`They Are Outside Time'

The late Donald Justice is one of those writers – Henry James, among the poet’s favorites, is another – whose work probably holds scant attraction for young readers. It’s an understandable and easily forgiven lapse, for the young are unlikely to appreciate a quiet, memory-driven poet like Justice whose sensibility is intimated by a selection of his titles: “Sadness,” “Thinking About the Past,” “Nostalgia and Complaint of the Grandparents.” To my mind, Justice accomplishes the almost-impossible feat of writing about evanescence and the bittersweetness of memory without lapsing into sentimentality. Consider “October: A Song,” a poem I read because of its seasonal interest before spending another hour or more with the Collected Poems:

“Summer, goodbye.
The days grow shorter.
Cranes walk the fairway now
In careless order.

They step so gradually
Toward the distant green
They might almost be brushstrokes
Animating a screen.

“Mists canopy
The water hazard.
Nearby, a little flag
Lifts, brave but frazzled.

“Under sad clouds
Two white-capped golfers
Stand looking off, dreamy and strange,
Like young girls in Balthus.”

Seldom is clarity so winningly coupled with wistfulness. Strong emotion (even strong, subdued emotion) has a way of gumming up language, particularly in writers whose first medium is emotion, not language. Justice’s poem is almost Imagistic in its declarative forthrightness, and the reference to the painted screen confirms he had East Asian art in mind. The poetic method may be borrowed from classical Chinese poetry (via Pound and Amy Lowell), but the scenes, especially of the golfers, are reminiscent of Hokusai (and, ridiculously, the opening of The Sound and the Fury – Benjy at the golf course). Justice was a master of the artfully, comically unexpected – in this case, Balthus, another artist noted for clarity. What comes to mind are two middle-aged men in funny clothes lolling about like pubescent girls. It’s funny but it works, and Justice has prepared us – “careless order,” “brave but frazzled,” “dreamy and strange.” Guy Davenport wrote in The Balthus Notebook:

“Balthus’s children have no past (childhood resorbs a memory that cannot yet be consulted) and no future (as a concern). They are outside time.”