1
Diddle diddle dumpling
My son John
Went to bed
With his stockings on
One shoe off
And the other shoe on
Diddle diddle dumpling
My son John
A woman’s voice is speaking it.
She knows what comes next. Her voice expresses the pleasure of knowing it. Anticipates your pleasure. Anticipates her own pleasure at being about to shape the sounds yet one more time.
The sounds were once uttered to her in the same fashion. By which utterance she was in part fashioned. As she now in turn is fashioning. A cycle becomes apparent to her in the rounded motion of it rolling in its grooves. Molding with molded sounds. Giving form to air. Counting out, as an accompaniment to touching, an extension of touching.
Contact.
The occasion of the rhyme is an infant’s bedtime. It marks a transition. It masks a transition. It masks an interruption. It distracts from the intrusion of being lifted out of play, hauled into the disagreeable discipline of having free movement restricted, of going through all the stages of washing and undressing and being put into bed and given over to darkness. A break point approaches. Soon the mouth of a cavern will swallow the room and all it holds.
A woman’s voice. It could have been a man’s voice but in memory never was. Not speaking but half chanting and half teasing. It is the sound of an intimate knowledge of the inside of the body. A sound of love or what sounds like love, of a desire to give comfort. Of the pleasure of sharing what is almost too silly to be said aloud. Of a holy and inane abandonment.
Diddle
What is diddle. What does diddle look like. Like nothing at all. It is the sound of some unsuspected capacity hidden in the mouth.
Diddle diddle
The action of the tongue moving back and forth against the top of the mouth. Just shy of where the teeth start. A ticklish repetition that could go on forever.
Dumpling
A round and busy sound, closing together and popping apart. Funny in itself and pleasurable to say again and again. A sound shaped like the mouth. And likewise a thing, something remembered and desired, a foodstuff scrumptious, word in which the texture of a dumpling in the mouth joins with the imagined flavor now permeating the sound of the word and the part the word plays in the rhythm of what is being put forth, in a place liberated from constraint and permanently surprising and pleasing. And somewhere inside it, on the reverse side of its syllables if you could follow them that far back, perhaps the surprise of having a body at all.
My son John
Three even claps. Whose son? Who’s John? Who speaks? Another infant entering another bed. Everything has already happened before. In the place across the way, wherever that way might be, the way where the words have already been, the country where they went pioneering, in the rhyme where everything that long ago happened is happening again. It happened and so the words are shaped this way. Everything that happens now must happen because it already did. Is in movement and can no longer be stopped.
Went to bed
With his stockings on
Heard before understood. Memorized before understood. A picture formed without asking why or how. The ruts of its sounds familiar like floorboards many times crawled over. A story told before any sense of what a story was. Why did it happen. Was it shameful that it happened. So shameful or ridiculous or miraculous that a rhyme was made of it.
One shoe off
The clomp of a shoe falling to the floor. Hitting the floor on the last beat.
And the other shoe on
An answer coming back, from other to one. A dance taking place, tilting back and forth from off to on. As if seesawing in a basket. A basket of contradictions. One on, other off. Light off, night on.
Diddle diddle dumpling
My son John
Falling now not rising. The same words coming back only to say that this time it’s over—once was to open, twice to close—the utterance snaps shut, ending where it started, returned inside itself. Swaddled in night. Engulfed.
Finally it will rise again to the surface as an inner voice, if not the voice of the listener then a voice that installed itself within, reciting what never needed to be memorized. It nudged its way into memory, finding by stealth a place already established for it. Where it will now continue to repeat itself. Perhaps for the pleasure of it. Pleasure on the part of who or what. Living machinery that plays its own music to itself. In any event not to be evicted.
To be joined by so many more, they will rattle around together, rhymes with crumbs of stories in them, the tales of Mother Hubbard’s poor dog and Peter the pumpkin eater and the woman in the gigantic shoe, the cadaverous husband and the enormous plump wife, of the mouse and the clock and the dish and the moon, of Jack and Jill and their disastrous fate at the bottom of hill. Not tales at all since you can never know anything further of them or what happened before or after, nothing actually of what any of this is about beyond its own grotesque fragmentary reality. Something simply was and was imprinted. The rhyme is proof of its finality.
Comforting because known, if for no other reason. Even if not chosen, somehow at home in the world of pails and shoes and barking dogs and water buckets. Of knocks and cracks and frights worn away into harmlessness, now merely odd, messages from beings who can say this and nothing more, which is like saying nothing. Why did they fall? Who had ever known them?
Not tales but shreds of sound. Pieces of thump.
See saw Marjory Daw
Pease porridge in the pot
Some in rags and some in tags
Alive only in the satisfaction of the edge of the tongue hitting the spot, to make the sound come right, any obstacle having been taken out of the way. Passage made clear.
And the beat ever after to be heard underneath at the bottom of it
Ding dong bell
Full fathom five
Fee fi fo fum
Tweedledee and Tweedledum
Boomlay boomlay boomlay boom
Dark ocean floor.
2
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Riding through the glen
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
With his band of men
Feared by the bad
Loved by the good
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Robin Hood
Television.
The theme breaks into the uninterrupted flow that is afternoon. To hear it at all you have to be aware of what time it is on the clock.
Time to hear the sound that will sound only once until next week. You may have to run from play in the yard to get there.
It is the summons to a beginning, the trumpet sounding before the joust, that finally will be the only thing remembered. It promised what endured only in the theme itself. All else, names and plots, bleached out to a crisscrossing shape as skeletal as the rafters of a barn. Men in a glen. Feared is to bad as loved is to good.
Compressing to four words
Riding through the glen
all of the story that counted. An eternal state of progressing through open space. All the happening that need ever happen.
The event is a picture. The picture is a sound. All are one. The past is now. The glen is here. The riding is continual within the words. Four words that are one word—glyph. Capsule or module in which you are transported. Without moving. Without actually going anywhere. Radiating in space. The movement itself motionless.
Four-word phrase within which nothing ever ends. Perpetual going-through.
Through what? A glen. What is a glen?
What is gone through. Compound of light and horse and rock and green. Of hill of grass. Of spur. Of air.
Eternal mystery of glen.
3
dark brown is the river
golden is the sand
it flows along forever
with trees on either hand
green leaves a-floating
castles of the foam
boats of mine a-boating
where will all come home
on goes the river
and out past the mill
away down the valley
away down the hill
away down the river
a hundred miles or more
other little children
shall bring my boats ashore
There were phrases found in Robert Louis Stevenson that stuck like pictures in a book seen once and never after unseen, returned to out of need
my bed is a boat
I never can get back by day
the trees are crying aloud
all night across the dark we steer
to Providence or Babylon
shivering in my nakedness
see the spreading circles die
cities blazing in the fire
the terrors of night for once spoken aloud, the power of fires and shadows.
And by morning light other words
hayloft
meadow-side
wagons
mill wheel
made of straw and weathered wood, pictures of a scarcely known world. World continuous with sun and ground and hedge.
In this book, handed down in an already crinkled copy, crayon marks in its margins, what was hidden was being revealed. A constant opening up. Nobody knew of these things except Robert Louis Stevenson. First named author. Secret voice, intimate presence.
The words are places and in the middle of them—the middle of themselves—they want to move beyond into other places
I should like to rise and go
where the golden apples grow
and that is enough. The words can stop right there, stay forever on that rising note, suspended
until they find themselves where everything has been all along, staring into water, the cool water always to be found lapping at the edge of the hiding place under some bridge, the edge of some clear stream
O the clean gravel!
A child makes boats out of paper. The boats are set floating in a stream and go out of sight and are lost. They are not lost. They will find a harbor among other children. Unknown children in an unknown world.
The children are not there. They are not to be seen. They are other. Who are they anyway. They are somewhere. On the other side. After the words end.
Where does poetry come from.
Where Go the Boats?
Geoffrey O’Brien has published eight collections of poetry, most recently The Blue Hill (Marsh Hawk Press, 2018). His other books include Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties (1988), The Phantom Empire (1993), The Browser’s Ecstasy (2000), Sonata for Jukebox (2004), The Fall of the House of Walworth (2010), and Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows (2013). He lives in Brooklyn. WHERE DID POETRY COME FROM is due from Marsh Hawk Press in May 2020.