Difficult Delights

By Arthur Purdy

A remarkable debut by a 90-year-old poet writing with force, beauty and wisdom about war and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479796304

Arthur Purdy

On May 18, 1923 in Newark, N.J. I was born to warm, outgoing, American parents. Then, a year later, my sister was born. We lived surrounded by and occupied with family. There I knew 22 aunts and uncles and 17 first cousins. We were a very people oriented family, with much empathetic discussion of their doings and personalities, for understanding, entertainment and a good bit of laughter. Most of my growing up years were lived in Elizabeth, N.J., where the depression seemed only with money, not with people. The streets, from four-family houses, were alive with after-school kids and neighbors on front steps. In high school, Mrs. MacFarquhar, starting with Bobbie Burns, brought about my love with poetry. At graduation I read 15 minutes of rhyming couplets, including many classmates names and activities. I was not valedictorian. In 1941, Indiana University and ROTC and WW2. I joined the US Army, designated for the infantry and the front line, and there the truth of war. Suddenly war, outside of me, was done and I was alive. I pledge myself to know each day I am alive. Back to school, no longer pre-med, no longer how I will be categorized. Now, to know, to learn, after living wars inhumanity, what I am, what is me, what are human beings. Searching great writings to know. Beyond knowing, we must feel what we are. We know we are alive from our feelings. Poetry expresses feelings. A few of my poems were published and some war poems were read before veterans groups. So I live my life rich with people, and poetry helps to keep my pledge to know each day I am alive.

Book preview

MUD IN YOUR I

MUD IN YOUR I

One neat night the Universe

And I to eye – my lusty I

Singing in mind and blood—

Rollicked in symmetrical flood,

Raised this flask over the bar,

Stuffed worlds and time in a passing star,

Swilled earth, guzzled sky,

Roared laughter and drank the me from my I.

Drank the me from the eye of me,

Transported, sweet brew, my I to you.

Here in my newly naked sight

Armies of you in religious flight

Trampling the fertile of flesh and mind

Through the beauty of now running to find

Tomorrow’s manna, the promised due.

Laughter, sad laughter, the me in you.

Mud in your I, Universe sings.

Life is wine. The cup is mine.

Deaf to the music, drunk with your I

You flee the night to immortally die.

In your circus of me, your nations of brothers

Where oneness excludes strangely all others,

By logic as cold as the light of the moon

You alone dance to heaven’s sweet tune.

Bottom’s up, boys, you’re the top, boys.

The world’s your pie, in your I.

To the sight of you! To the sight of me!

To the inbetween we rarely see!

So little to take Death seems perverse,

But, boys, it uncorks the whole Universe.

Not for the world will it let you go by

Without drinking full the me from your I.

BENEATH THE MUSHROOMED CLOUD OF BRAIN

Beneath the mushroomed cloud of brain,

     Explosionwise in all directions

Glittering glands drive blasts of hunger,

     And the word of being bursts

To syllables of disconnected days.

Rising, ungathered, we gravitate

     In consuming herds, worshipping

Wholeness at the altars of computed numbers,

     With human faces shrinking

On the coins and dollars of efficiency.

Stones of comfort, from the marketplaces hurled,

     Numb the voices of our blood,

Stun the self, spirit it beyond

     Our grasp, where wellfed hunger

Steals loaves from starving worlds.

Galaxies throb in the womb, ionizing

     Form to shape. But shape

Devours form and nations earth

     In willful vanity, where light of our streetlamps

Drowns stars, inflates our shadows.

WAITING ROOM

In shaded light and padded ease

Conditioned air murders the season.

The glassed-in fish, the cactus and I

Share the comfortable passing of reason.

I wear a tie; I comb my hair;

My feet are buried in shiny shoes;

But every hour on the hour

I’m less familiar than the news

Those peddlers hawk; demusiced music

In between crowding void with void.

I crouch inside this waiting, rescuing

Thought by enterprise destroyed

Among the magazines. I can’t believe

The photoed girl’s glandular pose,

Nor manhood in motorcars speeds the race,

That mind of flesh in technology’s clothes

Does more than gird old loins of doubt.

I’ve