September 21, 2004
Poetry and what it can do for the human spirit has been underappreciated for some time. I'm certainly no expert but I'm married to an English grad student and have attended some local university readings and poetry slams and I can now certainly appreciate that poetry (like other good art forms) can make you feel things and see in new ways. It seems to be making a comeback. You would think that $100,000,000.00 could be put to good use in publicizing the importance of poetry.
Recently, a new U.S. Poet Laureate was named, and he is from my home state. Poetry seems to be losing some of its "snobbish" image and is returning to the common person. If you have two eyes or two ears and the mind of a human being, you have what it takes to appreciate poetry - and probably even create some.
Westron wind, when wilt thou blow,
Small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.
Calling bees to the thread, bees, your recommendations of contemporary poets (and perhaps an original line or two?) are needed at the thread.
Me, I've long been partial to Billy Collins.
My humble opinion (as a former English lit major FWIW): Two of the best contemporary American poets-- one dead(Eigner), one living:
Larry Eigner
Michael Palmer
I can report from London that the live poetry scene is blossoming. Not only is loads of good work being done by an astonishing variety of artists, but the boundaries between poetry, performance and stand-up comedy are growing increasingly blurry - and not in the terribly wanky way it was blurring up until recently. Good fun.
Poetry: no longer shit. Poetic film at eleven.
Poetry will never die as long as there are folk who enjoy and relish what words may be made to do.
I'm partial to Charles Simic, and Kay Ryan. My personal taste runs to the compact, artfully stark work these two poets do so very well.
By naming just those two, it feels like I'm somehow excluding the many, many excellent poets writing now --it's really difficult to single out any out as worthwhile or best, and anyhow, this is a matter of individual compatibility between reader and poet.
If you like poetry, read it, listen to it, and eventually you decide what works or doesn't for you. The reader/listener always does half the work. More and more poems to be found online, it's wonderful.
I attended a poetry class where the prof passed out index cards and wanted us to put our name and the name(s) of our favorite poet(s) on the card.
He thought I was being smart when I told him the card was too small.
And this was a poetry teacher!
*sighs
the mockingbird
the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn't understand.
yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman's legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.
I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.
summer was over.
-Charles Bukowski
1.
After yesterday
afternoon's blue
clouds and white rain
the mockingbird
in the backyard
untied the drops
from leaves and twigs
with a long singing
-- A.R. Ammons, "After Yesterday"
2.
...Nothing lasts.
There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,
now...
Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings
of the green moth
against the lantern
against its heat
against the beak of the crow
in the early morning....
--Mary Oliver, "Flare"
3.
Above the bougainvillea, coming unstuck
from the stuccoed urban maze,
a mockingbird is doing the best he can
to make something from the nothing
that precedes him. The voice
climbs, tumbles, and I wonder
if he is riding or falling from
the edge of his song,
the song he doesn't own,
just as the surfer's not master
of the wave, no matter
the moves....
--Terry Blackhawk, "On The Blackbird Singing In The Morning In The Barrio A Few Blocks From the Boardwalk On The Beach In Venice, California"
I listened, marvelling, this spring as one of these mad birds sang for three hours with never a pause. That afternoon he chased off a pair of crows trying to cross the old orchard -- their mistake.
Some People Like Poetry
Some people --
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.
Like --
but then you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf.
your own way,
petting the dog.
Poetry --
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.
-- Wislawa Szymborska, "Some People Like Poetry", translated Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
In vain, in vain - the all-composing hour
Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the power.
She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sickening stars fade off th' ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand oppressed,
Closed one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heaped o'er her head!
Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense !
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private , dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine !
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.
--from the Dunciad, by Alexander Pope.
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the Spirit
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
--Stephen Spender
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to percieve in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with its breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
-- e. e. cummings
Everyone is asleep
There is nothing to come between
the moon and me.
-- Enomoto Seifu-Jo
Since bees mentioned cummings, I thought I'd post the reading I chose for my wedding:
if everything happens that can't be done
(and anything's righter
than books
could plan)
the stupidest teacher will almost guess
(with a run
skip
around we go yes)
there's nothing as something as one
one hasn't a why or because or although
(and buds know better
than books
don't grow)
one's anything old being everything new
(with a what
which
around we go who)
one's everyanything so
so world is a leaf is a tree is a bough
(and birds sing sweeter
than books
tell how)
so here is away and so your is a my
(with a down
up
around again fly)
forever was never till now
now i love you and you love me
(and books are shutter
than books
can be)
and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
(with a shout
each
around we go all)
there's somebody calling who's we
we're everything brighter than even the sun
(we're everything greater
than books
might mean)
we're everyanything more than believe
(with a spin
leap
alive we're alive)
we're wonderful one times one
-e.e. cummings
As the poets have mournfully sung,
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling-in-money,
The screamingly-funny,
And those who are very well hung.
-W. H. Auden
My favorite poem of all time...one of the classics (kinda long):
Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
ok..too long to post the entire thing here, can be found here
Ode to a Goldfish:
Oh,
Wet
Pet
Can't remember who it's by, somebody great, though...
This is the song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls
the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.
I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song
is a cry for help: Hekp me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique
at last. Also
it is a boring song
but it works every time.
-- Margaret Atwood, "Siren Song"
My neigbour in the East has
A grove of aspens. Tonight
The rain sounds mournfully in
Them. Alone, at my window,
I cannot sleep. Autumn insects
Swarm, attracted by my light.
--Su Tung Po, "Rain in the Aspens"
Flowers bloom:
no one
to enjoy them with.
Flowers fall:
no one
with whom to grieve.
I wonder when love's
longings
stir us most --
when flowers bloom
ir when flowers fall?
-- Heueh T'ao, "Gazing at Spring"
World was in the face of the beloved --,
but suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world cannot be grasped.
Why didn't I, from the fall, beloved face
as I raised it to my lips, why didn't I drink
world, so near that I could almost taste it?
Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.
But I was filled up also, with too much
world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Neglected to add, trans. Stephen Mitchell
I love Rilke. Mrs. Tool had the following engraved inside my wedding ring:
WITH ONLY THIS ONE DREAM -- YOU COME TOO.
ohh goody, more poetry
coffee and good poetry with horses early in the morning--the best way to start the day
The Dream
Louise Bogan
O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.
Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.
Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
Another woman, as I lay half in a swound,
Leapt in the air, and clutched at the leather and chain.
Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
Throw him, she said, something you alone claim.
No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,
And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.
But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,
The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
Came to my side, and put down his head in love.
BlueHorse, ye got that just right!
*applauds*
This talk of horses in the morning put me in mind of this Ted Hughes poem I'm sure you all know:
I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,
Not a leaf, not a bird,--
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood
Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness
Till the moorline--blackening dregs of the brightening grey--
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:
Huge in the dense grey--ten together--
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.
I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.
I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.
Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,
And the big planets hanging--.
I turned
Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,
And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,
Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them
The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,
Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays--
In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place
Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing
curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.
I haven't read that one before, so thanks, Abiezer_Coppe. I'm not as familiar with Hughes' work as I'd like to be.
Absolutely lovely, and one of my favorite, Abie.
This Is A Poem I Wrote At Night, Before The Dawn
Delmore Schwartz
This is a poem I wrote before I died and was reborn:
- After the years of the apples ripening and the eagles
soaring,
After the festival here the small flowers gleamed like the
first stars,
And the horses cantered and romped away like the
experience of skill; mastered and serene
Power, grasped and governed by reins, lightly held by
knowing hands.
The horses had cantered away, far enough away
So that I saw the horses' heads farther and farther away
And saw that they had reached the black horizon on the
dusk of day
And were or seemed black thunderheads, massy and
ominous waves in the doomed sky:
And it was then, for the first time, then that I said as I
must always say
All through living death of night:
It is always darkness before delight!
The long night is always the beginning of the vivid blossom of day.
Another cup of coffee! More horse poems!
TH featured quite a bit in our school syllabus, and then some of the outfall of the Sylvia Plath controversy got to me a bit, plus he can seem forced at times, so it took me some time to truly appreciate Hughes' work fully. But there's so much of his work that really stays with you. I particulaly recall a fantatsic cycle of works inspired by his days as a sheep farmer in Devon, and one poem about a young man coming back from the war and failing to readjust. He definitely repays time spent with interest.
Unity
The horse's mind
Blends
So swiftly
Into the hay's mind.
-- Fazil Husnu Daglarca
Nice, Bees.
ice for the eagles
Charles J. Bukowski
I keep remembering the horses
under the moon
I keep remembering feeding the horses
sugar
white oblongs of sugar
more like ice,
and they had heads like
eagles
bald heads that could bite and
did not.
The horses were more real than
my father
more real than God
and they could have stepped on my
feet but they didn't
they could have done all kinds of horrors
but they didn't.
I was almost 5
but I have not forgotten yet;
o my god they were strong and good
those red tongues slobbering
out of their souls.
From Run With the Hunted.
The Mist
I turned back to see.
but the man I passed was veiled
in mist already.
-- Shiki
Replica
Only a single bird
is singing.
The air is cloning it.
We hear through mirrors.
-- Garcia Lorca
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the lught breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
-- James Wright, "A Blessing"
Yes, Bees, one of my favorites.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood, that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth into my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks....
--Dylan Thomas, from "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"
I always loved that line in the final stanza of Fern Hill 'that time would take me/ Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand'.
Anyway, here's Hallaig in the original Gaelic with Sorley MacLean's own transalation. He's just about my favoutite poet. Seumas Heaney also translated it, but not as well I think.
And now Bees has picked one of my favourites :) You have good aim!
Don't know if this has made it on MoFi yet, but Slate had a great piece about the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. Here's a sample:
Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.
It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.
Adios, sun!
I know for sure that you're the moon,
but I
won't tell nobody,
sun.
You sneak
behind the curtain
and cover your face
with rice powder.
By day, the farmhand's
guitat,
by night,
Pierrot's mandolin.
I should care!
Your illusion,
sun, is to make
the garden
turn Technicolor.
Adios, sun!
And don't forget who loves you:
the snail,
the little old lady
on her balcony,
& me ...
spinning my heart like a ...
top.
-- Garcia Lorca
Horse By Moonlight
A horse escaped from the circus
and lodged in my daughter's eyes
there he ran circles around the iris
raising silver dust-clouds in the pupil
and halting sometimes
to drink from the holy water of the retina.
Since then my daughter feels a longing
for meadows of grass and green hills
waiting for the moon to come
and dry with its silk sleeves
the sad water that wets her cheeks.
-- Alberto Blanco, trans Jennifer Clenment
Wilderness Gothic
Across Roblin Lake, two shores away,
they are sheathing the church spire
with new metal. Someone hangs in the sky
over there from a piece of rope,
hammering and fitting God's belly-scratcher,
working his way up along the spire
until there's nothing left to nail on---
Perhaps the workman's faith reaches beyond:
touches intangibles, wrestles with Jacob,
replacing rotten timber with pine thews,
pounds hard in the blue cave of the sky,
contends heroically with difficult problems of
gravity, sky navigation and mythopeia,
his volunteer time and labor donated to God,
minus sick benefits of course on a non-union job---
Fields around are yellowing into harvest,
nestling and fingerling are sky and water borne,
death is yodeling quiet in green woodlots,
and bodies of three young birds have disappeared
in the sub-surface of the new county highway---
That picture is incomplete, part left out
that might alter the whole Dürer landscape:
gothic ancestors peer from medieval sky,
dour faces trapped in photograph albums escaping
to clop down iron roads with matched grays:
work-sodden wives groping inside their flesh
for what keeps moving and changing and flashing
beyond and past the long frozen Victorian day.
A sign of fire and brimstone? A two-headed calf
born in the barn last night? A sharp female agony?
An age and a faith moving into transition,
the dinner cold and new-baked bread a failure,
deep woods shiver and water drops hang pendant,
double yolked eggs and the house creaks a little---
Something is about to happen. Leaves are still.
Two shores away, a man hammering in the sky.
Perhaps he will fall.
- Al Purdy
Yummy, Islander. I've never read Purdy before. Me likes.
Goody Bees! more horse images in poetry.
The Horses of Achilles
Constantine P. Cavafy
When they saw Patroklos dead
-so brave and strong, so young-
the horses of Achilles began to weep;
their immortal natures were outraged
by this work of death they had to look at.
They reared their heads, tossed their manes,
beat the ground with their hooves,
and mourned Patroklos, seeing him lifeless, destroyed,
now mere flesh only, his spirit gone,
defenceless, without breath,
turned back from life to the great Nothingness.
Zeus saw the tears of those immortal horses and felt sorry.
"I shouldn't have acted so thoughtlessly
at the wedding of Peleus," he said.
"Better if we hadn't given you as a gift,
my unhappy horses. What business did you have down there,
among pathetic human beings, the toys of fate?
You're free of death, you won't get old,
yet ephemeral disasters torment you.
Men have caught you in their misery."
But it was for the eternal disaster of death
that those two gallant horses shed their tears.
The Flaggy Shore
(for Norah Nolan)
Even before I've left, I long
for this place. For hay brought in before the rain,
its stooks like stanzas, for glossy cormorants
that make metal eyes and divce like hooks,
fastening the bodice of the folding tide
which unravels in gardens of caraigin.
I walk with the ladies who throw stones at the surge
and their problems, don't answer the phone
in the ringing kiosk. Look. In the clouds
hang pewter promontories, long bays
whose wind-indented silent coasts
make me homesick for where I've not been.
Quicksilver headlands shoot into the night
till distance and the dying of day
dull steel and vermillion to simple lead
blown downward to the dark, then out of sight.
-- Greneth Lewis
So much for the elves' wergild, the true governance
of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in
engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for
ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern.
Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground:
my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced,
sick on outings - I who was taken to be a king of
some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.
Geoffery Hill, from 'Mercian Hymns'
No Time
She left me. What voice
colder than the wind
out of the grave said: 'It is over'? Impalpable,
invisible, she comes
to me still, as she would
do, and I at my reading.
There is a tremor
of light, as of a bird crossing
the sun's path, and I look
up in recognition
of a presence in absence.
Not a word, not a sound,
as she goes her way,
but a scent lingering
which is that of time immolating
itself in love's fire
R.S Thomas, from his 1995 collection 'No Truce with the Furies'. It's a poem for his late wife of some fifty years. I think the last line may rank with the most beautiful ever written in the English language.
Talking to Grief
Ah grief I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.
You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.
--Denise Levertov
Though it be broken --
broken again -- still it's there:
the moon on the water.
-- Chosho, trans Harold Henderson
Madly Singing in the Mountains
There is no one among men who has not a special failing:
And my failing consists in writing verses.
I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:
But this infirmity will remain behind.
Each time that I look at a fine landscape:
Each time that I meet a loved friend,
I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry
And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.
Ever since the day I was banished to Hsun-yang
Half my time I have lived among the hills.
And often, when I have finished a new poem,
Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.
I lean my body on the banks of white stone:
I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.
My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:
The apes and birds all come to peep.
Fearing tio become a laughingstock in the world,
I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.
-- Po Chu-i, trans Arthur Waley
Lovely bees! Arthur Waley is one of my heroes as a translator - he did excellent and challenging versions of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) and what I hear is a great version of 'Journey to the West'. He was a professor at my university (SOAS in London), a friend of the 'Bloomsbury set' and by all accounts quite the 'character'.
I have a collection of Bo Zhuyi's poems (as we pinyin educated types spell him these days). Maybe I'll have a stab at transalting something here, though ny classical Chinese is rather rusty.
Just realised that some of my comments on Mr Waley (the Zhuangzi bit) result from conflating him with Angus Graham who followed him at SOAS. Also Arthur was only an honorary lecturer. My memory is ridiculous! Correction just in case a passing Sinologist sees this and has me drummed out of the club.
Now I'll look forward to that, Abiezer_Coppe!
Incidentally, transalting is one of the most serendipitous typos I've seen in ages -- and I plan to steal it.
Arghh! I do that all the time, which is very silly since it's my main living! I see what you mean about the serendipity though. An exchange of flavours?
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
excerpted from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" by William Carlos Williams
Sonnet
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here wile we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
- Billy Collins
Ah, bone, I do so love that first selection you give!
Says it all right there of why I decided to try putting poems on monkeyfilter. Such a foolish critter I be, but it seems the world right now needs poetry. As it does all the arts which celebrate the quandries and confusions of the human heart.
Let us creep then, you and I,
To where the woollens are spread out to dry
Like salmon filleted upon a counter;
Let us grope through these still unlaundered sheets,
Past kilts adrip with all their pleats,
Where winter moths aspire to light the last flickering candle
Past dusty jars of pickles and preserves,
To mateless socks that may outlast those condiments,
Lie solo. And abandoned.
Bees, that is a bad take on a poem I don't really like all that well.
But you're forgiven.
How 'bout in the style of Wally S.? Now there's a man who probably had garters on his socks. (and would shudder at the idea of green ones)
Bird
It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air -
and there, night came in.
When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography -
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.
Pablo Neruda
Agree with you, BlueHorse, and appreciate your comment; when something doesn't work I do like to get feedback on it.
Not much of an Eliot fan -- I only seem to enjoy bits and pieces of his work.
Birth of the Foal
As May was opening the rosebuds,
elder and lilac beginning to bloom,
It was time for the mare to foal.
She'd rest herself, or hobble lazily
after the boy who sang as he led her
to pasture, wading through the meadowflowers.
They wandered back at dusk, bone-tired,
the moon perched on a blue shoulder of sky.
Then the mare lay down,
sweating and trembling, on her straw in the stable.
The drowsy, heavy-bellied cows
surrounded her, waiting, watching, sniffing.
Later when even the hay slept
and the dhaft of the Plough pointed south,
the foal was born. Hours the mare
spent licking the foal with its glue-blind eyes.
And the foal slept at her side,
a heap of feathers ripped from a bed.
Straw never spread as soft as this.
Milk or snow never slept like a foal.
Dawn bounced up in a bright red hat,
waved at the world and skipped away.
Up staggered the foal.
Its hooves were jelly-knots of foam.
Then day sniffed with its blue nose
through the open stable window, and found them --
the foal nuzzling its mother,
velvet fumbling for her milk.
Then all the trees were talking at once,
chickens scrabbled in the yard,
like golden flowers
envy withered the last stars.
-- Ferenc Juhasz, trans David Wevill
A man hired by John Smith and Co.
Loudly declared that he'd tho.
Men that he saw
Dumping dirt near his door --
The drivers, therefore, didn't do.>/i>
--Mark Twain
Bees, I do love you! More, please.
FAITH
Kay Frydenborg
In jumping an obstacle, the horse,
with his remarkable stereoscopic vision,
cannot see what he must surmount
at the moment he is upon it. This may seem
no more problematic to him than the fact
that he views two simultaneous alternate images
on his left and his right, instead of one
panoramic scene flowing together. Somehow
his equine brain (which we call "limited")
can process and accommodate both realities
at once. Eons of seeing in his own way
has taught him this.
Instead of looking where he leaps,
he memorizes in one glance
the location and dimension of the barrier:
its depth and height
its whiteness or greenness or blueness
(although we assume he is colorblind)
its smooth, blocky symmetry or
the spiky, irregular pine branches bunched
at its base
the likelihood of its causing him bodily harm
or death (does he anticipate death? He has never
told us.) He counts
while moving toward the precise take-off point
the number strides needed to reach it
safely, automatically adjusting the length of his steps
to fit.
Whenever he leaves the earth, pushing off
with his powerful haunches, lifting
the swinging fulcrum of his shoulder,
cracking his back in one smooth arc,
he has no way of knowing whether he will ever
touch land again. He has nothing
to go on but faith. And yet he launches himself
on the trajectory of his memory
time and again because
we ask it of him, even though
he can clearly see, out of both eyes,
there is an easier way around.
2.
I have seen an adolescent thoroughbred galloping
three-legged, lurching through the churning butts
of the others, not even feeling the clods of mud flung
into his eyes, his shattered leg dangling uselessly,
while his desperate jockey tugs with puny arms
at his mouth. He flings his whole being
into a single conviction: that winning
the race, crossing the finish line first,
will end his pain.
I have held the head of an old gelding,
his lungs ossified by heaves
their tiny sacs like hollow bones
trapping the old air inside.
I have stroked his neck and watch him
labor to expel each diminished breath,
while his frightened eyes fixed on mine
with a certainty that I would
cure him, even though I had nothing
to offer but my tears.
Yesterday we were trotting, my horse
and I (he trots, I sit: we both
know our jobs.) His toe caught
the loose ash of the arena floor, and he dropped
to his knees, while I tried to stay
over his center, tried to help him
to his feet. As the black grit rushed up
into our faces, he scrambled to contain
both my weight and his,
the bones of his forelegs
as fragile as birds' wings.
After I rolled off his neck he waited
for me to brush the ashes
from mine. Then he offered
his back to me again.
The Maltese Dog
He came from Malta, and Eumelus says
He had no better dog in all his days.
He called him Bull: he went into the dark.
Along those roads we cannot hear him bark.
-- Tymnes, trans Edmund Blunden
Two poems:
Kobayashi Issa, trans Robert Hass
Hey, sparrow!
out of the way,
Horse is coming.
Naked
on a naked horse
in pouring rain
The Pit Ponies
They come like the ghosts of horses, shyly,
To this summer field, this fresh green,
Which scares them.
They have been too long in the blind mine,
Their hooves have trodden only stones
And the soft, thick dust of fine coal.
And they do not understand the grass.
For over two years their sun
Has shone from an electric bulb
That has never set, and their walking
Has been along the one, monotonous
Track of the pulled coal trucks.
They have bunched their muscles against
The harness and pulled, and hauled
But now they have come out of the underworld
And are set down in the sun and real air
Which are strange to them. They are humble
And modest, their heads are downcast, they
Do not expect to see very far. But one
Is attempting a clumsy gallop. It is
Something he could do when he was very young,
When he was a little foal a long time ago
And he could run fleetly on his long foal's legs
And almost he can remember this. And look,
One rolls on her back with joy in the clean grass!
And they all, awkwardly and hesitantly, like
Clumsy old men, begin to run, and the field
Is full of happy thunder. They toss their heads,
Their manes fly, they are galloping in freedom.
The ponies have come aboveground, they are galloping!
-- Leslie Norris
A sky. A field. A hedge flagrant with gorse.
I'm trying to remember, as best I can,
if I'm a man dreaming I'm a plowhorse
or a great plowhorse dreaming I'm a man.
-- Paul Muldoon, from "Horses"
When the unreal becomes real,
the real becomes unreal,
Story of the Stone, Cao Xue Qin
Reflected
in the dragonfly's eye --
mountains.
-- Issa
The Horse Fair
Robin Becker
My skirts would have been a great hindrance, making me conspicuous and perhaps calling forth unpleasant remarks. …Thus I was taken for a young lad, and unmolested.--Rosa Bonheur
1.
Found out, identified astride
the chestnut, head tilted
in the manner of the rearing
grey Percheron, you are
Rosa Bonheur disguised as one
of the handlers,
cross-dressed in a blue smock,
center of the painting.
You are performing a fantasy
of belonging
to a genre-scene that admits
none of your sex
and now the art history
that permitted you
to remain invisible
finds you androgynous
where horses bristle
at their restraining tack.
2.
There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them.--Ruskin
She would not see them as subservient.
She painted the tarsal joint of the hind leg
For forty years, perfecting its voluted spring.
She knew the Arabian horse to be of porphyry, granite, and sandstone;
she knew the English stallion Hobgoblin, veined with seawater.
She knew anatomical science predicted movement;
thus, in trousers and boots, throughout the slaughterhouses and stockyards
and in livestock markets, a small woman with cropped hair passed.
She knew the Belgian, her dense ossature, wattage of the livid eye,
oscillation of gait, the withheld stampede gathering
in the staunch shoulder for the haulage of artillery.
She would not picture subservience.
Great Aso
Horses are standing in rain.
A herd of horses with one or two foals is standing in rain.
In hushed silence rain is falling.
The horses are eating grass
With tails, and backs too, and manes too, completely soaking wet
they are eating grass,
eating grass.
Some of them are standing with necks bowed over absent-mindedly and not eating grass.
Rain is falling and falling in hushed silence.
The mountain is sending up smoke.
The peak of Nakadake is sending up dimly yellowish and deeply oppressive volcanic smoke, densely, densely.
And rain clouds too all over the sky.
Still they continue without ending.
Horses are eating grass.
On one of the hills of the Thousand-Mile-Shore-Of-Grass
they are absorbedly eating blue-green grass.
Eating.
They are all standing there quietly.
They are quietly gathered in one place forever, dripping and soaked with rain.
If a hundred years go by in this single moment, there would be no wonder.
Rain is falling. Rain is falling.
In hushed silence rain is falling.
-- Tatsuji Miyoshi
No need to cling
to things --
floating frog.
-- Joso
Wow, Bees. Fantastic. What wonderful images.
Equestrian Statues
Robert James Berry (West Malaysian Poet)
The deep breathing grasslands
Boundless as the act of time
Are apricot-skied at sunset.
As evening foals darkness,
A sudden fury of scarlet horses
Canter the horizon
And the wind yearns
To slit open the husk of night
That is thick coir matting.
In an unstarred dark
Strong as the hook of the sea,
Equestrian statues are
Rearing stones on the threshold of sleep,
Snorting monsters
Pawing a forbidden territory
Before our time,
Playing the supernatural sky
Like clamouring almighties
Before becoming still
Granite stallions drinking water
As Aquarius rises.
We Have Not Long To Love
We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those
we fold away.
Coarse fabrics are the ones
for common wear.
In silence I have watched you
comb your hair.
Intimate the silence,
dim and warm.
I could, but did not, reach
to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break
that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper
would be shrill.)
So moments pass as though
they wished to stay.
We have not long to love.
A night. A day ....
--Tennessee Williams
Moon, Flowers, Man
I raise my cup and invite
The moon to come down from the
Sky. I hope she will accept
Me. I raise my cup and ask
The branches, heavy with flowers,
To drink with me. I wish them
Long life and promise never
To pick them. In company
With the moon and the flwoers,
I get drunk, and none of us
Ever worries about good
Or bad. How many people
Can comprehend our joy? I
Have wine and moon and flowers.
Who else do I want for drinking companions?
-- Su Tung P'o, trans Kenneth Rexroth
It is spring once more in the Coast Range
Warm, perfumed, under the Easter moon.
The flowers are back in their places.
The birds are back in their usual trees.
The winter stars set in the ocean.
The summer stars rise from the mountains.
The air is filled with atoms of quicksilver.
Resurrection envelops the earth.
Goemetrical, blazing, deathless,
Animals and men march through heaven,
Pacing their secret ceremony.
The Lion gives the moon to the Virgin.
She stands at the crossroads of heaven,
Holding the full moon in her right hand,
A glittering wheat ear in her left.
The climax of the rite of rebirth
Has ascended from the underworld
Is proclaimed in light from the zenith.
In the underworld the sun swims
Between the fish called Yes and No.
-- Kenneth Rexroth
Perhaps some of our monkeys might like to submit work to the Guardian's Poetry Workshop?
I'm in need of a poetry fix.
I'll share mine, if you'll share yours. (Bees, bring on the horses!)
Names of Horses
Donald Hall
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
"How I Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent (or Vice Versa)"
by R.J. Yeatman and W.C. Sellar
I sprang to the rollocks and Jorrocks and me,
And I galloped, you galloped, he galloped, we galloped all three...
Not a word to each other; we kept changing place
Neck to neck, back to front, ear to ear, face to face;
And we yelled once or twice, when we heard a clock chime,
"Would you kindly oblige us, Is that the right time?"
As I galloped, you galloped, he galloped, we galloped, they two shall have galloped, let us trot.
I unsaddled the saddle, unbuckled the bit,
Unshackled the bridle (the thing didn't fit)
And ungalloped, ungalloped, ungalloped, ungalloped a bit.
Then I cast off my bluff-coat, let my bowler hat fall,
Took off both my boots and my trousers and all --
Drank off my stirrup-cup, felt a bit tight,
And unbridled the saddle: it still wasn't right.
Then all I remember is, things reeling round
As I sat with my head twixt my ears on the ground --
For imagine my shame when they asked what I meant
And I had to confess that I'd been, gone, and went
And forgotten the news I was bringing to Ghent.
Though I'd galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped and galloped
And galloped and galloped and galloped. (Had I not would have been galloped?)
Envoi
So I sprang to a taxi and shouted, "To Aix!"
And he blew on his horn and he threw off his brakes
And all the way back till my money was spent
We rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled --
And eventually sent a telegram.
The origins of this fine parody lie with Robert Browning's "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix".
Ahh, I hadn't visited this tread in a while. The horse poetry has me by the emotions. Was going to ask, "What was the first poem that got you into verse?", but maybe later. Keep going, please.
Render, Render
Thomas Lux
Boil it down: feet, skin, gristle,
bones, vertebrae, heart muscle, boil
it down, skim, and boil
again, dreams, history, add them and boil
again, boil and skim
in closed cauldrons, boil your horse, his hooves,
the runned-over dog you loved, the girl
by the pencil sharpener
who looked at you, looked away,
boil that for hours, render it
down, take more from the top as more settles to the bottom,
the heavier, the denser, throw in ache
and sperm, and a bead
of sweat that slid from your armpit to your waist
as you sat stiff-backed before a test, turn up
the fire, boil and skim, boil
some more, add a fever
and the virus that blinded an eye, now's the time
to add guilt and fear, throw
logs on the fire, coal, gasoline, throw
two goldfish in the pot (their swim bladders
used for "clearing"), boil and boil, render
it down and distill,
concentrate
that for which there is no
other use at all, boil it down, down,
then stir it with rosewater, that
which is now one dense, fatty, scented red essence
which you smear on your lips
and go forth
to plant as many kisses upon the world
as the world can bear!
Fiat Lux!
path, in my case, nursery thrymes were the primary source, I suppose.
Older folk in my family were always reciting poetry, and everyone read it aloud -- I can't remember not knowing Young Lochinvar and such old favorites. Absorbed many pieces almost by osmosis before I ever learned to read on my own or started school.
BlueHorse, maybe ye should consider compliing a book of horse-poems.
Uh, Bees, it started as a small obsession to please myself, but now my hitherto unspoken wish is to publish an anthology of powerful and moving horse poetry--toward that end I've compiled over 600 poems, and still adding. Too bad I'm such an idjit about How To Do Teh Fublishing.
Path: of course it started in the nursery --
First, there was the lullaby:
Hush-a-bye don't you cry,
Go to sleep-y, little baby.
When you wake you shall have
All the pretty little horses.
Blacks and bays, dapple grays,
Coach and six white horses.
Hush-a-bye don't you cry,
Go to sleep-y, little baby.
Then we went to Mother Goose and trotting games:
I had a little hobby-horse,
And it was dapple gray;
Its head was made of pea-straw,
Its tail was made of hay.
I sold it to an old woman
For a copper groat;
And I'll not sing my song again
Without another coat.
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Bell horses, bell horses,
What time of day?
One o'clock, two o'clock,
Time to away.
Horsie, horsie, don't you stop,
Just let your feet go clippety clop;
Your tail goes swish,
And the wheels go round—
Giddyup, you're homeward bound!
If I had a donkey
That wouldn't go
Do you think I'd beat him?
Oh, no, no!
I'd put him in a barn
And give him some corn,
The best little donkey
That ever was born.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side.
And if “ifs” and “ands”
Were pots and pans,
There’d be no work for tinkers!
I had a little pony,
His name was Dapple-Gray,
I lent him to a lady,
To ride a mile away.
She whipped him, she slashed him,
She rode him through the mire;
I would not lend my pony now
For all the lady’s hire.
Donkey, donkey, old and gray,
Ope your mouth and gently bray;
Lift your ears and blow your horn,
To wake the world this sleepy morn.
Jokeli, can you really ride
Trot, trot, trot?
Aye, over every green mountain side —
Trot, trot, trot!
Has your pony I pray had oats today?
White horsie, click! White horsie, clack!
You'll maybe throw Jokeli off your back!
Trot, trot, jolt!
The farmer has a colt,
The colt he runs away,
The farmer falls, hooray!
Bump! Goes the farmer!
Finally I memorized a "real" poem at age 5:
The Huntsmen
Walter De La Mare
Three jolly gentlemen,
In coats of red,
Rode their horses
Up to bed.
Three jolly gentlemen
Snored till morn,
Their horses champing
The golden corn.
Three jolly gentlemen
At break of day,
Came clitter-clatter down the stairs
And galloped away.
I recited it repeatedly till threatened with a gag.
Finally, I have to confess that Siv Cedering's fantastic prose poem, The Blue Horse is the source of my Monkey moniker.
*blushes to be found out
BlueHorse, thinking ye might do worse than post a Curious, George about this anthology, since monkeys have considerable knowledge and experience
On A Parson Bit By His Horse
The steed bit his master;
How came this to pass?
He heard the good pastor
Cry, 'All flesh is grass!'
-- Old Jingle
Sudden rain --
rows of horses,
twitching rumps.
-- Shiki
Bees, bees, bees
We love bees.
They don't make us sneeze.
Unlike .... um .... nasty cheese!
Bees, bees, bees,
We love bees!
<now I'm reduced to stealing bad poetry>
*shame
Forgive me, bees. I'll try again.
jokes, poems & artwork
Our best crop a short piece about Meriwether and the advise a wise older professor gave a young bee farmer
”The best fertilizer is always the imprint of the owner's feet." great-grandfather Thomas G. Hardie
"A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay.
A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon.
But a swarm of bees in July isn't worth a fly."
This is an old saying that describes the value of a honey bee swarm.When the queen in a colony of honey bees gets older and/or when a colony feels that it is getting too large a population,then around half of the bees will take off and swarm. Especially in the north,our yearly management includes thoughts of preparing the bees for the winter,and this saying notes that the earlier that a swarm is retrieved by the beekeeper,the more time the bees will have to raise a family and gather food for the upcoming winter.
Bees, bees, bees
We love bees.
They don't make us sneeze.
Unlike .... um .... nasty cheese!
Bees, bees, bees,
We love bees!
-by Kate Wheeler and Liz Hart
Awesome members of the most honorable weekend honey house crew 2001,
holding a possibly untouchable record for a duo unloading tanks of cold
raw honey week after week.
Last Night
by Antonio Machado
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt--marvelous error!--
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt--marvelous error!--
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt--marvelous error!--
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt--marvelous error!--
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.
*blows bees a kiss
arrrgh, I copy/pasted too much
Forgive me, again</b. bees and all!
Fascinating ittle animals, bees --and that bee poem is delightful, thank you, BlyeHirse.
= BlueHorse
Today I can't for bees, obviously.
=can't type for
Ach! Got up lete and it's not all it's made out to bee, I think.
Leaving the House of a Friend
Out comes the bee
from deep among peony pistils --
oh, so reluctantly!
-- Basho
Laving the House of a Friend
Out comes the bee
from deep among peony pistils --
oh, so reluctantly!
-- Basho
Brassei Photograph IV: Horses of Apollo
The horses of Apollo have galloped
into the forest, left the statue where
they were forced to stand all day
with Apollo. They stomped and bit
each other, impatient to gallop across
the universe and pull the stubborn sun
into night. Here in Paris it is cloudy all
the time. Apollo is a lazy fuck who never
spurs them on, so they canter under trees,
eat horse chestnuts, whisper to each other
in the manner of horses with no work to do.
They sway in the wind and tell stories of how
they fished Dawn from the sea and sprang
Helios out of eclipse. But that was long ago
in Delphi, before they had to be statues, when
they were alive and everything depended on them.
-- Susan Thomas
This whole thread is gonna get shut down if you two don't stop filling up your posting quotas, as soon as you can get then up here.
Relax,already.
I do agree, horselady, that it would be well worth the while to do a real compilation for publication. Photos or illustrations?
Meanwhile, no one has mentioned my favourite writer(s), archie the cockroach and mehitabal, who said:
i once heard the survivors of a colonly of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization
dx -Are there commenting quotas?
And, yes there's been some discussion on MoFi of archie and mehitabel in the past, but my search didn't bring up anything serious. Thanks for the link.
No quotas, no quotas,
A slip, a blip,
to make a mistake, I shouldn't hesitate
oh list
to the call of
the springtime
oh hark to
suggestions of may
awake for its
birds on the
wing time give
ear for the meadows
are gay which
also applies to the tearooms
the boulevards
avenues
streets
the dear rooms and cheap
rooms and free rooms for
spring is a season
of sweets oh god
but i wish i were keats
oh god but i
wish i were
keats....
-- Don Marquis, from "plaint of spring"
Thanks, Beez
Love,
BlyeHirse
Dx: Of COURSE there's a quota.
First Bees quota one poet, then I quota'nother. What else could you want? When are you going to quota poem?
*grabs throat, staggers backwards*
Gahh!
*clunk!*
I wish in the city of your heart
you would let me be the street
where you walk when you are most
yourself. I imagine the houses:
it has been raining, but the rain
is done and the children kept home
have begun opening their doors.
-- Robley Wilson. "I wish in the city of your heart"
Let's take
the duckweed way
to clouds.
-- Issa
The Horses
Edwin Muir
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
A Swan Day, Obituary Day and Alle
To remember
now
takes me longer;
I forget who it was,
if I ever knew,
said, Animals are here
to teach us compassion.
Less than would fill
my fist
of feathers,
the trim brown wren
sits out, out sits
the lightning
and the lashing
rain.
The Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs tos the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
-- Wyslawa Szymborska
THE HIPPOPOTAMUS
O. Nash (O.f Course)
Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.
Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.
Rats! should have been on the silly poetry page
Where's the silly poetry page? I have a silly poem I'd like to share...
Moth: It's pretty silly over here
Robert Browning
Childe Roland
As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood.
One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare,
Stood stupefied, however he came there:
Thrust out past service from the devil’s stud!
Alive? He might be dead for aught I know.
With that red gaunt colloped* neck a-strain.
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane:
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
*ridged
Excerpt: only mention of horse in poem
According to my old Funk and Wagnalls, collops refers to meat cut into chunks, as if for a stew: the horse's neck has been cut or hacked by something sharp.
Thankee kindly, GramMa!
Bees, I thought that was strange, but I copied it straight from the book. Makes more sense that way, doesn't it. Tsk, Tsk, if you can't believe what you read in print ....
My father was fond o' saying: THE BOOK IS WRONG! And he was often right. So I regard any text as a work in progress, no matter how venerated it is. Especially footnotes.
"The Fired Pot"
by Anna Wickham
In our town, people live in rows.
The only irregular thing in a street is the steeple;
And where that points to, God only knows,
And not the poor disciplined people!
And I have watched the women growing old,
Passionate about pins, and pence, and soap,
Till the heart within my wedded breast grew cold,
And I lost hope.
But a young soldier came to our town,
He spoke his mind most candidly.
He asked me quickly to lie down,
And that was very good for me.
For though I gave him no embrace—
Remembering my duty—
He altered the expression of my face,
And gave me back my beauty.
Poetry Daily's pick for today. I liked the steeple image.
Lightheartedly take from the palms of my hands
A little sun, a little honey,
As Persephone's bees commanded us.
Not to be untied, the unmoored boat;
Not to be heard, fur-shod shadows;
Not to be silenced, life's thick terrors.
Now we have only kisses,
Bristly and crisp like bees,
Which die as they fly from the hive.
They rustle in transparent thickets of night,
Their homeland thick forest of Taigetos,
Their food -- honeysuckle, mint, and time.
Lightheartedly take then my uncouth present:
This simple necklace of dead, dried bees,
Who once turned honey into sun.
-- Osip Mandelstam, "Lightheartedly from the palms of my hands"
A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord, let me suffer much
and then die
Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear
Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before
Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it
so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love
Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain
And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head.
-- Anna Kamienska
One reason I like opera
Marge Piercy
In movies, you can tell the heroine
because she is blonder and thinner
than her sidekick. The villainess
is darkest. If a woman is fat,
she is a joke and will probably die.
In movies, the blondest are the best
and in bleaching lies not only purity
but victory. If two people are both
extra pretty, they will end up
in the final clinch.
Only the flawless in face and body
win. That is why I treat
movies as less interesting
than comic books. The camera
is stupid. It sucks surfaces.
Let's go to the opera instead.
The heroine is fifty and weighs
as much as a '65 Chevy with fins.
She could crack your jaw in her fist.
She can hit high C lying down.
The tenor the women scream for
wolfs down an eight course meal daily.
He resembles a bull on hind legs.
His thighs are the size of beer kegs.
His chest is a redwood with hair.
Their voices twine, golden serpents.
Their voices rise like the best
fireworks and hang and hang
then drift slowly down descending
in brilliant and still fiery sparks.
The hippopotamus baritone (the villain)
has a voice that could give you
an orgasm right in your seat.
His voice smokes with passion.
He is hot as lava. He erupts nightly.
The contralto is, however, svelte.
She is supposed to be the soprano's
mother, but is ten years younger,
beautiful and Black. Nobody cares.
She sings you into her womb where you rock.
What you see is work like digging a ditch,
hard physical labor. What you hear
is magic as tricky as knife throwing.
What you see is strength like any
great athlete's. What you hear
is still rendered precisely as the best
Swiss watchmaker. The body is
resonance. The body is the cello case.
The body just is. The voice loud
as hunger remagnetizes your bones.
A Very Valentine
Very fine is my valentine.
Very fine and very mine.
Very mine is my valentine very mine and very fine.
Very fine is my valentine and mine, very fine very mine and mine is my valentine.
--Gertrade Stein
My Mother's Tango
I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows --
she rides a wild pony for my birthday,
a white pony on the seventh floor.
"And where will we keep it?" "On the balcony!"
the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.
At the center of my life my mother dances,
yes, here in childhood, my mother
asks to describe the stages of my happiness --
she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:
between the regiments of saucers and towels,
she moves so fast -- she is motionless,
opening and closing doors.
But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!
My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.
I draw an axis through the afternoon
to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language --
young, not young -- my mother
gallops a pony on the seventh floor.
She becomes a stranger and acts herself. opens
what is shut, shuts what is open.
-- Ilya Kaminsky
Thank you, Bees
When It Comes
What does it all come down to when it comes?
How do things end that have the grace to end?
The Iliad stops with "Hector the breaker of horses";
The last word of Lord Jim is "butterflies".
-- William Harmon
Listening To My Son's Heart
It's a game we play.
Well, as much a game as I can play with a one-year-old.
It goes like this.
When I come home from work,
he's there, toddling around the kitchen, wide-eyed
in his baby blue sleeping suit
with the padded feet.
When he sees me, he smiles, and I do too,
and I imagine the sound, the thud thud thud
if his tiny heart that I remember
from the last time we played our game.
I stoop down so my haunches almost touch the floor
and open my arms for a hug. He walks over
in his confident but uneasy way
and we are eye to eye when he breaks into laughter,
wraps his arms around my neck, and gently
nibbles on my shoulder. I do the same,
and it's then that I hear it, his heart
much faster than mine. After a minute or so
he turns around and walks out of my arms
only to turn around again and walk back
laughing, anticipating the hug
and, I think, the repetition. And again
I hear his heart, and again, momentarily,
an uncanny mixture of joy and fear,
happiness and anxiety overtakes me.
It is, I know, my pleasure in his life,
in his being here with us, and my fear
for him, for the difficulties yet to come.
But it is, also, a kind of self-pity;
the comfort of remorse that comes from imagining pain
juxtaposed against happiness, the permutations
of the future against the immediacy of the present,
the sound of his heart against the absence of it.
-- Anthony Petrosky
The bee is drunk with honeyed dew
In flowered colours a metallic dance
A hitched stagger in shifting winds
A flutter of smile in all that morass.
Enterprises of hive now gone distant
Structures and stimulations now left behind
The queen and drones wishing gone astray
For a sip of freedom and a new start.
Aromatics grazed in a buzz of curse
A soft cradled sun in a warm burst
Rocking fragrance in the azured skies
In liquefied reflections of droning surge.
The Bee, Durlabh Singh
The dead bee lies on the window ledge, a relic,
its amber-yellow body barred in black and its head
tucked in, dust gathering on every follicle....
flies too, all sizes, lying on their sides as if
asleep, just a quick nap and they'll be up and off
about their business. Souls, we used to say:
bees, butterflies, wasps, moths, all sorts of flies,
the air crowded and loud with leftover angels --
but not the spider in its complex web, fallen
from grace but walking on air, vigilant in ways
that harden the heart, getting its appetite back.
--from "Windowgrave" by Eamonn Grennan
1. BlueHorse: The opera poem you posted is astounding.
2. Bees and MCT: Have either of you read David Young's translations of Rilke? I like Stephen Mitchell and all (his translation of the Tao Te Ching stays in my back pocket when I'm not loaning it out to someone), but Young's translation of the Sonnets to Orpheus is probably my all-time favorite volume of poetry.
3. Walt Whitman's advice: don't become a poet
bone, I have to laugh out loud everytime I read that poem, MP is great.
Marge Piercy
Toad dreams
That afternoon the dream of the toads rang through the elms by Little River and affected the thoughts of men, though they were not conscious that they heard it.--Henry Thoreau
The dream of toads: we rarely
credit what we consider lesser
life with emotions big as ours,
but we are easily distracted,
abstracted. People sit nibbling
before television's flicker watching
ghosts chase balls and each other
while the skunk is out risking grisly
death to cross the highway to mate;
while the fox scales the wire fence
where it knows the shotgun lurks
to taste the sweet blood of a hen.
Birds are greedy little bombs
bursting to give voice to appetite.
I had a cat who died of love.
Dogs trail their masters across con-
tinents. We are far too busy
to be starkly simple in passion.
We will never dream the intense
wet spring lust of the toads.
bone, like Mitchel's translation a lot, but am not enthusiastic about Bly's, alas.
Since you speak so highly of the David Young Orpheus I'm going to see if I can lay hands on a copy -- thank you.
BlueHorse, Pierce is great fun! Do ye sippose lust alone could make a toad explode? -- this thread tells a strange tale.
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over a chair,
to fill yourself with
my vanity, my love,
my hope, my body.
Barely risen from sleep,
I relinquish the water,
enter your sleeves,
my legs look for
the hollows of your legs,
and so embraced
by your infatigable faithfulness
I rise, to tread the grass,
entering poetry,
consider through the windows
the things, the men
the women...
I wonder
if one day
a bullet
from the enemy
will leave you stained with my blood
and then you will die with me,
or one day
not quite
so dramatic
but simple,
you will fall ill,
clothes,
with me,
grow old
with me, with my body
and together
we will enter
the earth.
Because of this
each day
I greet you
with reverence and then
you embrace me and I forget you,
because we are one,
and we will go on
facing the wind, in the night,
the streets or the fight,
a single body,
one day, one day, some day, still.
-- from "Ode to Clothes", by Pablo Neruda
Little Foot
by Stuart Dischell
Under the bed
I found your old sock
Like a bird peeking out
The sleeve of my shirt.
I plucked it up.
So sad, little foot,
Now it's in the pocket
Of my coat for luck.
Later in the earth
I'll feed its nest,
Worms a plenty
Thief! Thief!
Baggins!BlueHorse!
Bent under burdens which sometimes
can be seen and sometimes can't,
they trudge through mud or desert sands,
hunched, hungry,
silent men in heavy jackets,
dressed for all four seasons,
and women with crumpled faces,
clutching something -- a child, the family
lamp, the last loaf of bread? ...
There's always a wagon or at least a wheelbarrow
full of treasures (a quilt, a silver cup,
the fading scent of home),
a car out of gas marooned in a ditch,
a horse (soon left behind), snow, a lot of snow,
too much snow, too much sun, too much rain,
and always that special slouch
as if leaning toward another, better planet,
with less ambituois generals,
less snow, less wind, fewer cannons,
less History (alas, there's no such planet, just that slouch).
Shuffling their feet,
they move slowly, very slowly,
toward the country of nowhere,
and the city of no one
on the river of never.
--Adam Zagajewsji, from "Refugees"
= Adam Zagajewsji
Ach!
= Zagajewski
my jaw hurts just trying to think how to say that
cold rain --
in wet corners
frogs riff
cold wet
in frogs corners
rain riff
To My Cat with an Eating Disorder
Alice N. Persons
You were thrown out of a moving vehicle
on a dirt road
in chilly winder downeast Maine,
little fur scrap, and I hope you don't
carry that memory with you,
but the hunger, the deep fear
that you'll never see food again
is still there five years later
when you are huge and sleek,
a sumo Buddha of a cat.
I've seen you, after a big meal,
heave yourself from a sound sleep,
pad into the kitchen, launch your bulk
onto the counter, and check the food supply,
then crouch there chewing and chewing,
green eyes empty, concentrating
on your burden, your compulsion,
doggedly eating, whether you want to or not.
There are stories about Holocaust or
Depression survivors whose refrigerators
and pantries are always full, just in case,
how some of them still wake in the night
and check their abundant supplies,
run their hands over the packages,
or eat without hunger, just because they can.
Cat, I stand in the dark kitchen
stroking your broad back,
wishing I could banish the fears
of one small, common creature,
those bad dreams that awaken you,
that hollow place in your memory
which can never be filled.
...and Lorca
glides in from the porch shadows, not a drop of rain on him,
not on his face, nor his delicate hands. He leaves no mud prints as he walks
into our living room and sits on our worn chintz
sofa. "What news have you of my father?" my father asks the poet.
Lorca looks around, then lights a cigarillo; the incandescence of the match flame lights
up his eyes. He exhales, then says, "He died thrown
from his horse." "True," my father says and runs into another room.
I approach slowly, driven by the smell of brilliantine on the poet's
combed hair. "Tell me abouyt the duende, Senor Lorca." He smiles
and aims a puff of smoke at me -- it makes my eyes water.
"You think you have it, Nino?" he asks. "I don't know," I say. I need the trembling
of this moment, then silence...."If you ever leave
this forsaken country," he adds, "you will neither sing nor play music.
But the duende will haunt you, like this memory of me, sitting here. Twenty-five years
from today, you will live in Tallahasee, Florida,
and it too will be raining. I will knock on your door, you will let me in,
and I will come and sit on your couch. You will ask me what news have I of your
father, and I will say: 'He is where you last left him, on a hospital bes, dead of a
massive coronary.' You will say 'how useless'. I will say:
'Aprende, the guitars are weeping, hear them?' We will sit in silence and listen to
the rain pour down on the earth. Poet in crinoline,
you come from remote regions of sorrow and return to the labyrinth:
love, crystal, stone, you vanish down the rivers of the earth to the sea.
--<sode>from "Duende" by Virgil Suarez</code>
leaving on a ten day trip
I get back in bed
for the warmth & to feel
your leg against mine
when the time comes
how will I ever leave this world
at once & without
looking back?
-- Diane di Prima, "Travel Song"
Day's End
Oxen and sheep were brought back down
Long ago, and bramble gates closed. Over
Mountains and rivers, far from my old garden,
A windswept moon rises into clear night.
Springs trickle down dark cliffs, and autumn
Dew fills ridgeline grasses. My hair seems
Whiter in lamplight. The flame flickers
Good fortune over and over -- and for what?
Tu Fu
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed in oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness,
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
-- Wallace Stevens, "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain"
Ah, yes, Wally taking a break from statistics. What an amazing man.
The Poetry Police
Garth Madsen
I've oxymoroned again.
I hope no one has noticed.
But sirens soar.
It's the POETRY POLICE.
Nervous, I attempt irony.
They take my license
and slam me against the wall.
They raise their eyebrows at my spondees
sneer at my anaphora
check the tread on my alliteration
"This metaphor isn't roadworthy,"
they tell me. "Too obscure."
they caution me on the similes.
All cliches, they say
I should be grateful
it's only a fine. They missed
the tautology on the seventh line
That's great, BlueHorse, and a new one to me. thanks.
To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long;
To look look at this green and say,
'I have seen spring in these
Woods," will not do -- you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the snall silences between
The leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peacce
They issue from.
-- Hohn Moffitt, "To Look at Any Thing"
Gentle Reader
Late in the night when I should be asleep
under the city stars in a small room
I read a poet. A poet: not
a versifier. Not a hot-shot
ethic-monger, laying about
him; not a diary of lying
about in cruel cruel beds, crying.
A poet, dangerous and steep.
O God, it peels me, juices me like a press;
this poetry drinks me, eats me, guts and marrow
until I exist in jester's sorrow,
until my juices feed a savage sight
that runs along the lines, bright
as beasts' eyes. The rubble splays to dust:
city, book, bed, leaving my ear's lust
saying like Molly, yes, yes, yes, O yes.
-- Josephine Jacobsen
The Eclipse
I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.
I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As mans hope of light in the face of darkness.
-- Richard Eberhart (1904-2005, RIP)
Turtle
Kay Ryan
Who would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She's often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.
Snow Fence
The red fence
takes the cold trail
north; no meat
on its ribs,
but neither has it
much to carry.
-- Ted Kooser
Errata
Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
-- Charles Simic
Lisel Mueller
Not only the Eskimos
We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:
the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,
guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,
rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,
snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,
surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can't find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science-fiction movie,
snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,
unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart's birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian Fields
and strangers spoke to each other,
paper snow, cut and taped,
to the inside of grade-school windows,
in an old tale, the snow
that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,
the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,
the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of furs,
though we have never traveled
to Russia or worn furs,
Villon's snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,
the snow in Joyce's "The Dead,"
the silent, secret snow
in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,
the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,
snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,
the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,
the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,
the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,
the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.
Tattoo
What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.
Ted Kooser from Delights & Shadows,
Copper Canyon Press,
Port Townsend, WA 2004
A Voice
They mutilate, they torment each other
with silences with words
as if they had another
life to live
they do so
as if they had forgotten
that their bodies
are inclined to death
that the insides of men
easily break down
ruthless with other
they are weaker
than plants and animals
they can be killed by a word
by a smile by a look
--Tadeusz Rozewicz
A.R. Ammons
Shit List; Or, Omnium-gatherum Of Diversity Into Unity
You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:
gosling shit (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout
shit, rainbow trout shit (for the nice), mullet shit,
sand dab shit, casual sloth shit, elephant shit
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest shit,
horse shit (a favorite), caterpillar shit (so many dark
kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros
shit, splashy jaybird shit, mockingbird shit
(dive-bombed with the aim of song), robin shit that
oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts,
chicken shit and chicken mite shit, pelican shit, gannet
shit (wholesome guano), fly shit (periodic), cockatoo
shit, dog shit (past catalog or assimilation),
cricket shit, elk (high plains) shit, and
tiny scribbled little shrew shit, whale shit (what
a sight, deep assumption), mandril shit (blazing
blast off), weasel shit (wiles' waste), gazelle shit,
magpie shit (total protein), tiger shit (too acid
to contemplate), moral eel and manta ray shit, eerie
shark shit, earthworm shit (a soilure), crab shit,
wolf shit upon the germicidal ice, snake shit, giraffe
shit that accelerates, secretary bird shit, turtle
shit suspension invites, remora shit slightly in
advance of the shark shit, hornet shit (difficult to
assess), camel shit that slaps the ghastly dry
siliceous, frog shit, beetle shit, bat shit (the
marmoreal), contemptible cat shit, penguin shit,
hermit crab shit, prairie hen shit, cougar shit, eagle
shit (high totem stuff), buffalo shit (hardly less
lofty), otter shit, beaver shit (from the animal of
alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down
cloaca—macaw shit, alligator shit (that floats the Nile
along), louse shit, macaque, koala, and coati shit,
antelope shit, chuck-will's-widow shit, alpaca shit
(very high stuff), gooney bird shit, chigger shit, bull
shit (the classic), caribou shit, rasbora, python, and
razorbill shit, scorpion shit, man shit, laswing
fly larva shit, chipmunk shit, other-worldly wallaby
shit, gopher shit (or broke), platypus shit, aardvark
shit, spider shit, kangaroo and peccary shit, guanaco
shit, dolphin shit, aphid shit, baboon shit (that leopards
induce), albatross shit, red-headed woodpecker (nine
inches long) shit, tern shit, hedgehog shit, panda shit,
seahorse shit, and the shit of the wasteful gallinule.
Topography
After we flew across the country we
got into bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
- Sharon Olds
This
This that lies heavy
and weighs down,
that aches like ache
and burns like a slap in the face,
is a stone
or an anchor.
--Adam Zagajewski
Marianne Moore
He Digesteth Harde Yron
though the aepyornis
or roc that lived in Madagascar, and
the moa are extinct,
the camel-sparrow, linked
with them in size--the large sparrow
Xenophon saw walking by a stream--was and is
a symbol of justice.
This bird watches his chicks with
a maternal concentration-and he's
been mothering the eggs
at night six weeks--his legs
their only weapon of defense.
He is swifter than a horse; he has a foot hard
as a hoof; the leopard
is not more suspicious.How
could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young
used even as a riding-beast, respect men
hiding actor-like in ostrich skins, with the right hand
making the neck move as if alive
and from a bag the left hand strewing grain, that ostriches
might be decoyed and killed!Yes, this is he
whose plume was anciently
the plume of justice; he
whose comic duckling head on its
great neck revolves with compass-needle nervousness
when he stands guard,
in S-like foragings as he is
preening the down on his leaden-skinned back.
The egg piously shown
as Leda's very own
from which Castor and Pollux hatched,
was an ostrich-egg.And what could have been more fit
for the Chinese lawn it
grazed on as a gift to an
emperor who admired strange birds, than this
one, who builds his mud-made
nest in dust yet will wade
in lake or sea till only the head shows.
. . . . . . .
Six hundred ostrich-brains served
at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent
and desert spear, jewel-
gorgeous ugly egg-shell
goblets, eight pairs of ostriches
in harness, dramatize a meaning
always missed by the externalist.
The power of the visible
is the invisible; as even where
no tree of freedom grows,
so-called brute courage knows.
Heroism is exhausting, yet
it contradicts a greed that did not wisely spare
the harmless solitaire
or great auk in its grandeur;
unsolicitude having swallowed up
all giant birds but an alert gargantuan
little-winged, magnificently speedy running-bird.
This one remaining rebel
is the sparrow-camel.
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
this air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
--Mark Strand
Silly Birds
Baby birds leave the nest so easily!
But it's hard as hell
to get the shell
off a wise old tortoise.
--Hung-Chih Cheng-chueh, trans Sam Hamill
...
Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.
Nothing has changed,, it's just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is, and ever will be a howl of innocence
aaccordsing to the time-honored scale and tonality.
Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonials, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tries to get away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeda.
Nothing has changed. Except for thr course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive,
at times certain, at othet times uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of tis own.
--Wislawa Szymborska, from "Tortures"
36 Hours
36 hours in the mystery chair
36 hours in the quizzical glare
of the naked lights and the visible hardware
Another bloke is leaving in a wheelchair
no joke, here comes the punchline
lights out... sack time
Steel shoes on the stone cold floor
I hear the screws screaming in the corridor
the bad news and the slammin' of the door
the "what did I do's" and the "what am I here for's"
shades of doubt fall deeper than the slag mine
lights out... sack time
Hard cheese and a chest complaint
one man sneezes, another two faint
sufferin' Jesus, this ain't my venue
The man through the mesh says it's time to crash
the creeping flesh of a nervous rash
the last man to make a dash
is on the menu
Here's the boss with a mouthful of emeralds
a Maltese cross and a pocket full of chemicals
Jack Frost snappin' at the genitals
wash my cosh it's a visit from the general
rule out sub section nine
lights out... sack time
The killer gorilla with the perspex hat
says I say so... and that's that
take out the dog bring back the cat
scrape out the cafeteria rats
stab the rabbit feed the swine lights out... sack time
Time flies ... slides down the wall
part of me dies under my overalls
I close my eyes and a woman calls
from a nightmare
The chronic breath of the dead collides
with a rattle of the waste disposal slides
no flowers for the man who dies
in the bombscare
he's in the frigidaire
Freezing in these paper jeans
standing stiff in a dead man's dream
tobacco barons and the closet queen
walk on the walls... wank in the beans
shave... shit... a shower and a shoe shine
that's it... sack time
everybody looks like Ernest Borgnine
That's it
36 hours on the battery farm
a blindfold and a broken arm
I got the cold shoulder sleepin' in the barn
whose barn... what barn... their barn
the old soldier and his old-world charm
lift that weight, drag that woodbine
lights out mate sackarooni time
lights out... sack time
John Cooper Clarke
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It has been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help.
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
--Philip Larkin
Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and brusises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling....
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough.
The wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle,
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.
--Anne Sexton, from "Words"
Memories of Horses
The lines in the hands of old people
gradually curve over and will point soon toward earth.
They take with them their secret language,
cloud-words and wind-letters,
all the signs the heart gathers up in the lean year.
Sorrow bleaches out and turns to face the stars
but memories of horses, women's feet, children
flow from their old people's faces down to the grass kingdom.
In huge trees we can often see
images of the peace in the sides of animals,
and the wind sketches in the grass, if you are happy,
running children and horses.
-- Rolf Jacobsen, trans. Robert Bly
We Are Many
Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing.
They have departed for another city.
When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed in my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.
On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.
When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to single out myself?
How can I put myself together?
All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
always brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.
But when I call upon my dashing being,
out comes the same old lazy self,
and so I never know just who I am,
nor how many I am, nor who we will be being.
I would like to be able to touch a bell,
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.
While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.
-- Pablo Neruda, trans Alastair Reid
That Neruda got it penned right.
He sure did. Thank you, bees.
The Wrong Way Home by James Tate
All night a door floated down the river.
It tried to remember little incidents of pleasure
from its former life, like the time the lovers
leaned against it kissing for hours
and whispering those famous words.
Later, there were harsh words and a shoe
was thrown and the door was slammed.
Comings and goings by the thousands,
the early mornings and late nights, years, years.
O they've got big plans, they'll make a bundle.
The door was an island that swayed in its sleep.
The moon turned the doorknob just slightly,
burned its fingers and ran,
and still the door said nothing and slept.
At least that's what they like to say,
the little fishes and so on.
Far away, a bell rang, and then a shot was fired.
A timely poem, StoryBored.
Epithalamion/Wedding Dawn
For Nicholas and Elena
Happy the man who is thirsty.
And the moths, pilgrims to our screens.
The father stands waist-deep in the water,
waiting. Happy the man waiting.
Who is not alone? Who does not slepp
in the dark house of himself, without music?
The world, a collapsed fire, shows only its smoke,
and the smoke hides its hills,
hides, too, the places where we are sleeping,
the hand opened, the hand closed.
Fragments, the lovers lie. And the question,
saying:
Who is broken? No one is broken,
but the living are sleeping, like animals,
like the dead. Tree dreams
of the man he was, who walked
by the shore, who followed
the hill upward, who dragged his roots
through the universe, who lay down
to suffer there, and, loving the earth,
left it exhausted, returned to it renewed.
But the house is dark. The sky at such time
has no light. Even the lines in the hand
are a little desert without name, and silent.
2
Friends, in the hours before dawn, the day of your wedding.
What will I tell you then?
The solitude's thorn
breaks into bloom now? I think it is so.
I think that if we are scarred, light heals us now.
We can be heard, making our difficult music.
And for this the sun
drags irself up from the dark parts of the world,
again, again.
The windows take on the peculiar fire of the living.
The dog hoots like a wood-pigeon, he has his morning.
3
You must not be angry with this planet.
For we are in a company
whose music surpasses its pain.
For I tell you, I sit in the dark, also,
and the wedding light came onto my window,
and the hills were cleared for me,
and the field spread out in front of me, remarkable, like marble.
And I thought, this is their day,
how it breaks for them!
O sir, the angel flies, even with bruises,
O lady, a bird can wash himself anywhere.
The dawn that came up the day of your wedding
took me in its hand like the creature that I am;
and I heard the dark that I came from
whispering, "Be silent."
And the dawn said, "Sing."
And I found the best words I could find around me
and came to your wedding.
-- Micheal Dennis Browne
You will hear thunder and remember me
You will hear thunder and remember me
And think: she wanted storm. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.
That day in Mosacow, it will all come true,
When, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shodow still to be with you.
--Anna Akmatova, translator unknown
Northern Lights
We watched the islands from the waterfront
as though they held a clue to what was next.
The wind built up in gusts to match our hearts
and blew the cafe chairs into the water.
Police in boats fished out the furniture
with poles, making us laugh amid the chuckles
rolled through us like the whale's back
rolls through water, like the islands
stretch through the north seas. I have stolen
some of the light which drenches you this midnight
to wish you all the islands in the world
and every one a different kind of peace.
-- Jo Shapcott
amid = until
"What Happened When Bobby Jack Cockrum Tried To Bring Home A Pit Bulldog
or
What His Daddy Said To Him that Day"
by David Lee
Son
let me tell you the story
of the man who saved
a baby grizzly bear
from a forest fire
and brought it home
nursed it
fed it
kept it like his own
And how the last thing
that man ever learned on earth
when it grown up
and he tried to keep it
out of the hog pen one morning
was the lesson
of what a grizzly bear
is at last
And it had
a final exam
he couldn't help
but pass
The Blue Bowl
Jane Kenyon
Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.
We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.
Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing
The lone wild goose doesn't peck or drink
just flies and cries out, seeking its flock.
Who cares for this tiny piece of shadow
lost in ten thousand layered clouds?
Does he see them where vision ends?
Does he hear them through his deep sorrow?
The wild ravens have no feelings.
They just caw raucoudsly, flapping, flapping.
-- Du Fu, "A Lone Goose", trans unknown
Hey Bluey, here at last is a poem I thought of about horses for you and reflects my knowledge of same.
*clears throat*
This is a poem about the horse
It is very short of course.
*clasps hands, shreaks, jumps up and down, hugs monitor*
wOw! For me, StoryBored, thank you! And it rhymes, too!
*intends to chant poem over and over in high little voice to drive non-horsie people in her life mad*
*blush*
Wow this poetry is easy
*furrows brow*
*begins epic work on bees*
Out of Shot and Höfn "From A Shiver by Seamus Heaney, [to be] published by Clutag Press in a limited edition of 300 copies."
Charles Bukowski
poetry readings
poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can't find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.
I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.
if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:
a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke
anything
anything
but
these.
Watched a recorded Bukowski reading at the Ridge Theatre, Vancouver that took place at the Western Front (also Vancouver) in 1976. Amazing. The old school audience (on film) was retarded.
The Bluebird is my favorite.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
-T.S. Eliot
let us roister
with the oyster!
stop your yawning!
nibble me!
just be claws
to grip me
nip me
as we cling
beneath the sea
o scuttle low
and bring me
sing me
past the depths
to heights
with thee
bees are an insect
that can often make honey
unless they bumble
Playin' Bees
Some bees are more equal (to the task) than others.
An acute bee is less than a right bee. But an obtuse bee is greater than a right bee.
One beeline can connect any two bees.
Any two bees that equal a right bee are complimentary.
Any two bees that fail to equal a right bee are damnably rude.
Two bee or not two bee is always in question.
Bees flying in parallel beelines will never arrive at the same hive. Never, ever.
"Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water —
A deep resonance."
-Basho
I used to have that one on the wall in perfect view for whenever I had to sit on the pot, it was so apropos.
InsolentChimp, my impression at this point is that you are hostile and/or embittered.
And no wonder if this remarkably execrable translation is the best you have of Basho's work.
Reading something this bad with any frequency can have a deleterious effect on even the best and wittiest.
I suggest ye cast the thing away before it does further harm to your aesthetic sensibility.
hehehe.
1b
From moon wreathed
bamboo grove,
cuckoo song.
2b
Summer grasses
all that remains
of soldiers dreams.
3b
Not one traveller
braves this road -
autumn night.
4b
Clouds -
a chance to dodge
moonviewing.
5b
Orchid breathing
incense into
butterfly wings.
6b
Spring - through
morning mist
what mountains there?
7b
Autumns end
how does my
neighbour live?
8b
Old pond
leap - splash
a frog.
Facing Snow
Battles, sobbing, many new ghosts.
Just an old man, I sadly chant poems.
Into the thin evening, wild clouds dip.
On swirling wind, fast dancing snow.
A ladle idles by a drained cask of green wine.
Last embers redden in ther empty stove.
No news, the provinces are cut off.
With one finger I write in the air, sorrow.
-- Du Fu
Letter From A Reader
Too much about death,
too many shadows.
Write about life,
an average day,
the yearning for order.
Take the school bell
as your model
of moderation,
even scholarship.
Too much death,
too much
dark radiance.
Take a look,
crowds packed
in cramped stadiums
sing hymns of hatred.
Too much music,
too little harmony, peace,
reason.
Write about those moments
whwn friendship's footbridges
seem more enduring
than despair.
Write about love,
long evenings,
the dawn,
the trees,
about the endless patience
of the light.
-- Adam Zagajewski
Oh Earth, Wait for Me
Return me, oh sun,
to my wild destiny,
rain of the ancient wood,
bring me back the aroma and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp in the river margins,
the smell of the birch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded restlessness
of towering araucaria.
Earth, give me back your gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.
-- Pablo Neruda
And no wonder if this remarkably execrable translation is the best you have of Basho's work.
Reading something this bad with any frequency can have a deleterious effect on even the best and wittiest.
I suggest ye cast the thing away before it does further harm to your aesthetic sensibility.
Naw, bees, it was just a long gone poop joke. I hate reading translations, especially of poetry, but my meagre skills in languages other than English prevent me from that. I get frustrated with reading things such as Rilke and Basho that I have to read several translations along with commentary on the languages and culture in order to get the gist of it. Mishima, Saramago et al are hard to accept for their own aesthetic when I read the translations. May as well have fun with it. But just so you know, I didn't credit it to Basho when I hung it on the wall of the poo factory.
dirty old business
if you have to flush it twice
use the aerosol
I am relieved, InsolentChimp! ;]
On a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes
'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selina, reclined,
Gazed in the lake below.
Her conscious tail her joy declared:
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes;
She saw, and purr'd applause.
Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream:
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Through richest purple, to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.
The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first, and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd, in vain, to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What Cat's averse to fish?
Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between:
(Malignant Fate sat by and smiled).
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
Shw tumbled headlong in!
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mew'd to every watery god
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd:
Nor cruel Tom nor Susan heard.
A favourite has no friend!
From hence, ye Beauties, undeceived,
Know one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
The Winter Palace
Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had at university
And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints,
And am starting to give offense by forgetting faces
And swearing I've never been in certain places.
It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.
-- Philip Larkin
Fairy Tales
You believed in your own story,
then climbed inside it --
A turquoise flower.
You gazed past ailing trees,
past crumbling walls and rusty railings.
Your least gesture beckoned a constellation
of wild vetch, grasshoppers, and stars
to sweep you into immaculate distances.
The heart may be tiny
but the world's enormous.
And the people in turn believe --
in pine trees after rain,
ten thousand tiny suns, a mulberry branch
bent over water like a fishing-rod,
a cloud tangled in the tail of a kite.
Shaking off dust, in silver voices
ten thousand memories sing from your dream.
The world may be tiny
but the heart's enormous.
-- Shu Ting, trans Donald Finkel
Seven-Sided Poem
When I was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow, said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.
The houses watch the men,
Men who run after women.
If the afternoons had been blue,
there might have been less desire.
The trolley goes by full of legs:
white legs, black legs, yellow legs.
My God, why all the legs?
my heart asks. But my eyes
ask nothing at all.
The man behind the moustache
is serious, simple, and strong.
He hardly ever speaks.
He has a few, choice friends,
the man behind the spectavles and the moustache.
My God, why hast Thou forsaken me
if Thou knew'st I was not God,
if Thou knew'st that I was weak?
Universe, vast universe,
if I had been named Eugene
that would not be what I mean
but it would go into verse
faster.
Universe, vast universe,
my heart is vaster.
I oughtn't to tell you,
but this moon
and this brandy
play the devil with one's emotions.
-- Carlos Drummond de Andrade, trams Elizabeth Bishop
Stone and Light
The stone doesn't repel the light,
The stone doesn't absorb the light.
On the stone sits a deerfly,
The light is radiant in its downy hair.
The light just now arrived on earth.
-- Shuntaro Tanikawa, trans Harold Wright
The Discarded Horse
Hitoshi Anzai
What on earth is it, going from where to where,
that is passing around through here I wonder?
The same as a wounded god,
a single abandoned military horse.
Shining more than death,
alone more than liberty,
and at the same time like peacefulness without a helper,
is the field of snow where he temporarily wanders about
with hardly his own lean shadow to feed on.
Presently one cry is neighed-out toward the distance
and collapsing from the knees he has tumbled down.
The Asian snow, the heavenly evening!
Fingers probe
The desert of a face
Diviners
Tear detectors
Below the surface
They plough their furrows
Their hives
Their palaces
Passions dissolve there
Rages also
Nothing glistens
Under the arcadea
No trade
On the docks
Without a harbour
A single
Boat
Heads out to sea
-- Claire Malroux, "Fingers probe", trans Marilyn Hacker
The contemporary tendency in poetry is to eschew repetition, but poetry would be poorer without it. Here, timely changes, from a Victorian's standpoint:
Ring Out, Wild Bells
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night,
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow;
The year is going, let him go,
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the noblest modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times,
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out the old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
White Towels
I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.
-- Richard Jones
Immigrant Talk with Picture Ripped from Porno Magazine
It's Sunday, Mary Lou,
most terrible day of the week when even empty bottles
look happy keeping company with the spiders under my bed.
They know nothing about my loneliness
shaped by wet pillows and crumpled sheets,
nothing about the emptiness that attacks me
while watching night programs on TV
with one hand on a lottery ticket
and another on the glass.
It's Sunday, Mary Lou,
and I'm already tired talking with ancestors
hidden in the basket of my dirty work clothes.
She's fake, they tell me every time I kiss your photo.
As if I don't know it.
Your long blond hair is not the same color as your pubic bush
which obediently lies under somebody's hand. Like a lamb.
And your big breasts don't seem like the place where some baby
can get some sleep with a drop of milk between its lips.
Even your phone number
printed at the bottom of your widely spread legs
is a fake.
Or belongs to someone I didn't need to call.
My neighbor's wife, the house next to mine,
seems happy walking with her kids on Sunday evening
--she can be seen in the red light district every night.
Even the tiny woman next door,
holding hands with her boyfriend who just got out of jail
says "Hello" on Sunday.
And I pretend not to know she's wearing a big hat
just to cover the dark bruises under her eyes.
Even my landlady's dog,
fifth in the last year,
walks lamely before licking my hand. On Sunday.
But my ancestors don't want to see that scene
and dive into the pockets of my work clothes.
It's Sunday, Mary Lou, lonely Sunday
when life seems different
and my loneliness has the shape of an empty bottle
keeping company with spiders and crumpled lottery tickets
under my bed.
It's Sunday, Mary Lou,
and nobody sees the moment when I put your photo
back in my wallet
to keep company with the picture of my darling
who once promised to wait for me
until I come back.
Nobody can see my pale eyes watching two pale photos
not able to tell which one is my darling
and which one is you, Mary Lou.
It's Sunday. Loney Sunday.
-Goran Simic
Requiem
Today
is the
perfect day
The sky
just so
clouds moving
fast
Drops of water
on leaves
of Russian sage
Dog sitting
her chin
on crossed paws
Light streams
through branches
of locust tree
I sit
just so
at the
small table
...
Everything is
perfect
just like this
you would have said
-- Abigail Gramig
A Martian sends a Postcard home
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under some tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world
For movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
-- Craig Raine
without a thought
the neighbour's back yard
turns green
-- William J. Higginson
I meant to post this a few days ago, since it would have been more appropriate, but you know how it is...
A propos of the Tennyson poem that bees posted above, it is a New Year's tradition in Sweden to broadcast a recital of a Swedish translation of "Ring out, wild bells" just before midnight strikes. No one is really sure how an English poem came to be such a symbol of Swedish-ness, but the translation, by Edvard Fredin, is so loose as to practically be a different poem - the wild bells have become just the one not-wild bell, for example, and the piece has a completely different meter. Also interestingly, as noted in this Wikipedia article (in Swedish), the turns of phrase that have the most resounding impact on the Swedish ear are creative embellishments on behalf of the translator... I have to admit that I like the translated version better than the original.
The first couple of verses, re-translated un-poetically back into English, go like this:
Ring, bell, ring in the grim new year's night
to the northern lights in the sky and the ground's snow
the old year lies down to die...
Ring the death knell over land and water!
Ring in the new and ring out the old
in the year's first, trembling minute.
Ring the power of lies out over the boundaries of the world
and ring in the truth to us who fumble.
(The Swedish version is also a bit of an excercise in proper recitation for anyone saying it out loud: get the pauses wrong in the first line and it sounds like you're saying "Doorbell ring" as opposed to "Ring, bell, ring", which has significantly less emotional resonance...)
Doorbell doth ring!
Mothninja doth bring
arctickled air
through wintry long nights --
a welcome bell chimes
these changing times,
hope for a brighter year
under cool northern lights!
(((!
Doorbell doth ring!
For the bees, and the spring
breezes that blow --
a new day's begun!
A welcome bell chimes
these changing times,
as hope starts to grow
'neath the warm southern sun.
The Loon on Oak-Head Pond
cries for three days, in the gray mist.
cries for the north it hopes it can find.
plunges and comes up with a slapping pickerel
blinks its red eye.
cries again.
you come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.
you sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,
in the silence that follows.
as though it were your own twilight.
as though it were your own vanishing song.
-- Mary Oliver
Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
there are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
Fleur Adcock
Twp Monkeys By Brueghel
I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing --
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.
-- Wislawa Szymborska, trans Magnus Kryski
211th Chorus (from Mexico City Blues)
The wheel of the quivering meat conception
Turns in the void expelling human beings,
Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits,
Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan
Racinghorses, poxy bubolic pigtics,
Horrible, unnameable lice of vultures,
Murderous attacking dog-armies
Of Africa, Rhinos roaming in the jungle,
Vast boars and huge gigantic bull
Elephants, rams, eagles, condors,
Pones and Porcupines and Pills-
All the endless conception of living beings
Gnashing everywhere in Consciousness
Throughout the ten directions of space
Occupying all the quarters in & out,
From super-microscopic no-bug
To huge Galaxy Lightyear Bowell
Illuminating the sky of one Mind-
Poor! I wish I was free
of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead
-Jack Kerouac
I didn't know this before but the Big Dipper is a roller coaster. But I'm posting this mostly because it is a cool song and it has a hidden segue.
Big Dipper
Cigarette and carrot juice
And get yourself a new tattoo
for those sleeveless days of June
I'm sitting on the Cafe Xeno's steps
with a book I haven't started yet
watching all the girls walk by
Could I take you out
I'll be yours without a doubt
on that big dipper
And if the sound of this it frightens you
we could play it real cool
and act somewhat indifferent
And hey June why did you have to come,
why did you have to come around so soon
I wasn't ready for all this nature
The terrible green green grass,
and violent blooms of flowered dresses
and afternoons that make me sleepy
But we could wait awhile
before we push that dull turnstile
into the passage
The thousands they had tread
and others sometimes fled
before the turn came
And we could wait our lives
before a chance arrives
before the passage
From the top you can see Monterey
or think about San Jose
though I know it's not that pleasant
And hey Jim Kerouac
brother of the famous Jack
or so he likes to say "lucky bastard"
He's sitting on the cafe Xeno's steps
with a girl I'm not over yet
watching all the world go by
Boy you are looking bad
Did I make you feel that sad
I'm honestly flattered
But if she asks me out
I'll be hers without a doubt
on that big dipper
Cigarettes and carrot juice
and get yourself a new tattoo
for those sleeveless days of June
I'm sitting on the cafe Xeno's steps
I haven't got the courage yet,
I haven't got the courage yet,
I haven't got the courage yet
-- Cracker
Seems this week is haunted by pones,InsolentChimp.
;]
Indigestible!
*eructates*
Telegraph Wires
Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor,
And fit them together. The thing comes alive in your ear.
Towns whisper to towns over the heather.
But the wires cannot hide from the weather.
So oddly, so daintily made
It is picked up and played.
Such unearthly airs
The ear hears, and withers!
In the revolving ballroom of space
Bowed over the moor, a bright face
Draws out of telegraph wires the tones
That empty human bones.
Ted Hughes
The Railway Children
When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.
Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.
We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,
Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled
We could stream through the eye of a needle.
- Seamus Heaney
I Had Been Chained and Padlocked
I had been chained and padlocked
and snapped to the clothesline
because I called my brother
a son of a bitch.
Then let's see how much you enjoy
being one of my puppies,
mother said,
and by evening,
when father came home from work,
I was barking almost deliciously
through the savage salt in my tears.
Beneath the clothesline
I had worn a path,
having been tempted at either end
by cars and cats and other dogs
and curious children,
one of whom I had bitten.
Father tossed me a bone,
said he'd see by Christ
how long I could live in a doghouse
before I changed my little tune.
I hung on,
and then some,
inhaling the hair and the clusters
and the bad breath of the dog
that had sacrificed his home:
until in the middle
of the third night
I called out to return.
In front of Franklin's crib
I swallowed a growl
to say I'd never say it again.
And I curled my fists that night
like Franklin's,
asleep in the bother
and the wonder
of a small skin.
-William Kloefkorn
Writing on Not Writing
I can feel my ship about to come in.
A white ship in a snowstorm
moving in.
The ship is made of gulls
huddled together
in the shape of a ship.
When it arrives, they will fly out into the storm,
leaving a space inside it
clear as reason.
I can tell there's going to be a blizzard
of being somewhere else
any minute
because of time's noise eating itself up
that is the noise of listening
that looks like a seething, florid whiteout of wings.
-- Jack Myers
Where'd all these birds come from?
The Sex of Money
You walk into the white field, squat
between rows of frozen cabbages, almost happy
he is gone. You spread the money
all around you on the ground, remembering
how it felt when he put it in your hands.
-Susan Musgrave
JACK
Maxine Kumin
How pleasant the yellow butter
melting on white kernels, the meniscus
of red wine that coats the insides of our goblets
where we sit with sturdy friends as old as we are
after shucking the garden’s last Silver Queen
and setting husks and stalks aside for the horses
the last two of our lives, still noble to look upon:
our first foal, now a bossy mare of 28
which calibrates to 84 in people years
and my chestnut gelding, not exactly a youngster
at 22. Every year, the end of summer
lazy and golden, invites grief and regret:
suddenly it’s 1980, winter batters us,
winds strike like cruelty out of Dickens. Somehow
we have seven horses for six stalls. One of them,
a big-nosed roan gelding, calm as a president’s portrait
lives in the rectangle that leads to the stalls. We call it
the motel lobby. Wise old campaigner, he dunks his
hay in the water bucket to soften it, then visits the others
who hang their heads over their Dutch doors. Sometimes
he sprawls out flat to nap in his commodious quarters.
That spring, in the bustle of grooming
and riding and shoeing, I remember I let him go
to a neighbor I thought was a friend, and the following
fall she sold him down the river. I meant to
but never did go looking for him, to buy him back
and now my old guilt is flooding this twilit table
my guilt is ghosting the candles that pale us to skeletons
the ones we must all become in an as yet unspecified order.
Oh Jack, tethered in what rough stall alone
did you remember that one good winter?
Bees, surely you are familiar with Maxine Kumin's writing/driving?
Yes, she's another fine poet.
Four white feet
and a white nose;
cut off his head
and feed him to the crows.
-- English traditional
Detestable, and false, Figure some slackard of a stablehand came up with that one in the old days.
One white foot.
buy him.
Two white feet,
try him.
Three white feet,
watch him as he goes.
Four white feet,
feed him to the crows.
Although, my Bees, I do prefer a black-footed horse in solid bay or grey--prefer them without the chrome.
And you and I must have a much-awaited chat about those Lusitanos
Read your version before, BlueHorse, but gave one I learned as a boy, which seems to have lost all the fine gradations. Bad news for American Saddlehorses, Clydesdales etc.
So curious as to why four white feet is considered bad?
Ah, StoryBored, 'tis because white feet are thought to be softer and to wear faster or to be more likely to throw a shoe. Additionally white feet are supposed to crumble, splay, or chip out more and to be more susceptable to thrush (hoof rot.) The old saying is No foot, No horse.
IMHO, they do wear faster if you ride a barefooted horse, and if I have to have white feet on a horse, I'd prefer them on the rear. But a good foot is a good foot, and I've not had problems holding shoes on any white-footed horses that I've had.
Nor have I.
Far as I can tell, the foot-thing is a crock, and the only reason for disdaining such lack of pigment is that, in an animal kept stabled in a box stall on dirty bedding or where peat moss was the bedding, stable-stains are much more obvious on white.
In the old days, considerations such as this, where some owners were inclined to value appearance over performance, grey and roan were sometimes preferred since their already multi-cooured coats did not reveal sweat so dramatically, nor the salt flakes etc left in the coats of the ill-groomed. Black coats and darker solid coloirs were said to show sweat the most, but the fact is, it will surfacve on any coat-colour, and the interpretation is up to the individual as to which is what.
Ye can still call up some hot discussions re some of these old-time notions in most any groups of the horse-addled.
That's neat! Thanks for filling me in youse guys. I've ridden three times in my life and enjoyed it. I should probably get back into it.
Bees is absolutely right. Get two horsepeople in a room, and you'll have three different arguments going. DON'T for the love of all that's holy, ever, EVER, attend a meeting of a horse club.
Here's one of Merwin's early ones:
The River of Bees
In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blind man followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older
Soon it will be fifteen years
He is old he will have fallen into his eyes
I took my eyes
A long way to the calendars
Room after room asking how shall I live
One of the ends is made of streets
One man processions carry through it
Empty bottles their
Image of hope
It was offered to me by name
Once once and once
In the same city I was born
Asking what shall I say
He will have fallen into his mouth
Men think they are better than grass
I return to his voice rising like a forkful of hay
He is old he is not real nothing is real
Nor the noise of death drawing water
We are the echo of the futire
On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survivce
Only to live
-- W.S. Merwin
The sensitive may wish to skip this one:
Barn Fire
It starts, somehow, in the hot damp
and soon the hot bales
throb in the hayloft. The tails
of mice quake in the dust,
the bins of grain, the mangers stuffed,
with clover, the barrels of oats
shivering individually in their pale
husks -- animate and inanimate: they know
with the first whiff in the dark.
And we knew, or should have: that day
the calendar refused its nail
in the wall and the crab apples hurling
themselves to the ground...Only moments
and the flames like a blue fist curl
all around the black. There is some
small blazing from the calves and the cows'
nostrils flare only once
more, or twice; above the dead dry
metal troughs....No more fat tongues worrying
the salt licks, no more heady smells
of deep green from silos rising now
like huge twin chimneys above all this.
With the lofts full there is no stopping
nor even getting close: it will rage
until dawn and beyond -- and the horses,
because they know they are safe there,
the horses run back into the barn.
-- Thomas Luc
- Thomas Lus.
Thank you, Bees.
What is it about horses especially that make images and metaphor surrounding them so exquisitely powerful?
Barbed Wire
Henry Taylor
One summer afternoon when nothing much
was happening, they were standing around
a tractor beside the barn while a horse
in the field poked his head between two strands
of the barbed-wire fence to get at the grass
along the lane, when it happened—something
they passed around the wood stove late at night
for years, but never could explain—someone
may have dropped a wrench into the toolbox
or made a sudden move, or merely thought
what might happen if the horse got scared, and
then he did get scared, jumped sideways and ran
down the fence line, leaving chunks of his throat
skin and hair on every barb for ten feet
before he pulled free and ran a short way
into the field, stopped and planted his hoofs
wide apart like a sawhorse, hung his head
down as if to watch his blood running out,
almost as if he were about to speak
to them, who almost thought he could regret
that he no longer had the strength to stand,
then shuddered to his knees, fell on his side,
and gave up breathing while the dripping wire
hummed like a bowstring in the splintered air.
Bees, Taylor is another fantastic poet/rider as I'm sure you know. Who else is missing?
!
= Thomas Lux!
this silly geezer...
doesn't know
where the keys are
Certainly, in any consideration of poets, BlueHorse, I think it'd be easier to find, right up till the 1920s or so, poets who hadn't ridden/driven a horse.
Only in the last century has that (?possibly) changed.
After all, Pegasus has a time-honoured affinity for poets.
There are no true cavaliers, bees?
In the spirit of the Communications Decency Act anniversary, I present Mr. Wilde:
from The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
V.
...
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity's machine.
...
-Oscar Wilde
Their sight grows dark.
Their minds are bent.
Some have too long
in cubicles been pent.
Bees--for Bees
Bees
Moore Moran
The hive whines in the oak above the pool,
A rotted enclave yet a natural home
For these small gatherers. First light, they ly,
Some favoring alyssum, others mums,
A few charmed by an open Pepsi can
Left near a lawn chair by my tanning daughter.
Toward noon, in quiet shallows, I see them
Slowing, circling. freighted with heat and hoard;
Some, visibly spent, totter to water's edge
And tumble in, wings crying urgent signals—
Two, three, at a time I fish them from
Bright pulsing circles of would-be demise.
They do me no harm for by now they know
The clumsy hulk attending them is friendly;
They wait to be redeemed, set on the deck,
Dazed, upright and happy for another day.
And yet they drop in numbers far too great
To save them all. The dying, without further
Protest, wait numb and motionless to pass
Back into nature. Such is an aging fancy,
Guileless enough to solemnize these passings.
The bee man wants the hive; he plans at dusk
To call on the queen—get her take on moving
To solid, more considered royal turf.
That's one I haven't seen before, BlueHorse.
All bees in truth are royalty -- the workers are all daughters of a queen, albeit sterile ones. And every drone's a prince. If I say so myself.
;]]
/bees: terrible, conceited critters
**sees Bees with nose in air, scratches him under upraised chin**
*bee side himself*
A Gift of Great Value
Oh that horse I see so high
where the world shrinks into its
relationships, my moter
sees as well as I.
She was born, but I bore with her.
The horse was a mighty occaision!
The intensity of its feet! The height
of its immense body!
Now then in wonder at evening, at
the last small entrance of the night,
my mother calls it, and I
call it my father.
With angry face, with no
rights, with impetuosity and
sterile vision -- and a great
wind we ride.
-- Robert Creeley
Birth of a Nation debuts 91 years ago today.
I, Too, Sing America
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
-Langston Hughes
It always amazes me that true poetry speaks as clearly now as it did when it was written. Ageless.
The Muse is a Little Girl
The muse is a little girl, impossibly polite.
She arrives when you're talking
or walking away from your car.
She's barefoot, she stands
next to you, mute; she taps your sleeve,
not even on your skin, just touches the cloth
of your plaid shirt, touches it twice.
She feels with her index finger the texture
and you keep talking, or you don't.
She will wait one minute. She is not hungry
or unhappy or poor. She goes somewhere else
unless you turn to look at her
and write it down. I'm kidding.
She's a horse you want to ride, she's a tall horse,
she's heavy, as if she could bear armor.
You can't catch her with apples.
I don't know how you get on.
I remember my cold fingers in the black mane.
- Marjorie Saiser
Percussion, Salt and Honey
Percussion, salt and honey,
A quivering in the thighs;
He shakes me all over again,
Eros who cannot be thrown,
Who stalks on all fours
Like a beast.
-- Sappho, trans Guy Davenport
You stole the words from my lips, BlueHorse!
Grrrr! (for the Sappho poem)
Percussion, Salt and Honey
that's a poem about a drummer in a restaurant.
Heh...just an intimate dinner for two...
tiptoes away sadly, not wanting to break up intimate dinner
She-Who-Must-Be-Aubade
Sappho -- paired with Hesperus,
stays not a shade, and is not far
who's yet the darling of the Muses;
despite the darts of death and Eros
she still sings of the evening star
[Since this is February, thought love's favorite merits mention.}
A translation of the poem referred to above is here.
...But what am I?
An infant crying in the night,
an infant crying for the light,
and with no language but a cry.
/Tennyson, if I remember correctly.
Ye do, dxlifer. From "In Memoriam" which seems too long to put here, except perhaps in chunks.
He's an eminently quotable poet, Tennyson, and by Margot Ascot's account a spell-binding reader/reciter of his own work. Heard an early recording of him doing "The Charge of the Light Brigade", but I understand the original recording had been damaged by poor storage. Some poets read well, and some are atrocious readers; Tennyson, despite all, I think falls into the former category.
"In Memoriam" is also the source for:
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye
That clothe the wold and meet the sky
And through the field the road runs by
To many-towered Camelot
And up and down the people go
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below
The island of Shalott
Good times.
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, Night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am there at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wreathed abroad,
And the musk of the roses blown.
For the breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to fade in the light that she loves
In a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.
This feast of olfactory treats! In glorious technicolour! It gets me every time. And the sound effects! This poem is so lush, so vigorous, I almost drown. Something like being tossed and pummeled in white water rapids each time I read or hear it. He, with really astonishing ease, varies and weaves those flowing rhythms so -- keeps me completely immersed all the way to the concluding crescendo:
She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My duast would hear her and heat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and trtemble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
Whee! Whoosh and over the top I go! It's so period, but I love this, I crave being swept away like this -- o wot is wrong with me? I am a bee without shame, made drunk just on Tennyson's incredibe word-weaving.
Loreena McKennitt made a lovely song of "The Lady of Shallot'. Video here of her performing it for the Queen (who seems rather unimpressed)
Feb. 14th ain't a month, bees... I always thought there was a more somber and reverent theme to February - at least for the U.S.
The Woodman and the Money Hunter
Throughout our rambles much we find;
The bee trees burst with honey;
Wild birds we tame of every kind,
At once they seem to be resign'd;
I know but one that lags behind,
There's nothing lags but money.
The woods afford us much supply,
The opossum, coon, and coney;
They all are tame and venture nigh,
Regardless of the public eye,
I know but one among them shy,
There's nothing shy but money.
And she lies in the bankrupt shade;
The cunning fox is funny;
When thus the public debts are paid,
Deceitful cash is not afraid,
Where funds are hid for private trade,
There's nothing paid but money.
Then let us roam the woods along,
And drive the coon and coney;
Our lead is good, our powder strong,
To shoot the pigeons as they throng,
But sing no more the idle song,
Nor prowl the chase for money.
-George Moses Horton
The US dollar has
long years to go
before it outlasts
Sappho.
;]
whoa, i don't know anything about Tennyson. Looks like i should go read some.
Thanks for that you guys. That's some beautiful words.
The Loreena McKennitt song is, in fact, called 'The Lady of Shalott' and does not refer in any way to the small but tasty onion-like comestible.
*sigh*
*considers taking a leek instead*
Great, Bees is turning this into a recipe thread.
Very well.
ODE TO CONGER CHOWDER, or ODA AL CALDILLO DE CONGRIO
Pablo Neruda
In the storm-tossed
Chilean
sea
lives the rosy conger,
giant eel
of snowy flesh.
And in Chilean
stewpots,
along the coast,
was born the chowder,
thick and succulent,
a boon to man.
You bring the Conger, skinned,
to the kitchen
(its mottled skin slips off
like a glove,
leaving the
grape of the sea
exposed to the world),
naked,
the tender eel
glistens,
prepared
to serve our appetites.
Now
you take
garlic,
first, caress
that precious
ivory,
smell
its irate fragrance,
then
blend the minced garlic
with onion
and tomato
until the onion
is the color of gold.
Meanwhile
steam
our regal
ocean prawns,
and when
they are
tender,
when the savor is
set in a sauce
combining the liquors
of the ocean
and the clear water
released from the light of the onion,
then
you add the eel
that it may be immersed in glory,
that it may steep in the oils
of the pot,
shrink and be saturated.
Now all that remains is to
drop a dollop of cream
into the concoction,
a heavy rose,
then slowly
deliver
the treasure to the flame,
until in the chowder
are warmed
the essences of Chile,
and to the table
come, newly wed
the savors
of land and sea,
that in this dish
you may know heaven.
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
from Eating Poetry by Mark Strand
Recipe For a Hippotamus Sandwich
A hippo sandwich is easy to make.
All you do is simply take
One slice of bread,
One slice of cake,
Some mayonnause,
One onion ring,
One hippopotamus,
One piece of string,
A dash of pepper --
That ought to do it.
And now comes the problem...
Biting into it.
-- Shel Silverstein
Ok, bees, here's one for your February and the USA's.
Gray
I have a friend
who is turning gray,
not just her hair,
and I do not know
why this is so.
Is it a lack of vitamin E
pantothenic acid, or B-12?
Or is it from being frantic
and alone?
'How long does it take you to love someone?'
I ask her.
'A hot second,' she replies.
'And how long do you love them?'
'Oh, anywhere up to several months.'
'And how long does it take you
to get over loving them?'
'Three weeks,' she said, 'tops.'
Did I mention I am also
turning gray?
It is because I *adore* this woman
who thinks of love
in this way.
-Alice Walker
Indeed, that would be one way to do it, InsolentChimp.
Recipe for Bouillabaisse
Joseph Mery
Before your epic starts, turn to and cook
A savant stock, the Preface to your book.
And what a stock! To baby fish and "fry"
Of scores of kinds...that morning's catch...apply
The slow, distilling heat of embers clear
And precious, spicy gravy will appear.
Steep in this sauce, with fine discrimination,
The this-and-that designed for titillation,
Manilla pepper, saffron, and bouquet!
Of fennel, with a crackling leaf of bay,
Salt, friend of man, and urchins from their bed
In warm Arenc, well-flavored and well fed.
When this great brew blows bubbles, sheds its skins,
And all is nicely done, your ode begins.
One thing is sure...this fine Phocaean dish
Is not the same without one master fish,
The vulgar hogfish, scorpion of the seas,
Which lonely on ts grill, could never please
The crudest tastes. Yet in a bouillabaisse
It has no peer, and nothing can replace
Its subtle odors. If, indeed, they fail,
No other art of cunning will prevail;
Hogfish alone, from chinks in shifting sand
Where bays and myrtles fringe the tenuous land
Or from some shadowed shelf of thymy cliff,
Provide such wafts for avid guests to sniff.
Next come such fish as choose a deeper stream
And hug the reefs: fine mullet, gilthead, bream,
Saint Peter's fish. embalmers of the stew
(Such game, in fact, as greedy perch pursue).
And last, the gurnard, with Booptic eyes,
And some the ichthyologists despise,
Grand fish which Neptune, under flaming sky,
Chooses with table-forks, lays trident by.
You heedless trippers, do not judge the case
From any one-and-tuppenny bouillabaisse.
Go to the Chateau-Vert. Say: "Something nice.
I'm not a haggler...never mind the price.
Dispatch your diver, let him burrow well
Around those rocks of heady ocean smell,
From Greece and Rome "thys" and "parangry" borrow,
And skip the cost. We'll talk of that tomorrow."
Wow. Any poem that mentions both ichthyology AND Neptune is OK by me!
Of course I'll gladly give the rule
I makes beat biscuit by,
But that don't guarantee you'll make
That bread the same as I.
'Cause cookin's like religion is:
Some's elected and some ain't,
An' rules don't no more make a cook
Then sermons make a saint.
=Miss Howard Weeden
I've just had an awful thought. Does The Monster both post poetry AND cook in in the same Underpants?
]Untitled]
Mountain
stars
eyes
in the
open
do
-- Cid Corman
The Monster both post poetry AND cook in in the same Underpants?
You'd rather I cooked with NO underpants?
Under One Small Star
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's our legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, o mystery of existence, as I pluck the occaisional thread from your train.
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.
I know that I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
-- Wislasa Szymborska
**reminds self never to accept a dinner invitation to T.U.Monster's house**
I Just Read a Shwackload of Horseshit, no offense, Blue
Poets say:
"it's theraputic"
but I don't see
any books underwritten by bedlam
poets say:
"it's just for fun"
but I've seen fists and faces fall
when the thumbs turn down, hell
poets say:
"it's a creative release"
but I seen one girl
smashing plates to make a point get lost
(I went to get a stiff drink at that point)
poets say
a lot of stuff
and see, none of it is true
roses aren't always red
and violets are violet
Poem To Be Read at 3 a.m.
Excepting the diner
In the outskirts,
The town of Ladora
At 3 a.m.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking.
The poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on.
-- Donald Justice
Thanks, bees ;).
;].
Variations on the word sleep
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towarda your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing is
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
-- Margaret Atwood
Ooh! Is that the same Margaret Atwood of "Handmaid's Tale" fame?
Yes. Ms. Atwood is a Canadian poet and novelist; she first became widely known for her poetry.
Frogs
Frogs sit more solid
than anything sits. In mid-leap they are
parachutists falling
in a free fall. They die on roads
with arms across their chests and
heads high.
I love frogs that sit
like Buddha, that fall without
parachutes, that die
like Italian tenors.
Above all, I love them because,
pursued in water, they never
panic so much that they fail
to make stylish triangles
with their ballet dancer's
legs.
-- Norman MacCaig
Love Is Not All
Love is not all; it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by need and moaning for releaae
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Poem
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
There is no snow in Hollywood
There is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
-- Frank O'Hara
Oh, gosh, you reminded me of one of Margaret Atwood poems that just made me wince the first time I heard it
...just a wee short verse.
You Fit Into Me
Margaret Atwood
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye
Ouch! GramMaaaa!
Carrefour
O you,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple trees just after bathing
Why did you not strangle me before sleeping
Rather than fill me with the wild honey of your words
And leave me to the mercy of the forest bees?
-- Amy Lowell
Beginning
The moon drops one or two feathers into the fields.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
-- James Wright
When the heart
When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open
Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt
And let it sting
Let a stray dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring
-- Michael Leunig
Antilamentation
by Dorianne Laux.
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
The Potato Manifesto
How long has our kind been marginalized
Ostracized at supermarkets
With a dismissive wave of hand
As poor folks' food
My origins are humble
But like me the Truffle also comes from the ground.
I'm the butt of jokes, derided,
Likened to lazy sit-abouts -- "couch potatoes."
My skin devoured with beer by potbellied men of no distinction.
So I issue a call to you, many-eyed brethren
Fellows discontents and maltreated Amer-potatoes
to migrate to Russia
where, blanded together, we will be appreciated
in fine-aged
vodka.
-- Cynthia Hwang
*sigh*
=blended
blanded works too.
Mmmm, potato booze...
POTATO SOUP
Twyla Hansen
In the early years she helped her mother plant peels,
carry the dishpan out to the garden, digging holes.
What you eat is what you plant, her mother always said,
that edible tuber common as dirt, a near-daily staple.
One grandmother left potato country long ago for this one,
another immigrated for the promise of more potato land.
As she learned to cook, she began peeling alone at the sink,
sticking a spare slice on her tongue, smell of starch
lingering on her fingers. Mashed, fried, baked on Sundays
for hours, regular as pulsating winds over the plains.
Soon graduating to French fries in sizzling grease, to fermented
spirits of the potato. Beginning with a certain look in an eye,
relying on folklore, that time of the month safe if planted
at night under the expansive and unblinking moon. Grabbling
into the soil around roots to steal an eager potato or two.
She's fond of the skin color, the flesh, textures, exotic flavors.
Moving on to potato-salad years, quick-boiled varieties
from the hot tub. Decades here and gone; potato-love constant.
By now she's concluded it's best on gradual simmer, consolation
accompanying maturity. In the afternoon she sautés onion
and butter, stirs in flour and milk, chops celery, carrot, adds
chicken stock. She thinks of the hour when they'll be eating,
into twilight, of the long night ahead in front of the fire.
Should she throw in something extra, for tang, for play--
a measure of chardonnay? All her life, she thinks, it has come
down to this, bringing the bottle up slow to meet her lips.
Wow, Horse! That's bloody brilliant. How did she reach inside my head?
Scary how poets can do that, innit?
I just loves the potatoes
Decades here and gone; potato-love constant.
By now she's concluded it goes beyond the culinary. In the afternoon she fashions nose and eyes, adds in brows and mouth, sculpts ears, lips, adds fluffy hair. She thinks of the hour when they'll be eating together, in the twilight, the long nights in front of the fire. Should she throw in something extra, for tang, for play -- a wisp of a mustache? All her life she thinks, it has come down to this, bringing his starchy countenance up slow to meet her lips.
Heh!
Seeing Red
You always seem to get it all wrong about me.
Just like back in the days when you thought
you'd up and die if you chomped me down,
so you ate my leaves instead and wound up dead.
Now you think it's okay to keep me from dying,
so you actually poison me through irradiation.
Where's your imagination? Where's the spirit
of the Aztecs, who grew me to death, named me tamatl
and loved me for the very fruity berry that I am?
From Plato to NATO, the vegetable consciousness
of western Civilization mineralizes its own
pockets; oilcloth pockets so you can steal soup.
That growers in this nation would stoop
to chemotherapy to give me greater so-called shelf-
life may hold the answer to cancer, but it doesn't
do a thing for me. I like to salt and spice
your mouth up, then seed it all red with zesty juice
and yellow-green afterthoughts like the bright
ting-a-ling of love. You hear what I'm saying?
You hear what I'm telling you? Rather than right
those ancient wrong notions, you've motioned them on.
Like edible street gangsters now, rain or shine,
we don't die; we multiply. Tell Henry Heinz
we tumourless tomatoes constantly see the best minds
of our generation goosed, juiced, and pissed.
-- Al Young
I saw the best produce of my generation destroyed by genetic modification, starving hysterical seedless,
dragging themselves through the factory farms at dawn looking for an angry fix,
potatoheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the organic dynamo in the farm machinery of night,
who hybrid and tatters and hollow-hulled and vitamin-enriched sat up pollinating in the supernatural darkness of irrigation ditches floating across the tops of gardens contemplating salsa,
who bared their pulp to Heaven under the combine and saw Beatrix-Potterian scarecrows staggering on granary roofs illuminated
who passed through processing plants with radiant green stens hallucinating Kansas and pest-resistant tragedy among the scholars of ornamental horticulture,
who were expelled from the cabbage patches for blighted & publishing obscene odes on the ridges of the pumpkin,
who cowered in unpeeled kitchens in aluminum foil, burning their rinds in toaster ovens and listening to the loud refrigerator through the colander...
)))!!!
Me, I only saw the best rinds of my generation,
but I'm telling ye, though they were strange, they had a peel!
Ode on Pumpkin Ridge
Headless horsemen vainly blunder
and bump into each other
In search of an orange
toupee that will fit.
OH, YOUZ GUYS!!
if the shiz knits...
Red Onions, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk --
Here is a soul, accepting nothing.
Obstinate as a small child
refusing tapioca, peaches, toast.
The cheeks are streaked, but dry.
The mouth is firmly closed in both directions.
Ask, if you like,
if it is merely sulking, or holding out for better.
The soup grows cold in the question.
The ice cream pools in its dish.
Not this is all it knows. Not this.
As certain cut flowerts refuse to drink in the vase.
And the heart, from its great distance, watches, helpless.
-- Jane Hirshfield
Hirshfield is good. Me likes!
Childhood, Horses, Rain
Jane Hirshfield
Again rain:
and the world like a fish held
under running water while the knife-blade
smooths the skin of scales.
Its twin eyes open, watching
not-death, not-life.
we shed our wild selves like this,
fearlessly, as water sheds its smoothness under wind,
and the image breaks, the white house, the apple tree,
the horses quivering with late summer flies as they graze,
the hundred wings brushing the lake of their backs.
Or the dog, who, seeing I will not open the door,
lies down at last to sleep: how, in her dream,
she chases down birds and barks softly.
How later the door will open, and she
in all her black and white ecstasy will burst through
to the scent of damp earth, return shaking rain from her
like seeds to the kitchen floor.
It is late and the dishes are finished, put away.
I towel her dry, she offers her feet up easily, as a horse
from long practice eases the farrier’s work:
stands patiently at the hiss of hot iron dipped briefly
into a pail, cooled now and shaped to this one
curve of hoof, pared not quite to the quick;
and the swift blows with their stopped-bell ring.
As we learn to stand, for this world.
from Of Gravity & Angels
For Horses, Horseflies
We know nothing about the lives of others.
Under the surface what strange desires,
what rages, weaknesses, fears.
Sometimes it breaks into the daily paper and we shake our heads in wonder
"Who would behave in such a way?" we ask.
Unspoken the thought, "Let me not be tested."
Unspoken the thought, "Let me not be known."
Under the surface, something that whispers,
"Anything can be done."
For horses, horseflies. For humans, shame.
-- Jane Hirshfield
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before.
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
-- Edna St Vincent Millay
Through a Glass, Darkly
Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.
In the form of many people
In all panoplies of time
Have I seen the luring vision
Of the Victory Maid, sublime.
I have battled for fresh mammoth,
I have warred for pastures new,
I have listed to the whispers
When the race trek instinct grew.
I have known the call to battle
In each changeless changing shape
From the high souled voice of conscience
To the beastly lust for rape.
I have sinned and I have suffered,
Played the hero and the knave;
Fought for belly, shame, or country,
And for each have found a grave.
I cannot name my battles
For the visions are not clear,
Yet, I see the twisted faces
And I feel the rending spear.
Perhaps I stabbed our Savior
In His sacred helpless side.
Yet, I've called His name in blessing
When after times I died.
In the dimness of the shadows
Where we hairy heathens warred,
I can taste in thought the lifeblood;
We used teeth before the sword.
While in later clearer vision
I can sense the coppery sweat,
Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery
When our Phalanx, Cyrus met.
Hear the rattle of the harness
Where the Persian darts bounced clear,
See their chariots wheel in panic
From the Hoplite's leveled spear.
See the goal grow monthly longer,
Reaching for the walls of Tyre.
Hear the crash of tons of granite,
Smell the quenchless eastern fire.
Still more clearly as a Roman,
Can I see the Legion close,
As our third rank moved in forward
And the short sword found our foes.
Once again I feel the anguish
Of that blistering treeless plain
When the Parthian showered death bolts,
And our discipline was in vain.
I remember all the suffering
Of those arrows in my neck.
Yet, I stabbed a grinning savage
As I died upon my back.
Once again I smell the heat sparks
When my flemish plate gave way
And the lance ripped through my entrails
As on Crecy's field I lay.
In the windless, blinding stillness
Of the glittering tropic sea
I can see the bubbles rising
Where we set the captives free.
Midst the spume of half a tempest
I have heard the bulwarks go
When the crashing, point blank round shot
Sent destruction to our foe.
I have fought with gun and cutlass
On the red and slippery deck
With all Hell aflame within me
And a rope around my neck.
And still later as a General
Have I galloped with Murat
When we laughed at death and numbers
Trusting in the Emperor's Star.
Till at last our star faded,
And we shouted to our doom
Where the sunken road of Ohein
Closed us in it's quivering gloom.
So but now with Tanks a'clatter
Have I waddled on the foe
Belching death at twenty paces,
By the star shell's ghastly glow.
So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, -- but always me.
And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.
So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more.
-George Smith Patton
Patton shows a touch of humour there(?)in:
...but now with Tanks a-clatter
have i waddled on the foe...
gives me a whole new mental image of the general.
;]
Ha, ha! I first imagined tanks travelling, teetering over pocked terrain, but now that you said that I had to think... I see those riding pants with the flared out thighs... and the football helmet and racing stripes... while he shuffles duck-like over the dead. A pox on the noisy house of your imagination, sir!
Concrete Seascape
oceanoceanoceanoceanocean
oceanoceanoceanoceanocean
oceanoceanoceanoceanocean
oceanoceanoceanoceanocean
oceanoceanoceanoceanocean
-- William Harmon
The Wreck
But what lovers we were, what lovers,
even when it was all over --
the bull-black, deadweight wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang
the bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port
and watched our sober unreal life
unmoor, a continent of grief;
the condlelight strange on our faces
like tiny silent blazes
and corruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs
into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,
gently hooked each other on,
like aqualungs, and thundered down
to mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back
to back, and made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.
-- Don Patterson
On Rainy Mornings the Mules
Salvatore M. Buttaci
Did I mention how in the long ago
These Sicilian streets were cobblestoned--
All of them!-- high concrete steps to break
The steepness of my ancestors' trudging walks?
On rainy mornings the farmers would plead
With their mules to cautiously step up or down
From stone to stone, front legs first, then back,
But those dumb beasts were petrified of falling.
Perhaps they were not so dumb, for they recalled
How, in the past, mules, even horses had stumbled.
Fractured limbs had earned them two shots to the head,
So while farmers with bent backs tested footholds,
Their eyes riveted on the wet cobblestones,
The mules chomped at the bit, displayed defiance
in screeching brays loud enough to coax
the rooster to re-announce the morning.
Farmers pulled the slippery wet ropes
And cursed the rain, the mules, cursed all creation
So vehemently it was hard to tell
Beast from man, bray from say, until the showers
Stopped, the sun began, and all made peace.
History
On a gray evening
Of a gray century,
I ate an apple
While no one was looking.
A small, sour apple
The color of woodfire,
Which I first wiped
On my sleeve.
They I stretched my legs
As far as they'd go,
Said to myself
Why not close my eyes now
Before the Late
World News and Weather.
-- Charles Simic
The poem below was generated by entering Lewis Carrol's poem Jabberwocky from Alice through the Looking Glass into an Apple Newton. (C) 1993 Robert McNally.
Tablespoons
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
"Beware the tablespoon my son,
The teeth that bite, the Claus that catch.
Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
The serious Bandwidth!"
He took his Verbal sword in hand:
Long time the monitors fog he sought,
So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
And stood a while in thought.
And as in selfish thought he stood,
The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
Came stifling through the trigger wood,
And troubled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and though,
The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
He left it dead, and with its head,
He went gambling back.
"And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
Come to my arms my bearish boy.
Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!"
He charted in his joy.
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
Ah, Pete, John Lennon would be proud of that one!
Agreed, TUM.
bees, never seen a poet named Simic I didn't like!
In wole hearted agreement, InsolentChimp!
= whole
(grummumble curse!)
[Caution: the Sensitive may wish to skip this one]
unclassical symphony
the cat murdered
in the middle of the street
tire-crushed
now it is nothing
and neither are
we
as
we
look
away.
-- Charles Bukowski
"Honey"
by Robert Morgan
Only calmness will reassure
the bees to let you rob their hoard.
Any sweat of fear provokes them.
Approach with confidence, and from
the side, not shading their entrance.
And hush smoke gently from the spout
of the pot of rags, for sparks will
anger them. If you go near bees
every day they will know you.
And never jerk or turn so quick
you excite them. If weeds are trimmed
around the hive, they have access
and feel free. When they taste your smoke
they fill themselves with honey and
are laden and lazy as you
lift the lid to let in daylight.
No bee full of sweetness wants to
sting. Resist greed. With its top off
you touch the fat gold frames, each cell
a hex perfect as a snowflake,
a sealed relic of sun and time
and roots of many acres fixed
in crystal-tight arrays, in rows
and lattices of sweeter latin
from scattered prose of meadows, woods.
:)
Hysteria
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her
laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only
accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in
by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost
finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple
of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands
was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checkered cloth over
the rusty green iron table, saying: 'If the lady and gentleman
wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman
wish to take their tea in the garden...' I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the
fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I
concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
-- T.S. Eliot
Awesome.
Ha! Here's another entrant for a mad teaparty..
Werewolf Lemonade
It's the humidity. The heat.
The way night drips over the end of day
slow and mysterious; how darkness pools
in coagulations across a wounded lawn,
under tired trees that thirst deeply
into graves of those who have died from it.
I take a long, iced drink of moonlight with lemon.
The glass sweats. Glistens. Blood rises.
It's a certain kind of moon, a certain sort of weed
blooming small white moths that float around
the old gypsy woman and Lon Chaney, Jr.
A meeting is called to decide the fate of mankind.
Lemonade is served with bitter cookies.
Reflections of canines glint off the polished table.
Everyone has a lie to tell or a once-upon-a-time.
Sweat slips into the wounds and burns like crazy.
The slightest of tongues, a long, continuous howl.
-- Stephen R. Roberts
Machu Picchu
-in the Peruvian Andes
Like being surrounded
by menacing picture postcards
standing on end
an overwhelmingness of stone
a thunder in the vision
-ghosts of Incas so absent here
and I so aware of them
their absence a negative-plus
-and next morning the neighbouring
mountain Birney once climbed
completely mist-obscured
and perhaps he is still climbing
from his Toronto hospital room
and if I yell “Hi Earle”
I’ll hear his Andean bellow
“Come on up Al”
-only one thing to do
in a place like thunder and lightning
stand and rejoice
that you’re alive in the mountains
for as long as may be
and to have all these things
fizz in your head like cheap booze
is using up all your quota
of inexhaustible delight
-that life should bring such gifts
and wrap them in clouds and stars
-Al Purdy
Know that I am living proof that it ain't easy to exhaust that quota!
Badwater, Death Valley
I am sleepy from too much color,
too subtle, too shifting, too bright,
from the ghosts of all who crawled
into this destroyed valley a century before,
a moment before, so many feet below
that level of the rolling sea,
oh God, what were they thinking, moving
headlong into this basin of bones?
-- Lonnie Hull Dupont
I loved the werewolf one bees - thanks!
MonkeyFilter: a long, iced drink of moonlight with lemon
Yeah, bees, I really liked the counterpoint of "...using up all..." and "...inexhaustible..." And ☾☾☾ for the speed in organizing that mad tea party!
I'm in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.
-- Charles Simic, in a notebook
I'm in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.
-- Charles Simic, in a notebook
Very nice, you Monkeys!
Sweet honey sucking bees,
why do you still surfeit on roses, pinks and violets,
As if the choicest nectar lay in them
Where with you store your curious cabinets?
Ah, make your flight to Melisuavia's lips.
There, there may you revel in ambrosian cheer,
Where smiling roses and sweet lillies sit,
Keeping their springtide graces all the year,
Yet, sweet, take heed, all sweets are hard to get
Sting not her soft lips, O, beware of that,
For if one flaming dart come from her eye,
Was never dart so sharp, ah, then you die.
--Jan Everaerts 1511-1536
Australia 1970
Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk,
dangerous till the last breath's gone,
clawing and striking. Die
cursing your captor through a raging eye.
Die like the tigersnake
that hisses such pure hatred from its pain
as fits the killer's dreams
with fear like suicide's invading stain.
Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood
that gaps the dozer-blade.
I see your living soil ebb with the tree
to naked poverty.
Die like the soldier-ant
mindless and faithful to your million years.
Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind,
stay obstinate; stay blind.
For we are conquorers and self-poisoners
more than scorpion or snake
and dying of the venoms that we make
even while you die of us.
I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust,
the dying creek, the furious animal,
that they oppose us still;
that we are ruined by the thing we kill.
-- Judith Wright
The Underpants Monster will steal all your shorts
and scrawl them all over with stories of sorts
and when they're returned with a faint whiff of oranges
you'll scratch your head why I wrote oranges
I did
boranges?bajeezus?whatermelon?
hmm...
ok:
and when they come back all covered in food
arranged into letters in such fine attitude
declaring the lifestyle of Mumbley John
and the pair of steel boxers he mumbled upon
or how Buffalo Jill made buffalo dill
fried in a pan in a thong made of twill
what was I saying? o, getting back to that
when you get them undies back that the monster once gat
why dontcha think twice about sending them to the cleaner
and just put em in a frame like a fine schnitzel weiner
8-D
This is kinda long and emotionally visceral but it's worth it. (Originally appearing on The Roots album Things Fall Apart, 1999)
Return to Innocence Lost
Muffled sound of fist on flesh
Blows to chest
No breath
Air gasps
You ain't nothing but white trash, bitch!
With each hit, each kick, each...broken rib
Crack, Crack!
Bones are crying
Mommy's crying and bleeding
And pleading
And then...
Daddy wants to fuck
Dick hard, swelled with power rush
And as if all that wasn't enough
Mommy's seven months heavy with birth
As...Daddy grunts and cursed drunk nothings in her bloodied ear
First...lullaby
First...Son...will...ever...hear
And never forget
Mommy almost bled to death when she have him...finally
She'd already lost...three
Uterus-bruised, shredded, and weak
From being daily beat
And Friday nights were the worse and...
Daddy never came with flowers
Instead he spent hours at some corner spot
With some bar pop named Cookie
Putting his thing down
Soiling Mommy's sheets with...
Sweet...talk shit,
Cookie's cheap lipstick,
Hair grease, sperm, and jezebel juice
To hell with the good news that...
He was a father for the first time
His thirst for wine and women
Clouded his vision...
No warm welcome for mother and son
Just...
The rank smell of ass-crack, funk, and cum
But Mommy's prayerful strength-her best defense
She...burned the dirty linens
Made a fresh bed
Laid sleeping First Son down
And never made a sound
As she purged her scourge
With birth-blood and quiet tears
Watching as her fears and love and sacrifice
Lie there in his soft skin and new life
Breathing, dreaming, fresh from God's eye
Mommy's little survivor
Like...her
Mommy called crazy and scorned
'Cuz she two more born
One boy soon after
The girl much later and...
Although they were both sung the same lullabies of hate
Her...First Son, the first one
Whose...womb-world was profaned
Came of age playing street games
With Stewie, Rezzie, and Little Brother
'Till his heart start to wither
In pain and shame
Blamed Mom for the wrong she let Daddy do to her
And him...
Let...sins of the Father cause his Innocence to wander
Found out amongst thieves
Chose to squander his dreams
Stopped believing in himself
Become prodigal with his life
Make impossible shit right with...
Gang-ties, crime, lies
Erase wise, woeful words of Mother
Replaced them with absurdities of others
Who had also lost their way
Played a different kind of street game now
First Son plunged deep
Speak street-family vows
Espouse no causes but his own
See, he couldn't protect Mommy's neck from Daddy's grasp
Or...protect Mommy's ass from Daddy's wrath
Couldn't shield her ears from...
Daddy's foul-mouthed, liquor-breath jeers
His only defense-served be confidence
Brown bottles housed his swift descent
Phones called cops on block frequent for his shenanigans
Now...Daddy and him twins in addiction
Driven to false-hearted heavens and friends
By liquefied demons
Had become what he despised from Conception 'til End
Destined for a demise
Survived nine lives of staying high
Conning, jewelry-pawning, arrests, theft
Womanizing...only for money, never for sex
Bullet in chest, baseball bat to the head
Left for dead
So, eyes wide and glassy
Speech...slowed and slurred
Lips twitched with caked-up codeine candy
And mouth corners one December 24th
Mr. Hide and False Friend
Took final ride to suburban supplier
Shots were fired by the gray man
With shaky hand
But not shaky enough to miss...
Hit...Lost Boy in back
So-called Friend runs for door
Leaves First Son blood-born
Lying alone in blood on cold floor
Death was the cause of...
Returning to Innocence Lost...
Baby 'Sis awake for dawn on Christmas morn
To Mommy's sobs and shakes
Daddy's silhouettes of regret
All past, omitted, and absolved by lost
As they clung to each other
Knowing...
--Ursula Rucker
A Zoological Romance, Inspired By
An Unusual Flow of Animal Spirits
No sweeter girl ewe ever gnu
Than Betty Marten's daughter Sue.
With sable hare, small tapir waist,
And lips you'd gopher miles to taste;
Bright, lambent eyes, like the gazelle,
Sheep pertly brought to bear as well;
Ape pretty lass, it was avowed,
Of whom her marmot to be proud;
Deer girl! I loved her as my life,
And vowed to heifer for my wife.
Alas! A sailor on the sly
Had cast on her his wether eye --
He'd dog her footsteps everywhere,
Anteater in the easy chair.
He'd setter round, this sailor chap,
And pointer out upon the map
The spot where once a cruiser bore
Him captive to a foreign shore.
The cruel captain far outdid
The yaks and crimes of Robert Kidd.
He oft would whale Jack with the cat,
And say, "My buck, doe you like that?
What makes you stag around so, say!
The catamounts to something, hey?"
Then he would seal it with an oath
And say, "You are a lazy sloth!
I'll starve you down, my sailor fine,
Until for beef and porcupine!"
And, fairly hoarse with fiendish laughter,
Would say, "Henceforth, mind what giraffe ter!"
In short, the many risks he ran
Might well a llama braver man.
Then he was wrecked and castor shore
While feebly clinging to anoa;
Hyena cleft among the rocks
He crept, sans shoes and minus ox;
And when he fain would goat to bed,
He had to lion leaves instead.
Then Sue would say, with troubled face,
"How koodoo live in such a place?"
And straightway into tears would melt,
And say, "How badger must have felt!"
While he, the brute, woodchuck her chin
And say, "Aye-aye, my lass!" and grin.
Excuse these steers....It's over now;
There's naught like grief the hart can cow.
Jackass'd her to be his, and she --
She gave Jackal, and jilted me.
And now, alas! the little minks
Is bound to him with Hymen's lynx.
-- Charles Follen Adams
Exploring the Dark Content
This dream is not a map.
A poem is not the territory.
The dreamer reclines in a barbershop
carpeted with Afro turf.
In the dark some soul yells.
It hurts to walk barefoot
on cowrie shells.
-- Harryette Mullen
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
In Praise Of Feeling Bad About Yourself
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
Thpough hearts of killer whales may weight a ton,
in every other way they're light.
On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.
-- Wistawa Szymborska
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
A poem is a large or small machine made of words.
-- William Carlos Williams
It's been a while since I've seen "Those Winter Sundays," bees, ☽☽☽! It's forcing me to type this one out... (Yeah, I know, more Eliot...)
Preludes
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to conciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up the between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision on the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling;
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
--T.S. Eliot
(And over my shoulder, the morning comes to conciousness.)
Last Lines
I have put on a grotesque mask
to write these lines. I sit
staring at myself
in a mirror propped on my desk.
I hold up my head
like one of those Chinese lanterns
hollowed out of a pumpkin,
swinging from a broom.
I peer through the eye-holes
into that little lighted room
where a candle burns,
making me feel drowsy.
I must try not to spill the flame
wobbling in its pool of wax.
It sheds no light on the scene,
only shadows flickering up the walls.
In the narrow slit of my mouth
my tongue appears,
darting back and forth
behind the bars of my teeth.
I incline my head,
to try and catch what I am saying.
No sound emerges, only
the coming and going of my breath.
Ach! The poem above is by Hugo Williams, and the title is "Last Poem".
Fibonacci sequence as poetic structure
it
looks
interesting
if kinda geeky
but then what the hell do i know?
1-1-2-3-5-8
two
thin
guys sit
on a bench
in starched white collars
they listen to Eddie Cantor
...
clothed
white
rabbit
with his watch
jumps into the hole
murmuring madly: how time flies
Think a sequence of such stanzas might be more effective than a single one.
Not really much to my taste, on first impression. Already feel an urge to break up at least the 8-syllabled line and to quit dithering so much in too-slow openings -- breaking this form would soon prove irrestible to me, I suspect it might be useful only occaisionally.
well, that's math for ya bees. Good for nothin' I say. Besides, what is the real reason for form in poetry other than as a learning device?
fib
on
a cheese
sea quince of
silly bulls makes five
an otter ate silly bulls, six.
1/1/2/3/5/8/13/21
This
form
is a
haven for
wild-eyed math poets
But I - none too soon, I tell you
Will eschew with thunderous force the chains of meter,
And common sense for that is the nature of those who dare to chainsaw down the tallest verbs.
I dunno bees - a fun post or two but not very satisfying.
i>)))</i> to islander!!!
A fibboneyparted, back-to-back one:
bah!
hum!
buggy
ridin' with
papa is boring --
eight syllables keeps us snoring
like the proverbial grampas
we pity the hoss
that can't yawn
but has to
trot on
'n'
on
pete -- thinking now this form's been pushed about as far as I care to push it.
;]
Bees:
Yet I am in love with words. Saxon
"Permanently"
Kenneth
One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.
Each Sentence says one thing—for example, "Although it was a dark rainy
day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet
expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective
earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill
has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the
boiler factory which exists nearby."
In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.
As the Adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.
*applause*
...although the poet obviously got lost in the end with that mushy stuff.
Never look a GrandHorse in the mouth, SB.
☽☽☽ GramMa!
You better watch it, you young Chimpersnapper!
I'm watching you. Always watching...
That's a new one to me -- thanks, BlueHorse.
For my friend, Wacky:
Haiku by José Juan Tablada (1871-1945)
Translated from the Spanish by Rigoberto González
Las abejas
Sin cesar gotea
miel el colmenar
cada gota es una abeja...
Bees
The beehive drips its honey
ceaselessly,
each drop a single bee...
That poem's about plumbing problems
Just recently discovered this Robert Morgan feller, and I can't get enough!
The Grain of Sound
A banjo maker in the mountains,
when looking out for wood to carve
an instrument, will walk among
the trees and knock on trunks. He'll hit
the bark and listen for a note.
A hickory makes the brightest sound;
the poplar has a mellow ease.
But only straightest grain will keep
the purity of tone, the sought --
for depth that makes the licks sparkle.
A banjo has a shining shiver.
Its twangs will glitter like the light
on splashing water. But the face
of banjo is a drum of hide
of cow, or cat, or even skunk.
The hide will magnify the note,
the sad of honest pain, the chill
blood song, lament, confession, haunt,
as tree will sing again from root
and vein and sap and twig in wind
and cat will moan as hand plucks nerve,
picks bone and cell and gut and pricks
the heart as blood will answer blood
and love begins to knock along the grain.
The Seven Ages
In my first dream the world appeared
the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet
In my second I descended
I was human, I couldn't just see a thing
beast that I am
I had to touch, to contain it
I hid in the groves,
I worked in the fields until the fields were bare --
time
that will never come again --
the dry wheat bound, caskets
of figs and olives
I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way
and like everyone I called that accomplishment
erotic freedom,
absurd as it seems
The wheat gathered and stored, the last
fruit dried: time
that is hoarded, that is never used,
does it also end?
In my first dream the world appeared
the sweet, the forbidden
but there was no garden, only
raw elements
I was human:
I had to beg to descend
the salt, the bitter, the demanding, the preemptive
And like everyone, I took, I was taken
I dreamed
I was betrayed
Earth was given to me in a dream
In a dream I possessed it
-- Louise Gluck
Ta, Underpants Monster and beeswacky!
On the Borders
We're driving across tableland
somewhere in the world;
it is almost bare of trees.
Upland near void of features
always moves me, but not to thought;
it lets me rest from thinking.
I feel no need to interpret it
as if it were art. Too much
of poetry is criticism now.
That hawk, clinging to
the eaves of the wind, beating
its third wing, its tail
isn't mine to sell. And here is
more like the space that needs
to exist aound an image.
This cloud-roof country reminds me
of the character of people
who first encountered roses in soap.
-- Les Murray
That hawk, clinging to
the eaves of the wind ....
Marvelous image!
This cloud-roof country reminds me
of the character of people
who first encountered roses in soap.
How do ya'll interpret this last line?
bland?
Perhaps, being an Aussie, Murray is referring to the indigenous people of the outback, where roses are not a native plant species.
*smacks petebest*
"roses in soap" is obviously a typo. It should be "rope on a soap". A reference to indigenous twine and cleaning.
Actually, it's a viral ad-poem for Snakes on a Plane.
*owwww*
Roses in soup are mighty tasty.
But yeah, I see it as a description of seeing/smelling something in person for the first time, when you've seen/smelled the fake one many times before. I'd seen pictures of the desert, but the real thing still moved me intensely.
What would I do without
what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
the pantings the frenzies towards succour towards love
without this sky that soars
above its ballust dust
what would I do what I did yesterday and the day before
peering out of my deadlight looking for another
wandering like me eddying far from all the living
in a convulsive space
among the voices voiceless
that throng my hiddenness
-- Samuel Beckett
petebest, here's another new form:
Four lines, three lines, and two lines make the total poem have three stanzas of free verse.
In the 1st stanza, some subject is introduced, in the 2nd stanza some tension or opposition is set forth, which the 3rd stanza resolves.
a door slams
an engine chokes
and falls silent
a dog barks
ripples slide
across
a Great Lake
not one gets
stopped at the border
An old-fashioned piece, this, which contains its own music, and was written by a committed poet ... that is, he wrote this while in the local asylum.
Summer
Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,
And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,
And love is burning diamonds in my true love's breast;
She sits beneath the whitethorn a-plaiting of her hair,
And I will to my true lover with a fond request repair;
I will look upon her face, I will in her beauty rest,
And lay my aching weariness upon her lovely breast.
The clock-a-clay is creeping on the open bloom of May,
The merry bee is trampling the pinky threads all day,
And the chaffinch it is brooding on its grey mossy nest
In the whitethorn bush where I will lean upon my lover's breast;
I'll lean upon her breast and I'll whisper in her ear
That I cannot get a wink o'sleep for thinking of my dear;
I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away
Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.
-- John Clare
Poets and madmen, Bees--sometimes there's little difference.
How cavalier.
Better than a Roundhead, I'd say -- though who knows in what time frames poor Clare managed to lose himself?
Man Writes Poem
Jay Leeming
This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now
to our man Harry on the scene, what's
the story down there Harry? "Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems
to be doing fine, he's using a blue pen, most
poets these days use blue or black ink so blue
is a fine choice. His curtains are indeed blowing
in a breeze of some kind and what's more his radiator
is 'whistling' somewhat. No metaphors have been written yet,
but I'm sure he's rummaging around down there
in the tin cans of his soul and will turn up something
for us soon. Hang on—just breaking news here Chuck,
there are 'birds singing' outside his window, and a car
with a bad muffler has just gone by. Yes ... definitely
a confirmation on the singing birds." Excuse me Harry
but the poem seems to be taking on a very auditory quality
at this point wouldn't you say? "Yes Chuck, you're right,
but after years of experience I would hesitate to predict
exactly where this poem is going to go. Why I remember
being on the scene with Frost in '47, and with Stevens in '53,
and if there's one thing about poems these days it's that
hang on, something's happening here, he's just compared the curtains
to his mother, and he's described the radiator as 'Roaring deep
with the red walrus of History.' Now that's a key line,
especially appearing here, somewhat late in the poem,
when all of the similes are about to go home. In fact he seems
a bit knocked out with the effort of writing that line,
and who wouldn't be? Looks like ... yes, he's put down his pen
and has gone to brush his teeth. Back to you Chuck." Well
thanks Harry. Wow, the life of the artist. That's it for now,
but we'll keep you informed of more details as they arise.
I lubs me some Writer's Almanac in the mornin'!
I see your Leeming and raise you a Koertge!
Fault
In the airport bar, I tell my mother not to worry.
No one ever tripped and fell into the San Andreas
Fault. But as she dabs at her dry eyes, I remember
those old movies where the earth does open.
There's always one blonde entomologist, four
deceitful explorers, and a pilot who's good-looking
but not smart enough to take off his leather jacket
in the jungle.
Still, he and Dr. Cutie Bug are the only ones
who survive the spectacular quake because
they spent their time making plans to go back
to the Mid-West and live near his parents
while the others wanted to steal the gold and ivory
then move to Los Angeles where they would rarely
call their mothers and almost never fly home
and when they did for only a few days at a time.
--Ron Koertge
Why I Take Good Care of my Macintosh
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse
and sometimes throws me
Because it is poky when cold
Because plastic is a sad, strong material
that is charming to rodents
Because it is flighty
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers
Because it leaps forward and backward,
is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me,
dozens of pockets of
gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods
strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts,
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole words of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted
and vanish in a flash
at "delete"
so it teaches
of impermanence and pain,
And because my computer and me are both brief
in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me
right inside the tent
And it goes out with me every morning
We fill up our baskets,
get back home,
Feel rich,
relax,
I throw it a scrap and it hums.
-- Gary Snyder
That puts me in mind of "Jubilate Agno!"
A person has to be Smart to see it, Monster, but yes, of course it would.
Good ol' Japhy Ryder...
... see what you done done to me ...
Yes, TUM, yes!
Three goodies in a row--ding ding ding
*jumps up and down as bells go off
How to Speak Poetry
Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in lobe, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse the two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. Ut is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to the side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love pur your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material.
What is the expression which the age demands? The age demands no expression whatever. We have seen photographs of bereaved Asian mothers. We are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. We have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. Everyone knows you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there. You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. Thsi should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because they know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser. Do not shout at them. Do not force a dry entry. That is bad sex. If you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. And remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. What is our need? To be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. Do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. The bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. They have also destroyed the stage. Did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? There is no more stage. There are no more footlighrs. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.
[CONTINUED]
This is an interior landcape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. Be good whores. The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition.
Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkercheif. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don't peep through them. Just wear them.
The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest appeal to emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honor you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in teh data and the quiet organization of your presence.
Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.
-Leonard Cohen
Inscription
To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic. The instrument of that magic,
language, is mysterious enough. We know nothing of its origin. We know
only that it divides into diverse lexicons and that each one of them com-
prises an indefinite and changing vocabulary and an undefined number of
syntactic possibilities. With those evasive elements I have formed this book.
(In the poem, the cadence and atmosphere of a word can weigh more than
its meaning.)
This book is yours, Maria Kodama. Must I say to you that this inscrip-
tion includes twilights, the deer of Nara, night that is alone and populated
mornings, shared islands, seas, deserts, and gardens, what forgetting loses
and memory transforms, the high-pitched voice of the muezzein, the death
of Hawkwood, some books and engravings?
We can give what we have given. We can only give what is already
the other's. In this book are things that were always yours. How mysterious
a dedication is, a surrender of symbols!
-- Jorge Luis Borges, trans W.B.
San Francisco Blues
42nd Chorus
I'd better be a poet
Or lay down dead.
Little boys are angels
Crying in the street
Wear funny hats
Wait for green lights
Carry bust out tubes
Around their necks
And roam the railyards
Of the great cities
Looking for locomotives
Full of shit
Run down to the waterfront
And dream of Cathay
Hook spars with Gulls
Of athavoid thought.
-Jack Kerouac
If the opening were forever
pierced by the opened,
nothing would remain in the end
but the same, fanning out
till night strikes, declares that
enough is enough. If someone
should choose his death: whose
chosen one is he, through
whom does he shudder hither?
Love dons her black cap
and kills. Even an onion surrenders
all in the end. Just as a chair, in spite
of everything, everywhere and nowhere,
wishes only to sit in for itself.
-- Hans Favery, from Eighteen Poems, trans Francis R Jones
Winter 4
He is thinking of the end of Oedipus,
not the beginning, not the part
where Oedipus chooses by giving the answer
to the beast at the Gate of Thebes.
No, it is the end he likes. The part
just after he puts out his eyes
and stands, suddenly
in that certain darkness, decided.
It is not a story of winter
but of the sun, the ceaseless
perfection of the desert in Africa.
How different it would be
had it taken place here, he thinks.
Herre the critical moment
would be putting the eyes back
in their sockets, that first shock
exactly the same as in the other story
only the beginning would have
to be different, all the roles
reversed.
-Patrick Lane
Birds Appearing in a Dream
One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,
another a tail of color-coded wires.
One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,
another a flicker with a wounded head.
All flew likes leaves fluttering to escape,
bright, circulating in burning air,
and all returned when the air cleared.
One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,
deep in the ground, miles from water.
Everything is real and everything isn't.
Some had names and some didn't.
Named and nameless shapes of birds
at night my hand can touch your feathers
and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,
you who have made bright things from shadows,
you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.
-- Michael Collier
The optimist's bluebird!
Caution for the sensitive reader: in the following, a scene of mayhem and carnage is presented.
Bird Crashing Into Window
In cartoons they do it and then get up,
a carousel of stars, asterisks, and question marks
trapped in a caption bubble above a dizzy,
flattened head that pops back into shape.
But this one collapsed in its skirt of red feathers
and now its head hangs like a closed hinge and its beak,
a yellow dart, is stuck to the gray porch floor
and seems transformed forever -- a broken gadget,
a heavy shuttlecock -- and yet it's not all dead.
The breast palpitates, the bent legs scrabble,
and its eye, the one that can't turn away,
fish-egg black, stares and blinks.
Behind me, sitting in a chair, his head resting
on a pillow,a friend recites Lycidas to prove
it's not the tumor or the treatment that's wasted
what his memory captured years ago in school.
Never mind he drops more than a line
or two. It's not a lean and flashy song he sings,
though that's what he'd prefer -- his hair
wispy, his head misshapen.
Beyond the window, the wind shakes down
the dogwood petals, beetles drown in sap,
and bees paint themselves with pollen. "Get up! Fly away!
my caption urges. "Get up, if you can!"
-- Michael Collier
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
--E. E. Cummings
Maybe not "modern," depending on your definition, but one of my favorite poems ever. Yeah, I'm a softie.
And no, I didn't mistake it. He capitalized his initials. Look it up.
This one's for the missing monk.
Bees' Wings
This washed-out morning, April rain descants,
Weeps over gravity, the broken bones
Of gravel and graveyards, and Cora puts
Away gold dandelions to sugar
And skew into gold wine, then discloses
That Pablo gutted his engine last night
Speeding to Beulah Beach under a moon
As pocked and yellowed as aged newsprint.
Now, Othello, famed guitarist, heated
By rain-clear rum, voices transparent notes
Of sad, anonymous heroes who hooked
Mackerel and slept in love-pried-open thighs
And gave out booze in vain crusades to end
Twenty centuries of Christianity.
His voice is simple, sung air: without notes,
There's nothing. His unknown, imminent death
(the feel of iambs ending as trochees
In a slow, decasyllabic death-waltz;
His vertebrae trellised on his stripped spine
Like a xylophone or keyboard of nerves)
Will also be nothing: the sun pours gold
Upon Shelley, his sis', light as bees' wings,
Who roams a garden sprung from rotten wood
And words, picking green nouns and fresh, bright verbs,
For there's nothing I will not force language
To do to make us one - whether water
Hurts like whiskey or the sun burns like oil
Or love declines to weathered names on stone.
-George Elliot Clarke
No flowers, no bees; No bees, no flowers.
-Mike Garofalo
The murmuring of Bees, has ceased
But murmuring of some
Posterior, prophetic,
Has simultaneous come.
The lower metres of the Year
When Nature's laugh is done
The Revelations of the Book
Whose Genesis was June.
Appropriate Creatures to her change
The Typic Mother sends
As Accent fades to interval
With separating Friends
Till what we speculate, has been
And thoughts we will not show
More intimate with us become
Than Persons, that we know.
- Emily Dickinson
Oh, how Dickinson leads on to more Dickinson...
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If Bees are few.
Good 'un, Chimp!
A clever bee?
No flowers. No Bees. No smiles.
Little Birds
The bees are the most wonderful of the flowers
feet so deep in electric soil.
There's no buzz louder
than the hours of such a bee's recoil.
There was a window into which the garden apes could spy
and the finest of the little birds would jest,
and drip a golden melody with every baroque sleeve
monkey-mouths would fall - not one could leave,
even in the apery the bird's song sung
There are no flowers like the bee and none yet stretch so high
to graze the very breath of stars with a humming-bird call
and though the sky may be for miles
none else can float so tall
So mark each photon's windowpane
has the song been sung here yet?
And yards away the great apes play
in hopes
of honeyed lines
)))!, InsolentChimp!
Holy beeswacky, Insolent Chimp. Good stuff, with honey dripping richly.
The bee flies the light fantastic,
Flower to flower, spreading the
Gift of new life and sweet endings.
The bee's knees pack golden dust
Into a suitcase we can't carry.
I hear the bee buzz, and stand
Quite still while it samples my scent,
And then goes off to taste the flowers
In the garden which I tend.
And,I stand, fixed by the pleasure
Of a bee's curiosity.
*bee-dazzled*
*bee-dazed*
Tears of joy.
Let's all fly the light fantastic with our Bee!
bees is back! bees is back! That's the best news I've gotten in months! *jumps up and down from pure joy*
Wow, Chimp & Path, that's some fancy scribblin' there! Banananananas all 'round!
'Tis true, we have some excellent poets in this monkeyhouse.
buzzzzzzzzzzz!
We only stand as tall as the bees knees.
So very happy to see your name attached to Mofi again, bees. So very happy!
/drunk - did I spell "very" right?
Desolation Blues
1ST CHORUS
I stand on my head on Desolation Peak
And see that the world is hanging
Into an ocean of endless space
The mountains dripping rock by rock
Like bubbles in the void
And tending where they want—
That at night the shooting stars
Are swimming up to meet us
Yearning from the bottom black
But never make it alas—
That we walk around clung
To earth
Like beetles with big brains
Ignorant of where we are, how,
What, & upsidedown like fools,
Talking of governments & history,
—But Mount Hozomeen
The most beautiful mountain I ever seen,
Does nothing but sit & be a mountain,
A mess of double pointed rock
Hanging pouring into space
O frightful silent endless space
—Everything goes to the head
Of the hanging bubble, with men
The juice is in the head—
So mountain peaks are points
Of rocky liquid yearning
—Jack Kerouac
That's some hangover! My commiserations to ye, InsolentChimp.
the con job
the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here
the U.S. ground troops were
largely
made up of
Blacks, Mexicans and poor
whites
most of whom had joined
the military
because it was the only job
they could find.
the ground war began today
at dawn
in a desert land
far from here
and the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
as on tv
and on the radio
the fat white rich newscasters
first told us all about
it
and then the fat rich white
analysts told us
why again
and again
and again
on almost every
tv and radio station
almost every minute
day and night
because
the Blacks, Mexicans
and poor whites
were sent there
to fight and win
at dawn
in a desert land
far enough away from
here.
-- Charles Bukowski
Before the Law
Before the law stands a gate keeper. To this gate keeper there comes a man from the country who asks for admittance to the Law. But the gate keeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the gate keeper, "but not at the moment." Since the gate stands open as usual, and the gate keeper steps to one side, the man can stoop to peer through the gateway into the interior. Seeing this, the gate keeper laughs and says: "If you like, just try to go in despite my veto. But be warned: I am powerful. And I am the meekest of the gate keepers. From hall to hall there is one gate keeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third gate keeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the gate keeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The gate keeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and even years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the gate keeper by his importunity. The gate keeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, patronizingly, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to the gate keeper. The gate keeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the gate keeper. He forgets the other gate keepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Law. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his year long contemplation of the gate keeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas to help him and to change the gate keeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishable from the gateway of the Law. Now he nears the end of his life. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to a point, a question he has not yet asked the gate keeper. He waves him nearer since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The gate keeper has to bend low toward him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the gate keeper; "you are insatiable."
"Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?"
The gate keeper recognizes the man has reached his end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. And now, I am going to shut it."
—Franz Kafka
Facing Snow and Writing What My Heart Embraces
At Mount Ssu-ming
in the cold in the snow,
half a lifetime's bitter chanting.
Beard hairs are easy to pluck out
one by one:
a poem's words are hard
to put together.
Pure vanity
to vent the heart and spleen;
words and theories, sometimers, aren't enough.
Loneliness, loneliness
my everyday affair.
The soughing winds pass on
the night bell sound.
--An Ching, trans J.P.S.
A recent translation. And here's a poem, not too recent, either:
Dedications
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs
towards a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading thios poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at somne words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
-- Adrienne Rich
☽☽☽ for the Dedications, me likey! I also learned a new word - soughing..!
Four in Hand
In front, four horses' nodding heads;
Beside me, a girl's two blonde braids;
Behind us, the groom, with self-important airs;
By the wheels, the sound of barking.
In the villages, the contentment of a becalmed life;
In the fields, busy harrows and plows;
All of this illuminated by the sun
So brightly, so brightly.
—Detlev von Lilencron, trans. Stanley Appelbaum
To Eros
I caught you by the neck
on the shore of the sea, while you shot
arrows from your quiver to wound me
and on the ground I saw your flowered crown.
I disemboweled your stomach like a doll's
and examined your deceitful wheels,
and deeply hidden in your golden pulleys
I found a trapdoor that said: sex.
On the beach I held you, now a sad heap,
up to the sun, accomplice of your deeds,
before a chorus of frightened sirens.
Your deceitful godmother, the moon
was climbing through the crest of the dawn,
and I threw you into the mouth of the waves.
--Alfonsina Storni, trans Kay Short
Time and again I have to love you
for you are what is so utterly strange
to me, almost as strange to me
as my being's core, which is
a wingbeat still lasting
long after the memory
of my name has evaporated. Sometimes,
once I become aware of myself
and our house starts to rustle
and I am tempted to call out
your name, I find you in my head
again, as if I had not meant
to caress you, caress you so.
--Hans Favery, from Eighteen Poems, trans Francis R. Jones
Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond
So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings
open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks
of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is
that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed
back into itself--
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.
And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn't a miracle
but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body
into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.
- Mary Oliver
the little horse is newlY
Born)he knows nothing and feels
everything,all around whom is
perfectly a strange
ness Of sun
light and of fragrance and of
Singing)is ev
erywhere(a welcom
ing dream:is amazing)
a worlD.and in
this world lies:smoothbeautifuL
ly folded:a(brea
thing and a gro
Wing)silence,who
is:somE
oNe.
-- E.E. Cummings, "the little horse is newlY"
Thank you, Bees!!
Hard not to read Du Fu, or Tu Fu, and realize how often he mentions birds. Sometimes a bird becomesthe subject of a poem, sometimes birds are mentioned as part of natural phenomena:
The Parrot
The parrot sits
Upon his perch,
Wrapped in gloomy thought,
And dreams
Of his distant home.
His wings of brightest blue
Are clipped;
From his red beak
Come words of wisdom.
Will they never, never
Unlatch his cage,
And set him free once more?
Impatient, in anger,
He claws and tears at his perch,
To which he has clung
So long.
Will the world of men
Not pity him,
And the freedom he has lost?
Of what use to him in prison
Is his coat of wondrous hue?
-- Tu Fu, trans Henry H. Hart
Broken Lines
River so blue the birds seem to whiten,
On the green mountainside flowers almost flame.
Sppring is dying, yet again.
Will I ever go home?
-- Du Fu, translator unknown
A Painted Falcon
Wind and frost swirl from white silk:
a painting of a great black hawk,
shoulders braced as he hunts hares,
glancing sidelong with a barbarian glare.
Grasp the gleaming leash and collar,
whistle him down from his bar,
and he'll strike common birds,
spattering the plain with feathers and blood.
-- Du Fu, tranlator unknown
SQUAAAAAAKK!!
A Lone Goose
The lone wild goose doesn't peck or drink,
just flies and cries out, seeking its flock.
Who cares for this tiny piece of shadow
lost in ten thousand layered clouds?
Does he see them where vision ends?
Does he hear them through his deep sorrow?
The wild ravens have no feelings.
They just caw raucously, flapping, flapping.
-- Du Fu, translator unknown
The Pelican's beak
Make it hard for it to speak.
Heh!
And the more so because
fish are stuffed in its jaws.
With its pouch filled so tight
the bird flaps long and hard
to achieve a short flight.
The Watcher
The light enters and I remember who I am; he is there.
He begins by telling me his name which (it should now be clear) is mine.
I revert to the servitude which has lasted more then seven times ten years.
He saddles me with his rememberings.
He saddles me with the miseries of every day, the human condition.
I am his old nurse; he requires me to wash his feet.
He spies on me in mirrors, in mahagony, in shop windows.
One or another woman has rejected him, and I must share his anguish.
He dictates to me now this poem, which I do not like.
He insists I apprentice myself tentatively to the stubborn Anglo-Saxon.
He has won me over to the hero-worship of dead soldiers, people with whom I could scarcely exchange a single word.
On the last flight of stairs, I feel him at my side.
He is in my footsteps, in my voice.
Down to the last detail, I abhor him.
I am gratified to remark that he can hardly see.
I am in a circular shell and the infinite wall is closing in.
Neither of the two deceives the other, but we both lie.
We know each other too well, inseparable brother.
You drink the water from my cup and you wolf down my bread.
The door to suicide is open, but theologians assert that, in the subsequent shadows of the other kingdom, there will I be, waiting for myself.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, trans A.B.
An Abandoned Garden
Robert Crawford
By August I noticed the lack of care,
And now in September I feel the despair.
The rusting tools, the vanished rows,
Reveal an all to brief affair,
The hopeful beginning has come to a close
As a meeting place for sinister crows
And devious weeds planning for when
They’ll make this a plot where anything goes.
What kind of errant husbandman
Would let it fall to field again?
I think I know, I’ve met a fe2w:
A fine egalitarian.
The type of man, a touch askew,
Who holds the universal view,
“To everything, a heart be true.”
But saves desertion just for you.
Unde Malum
Where does evil come from?
It comes
from man,
always from man
only from man
-- Tadeusz Rosewics
Alas, dear Tadeusz,
good nature and wicked man
are romantic inventions
you show us this way
the depth of your optomism
so let man exterminate
his own species
the innocent sunrise will illuminate
a liberated fauna and flora
where oak forests reclaim
the postindustrial wasteland
and the blood of a deer
torn asunder by a pack of wolves
is not seen by anyone
a hawk falls upon a hare
without witness
evil disappears from the world
and consciousness with it
Of course, dear Tadeusz,
evil (and good) comes from man.
-- Czeslaw Milosz
To My Daughters, Asleep
Surrounded by trees I cannot name
that fill with birds I cannot tell apart
I see my children growing away from me;
the hinges of the heart are broken.
Is it too late to start, too late to learn
all the words for love before they wake?
-- Robin Robertson
Anyone named "Robin Robertson" has no choice but to become a poet.
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost
Easily one of my favourite poems. Easily.
Very nice touch of Der Frostlemeister there!
Hi, Kaeldra! Fine choice.
Bow
A white dew
points the lawn;
I draw to full stretch,
blind-sighting in the dark
along the memory of your body.
Now there are no half-measures --
the flight is loosed, the flesh
invites the storm; I will
drive into your heart
up to the feathers.
-- Robin Robertson
From the link via Sir Bees, versedaily,
Poem against Poem
Copyright © 2006 George Moore All rights reserved
from Meridian
Ah, now it comes to me,
late in life. After years of
fabrication, the death of
the word, the birth of words,
a circular cist or grave.
Digging up the skeletons
to replace them with names.
After all this time no time
remains, and so it rises
against an immanence, the
ubiety of sky. Now I can get
back to living. Thank you.
Goodbye.
can someone explain what it's doing? I like it and there were two words I looked up because I didn't know them but I'm not sure if he's talking about death or some other loss/renewal/inspiration - ?
OK, I'll bite. Don't laugh at me.
Late in life...with age comes wisdom
Fabrication--building up as well as the thought of lying? Fabricate with words?
death/birth cycle/circle
To me the use of death of the word implies some sort of dying doctrine or changing dogmatic way of looking at things, whereas saying the birth of words suggests dialogue, or perhaps communication. Poets birth words.
Here's the idea of a circle again--one that ends with death. Grave has the meaning of burial as well as serious--these are serious words.
cist: A wicker receptacle used in ancient Rome for carrying sacred utensils in a procession.
Perhaps the sacred utensils are the words, and the receptacle is the author? Utensils are used to fashion something--words fashioning/defining a life? Looking at a personal history?
Procession, again with the idea of aging or moving toward death, or the actual funeral procession.
Skeletons are about as anonymous as you can get--perhaps he's finally recognizing people? Developing relationships, or "fleshing out."(thus being able to use words and connect?)
All this time...again the idea of aging, no time remains=death.
immanent: 1. Existing or remaining within; inherent
2. Restricted entirely to the mind; subjective.
ubiety: The condition of being located in a particular place.
Seems like the whole poem turns on this juxtaposition of words--they're not quite opposites, yet they play meanings off each other.
The sky is endless with no particular locus, so is unrestricted. Ubiety of sky seems to be an oxymoron, or that he's trying to pinpoint an idea so huge that it can't be located or defined.
Immanent meaning inherient suggests death in all living things, and there is the subjective view that we all share in looking at our own lives/pasts/behaviors/words. The word plays off the meaning of imminant, or impending, soon to come.
It is key--what's he talking about? His life, or the meaning of Life?
There's gratitude non-specifically given as to the universe, or time, or the process of age. Or perhaps to the reader or a deity.
The idea of "Now I can get back to living" suggests that there were other things that occupied the poet that he now feels were not the correct things to pursue.
The Good Bye is also non-specific and not directed. Good Bye to the world, good bye to who he was, good bye to the reader, good bye to the universe--again with the implication of death.
Whew! Somebody else take it away...
Perhaps the poem describes a feeling of not un-welcomed apostasy and a newly found sense of freedom or inspiration -
'the death of "the word" - of God?, a release from religious strictures and a birth of understanding emerging from the tomb that holds old beliefs.
Naming skeletons, maybe a release from history (personal or otherwise), coming to terms with the past.
He rises above an immanence, perhaps rising above himself.
It, his spirit, his nirvana, his revelation, the remainder of is his life, is suddenly unencumbered.
Goodbye - God be with ye.
Sounds quite hopeful to me, but I dunno.
God of the Jellyfish
The god of the jellyfish
must be a luminous, translucent bowl
the size of a big top,
drifting upside down
in an unbounded sea.
Surely, this god, hung
with streamers and oral arms,
ruffled and lacy
as thousands of wedding gowns
and Victorian bodices,
created all the jellyfish of Earth.
Male and female, god created them
in god's own image;
the cross jellies and the crystal jellies,
the sea nettle and the golden lion's mane,
the sea wasp and the the Portuguese man-of-war --
and gave them nerve nets instead of brains
to ensure their humility,
put statoliths like tiny pearls
in their sensory pits
to give them balance,
and placed spines on their nematocysts
so they could capture food
and would sting and burn any
living thing
that would harm them.
And the god of the jellyfish
gave them ocelli
that shine like the eyes on a butterfly wing
when they turn toward the light,
and now their god watches over them
with god's own great ocellus
as they swirl and dive
in glistening cathedrals, and does not
expect worship or even praise:
the iridescence
of their umbrellas will suffice.
-- Lucille Lang Day
Thanks GramMa & islander - I got similar things from it although I didn't see the religious angle (unless it was an agnostic one - speaking of, Ubiety of sky is totally my new sock puppet name)
I like the Zen koan effect of poems and this one certainly has it, I just wondered if I was missing the forehead-smackingly obvious.
Immanence offers some informative links.
ubiety refers to a partular location, whereas ubiquity refers to a condition of being in several or all places at once.
Suspect poets may be predisposed to prefer transcendence, petes; it's the pegasus thing.
Ah, Islander, nice take! Bees, thanks for the linkies.
I lubs dis kinda thang.
Trumpeter Swan
He takes a run at it: heaving himself
up off the lake, wingbeats echoing,
the wheeze of each pull
pulling him free.
The sky is empty;
every stretch of water
flaunts its flight.
You can learn how to fly, see all the edges
soften and blur, but you can't hold on
to the height you find,
you can never be taught how to fall.
-- Robin Robertson
Forgetfulness
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.
Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.
It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.
No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
--Billy Collins
We in the grappling nights,
we fall from nearness to nearness;
and where the woman in love sweetly thaws,
we are a plunging stone.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow
As for us, the Ancients, we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is, that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to till our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
-Jonathan Swift
Bees after Virgil
That the bees were born in the corpse of the injured animal. That the bees came forth out of the corrupted flesh.
That a small room was chosen, made narrow just for this and the animal was led beneath the low roof and cramped walls
and that the four winds came through the four windows and that the morning fell upon the small
and heavy head, its horns curving out from the whorled medallion of the forehead.
That the hot nostrils and the breathing mouth were stopped and the flesh was beaten, pounded to a pulp, beneath the unbroken hide.
He lies on his side on the broken apple-boughs. He lies on a bed of fragrant thyme and the cassia is laid in sprays about him and the sweetness of the fields surrounds him.
Do this when the west wind blows. Do this when the meadows are alive with poppies. Do this when the swallow hangs her pendulous
nest and the dew is warm and the days grow long. And all the living fluids will swirl within the hide, and the bones
will dissolve like bread in water. and a being will be born, and another, and then a thousand
and a thousand thousand swarming without limbs or form. And that the wings will grow from atoms. and that the stirring wings
will find their way into the air. And that a thousand stirring wings will come forth into the day like a storm of arrows made of wind
and light. And the flesh will fall back into the earth, and the horror into sweetness, and the dark into the sun, and the bees thus born.
-- Susan Stewart
Following on the Nature thread, and the time of season:
In the Middle of August
The dead heat rises for weeks,
Unwanted, unasked for, but suddenly
Like the answer to a question,
A real summer shower breaks loose
In the middle of August. So think
Of trumpets and cymbals, a young girl
In a sparkling tinsel suit leading
A parade down Fifth Avenue, all
The high school drummers in the city
Banging away at once. Think of
Bottles shattering against a warehouse,
Or a bowl of apricots spilling
From a tenth-floor window: the bright
Rat-a-tat-tat on the hot pavement,
The squeal of adults scurrying
For cover like happy children.
Down the bar, someone says it's like
The night she fell asleep standing
In the bathroom of a dank tavern
And woke up shivering in an orchard
Of lemon trees at dawn, surprised
by the sudden omnipotence of yellows.
Someone else says it's like spinning
A huge wheel and winning at roulette,
Or drawing four aces and thinking:
"It's true, it's finally happening."
Look, I'm not saying that the pretty
Girl in the fairy tale really does
Let down her golden hair for all
The poor kids in the neighborhood--
Though maybe she does. But still
I am saying that a simple cloud
Bursts over the city in mid-August
And suddenly, in your lifetime,
Everyone believes in his own luck.
--Edward Hirsch
That one got me, StoryBored. Thanks for that.
Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card nor a kissogram.
I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.
Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.
-- Carol Ann Duffy
How shall I begin my song?
How shall I begin my song
In the blue night that is settling?
In the great night my heart will go out,
Toward me the darkness comes rattling.
In the great night my heart will go out.
Brown owls come here in the blue evening,
They are hooting about,
They are shaking their wings and hooting.
Black Butte is far,
Below it I had my dawn.
I could see the daylight
coming back for me.
The morning star is up.
I cross the mountains
into the the light of the sea.
-- Owl woman, trans Frances Densmore
The Clause
This entity I call my mind, this hive of restlessness,
this wedge of want my mind calls self,
this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching,
keeps referring, keeps aspiring, longing, towards some state
from which ambiguity would be banished, uncertainty expunged;
this implement my mind and self imagine they might make together,
which would have everything accessible to it,
all our doings and undoings all at once before it,
so it would have at last the right to bless, or blame,
for without everything before you, all at once, how bless, how blame?
this capacity imagination, self and mind conceive might be the "soul,"
which would be able to regard such matters as creation and
destruction,
origin and extinction, of species, peoples, even families, even mine,
of equal consequence, and might finally solve the quandary
of this thing of being, and this other thing of not;
these layers, these divisions, these meanings or the lack thereof,
these fissures and abysses beside which I stumble, over which I reel:
is the place, the space, they constitute,
which I never satisfactorily experience but from which the fear
I might be torn away appalls me, me, or what might most be me?
Even mine, I say, as if I might ever believe such a thing;
bless and blame, I say, as though I could ever not.
This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built assemblage,
this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum of me,
is this where I'm meant to end, exactly where I started out?
--C.K. Williams
The Workman's Friend
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
In time of trouble and lousy strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.
-- Flann O'Brien
In the Microscope
Here too are the dreaming landscapes,
lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses,
tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
who lay down their lives for a song.
Here too are cemeteries,
fame and snow.
And I hear the murmuring,
the revolt of immense estates.
-- Miroslav Holub
In Fear of Harvests
James Wright
It has happened
Before: nearby,
The nostrils of slow horses
Breathe evenly,
And the brown bees drag their high garlands,
Heavily,
Toward hives of snow.
...
Bedtime story
The apple, the lips, the drops of blood,
the thorn, the bloom in the young girl's
cheeks. A rosy warmth, you feel the heart,
the rocking motion, blanket's weight.
This is the start of a small dream, lazy
campfire, gypsy's song, this is the song
of the peddler's wagon, peek of stocking,
lusty daughter. This is desire lapping the edge,
dark red flowers, smell of smoke. These
are the songs of the drunken men, eating
sausages made from blood. This is you
in your father's arms. Are you dreaming now?
Are you dreaming yet? There's darkness
ahead, shadowy wolves, their jaundiced
eyes, their long slick tongues. Can you hear
the bells, do you feel the pull? The night air
chills, you reach for fire. You see the daughter
sent to the stream, buckets swinging back and
forth. This is a dream. The start of a dream.
Who is the girl? The wolves advance.
-- Deborah Bogen
Workers (foragers)
After this seven-
months slumber, honey-stupored
& warm, we unfold our
wings, shake off
the hive, set out for buckwheat
& the low flowers of spring. We work
ourselves ragged, each day
going out, to come back heavy
with nectar & pollen. Seconds
collapse. In seven weeks we
fall, dried-out
husks, ravaged lace. Long
winter, we huddled
for warmth, our bodies the lamp,
honey the fuel
that kept us.
-- Nick Flynn
Mourning Doves
Stop that bobbing and cooing;
pay some attention to what you are doing!
Surely, in the long, dovetailed history
of the family there must have been one,
male or female,
who saw the logic behind a well-sculpted nest,
who argued for a safer location, a protected
eave or shrub.
Anything would be better than this flattened
mat of grass and twigs balanced on a branch
of aging spruce,
a nest so carelessly constructed that it will
shatter with the first heavy rain, or break
under the weight
of its own children. Fledglings don't leave
this nest as often as the nest leaves them,
dumping them out,
ready or not, a species so unconcerned with
its own preservation that one could doubt
Darwin's theory,
or any theory that allows a nest so hastily
done that eggs may roll away
before hatching,
unless Mourning Doves, iridescent in their dusty
gray, so constant with their tender song,
are such common currency,
that Nature can afford this laissez faire.
She shrugs her round shoulders
and simply doesn't care.
-- Cathryn Essinger
Honey Child
There was one man left in town
able to call you scavenger,
high yellow, or the macaroon woman.
There was one man at your birthday party
who rode into Alabama on a wild horse
and placed a bullet on his tongue
drank blue tequila until the worm
settled in his throat and he bellowed your name.
Was this the one man who foretold
your two brown daughters and a son
drove the automobile without a floorboard
into the green mountains like a helmsman
tossed into fog and ruin?
This man meant what he said:
built a stone house out of water
took a rainbow into his mouth
and from the Petrified :Forest
pulled the arrowhead that circled the earth
tore the ground and landed at your feet.
This was the same man who wed
his science to your volcanic eyes
read death poems in broad daylight
boiled red clay and raw honey
until the smoke signals spelled out your name
and nearly placed your heart into his hands.
-- Charles Fort
Magic, mecurious!
October
Those fallen leaves, pale supplicants,
have much to teach us of surrender,
how, wrapped in autumn's incense
they unfurl their flags to the wind
Every year I want to kneel in damp soil
and say farewell to blessed things:
the swift geese as they shout each to each
above the treetops, the white nicotinia
at my door, still releasing its fragrance
against the chill of evening,
the memory of a much-loved hand
the last day I held it
There was early morning light rich as silk,
the flash of late fireflies
amidst the cedar,
cows' tails whisking in the amber fields,
the chiaroscuro of a moth's wing
Goodbye, brief lives,
ablaze with tenderness;
today the glory of the leaves
is enough, for I am learning anew
to release all I cannot hold,
these moments of luminous grace
saying Here and here is beauty,
here grief: this is the way to come home
-- Carolyn Smart
What a fine piece, homunculus!
I don't normally ponder the biographical particulars of a poet, but I do wonder how he came to go over there - how old he was, and whether others in his family had served in the military.
A sad truth is no poet ever needs to go to war to know this. Although many have done so, one always hopes a new generation won't have to.
There's more about the author in this article.
Them Again
from Chinese Apples
I don't have to call them,
I never know when they'll buzz,
the pests, then they can't
stop talking, like taxi static
on the phone behind
whatever living voice
I'm trying to hear.
And now they're back.
A headset twitters
near the famed Korean
who rides our bus repeating
"Remember me, remember
me to everybody"
that streams into wingbeats
when blackbirds slap trees
then pretend to leave. I never know
where they'll be, my skittish
talky dead, in dozens sung
by girls skipping rope,
Mama told Papa don't be so bad,
or deer bounding down court,
Get back, pick him up!
They talk their talk
and claim me: my father
who hardly spoke at all;
a brain-fevered friend
cussing Jesus in tall cotton;
another who lived to quarrel
and still can't shut up,
like fanatical mosquitoes,
ladybugs clogging the screen,
or gossipy mob of moths
stuck to the underside
of our incomplete existence,
batting their opaque wings
at our brief blackbird world,
so much noise and so it goes
when this big-nosed redhead,
before getting on,
sucks and dumps his smoke,
jet-trailing through the door—
he hacks and he hawks
and he sets them loose again
to crowd me, saying the same
senseless things they say.
—W. S. DiPiero
Crazy, man. Crazy.
The pages clock has not heard the buzz
for long the time before this since was.
Every time I see this thread, or the Maine bears one, or any bee one, on the sidebar, I get all hopeful. Again.
No more flowers, no more trees,
No more singing birds,
Such is the burden of the bees,
Like pollen: fertile words.
The Woman Who Collects Noah's Arks
Has them in every room of her house,
wall hangings, statues, paintings, quilts and blankets,
ark lampshades, mobiles, Christmas tree ornaments,
t-shirts, sweaters, necklaces, books,
comics, a creamer, a sugar bowl, candles, napkins,
tea-towels and tea-tray, nightgown, pillow, lamp.
Animals two-by-two in plaster, wood,
fabric, oil paint, copper, glass, plastic, paper,
tinfoil, leather, mother-of-pearl, styrofoam,
clay, steel, rubber, wax, soap.
Why I cannot ask, though I would like
to know, the answer has to be simply
because. Because at night when she lies
with her husband in bed, the house rocks out
into the bay, the one that cuts in here to the flatlands
at the center of Texas. Because the whole wood structure
drifts off, out under the stars, beyond the last
lights, the two of them pitching and rolling
as it all heads seaward. Because they hear
trumpets and bellows from the farther rooms.
Because the sky blackens, but morning finds them always
safe on the raindrenched land,
bird on the windowsill.
Very nice, mecurious.
These days when I hear 'the ark' I think about a comment from Joseph Campbell that fish were the only animals not on the ark.
Wow, that's great! Did you really write that?
I'm wearing my denim shirt with the embroidered Ark and animals on it today. It fools the Xtians into allowing me to pass.
Lower the Standard: That's My Motto
Lower the standard: that's my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We're tired of falling off ladders. Who says a cihld can't paint? A pro is somebody who does it for money. Lower the standards. Let's all play poetry. Down with ideals, flags, convention buttons, morals, the scrambled eggs on the admiral's hat. I'm talking sense. Lower the standrads. Sabotage the stylistic approach. Let weeds grow in the subdivision. Putty up the incisions in the library facade, those names that frighten grade-school teachers, those names whose U's are cut like V's. Burn the Syntopicon and The Harvard Classics. Lower the standards on classics, battleships, Russian ballet, national anthems (but they're low enough). Break through to the bottom. Be natural as an American abroad who knows no language, not even American. Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs. Renovate the Abbey of cold-storage dreamers. Get off the Culture Wagon. Learn how to walk the way you want. Slump your shoulders, stick your belly out, arms all over the table. How many generations will this take? Don't think about it, just make a start. (You have made a start.) Don't break anything you can step around, but don't pick it up . The law of gravity is the law of art. You first, poetry second, the good, the beautiful, the true come last. As the lad said: we must love one another or die.
-- Karl Shapiro
Oo, nice shirt, granma!
Thanks, SB!
Fantastic poem. I've not heard that before.
WE NEEDS MOR POMES!
Yer right! This week has been a washout for me workwise so putting up some Pomes is my penance. More to come.
Horse Poetica by Matthew Thorburn
The one I rode in on. That mud-colored nag.
When he blinks his black eye bigger
than my fist, his eyelid's an upside-down
pocket. And the scrape, the spark of horseshoes
on dry riverbed rocks—every sound has a silence
tied to its tail. Or else it gets penned
up in the mighty barrel staves of his ribs.
Oh, but staves? That makes me
hear music. That tinny harmonica, that tuneless
squeezebox, the song we ought to know
better by now, but still follow for days
down a path that's only a path because
we belive it is. Now where'd our giddy up
and go go? My horse can't canter. I hop along.
We've been outfoxed. Farmed out and fenced in.
If we were given a chance, then given
a second chance, we'd both choose a paddle
and a boat and float. Soggy but saddle-less.
We'd both need new names.
Then new shoes. Meanwhile, we hang
a left at the one-armed cactus. There's another life
after this one, but it's just as dusty. Meanwhile,
we're caught in a crowd of cows and cowhands.
But they part for us, they part like the Red Sea
of beef. Then they get going. Then I get
the bit between his teeth. Then he bites.
Boy, could we use a minor catastrophe or two.
Let lightning like a lasso streak straight at us.
Nice! Thank you GramMa.
"tuneless squeezebox" that's awesome.
I'm sorry. I forgot to add the author of the poem The Woman Who Collects Noah's Arks, Texas poet Janet McCann. I regret the unintentional inference that the work was mine. I wish!
The Potato Eaters
Sometimes, the naked taste of potato
reminds me of being poor.
The first bites are gratitude,
the rest, contented boredom.
The little kitchen still flickers
like a candle-lit room in a folktale.
Never again was my father so angry,
my mother so still as she set the table,
or I so much at home.
--Leonard Nathan
Jeepers, i just read that very poem today, mecurious.
The Colonel
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread.
I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
-- Carolyn Forche
Sunday evening after supper here's a little bit of world-weariness, with optimistic fringe.
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs --
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won't fall finally down.
Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs,
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it's mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
--Richard Hugo
Damn fine post about Sorley MacLean on MeFi posted by some giezer.
Is that our Abigiezer?
I garnered a small but select response, I like to think. Because I'm delusional. But the post was Sorley needed, I felt.
My Physics Teacher
He tried to convince us, but his billiard ball
Fell faster than his pingpong ball and thumped
To the floor first, in spite of Galileo.
The rainbows from his prism skidded off-screen
Before we could tell an infra from an ulta.
His hand-cranked generator refused to spit
Sparks and settled for smoke. The dangling pith
Ignored the attractions of his amber wand.
No matter how much static he rubbed and dubbed
From the seat of his pants, and the housebrick
He lowered into a tub of water weighed
(Eureka!) more than the overflow.
He believed in a World of Laws, where problems had answers,
Where tangible objects and intangible forces
Acting thereon could be lettered, numbered and crammed
Through our tough skulls for lifetimes of homework.
But his only uncontestable demonstration
Came with our last class; he broke his chalk
On a formula, stooped to catch it, knocked his forehead
On the eraser-gutter, staggered slewfoot, and stuck
One foot forever into the wastebasket.
--David Wagoner
Wagoner rocks!!
*sighs
I've missed this thread.
Appeal to the Grammarians
We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we're capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we're ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.
We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,
The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,
The flat tire at journey's outset,
The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.
But mainly because I need it—here and now
As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio
Staring at my espresso and cannoli
After this middle-aged couple
Came strolling by and he suddenly
Veered and sneezed all over my table
And she said to him, "See, that's why
I don't like to eat outside."
Paul Violi
That's a keeper, Granma! I'd never heard of Wagoner until i ran across that poem by accident. And now this Violi fellow needs looking into....
The Meat Thieves
Susan Wicks
Drivers wanted. Thieves and alcoholics need not apply.
JOB AD IN A BUTCHER'S WINDOW
And yet we're good with meat.
Our agile fingers know how to pick
a crusted lock. Corn-fed chickens wait
quartered in the cold safe
in a fur of breath. Under our coats
we hide small finds — an ear, a stiffened wing,
a wishbone; rabbits' kidneys slide their satin eyes
into our pockets where the fluff congeals.
We can tiptoe through blood
and leave no footprints: friends will testify
we were far from this square of sawdust,
far from ourselves.
When we first saw meat
swing from your hook our hands started to shake
as we reached for the bottle. Now we stroke apart
the cutlets on their spine of bone. The marbled fat
is cool, the suet clean as candles;
mince curls like hair
from the greased machine. And each discarded heart
is a maze of hidden chambers, every valve
gasps open. In a gold wave
the sawdust swells underfoot:
all we can take is ours
and the getaway car waiting,
packed tight from roof to floor
with perishable goods. We'll part the air
in a screech of burnt rubber. While you turn in your sheet
we'll stitch up your town
with a zigzag of tail-lights,
hooting and whooping at a job well done.
Story: now your turn!
Jump in, Monkeys
*cues duelling banjos music*
--
Collage of Echoes
I have no promises to keep
Nor miles to go before I sleep1,
For miles of years I have made promises
and (mostly) kept them.
It's time I slept.
Now I lay me down to sleep2
With no promises to keep.
My sleaves are ravelled3
I have travelled4.
--Isabella Gardner
1 Robert Frost – “Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening”
2 Child’s rhyme
3 Macbeth, 2.2.37
4 Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
The Elephant Is Slow To Mate
Hilda Doolittle
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse
and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.
So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.
They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.
The Dance
In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.
William Carlos Williams
Ode to the Midwest
by Kevin Young
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
—Bob Dylan
I want to be doused
in cheese
& fried. I want
to wander
the aisles, my heart's
supermarket stocked high
as cholesterol. I want to die
wearing a sweatsuit—
I want to live
forever in a Christmas sweater,
a teddy bear nursing
off the front. I want to write
a check in the express lane.
I want to scrape
my driveway clean
myself, early, before
anyone's awake—
that'll put em to shame—
I want to see what the sun
sees before it tells
the snow to go. I want to be
the only black person I know.
I want to throw
out my back & not
complain about it.
I wanta drive
two blocks. Why walk—
I want love, n stuff—
I want to cut
my sutures myself.
I want to jog
down to the river
& make it my bed—
I want to walk
its muddy banks
& make me a withdrawal.
I tried jumping in,
found it frozen—
I'll go home, I guess,
to my rooms where the moon
changes & shines
like television.
Heee!
Drucker's Mule Barn
Jeffrey Franklin
There they are, standing in the boxy stalls,
there's Jake, beard-stubble dun, one ear
turreted straight back, chewing in slow motion,
and there's Boxer with a blue hoof cocked
as you walk gingerly behind, and then Manchu—
"yellow-slant-eyed-wicked-bastard,"
Uncle Don hisses at him—almost invisible
in the sun-spatter of hay-light through the slats,
and there at the end, The Reverend, as Rodney
dubbed him, by turns solemn and ecclesiastical
with wrath, shiny black as a cheap Sunday suit.
I don't know how to get back there now,
though curls of dust from our passing still settle
down through the hushed air on the old turnpike.
The poplars, pin oaks, and shagbark hickories
that yellow the roof of the road's tunnel in fall
rustle green still with invisible passings.
But there it is, I swear to God, at the dogleg
where the creek bends behind, up ahead on the left,
that gray hulk of timber and tin with the doors
swung wide, Uncle Don and Rodney out front
in their washed-out Pointer Brand overalls,
passing the black twist of Black Mariah.
They still know how to talk to a mule
the way a mule needs to be talked to
when it baulks, when it hesitates between
narcolepsy and the urge to crush you utterly,
when it cogitates the somber truths.
I need those somber truths now,
and narry a mule around. Not infrequently
I need the instruction of one who knows
how to grind resentment into patience. I need
to pace myself, I need some mule time,
I need the bitter consolation and the succor
of sweet hay, dusk, fly-buzz, slant sun.
That's why when someone I don't know
and don't want to know rings my phone
I sometimes pick it up and say, "Drucker's
Mule Barn." For all I know a Goddamn interstate's
been laid smack on top of that turnpike,
barn, mules, creek, and trees just
a foiled layer of sediment in a fossil's seam,
and no one there, when the non-existent phone
begins inaudibly to ring and ring and ring,
to answer.
Child Developement
Billy Collins
As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.
Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.
They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.
The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.
Need. More. Poems.
Harvesting the Cows
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Stringy, skittery, thistle-burred, rib-etched,
they're like a pack of wolves lacking a sheep
but also lacking the speed, the teeth, the wits—
they're heifers culled from the herd, not worth the cost
of feeding and breeding and milking, let loose on a hill
one-third rock, one-third blackberry bramble.
And now, the scrub stung black by hard frost,
here come the young farmer and his father,
one earnest, one wizened, wind-whipped, sun-whipped,
who make at the gate, from strewn boards and boughs,
a pen, and park at its near end the compact
silver trailer, designed for two horses—
it waits at the mouth of the rutted tractor-trail
descending through trees, an artificial gulley.
Up goes Junior, hooting, driving them down.
So much bigger than wolves, these sixteen cows:
head to flank or flank to scrawny flank,
they can't turn around; but what they know is no:
some splash over the walls of the small corral,
one, wall-eyed, giddy, smashes away
the warped plank that's propped on the far side,
crashing across alders and wet windfall
in a plausible though explosive dance, which prompts
another to aim herself at the same hole,
too late: the planks back up, she's turned to the clump
and soon swimming among them, their white necks
extended like the necks of hissing geese,
but so much bigger than geese. When the younger man
wraps one neck in his arms, the cow rears up
and he goes down, plaid wool in shit-slicked mud;
so then the elder takes her by the nose—
I mean, he puts two fingers and a thumb
inside the nostrils, pulls her into the trailer.
The rest shy and bunch away from the gate;
a tail lifts for a stream of piss; one beast
mounts another—panic that looks erotic—
and the herdsmen try guile, a pail of grain
kept low, which keeps the head of the lead cow low
as though resigned, ready for the gallows.
The silver loaf opens, swallows them in,
two by two by two, and takes them away.
Hams need to be smoked, turkeys to be dressed out
here in Arcadia, where a fine cold spit
needles the air, and the birch and beech let go
at last their last tattered golden rags.
oop, haven't popped in, in a while. Islander, that's one of my fave Billy Collins'; Granma, that's the first pome i ever seen about cows.
Here's one:
Naming of Parts – Henry Reed
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.
Ummmm!
Story: one of my favorites--the imagery and play on words is yummy
'Nother poem about cows, just for you!
Freeing the Dead Cow in River
Eric Torgersen
In the daydream poem-to-be that surfaced once years ago
it would have been a woman, her last slow float down the river
in the final grip and current of her one life story,
and I, on the bank, would have sighted her and dreamed her
a song, perhaps her first, perhaps only her last;
I'd have thought for us all, then chosen the wisest nothing,
let her go on alone, as she seemed to know how to.
This thing snagged here instead, the ineluctable
cow conferred by the only and endless world--
just a distended black-and-white hump above water,
far too much like a hugely pregnant belly;
the rest furred brown, as if she'd been long on her way.
I let her be for a week; she was getting nowhere
till I gave her a first timid push with the end of a garden rake.
I wound up good and wet in that bad Ganges,
fell in, at first, for trying too hard to stay dry,
then waded in with the rake to muscle the bulk of her
free and nudge her out like a tug to the channel.
Her head rose out of the water once, pale and rancorless;
then she found the current and it took her
and I who'd freed her turned to my next labor.
Well, it could have been worse:
I never saw a purple cow...
Moo!
Ok, here's another one which explains quite well why poetry does and does not work.
THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY
is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head; it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word barn
that the writer wrote
but the barn you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally- some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows...
And barn is only a noun- no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.
~~-Thomas Lux
p.s. note cows snuck into pome at last moment
Lovely, StoryBored!
Thank ye kindly, Granma. Another pome for all child-at-heart monkeys before lights out on Sunday, i got six minutes to go before the midnite hour, when i have to be in bed else i turn into a pumkin.
Where Children Live -- by Naomi Shihab Nye
Homes where children live exude a pleasant rumpledness,
like a bed made by a child, or a yard littered with balloons.
To be a child again one would need to shed details
till the heart found itself dressed in the coat with a hood.
Now the heart has taken on gloves and mufflers,
the heart never goes outside to find something to "do".
And the house takes on a new face, dignified.
No lost shoes blooming under bushes.
No chipped trucks in the drive.
Grown-ups like swings, leafy plants, slow-motion back and forth.
While the yard of a child is strewn with the corpses
of bottle-rockers and whistles,
anything whizzing and spectacular, brilliantly short-lived.
Trees in children's yards speak in clearer tongues.
Ants have more hope. Squirrels dance as well as hide.
The fence has a reason to be there, so children can go in and out.
Even when the children are at school, the yards glow
With the leftovers of their affection,
The roots of the tiniest grasses curl toward one another
Like secret smiles.
This is a found poem, by me.
A Poem, Found in the Amazon.com Reader Reviews
for the Oster BPST02-B Professional Series Blender, Black
This blender isn't for everyone,
this is a very serious blender,
for serious users.
Blends ice like there is no tomorrow,
I mean no chunks what-so-ever.
What a nice blender.
I wanted a powerful blender. WOW,
I didn't know blenders came
this powerful. BEST BLENDER EVER.
One speed is plenty,
it's a blender not a bicycle.
A No Nonsense Blender
It's almost as if an airplane
is taking off in your kitchen.
you will NOT be able to hold a conversation
But it's over in seconds,
so it doesn't matter.
It's Everything it's said to be
No fru-fru/bling.
No gadgetry
or multi-mode/40-button fake quality.
No pastel plastics. Just
the best blending on earth.
Owned for a flawless month now.
I've tried blending almost everything but granite.
I've nicknamed mine "Heraclitus"
because it causes everything I feed it
to flow and become.
*applause*
Paradise
Arthur Smith
I used to live there. Every morning
The downtown streets were cobbled with gold, honey
Flowed—all that stuff. I'm not kidding. Summers
Lasted a lifetime, broken by Christmas
And New Year's.
Mornings were like waking to someone's scent
You hadn't yet met and married for life,
Though I didn't know that then—the night-cooled
Muskmelons rolling belly up to the stars,
And by late afternoon the dusk-colored
Dust of apricots on everything.
From that earth, my body
Assembled itself, and when the veil dropped,
I tried to say what I saw. The light winds
Around me died, the sheers of summer wavered
As though all of it were mirage. Cantaloupes,
Grapes, clusters of ruby flames like champagne,
Though I didn't know that then—
Nectarines like morphine—didn't know that either.
Oranges, almonds, rainbows,
Tangs—rolling in all year long, that bounty.
You tell people that, over and over,
And it's really crazy, they won't believe you.
All that sugar coaxed out of clay, and you
Can't even give it away—and each dawn
More is just piled on. I took in as much
As I could, like larder, and walked away.
End of Summer
Just an uncommon lull in the traffic
so you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,
with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,
and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,
and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversation
and brought to you, loud.
It would be so different
if any of these were missing is the feeling
you always have on the first day of autumn,
no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehow
the sun singling out high windows,
a waiter settling a billow of white cloth
with glasses and silver, and the sparrows
shattering to nowhere are the Summer
waving that here is where it turns
and will no longer be walking with you,
traveller, who now leave all of this behind,
carrying only what it has made of you.
Already the crowds seem darker and more hurried
and the slang grows stranger and stranger,
and you do not understand what you love,
Yet here, rounding a corner in mild sunset,
is the world again, wide-eyed as a child
holding up a toy even you can fix.
How light your step
down the narrowing avenue to the cross streets,
October, small November, barely legible December.
--James Richardson
Guilty secret note to poem posters: Ever get the temptation to alter the words of a poem? I confess I sometimes think about the slight tweak. I'm just a peasant blowing my nose loudly in the church of genius...but ...but... what if, for example in the poem above, the line "...shattering to nowhere are the Summer" was "...shattering to nowhere *is* the summer"?
Masterful
Gabriel Spera
Though it's a city job, Carlos isn't wearing
his orange vest and yellow hardhat,
but clomps around in tan ranchero hat
and washed-out denim shirt. The foreman
warns him once again, as he must, and Carlos
swears he won't forget again tomorrow.
He straps himself in to the motor grader,
skims a glove across the fat black knobs,
and eases forth with a mule-driver's patience,
leveling truck-dumped piles of raw fill
smoother than the sea of Cortez.
Maybe it's a gift, such effortless grace,
such seamless union of man and machine,
and maybe it's a sign how every morning,
punctual as the lunch truck with its
shave-and-a-haircut horn, he kills the engine,
clambers down, struts up close to a massive
chevron-treaded tire and just starts peeing,
as though the whole site weren't naked
as a soccer field, boxed along three sides
by green glass towers. Not that it matters—
the soil he darkens will be asphalted over
soon enough, and even now, here comes
the water-tank truck, spewing like a fire plug
wrenched open in the mid-city heat.
Small hot-pink pennants still mark
the heavy conduit we sank just yesterday,
and we've got planks on edge, framing
where the walkway's going to be.
The cement mixer inches up, its great drum
putting like a clock hand teasing toward the hour.
And Hector levers the crusty sluice above
the ready beds, the newsprint-colored mortar
plopping like horseshit to the ground.
And Manny makes quick work of it, his trowel
and squeegee broom drawing it so tight,
a dropped dime would roll to a standing stop
and never topple over. There is a thin line
between miracle and mastery. Even
Carlos stands, hat off with the rest of us,
nodding as with subtle understanding.
I got dusty reading that.
Dirge
1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came
3-2-1;
bought his Carbide at 30 but it went to 29; had the
favorite at Bowie but the track was slow--
O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power,
knee action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star?
Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three
cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter
born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails--
Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the
certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless,
the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called;
nevertheless, the radio broke,
And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,
just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one
straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short
step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
just one too many,
And wow he died as wow he lived,
going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and
biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die,
With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket,
and where the hell are we going on the right hand silver
knob, and who the hell cares walking second from the
end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not.
Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York
Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,
Wham, Mr Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper;
bop, summer rain;
bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.
--Kenneth Fearing
good one SB, thanks
Nice. Love a poet that can juggle the words.
Ye can smell the wet cement in that last one, GramMa.
StoryBored, to me it seemed as if the sparrows were shattering off, taking flight...
Pete, Granma: You're welcome!
Islander: you're right, how did i miss that?
On Birds and Bugs by Bai Juyi (772-846)
trans. Geoffrey Waters
Mites fight bloody battles for nests on a mosquito's eyelash;
Tiny kingdoms are at war over lands on a snail's horn.
If we looked down across our own world from highest heaven,
We would see heroes fighting to the death for a speck of dust.
On a Sonnet
Leah Goldberg
Happily
happiness doesn't know justice
It comes when it wants
and it wants unjustly
Time for you to withdraw into the rustle
of black silk attire
rather than to dress up in smiles
But is it your fault
that like rain it caught you on the road by surprise
that you didn't have time to cover your silver head
And now you stand like a lonely tree
open to all the winds and birds
And now you shine like a lake
and whether you want to or not
you reflect the sky
Ars Metaphysica
Bill Rasmovicz
Your head is a landscape revised by culm
and tire smoke, you stare through the window
as though words will appear,
heraldic and from nowhere.
Light as a paper bag, you amble about town
waiting for the wind to take hold.
You profess the body is a cello, and the moon
the eye by which you see.
You maintain your ancestors were barbarians,
that the tongue can out-leverage a crowbar.
You ascertain the weather with a fork
and an empty bottle of port.
Moths sleep under the mattresses of your eyelids.
You testify to wolves inhabiting your bones at night.
You claim the dead speak through you.
Crows circle your house like tiny hurricanes.
Saplings take root in your gutters.
Your own voice frightens you.
You're a liar, a thief. You're vain.
You believe you can extract silence from a stone.
You contend the friction between pen and paper
creates light. You believe the darkness
is larger than any space can hold.
*applause*...reminds me a little of:
He who is brave in daring will be killed,
He who is brave in not daring will survive,
One of these two courses is beneficial,
The other is harmful.
Who knows the reason for heaven's dislikes?
The Way of Heaven
does not war
yet is good at conquering,
does not speak
yet is good at answering,
is not summoned
yet comes of itself,
is relaxed
yet good at making plans.
Heaven's net is vast;
Though its meshes are wide,
nothing escapes.
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tse, Chapter 73.
Islander: that speck of dust poem is a keeper.
Oh, Story, I like that! I'll have to look into Lao Tse...
57. Conquer with Inaction
Do not control the people with laws,
Nor violence nor espionage,
But conquer them with inaction.
For:
The more morals and taboos there are,
The more cruelty afflicts people;
The more guns and knives there are,
The more factions divide people;
The more arts and skills there are,
The more change obsoletes people;
The more laws and taxes there are,
The more theft corrupts people.
Yet take no action, and the people nurture each other;
Make no laws, and the people deal fairly with each other;
Own no interest, and the people cooperate with each other;
Express no desire, and the people harmonize with each other.
Man, this is some good stuff.
I owe you big time, my friend!
Ode on Dictionaries
Barbara Hamby
A-bomb is how it begins, with a big bang on page
one, a calculator of sorts whose centrifuge
begets bedouin, bamboozle, breakdance, and berserk,
one of my mother's favorite words, hard-knock
clerk of clichés that she is, at the moment going ape
the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape
disguised as her brain, a rococo lexicon
of Deuteronomy, Job, gossip, spritz, and neo-con
ephemera all wrapped up in a pop burrito
of movie star shenanigans, like a stray Cheeto
found in my pocket the day after I finish the bag,
tastier than any oyster and champagne fueled fugue
gastronomique I have been pursuing in France
for the past four months. This 82-year-old's rants
have taken their place with the dictionary I bought
in the fourth grade, with so many gorgeous words I thought
I'd never plumb its depths. Right the first time, little girl,
yet here I am still at it, trolling for pearls,
Japanese words vying with Bantu in a goulash
I eat daily, sometimes gagging, sometimes with relish,
kleptomaniac in the five-and-dime of language,
slipping words in my pockets like a non-smudge
lipstick that smears with the first kiss. I'm the demented
lady with sixteen cats. Sure, the house stinks, but those damned
mice have skedaddled, though I kind of miss them, their cute
little faces, the whiskers, those adorable gray suits.
No, all beasts are welcome in my menagerie, ark
of inconsolable barks and meows, sharp-toothed shark
OED of the deep ocean, sweet compendium
of candy bars—Butterfingers, Mounds, and M&Ms—
packed next to tripe and gizzards, the trim and tackle
of butchers and bakers, the painter's brush and spackle,
quarks and black holes of physicists' theory. I'm building
my own book as a mason makes a wall or a gelding
runs round the track—brick by brick, step by step, word by word,
jonquil by gerrymander, syllabub by greensward,
swordplay by snapdragon, a never ending parade
of clowns and funambulists in my own mouth, homemade
treasure chest of tongue and teeth, the brain's roustabout, rough
unfurler of tents and trapezes, off-the-cuff
unruly troublemaker in the high church museum
of the world. O mouth—boondoggle, auditorium,
viper, gulag, gumbo pot on a steamy August
afternoon—what have you not given me? How I must
wear on you, my Samuel Johnson in a frock coat,
lexicographer of silly thoughts, billy goat,
X-rated pornographic smut factory, scarfer
of snacks, prissy smirker, late-night barfly;
you are the megaphone by which I bewitch the world
or not, as the case may be. O chittering squirrel,
Ziploc sandwich bag, sound off, shut up, gather your words
into bouquets, folios, flocks of black and flaming birds.
I just watched a DVD of an event last year in Dublin to mark the anniversary of Flann O'Brien's death. It's okayish, with David Kelly and Tommy Tiernan among others. However, to my mind, it's not a patch on Eamonn Morrissey's monologues on The Brother and the taxidermist story. Anyway, if you'd like to see the DVD I mentioned, e-mail is in the profile. Ordinarily, I'd just give an amazon link, but I can't find the reference in this case.
Why post in this thread? Because the beesmeister posted the plain man's ong here.
Oo, just got my hi-speed Net access back and now catching up on pomes.
Granma, that Ode is a delight.
Roryk, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN!
More on the Ode, there be riches here...
A is abacus (= "a calculator of sorts")
B is bummer (= hardknock word)
C is creationism (= the current rave in the fundamentalist landscape)
....
For you, SB!
Abandoned Farmhouse
Ted Kooser
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an ustairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.
A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth,and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.
Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed chocked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm – a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
Gee, that is a good one. Thanks Granma! I miss the pomes.
Your turn, SB
The War Prayer
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle –be Thou near them! With them –in spirit—we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it—for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen”
--Mark Twain.
Fuckin' A, men
Hi StoryBored!
Too damn bad that prayer can't be said before every press conference Bush holds concerning this f@#*in' war!!
The Prose Poem
Campbell McGrath
The Ecco Press
On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the wind-sewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk's descent from the lightning-struck tree. You've passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?
Heya islander, how goes!?
Granma, thanks for that. I like the question at the end.
Here's another:
Iowa & Other Accidents
There was snow that afternoon covering the road
which twisted toward the secret
of water, the mysterious surge
of sludge & loam, the living
Mississippi, unlike the rest of the Midwest,
drawing itself through landscape. There was an appointment
you were keeping
in Moline: a cheap hotel, booze, a little blow. On the Lower
East Side, a woman
spills her martini, makes a gesture
like erasure, or regret. It was almost Christmas.
In the rear view
suddenly, the car you will always describe as oncoming
must have slipped into a skid
and now, rising up over the bank,
it startles you—that reflection. In Moline
the maid corners the bed, straightens the clean
line of sheet. Almost Christmas. On the road,
swirls of snow. On the road
the car hovering behind you, a witness,
unfortunate & so unlike the audience permitted
the distance of fictions, the artifice
of plot. And worse, of course, the law
of cause & effect: I looked up,
it started to fall. You must attach
subject to verb, must say
I saw, and did, in your rear view, the car you’d thought
nothing of,
the gray sedan lifting slowly from the common snow,
turning, and the accident
always there, about to happen.
-- Kate Northrop
What the Horses See at Night
Robin Robertson
When the day-birds have settled
in their creaking trees,
the doors of the forest open
for the flitting
drift of deer
among the bright croziers
of new ferns
and the legible stars;
foxes stream from the earth;
a tawny owl
sweeps the long meadow.
In a slink of river-light,
the mink's face
is already slippery with yolk,
and the bay's
tiny islands are drops
of solder
under a drogue moon.
The sea's a heavy sleeper,
dreaming in and out with a catch
in each breath, and is not disturbed
by that plowt - the first
in a play of herring, a shoal
silvering open
the sheeted back skin of the sea.
Through the starting rain, the moon
skirrs across the sky dragging torn shreds of cloud behind.
The fox's call is red
and ribboned
in the snow's white shadow.
The horses watch the sea climb
and climb and walk
towards them on the hill,
hear the vole
crying under the alder,
our children
breathing slowly in their beds.
Wow, islander, thank you!!!
I didn't have this poem in my collection of horse poetry, and I've put together three notebooks containing over 800 poems.
Here's one backatcha:
Horse By Moonlight
Alberto Blanco, trans Jennifer Clenment
A horse escaped from the circus
and lodged in my daughter's eyes
there he ran circles around the iris
raising silver dust-clouds in the pupil
and halting sometimes
to drink from the holy water of the retina.
Since then my daughter feels a longing
for meadows of grass and green hills
waiting for the moon to come
and dry with its silk sleeves
the sad water that wets her cheeks.
The Student Theme
Ronald Wallace
The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!
The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.
The metaphors stood silent as tombstones
While the similes said like yeah,
And the hysteron proteron, read then written.
!!
Listen
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
--W.S. Merwin
One of my fave poets. Thank you for posting, StoryBored.
You're welcome! I stumbled on it by accident in an anthology and was struck by it. I don't know anything at all about him. Are there any other poems that you'd recommend by him?
One of my favourite poems by Merwin, and indeed by any poet, is Words from a totem animal, too long to post here in its entirety, but can be found here. It inspired me to start the novel that I'm hoping to finish at some point ;)
Other online anthologies here, here and here
Oooooooh, mothninja! You rock!
I've been wanting to explore more Merwin...
W.S. Merwin: The Horse.
In a dead tree
there is the ghost of a horse
no horse
was ever seen near the tree
but the tree was born
of a mare
it rolled with long legs
in rustling meadows
it pricked its ears
it reared and tossed its head
and suddenly stood still
beginning to remember
as its leaves fell
from Merwin's, "The Compass Flower."
Another of my favs is Philip Levine
The Horse
for Ichiro Kawamoto, humanitarian, electrician, & survivor of Hiroshima
They spoke of the horse alive
without skin, naked, hairless,
without eyes and ears, searching
for the stableboy’s caress.
Shoot it, someone said, but they
let him go on colliding with
tattered walls, butting his long
skull to pulp, finding no path
where iron fences corkscrewed in
the street and bicycles turned
like question marks.
Some fled and
some sat down. The river burned
all that day and into the
night, the stones sighed a moment
and were still, and the shadow
of a man’s hand entered
a leaf.
The white horse never
returned, and later they found
the stable boy, his back crushed
by a hoof, his mouth opened
around a cry that no one heard.
They spoke of the horse again
and again; their mouths opened
like the gills of a fish caught
above water.
Mountain flowers
burst from the red clay walls, and
they said a new life was here.
Raw grass sprouted from the cobbles
like hair from a deafened ear.
The horse would never return.
There had been no horse. I could
tell from the way they walked
testing the ground for some cold
that the rage had gone out of
their bones in one mad dance.
Notice
This evening, the sturdy Levi's
I wore every day for over a year
& which seemed to the end
in perfect condition,
suddenly tore.
How or why I don't know,
but there it was: a big rip at the crotch.
A month ago my friend Nick
walked off a racquetball court,
showered,
got into this street clothes,
& halfway home collapsed & died.
Take heed, you who read this,
& drop to your knees now & again
like the poet Christopher Smart,
& kiss the earth & be joyful,
& make much of your time,
& be kindly to everyone,
even to those who do not deserve it.
For although you may not believe
it will happen,
you too will one day be gone,
I, whose Levi's ripped at the crotch
for no reason,
assure you that such is the case.
Pass it on.
--Steve Kowit
*stands up to applaud*
That was fabulous. And slightly heartwrenching.
Waiting to Cut the Hay
Erica Funkhouser
In the toolshed the best thing
is the heart-shaped seat of the tractor.
You don't have to know anything to sit in it.
You don't have to squeeze out the choke
and pump the gas pedal before you can go anywhere.
You don't have to steer the front wheel around
like the neck of a stubborn horse
in order to get out to the fields.
You don't have to look through the rusted floorboards
to see that the timothy is ripe
and that all the hayfields tilt toward the toolshed.
Even the stones beneath the fields lean this way.
And here comes the far pasture,
with its sumac and cow parsley and sway-backed fence,
and here's the road to the river, and now the river itself,
the shy wood duck flapping up from the reeds,
the bullfrogs frog-kicking into black water,
and the yellow perch swirling like our own galaxy
until they're right here above the clutch
where you can lower your toes in among them.
It's National Poetry Month. So write/read some national poetry.
"heart-shaped seat" - that's nice image.
The Mower
Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
celleebrate national poetree month!!
Across The Road
- Anne Harré
The woman across the road
lives alone, directly
next to a man
who also lives alone.
Between them are twelve
maybe fourteen inches (centimetres
ineffectual, tip-toeing)
of brick, half an inch (each side)
of gib-board, a feathering of wall-paper,
a smear of paint.
The house exactly mirrors itself,
like the weather-vane couple,
wooden predictors swinging each one in
and out. She, off to work,
he, drunkenly forgetting medication,
taking an axe to her fence.
What a great way to start a Friday!
That's great, Ed. I've never heard of - Anne Harré. I guess I better get with it and look her up!
To Help the Monkey Cross the River
which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.
--Thomas Lux
Jane Duran
Chimeras
What if the ship were put together
with safety pins, newspaper,
cotton, paste and sawdust?
Or what if there was nothing to it?
What if the deck never happened,
the ochres and reds I remember
giving the lie, and at night
no beguiling surfaces, railings, rain?
And what if that port, the one that was
or might have been –
the open promenade, laughter,
palm trees, crates of coffee, papayas,
the sky almost a royal blue,
were just my love telling tales,
being there, colouring in
all the lavish and lost places?
Salut Islander!
Lift Your Right Arm
Lift your right arm, she said.
I lifted my right arm.
Lift your left arm, she said.
I lifted my left arm. Both of my arms were up.
Put down your right arm, she said.
I put it down.
Put down your left arm, she said.
I did.
Lift your right arm, she said.
I obeyed.
Put down your right arm.
I did.
Lift your left arm.
I lifted it.
Put down your left arm.
I did.
Silence. I stood there, both arms down, waiting for her next command. After a while I got impatient and said, what next.
Now it's your turn to give the orders, she said.
All right, I said. Tell me to lift my right arm.
--Peter Cherches
Planting the Alder
Seamus Heaney
For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.
For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.
For the sub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted ermerald, chrlorophyll.
For the scut and scat of the cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.
For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch
But mostly for the swinging locks
of yellow catkins,
Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.
streel-head?
mmmmm, lovely poems you guyz
The world needs more trees.
Tree
~ Jane Hirshfield ~
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books --
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Robinson Jeffers
Hurt Hawks
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.
II
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
PABLO NERUDA
I HAVE A CRAZY
Crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
I love
cups
rings
and bowls -
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love
all thing,
not just
the grandest,
also
the infinite
ly
small-
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
and flower vases.
Oh yes.
LOST IN POEM-LIGHT
Lynne Thompson
"there is a secret happiness in seeing the world by poem-light" Jane Hirshfield
The old friends
don't drop by anymore--
not since the day I passed round
odes as hors d'oeurves,
poured sestinas on the rocks.
They sadly shake their heads & whisper:
"When did she disappear
into that shimmer of poem-light?"
Even when the random invitation issues,
my hosts all quake with fear
that I'll corner the guest of honor
chanting ghazals for an hour
or terrorize their children
with tropes and terza rima.
My family's worried, too;
I hear that they are planning
to lock me up with my pantoums
and to shun me for my sonnets but
I'm planning a poetic escape to States
where poems gallop naked astride a naked horse,
to pledge allegiance to a Country where Wild's
the language that's spoken every day.
A 2-fer!!
Needs more poems around here.
How funny, Gramma, I was just coming here to post some Neruda.... *proclaims today NerudaDay*
Ode to My Socks, by Pablo Neruda, trans. Robert Bly
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.
The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.
I always make sure the socks match the pantoumes.
Oy, mothie, great minds must think alike. ;)
Or you were having a poem withdrawal like I was.
More Neruda:
Fleas interest me so much
Fleas interest me so much
that I let them bite me for hours.
They are perfect, ancient, Sanskrit,
machines that admit of no appeal.
They do not bite to eat,
they bite only to jump;
they are the dancers of the celestial sphere,
delicate acrobats
in the softest and most profound circus;
let them gallop on my skin,
divulge their emotions,
amuse themselves with my blood,
but someone should introduce them to me.
I want to know them closely,
I want to know what to rely on.
Litany
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.
I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.
--Billy Collins
Billy Collins always comes through.
Cat, Failing
by Robin Robertson
A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into a grim towel. I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.
He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of being
found out. Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.
Underwear
I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout.
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti
*stands and applauds StoryBored!
To continue with our theme for the evening:
Frugal Poem: Flour Sack Underwear
When I was a Maiden fair,
Mama made our underwear.
With five tots & Pa's poor pay,
How could she buy us lingerie?
Monograms & fancy stitches
were not on OUR flour sack britches.
Panty waists that stood the test
With Gold Medal on the Chest.
Little pants the best of all
With a scene I still recall:
Harvesters were gleaning wheat
Right across the little seat.
Tougher than a grizzly bear
Was our flour sack underwear.
Plain or fancy, three feet wide,
stronger than a hippos hide.
Through the years each Jill & Jack
Wore this sturdy garb of sack.
Waste not, want not, we soon learned,
Penny saved, a penny earned.
Bedspreads, curtains, tea towels, too.
Tablecloths to name a few.
But the best beyond compare
was our Flour Sack Underwear!
~Author Unknown
As Soon as Fred Gets Out of Bed
As soon as Fred gets out of bed,
his underwear goes on his head.
His mother laughs, "Don't put it there,
a head's no place for underwear!"
But near his ears, above his brains,
is where Fred's underwear remains.
At night when Fred goes back to bed,
he deftly plucks it off his head.
His mother switches off the light
and softly croons, "Good night! Good night!"
And then, for reasons no one knows,
Fred's underwear goes on his toes.
Jack Prelutsky
Bees and Morning Glories
by John Ciardi
Morning glories, pale as a mist drying,
fade from the heat of the day, but already
hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg
hooks have found and are boarding them.
This could do for the sack of the imaginary
fleet. The raiders loot the galleons even as they
one by one vanish and leave still real
only what has been snatched out of the spell.
I’ve never seen bees more purposeful except
when the hive is threatened. They know
the good of it must be grabbed and hauled
before the whole feast wisps off.
They swarm in light and, fast, dive in,
then drone out, slow, their pantaloons heavy
with gold and sunlight. The line of them,
like thin smoke, wafts over the hedge.
And back again to find the fleet gone.
Well, they got this day’s good of it. Off
they cruise to what stays open longer.
Nothing green gives honey. And by now
you’d have to look twice to see more than green
where all those white sails trembled
when the world was misty and open
and the prize was there to be taken.
their pantaloons heavy
with gold and sunlight.
Lovely!
Poetry Comes from Our Tree-Climbing Ancestors, Neuroscientist Says
Our ancestors wore flour-sack pantaloons.
A couple from William Stafford..
Looking for Gold
A flavor like wild honey begins
when you cross the river. On a sandbar
sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it
a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and so bold?
You forget about gold. You stare—and a flavor
is rising all the time from the trees.
Back from the river, over by a thick
forest, you feel the tide of wild honey
flooding your plans, flooding the hours
till they waver forward looking back. They can’t
return; that river divides more than
two sides of your life. The only way
is farther, breathing that country, becoming
wise in its flavor, a native of the sun
Allegiances
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.
Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked-
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:-we
encounter them in dread and wonder,
But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.
Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.
Poetry Comes from Our Tree-Climbing Ancestors, Neuroscientist Says
Of course!
The Monkey is Reaching
The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He’ll never give up.
If he’d let go the branch and
Disappear in the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness.
-
Hakuin
A Poem About Monkeys
for Chloe
How they're noisy, how
they're swinging,
how the zoo is
a wild place, a place
of innovation.
The howler, the gorilla,
the capuchin:
they're all monkeys.
Your eyes see only
posture, hair,
faces like playful children.
In Curious George
the adventure is madcap,
that crazy George
loose in the modernity
we call home.
It's wacky is what it is,
how we lose each other,
how we reconnect.
And, you, at this
high end of evolution,
with your adult vocabulary,
your soulfulness,
your own sense of adventure,
you're a monkey yourself.
We all are,
and that's a secret.
We're all a little wild still,
a little too loud,
but we've learned to walk
upright, right
or wrong, and we've
learned we need the other monkeys,
in this untamed place,
our lives.
Corey Mesler
*applause*
That could be the MonkeyFilter Anthem.
oooooook eeeee oook oook ook OOOOOOOK!!!
OOOOK!
Hmmm, that sounds familiar...maybe if you whistle a few bars.....
Mr. Mesler.
The. Gorilla. Is. An. Ape.
TUM: It's a po-em.
Liberties are permitted.
"Nonsense Song"
by Anonymous
It was midnight on the ocean;
Not a street car was in sight.
The sun was shining brightly,
And it rained all day that night.
'Twas a summer's night in winter
And the rain was snowing fast.
A barefoot boy with shoes on
Stood sitting on the grass.
The rain was pouring down,
The moon was shining bright,
And everything that you could see
Was hidden out of sight.
It was evening and the rising sun
Was setting in the West.
The little fishes in the trees
Were huddled in their nest.
While the organ peeled potatoes,
Lard was rendered by the choir.
While the sexton rang the dish rag,
Someone set the church on fire.
"Holy Smoke," the preacher shouted,
And in the rush he lost his hair.
Now his head resembles heaven,
For there is no parting there.
I saw a great, big, tiny house
Ten thousand miles away.
And to my view 'twas out of sight
Last night, the other day.
The walls projected inward,
The front door round the back.
Alone it stood between two more.
The walls were whitewashed black.
So there!
Permitted, yes. Pass unnoted, never!
Dutch
Much of life
is Dutch
one-digit
operations
in which
legions of
big robust
people crouch
behind
badly cracked
dike systems
attached
by the thumbs
their wide
balloon-pantsed rumps
up-ended to the
northern sun
while, back
in town, little
black-suspendered
tulip magnates
stride around.
--Kay Ryan
Posted as a comment on the nuttiness in today's economy and also to mark the appointment of Kay Ryan as the newest American poet laureate!
I LOLed at that one!!!!!
More Ryan....
Bestiary
A bestiary catalogs
bests. The mediocres
both higher and lower
are suppressed in favor
of the singularly savage
or clever, the spectacularly
pincered, the archest
of the arch deceivers
who press their advantage
without quarter even after
they’ve won as of course they would.
Best is not to be confused with good—
a different creature altogether,
and treated of in the goodiary—
a text alas lost now for centuries.
“I realized that whatever we do or don’t do, we’re utterly exposed.”
Kudos to Ryan.
Yay! That's a new one for me. Thanks Granma!
This Ecstatic Nation: Learning from Emily Dickinson after 9/11
Her Own Society: A new reading of Emily Dickinson
From Li Kan speaks beneath the tree by Harry Martinson, trans. Stephen Klass
Waves from all upheavals turn swiftly old
and paths from all upheavals soon become highroads.
What is left is a longing for something not
the wheel of appetites or revenges.
Man is best when he wishes good he cannot do
and stops breeding evil he finds easier to do.
He will still have a direction. It will have no end in view.
It is free from unsparing endeavor.
So a Ballerina Walks into a Biker Bar
Suzanne Parker
Her tutu is luminescent,
a white net catching the darkness
with her powers to spin.
Digs jerks his chin, nudges
the closest stool mate,
Five bucks she trips on a peanut
and so we recognize beauty.
The bet: A single arabesque in a biker bar.
First, the rise to relevé. Then the arch,
pulls up, waits for the weight
of her entire body to balance in its cup.
Slowly, she raises one leg. Like scissors,
they separate, ankle high. Flirting,
she raises a leg knee high.
Finally, her body tips at waist high,
bowing to physics, to the bar,
to the men now frozen, bets laid.
Then, it's the rush, the flight,
the sweep downward toward the earth
and teasing with the hand's stroke,
the leg raised now, a clock
striking twelve, an arrow shot,
the finality of one straight line.
But, she's not done.
To succeed, she cannot wobble
must stick it, sweat it, points
of pain radiating upwards
as one slender ankle shakes
through two whole beats of Lynard Skynard,
trembles as the smoke shifts,
the tracks change,
the long silence before the next song.
Then, the quad shivers, a fast descent,
the grimy floor. So,
a ballerina walks into a biker bar.
She leaves, a little unsteady
in her toe shoes, stinking of cigarettes,
beer, bills stuffed in her tutu.
All Shall Be Restored
by Kay Ryan
The grains shall be collected
from the thousand shores
to which they found their way,
and the boulder restored,
and the boulder itself replaced
in the cliff, and likewise
the cliff shall rise
or subside until the plate of earth
is without fissure. Restoration
knows no half measure. It will
not stop when the treasured and lost
bronze horse remounts the steps.
Even this horse will founder backward
to coin, cannon, and domestic pots,
which themselves shall bubble and
drain back to green veins in stone.
And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, ever more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost.
Nice, SB
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"
Poetry bailout! via le bleu
Hee Hee. Read it on the blue. Glad you posted here, islander. It's a good'un.
The Family Monkey
Russell Edson
We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather
recklessly with funds carefully gathered since
grandfather's time for the purchase of a steam monkey.
We had either, by this time, the choice of an electric
or gas monkey.
The steam monkey is no longer being made, said the monkey
merchant.
But the family always planned on a steam monkey.
Well, said the monkey merchant, just as the wind-up monkey
gave way to the steam monkey, the steam monkey has given way
to the gas and electric monkeys.
Is that like the grandfather clock being replaced by the
grandchild clock?
Sort of, said the monkey merchant.
So we bought the electric monkey, and plugged its umbilical
cord into the wall.
The smoke coming out of its fur told us something was wrong.
We had electrocuted the family monkey.
ACCK!!!
Postscript
Seamus Heaney
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among the stones
The surface of the slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lighting of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Unless you think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Meltdown
Nick Bruno
He stepped past the police cordon,
put on the mandatory surgical gloves,
pulled out his notepad and pen
and considered why,
they had asked a poet
to visit the scene of a crime.
The force of the explosion had strewn
about human parts. The cadaver's pride
was on the commode. His vanity
hung by the mirror. The libido sat
exposed on the loveseat. Gobbets of guilt,
were hidden in denial behind the door.
But most telling, his stupidity
was splattered on the wall
behind the writing desk in particles
of dura mater and blood. And there
in front of the corpse was the culprit:
a journal of love poems in the victim's handwriting.
Dracula’s Housecat
—Anna George Meek
More lithe I am, and living,
than he who also hunts by night.
We whisper the fields where titmice quiver;
we sip black water from the kills.
I leap the grass blades, the air unsheathed,
moon the shape of my eye. He's quick
for a little bat, but I feast first:
mortality coils in my haunches.
I eat and bare my belly in bloodroot
to tease the lean eagles who desire me.
And still, the bat is suckling his corpse.
I would rip off his wings and roll his soul
immortally between my paws,
but he alone lets me in before dawn
to climb the castle drapes. Later,
I rapture in sunlight while he sleeps
in his box—which I have only once
misused. I love my warm body thrumming.
I love my delicious short life.
Want more poems!
A BEDTIME STORY
Once upon a time,
an old Japanese legend
goes as told
by Papa,
an old woman traveled through
many small villages
seeking refuge
for the night.
Each door opened
a sliver
in answer to her knock
then closed.
Unable to walk
any further
she wearily climbed a hill
found a clearing
and there lay down to rest
a few moments to catch
her breath.
The village town below
lay asleep except
for a few starlike lights.
Suddenly the clouds opened
and a full moon came into view
over the town.
The old woman sat up
turned toward
the village town
and in supplication
called out
Thank you people
of the village,
If it had not been for your
kindness
in refusing me a bed
for the night
these humble eyes would never
have seen this
memorable sight.
Papa paused, I waited.
In the comfort of our
hilltop home in Seattle
overlooking the valley,
I shouted
“That’s the end?’’
--by Mitsuye Yamada
That's great!!
I like it too!
Now for a Christmassy pome
The Fourth Wise Man
The fourth wise man
disliked travel. If
you walk, there's the
gravel. If you ride,
there's the camel's attitude.
He far preferred
to be inside in solitude
to contemplate the star
that had been getting
so much larger
and more prolate lately -
stretching vertically
(like the souls of martyrs)
toward the poles
(or like the yawns of babies).
--Kay Ryan
Loves ya, Story!
Back atcha:
Winter Song
Maggie Nelson
Solitude is a gift
Say it to yourself
under a canopy
of phony stars
Think of Lily in
her old season, living
with three pale cats
Her mind a lavender wash
Think of the man floating spray mums
at the feet of the colossus
before a day spent staring
at the wall
On the great ceiling of plates
and grates, a single leaf scrapes by
as the clear poison singes its path
from nostril to deep brain
The winter is not too sad, say it
then sing it
from your new pod, your new fig
made of glass
Thanks for that one, Granma! Woo! there's pleasures in these treasures. The ending '...a new fig made of glass' made me think of this one I came across just the other day:
Charles on Fire
Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unlovliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.
--James Merrill
Whoa!
Merrill never disappoints.
Any other pome luvers out there with a good one?
I have a sudden urge to turn December into poem-a-day month.
The God Who Loves You
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
--Carl Dennis
Well, the poem-a-day urge died a quick death. Okay, how about a poem a week instead.
Ethics
In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
if there were a fire in a museum
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter—the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond saving by children.
--Linda Pastan
I really like that ending.
Sorry, Story, I had foot surgery last Monday and have been too drugged up to successfully recognize what a poem looks like.
My turn/offering:
Fire Should Be Measured by What Didn't Burn
Passion is inferred by what isn't said.
Absence will be valued by the one who notices first.
Pleasure can be ranked by all other thoughts kept out.
Fatigue is always spoken in a narrow range of voice.
Wars are justified by the troops who didn't die.
Progress is best measured when sleep shuts out the rain.
Fidelity is most natural when the ear believes in pressure.
Hunger is most keen when the menu spreads like ice.
Will takes up its post when the mind is bent on territory.
Resolve will turn to weeping when the curtain falls at last.
Lapis cracks but slowly as pearls are ground to dust.
Medicine's no specific unless the alternative is rust.
Sacrifice can have no meaning if the witness turns away.
The field is only battle when the mess hall shuts its doors.
Wind brings down the enterprise, no matter our delight.
The crowd moves toward the exit when the puppet master speaks.
We put our shoes on standing if our beds are board and brick.
We search the web for meaning if our dinner table's bleak.
A life's measured value is who didn't come to call.
Noise can best be noted by the silence afterward.
Death can have no meaning. That's what we learned in school.
Your going into silence is the thing we can't endure.
Whatever comes will come. Leaves are flying in the cold.
The flocks about their maps. The cord wood in the frame.
We've made the best we can of the absence and the void.
The furniture of living's exquisite. Believe it. Say no more.
Keep all the curtains open. In the window flies the snow.
Hilda Raz
OMG! The mare's thrown a shoe!
(Hope you're feeling better, GramMa)
Some really gorgeous stuff here recently, thank you all for sharing!
Eeeep hope you're ok, GramMa! *hugs*
Hope you's back on your feet, GranMa! That Raz pome is terrific. (I've not heard of her).
Love dances with yellow-haired April;
it is nature's good, sweet season,
and in the swelling shadows enfolding dew and musk
are langorous bird songs yet unheard.
Clear, sweet, graceful waters
pour into the musk-scented abyss,
taking its musk and leaving its freshness,
all revealing the wealth of their source to the sun,
darting here, there, like nightingales.
So too life gushes forth on earth, and sky and wave.
But on the waters of the lake, white and still,
still as far as the eye can see and clear to the depths,
the butterfly which makes its fragrant bed within the heart
of the wild lily, sports with its small strange shadow.
"Lovely dreamer, tell me what you have seen this night?"
"A night full of wonder, a night sown with magic!
No movement on earth or skies or seas,
not even as much as the bee makes near the tiny flower.
Around something motionless, whitening in the lake,
only the full moon moved
and a graceful girl rises clothed in its light."
-"Temptation" by Dionysios Solomos
translated by Rae Dalven
Christophine, that's just beautiful. And how lovely to see you back here!
Loverly pome, Christophine!
Glad you're back.
Three pomes in two days! It's a movement!
Searching
I recall someone once admitting
that all he remembered of Anna Karenina
was something about a picnic basket,
and now, after consuming a book
devoted to the subject of Barcelona—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—
all I remember is the mention
of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.
The sheer paleness of him looms over
all the notable names and dates
as the evening strollers stop before him
and point to show their children.
These locals called him Snowflake,
and here he has been mentioned again in print
in the hope of keeping his pallid flame alive
and helping him, despite his name, to endure
in this poem, where he has found another cage.
Oh, Snowflake,
I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—
no, you were the reason
I kept my light on late into the night,
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.
- Billy Collins
that's a new Collins' one for me. Good stuff, Islander!
"Riding Westward"
By Carl Phillips
Any sunset, look at him: standing there,
like between his legs there's a horse
somehow, on either side of it a saddlebag
of loss, a pack of sorrow, and him Kid
Compromise his very own shoot-'em-up
tilt to the brim of his hat self, smirk to match,
all-for-love-if-it's-gotta-come-to-that half
swagger,
half unintentional, I think, sashay.
The silver spurs at his ankles where maybe
the wings would be, if the gods still existed,
catch the light, lose it, as he stands in place,
scraping the dirt with his boots: lines, circles
that stop short, shapes that mean nothing—
no bull, not like that, but scraping shyly, like
a man who's forgotten that part of himself,
keeps forgetting, because what the fuck?
As he takes his hat off; as he lifts his head up
like if right now he could be any animal he'd
choose coyote; as all the usual sunset colors
break over his face,
he starts up singing again,
same as every night, same song: loneliness
by starlight, miles to go, lay me down by
the cool etc.—that kind of song, the kind
you'll have heard before, sure, somewhere,
but where was that,
the singer turning this
and that way, as if watching the song itself—
—the words to the song—leave him, as he
lets each go, the wind carrying most of it,
some of the words, falling, settling into
instead that larger darkness, where the smaller
darknesses that our lives were lie softly down.
The Prediction
by Mark Strand
That night the moon drifted over the pond,
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,
a young woman walked, and for an instant
the future came to her:
rain falling on her husband’s grave, rain falling
on the lawns of her children, her own mouth
filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,
a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,
a woman strolling under its trees, thinking of death,
thinking of him thinking of her, and the wind rising
and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark.
Ain't a poem but 'tis close, what the heck.
Ontology and the Platypus
Kathy Fagan
So which mammalian fuck-up list produced
the platypus, produced the bird-billed, flat-foot, erstwhile
beavers dressed like ducks for Halloween?
Crepuscular and nipple-less,
they suckle hatchlings in the changeling dusk—
Diaphanously the god-swan boned
a married chick and she begot two eggs,
neither good. The launching of a thousand ships ensued.
Homer never saw a platypus,
though in his dreams he may have heard them growl,
a noise between a gurgle and a hiss.
The males are venomous. A plural
form of platypus does not exist.
Love the poem, BlueHorse!
My high school English teacher and I used to debate whether "platypuses" or "platypi" was correct. I favored the latter.
According to MS Word spell-check, though, *she* was right.
:D <--Is it a smiley, or a platypus emoticon? You decide!
Three thumbs up for the platypussian pome!
Fair and Unfair
The beautiful is fair. The just is fair.
Yet one is commonplace and one is rare,
One everywhere, one scarcely anywhere.
So fair unfair a world. Had we the wit
To use the surplus for the deficit,
We'd make a fairer fairer world of it.
--Robert Francis
The Platypus Speaks
Sandra Beasley
As far as the duck-billed platypus goes,
I'd like to point out there's no other kind
of platypus. You don't say horse-hooved deer
or moth-winged butterfly. A beast should be
her own best description. I deserve that,
having survived a hundred thousand years
of You would make a fine-looking hat. Years
take their toll—the right ovary that goes
on the fritz every time, flat feet, and that
tangled mess of our sex: ten different kinds
of X, Y, and yeah, blind dates tend to be
a disaster. We're not sluts like the deer;
it's June through October only, my dear.
Then we build deeper burrows for the year,
each dirt plug a form of daycare. To be
a mom must suck, or so the saying goes,
except we've got no teats—only a kind
of belly-gulley, where milk pools so that
the platypups can lap it up. Take that,
Disney. Bambi's mom was never a deer
daiquiri. Takes a particular kind
of woman to do that for seven years,
twins every time, while the deadbeat dad goes
back to his bachelor pad. He must be
so satisfied—lazy as a queen bee—
stroking his only weapons, hind spurs that
barnacled to his ankles. Out he goes
with enough venom to kill angry deer,
but would he save me from hunters? No.Years
teach me not to expect a card, a kind
Mother's Day word, or flowers of any kind.
There's no alimony in the wild, beware.
Even minor developments take years.
But evolution's crawl has its perks: that
way I track electric waves, swift as deer,
swiveling to go as the hot shrimp goes,
each soul-spark a kind of beacon. If that
makes me the bad guy, Disney, be a dear:
wait a thousand years, then see how it goes.
Old Man Platypus
Banjo Patterson
Far from the trouble and toil of town,
Where the reed beds sweep and shiver,
Look at a fragment of velvet brown --
Old Man Platypus drifting down,
Drifting along the river.
And he plays and dives in the river bends
In a style that is most elusive;
With few relations and fewer friends,
For Old Man Platypus descends
From a family most exclusive.
He shares his burrow beneath the bank
With his wife and his son and daughter
At the roots of the reeds and the grasses rank;
And the bubbles show where our hero sank
To its entrance under water.
Safe in their burrow below the falls
They live in a world of wonder,
Where no one visits and no one calls,
They sleep like little brown billiard balls
With their beaks tucked neatly under.
And he talks in a deep unfriendly growl
As he goes on his journey lonely;
For he's no relation to fish nor fowl,
Nor to bird nor beast, nor to horned owl;
In fact, he's the one and only!
*slaps duckbill shut repeatedly*
The Dead
Fleda Brown
The dead are disorderly. If they rot, worms;
if cremated, a waste of smoke. Maybe rot
is better. For where does fire-energy go? I see
energy transferred to worms and so on. But fire
speeds up molecules, then they slow down.
Worms can sometimes turn into winged things.
Good grief, I'm here on the dock thinking how best
to be dead! A dead fish lies on the lake bottom,
white-belly up, quickly absorbed into the under-
world. The day's getting warmer. The day depends
upon the release of energy from the dead, whatever
has turned itself over to this rising. Triple layers:
earth, water, air—transversed only by those
who've taken the plunge, so to speak. I'm caught,
my foot in the bear-trap of living. Mother's grave
is sinking, the cheap casket. We've betrayed her
once again. I feel her feeling, the suffering she
feels in there, the dirt, the disorder. She'll never
be smoke; she's heavier, sadder. I don't want to
talk about this. People who talk about abstractions
are like jet-trails that gradually disperse. Others
rot. They are loved by worms. Sad as it is, it's
more exacting. There are bones, fingernails, hair,
and then the bones go, and the hair looks like dirt.
The dirt is happy and the body is happy
to be opened, after a lifetime of nail biting. It loves
the way the air filters through, like carbonation.
It feels that it cannot feel. The not-feeling is like
not-being, only more so: it is being all the way
through, nothing to get in the way Here come
four ducklings, there used to be five, still downy,
with their mother. I imagine the fifth one, the quick
turtle's jaw, the bloop under, the mother's wild
circling, then all settling, easy. The rest want me
to feed them. They bob in a nice neat row.
Sunlit Morning
Mary Montague
A sunlit September morning. Bright balsam-light
planing through poles of Sitka spruce,
ambering under a honeycombed canopy
to tan the leaflitter, its shag of needles,
shale of beech. Now a sound, soft shush
like finest rain, a light spray through the trees;
but there is no rain, no wind. I look up
through the rough furze of spruce
to see a definite motion, a purposeful
swing. The cause imprints momentarily
against pale yellow glare as it scuttles
along a branch: a lithe weasel-like
body with a brush of tail that's thinned
by the combing of light. It headlongs
up the trunk, then trapezes across
to the next tree and is followed
by another, then another. The trees'
pine-green plumage swishes and sweeps
as three red squirrels make a vertical
slalom to ford the air. I curdle with pleasure:
a remnant of ancient fauna survives
in a hybrid plantation. The lead squirrel
descends to the floor, glances back:
pixie head, monocular gaze
holding me briefly as its forelegs
splay beyond the hunch of back,
the feather of tail. I flick for the others
and when I look again the squirrel is gone.
They are all gone. The woods are silent.
That last one sounds like home, GramMa.
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half words whispered low;
As earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
Robert Graves
Cemetery Moles
Robert Wrigley
Most are not blind, but still,
might the concrete burial vaults
be perceived before a tunnel
comes to such a sudden, hard naught?
Though I notice their mounds mostly
down here with the old stones, last row—
those graves that are not only
vaultless but with a wooden casket, too.
And the stories from the sexton?
A filled tooth on a hill whitely shining,
and a mole in a trap one early June,
around its neck a wedding ring.
For the Birds
Ciaran Berry
Something has pried open the body of this hare,
unpicked a seam from between the stilled hindlegs
to the middle of the slackened, gray belly.
Now the two sides of the wound part slowly,
like a mouth widening as it comes on the right word,
or that neat tear in the half-obscured lower thigh
at the center of the theater in Eakins's The Gross Clinic
where, as I remember it, the owl-eyed surgeon
seems so unmoved by the thick, scarlet globules
that glisten like cheap lipstick on his thumb
and the anguish a mother buries in her dress sleeve
as he explains precisely how he will poke
a scalpel into tendon, muscle, bone, to remove
the latest clot of gangrene from the left leg of her son
who might, if all goes well, last out the year.
Two assistants hold the patient down, while
a third and fourth, with their crude tools, keep open
the incision and stare deep into the mysteries
of the flesh, as eager for their time with the body
as the petrels, kittiwakes, black-headed gulls,
that tend the hare's remains up here in the near-
heaven of the dunes, all neck and beak and skirl
as they uncoil the intestines turn by turn,
divide liver from lung, pick out the heart,
squabble over the kidneys. Hauling away whatever
they can use, they rise through marram grass,
through shifts of sand, and disappear, leaving me here
to understand a little more what the dead mean
to the living, why every St. Stephen's Day
of that decade we lived on the outskirts of town
the same three freckled cousins, wearing straw hats
and masks, would bring to our front door
a single wren. One of them played a tin whistle,
his mud-scabbed fingers missing every third note,
another grinned as he held up their find in a jam jar,
while the third, his voice not yet broken, sang
a song about that king of birds "caught in the furze,"
that ball of roan and gray feathers punished because
its ancestor had once exposed the patron saint
of stone masons to those who pursued him
simply by singing from the wall the soon-to-be-martyr
had crouched behind. Like the saint, the bird
would suffer a harsh end—not stoned and left out
for the hooded crows, but stolen from its hiding place
deep in the undergrowth, fated to expire
behind that wall of glass, which must have seemed
invisible at first, when the boy's cupped hands
opened and the bird dropped down into its cage.
Half-starved as they stood there in old men's clothes,
those boys were also part of the cycle, and
would soon become their fathers so their fathers
could be earth, the oldest one driving a tractor back
and forth from the church, the one who sang
hanging dead rooks up in the fields to save the grain,
while the youngest boy, the one who held the bird,
inherited the title of village drunk and cleared
his mother's house of possessions to quench
a thirst that would land him face up in the ditch,
eyes glazed with a thin layer of ice, dead as the hare
struck down here in the dunes where, cold and prone,
the pistons of its legs proved no more than flesh
and bone, it lies empty as those blue tits Keats shot
to clear the air a few days after his brother
coughed up phlegm flecked with blood for the last time.
Keats, who was months away from his nightingale
and further still from Rome. Yet as he lowered the gun
to watch each ruffle of feathers fall to earth, he felt
sure the same blackness that had claimed poor Tom
was sprouting in his lungs and would blossom,
that his remains would mean no more than a dropped
apple to the worms the graveyard birds would yank out
of the earth and swallow whole, that he and each
of us would end up as coiled muscle in the wings
of house sparrows, a dull throb in the robin's fragile
heart, dissonance in the hoarse throat of a thrush.
***********
It gets awfully lonely in here...
You probably know this one already, Granma, but it was the first that came to mind on reading yours.
Question
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
--May Swenson
Pomes say no to the lonelies!
In My Mother's Drawer
Richard Terrill
Lint roller Packer decal a bag of tops for lost pens.
Two opened rolls of peppermint BreathSavers,
"Works even after the mint is gone."
4-in-1 screwdriver/bottle opener
for donors to the VFW
("Goodluck," says the many-leaved clover on its face.)
Hand mirror from a long-merged building and loan.
Mentholatum stick best if used before. . . . Everything
is half gone, still good, worth saving.
Like the newspaper
clippings: Ghandi's Seven Sins Dear Abby
from a May 31st ("Work as if
your life was in peril.
It really is."),
Cousin Ralph's obituary, time of visitation underlined in black.
And typed out on a scrap cut to fit these words:
1 box golden raisins
Gin—pour over to cover
Let stand (about one week) until liquor
disappears.
EAT ONLY 9 RAISINS A DAY
Results in less than a month.
Visits to St. Elizabeths
by Elizabeth Bishop
This is the house of Bedlam.
This is the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the time
of the tragic man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a wristwatch
telling the time
of the talkative man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the honored man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the roadstead all of board
reached by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the old, brave man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
These are the years and the walls of the ward,
the winds and clouds of the sea of board
sailed by the sailor
wearing the watch
that tells the time
of the cranky man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
beyond the sailor
winding his watch
that tells the time
of the cruel man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a world of books gone flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
over the creaking sea of board
of the batty sailor
that winds his watch
that tells the time
of the busy man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is there, is flat,
for the widowed Jew in the newspaper hat
that dances weeping down the ward
waltzing the length of a weaving board
by the silent sailor
that hears his watch
that ticks the time
of the tedious man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to feel if the world is there and flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances joyfully down the ward
into the parting seas of board
past the staring sailor
that shakes his watch
that tells the time
of the poet, the man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
This is the soldier home from the war.
These are the years and the walls and the door
that shut on a boy that pats the floor
to see if the world is round or flat.
This is a Jew in a newspaper hat
that dances carefully down the ward,
walking the plank of a coffin board
with the crazy sailor
that shows his watch
that tells the time
of the wretched man
that lies in the house of Bedlam.
Nice, Story. I hadn't seen that one before.
Thanks Granma! Good to hear a voice now and again. I fear the worst, our declining monkeydom...
Song For The Last Act
Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
Beyond, a garden, There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.
Now that I have your face by heart, I look.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music's cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.
Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.
Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.
- Louise Bogan
A sadly autumnal note there, StoryBored.
Perhaps the onset of spring will raise the spirits of we northern monkeys.
Having dug around a bit, it seems to me that poor old Louise wasn't the most chipper of poets at the best of times, was she?
Islander, good to hear from ya! Louise had some challenges and she dealt it out in her poems. Here's another with a tinge of teh creepy:
EVENING IN THE SANITARIUM
The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened
with decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses
are watching a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe
bone needles; of the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.
The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are
almost well.
Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced
woman whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now leveling off; one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy,
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been
possible.
O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated
after childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling
unwanted!
To the suburban railway station you will return, return,
To meet forever Jim home on the 5:35.
You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless
as anybody else.
There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.
The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide
to be.
Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not
drink habitually.
The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet
And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.
The cats will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the
mothers relieved.
The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.
Childhoods will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.
At the ends of the corridors the baths are running.
Mrs. C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.
Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something.
To Help the Monkey Cross the River,
Thomas Lux
which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.
THE COLD
Kenneth Sherman
In this country
the cold drives people inside.
Their houses swallow them.
The furnace churns
and they sit in the warm belly
of the great house bear,
filled with a private odor.
When they venture out
they wear hats
or ear muffs and resemble
ridiculous animals.
They flap their arms to keep warm
like people-sized birds.
In summer they emerge
but you can see the winter
has not left them. You see it
in their faces, their movements,
in the way they greet one another,
tentatively, as if there may not be
another summer and winter will last and last
like a condition that is chronic.
But they don't walk to the clinic.
They accept it
the way their ancestors once accepted God -
without singing, without celebration
and in August, in the wilderness,
they stare in amazement
at the profusion of green
and accept the naked silence as a hymn.
Lovely Seamus Heaney post over on the Blue, btw.
Thanks, islander.
Dorothy Livesay: “Other”
1.
Men prefer an island
With its beginning ended:
Undertone of waves
Trees overbended.
Men prefer a road
Circling, shell-like
Convex and fossiled
Forever winding inward.
Men prefer a woman
Limpid in a sunlight
Held as a shell
On a sheltering island . . .
Men prefer an island.
2.
But I am a mainland
O I range
From upper country to the inner core:
From sageland, brushland, marshland
To the sea's floor.
Show me an orchard where I have not slept,
A hollow where I have not wrapped
The sage about me, and above, the still
Stars clustering
Over the ponderosa pine, the cactus hill.
Tell me a time,
I have not loved,
A mountain left unclimbed:
A prarie field
Where I have not furrowed my tongue,
Nourished it out of the mind's dark places;
Planted with tears unwept
And harvested as friends, as faces.
O find me a dead-end road
I have not trodden
A logging road that leads the heart away
Into the secret evergreen of cedar roots
Beyond the sun's farthest ray—
Then, in a clearing's sudden dazzle,
There is no road; no end; no puzzle.
But do not show me! For I know
The country I caress:
A place where none shall trespass
None possess:
A mainland mastered
From its inaccess.
———
Men prefer an island.
via
Lines
Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.
--Martha Collins
Nice! This post is my 'go to' reference when I need a poem about a specific subject for school. Always good stuff.
Hawk
by Daniel Waters
All eyes are fearful of the spotted hawk,
whose dappled wingspread opens to a phrase
that only victims gaping in the gaze
of Death Occurring can recite. To stalk;
to plunge; to harvest; the denial-squawk
of dying's struggle; these are but a day's
rebuke to hunger for the hawk, whose glazed
accord with Death admits no show of shock.
Death's users know it is not theirs to own,
nor can they fathom all it means to die—
for young to know a different Death from old.
But when the spotted hawk's last flight is flown,
he too becomes a novice, fear-struck by
the certain plummet once these feathers fold.
Derivative, but I like it.
MICHELANGELO: TO GIOVANNI DA PISTOIA WHEN THE AUTHOR WAS PAINTING THE VAULT OF THE SISTINE CHAPEL—1509
by Michelangelo Buonarotti
translated by Gail Mazur
I've already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.
Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.
Shut yer complainin' gob Mickey, you'll never amount ta anythin'!
two months without one pome. me sad.
Numbers
I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.
I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.
And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.
Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.
There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.
And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.
Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.
--Mary Cornish
Thanks StoryBored!
Aye, we've been neglectful.
Blame it summer, perhaps.
The River on the Terrace
Time after time, the river of light
Flows down the broad steps of the terrace
Between the white walls and blue shutters
And under the carob and grapevine, coming on
In slow gold blinks, in indigo and rust,
Minting coins to sink among the shadows
It discards as it conceives them,
Folding clean sheets out of nothing,
Wheeling then pausing minutely as if
On the unbroken skin of itself.
Its depth is the authority it wields
To hold us to this wager, sliding past our feet
Over the plain of cracked paving-stones,
Onwards to the terrace-end, then out and down
Into the burning mezzogiorno air.
The river sinks into the rock. It never was,
Until a breeze comes up the valley
And the water re-awakes. Again we watch,
Like travellers halted at a ford,
Beside this force that seems to be anxiety.
What is it like, what is it like,
Unpassing epoch-afternoon, dry bed
Through which the river fades, then flows?
Like love, and like anxiety, like this.
--Sean O'Brien
wonderful metaphors in the Cornish poem...
fish times fish, chinese take-out boxes
The O'Brian poem makes me want to float the Boise River and just get away from the daily reality.
Story, meesa sad too, when there no pomes. Fortunately, we have islander, so we're not totally alone in da post
We Regret to Inform You
George Witte
Economies of scale dictate
specific fates, a calculus
where greater good enables one
unhappy outcome at a time
(others' grief negating yours).
We can't account for every life.
Advertising's down, the papers
allocate obituaries
to lives and deaths deemed newsworthy.
The worm's devoured to feed the flock;
objectives require sacrifice,
loss is cross-collateralized
against the term of patient gain,
the upside's ultimate return.
Whoever dies obliges us
to justify with other names
that name beneath the photograph
so no one's left anonymous,
alone in suffering, but shares
the common decencies: a call,
green wreath or funeral bouquet,
official letter of regret
and gratitude for service done—
so many waiting to be mailed
while urgent matters intervene—
condolences expressed above
our signature facsimile.
Yay, a summer pome handful! Bless y'all and so good ta hear from you. George Witte is new for me, and so is the O'Brien fellow.
Mockingbird
Nothing whole
is so bold,
we sense. Nothing
not cracked is
so exact and
of a piece. He's
the distempered
emperor of parts,
the king of patch,
the master of
pastiche, who so
hashes other birds'
laments, so minces
their capriccios, that
the dazzle of dispatch
displaces the originals.
As though brio
really does beat feeling,
the way two aces
beat three hearts
when it's cards
you're dealing.
-– Kay Ryan
Oh, yes! I like that.
Hhmmm, my turn.
*rubs hands together, begins search*
Thing
Rae Armantrout
We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,
for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles
and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"
though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.
Midsummer
by Louise Glück
On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.
The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.
On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.
At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.
And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.
And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.
And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.
Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.
And you thought of walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.
The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.
And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:
You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though
you can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.
Unit of Measure
Sandra Beasley
All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.
Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara.
Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara.
Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze
more or less frequently than the capybara.
Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons
than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark.
Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara,
who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known
as his alarm squeal. Everyone is more or less alarmed
than a capybara, who—because his back legs
are longer than his front legs—feels like
he is going downhill at all times.
Everyone is more or less a master of grasses
than the capybara. Or going by the scientific name,
more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris—
or, going by the Greek translation, more or less
water hog. Everyone is more or less
of a fish than the capybara, defined as the outermost realm
of fishdom by the 16th-century Catholic Church.
Everyone is eaten more or less often for Lent than
the capybara. Shredded, spiced, and served over plantains,
everything tastes more or less like pork
than the capybara. Before you decide that you are
greater than or lesser than a capybara, consider
that while the Brazilian capybara breeds only once a year,
the Venezuelan variety mates continuously.
Consider the last time you mated continuously.
Consider the year of your childhood when you had
exactly as many teeth as the capybara—
twenty—and all yours fell out, and all his
kept growing. Consider how his skin stretches
in only one direction. Accept that you are stretchier
than the capybara. Accept that you have foolishly
distributed your eyes, ears, and nostrils
all over your face. Accept that now you will never be able
to sleep underwater. Accept that the fish
will never gather to your capybara body offering
their soft, finned love. One of us, they say, one of us,
but they will not say it to you.
A hoot and a half! *applause for the capybara*
@islander:
You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful
Please be more specific with regard to date, time, etc. :)
I seem to have misplaced my timetable, SB. But I'm sure it's any day now.
*packs bags*
*waits by the door*
Coda: Leaving the House
Tom Pow
Whenever we left the house
for any time, Mum liked to leave
a little washing on the line —
a tea towel say or a dish clout,
just to make people think we were
merely out. Curtains she left
half closed, with blinds half down:
let the unsuspecting who called
around find us half open, half shut —
screening the brightest streaks of light
or keeping a grey day at bay.
But of course anyone who peeked
would know no one could possibly
be living there — each surface
so carefully scoured, the smallest
cloth folded by the sink. Leave it
as you'd wish to return to it
was Mum's motto. But Dad scolded
her in her absence as he packed
and re-packed the car. 'How your mother
thinks all this'll fit ...' Dad lacked
the patient arts. And it's an in-
complete art, the art of leaving
a house. I hear my own wife start —
'What's keeping you?' while I roam round
our house, twitching at the curtains,
leaving something always undone
Road Report
Driving west through sandstone’s
red arenas, a rodeo of slow erosion
cleaves these plains, these ravaged cliffs.
This is cowboy country. Desolate. Dull. Except
on weekends, when cafes bloom like cactus
after drought. My rented Mustang bucks
the wind—I’m strapped up, wide-eyed,
busting speed with both heels, a sure grip
on the wheel. Black clouds maneuver
in the distance, but I don’t care. Mileage
is my obsession. I’m always racing off,
passing through, as though the present
were a dying town I’d rather flee.
What matters is the future, its glittering
Hotel. Clouds loom closer, big as Brahmas
in the heavy air. The radio crackles
like a shattered rib. I’m in the chute.
I check the gas and set my jaw. I’m almost there.
--Kurt Brown
Yeeee Haw!
Cat's Dream
by Pablo Neruda
How neatly a cat sleeps,
Sleeps with its paws and its posture,
Sleeps with its wicked claws,
And with its unfeeling blood,
Sleeps with ALL the rings a series
Of burnt circles which have formed
The odd geology of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
With all the fur of time,
With a tongue rough as flint,
With the dry sex of fire and
After speaking to no one,
Stretch myself over the world,
Over roofs and landscapes,
With a passionate desire
To hunt the rats in my dreams.
I have seen how the cat asleep
Would undulate, how the night flowed
Through it like dark water and at times,
It was going to fall or possibly
Plunge into the bare deserted snowdrifts.
Sometimes it grew so much in sleep
Like a tiger's great-grandfather,
And would leap in the darkness over
Rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.
Sleep, sleep cat of the night with
Episcopal ceremony and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams
Control the obscurity
Of our slumbering prowess
With your relentless HEART
And the great ruff of your tail.
Thanks BH. Only Neruda could give such a fierce picture of a sleeping cat.
Breakage
by Mary Oliver
I go down to the edge of the sea.
How everything shines in the morning light!
The cusp of the whelk,
the broken cupboard of the clam,
the opened, blue mussels,
moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—
and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,
dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.
It's like a schoolhouse
of little words,
thousands of words.
First you figure out what each one means by itself,
the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop
full of moonlight.
Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.
Lovely, islander!
I can hear echos of GMH Pied Beauty in the phrasing and rhythm of this.
Oh why not post it...
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Today They Will Show Me the Homunculus
Dean Young
I knew it was on the other side of the door
gurgling like a leak, still mushy
and wrinkled and pupating, pumping
lymph into its wings.
They'd given me one of its blankies
to try to get me used to it
but I didn't want to be superceded and destroyed.
I didn't want to use such grandiose words,
I knew I had a small place in the leaf litter
processing leaf litter
but I didn't want its spit on my idols.
Whenever they lectured me about trying to try
my quills would stand up
so they'd point to the chain
attached to the wash line outside,
churned up mud beneath,
an empty bleach jug to play with.
Had they forgotten how crazy with happiness
they were when I nose-bounced the orange ball,
when I brought home papers stickered with stars,
how I got promoted at the pyramid?
Since the arrival of the homunculus
they couldn't sleep, they'd neglect to light
the incense in the shrine, he hadn't
mounted her for weeks, they'd forgotten
my birthday, their eight eyes grown
cloudy, their bridal webs weighed down
with dust. Soon I too will be weighed down
with dust in an ordinary way, at a chair
that's comfortable but too low,
even the napkin folded under the table leg
not stopping the wobbling.
Or trotting by the paralyzed fireman's house
with the pinwheels in the kale garden
or the house of the disgraced politician
with the blinds never closed
or the graveyard where the children play tag
and my rudimentary heart will give out
and I know the homunculus will be there,
adjusting the oxygen mask then deciding
to turn off the machines, pressing my paws
and skull into the tar-pit for preservation,
swearing to remember, swearing
there will never be another like me, making sure.
Fox masks, wolf masks, I try them on
as if I were a savage.
Long ago I realized
from scratchings traced
on cave walls
or from dim ethnologies,
from collections hidden
in musty storerooms or museum basements,
from phrenological attempts to see
the beast in man,
how much of beast persisted.
Here was I
cursed by these foxes and their kin the wolves
to see them everywhere.
If my one-time friend the artist showed me a picture painted
of a closed garden
there was sure to be a fox who peered
from among the flowers,
a fox even the artist had not seen.
I have been cursed
for that as well, the artist crying he had not
seen the fox, he had not painted it,
but there it was
among the innocent flowers hiding
or among trees
or hidden
in a wheat field’s tawny light.
Once seen, the artist
could not unsee it
though his brush was clean
of all intent;
the creature grew
just from my trembling fingertip until
by no subterfuge of the imagination could we
ignore it and forget.
For reasons plain my friend
chose to go elsewhere with his canvases.
Why blame him?
The faces sprang
from some
uncanny pleasurable perception.
I saw them in the boles of ancient trees,
in shadows dancing upon walls
I am at last aware
that there exists
changelings
born from a fourth dimension lurking
somewhere about
and I am one of these.
I see our blighted
formalized
pollution-filled
landscape of old cans,
bottles, and oil drums,
as if it held
ghostly potentials:
that the smiling fox
who was
lives in the shrubbery,
that the buffalo wolf still howls
upon the snowy hilltop
summoning
a nonexistent pack
for hunting lost
among old skulls
the prairie grasses cover.
My childhood was preoccupied with dreams
of how to free all animals immured
in shabby local zoos,
in boxes foul,
in crates from which
the heaven sweeping hawks
still scanned their wide dominions
helplessly.
So is it now. The fox, the wolf, the coyote
the last
contenders against traps and poison
hold with grim teeth
slowly retreating
into waste lands where only coyotes run.
I am born of these,
their changeling.
Who first rocked
my cradle
or what wild thing left me
upon my parents’ doorstep
is a mystery
although
through this means I can see
faces where faces are not
and I know
a nature still
as time is still
beyond the reach of man.
You may search scarp and butte,
read Indian pictographs
on up-reared mesas,
but you will not find
or trace
more of me than is found
in two poised ears
behind my mother’s picture
or
on some rain-lashed night
a voice that barks
brief syllables
may be
at last my own.
from Notes of an Alchemist by Loren Eiseley
via , via
Mmmm, lovely poem.
It lifts my heart to see a coyote, and foxes are so rare and special around here that after seeing one the joy lasts for days.
Riding Lesson
I learned two things
from an early riding teacher.
He held a nervous filly
in one hand and gestured
with the other, saying "Listen.
Keep one leg on one side,
the other leg on the other side,
and your mind in the middle."
He turned and mounted.
She took two steps, then left
the ground, I thought for good.
But she came down hard, humped
her back, swallowed her neck,
and threw her rider as you'd
throw a rock. He rose, brushed
his pants and caught his breath,
and said, "See that's the way
to do it. When you see
they're gonna throw you, get off."
--Henry Taylor
So, Granma are those quotes real or are they original from Taylor?
Oft attributed to Taylor, however he's seeped in the old traditions, from whence this wisdom has been handed down for lo, many the bruised generations.
The Little Dog Upstairs That Never Quits Barking
has suddenly quit. And in the quiet
I wait for him to resume, imagining him
(for I have seen him—his tight white curls,
his anxious, mashed-in face)
staring into space, too sorrowful now
even to cry out, settling
with a sigh in the leopard armchair,
facing the wooden indifference of the door.
Poetry after all is a form of barking.
Yap, yap, yap,
someone please come back.
Take me outside to piddle
among the flower stalks. Cradle me
in the arms of your strange tall species,
grant me a biscuit shaped like a bone.
. . . And now I, too, fall silent. The clock
in the kitchen keeps clicking away
saying Love me to the skillet and saucepans,
the wire rack of dishes, cans of soup
and beans, O bowl of sugar, O dispenser of salt.
Kim Addonizio
Persimmons
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
- Li-Young Lee
Love it, mothy.
I don't believe I've ever tasted a persimmon...
Thanks, mothninja.
Beautiful. Thanks.
Lovely, lovely poem, mothy.
What is it about persimmons that inspires?
Mu Ch'i's Persimmons
Gary Snyder
There is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake.
—Dōgen, November, 1242.
On a back wall down the hall
lit by a side glass door
is the scroll of Mu Ch’i’s great
sumi painting, “Persimmons”
The wind-weights hanging from the
axles hold it still.
The best in the world, I say,
of persimmons.
Perfect statement of emptiness
no other than form
the twig and the stalk still on,
the way they sell them in the
market even now.
The original’s in Kyoto at a
lovely Rinzai temple where they
show it once a year
this one’s a perfect copy from Benrido
I chose the mounting elements myself
with the advice of the mounter
I hang it every fall.
And now, to these overripe persimmons
from Mike and Barbara’s orchard.
Napkin in hand,
I bend over the sink
suck the sweet orange goop
that’s how I like it
gripping a little twig
those painted persimmons
sure cure hunger
Aye, persimmons! especially the fuyu ones. Essential monkey fare. YUM.
Story, I'm glad you like them. Have two!
Haiku by Issa
Nice: wild persimmons...
And notice how the mother
Eats the bitter parts
Persimmons
by Li-Young Lee
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.
My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.
Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.
Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.
This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.
Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.
He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?
This is persimmons, Father.
Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.
Keeping with the tree-borne comestible theme...
Ode To a Chestnut on the Ground
Pablo Neruda
From bristly foliage
you fell
complete, polished wood, gleaming mahogany,
as perfect
as a violin newly
born of the treetops,
that falling
offers its sealed-in gifts,
the hidden sweetness
that grew in secret
amid birds and leaves,
a model of form,
kin to wood and flour,
an oval instrument
that holds within it
intact delight, an edible rose.
In the heights you abandoned
the sea-urchin burr
that parted its spines
in the light of the chestnut tree;
through that slit
you glimpsed the world,
birds
bursting with syllables,
starry
dew
below,
the heads of boys
and girls,
grasses stirring restlessly,
smoke rising, rising.
You made your decision,
chestnut, and leaped to earth,
burnished and ready,
firm and smooth
as the small breasts
of the islands of America.
You fell,
you struck
the ground,
but
nothing happened,
the grass
still stirred, the old
chestnut sighed with the mouths
of a forest of trees,
a red leaf of autumn fell,
resolutely, the hours marched on
across the earth.
Because you are
only
a seed,
chestnut tree, autumn, earth,
water, heights, silence
prepared the germ,
the floury density,
the maternal eyelids
that buried will again
open toward the heights
the simple majesty of foliage,
the dark damp plan
of new roots,
the ancient but new dimensions
of another chestnut tree in the earth.
Holidays are comin' and the cold weather makes my bones ache, therefore, I bring you:
User's Guide to Physical Debilitation
Paul Guest
Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
or the culture of death, which really has it out
for whoever has seen better days
but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,
you, or your beleaguered caregiver
stirring dark witch's brews of resentment
inside what had been her happy life,
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.
An important first step,
with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor.
When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity;
with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;
or with someone blindly feeling their way
through an extended power outage
caused by summer storms you once thought romantic.
Page twelve instructs you how best
to be inspiring to Magnus next door
as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit
above Alberta. And to Betty
in her dark charm confiding a misery,
whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours.
The curl of her hair that her finger knows
better and beyond what you will,
even in the hypothesis of heaven
when you sleep. This guide is intended
to prepare you for falling down
and declaring détente with gravity,
else you reach the inevitable end
of scaring small children by your presence alone.
Someone once said of crushing
helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that.
We agree with that wisdom
but gleaming motorcycles are hard
to turn down or safely stop
at speeds which melt aluminum. Of special note
are sections regarding faith
healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies
like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy,
and what to say to loved ones
who won't stop shrieking
at Christmas dinner. New to this edition
is an index of important terms
such as catheter, pain, blackout,
pathological deltoid obsession, escort service,
magnetic resonance imaging,
loss of friends due to superstitious fear,
and, of course, amputation
above the knee due to pernicious gangrene.
It is our hope that this guide
will be a valuable resource
during this long stretch of boredom and dread
and that it may be of some help,
however small, to cope with your new life
and the gradual, bittersweet loss
of every God damned thing you ever loved.
Curiosity
Alastair Reid
may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.
Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.
Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die--
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.
Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do
Time for something lighter:
At The Zoo
There's turtles I'm certain are dead, cos they don't move a muscle all day
And a parrot that's very embarassed, by the things they've taught him to say
There's forty-four species of antelope, and twenty-two kinds of g-nu
But I was thirty-six kinds of bored, thanks, when I went down to the zoo
There's a stinking wallaby cage, that the wallabies want to escape from
There's a worn-out log of wood, that the gibbons walk up and down on
The panthers are pacing their cages, but they'd rather be chasing you -
So I flipped the bird at the zookeeper, when I went down to the zoo
There's a panda who's name is Amanda - whose brilliant idea was that?
There's a bear with big bald patches, and a sort of retarded cat
And you can't throw pooh at the monkeys - but they can throw pooh at you
So I played games on my mobile, when i went down to the zoo
There's that dumbass stupid zoo song, that everyone has to sing
And I can't believe what Dad said, when the gibbon was pulling its thing
And I'd boycott the place in a second, if there was anything else to do
So me and my mate smoke weed by the gate, when I go down to the zoo.
Jon Bridges (NZ Listener Magazine Nov 2009)
After AA Milne
I LOLed till it hurt!!!
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What's the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city's main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader.
He's even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
--by C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Edmund Keeley
Ooooooh SB, thank you. Good to have a new poem on a snowy afternoon. I love Cavafy and hadn't read that one.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Our politicians are the barbarians. They have come about by our voting them into office.
The Distances
Henry Rago
This house, pitched now
The dark wide stretch
Of plains and ocean
To these hills over
The night-filled river,
Billows with night,
Swells with the rooms
Of sleeping children, pulls
Slowly from this bed,
Slowly returns, pulls and holds,
Is held where we
Lock all distances!
Ah, how the distances
Spiral from that
Secrecy:
Room,
Rooms, roof
Spun to the huge
Midnight, and into
The rings and rings of stars.
Since it's a snowy, icky day, and I can't go out to play, here's two more:
Hedgehog
by Paul Muldoon
The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret
With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.
We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.
The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.
We forget the god
under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
will a god trust in the world.
Half a hedgehog
by Miroslav Holub
The rear half had been run over,
leaving the head and thorax
and the front legs of the hedgehog shape.
A scream from a cramped-open
jaw. The scream of the mute is
more horrible than the silence after a flood,
when even black swans float
belly upwards.
And even if some hedgehog doctor were
to be found in a hollow trunk or under the leaves
in a beechwood there’d be no hope
for that mere half on Road E12.
In the name of logic,
in the name of the theory of pain,
in the name of the hedgehog god the father, the son
and the holy ghost amen,
in the name of games and unripe raspberries,
in the name of tumbling streams of love
ever different and ever bloody,
in the name of the roots which overgrow
the heads of aborted foetuses,
in the name of satanic beauty,
in the name of skin bearing human likeness,
in the name of all halves
and double helices, of purines
and pyrimidines
we tried to run over
the hedgehog’s head with the front wheel.
And it was like guiding a lunar module
from a planetary distance,
from a control centre seized
by cataleptic sleep.
And the mission failed. I got out
and found a heavy piece of brick.
Half the hedgehog continued screaming. And now
the scream turned into speech,
prepared by
the vaults of our tombs:
Then death will come and it will have your eyes.
That last one was scary, scary, Granma!
Now i'm going to have to leave the light on.
It's the cajoles (aka huevos) that really matter!
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
For Fabbio Doplicher
We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious
"cheap date" (no explanation lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we
could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic--
and least poetic-- so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans
were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked
"What's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori
or the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth
is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. "If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die
they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.
That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry--
(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry
is what he thought, but did not say.
To Help the Monkey Cross the River
which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.
by Thomas Lux
Lament of the Old Pole
As gray as an old wooden telegraph pole, I am now
Growing gnarled. I am beginning to crack, and I am
Getting deaf. I no longer hear the beatific sound
In myself that, as if with love, makes even concrete hum.
It was the music of the wind, in chords long and severe,
And like its accurate and pure tuning fork, I chimed.
And wasn't it also sometimes the music of the spheres,
The night beneath the plectrum of the moon, and the untamed
Longing of the stars?—But is it truly music? When all
That is detonates, explodes, and improvises its jazz
Across the supernova, the aphasiac black hole,
The nebulous cluster where love is born of excess gas?
So when I had a good ear, what was I able to hear
Ascending in my fibers, up out of the embanked earth?
What melody was it, monotonous but still sincere,
And like the one the grass whispers, no longer to be heard?
But stop for a moment anyway, you bastard drivers,
Always hurrying; for one second, rest your hand on my shaft
And then one cheek on the spot where the still-smooth wood quivers:
See, I remain on the lookout (even if I am deaf)
For the space where my swaying, still-flexible wire
Is measuring a mountain, weighing a bird or a cloud.
I'm going to be rooted for the long run in the quiet,
But might perhaps be green again at the next flowering.
Jacques Réda / translated from the French by Andrew Shields
Two old poles were walking down the street
When one says to the other,
I think we should form our own splinter group.
*mutters*
woodenhead post-er
A Picture of the House at Beit Jala
He has to return to shut that window,
it isn't entirely clear
whether this is what he must do,
things are no longer clear
since he lost them,
and it seems a hole somewhere within him
has opened up
Filling in the cracks has exhausted him
mending the fences
wiping the glass
cleaning the edges
and watching the dust that seems, since he lost them,
to lure his memories into hoax and ruse.
From here his childhood appears as if it were a trick!
Inspecting the doors has fully exhausted him
the window latches
the condition of the plants
and wiping the dust
that has not ceased flowing
into the rooms, on the beds, sheets, pots
and on the picture frames on the walls
Since he lost them he stays with friends
who become fewer
sleeps in their beds
that become narrower
while the dust gnaws at his memories "there"
... he must return to shut that window
the upper story window which he often forgets
at the end of the stairway that leads to the roof
Since he lost them
he aimlessly walks
and the day's small
purposes are also no longer clear.
Ghassan Zaqtan
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
42
for Lorna Goodison
This prose has the gait of a mule urged up a mountain road,
a slope with wild strawberries; yes, strawberries grow there,
and pines also flourish; native trees from abroad,
and coffee-bush shining in the crisp blue air
fanning the thighs of the mountains. Pernicious ginger
startles around corners and crushed lime
leaves its memory on thumb and third finger,
each page has a freshness of girlhood's time,
when, by a meagre brook the white scream
of an egret beats with the same rhythm as crows
circling invisible carrion in their wide dream;
commas sprout like thorn-bush alongside this curved prose
descending into some village named Harvey River
whose fences are Protestant. A fine Presbyterian
drizzle blesses each pen with its wooden steeple over
baking zinc roofs. Adjectives are modestly raised in this terrain,
this side-saddle prose on its way to the dressmaker
passes small fretwork balconies, drying clothes
in a yard fragrant as Monday; this prose
has the sudden smell of a gust of slanted rain
on scorching asphalt from the hazed hills of Jamaica.
-Derek Walcott
Oh yay Derek Walcott! And gosh, GramMa, that one really made me tear up. Wonderful stuffs, thank you both.
Nice, islander. I don't think I've read Walcott before. Name doesn't stick in my memory. Will have to google...
HEY! Mothninja, get back here! Where's your poem??
Oo sorry! Didn't have any particular poem inspiring me to share at the time of posting...
Philosophy
If I should labor through daylight and dark,
Consecrate, valorous, serious, true,
Then on the world I may blazon my mark;
And what if I don't, and what if I do?
-- Dorothy Parker
Wild Gratitude
Edward Hirsch
Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In every one ofthe splintered London streets,
And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's
With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude,
And his grave prayers for the other lunatics,
And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry.
All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how
Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759,
For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience.
This was the day that he blessed the Postmaster General
"And all conveyancers of letters" for their warm humanity,
And the gardeners for their private benevolence
And intricate knowledge of the language of flowers,
And the milkmen for their universal human kindness.
This morning I understood that he loved to hear—
As I have heard—the soft clink of milk bottles
On the rickety stairs in the early morning,
And how terrible it must have seemed
When even this small pleasure was denied him.
But it wasn't until tonight when I knelt down
And slipped my hand into Zooey's waggling mouth
That I remembered how he'd called Jeoffry "the servant
Of the Living God duly and daily serving Him,"
And for the first time understood what it meant.
Because it wasn't until I saw my own cat
Whine and roll over on her fluffy back
That I realized how gratefully he had watched
Jeoffry fetch and carry his wooden cork
Across the grass in the wet garden, patiently
Jumping over a high stick, calmly sharpening
His claws on the woodpile, rubbing his nose
Against the nose of another cat, stretching, or
Slowly stalking his traditional enemy, the mouse,
A rodent, "a creature of great personal valour,"
And then dallying so much that his enemy escaped.
And only then did I understand
It is Jeoffry—and every creature like him—
Who can teach us how to praise—purring
In their own language,
Wreathing themselves in the living fire.
Poetry of the Shipping Forecast read from Oxford Ness lighthouse
Hey, that's my friend Zeb! He said it was a really amazing experience. The lighthouse keeper told him that in the olden days before the Shipping Forecast on the radio, sailors used to determine their position by the taste of the water. Magical. Do tune in to listen to Zeb if you get a chance, he has the most beautiful voice and is a great journalist.
The Shipping Forecast has a liturgical poetry to it, one that many many British people know by heart. I find its rhythm comforting, and the images it evokes inspiring; many's the time I've fallen asleep listening to it.
Brilliant lateral-thinking post, islander, thank you!
British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy reads her new poem Silver Lining, inspired by the volcanic ash cloud hanging over Europe.
...the hush and shush of ash...
Absolutely lovely, mothy. Thank you.
The Hammock Knot
Keith Ratzlaff
I went at it first with my teeth
the way a squirrel would,
the second time with two sets of pliers
the way a mechanic would, and now
I’m thinking about the knife
as a samurai or chef would—
or Alexander the Great—
the way a field hand would
walking beans, or a man
with a machete in a canebrake,
or a surgeon, a hunter
gutting a deer, a farmer with twine
gone haywire in the baler.
But it’s November, and the air itself
is dangerous enough, full
of maple samurais twirling
like axes, like the blades
of the mower I’ll use next spring
to level them. I’ll miss a few
on purpose—under the pines,
behind the garage—because
everything deserves a chance
to come almost to nothing.
I’d kept the hammock hanging
out of hope for a warm October,
which I got, and the slow,
suspended joy of poems read
with my back just off the ground,
and a blue sky whenever my eyes
slipped off the page—
which was most of the time.
All that while the knot held me up
with the kind of joy only knots have,
which is friction stopped and clenched
and wound around itself, so later,
in middle November, I would stoop
and finally grab it in my teeth.
I’m kidding about the knife.
I’m no hero. How could I be
with the apple gone bare,
with the lilac buds fooled
by the last autumn warmth,
with the buckthorn’s yellow
blown down the alley,
across the school parking lot,
out into the cornfields where
the leaves are obliterated?
Who could do anything
but gnaw at the ropes—
what from the kitchen window
must have looked like a kiss,
a hard one with the passion
of ropes coming together,
my lips mashed against my teeth?
Who could deny it was a kiss
when the knot was the last thing,
the only thing I own, holding on?
RIP Peter Porter
This page insists that I explain myself
This page insists that I explain myself
my poems are over-structured, I am told
but I’m only making good use of my brain
the letters I send you never say
what I want to say, but does it matter
since I write to you concerning me
I let these poems fill-in the proper forms
space is tight, rectangles
for iambs, occasionally trochees
keeping rhythm steady on its feet
but somebody says to be serious
is the way to control your poems – Frost,
Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Graves –
always out there on the track
audiences cheering them on forever
the loneliness of the long-dictioned rhymer
dining out with novelists and critics –
consider what happens when our words
become professional – literature
forgets it’s feudal, its narrow kingdom
of palaces and prayer-wheels
Animal Planet
Jim Natal
This is the hour of hyenas.
the hour of crows descending,
filling the trees and scaring away
the songbirds. This is the hour of
the weasels, of rampant viruses, of lap
dogs that bite your ankle as you walk away.
Now the baboons are on the loose, seizing
rocks and sticks, and the wrestling bears have
mauled their trainers. Zoo elephants crush keepers
underfoot; Seigfried and Roy have canceled tonight's
performance. It's the wrong day to wear your pet python
around your neck or to feed the piranhas by hand. Even
the dolphins are in an ugly mood—they really do have teeth
in those beaks. Lemurs and sloths are speeding up, sharpening
their long climbing nails. Prehensile tails braid tightly across
the globe. Railroad bridges, undermined by moles, collapse.
The lemmings turn back at the lip of the cliff, and beavers chew
pines to block back roads. Flocks of gulls loiter on airport runways
while winged tornadoes of flies, mosquitoes, wasps, and bees writhe
through heavy air. Listen: locusts are humming something uber alles.
And from the way they're waddling, the marsupials are packing heat
in their pouches. Ibis is no walk in the woods anymore. Picnic in the park.
Hike through the bush. It's a jungle out there. Just ask the wolves, the lice,
sharks, raptors, scorpions, lizards, and voles. Is it time, Mr. Darwin? Is it time?
Mr. Darwin, I trust, would say yes.
Oo, just catching up on all the scrumptious pomes i've missed.
Here's a weird one for Mum's Day.
Tomatoes
A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing onto their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.
--Stephen Dobyns,
Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heyday of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it, was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin: A Message to Po Chu-I
Poetry in motion - Simon Armitage walks the Pennine Way - troubadour style
Reading "The Shout" and "The Christening"
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
-- Wendell Berry
(My sequoia never did grow.)
Nice one, mothy!
One suspects that a certain beekeeping monkey would have appreciated Mr. Berry...
Yes, islander. Yes, I think he would have.
*sighs*
My favorite Wendell:
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Barry
Beer
Lee Upton
Like the life of the mind,
beer pushes suds.
It spins a halo—so happy to see us—
and begins its frothy ascension
of luxury cream,
Venus lifting the foam mattress.
And then, like a little Niagara,
beer comes to a decision—
you can’t say you weren’t warned—
and overwhelms the glass.
Frothy eel pit,
ancestral tonic.
Mopping the foam from the table:
it’s like wiping spray from a trough
while panning for gold.
Or sopping up, with a cocktail napkin,
an evaporating mermaid.
And then, returning to the glass,
we lift a torch doused in the surf of time.
This is our brew against subtlety.
Even its fluff thickens eyelids,
puts us on a low, low setting,
and hauls the perfumed barge
of sleep in its wake.
Then, in a flourish,
beer signs its name with the legend:
You there,
you with your throat in a lather,
I am dread’s quencher,
anxiety’s antidote,
guilt’s blotter.
You. You’ve had enough
existence for one day.
The Lost Brother
Stanley Moss
I knew that tree was my lost brother
when I heard he was cut down
at four thousand eight hundred sixty-two years;
I knew we had the same mother.
His death pained me. I made up a story.
I realized, when I saw his photograph,
he was an evergreen, a bristlecone like me
who had lived from an early age
with a certain amount of dieback,
at impossible locations, at elevations
over 10,000 feet in extreme weather.
His company: other conifers,
the rosy finch, the rock wren, the raven and clouds,
blue and silver insects that fed mostly off each other.
Some years bighorn sheep visited in summer—
he was entertained by red bats, black-tailed jackrabbits,
horned lizards, the creatures old and young he sheltered.
Beside him in the shade, pink mountain pennyroyal—
to his south, white angelica.
I am prepared to live as long as he did
(it would please our mother),
live with clouds and those I love
suffering with God.
Sooner or later, some bag of wind will cut me down.
As a windbag myself, I feel a bit like the bad guy here.
Why, you hardly ever say anything, StoryBored. So good to hear from you!
The Homecoming
All the great voyagers return
Homeward as on an arc of thought;
Home like a ruby beacon burns
As they crest wind, scale wave, soar air;
All the great voyagers return,
Though we who wait never have done
Fearing the piteous accidents,
The coral reef sharp as the bones
It has betrayed, fate’s cormorant
Unleashed, whose diving’s never done.
Even the voyager of mind
May fail beneath behemoth’s weight;
Oh, the world’s bawdy carcass blinds
All but the boldest, rots the sails
And swamps the voyaging of the mind.
But all the great voyagers return
Home like the hunter, like the hare
To its burrow; below, earth’s axle turns
To speed their coming, the following fair
Winds bless their voyage, blow their safe return.
by Barbara Howes
Excellent choice, islander :)
Why should we two ever want to part?
Just as the leaf of water rhubarb lives floating on the water
we live as the great one and little one.
As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and little one.
This love between us goes back to the first humans;
it cannot be annihilated.
Here is Kabir's idea:
what is inside me moves inside you.
--Kabir, trans. by Robert Bly
hopes the italics thingy works this time, been so long since he tried writing in HTMLish
Ah, lovely Bees.
Description of a Badly Drawn Horse
Daniel Johnson
The horse's head looks more like the butt end
of an oar, squared off and wooden the way an animal's is not.
Its mane is mangy; the mouth toothy; one white eye is wild.
The legs tangle at wrong angles and the body seems short.
This was a horse to shoot, but I sharpened my pencil instead,
and returned to my seat. Astride the beast, with hands like clouds
and checkered shirt, is a boy—not whipping his horse,
battering its belly with shiny spurs, or scouting the dusty plains
and bluffs for a good leap-off place. He's smiling terribly.
Mountain Cottage
In the water, horse hooves trample the evening glow
as my drunken sleeves catch wind and falling flowers.
River kids peek out their door. How did they know?
I guess the magpies' song reached the mountain cottage before me.
-- Liu Yin
Will preface this by saying of the Chinese poet Lu Ji -- he is thought to have lived 261-303. (In China. Far, far from the Greeks and Greek notions of Pegasus and poets.)
Anyhow, Lu Ji wrote The Art of Writing.
A couple of excerpts from it:
1. The Impulse
The poet stands between heaven and earth
and watches the dark mystery.
To nourish myself I read the classics.
I sigh as the four seasons spin by
and the swarm of living things kindles many thoughts....
2. Meditation
At first I close my eyes. I hear nothing.
In interior space I search everywhere.
My spirit gallops to the earth's eight borders
and wings to the top of the sky.
Soon, misty and brightening like the sun about to dawn,
ideas coalesce and images ignite images.
When I drink the wine of words
and chew flowers from the Six Books,
I swim freely in the celestial river
and dive into the sea's abyss.
Sometimes words come hard, they resist me
till I pluck them from deep water like hooked fish;
sometimes they are birds soaring out of a cloud
that fall right into place, shot through with arrows,
and I harvest lines neglected for a hundred generations,
rhymes unheard for a thousand years....
Fine and fascinating link, islander! Thanks.
Today is National Poetry Day in the UK.
A Poem About Monkeys
for Chloe
How they're noisy, how
they're swinging,
how the zoo is
a wild place, a place
of innovation.
The howler, the gorilla,
the capuchin:
they're all monkeys.
Your eyes see only
posture, hair,
faces like playful children.
In Curious George
the adventure is madcap,
that crazy George
loose in the modernity
we call home.
It's wacky is what it is,
how we lose each other,
how we reconnect.
And, you, at this
high end of evolution,
with your adult vocabulary,
your soulfulness,
your own sense of adventure,
you're a monkey yourself.
We all are,
and that's a secret.
We're all a little wild still,
a little too loud,
but we've learned to walk
upright, right
or wrong, and we've
learned we need the other monkeys,
in this untamed place,
our lives.
--Corey Mesler
Now that there is a guy who knows his monkeys.
Now there is a woman who knows her wetlands. ;]
Water Study
Boats mean we exist.
Water is everything. May it break
on soil sculpt perfect specks.
Turn this place jade as leaves. Break
over stones smooth palms no
rough work only paper. Colorless salt
knows color cerulean rising in rays. Shells are
the truth. Listen carefully close
to the ear there are bones everywhere.
--Myronn Hardy
...I advance as long as forever is.
--Dylan Thomas
An Iris Murdoch Reader
Everyone knows something. No one knows everything.
Most know less than they think.
As in life, there is much confusion,
especially about love. The girl in the basement kitchen,
grown disenchanted with the scholar
who is confused about the shape of his career,
considers entering a nunnery in Argentina.
Her mother has encountered a man
she has not seen in twenty years.
Someone is writing a book; someone
is hiding a crime; someone is about to suffer
near-death by almost-drowning. The narrator's
cousin doesn't know how to answer
her mentor's letter, isn't aware
she might be the heroine of this particular tale.
Everyone has forgotten something—
is this the moral?—with marvelous
consequences. There are self-delusions
and glimpses of God in surprising guises.
Children are always arriving home
or going away to school. In twos or threes
lovers or ex-lovers or would-be lovers
take cliff-top walks, receive invitations
to dinner parties given by former friends
or present rivals, send and perceive mixed signals.
A dog follows someone home.
People live in a succession of weathers,
patterns of drizzle or downpour or blazing sunshine.
It is difficult to see clearly. Some
thing is lost; something is foreign.
Somewhere a swimmer is diving
into the sea, the sea.
--John Drexel
Bait Goat
Kay Ryan
There is a
distance where
magnets pull,
we feel, having
held them
back. Likewise
there is a
distance where
words attract.
Set one out
like a bait goat
and wait and
seven others
will approach.
But watch out:
roving packs can
pull your word
away. You
find your stake
yanked and some
rough bunch
to thank.
There were horses in all our days.
An open white page in any book was a lean white horse
looking out, and a swollen door stuttering at night
was the breath and stamp of a horse nearby.
Boys ran like horses
and our hidden eyes in the oak trees
wore their depth of amber.
Even the mountain swung its back low between peaks
and moved into the plain of darkness
like a horse coming home.
Those days we brushed each other's hair like the manes of horses
and with their kindness gave each other kingly gifts.
We stood skin to skin in the rain. We swept away the gathering flies.
--Annie Lighthart, "There Were Horses"
Nice Bees. Another for the collection.
Barbed Wire
by Ralph Burns
Two or more strands twisted together,
Oxides and baser salts, admixture
Of carbon, metal of lash and scourge,
Strung like a virus, barbed intervals,
Stapled by hand to bois d'arc poles,
Woven by machine, "devil's rope"
Of vast interior plains,
Of meadows bruised by their own
Amplitude, barbed wire of a thousand
Different kinds, undulating loops,
Half round and square--Reynold's Web,
Preston's Braid, Meriwether's Cold-
Weather Wire, Shellaberger's Long Zigzag,
Walking Wire, Curtis's Ladder, Visible Lace,
Arch and Leaf, Descending Beads, Staple Barb,
Open Diamond Point, Sproul's Twins,
Elsey's Ribbon, Brink's Buckle, Ellwood's Star,
Flute and Rib, Spool and Spurs, Joined Saucers,
Tie through Eye, Body Grip,
Blake's Knee Grip, Underwood's Tack--
Unloved, unloving; that to name these
Does no political good, but as precision
Is polemical, against vague statement
And circular evasion, as the sharp angle of sun
And crossed wires together body forth a spark,
It is some kind--cold, unmusical, utterly itself,
Keeping cattle in, or the enemies of sheep
Out.
Ach! must admit I detest barbed wire.
Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys people and their speech.
His singing elevates a technique that wipes out
the earth so we are not eaten by worms.
The drunk sells his coat.
The thief sells his mother.
Only the poet sells his soul to separate it
from the body that he loves.
--Tomaz Salamun, "Folksong", trans. Charles Simic
Talking To Little Birdies
Charles Simic
Not a peep out of you now
After the bedlam early this morning.
Are you begging pardon of me
Hidden up there among the leaves,
Or are your brains momentarily overtaxed?
You savvy a few things I don't:
The overlooked sunflower seed worth a holler;
The traffic of cats in the yard;
Strangers leaving the widow's house,
Tieless and wearing crooked grins.
Or have you got wind of the world's news?
Some new horror I haven't heard about yet?
Which one of you was so bold as to warn me,
Our sweet setup is in danger?
Kids are playing soldiers down the road,
Pointing their rifles and playing dead.
Little birdies, are you sneaking wary looks
In the thick foliage as you hear me say this?
"Adlestrop"
by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
Yes, I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Thomas died in WWI, in 1917, in Flanders.
The Owl
Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.
Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was barred out except
An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.
And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
--Edward Thomas
A Barred Owlby Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur
The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owl’s voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”
Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dreaming of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.
Bluebird
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?
--Charles Bukowski
Bukowski's so strange.
Aye, well, many poets are.
I suspect it comes from the outsider-looking-in attitude so many poets have.
Autumn Grasses
by Margaret Gibson
In fields of bush clover and hay-scent grass
the autumn moon takes refuge
The cricket's song is gold
Zeshin's loneliness taught him this
Who is coming?
What will come to pass, and pass?
Neither bruise nor sweetness nor cool air
not-knowing
knows the way
And the moon?
Who among us does not wander, and flare
and bow to the ground?
Who does not savor, and stand open
if only in secret
taking heart in the ripening of the moon?
(Shibata Zeshin, Autumn Grasses, two-panel screen)
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
--Mark Strand
What do these mutts barking in unison
Up and down our road
Have on their minds tonight?
A burglar slipping through an open window?
A couple of kids making out in a parked car?
Perhaps it's the silence that bugs them?
The empty road at this hour of night.
You'd think their owners
Would let them in by now-but no!
They must be worrying too
What's out there in the dark?
A bear going through a trash can?
A suicide swaying from a branch?
A star, for some unknown reason,
Calling it quits after millions of years
And falling out of the sky?
--Charles Simic, "Musing the Obscure"
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
--Mark Strand
Library
Albert Goldbarth
This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it;
this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death
list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in
my girlfriend's bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled
painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a "book." That is, an audio cassette. This other "book" is a screen
and a microchip. This other "book," the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband's
tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking
through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written
by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a
hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text.
This book was dictated by Al-Méllikah, the Planetary Spirit of the Seventh
Realm, to his intermediary on Earth (the Nineteenth Realm), who
published it, first in mimeograph, and many editions later in gold-
stamped leather.
This book taught me everything wrong about sex.
This book poured its colors into my childhood so strongly, they remain a
dye in my imagination today.
This book is by a poet who makes me sick.
This is the first book in the world.
This is a photograph from Viet Nam, titled "Buddhist nuns copying
scholarly Buddhist texts in the pagoda."
This book smells like salami.
This book is continued in volume two.
He was driving — evidently by some elusive, interior radar, since he was
busy reading a book propped on the steering wheel.
This book picks on men.
This is the split Red Sea: two heavy pages.
In this book I underlined deimos, cabochon, pelagic, hegira. I wanted to use
them.
This book poured its bile into my childhood.
This book defames women.
This book was smuggled into the country one page at a time, in tiny pill
containers, in hatbands, in the cracks of asses; sixty people risked their
lives repeatedly over this one book.
This book is nuts!!!
This book cost more than a seven-story chalet in the Tall Oaks subdivision.
This book — I don't remember.
This book is a hoax, and a damnable lie.
This chapbook was set in type and printed by hand, by Larry Levis's then-
wife, the poet Marcia Southwick, in 1975. It's 1997 now and Larry's
dead — too early, way too early — and this elliptical, heartbreaking poem
(which is, in part, exactly about too early death) keeps speaking to me
from its teal-green cover: the way they say the nails and the hair
continue to grow in the grave.
This book is two wings and a thorax the size of a sunflower seed.
This book gave me a hard-on.
This book is somewhere under those other books way over there.
---con't---
Library ---con't---
This book deflected a bullet.
This book provided a vow I took.
If they knew you owned this book, they'd come and get you; it wouldn't
be pretty.
This book is a mask: its author isn't anything like it.
This book is by William Matthews, a wonderful poet, who died today, age
55. Now Larry Levis has someone he can talk to.
This book is an "airplane book" (but not about airplanes; mean to be read on
an airplane; also, available every three steps in the airport). What does it
mean, to "bust" a "block"?
This is the book I pretended to read one day in the Perry-Castañeda Library
browsing room, but really I was rapt in covert appreciation of someone
in a slinky skirt that clung like kitchen plasticwrap. She squiggled near,
and pointed to the book. "It's upside-down," she said.
For the rest of the afternoon I was so flustered, that when I finally left the
library... this is the book, with its strip of magnetic-code tape, that I
absentmindedly walked with through the security arch on the first day of
its installation, becoming the first (though unintentional) lightfingered
lifter of books to trigger the Perry-Castañeda alarm, which hadn't been
fine-tuned as yet, and sounded even louder than the sirens I remember
from grade school air raid drills, when the principal had us duck beneath
our desks and cover our heads — as if gabled — with a book.
The chemical formulae for photosynthesis: this book taught me that.
And this book taught me what a "merkin" is.
The cover of this book is fashioned from the tanned skin of a favorite slave.
This book is inside a computer now.
This "book" is made of knotted string; and this, of stone; and this, the gut
of a sheep.
This book existed in a dream of mine, and only there.
This book is a talk-show paperback with shiny gold raised lettering on the
cover. (Needless to say, not one by me.)
This is a book of prohibitions; this other, a book of rowdy license. They
serve equally to focus the prevalent chaos of our lives.
This book is guarded around the clock by men in navy serge and golden
braiding, carrying very capable guns.
This is the book that destroyed a marriage. Take it, burn it, before it costs
us more.
This book is an intercom for God.
This book I slammed against a wall.
My niece wrote this book in crayon and glitter.
This is the book (in a later paperback version) by which they recognized
the sea-bleached, battered, and otherwise-unidentifiable body of Shelley.
Shit: I forgot to send in the card, and now the Book Club has billed me
twice for Synopses of 400 Little-Known Operas.
This book is filled with sheep and rabbits, calmly promenading in their
tartan vests and bowties, with their clay pipes, in their Easter Sunday
salad-like hats. The hills are gently rounded. The sun is a clear firm
yolk. The world will never be this sweetly welcoming again.
This book is studded with gems that have the liquid depth of aperitifs.
This book, 1,000 Wild Nights, is actually wired to give an electr/ YOWCH!
This book I stole from Cornell University's Olin Library in the spring of
1976. Presumably, its meter's still running. Presumably, it still longs for
its Dewey'd place in the dim-lit stacks.
---con't---
Library---con't---
This book has a bookplate reminding me, in Latin, to use my scant time well.
It's the last day of the semester. My students are waiting to sell their
textbooks back to the campus store, like crazed racehorses barely
restrained at the starting gate.
This book caused a howl / a stir / a ruckus / an uproar.
This book became a movie; they quickly raised the cover price.
This book is the Key to the Mysteries.
This book has a bookplate: a man and a woman have pretzeled themselves into one lubricious shape.
This book came apart in my hands.
This book is austere; it's like holding a block of dry ice.
This Bible is in Swahili.
This book contains seemingly endless pages of calculus — it may as well be
in Swahili.
This is the book I pretended to read while Ellen's lushly naked body
darkened into sleep beside me. And this is the book I pretended to read
in a waiting room, once, as a cardiac specialist razored into my father's
chest. And THIS book I pretended having read once, when I
interviewed for a teaching position: "Oh yes," I said, "of course," and
spewed a stream of my justly famous golden bullshit into the conference
room.
This book was signed by the author fifteen minutes before she died.
This is Erhard Ratdolf's edition of Johann Regiomontanus's astronomical
and astrological calendar (1476) — it contains "the first true title-page."
She snatched this book from a garbage can, just as Time was about to
swallow it out of the visible world irrevocably. To this day, her
grandchildren read it.
This book: braille. This one: handmade paper, with threads of the poet's
own bathrobe as part of the book's rag content. This one: the cover is
hollowed glass, with a goldfish swimming around the title.
This is my MFA thesis. Its title is Goldbarth's MFA Thesis.
This is the cookbook used by Madame Curie. It still faintly glows, seven
decades later.
This book is the shame of an entire nation.
This book is one of fourteen matching volumes, like a dress parade.
This is the book I'm writing now. It's my best! (But where should I send
it?)
This book doesn't do anyth / oh wow, check THIS out!
This is the book I bought for my nephew, 101 Small Physics Experiments.
Later he exchanged it for The Book of Twerps and Other Pukey Things, and
who could blame him?
This book is completely marred by the handiwork of the Druckfehlerteufel —
"the imp who supplies the misprints."
This book has a kind of aurora-like glory radiating from it. There should be
versions of uranium detectors that register glory-units from books.
We argued over this book in the days of the divorce. I kept it, she kept the
stained glass window from Mike and Mimi.
Yes, he was supposed to be on the 7:05 to Amsterdam. But he stayed at
home, to finish this whodunit. And so he didn't crash.
This book has a browned corsage pressed in it. I picked up both for a dime
at the Goodwill.
"A diet of berries, vinegar, and goat's milk" will eventually not only cure
your cancer, but will allow a man to become impregnated (diagrams
explain this) — also, there's serious philosophy about Jews who control
"the World Order," in this book.
---con't--
Library---con't---
This book reads from right to left. This book comes with a small wooden
top attached by a saffron ribbon. This book makes the sound of a lion, a
train, or a cuckoo clock, depending on where you press its cover.
I've always admired this title from 1481: The Myrrour of the Worlde.
This book is from the 1950s; the jacket says it's "a doozie."
This book is by me. I found it squealing piteously, poor piglet, in the back
of a remainders bin. I took it home and nursed it.
This book let me adventure with the Interplanetary Police.
I threw myself, an aspirant, against the difficult theories this book
propounded, until my spirit was bruised. I wasn't any smarter — just
bruised.
This book is magic. There's more inside it than outside.
This is the copy of the Iliad that Alexander the Great took with him,
always, on his expeditions — "in," Thoreau says, "a precious casket."
Help! (thump) I've been stuck in this book all week and I don't know how
to get out! (thump)
This is the book of poetry I read from at my wedding to Morgan. We were
divorced. The book (Fred Chappell's River) is still on my shelf, like an
admonishment.
This book is stapled (they're rusted by now); this book, bound in buttery
leather; this book's pages are chemically-treated leaves; this book, the
size of a peanut, is still complete with indicia and an illustrated colophon
page.
So tell me: out of what grim institution for the taste-deprived and the
sensibility-challenged do they find the cover artists for these books?
This book I tried to carry balanced on my head with seven others.
This book I actually licked.
This book — remember? I carved a large hole in its pages, a "how-to
magazine for boys" said this would be a foolproof place to hide my
secret treasures. Then I remembered I didn't have any secret treasures
worth hiding. Plus, I was down one book.
This book is nothing but jackal crap; unfortunately, its royalties have paid
for two Rolls-Royces and a mansion in the south of France.
This book is said to have floated off the altar of the church, across the
village square, and into the hut of a peasant woman in painful labor.
This is what he was reading when he died. The jacket copy says it's "a real
page-turner — you can't put it down!" I'm going to assume he's in
another world now, completing the story.
This book hangs by a string in an outhouse, and every day it gets thinner.
This book teaches you how to knit a carrying case for your rosary; this one,
how to build a small but lethal incendiary device.
This book has pop-up pages with moveable parts, intended to look like the
factory room where pop-up books with moveable parts are made.
If you don't return that book I loaned you, I'm going to smash your face.
This book says the famously saintly woman was really a ringtailed trash-
mouth dirty-down bitch queen. Everyone's reading it!
There are stains in this book that carry a narrative greater than its text.
The Case of _______. How to _______. Books books books.
I know great petulant stormy swatches and peaceful lulls of this book by
heart.
I was so excited, so jazzed up! — but shortly thereafter they found me
asleep, over pages six and seven of this soporific book. (I won't say by
who.)
And on her way back to her seat, she fell (the multiple sclerosis) and
refused all offered assistance. Instead, she used her book she'd been
reading from, as a prop, and worked herself pridefully back up to a
standing position.
---con't---
Library---con't---
They gave me this book for free at the airport. Its cover features an Indian
god with the massive head of an elephant, as brightly blue as a druid,
flinging flowers into the air and looking unsurpassably wise.
My parents found this book in my bottom drawer, and spanked the living
hell into my butt.
This book of yours, you tell me, was optioned by Hollywood for eighty-
five impossibajillion dollars? Oh. Congratulations.
They lowered the esteemed and highly-published professor into his grave.
A lot of silent weeping. A lot of elegiac rhetoric. And one man shaking
his head in the chill December wind dumbfoundedly, who said, "And he
perished anyway."
Although my 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Hurd, always said "Whenever
you open a book, remember: that author lives again."
After this book, there was no turning back.
Around 1000 A.D., when the Magyars were being converted over to
Christianity, Magyar children were forced to attend school for the first
time in their cultural history: "therefore the Magyar word konyv means
tears as well as book."
This book, from when I was five, its fuzzy ducklings, and my mother's
voice in the living room of the second-story apartment over the butcher
shop on Division Street.... I'm fifty now. I've sought out, and I own
now, one near-mint and two loose, yellowing copies that mean to me as
much as the decorated gold masks and the torsos of marble meant to the
excavators of Troy.
This book is done.
This book gave me a paper cut.
This book set its mouth on my heart, and sucked a mottled tangle of blood
to the surface.
I open this book and smoke pours out, I open this book and a bad sleet
slices my face, I open this book: brass knuckles, I open this book: the
spiky scent of curry, I open this book and hands grab forcefully onto my
hair as if in violent sex, I open this book: the wingbeat of a seraph, I
open this book: the edgy cat-pain wailing of the damned thrusts up in a
column as sturdy around as a giant redwood, I open this book: the travel
of light, I open this book and it's as damp as a wound, I open this book
and I fall inside it farther than any physics, stickier than the jelly we
scrape from cracked bones, cleaner than what we tell our children in the
dark when they're afraid to close their eyes at night.
And this book can't be written yet: its author isn't born yet.
This book is going to save the world.
---end---
Whew!
That Albert, he's good, but he kinda wrote a book there.
I like 'em succinct.
It's a fun poem, though. Kinda like spending an afternoon wandering in the library!
Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.
--Nicanor Parra, "Young Poets", trans Miller Williams
Given a choice, I prefer a poem be less discursive, more to the point, in general less autobiographical and more lyric than narrative. But what suits me may not suit the next fellow. There's no right or wrong to it, just a question of each person's personal taste.
To Whom It May Concern
I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain,
Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
Every time I shut my eyes all I see is flames.
Made a marble phone book and I carved out all the names
So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains.
They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam.
--Adrian Mitchell
How It Happens
The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us
--W.S. Merwin
The Horse of Your Heart
When you've ridden a four-year-old half of the day
And, foam to the fetlock, they lead him away,
With a sigh of contentment you watch him depart
While you tighten the girths on the horse of your heart.
There is something between you that both understand
As it thrills an old message from bit-bar to hand.
As he changes his feet in that plunge of desire
To the thud of his hoofs all your courage takes fire.
When an afternoon fox is away, when begins
The rush down the headland that edges the whins,
When you challenge the Field, making sure of a start,
Would you ask any horse but this horse of your heart?
There's the rasping big double a green one would shirk,
But the old fellow knows it as part of his work;
He has shortened his stride, he has measured the task,
He is up, on, and over as clean as you'd ask.
There's the water before you-no novice's test,
But a jump to try deeply the boldest and best;
Just a tug at the leather, a lift of the ear,
And the old horse is over it-twenty foot clear.
There is four foot of wall and a take-off in plough,
And you're glad you are riding no tenderfoot now
But a seasoned campaigner, a master of art,
The perfect performer-the horse of your heart.
For here's where the raw one will falter and baulk,
And here's where the tyro is pulled to a walk,
But the horse of your heart never dwells or demurs
And is over the top to a touch of the spurs.
To you who ride young ones half-schooled and half-broke,
What joy to find freedom a while from your yoke!
What bliss to be launched with the luck of the start
On the old one, the proved one, the horse of your heart !
--William Henry Ogilvie
How to Like It
These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing? The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept—
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.
--Stephen Dobyns
That's just how I feel today, islander!
nasty dreary weather and a cold in the chest--blarg!
(bees, one of my favorite poems)
For Granma...
The Horse
- Fiona Farrell
Imagine a horse. A dapple
grey standing in a field.
Eyes closed. Its lashes
demure, its pink nostrils
flaring on warm air. One
foot on point like a dancer
resting. The very image
of motion stilled. No jump
no dumbledum.
The horse dozes by a fence
and you, a small child,
spread on its back. Bare
legs straddle its warm
coat. Bare arms about the
neck of the beast. This beast
who lets you lie upon his back,
legs straddled in the sun.
And then there comes a
cloud, a cloud of flies no
bigger than a needle's
point, all prick and agitation.
They land upon the horse's
coat. His skin quiver. Not
all over. Just in that place
where the flies nick. Skin
quivers under bare leg.
He stamps one hoof.
Quiver and stamp.
Quiver and stamp on
a blue day and you small,
straddled across the back
of a big beast. And
that is how the earth is.
I believe this is an allusion to the recent happenings in Canterbury.
Mmmmmm, wonderful, Ed! This one gets saved in my personal 'book.'
And one back atcha, since we haven't been posting the pomes lately.
Horse and Rider
Melissa Range
Sing unto the Lord a drift of a song,
a song that goes before the Law:
make of your voice a shaft of flame
shifting into cloud and back again,
a rift in a wave, a crack in a wheel,
a road in the midst of the sea;
make of your voice a staff turned snake
turned brass turned tambourine.
Sing of swift colts bolting
from their mares onto the plains of tender sand,
bolts of dyed silk rippling as they unfurl—
cedar, sable, silver, sunset, snow.
Sing of the vacant stables, the casks of grain;
of the rakes and forks that lean against the stalls;
of the stable-boys—all younger sons—
whose charges charge away.
Sing of helmets hailed upon the fields,
gold flax and barley rotting in the bud;
of the bare-headed boys who urge their chariots on
with surging throats: O sing of their black hair.
Sing of the groomed hooves and flanks
and haunches brushed blinding in the glare,
jolting the riders they bear—all younger sons—
until the sand tenders itself unto the sea.
Sing this day of the gift of the Lord: the genesis
of a song so old it has no attribution;
of a tongue's first poetry—the gleaming shard
which broke from prose, from simple speech,
the jagged line which founded epic, identity, belief.
Sing of defeat, for without defeat, how could we sing?
Sing of swords, shields, chariots, sifting
down beneath the tangling reeds.
Sing of the clear dry heavens, the mottled sea—
cedar, sable, silver, sunset, snow.
Sing unto the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously;
He has slaughtered whom He has slaughtered;
He has shown Himself worthy of all our noise:
He has rid the earth of a few more horses, a few more boys.
"Place"
W.S. Merwin
On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
what for
not for the fruit
the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted
I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time
with the sun already
going down
and the water
touching its roots
in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing
one by one
over its leaves
Oh my bees...
One for you.
Questions About Angels
by Billy Collins
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Very nice, StoryB.
Angels and saints...
The Beginnings of Idleness in Assisi
Mary Ruefle
Mark how curious it is with him:
he would walk for days
in the same field, wearing
no more than a robe,
stooping now and then for
a sprig of woodruff.
His passion
was to be stung by a bee,
his body releasing its secret purpose
into the body of the bee, that
he might be done with it
once and for all. It took
his breath away, and
forever after he stood there
lonely as a finger: whatever
touched or hoped to touch,
whatever tried to count
the features of his profile
found only a thumbnail sketch.
Like this little tiger lily,
his new stance we never understood
with any human certainty.
Indeed, we ceased to believe in it.
Either he is letting go
all the animals at once
from his bosom, or welcoming
them one by one
into his arms:
the birds at his feet do not hold
his kindness against him,
chattering to one another that one day
he will come to his senses,
and sitting down, the whole
beautiful and weighted world
will settle in his lap
like the statue of a cat.
Are saints so because they do it only?
Or are they only flat-out Holy?
The Vatican may soon decide
On Monkey-Angel Filter's side.
Nice to hear from you, Granma!
September, The First Day Of School
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.
II
A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,
The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form
Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.
--Howard Nemerov
For Granma, because it's been a while:
Nefarious
paw-thick with mud, recovers his home under the shed,
dresses in a lick, meditates the wind rising; his goal,
that chamber of food: clean ughs of the fleshy zingle
their female sips the juice from. Knows Family, skipped that,
yowls he scorned it. Though in his claws there is a craving to feel stroked?,
forget it, this is Nefarious. Back again, the usual bag
torn out by an invading hunger. CC gone, covering the floor
walnut shells, morsels of plastic, a top of beetroot
he saw pressed to the side, guessed was something
to hide a tooth in. But they ate it ail, skinny indoor pussies
who now kneel about the kitchen, pawing through rubbish.
Uncovering in chewed foam the notes of a serial killer
1 can smell your latest work, I know about a carcass
puzzling your pan. My guts slap loud as the night hail.
- RICHARD REEVE
Child Development
As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.
Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.
They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.
The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.
Billy Collins
*Essentially* a great reference here, homster :)
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