometimes, though, exiled things are the small change Of a great transaction, a death or breakup: A hesitance clings to them like the smell Of the old parlor till someone impatient cries, She’s gone; clear this stuff out! Give us some room!
Hunter-gatherers, we forage sleepily Or snatch with sudden fingers, an alternation Old as the species, a rhythm as amnesic As night tides. Flea markets and country auctions Are transfer points of history, Sargassos From which we fish a thing or two we fancy As the rest sinks. The process is Darwinian: Fitness for a niche preserves one lamp, Damns others as good. The more I know I think Great books and even cathedrals fall beneath The same laws. Last year I found a wicker swing For the porch and a clock that, cleaned, might tick for half A century. I thought: How long I’ll last Is in between. I scrubbed my finds hard, to banish The entropy of others’ firmaments. New to my galaxy, let them reflect me!
Taste is an ability to recognize
the one excellence amidst
a thousand mediocrities.
—Chesterfield
A splendid principle for life, Milord: Since passion pulls at judgment, let judging well Be one’s passion! Classical, too: the fear of shame That maddens heroes, the measure of great souls, Is after all the drive to be that One, The best among fairly good. And what if taste, In a Periclean interlude, should triumph? Social pressure might raise the best and damn The worst, improving horseflesh, architecture, Cooking, even (admittedly a stretch) The status of poets. Rummaging a sale Where the best is blemished and the world outside Has the same look of huddling in a heap Toward chaos, putting this aside for that, I feel a little lordly—self-endowed With powers of choice—one of a better sort.
In Gaza boys comb over rubbish piles For anything—a pot without a hole— To trade for a scoop of chickpeas. In Calcutta, The Entrepreneur of the Year (she won a prize) Was a woman who started a junkyard in her yard. An Indian friend just come to the U.S. asked What struck him first, said, Open car lots. In my town They’d be stripped clean by dawn: a mirror will buy a meal. I feel the shabbiness of my good fortune, Trolling the fine junk of a rich country, breathing By choice the dust of what an old writer called “A thousand mediocrities.” But we too Show cleverness: we stretch a pension, assemble A cheap layette for a coming grandchild, afford A hobby. In the worst places in the world, When something changes for the better—the rich Are broken to the yoke of partial justice, Or spent land is revived—new adaptations Blossom: ornaments are hammered from scrap, Chunks of camel meat for sale sizzle In the bazaar on radiator mesh. Fresh flowers and fabrics wave. The human hive Crawls stall to stall like bees across the comb, Scenting from cell to cell the honey of hope.
Paul Hamill has published in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Cortland Review, Diagram, and others. The most recently published of his collections is a chapbook, Meeting the Minotaur, from Split Oak Press, 2011. He retired from Ithaca College in 2011, where he had been a senior administrator, sometimes lecturer, and also, for a couple of years, county Poet Laureate. He spent last year as a Senior Fulbright Fellow at Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, Romania, named for a great poet whom the authorities forced to refuse the Nobel Prize in the early 1950s. A sequence of Hamill’s poems and an interview with him can be found in the current issue of the Journal of American, British, and Canadian Studies (Romania).