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 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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

1999

Edit

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

Intermission

Edit

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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