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Two poems by Marvin Bell
“To Dorothy” and “The Self and the Mulberry”
To Dorothy
You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
And a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
Of a windy night, it brushes the wall
And sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
‘Things that are lost are all equal.’
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
The air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.
The Self and the Mulberry
I wanted to see the self, so I looked at the mulberry.
It had no trouble accepting its limits,
yet defining and redefining a small area
so that any shape was possible, any movement.
It stayed put, but was part of all the air.
I wanted to learn to be there and not there
like the continually changing, slightly moving
mulberry, wild cherry and particularly the willow.
Like the willow, I tried to weep without tears.
Like the cherry tree, I tried to be sturdy and productive.
Like the mulberry, I tried to keep moving.
I couldn’t cry right, couldn’t stay or go.
I kept losing parts of myself like a soft maple.
I fell ill like the elm. That was the end
of looking in nature to find a natural self.
Let nature think itself not manly enough!
Let nature wonder at the mystery of laughter.
Let nature hypothesize man’s indifference to it.
Let nature take a turn at saying what love is!
Marvin Bell
Marvin Bell (1937-2020) was an American poet who was named the first Poet Laureate of Iowa in 2000. Raised on Long Island, NY, he received an MFA form the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he would later teach for 40 years, retiring in 2005 as the Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters. His poems are often concerned with the relationship of the self to others and, in his later work, its relation to the natural world.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Two poems by Marvin Bell
“To Dorothy” and “The Self and the Mulberry”
Two poems by Marvin Bell
“To Dorothy” and “The Self and the Mulberry”
To Dorothy
You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
And a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
Of a windy night, it brushes the wall
And sweeps away the day till we sleep.
A child said it, and it seemed true:
‘Things that are lost are all equal.’
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
The air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.
The Self and the Mulberry
I wanted to see the self, so I looked at the mulberry.
It had no trouble accepting its limits,
yet defining and redefining a small area
so that any shape was possible, any movement.
It stayed put, but was part of all the air.
I wanted to learn to be there and not there
like the continually changing, slightly moving
mulberry, wild cherry and particularly the willow.
Like the willow, I tried to weep without tears.
Like the cherry tree, I tried to be sturdy and productive.
Like the mulberry, I tried to keep moving.
I couldn’t cry right, couldn’t stay or go.
I kept losing parts of myself like a soft maple.
I fell ill like the elm. That was the end
of looking in nature to find a natural self.
Let nature think itself not manly enough!
Let nature wonder at the mystery of laughter.
Let nature hypothesize man’s indifference to it.
Let nature take a turn at saying what love is!
Marvin Bell
Marvin Bell (1937-2020) was an American poet who was named the first Poet Laureate of Iowa in 2000. Raised on Long Island, NY, he received an MFA form the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he would later teach for 40 years, retiring in 2005 as the Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters. His poems are often concerned with the relationship of the self to others and, in his later work, its relation to the natural world.
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