broken links to poems at the link above, try here.
Today's just dia de la Muertos, innit?
seems that way! memorialfilter I guess.
One of my very favourites. RIP.
In related news, Phillip Lamantia passed away a few days ago.
I watched his memorial pour out of the church today and saw a collection of SF's finest poets gathered on Vallejo St -- including Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a bicycle helmet.
In related news, 7.5 billion people didn't die today... who'd a thunk...
:)
Debaser: I'd heard that, but I'm not quite sure I believe you. What are their names, so I can call them and verify?
What I took in my hand
grew in weight. You must
understand it
was not obscene.
Night comes. We sleep.
Then if you know what
say it.
Don't pretend.
Guises are
what enemies wear. You
and I live
in a prayer.
Helpless. Helpless.
Aloud I speak....-- Robetrt Creeley, from "Song"
And here's another by him.
Goodbye
Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose
itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run
or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head
of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.
It was Zukofsky's
"Born very young into a world
already very old..."
The century was well along
when I came in
and now that it's ending,
I realize it won't
be long.
But couldn't it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother'd say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,
did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.
Robert Creeley
Goshamighty bass player Steve Swallow made twodiscs of Creeley's poems set to music. Shiela Jordan sings on the first, Creeley himself reads on the second.
I was at a conference where he spoke (a panel on Black Mountain College). He was uncomfortable sitting at the panelists table and instead chose to sit next to me. I was flattered beyond belief. He made funny comments through the whole thing, short and murmured observations. So gracious and able to see through the crap.
Wrong Side of the River
I watched you on the wrong side
of the river, waving. You were trying
to tell me something. You used both hands
and sort of ran back and forth,
as if to say look behind you, look out
behind you. I wanted to wave back.
But you began shouting and I didn't
want you to think I understood.
So I did nothing but stand still,
thinking that's what to do on the wrong side
of the river. After a while you did too.
We stood that way for a long time. Then
I raised a hand, as if to be called on,
and you raised a hand, as if to the same question.
-- Stanley Plumly
The Rhythm
It is all a rhythm,
from the shutting
door, to the window
opening,
the seasons, the sun's
light, the moon,
the oceans, the
growing of things,
the mind in men
personal, recurring
in them again,
thinking the end
is not the end, the
time returning,
themselves dead but
someone else coming.
If in death I am dead,
then in life also
dying, dying...
And the women cry and die.
The little children
grow only to old men.
The grass dies,
the force goes.
But is met by another
returning, oh not mine,
not mine, and
in turn dies.
The rhythm which projects
from itself continuity
bending all to its force
from window to door,
from ceiling to floor,
light at the opening,
dark at the closing.
-- Robert Creeley
Silence
I will stop listening to it.
Becauase everything I forget
falls into the sea.
Into the sea's solitary heart
wherein dwells a restless
silence.
-- Ivan Onate, trans Steven J. Stewart
The People Are a Temple
And souls are candles, each lighting the other.
-- Gennady Aygi
7-5-7
Though battered, shattered, broken
by waves, the full moon
reassembles her bruised face.
Again (Wrightsville Beach)
Crusoe again, confounded, confounding purposes
just cruising, looking around and around
for edges of the familiar, place he was in back then,
wherever -- all the old sand and water.
How much he thought to be there, he can't remember.
Shipwreck wouldn't seem thinkable, at least until
after it happened, and then one begins at the edge, the beach,
going forward, backward, until one finds place again.
Oh, gosh, there's mother! Or brother, sister, father -- some
friend of long-standing, anyone who still is there, can be
securing. Of course, you're -- and you look so well!
Even years slip past in the background.
The water, waves, sand, the backdrop of the houses
because it's all been developed -- Friday's Diner, Crusoe's Condos --
it's all as it would be, the locals, the tourists,
whoever got here first and what they could make of it.
But the old story is real too, the footprint, the other,
anyone's fears of anyone, the displacement when
for the first time one sees some other is there,
not just imagined, and won't necessarily agree
with anything at all one wants, won't in that sense go away.
-- Robert Creeley
Shortly before Creeley's death, he gave this interview.
America
America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.
Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world
you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.
People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.
Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back
what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.
-- Robert Creeley
Echo
Broken heart, you
timeless wonder.
What a small
place to be.
True, true
to life, to life.
-- Robert Creeley
What the Gravedigger Needs
Teuva, Finland
overalls
rubber boots
leather gloves
iron spear to loosen up the frozen ground
lantern
spade
length of rope
board to prevent mourners falling in
bicycle to go from grave to grave
-- Rachel Loden
Chasing The Bird
The sun sets unevenly and the people
go to bed.
The night has a thousand eyes.
The clouds are low, overhead.
Every night it is a little bit
more difficult, a little
harder. My mind
to me a mangle is.
--Robert Creeley
Valentine for You
Where from where to
the thought to do --
Where with, whereby
the means themselves now lie --
Wherefor, wherein
such hopes of reconciling heaven --
Even the way is changed
without you, even the day.
-- Robert Creeley
-- Robetrt Creeley, from "Song"And here's another by him.