Leave the gun. Take the Cannoli. Also, Robert Lowell

July 06, 2021

I don't know why I thought about that line on the school run this morning!

I know there have been multiple attempts to analyse and understand the line within the broader context of the Godfather narrative because, well, I just googled it.

My overly simplistic reading is something like 'rescue what good you can from a horrible situation' or 'eat desert as a coping mechanism' (I'm speaking as someone who ate half a leftover birthday cake yesterday.) They wont get me a PhD in Film Studies but hopefully They're will buy me a few lines here. I don't know why I just read this paragraph back in a Meg Ryan 'You've Got Mail' voice...

Some of my recent Cannoli's are the American poets: Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and William H. Matchett. I can't pretend that I fully understand them but I find that when I read any one of them I get that tingly/excited 'I should write a poem!' feeling, often quickly followed by that tired/blank page 'I should go to bed now..' feeling. Maybe it's not necessary to make your own Cannoli..

And yet! I always come back for another go. I love Lowell's poem 'Waking Early Sunday Morning', maybe just for the noise and energy of it:

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible

stone and bone-crushing waterfall-

raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten

steps of the roaring ladder, and then

to clear the top on the last try,

alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off. the Salmon breaks

water, and now my body wakes

to feel the unpolluted joy

and criminal leisure of a boy-

no rainbow smashing a dry fly

in the white run is free as I,

here squatting like a dragon on

time's hoard before the day's begun!

(And so on..)

Robert Lowell and some books

I chanced upon a video of Lowell reading from his poem 'Water', from sometime in the 50s I think. 'Water' seemed to fit into my general over-arching watery/flowy/constant movement theme. It was a bit of a call back to the Anais Nin interview which appears earlier in the audio.

I loved hearing Lowell read his poem but now, reading it back myself, I find it feels way more claustrophobic and sad than I remembered... The opening two stanzas feature in the Hollow Ships audio until they are drowned out by a passing plane and some birdsong.

Here is the full poem:

Water

It was a Maine lobster town—
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this distance in time
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.