Almost baroque in its efforts to evoke a "Western" style, and not at all subtle in its insistence on the need for women to submit to men. On the whole a textbook example of rejection of Eastern culture as false, the transformational effect of the wild landscape, the struggle of masculinity to establish itself, and the subjugation of women The linguistic and narrative skills of the Virginian are fun: the tall tale about the frog farms is a particularly entertaining scene, and it is striking that most of the conflicts between Trampas and the Virginian take place in words.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Monday, September 12, 2011
Gull Skeleton
In the first verse I find his skeleton
nested in shore grass, late one autumn day.
The loss of life and the life which is decay
have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one
that what they left is perfect; and here in
the second verse I kneel to pick it up:
bones like the fine white china of a cup,
chambered for lightness, dangerously thin,
their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight
even now, from the warm solace of my hand.
In the third verse I bend to that demand
and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,
because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,
his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,
his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep
climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.
Jonathan Revere
nested in shore grass, late one autumn day.
The loss of life and the life which is decay
have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one
that what they left is perfect; and here in
the second verse I kneel to pick it up:
bones like the fine white china of a cup,
chambered for lightness, dangerously thin,
their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight
even now, from the warm solace of my hand.
In the third verse I bend to that demand
and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,
because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,
his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,
his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep
climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.
Jonathan Revere
For the Birds
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.
Ciaran Berry
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.
Ciaran Berry
Human Beauty
If you write a poem about love . . .
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death . . .
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
Albert Goldbarth
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death . . .
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
Albert Goldbarth
The Crossing
Not to forget that we had wooden guns once
just as the Germans did when they invaded
the Ruhr in 1936 and likewise
we abandoned wallpaper for paint
and there was an army of 500,000 monkeys
who carried wooden rifles over their heads
when they crossed the Delaware and how
the Hessians applauded and how George Washington
ordered grog for everyone there and since it
was a Christian holiday they built
the largest fire in New Jersey history
and even burned their beautiful boat whose curves
anticipated the helical waves and whose bottom
unfolded, as it were, or shot through water
something like a bottle or just skimmed
the surface like a stone and everyone sitting
stood up, not only Washington, and shouted
just above Trenton almost the shortest night
of the year and we spoke Deutsche and everyone hugged
the person to his right although the left was
not out of the question and we said, "Peace," we
always say it, the way they said it in the Rhine,
the way they said it on the Danube, and now the
Ohio, and now the Mississippi, the Batsto,
the Allegheny, hug your monkey, kiss
the nearest Romanian, kiss the nearest Greek.
Gerald Stern
just as the Germans did when they invaded
the Ruhr in 1936 and likewise
we abandoned wallpaper for paint
and there was an army of 500,000 monkeys
who carried wooden rifles over their heads
when they crossed the Delaware and how
the Hessians applauded and how George Washington
ordered grog for everyone there and since it
was a Christian holiday they built
the largest fire in New Jersey history
and even burned their beautiful boat whose curves
anticipated the helical waves and whose bottom
unfolded, as it were, or shot through water
something like a bottle or just skimmed
the surface like a stone and everyone sitting
stood up, not only Washington, and shouted
just above Trenton almost the shortest night
of the year and we spoke Deutsche and everyone hugged
the person to his right although the left was
not out of the question and we said, "Peace," we
always say it, the way they said it in the Rhine,
the way they said it on the Danube, and now the
Ohio, and now the Mississippi, the Batsto,
the Allegheny, hug your monkey, kiss
the nearest Romanian, kiss the nearest Greek.
Gerald Stern
The Uncertainty of the Poet
I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.
I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.
I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.
A fond poet of 'I am, I am' --
Very bananas.
Fond of 'Am I bananas?
Am I?' -- a very poet.
Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?
Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very'.
I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?
Wendy Cope
I am very fond of bananas.
I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.
I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.
A fond poet of 'I am, I am' --
Very bananas.
Fond of 'Am I bananas?
Am I?' -- a very poet.
Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?
Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very'.
I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?
Wendy Cope
How the Dead Bury the Dead
This should have been the question
to Jesus, not why, all that philosophy,
but how, a little scientific curiosity.
Maybe it became a disciple joke. The answer?
With a pick and shovel? They'd giggle to themselves as they
straggled behind him. Or maybe the beginning of the knock
knock joke, most Biblical humor being
morbid, Martha saying of poor
Lazarus, "But, my Lord, by now he stinketh," and breaking
everyone up.
But nobody asked, or wrote it down. What difference could it make
then, so near eternal life? But in those Dead Sea caves
was neither handbook nor The Disciples' Big Book O' Jokes,
which is a tragedy. Think about the savings!
Or the quiet, kissless wakes because
no one has lips. Or tears. Or casket wood to choose.
And what else have they got to do? Bone idle, the British
say. And that was the way he said it, "Let the dead bury
the dead," as if they'd been waiting to, the real unemployed.
Perhaps it's a potion you pour, a dust sprinkled on the
graves that pulls them to the top
like Clearasil. Maybe just leaving
the bodies at the edges of graveyards at sundown,
or wrapped on the curbs like garbage bags
brings them like the tooth-fairies they were as apprentices.
From our beds we'll hear the clacking and sliding of knuckles
on the handles like more bones, and in the morning they'll be gone
beneath another anthill, and we'll be about
our business, their lives vanishing behind us
like dreams. And aren't there more
important things to do? After all, where were they going
in such an all-fired hurry they couldn't even take
the time to stick somebody in the ground?
Oh. And the answer? Almost anywhere. And as quickly as possible.
William Greenway
to Jesus, not why, all that philosophy,
but how, a little scientific curiosity.
Maybe it became a disciple joke. The answer?
With a pick and shovel? They'd giggle to themselves as they
straggled behind him. Or maybe the beginning of the knock
knock joke, most Biblical humor being
morbid, Martha saying of poor
Lazarus, "But, my Lord, by now he stinketh," and breaking
everyone up.
But nobody asked, or wrote it down. What difference could it make
then, so near eternal life? But in those Dead Sea caves
was neither handbook nor The Disciples' Big Book O' Jokes,
which is a tragedy. Think about the savings!
Or the quiet, kissless wakes because
no one has lips. Or tears. Or casket wood to choose.
And what else have they got to do? Bone idle, the British
say. And that was the way he said it, "Let the dead bury
the dead," as if they'd been waiting to, the real unemployed.
Perhaps it's a potion you pour, a dust sprinkled on the
graves that pulls them to the top
like Clearasil. Maybe just leaving
the bodies at the edges of graveyards at sundown,
or wrapped on the curbs like garbage bags
brings them like the tooth-fairies they were as apprentices.
From our beds we'll hear the clacking and sliding of knuckles
on the handles like more bones, and in the morning they'll be gone
beneath another anthill, and we'll be about
our business, their lives vanishing behind us
like dreams. And aren't there more
important things to do? After all, where were they going
in such an all-fired hurry they couldn't even take
the time to stick somebody in the ground?
Oh. And the answer? Almost anywhere. And as quickly as possible.
William Greenway
The Candlelighter
From Dove cottage, I sloped out through the side gate
and climbed the corpse road past the coffin stone,
then curved through a mixed copse to a scree path
scored by rainwater into the hill's back.
I was hauled upward by a borrowed dog
on a makeshift leash, a yellow Labrador,
busy for every birdcall and blown leaf.
Over a hand-stacked wall, in the next fold,
under the driftwood bones of an old elm,
a red deer had dropped down from the high fell
with morning beaconed in its flaming horns.
With dawn-light cradled in its branching crown.
I stood in some blind spot of its dark eye,
and deer and dog were still and unaware
and stayed that way, divided by the wall,
wild stag and hunting hound in separate worlds,
before the deer pushed on through tinder thickets,
igniting the next wold. And the dog yawned.
Then I hacked up the gyull to higher ground,
toward the hill's bare head, counting the dead
and the hikers striding along the ridge,
thinking of taking a drink from the tarn,
thinking of adding a new stone to the cairn.
Simon Armitage
and climbed the corpse road past the coffin stone,
then curved through a mixed copse to a scree path
scored by rainwater into the hill's back.
I was hauled upward by a borrowed dog
on a makeshift leash, a yellow Labrador,
busy for every birdcall and blown leaf.
Over a hand-stacked wall, in the next fold,
under the driftwood bones of an old elm,
a red deer had dropped down from the high fell
with morning beaconed in its flaming horns.
With dawn-light cradled in its branching crown.
I stood in some blind spot of its dark eye,
and deer and dog were still and unaware
and stayed that way, divided by the wall,
wild stag and hunting hound in separate worlds,
before the deer pushed on through tinder thickets,
igniting the next wold. And the dog yawned.
Then I hacked up the gyull to higher ground,
toward the hill's bare head, counting the dead
and the hikers striding along the ridge,
thinking of taking a drink from the tarn,
thinking of adding a new stone to the cairn.
Simon Armitage
it was like this: you were happy
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.
It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.
At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?
Now it is almost over.
Like a love, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.
Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.
It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
Jane Hirschfield
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.
It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.
At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say?
Now it is almost over.
Like a love, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness—
between you, there is nothing to forgive—
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.
Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.
It doesn't matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.
Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
Jane Hirschfield
Heroes
In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.
I thought the instance of the one humanness
in Virgil's plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.
That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all the industrious wis-
dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.
Robert Creeley
is beyond himself into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death.
I thought the instance of the one humanness
in Virgil's plan of it
was that it was of course human enough to die,
yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.
That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all the industrious wis-
dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.
Robert Creeley
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W. H. Auden
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W. H. Auden
The Double Play
In his sea-lit
distance, the pitcher winding
like a clock about to chime comes down with
the ball, hit
sharply under the artificial
banks of arc lights, bounds like a vanishing string
over the green
to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisible
shadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second baseman
pirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to through
from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,
to the leaning-
out first baseman ends the dance
drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove
stretches. What
is too swift for deception
is final, lost, among the loosened figures
jogging off the field
(the pitcher walks), casual
in the space where the poem has happened.
Robert Wallace
distance, the pitcher winding
like a clock about to chime comes down with
the ball, hit
sharply under the artificial
banks of arc lights, bounds like a vanishing string
over the green
to the shortstop magically
scoops to his right whirling above his invisible
shadows
in the dust redirects
its flight to the running poised second baseman
pirouettes
leaping, above the slide, to through
from mid-air, across the colored tightened interval,
to the leaning-
out first baseman ends the dance
drawing it disappearing into his long brown glove
stretches. What
is too swift for deception
is final, lost, among the loosened figures
jogging off the field
(the pitcher walks), casual
in the space where the poem has happened.
Robert Wallace
from Four Quartets
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years --
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
from Four Quartets
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years --
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
Aftershocks
We are not in the same place after all.
The only evidence of the disaster,
Mapping out across the bedroom wall,
Tiny cracks still fissuring the plaster --
A new cartography for us to master,
In whose legend we read where we are bound:
Terra infirma, a stranger land, and vaster.
Or have we always stood on shaky ground?
The moment keeps on happening: a sound.
The floor beneath us swings, a pendulum
That clocks the heart, the heart so tightly wound,
We fall mute, as when two lovers come
To the brink of the apology, and halt,
Each standing on the wrong side of the fault.
A. E. Stallings
The only evidence of the disaster,
Mapping out across the bedroom wall,
Tiny cracks still fissuring the plaster --
A new cartography for us to master,
In whose legend we read where we are bound:
Terra infirma, a stranger land, and vaster.
Or have we always stood on shaky ground?
The moment keeps on happening: a sound.
The floor beneath us swings, a pendulum
That clocks the heart, the heart so tightly wound,
We fall mute, as when two lovers come
To the brink of the apology, and halt,
Each standing on the wrong side of the fault.
A. E. Stallings
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
-Kenneth Koch
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
-Kenneth Koch
Empathy
Once in a small rented room, awaiting
a night call from a distant time zone,
I understood you could feel so futureless
you’d want to get a mermaid
tattooed on your biceps. Company
forever. Flex and she’d dance.
The phone never rang, except for those
phantom rings, which I almost answered.
I was in D.C., on leave from the Army.
It was a woman, of course, who didn’t call.
Or, as we said back then, a girl.
It’s anybody’s story.
But I think for me it was the beginning
of empathy, not a large empathy
like the deeply selfless might have,
more like a leaning, like being able
to imagine a life for a spider, a maker’s
life, or just some aliveness
in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets
so you take it outside in two paper cups
instead of stepping on it.
The next day she called, and it was final.
I remember going to the zoo
and staring a long time
at the hippopotamus, its enormous weight
and mass, its strange appearance
of tranquility.
And then the sleek, indignant cats.
Then I went back to Fort Jackson.
I had a calendar taped inside my locker,
and I’d circle days for which I
had no plans, not even hopes—
big circles, so someone might ask.
It was between wars. Only the sergeants
and a few rawboned farm boys
took learning how to kill seriously.
We had to traverse the horizontal ladder,
rung after rung, to pass
into mess hall. Always the weak-handed,
the weak-armed, couldn’t make it.
I looked for those who didn’t laugh
at those of us who fell.
In the barracks, after drills,
the quiet fellowship of the fallen.
Stephen Dunn
a night call from a distant time zone,
I understood you could feel so futureless
you’d want to get a mermaid
tattooed on your biceps. Company
forever. Flex and she’d dance.
The phone never rang, except for those
phantom rings, which I almost answered.
I was in D.C., on leave from the Army.
It was a woman, of course, who didn’t call.
Or, as we said back then, a girl.
It’s anybody’s story.
But I think for me it was the beginning
of empathy, not a large empathy
like the deeply selfless might have,
more like a leaning, like being able
to imagine a life for a spider, a maker’s
life, or just some aliveness
in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets
so you take it outside in two paper cups
instead of stepping on it.
The next day she called, and it was final.
I remember going to the zoo
and staring a long time
at the hippopotamus, its enormous weight
and mass, its strange appearance
of tranquility.
And then the sleek, indignant cats.
Then I went back to Fort Jackson.
I had a calendar taped inside my locker,
and I’d circle days for which I
had no plans, not even hopes—
big circles, so someone might ask.
It was between wars. Only the sergeants
and a few rawboned farm boys
took learning how to kill seriously.
We had to traverse the horizontal ladder,
rung after rung, to pass
into mess hall. Always the weak-handed,
the weak-armed, couldn’t make it.
I looked for those who didn’t laugh
at those of us who fell.
In the barracks, after drills,
the quiet fellowship of the fallen.
Stephen Dunn
Friday, August 26, 2011
Fragment
The glass does not break because it is glass,
Said the philosopher. The glass could stay
Unbroken forever, shoved back in a dark closet,
Slowly weeping itself, a colorless liquid.
The glass breaks because somebody drops it
From a height — a grip stunned open by bad news
Or laughter. A giddy sweep of grand gesture
Or fluttering nerves might knock it off the table —
Or perhaps wine emptied from it, into the blood,
Has numbed the fingers. It breaks because it falls
Into the arms of the earth — that grave attraction.
It breaks because it meets the floor's surface,
Which is solid and does not give. It breaks because
It is dropped, and falls hard, because it hits
Bottom, and because nobody catches it.
A. E. Stallings
Said the philosopher. The glass could stay
Unbroken forever, shoved back in a dark closet,
Slowly weeping itself, a colorless liquid.
The glass breaks because somebody drops it
From a height — a grip stunned open by bad news
Or laughter. A giddy sweep of grand gesture
Or fluttering nerves might knock it off the table —
Or perhaps wine emptied from it, into the blood,
Has numbed the fingers. It breaks because it falls
Into the arms of the earth — that grave attraction.
It breaks because it meets the floor's surface,
Which is solid and does not give. It breaks because
It is dropped, and falls hard, because it hits
Bottom, and because nobody catches it.
A. E. Stallings
Archipelago
This happens in Schubert
And elsewhere,
Iowa, for example.
There is something incomplete that lingers,
Trails off
And a pause —
That lengthens
And goes on — and on.
Strand by strand,
The rope breaks.
The fingertips cannot remember
The last thing they touched.
The boat pulls away from the dock —
The old confusion
Between forgetting and loss.
Then a series of notes played more slowly,
Softer,
Echoing — remotely, precisely —
The previous phrase,
Almost a melody,
On the edge —
A very slow waterfall
Suggesting completeness,
Gifts
Exchanged
In the interstices of the stars.
Robert Rehder
And elsewhere,
Iowa, for example.
There is something incomplete that lingers,
Trails off
And a pause —
That lengthens
And goes on — and on.
Strand by strand,
The rope breaks.
The fingertips cannot remember
The last thing they touched.
The boat pulls away from the dock —
The old confusion
Between forgetting and loss.
Then a series of notes played more slowly,
Softer,
Echoing — remotely, precisely —
The previous phrase,
Almost a melody,
On the edge —
A very slow waterfall
Suggesting completeness,
Gifts
Exchanged
In the interstices of the stars.
Robert Rehder
untitled
I step outside
myself, out of my eyes,
hands, mouth, outside
of myself I
step, a bundle
of goodness and godliness
that must make good
this devilry
that has happened.
Ingeborg Bachmann
myself, out of my eyes,
hands, mouth, outside
of myself I
step, a bundle
of goodness and godliness
that must make good
this devilry
that has happened.
Ingeborg Bachmann
A Man May Change
As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap
escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water
is how a man may change
and still hour by hour continue in his job.
There in the mirror he appears to be on fire
but here at the office he is dust.
So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains,
he stands easily on the pavement
and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one
cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others,
and life stands on the brink. It rains
or it doesn't, or it rains and it rains again.
But let it go on raining for forty days and nights
or let the sun bake the ground for as long,
and it isn't life, just life, anymore, it's living.
In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days,
it sometimes happens that a man has changed
so slowly that he slips away
before anyone notices
and lives and dies before anyone can find out.
Marvin Bell
escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water
is how a man may change
and still hour by hour continue in his job.
There in the mirror he appears to be on fire
but here at the office he is dust.
So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains,
he stands easily on the pavement
and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one
cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others,
and life stands on the brink. It rains
or it doesn't, or it rains and it rains again.
But let it go on raining for forty days and nights
or let the sun bake the ground for as long,
and it isn't life, just life, anymore, it's living.
In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days,
it sometimes happens that a man has changed
so slowly that he slips away
before anyone notices
and lives and dies before anyone can find out.
Marvin Bell
A Woman Acquainted with the Night
My wife is not afraid of dark.
She uses lights like handholds,
climbing down caverns she accepts as found.
She is as comfortable as blossoms
when the sun goes down.
Forests we've camped in at night
are forests, to her, clear-eyed,
seeing no visions she can't
blink away. In sudden dark,
she goes on mending clothes by feel
while I sweat and rage
to make the spare fuse fit.
When she was six a fat man
digging a storm cellar
shut her and a friend inside,
stood on the black steel door
and stomped like thunder.
Frozen, too frightened to reach
for Becky screaming in her ears,
she felt nothing could ever
be that dark again. In time
the door clanged open and light
baptized her with perhaps
too deep a trust in saviors.
She lies down now in darkness
with no human hand but mine
to cling to, nothing but faith
in the moment to let her sleep.
When storms short out
the relay stations, she knows
how to touch me, how to make
romance of failure,
knows like blind friends
how many steps to the candles
so if our children wake and cry
for light, there will be light.
Walter McDonald
The Flying Dutchman (George Elliston poetry prize)
She uses lights like handholds,
climbing down caverns she accepts as found.
She is as comfortable as blossoms
when the sun goes down.
Forests we've camped in at night
are forests, to her, clear-eyed,
seeing no visions she can't
blink away. In sudden dark,
she goes on mending clothes by feel
while I sweat and rage
to make the spare fuse fit.
When she was six a fat man
digging a storm cellar
shut her and a friend inside,
stood on the black steel door
and stomped like thunder.
Frozen, too frightened to reach
for Becky screaming in her ears,
she felt nothing could ever
be that dark again. In time
the door clanged open and light
baptized her with perhaps
too deep a trust in saviors.
She lies down now in darkness
with no human hand but mine
to cling to, nothing but faith
in the moment to let her sleep.
When storms short out
the relay stations, she knows
how to touch me, how to make
romance of failure,
knows like blind friends
how many steps to the candles
so if our children wake and cry
for light, there will be light.
Walter McDonald
The Flying Dutchman (George Elliston poetry prize)
After the Flood, We
We must be the only ones
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods
I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)
gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;
fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.
You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,
tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,
not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.
Margaret Atwood
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods
I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)
gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;
fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.
You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,
tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,
not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.
Margaret Atwood
How Some of it Happened
My brother was aftraid, even as a boy, of going blind--so deeply
that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him,
he said, as they lay on the kitchen table.
He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door
from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle
of the night when everyone was sleeping.
We found the pile of sharp shining crystals in the upstairs hall.
So you understand, it was terrible
when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through
his cheek
and up into his eye from underneath
and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out
once a week for many weeks. He learned to, lean into it,
to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated,
breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue
and wide open, looked and looked at the clock.
My brother promised me he wouldn't die after our father died.
He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me
five years,
as clearly as he promised he'd be home for breakfast when I watched him
walk into that New York City autumn night. By nine, I promise,
and he was--he did come back. And five years later he promised five
years more.
So much for the brave pride of premonition,
the worry that won't let it happen.
You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober
and I thought, OK, I'm not. I'm going to see thirty and live to be an old
man.
And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn't that funny?
--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.
This is what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed
so I can see you.
Marie Howe
that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him,
he said, as they lay on the kitchen table.
He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door
from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle
of the night when everyone was sleeping.
We found the pile of sharp shining crystals in the upstairs hall.
So you understand, it was terrible
when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through
his cheek
and up into his eye from underneath
and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out
once a week for many weeks. He learned to, lean into it,
to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated,
breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue
and wide open, looked and looked at the clock.
My brother promised me he wouldn't die after our father died.
He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me
five years,
as clearly as he promised he'd be home for breakfast when I watched him
walk into that New York City autumn night. By nine, I promise,
and he was--he did come back. And five years later he promised five
years more.
So much for the brave pride of premonition,
the worry that won't let it happen.
You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober
and I thought, OK, I'm not. I'm going to see thirty and live to be an old
man.
And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn't that funny?
--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.
This is what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed
so I can see you.
Marie Howe
After
Where I am going now
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.
Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job
it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.
It is to be the beam of morning in the room,
the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.
The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.
The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.
No one,
and the father of no one.
Franz Wright
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.
Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job
it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.
It is to be the beam of morning in the room,
the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.
The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.
The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.
No one,
and the father of no one.
Franz Wright
Epilogue
Those blesséd structures, plot and rhyme --
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Robert Lowell
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
Robert Lowell
Ice Fishing
For hours at this hole in the ice
the boy pretended to be the last person alive,
left with the task of testing the world's depths,
pulling up line, measuring by arm's lengths.
He'd feel the little tug
of the metal weight and then all the lovely looseness
of the line. This morning he'd heard his mother breaking dishes,
his father sobbing with anger again,
crying out, "For God's sake,
for God's sake, Kay."
He thought if he just tried hard enough,
did one thing well,
he might fix things, he'd bring home a fish
just as if he were a normal kid in a normal family,
and his mother would be so pleased, she'd get dressed,
and the kitchen would fill with tarragon and butter
and fish sizzling, that luxurious oily smell,
and his father would open the windows at last,
and the winter air, sharp and clean,
would cut through the grease
of too much happiness.
Christopher Bursk
the boy pretended to be the last person alive,
left with the task of testing the world's depths,
pulling up line, measuring by arm's lengths.
He'd feel the little tug
of the metal weight and then all the lovely looseness
of the line. This morning he'd heard his mother breaking dishes,
his father sobbing with anger again,
crying out, "For God's sake,
for God's sake, Kay."
He thought if he just tried hard enough,
did one thing well,
he might fix things, he'd bring home a fish
just as if he were a normal kid in a normal family,
and his mother would be so pleased, she'd get dressed,
and the kitchen would fill with tarragon and butter
and fish sizzling, that luxurious oily smell,
and his father would open the windows at last,
and the winter air, sharp and clean,
would cut through the grease
of too much happiness.
Christopher Bursk
Tell Me Why This Hurry
Edit
Tell Me Why This Hurry
by Marta Kvande on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:40am
The lindens are blossoming the lindens have lost their blossoms
and this flowery procession moves without any restraint
Where are you hurrying lilies of the valley jasmines
petunias lilacs irises roses and peonies
Mondays and Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays
nasturtiums and gladioli zinnias and lobelias
yarrow dill goldenrod and grasses
flowery Mays and Junes and Julys and Augusts
lakes of flowers seas of flowers meadows
holy fires of fern one-day grails
Tell me why this hurry where are you rushing
in a cherry blizzard a deluge of greenness
all with the wind racing in one direction only
crowns proud yesterday today fallen into sand
eternal desires passions mistresses of destruction
Julia Hartwig
Tell Me Why This Hurry
by Marta Kvande on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:40am
The lindens are blossoming the lindens have lost their blossoms
and this flowery procession moves without any restraint
Where are you hurrying lilies of the valley jasmines
petunias lilacs irises roses and peonies
Mondays and Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays
nasturtiums and gladioli zinnias and lobelias
yarrow dill goldenrod and grasses
flowery Mays and Junes and Julys and Augusts
lakes of flowers seas of flowers meadows
holy fires of fern one-day grails
Tell me why this hurry where are you rushing
in a cherry blizzard a deluge of greenness
all with the wind racing in one direction only
crowns proud yesterday today fallen into sand
eternal desires passions mistresses of destruction
Julia Hartwig
sonnet
Edit
sonnet
by Marta Kvande on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:39am
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
and look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee -- and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
sonnet
by Marta Kvande on Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:39am
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
and look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee -- and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
The Well Dressed Man with a Beard
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Wallace Stevens
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house . . .
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Wallace Stevens
Friday, August 5, 2011
untitled
As if death was an island:
anyone could go there, on a slow
ferry crowded with eyes
and disembark at villages
distilled to whitewash and cypress.
As if you memorised
the first cicadas
and listened through eternity for change:
the buttermilk coin
melting beneath your tongue;
the same crows wheeling in a wide
hoop; a distant voice
calling your name, worn smooth by constant use,
a word you should, but do not, recognise.
John Burnside
Selected Poems (Cape Poetry)
anyone could go there, on a slow
ferry crowded with eyes
and disembark at villages
distilled to whitewash and cypress.
As if you memorised
the first cicadas
and listened through eternity for change:
the buttermilk coin
melting beneath your tongue;
the same crows wheeling in a wide
hoop; a distant voice
calling your name, worn smooth by constant use,
a word you should, but do not, recognise.
John Burnside
Selected Poems (Cape Poetry)
The Too Late Poem
Nothing in the room can go back.
The ashes couldn’t be paper again,
the paper couldn’t return to its parental linen rags.
That arrow doesn’t reverse: the linen
could never again be a possibility
waiting, alive, inside the field of flax.
Whatever’s recently happened
in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem,
but we know this: its people can’t go back
to who they were before. And the light,
here, now, or any light as the day goes forward,
yours, or mine ... it can’t regain its first existence,
at the start of things: an innocence.
For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit.
__________________
She’s left the room. He stays in the bed,
below the covers, and when she exits the house
—the door is audible—he curls up, bean of sadness
that he is. Her travel is greedy, it needs the miles (by now
she’s past the city limits). His is weaker, but ambitious,
if by fetal position we mean a desire to travel
the whole life-corridor back to its insular source.
I’m sorry, but we can’t: nor can the photons of the cosmos
do a U-turn and reconstitute the Original Field of Energy
the size of a barnyard egg. They’re going to scatter outward
over the edge of zero. Barnyard egg ... he remembers
his grandparents’ small, hand-labor farm ... the horror when he first saw
a decapitated chicken running crazy in the grit, to flee
the fate that had already happened.
Albert Goldbarth
The ashes couldn’t be paper again,
the paper couldn’t return to its parental linen rags.
That arrow doesn’t reverse: the linen
could never again be a possibility
waiting, alive, inside the field of flax.
Whatever’s recently happened
in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem,
but we know this: its people can’t go back
to who they were before. And the light,
here, now, or any light as the day goes forward,
yours, or mine ... it can’t regain its first existence,
at the start of things: an innocence.
For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit.
__________________
She’s left the room. He stays in the bed,
below the covers, and when she exits the house
—the door is audible—he curls up, bean of sadness
that he is. Her travel is greedy, it needs the miles (by now
she’s past the city limits). His is weaker, but ambitious,
if by fetal position we mean a desire to travel
the whole life-corridor back to its insular source.
I’m sorry, but we can’t: nor can the photons of the cosmos
do a U-turn and reconstitute the Original Field of Energy
the size of a barnyard egg. They’re going to scatter outward
over the edge of zero. Barnyard egg ... he remembers
his grandparents’ small, hand-labor farm ... the horror when he first saw
a decapitated chicken running crazy in the grit, to flee
the fate that had already happened.
Albert Goldbarth
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Bellocq's Ophelia
---from a photograph, circa 1912
In Millais's painting, Ophelia dies faceup,
eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp
of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds
growing out of the pond, floating on the surface
around her. The young woman who posed
lay in a bath for hours, shivering,
catching cold, perhaps imagining fish
tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole
raised upon her white skin. Ophelia's final gaze
aims skyward, her palms curling open
as if she's just said, Take me.
I think of her when I see Bellocq's photograph---
a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair
spilling over. Around her, flowers---
on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even
the ravages of this old photograph
bloom like water lilies across her thigh.
How long did she hold there, this other
Ophelia, nameless inmate in Storyville,
naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold?
The small mound of her belly, the pale hair
of her pubis---these things---her body
there for the taking. But in her face, a dare.
Staring into the camera, she seems to pull
all movement from her slender limbs
and hold it in her heavy-lidded eyes.
Her body limp as dead Ophelia's,
her lips poised to open, to speak.
Natasha Trethewey
In Millais's painting, Ophelia dies faceup,
eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp
of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds
growing out of the pond, floating on the surface
around her. The young woman who posed
lay in a bath for hours, shivering,
catching cold, perhaps imagining fish
tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole
raised upon her white skin. Ophelia's final gaze
aims skyward, her palms curling open
as if she's just said, Take me.
I think of her when I see Bellocq's photograph---
a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair
spilling over. Around her, flowers---
on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even
the ravages of this old photograph
bloom like water lilies across her thigh.
How long did she hold there, this other
Ophelia, nameless inmate in Storyville,
naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold?
The small mound of her belly, the pale hair
of her pubis---these things---her body
there for the taking. But in her face, a dare.
Staring into the camera, she seems to pull
all movement from her slender limbs
and hold it in her heavy-lidded eyes.
Her body limp as dead Ophelia's,
her lips poised to open, to speak.
Natasha Trethewey
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
In Praise of Four-Letter Words
We yell shit
when the egg carton slips
and the ivory globes
splatter on blue tile.
And when someone leaves you
bruised as a dropped pear, you spit
that fucker, fucking bastard, motherfucker.
And if you just got fired, the puppy
swallowed a two-inch nail, or
your daughter needs another surgery,
you might walk around murmuring
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
under your breath like reciting a rosary.
Cock and cunt - we spew them out
as though they were offal,
as though that vulnerable
bare skin of the penis, that swaying it
does
like a slender reed in a pond, the vulva
with its delicate mauve or taupe
or cinnamon fluted petals were the worst
things we know. You'd think we despise
the way they slide together,
can't bear all those nerves
bunched up close as angels
seething on the head of a pin.
And suck, our yes
to the universe, first hunger, whole
mammalian tribe of damp newborns
held in contempt for the urgent rooting,
the nubbly feel of the nipple in the mouth,
fine spray on the soft palate.
What does it mean
to bring another's body
into our body, whether through our mouth
or that other mouth--to be taken in?
When life cracks us
like a broken tooth,
when it wears us down
like the tread of old tires,
when it creeps over us
like shower mold, isn't this
what we cry for?
Maybe all that shouting
is shouting to God, to the universe,
to anyone who can hear us.
In lockdown within our own skins,
we're banging on the bars with tin
spoons,
screaming in the only language strong
enough to convey the shock
of our shameful need. - Fuck!
we look around us in terrified
amazement -
Goddamn! Goddamn! Holy shit!
Ellen Bass
www.ellenbass.com
when the egg carton slips
and the ivory globes
splatter on blue tile.
And when someone leaves you
bruised as a dropped pear, you spit
that fucker, fucking bastard, motherfucker.
And if you just got fired, the puppy
swallowed a two-inch nail, or
your daughter needs another surgery,
you might walk around murmuring
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
under your breath like reciting a rosary.
Cock and cunt - we spew them out
as though they were offal,
as though that vulnerable
bare skin of the penis, that swaying it
does
like a slender reed in a pond, the vulva
with its delicate mauve or taupe
or cinnamon fluted petals were the worst
things we know. You'd think we despise
the way they slide together,
can't bear all those nerves
bunched up close as angels
seething on the head of a pin.
And suck, our yes
to the universe, first hunger, whole
mammalian tribe of damp newborns
held in contempt for the urgent rooting,
the nubbly feel of the nipple in the mouth,
fine spray on the soft palate.
What does it mean
to bring another's body
into our body, whether through our mouth
or that other mouth--to be taken in?
When life cracks us
like a broken tooth,
when it wears us down
like the tread of old tires,
when it creeps over us
like shower mold, isn't this
what we cry for?
Maybe all that shouting
is shouting to God, to the universe,
to anyone who can hear us.
In lockdown within our own skins,
we're banging on the bars with tin
spoons,
screaming in the only language strong
enough to convey the shock
of our shameful need. - Fuck!
we look around us in terrified
amazement -
Goddamn! Goddamn! Holy shit!
Ellen Bass
www.ellenbass.com
Monday, July 18, 2011
The bud stands for all things . . .
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell
The Embrace
You weren't well or really ill yet either,
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out — at work maybe? —
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the *story* of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you -- warm brown tea -- we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
Mark Doty
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace.
I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out — at work maybe? —
having a good day, almost energetic.
We seemed to be moving from some old house
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the *story* of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative
by your face, the physical fact of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without strain?
So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth
and clarity of you -- warm brown tea -- we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.
Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.
Mark Doty
Thursday, July 14, 2011
some shape of beauty
A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
John Keats
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.
John Keats
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club
This is a kind of novella in three linked stories. At first the club had something of the flavor of Chesterton's Club of Queer Trades, and I expected the stories to be of the club itself. I wouldn't be surprised if Chesterton had been influenced by this little work, but it was rather different --- more the story of a revenge pursued, an obligation hedged about by the rules of honor and played out on the baroque field of late Victorian royalty. Fascinating, too, that nearly all the important actions take place offstage, as it were, and are rarely seen from the perspective of the main agents in the drama. Seen from the periphery and through the eyes of unwitting participants, the stories focus on the ways the unwitting are drawn in, on anticipation, and above all on form --- form as understood by gentlemen. Empty, then --- yet from another point of view that glittering form was once thought to hold all the meaning in the world.
Spiritual Chickens
A man eats a chicken every day for lunch,
and each day the ghost of another chicken
joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could
only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual
chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering
the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last
there is no more space and one of the chickens
is popped back across the spiritual plane to the earthly.
The man is in the process of picking his teeth.
Suddenly there's a chicken at the end of the table,
strutting back and forth, not looking at the man
but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens.
The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand
passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken
with a chair and the chair passes though her.
He calls in his wife but she can see nothing.
This is his own private chicken, even if he
fails to recognize her. How is he to know
this is a chicken he ate seven years ago,
on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July,
with a little tarragon, a little sour cream?
The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house
flapping his arms and making peculiar hops
until the authorities take him away for a cure.
Faced with the choice between something odd
in the world or something broken in his head,
he opts for the broken head. Certainly,
this is safer than putting his opinions
in jeopardy. Much better to think he had
imagined it, that he had made it happen.
Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth
at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in
with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when
suddenly she has the whole place to herself.
Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she
had a brain, she would think she had caused it.
She would grow vain, egotistical, she would
look for someone to fight, but being a chicken
she can just enjoy it and make little squawks,
silent to all except the man who ate her,
who is far off banging his head against a wall
like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel,
making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in
or nothing of value falls out. How happy
he would have been to be born a chicken,
to be of good use to his fellow creatures
and rich in companionship after death.
As it is he is constantly being squeezed
between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head -- why surrender
his corner on truth? -- better just to go crazy.
Stephen Dobyns
and each day the ghost of another chicken
joins the crowd in the dining room. If he could
only see them! Hundreds and hundreds of spiritual
chickens, sitting on chairs, tables, covering
the floor, jammed shoulder to shoulder. At last
there is no more space and one of the chickens
is popped back across the spiritual plane to the earthly.
The man is in the process of picking his teeth.
Suddenly there's a chicken at the end of the table,
strutting back and forth, not looking at the man
but knowing he is there, as is the way with chickens.
The man makes a grab for the chicken but his hand
passes right through her. He tries to hit the chicken
with a chair and the chair passes though her.
He calls in his wife but she can see nothing.
This is his own private chicken, even if he
fails to recognize her. How is he to know
this is a chicken he ate seven years ago,
on a hot and steamy Wednesday in July,
with a little tarragon, a little sour cream?
The man grows afraid. He runs out of his house
flapping his arms and making peculiar hops
until the authorities take him away for a cure.
Faced with the choice between something odd
in the world or something broken in his head,
he opts for the broken head. Certainly,
this is safer than putting his opinions
in jeopardy. Much better to think he had
imagined it, that he had made it happen.
Meanwhile, the chicken struts back and forth
at the end of the table. Here she was, jammed in
with the ghosts of six thousand dead hens, when
suddenly she has the whole place to herself.
Even the nervous man has disappeared. If she
had a brain, she would think she had caused it.
She would grow vain, egotistical, she would
look for someone to fight, but being a chicken
she can just enjoy it and make little squawks,
silent to all except the man who ate her,
who is far off banging his head against a wall
like someone trying to repair a leaky vessel,
making certain that nothing unpleasant gets in
or nothing of value falls out. How happy
he would have been to be born a chicken,
to be of good use to his fellow creatures
and rich in companionship after death.
As it is he is constantly being squeezed
between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head -- why surrender
his corner on truth? -- better just to go crazy.
Stephen Dobyns
Monday, July 11, 2011
My Misspent Youth
Meghan Daum, My Misspent Youth
A 2-hour read this evening. Liked it more than I expected to. Has the detached ironic tone common to many young writers, but also applies it to herself. Occasionally falls into the smug condescension of those many young writers, but doesn't spare herself. Particular highlights: the essays on virtual relationships, on dolls, and on polyamory.
A 2-hour read this evening. Liked it more than I expected to. Has the detached ironic tone common to many young writers, but also applies it to herself. Occasionally falls into the smug condescension of those many young writers, but doesn't spare herself. Particular highlights: the essays on virtual relationships, on dolls, and on polyamory.
The Woodpecker Pecks, But the Hole Does Not Appear
It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we've done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.
This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow-and-dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.
Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.
Charles Wright
How quickly all that we've done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.
This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow-and-dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.
Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.
Charles Wright
As I Walked Out One Evening
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
W. H. Auden
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
W. H. Auden
The Fragility of Heavy Machinery
They don't love
what live things do, not the blue drain
of veins, not the swell of lungs, certainly not
the slide of balls
in sockets, that slick
organic superiority. All this time,
they've been eyeing our particular kind
of flexibility as they go on drilling
and driving piles, wondering
at our lack of sensitivity. Look at the belly
of a jet sometime and see how thin,
how far, the skin's
been stretched, look at a crane's
bent arm, hold in your hand the cripple
of a stripped screw. None of these things
know what to do. No matter what they say, banging
their anger, sighing with that high whine, shrieking
fatigue, all we hear
is noise, all we see is something
serving. The occasional accident we put down
to human error, while all the while
they stare back smiling
from the wreckage, knowing
what we made them for.
Caroline Fraser
what live things do, not the blue drain
of veins, not the swell of lungs, certainly not
the slide of balls
in sockets, that slick
organic superiority. All this time,
they've been eyeing our particular kind
of flexibility as they go on drilling
and driving piles, wondering
at our lack of sensitivity. Look at the belly
of a jet sometime and see how thin,
how far, the skin's
been stretched, look at a crane's
bent arm, hold in your hand the cripple
of a stripped screw. None of these things
know what to do. No matter what they say, banging
their anger, sighing with that high whine, shrieking
fatigue, all we hear
is noise, all we see is something
serving. The occasional accident we put down
to human error, while all the while
they stare back smiling
from the wreckage, knowing
what we made them for.
Caroline Fraser
Gull Skeleton
In the first verse I find his skeleton
nested in shore grass, late one autumn day.
The loss of life and the life which is decay
have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one
that what they left is perfect; and here in
the second verse I kneel to pick it up:
bones like the fine white china of a cup,
chambered for lightness, dangerously thin,
their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight
even now, from the warm solace of my hand.
In the third verse I bend to that demand
and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,
because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,
his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,
his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep
climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.
Jonathan Revere
nested in shore grass, late one autumn day.
The loss of life and the life which is decay
have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one
that what they left is perfect; and here in
the second verse I kneel to pick it up:
bones like the fine white china of a cup,
chambered for lightness, dangerously thin,
their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight
even now, from the warm solace of my hand.
In the third verse I bend to that demand
and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,
because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,
his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,
his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep
climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.
Jonathan Revere
1999
1999
by Marta Kvande on Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 10:48am
It was a year in which sadness fulfilled the Socialist ideal
and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage.
The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked
a local representative, and friends came over
in all their casualty with pictures of sadness
in billfolds beside their babes.
Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket,
and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth
to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel,
the wall grieved down my thighs and still
born in the drench -- after such sadness
what resolution? -- the beginning.
Christina Davis
and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage.
The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked
a local representative, and friends came over
in all their casualty with pictures of sadness
in billfolds beside their babes.
Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket,
and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth
to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel,
the wall grieved down my thighs and still
born in the drench -- after such sadness
what resolution? -- the beginning.
Christina Davis
Intermission
Intermission
by Marta Kvande on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 2:45pm
They're feeding each other, two small birds
swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks
kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each
other's needs without question, drawing
the big world into their brief circle
of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
as if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
the path between desire and satisfaction
shorter than thought, the ground dividing
being from being—one flesh-protected
spark of life from another—covered
in no time, so even time, for the moment,
is a matter of no moment, smoke that
vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave
but a flaring thing behind—candescent,
burning its one good instant till all is ash,
redemptive breath recovering itself,
eyes seeking in eyes an answer
to what's happened. The fire at the heart
of things is what these two birds ignite
in their give and take, saying we live
in the one world—where some law of
loving exchange is what tends the blaze
and can startle us into a kind of intermission
of peace between two clamorous cliff-
crumbling waves that rear break roar and
rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
the air we stand in with a surf-storm of
salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.
Eamon Grennan
swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks
kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each
other's needs without question, drawing
the big world into their brief circle
of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
as if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
the path between desire and satisfaction
shorter than thought, the ground dividing
being from being—one flesh-protected
spark of life from another—covered
in no time, so even time, for the moment,
is a matter of no moment, smoke that
vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave
but a flaring thing behind—candescent,
burning its one good instant till all is ash,
redemptive breath recovering itself,
eyes seeking in eyes an answer
to what's happened. The fire at the heart
of things is what these two birds ignite
in their give and take, saying we live
in the one world—where some law of
loving exchange is what tends the blaze
and can startle us into a kind of intermission
of peace between two clamorous cliff-
crumbling waves that rear break roar and
rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
the air we stand in with a surf-storm of
salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.
Eamon Grennan
Writing
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters,
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing; continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
Howard Nemerov
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing; continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
Howard Nemerov
The Lowest Trees Have Topps
The lowest trees have topps, the ante her gall,
The flie her spleene, the little sparke his heat:
The slender hears cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stinges, although they be not great;
Seas have their sourse, and soe have shallow springes:
And Love is Love, in beggars and in Kinges.
Wher waters smothest ronne, ther deepest are the foords,
The diall stirrs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest fayth is found in fewest woordes,
The turtles doe not singe, and yet they love;
True heartes have ears and eyes, no tongues to speake:
They heare and see, and sigh, and then they breake.
Sir Edward Dyer (c. 1540-1607)
The flie her spleene, the little sparke his heat:
The slender hears cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stinges, although they be not great;
Seas have their sourse, and soe have shallow springes:
And Love is Love, in beggars and in Kinges.
Wher waters smothest ronne, ther deepest are the foords,
The diall stirrs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest fayth is found in fewest woordes,
The turtles doe not singe, and yet they love;
True heartes have ears and eyes, no tongues to speake:
They heare and see, and sigh, and then they breake.
Sir Edward Dyer (c. 1540-1607)
Emmonsails Heath in Winter
I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half-rotten ash tree's topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed -
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the 'awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.
John Clare
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half-rotten ash tree's topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed -
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the 'awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.
John Clare
Circular
Daylight illuminated, but only for those
who had some knowing in their seeing,
and night fell for everyone, but harder
for some. A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.
Love at noon that was still love at dusk
meant doubt had been subjugated
for exactly that long, and best to have music
to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy.
Those alone spoke to their dogs,
but also to plants, to the brilliant agreeableness
of air, while those together were left
to address the wall or open door of each other.
Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm,
some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others.
Daylight concealed, but only for those
fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up
earth to sky, pagan and unknowable.
How we saw it was how it was.
Stephen Dunn
who had some knowing in their seeing,
and night fell for everyone, but harder
for some. A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.
Love at noon that was still love at dusk
meant doubt had been subjugated
for exactly that long, and best to have music
to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy.
Those alone spoke to their dogs,
but also to plants, to the brilliant agreeableness
of air, while those together were left
to address the wall or open door of each other.
Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm,
some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others.
Daylight concealed, but only for those
fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up
earth to sky, pagan and unknowable.
How we saw it was how it was.
Stephen Dunn
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
One Art
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
Curiosity
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 old 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.
Alastair Reid
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 old 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.
Alastair Reid
untitled (Mandelstam)
At the hour when the moon appears in the city
and the wide avenues slowly fill with its light
then the night swells with bronze and sadness,
time the barbarian smashes the wax songs,
then the cuckoo counts her griefs on the stone tower
and the pale woman with the sickle steps down
through the dead, scattering straw on the board floor,
rolling huge spokes of shadow slowly across it.
Osip Mandelstam
and the wide avenues slowly fill with its light
then the night swells with bronze and sadness,
time the barbarian smashes the wax songs,
then the cuckoo counts her griefs on the stone tower
and the pale woman with the sickle steps down
through the dead, scattering straw on the board floor,
rolling huge spokes of shadow slowly across it.
Osip Mandelstam
Elegy (Sorescu)
The light in the eyes has dimmed,
The smile at the corner of the mouth has been extinguished.
But the day isn't dark,
People go by in the streets, laughing merrily.
How good that everything is thus appointed
That I may disappear from the flock while no one's taking heed.
Nothing happens in this world
Except matters of substance, bathed
In indifference.
[30 November 1996]
Marin Sorescu
The smile at the corner of the mouth has been extinguished.
But the day isn't dark,
People go by in the streets, laughing merrily.
How good that everything is thus appointed
That I may disappear from the flock while no one's taking heed.
Nothing happens in this world
Except matters of substance, bathed
In indifference.
[30 November 1996]
Marin Sorescu
unvisited tombs
. . . for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot
George Eliot
The Swimming Lesson
Feeling the icy kick, the endless waves
Reaching around my life, I moved my arms
And coughed, and in the end saw land.
Somebody, I suppose,
Remembering the medieval maxim,
Had tossed me in,
Had wanted me to learn to swim,
Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all
About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace --
How to survive in any place.
Mary Oliver
Reaching around my life, I moved my arms
And coughed, and in the end saw land.
Somebody, I suppose,
Remembering the medieval maxim,
Had tossed me in,
Had wanted me to learn to swim,
Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all
About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace --
How to survive in any place.
Mary Oliver
Thursday, June 23, 2011
consider them both . . .
. . . consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
-Herman Melville
-Herman Melville
Metamorphoses
. . . what we were
and what we are today is not to be
tomorrow . . .
There is no thing that keeps its shape; for nature,
the innovator, would forever draw
forms out of other forms. In all this world---
you can believe me---no thing ever dies.
By birth we mean beginning to re-form,
a thing's becoming other than it was;
and death is but the end of the old state;
one thing shifts here, another there; and yet
the total of all things is permanent.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, book XV
trans. Allen Mandelbaum
and what we are today is not to be
tomorrow . . .
There is no thing that keeps its shape; for nature,
the innovator, would forever draw
forms out of other forms. In all this world---
you can believe me---no thing ever dies.
By birth we mean beginning to re-form,
a thing's becoming other than it was;
and death is but the end of the old state;
one thing shifts here, another there; and yet
the total of all things is permanent.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, book XV
trans. Allen Mandelbaum
Monday, June 20, 2011
human nature
Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like a thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-W. S. Merwin
Like a thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-W. S. Merwin
Sunday, June 19, 2011
POEM
The eager note on my door said, "Call me,
call when you get in!" so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!
Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was
there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.
Frank O'Hara
call when you get in!" so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!
Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was
there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.
Frank O'Hara
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