THINGS WHOLE AND HOLY FOR KENNETH REXROTH 215Shortly after emceeing San Francisco’s landmark 1955 event at which Allen
Ginsberg first chanted Howl, Rexroth translated Spanish love poems for Law-
rence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, snugly fitting Neruda’s manner:
You are the delirious youth of the bee,
The drunkenness of the wave...
When I lie on the earth you come into being
Like the flowing dust, the river deepening its bed.The question is, Will the real woman please step forward? Rexroth praised and
helped publish women such as Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Levertov. Then late
in life he invented a woman to voice his Love Poems of Marichiko. She offers—or
Rexroth has her offer—her lover “the dew / Of the first morning of the world,”
she blazes “like the inside of a vast expanding pearl,” and holds “the perfumed
dusk” in her hair.
One way or another we come back gratefully to Rexroth’s bounding energy
—erotic, poetic, political, philosophic, religious, environmental. In Defense of
Earthgives his daughters an aardvark-to-zebra bestiary, and for the older girl,
“Mary and the Seasons” overflows with open-air life and the “completely open
nervous system” Tu Fu had.
The wholeness of life, for Rexroth, means finding holy within bodily events,
the supernatural within nature, and doing this through poems. So, weaving
seven- with eight-syllable lines, he begins “Incarnation” in the mountains, as
ever.
Climbing alone all day long
In the blazing waste of spring snow,
I came down with the sunset ’s edge
To the highest meadow, green
In the cold mist of waterfalls,
To a cobweb of water
Woven with innumerable
Bright flowers of wild iris.Then sunset, blazing snow, waterfall mist, wild iris weave into his wife ’s “touch
and smell” to bring on incarnation.
Forever the thought of you,
And the splendor of the iris,
The crinkled iris petal,
The gold hairs powdered with pollen,
And the obscure cantata
Of the tangled water, and the
Burning, impassive snow peaks,
Are knotted together here.