In All, There Were Three Things by Fernando Pessoa

de todo, quedaron tres cosas:

la certeza de que estaba siempre comenzando,
la certeza de que había que seguir
y la certeza de que sería interrumpido
antes de terminar.

 
Hacer de la interrupción un camino nuevo,
hacer de la caida, un paso de danza,
del miedo, una escalera,
del sueño, un puente, de la búsqueda,...un encuentro

by Fernando Pessoa

In all, there were three things:

the certainty one is always beginning 

the certainty one must go further

and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.

From the interruptions, to make a new path,

from falling, a dance step,

from fear, a ladder

from sleep, a bridge, from the search...the meeting

By Fernando Pessoa

Translated by Cecilia Ramon and Sheila Packa

These words by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa express the frustrations of being a writer or artist. I post them here to remind myself of the fact that each new project has these three things.  Art is capability, and maybe the best art flourishes in the tension between failure and success. The writer or artist learns how to use limitations productively in the service of creating the new work. In my mind, the best artists and writers are always exploring  -- whether that is beings, objects or obstacles -- and learning new approaches, techniques, and methods.  I remind myself -- so easy to forget -- that my muse has a name: Seek. 

Quotes from the Masters

"Poetry is made up of nothing except beautiful details."   --Voltaire


I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; prose—words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (July 12, 1827)


This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
-- Walt Whitman,  from Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)


If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way.  --Emily Dickinson

In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions. The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.  If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
--Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry


Walking, like prose, has a definite aim....When the man who is walking has reached his goal...when he was reached the place, book, fruit, the object of his desire...this possession at once entirely annuls his whole act; the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbs the means; and whatever the act, only the result remains. It is the same with utilitarian language: the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard....The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically. 
-- Paul Valery, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," The Art of Poetry

The difference between the action of a poem and and of an ordinary narrative is physiological.
--Paul Valery, "Remarks on Poetry," The Art of Poetry

Making Poems and Love

If there is a connection between love and good writing, then it's the body.  Many poets write the erotic. This poem by Donald Hall (see the New Yorker January 23, 2012 for his wonderful essay about aging) creates a couple making love, and his focus on the color gold fascinates me.  It's as if he has set this moment in amber to keep for all eternity. The sense of enclosure is palpable, the walls of the room echoed by the sides of the clear bowl that holds the yellow roses.  The other focus is centers of daisies, the couple centered in the room, and the light.

Gold

Pale gold of the walls, gold
of the centers of daisies, yellow roses
pressing from a clear bowl. All day
we lay on the bed, my hand
stroking the deep
gold of your thighs and your back.
We slept and woke
entering the golden room together,
lay down in it breathing
quickly, then
slowly again,
caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily
touching my hair now.

We made in those days
tiny identical rooms inside our bodies
which the men who uncover our graves
will find in a thousand years,
shining and whole.

The stanza break in this poem travels forward in time, beyond the deaths of these two lovers in a fascinating and satisfying figurative leap, the "tiny identical rooms inside our bodies"
where gold light will remain.  The "o" sound resonates through this poem, solemn, orchestral, and extraordinary.  It is as if the poet were spinning honey. 

If there is one mantra spoken by writing teachers, it might be this: write with the five senses. If writers forget physicality, we forget the source of pleasure. This poem by "Little Lion Face" by May Swenson uses all the sensual and erotic possibilities of the body.  Here is an excerpt:

Little lion face
I stopped to pick
among the mass of thick
succulent blooms, the twice

streaked flanges of your silk
sunwheel relaxed in wide
dilation, I brought inside,
placed in a vase.  Milk

of your shaggy stem
sticky on my fingers, and
your barbs hooked to my hand,
sudden stings from them 

were sweet.  Now I'm bold
to touch your swollen neck,
put careful lips to slick
petals, snuff up gold

pollen in your navel cup.

There are two bodies connecting, interacting, in this poem. The narrator feels "barbs hooked to my hand, sudden stings," and the dandelion she has described with "swollen neck" and a "navel cup."  The entire poem delivers this level of intense connection. The sibilance, the s sounds, abound and the vowel sounds, or assonance, lends more richness. Later in the poem, echoing the succulent, the poet twice repeats the word, suck. And the erotic energy amazes, considering the topic is a dandelion.  She makes love with her words. The reader is transported. 

Transport is a very apt word. The use of figurative language, associational leaps of time and space, and ecstatic moments of being are the realm of poetry.  In another poem by Mark Doty, "A Display of Mackerel," we find a juxtaposition of mackerel at a fish market with a Tiffany stained glass window and jewels displayed in a shop.  The "iridescent, watery, prismatics" can transport us between the body of a fish, to a soap bubble, to gems in a glass case.

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window. 

It's a meditation on love and death, this meditation on mackerel.  Doty heightens the effect by
the use of high contrast. The fish are displayed on crushed ice, quickly followed by an image 
of sun on gasoline. The particular is considered along with the multitude. He puts no boundary
between the natural and the created, fish scale and jeweler's enamels, dead and alive. All is 
beauty.  "They're all exact expressions/ of the one soul..."  and 

Suppose we could iridesce, 


like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer--would you want

to be yourself only
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost?  They'd prefer,


plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting

With mackerel, no less, Doty strikes at the fundamental questions of the individual and
communal. What is it for, he seems to ask, except for what he calls in The Art of Description,
dazzle?

Love, love, love. That's what all these poems are about. They demonstrate how poets enter 
writing through the body, explore with the senses, and leap into the figurative, reaching the 
metaphysical, all the while remaining connected to the physical body. 
 

___

Doty has a new book about writing, The Art of Description: World Into Word (Graywolf Press,
2010) that I recommend.  From a poets perspective, he examines splendid descriptive work
by various poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swenson, and that of many
others beside an abecedarian guide. 

____

"Gold" by Donald Hall
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16635

"Little Lion Face" by May Swenson
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15815


"A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty
"http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/176663

The Use of the Past: Reading Virginia Woolf

Memory is a rich source of material for all poets and writers. It is the substance of memoir but also a major part of fiction and poetry. What we notice, what images resonate, what our mind fastens upon -- what fascinates -- changes over time. I've been reading a wonderful work about origins: Virginia Woolf, in "A Sketch of the Past," wrote:

"I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible -- I often wonder -- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it -- the past -- as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There are the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890. I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start."

Each of us possesses those moments of great intensity that live in our mind, that actually illuminate and cast light on other events and become part of our perception. We listen to the past.

These moments make us who we are. Our listening to the past takes us back to events that are moments of intense sensation and awareness. Moments of being, Virginia Woolf calls them. And it isn't only events -- day dreams or night dreams like her own dream of the looking glass where she saw the frightening face of an animal in the background also create our consciousness. They are our dream of life.

Each writer has their own set of images, words, and sounds that are unique. These are repeated through one's body of work. Kate Green, a writing teacher, poet and novelist from Minneapolis, called these "totemic images" because they are very deep and they are in fact sources for the individual writer that yield again and again.

In writing, these are coordinates on the map that one might call the self. We see, hear, smell, taste and touch everything through these moments of being. It gives our work dimension and depth. Woolf said:

"I was thinking about Stella as we crossed the Channel a month ago. I have not given her a thought since. The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand time deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. But to feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary. The present must be smooth, habitual. For this reason -- that it destroys the fullness of life -- any break -- like that of house moving -- causes me extreme distress; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into hard thin splinters. As I say to L: "What's there real about this? Shall we ever live a real life again?" "At Monk's House," he says. So I write this, taking a morning off...I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream."

I write a lot, essay, poetry and fiction. It seems difficult now to distinguish kinds of writing -- memoir or nonfiction, fiction or poetry -- except by considering the external form, the writer's intent, and the purpose of the language. We want memoir and biography to be based on facts. of course. But it is a creation or a re-creation.

In fiction, the writer can create the facts to make a drama. Fiction captures the heightened moments of being and those other moments that mundane and the unremarkable in every life. "Non-being" according to Woolf -- "those moments lived not consciously." She said: "The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being."

Poetry (including prose poems) seems to have a shorter circuit, an immediate arrival at being, through its compression, physicality, language and music. Poetry has the capability of simultaneity. To me, it is the invention or device that Woolf wanted. Good writing does help us "plug in" and live our lives through from the start.
_______

Schulkind, Jeanne, Editor. Moments of Being: Virginia Woolf. Second Edition. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, New York, London. c1985 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett.

Revision and The Body

Good poems are written in the body.  Some might say that poems are written with the body.  The five senses are full engaged. The poem is connected to the body of the person and to the earth's body.  

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry," says Emily Dickinson.  She reminds me that part of the body is energy. The first half of this sentence, "if I feel physically..."  is countered by the next part, "as if the top of my head were taken off." I think of this as energy. These days we are aware of an energy body in alternative healing, Hindu or yoga philosophy, people talk about the chakras and the concept of kundalini, the upward journey through the body toward union with the divine. This experience is a spiritual one. I define the word spirituality in this way--a mutuality of spirits, a feeling of congruence with another. Poetry is the union or communion of the spirit. 

How does one create a poem that gives another person this experience? I do think there are ways to revise increase the poems physicality and spirituality. First question then is, is the poem written in the body? Does it employ all the senses? Is it fully physical?  


The next question is about spirit or energy. This part of revision, in my experience is about taking out the extra junk: extra words, explanation, interpretation.  It involves becoming more simple, more focused, more evocative.  In my college writing class with teacher Wayne Moen, I learned that the more evocative a poem, the stronger it was.  He insisted that we allow the reader to participate in making meaning.  Lawrence Sterne also said this; he was the author of Tristam Shandy. Do not insult the reader, Sterne warned, by telling him what to think or feel. The revision technique needed is one of ellision. Take out clutter, words, lines, sections of the poem in a fearless surgery.  

The next way to increase the energy of the poem is through the rhythm and sound of the words. One strives to create a certain music, even if it is not a formal poem, the poet pays attention to the vowels, consonants and where the stresses fall. Other things increase the energy as well -- resistances, frictions, contrasts, textures.  


Muriel Rukeyser wrote about energy:  "In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions." 

"The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility. 

"If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death." --Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry

Muriel Rukeyser was a poet and social activist. The Life of Poetry was published in 1949.  She was actively against the war and censorship (remember McCarthyism). The first chapters of her book examine the resistances that our culture has had to poetry. People say they "don't have time for it."  I love the way she analyzes this as a fear.  "A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response."  Are we willing to open ourselves to an emotional experience? Are we willing to take a poem inside, to listen with our own senses to the world another has given us? Are we willing to have time for the spirit?

New Work & Poetry Hybrids

Right now, I am at work on a new piece of writing. It is a hybrid between poetry and prose, and I search inside for its form. The goal is to find that interesting friction or energy that will engage me and the reader, and that will help the work go forward. Often, writer's block will occur when I've taken a wrong turn. I work in fits and starts, forward and back, revising and developing.  

Anne Carson writes (from the section Short Talks in her book of essays and poems, Plainwater (Vintage Books, New York, 1995): 

Anne Carson is a poet, translator, scholar of ancient Greek literature, and essayist, and she is a good example of a writer who is combining forms.  She is entertaining and incisive. The Autobiography of Red carries the Greek myth of Herakles into contemporary culture. This story in poems details the Red Monster as a gay man who wears a heavy black coat to disguise his wings. We read about Herakles' mother and a lover in Argentina.  The book also contains an interesting essay about the adjective and meat.  The book Men in the Off Hours has poems that are essays. The Beauty of the Husband is billed as a fictional essay in 29 tangos. Decreation contains a set of poems, a play, and essays about ecstasy and eclipses.  Nox is an art box of fragments and photographs, memories of a brother, and a translation of an ancient Greek elegy.

The boundaries are not fixed. Patterns shift. Formal poems give way to informal. Meaning gives way to language. Poetry gives way to prose. Sources vary. Discourses mix. There is a potluck of essay, fiction, autobiography, poetry. Conventions travel. Cultures blend. Translations err and err again. Words are the stock in trade. Poets conduct raids of other landscapes and lexicons. We make forays into art and science and metadata to yield the right friction or energy or fusion.

Recently, WW Norton came out with an anthology, American Hybrid. The editors have included many good poets who are experimenting with language, but I thought the collection falls a little short. The editors acknowledged how challenging it was to put the collection together. Their initial choices they decided against, in favor of collecting the work of the earlier generation, the precursors. The publishing world has turned upside down Cole Swenson writes, and academics are no longer on top. Changes are happening fast. Technology, the internet, and rapid changes in our culture make it difficult for an editor of such an anthology to keep pace.  In order to learn the new works, it's best to scan the New York Times Book Review.  Besides the interesting fusions in genre, other influences exist. Graphic novels, music videos, video games, and hypertext provide interesting story telling techniques. 

I read Anne Carson because she opens doors. I also read Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian prose writer.  This is an excerpt from the novel, The Hour of the Star (New Directions, 1992) that so clearly conveys that each book tells the writer how it must be written. It was written in Portuguese and is translated by Giovanni Pointiero. The narrator is a writer, Rodrigo S.M., who tells the story of a poor girl from Northeast Brazil who comes to the city and works as a typist. She is a very bad typist, and she lives a very sad existence. The drama of the novel is the struggle the writer Rodrigo has with his story.  He says:

"I know perfectly well that every day is one more day stolen from death. In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze, the words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow. Allegro con brio. I shall attempt to extract gold from charcoal."

"I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day. Yet I am prepared to leave quietly by the back door. I have experienced almost everything, even passion and despair. Now I only wish to possess what might have been but never was." 

Lispector is not a writer who is much concerned with plot. She has the concerns of a poet yet writes in prose. She is a wonderful and deep writer who is able to bring the reader with her into a threshold space of each moment, a threshold of becoming. This book is a very good book to read when one is struggling with a piece of writing, becoming.  I return to her work again and again for her vision.

How Do You Know When You're Done?

Endings are difficult -- think of love affairs, departures, and deaths.  So where do you begin?  I ask this question not only to open a line of thinking about the ways to conclude a poem, but as a reminder that, at least in a work of art, an end is likely intimate with its beginning.  And this might be true of other things too.

A few years ago, yearning for a dog, my partner and I went to the animal shelter. There was a photograph on line.  Some rescue websites post beautiful photographs of silky furred puppies playing on orange pumpkins, but the photograph we viewed was of a skinny, medium-sized black dog, smiling, behind a chain link fence. She had her head tilted just so, a certain wistfulness that caused us to get in the car and have a look. She was about a year old, and she'd been found on the Townline Road, starving.  Her body revealed she had been recently lactating as well, but had no puppies. She did have a wonderful grin caused in part by a underbite, a permanent smile, a shining row of white teeth. We took her home despite the fact she could not for a minute focus on us, or be persuaded away from the rabbit cage, or coaxed into accompanying our lead on the leash. I thought of her a teen mother; bred too young, unable to be responsible. It's something we have made into a joke; we say we posted bail, got her out of jail, for turning tricks on the Townline Road. As soon as we got her home; she ran away.  It's probably the Border Collie in her; she is a mix of many things. A special blend. We named her Sky.

Sky ran away several times, and in fact is incapable of staying home or in the yard. Yesterday, as I was going out of the house with an armful of old newspapers and the end of her leash, I dropped everything. There wasn't even a heartbeat of hesitation; she flung herself down the road with wild abandon. I've tried to change that behavior, carried treats in my pocket, conducted training exercises, been consistent. But running is her nature; I can't change it. Someday, I'm sure, that will be her end.

And think of all those other beginnings and ends. My last love began with a lavendar note; it ended also with writing.  My job happened to me. I fell into it almost accidentally, on my way somewhere else. It was a case of being in the right time and right place, and I stayed for many years. The departure did not feature much deliberation; I was seized with a sudden urge to go, in order to pursue other opportunity.  Endings can happen in so many ways. My mother died after a long illness. A cousin I had died suddenly, in a car accident.

I've been considering endings quite a lot lately, after leaving my job, and bringing another large writing project to a close.  I've been doing a writing workshop every month for a year, and I wonder really, how do you know when you're done?  Once one is in a flow, there is a certain force that carries you along. Endings should be considered. How do you find the right way, the right time and place?  

Formal poetry have built-in conclusions. The sonnet has its question and response; the form itself lends the writer the place for a turn in the poem that becomes a conclusion. The conclusion might be an amplification or epiphany. The sestina form with its obsessive repeats of the end words, 6 line stanzas, 6 stanzas, ends in a 3 line final stanza that incorporates all the six end words used throughout the poem. The villanelle also leads the writer into the conclusion if one follows the form. Studying forms of poetry might help you understand how meter, rhyme, and line might come together. The formal poem is a like a ritual or ceremony.  One follows it; the experience has a certain shape and form.

Rituals and ceremonies are wise practice; the funeral will help us accept a death. A divorce proceeding will undo a wedding.  A break-up has its familiar characteristics.  Good-byes entail certain rituals, even in poems.  Change can happen suddenly; it can be too abrupt. A good ending is a good resolution; it satisfies.

Free verse or blank verse does not offer formulaic resolutions.  I've been considering the conclusion of free verse poems and decided to review some ways they end.  Some are actually good-bye poems, and some are not.  This one for example is published at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19191

I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run
  by Matthea Harvey

Rain fell in a post-romantic way.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked

under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The translator made the sign

for twenty horses backing away from
a lump of sugar. Yes, you.

When I said did you want me
I meant me in the general sense.

The drink we drank was cordial.
In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.

The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.
 
Harvey's poem is very focused; she begins with rain falling, and the word "post-romantic" immediately indicates the situation is a break up; and it could be the final drink she describes in that restaurant/bar.  There is a tearing sensation created by "heads in the carpets, toes tucked under carpets" and even more distance indicated by the detail about a translator and twenty horses backing away.

As the poem develops, the details exact to the room, very specific. "The drink we drank was cordial" has a very pleasing sound play.  The alliteration of d sounds, hard consonants, echo a relationship that is done. The meter is very pronounced: two iambs, one anapest. It rings of ending.  Image-wise, it is as if her consciousness was withdrawing from the expansive pre-romantic world and she was no longer having eye contact.  "In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled."

Her last two lines are a great conclusion to the poem. The figurative image, "The Old World smoked in the fireplace," picks up a likely detail of the room she's in and uses it to mean the former world of the relationship has just turned to ashes and smoke.  And "Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat" would suggest the old children's song, "Out went the doctor, out went the nurse, out went the lady in the alligator purse."  But perhaps the detail might also reflect a painting found on the wall; the narrator now is no longer at the table, staring into the spoon, but even farther away. She has disappeared completely.

The conclusion is so completely congruent with the withdrawal of love; the narrator disappears before the end of the poem.  It's a clear good-bye poem.  The ending image is consistent with a conclusion that is a farewell. The image resonates like a bell that sounds after it's been struck.

Good poems begin in image and action, stay focused on that thing that came in when they begin, and find the sound to accompany you along the way.  This is a superb poem.

Strong endings are very important to a good poem, in my opinion.  There is another poem to consider. This one by Naomi Shihab Nye was published on Writer's Almanac at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/03/29

The Art of Disappearing
   by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

This is a wonderful poem in a pattern of "When," "If/then," and imperatives. In the last stanza, a slight shift in sentence structure away from when and if to three commands creates a satisfying conclusion. However, there is a "then."  This unifies it to the earlier stanzas.  There is that resonant quality here too, in fact an actual bell resounds.  The reader is left with a strong image of leaf and tumbling and the proviso to decide what to do with one's time.

The poem seems to result in a moment of silence, as if the reader must pause and take it in,  as if one is filling in one's own details, weighing the desire to say no to all the expectations and demands.  The sound of the language here also has a ring, the long i sound, as in chime. It resounds.  The sound of the line is very important, and decisions about when one is finished with a poem can be made when one is satisfied with the sound when one reads it aloud.     

There are many other ways to end poems, of course. In the poem by Allen Ginsberg, "The Lion for Real," the poem offers long ranging lines and a sequence of images in a story about a lion; the narrator of the poem explains his encounters, where and what it was like and what it did. In the end stanza, there is a shift. The narrator turns from explaining to the reader or others and addresses the lion directly. It is suddenly a prayer or entreaty to a god; and it's very powerful:
...
Lion that eats my mind now for a decade knowing only your hunger
Not the bliss of your satisfaction O roar of the Universe how am I chosen
In this life I have heard your promise I am ready to die I have served
Your starved and ancient Presence O Lord I wait in my room at your Mercy.

The entire poem can be read online at the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179384


The story turns, like a sonnet might turn.  It ends in a capitulation or adoration; he has offered his complete being to the fear. The last line has even a sexual inference, "I wait in my room" which acknowledges that fear is paradoxical, we are drawn to it; the power of the lion is seductive and potentially transformative.  He surrenders completely.

Ginsberg's poems have an incantatory power. Howl ends with a last section of anaphoristic lines.  "I am with you..." begins each line and the narrator focuses on the images of the psychiatric ward but also larger America.  This poem is also at the Poetry Foundation website at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179381This is the end:
...

I’m with you in Rockland

   where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself    imaginary walls collapse    O skinny legions run outside    O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here    O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

   in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

The sequence of "O" phrases develop into an emotional crescendo.  It moves beyond the ward, across America, in the Western night.   It's no surprise that Ginsberg returns with another poem, "Footnote to Howl" that returns to Howl to add a final incantatory, celebratory footnote that is a blessing.  He is grounded in the body, and singing it as holy.  It's a stronger final conclusion.  You can read the entire poem here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240700

The story I offered about our dog Sky is a story still unfolding. She came back today and was rewarded with treats. I'm not sure if she hasn't trained me more than I've trained her. We have -- each for the other-- expectations.

Free verse poems develop their own patterns.  The pattern is an expectation, and it must be considered and lead into a satisfying ending. The structure of the poem will offer a clue to the appropriate choice. The epiphany is perhaps a classic ending to a poem; the concept of "turn," referring to a shift that's made inside a sonnet, offers a useful guide. The direction of the poem shifts; the language shifts, it is perhaps how best one can read a situation to know if it is the end.

The examples that I've offered here suggest that good endings have resonant images, pleasing sounds in the language, movement, crescendos or blessings.  Finding the right ending will release the poem in the best way; it is perhaps a spiritual exchange, a transfer of image and sound that rises, travels, arrives from the writer's inhaled breath to the reader's last exhalation.