George Oppen

[from George Oppen's This In Which, 1965]

Psalm

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!

                                  Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear the grass

                                  The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                                  Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                                  The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

nouns and verbs

If you have a subscription to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I would like to read this article.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

[from Olena Kalytiak Davis’s shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, 2003]

in the clear long after

Spring is cheap, but clean of sky. Long after she used to
meet him on the sly. He didn’t say much, because to
speak you need a voice, need lead. Among the dead there were
such fresh ghosts, they were still breathing. Through their
mouths. Time, time, to adjust to an other. An ether
O so—No—too sweet. Intox-icated with permeability. ’Tis nox-
ious, to eat evanescence. However steadily, however slowly.
They stemmed into heady blows.
They missed
the stain. Of blue berries and argument. They missed
their lips. The yew and the thorns. They missed.
Their flaws.

O, to be stung by an errant bee. O, to sting.
O, to see you again. Covered in spring.

Frank Bidart

[from Frank Bidart's Star Dust, 2006]

Song

You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.

Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.

Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.

It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.

Ellen Doré Watson

[from Ellen Doré Watson’s This Sharpening, 2006]

Ever Since

Ever since the alarm went off, inconvenient feelings stirring,
outsized, unruly, trying to elbow their way in or out, restless
over the map of the day, trying the hang-dog, downcast eyes
routing, storming through your body, just like Della said
last week, sister in malady, pointing to her chest: there’s
too much in here, and for as long as you keep your hands, legs,
mouth, and feet busy, ticker-tape brain ticking, they remain
a lozenge, a sourness pushing out an odor only you can smell,
refusing to dissolve — but just try to slip into the tub or behind
the wheel and you’ll need more than the radio to beat back
the take-over, imminent domain, white line through wet lashes,
overblown heart blown open, floodgates and warning lights
and day-glo bumper stickers: emotion the size of a moose
planted in our path — ridiculous, undeniable, locally fatal.

W. S. Merwin

[from W. S. Merwin's The Lice, 1967]

The Child

Sometimes it is inconceivable that I should be the age I am
Almost always it is at a dry point in the afternoon
I cannot remember what
I am waiting for and in my astonishment I
Can hear the blood crawling over the plains
Hurrying on to arrive before dark
I try to remember my faults to make sure
One after the other but it is never
Satisfactory the list is never complete

At times night occurs to me so that I think I have been
Struck from behind I remain perfectly
Still feigning death listening for the
Assailant perhaps at last
I even sleep a little for later I have moved
I open my eyes the lanternfish have gone home in darkness
On all sides the silence is unharmed
I remember but I feel no bruise

Then there are the stories and after a while I think something
Else must connect them besides just this me
I regard myself starting the search turning
Corners in remembered metropoli
I pass skins withering in gardens that I see now
Are not familiar
And I have lost even the thread I thought I had

If I could be consistent even in destitution
The world would be revealed
While I can I try to repeat what I believe
Creatures spirits not this posture
I do not believe in knowledge as we know it
But I forget

This silence coming at intervals out of the shell of names
It must be all one person really coming at
Different hours for the same thing
If I could learn the word for yes it could teach me questions
I would see that it was itself every time and I would
Remember to say take it up like a hand
And go with it this is at last
Yourself

The child that will lead you

Louis Simpson

[from Louis Simpson's At the End of the Open Road, 1960]

The Redwoods

Mountains are moving, rivers
are hurrying. But we
are still.

We have the thoughts of giants—
clouds, and at night the stars.

And we have names — gutteral, grotesque —
Hamet, Og — names with no syllables.

And perish, one by one, our roots
gnawed by the mice. And fall.

And are too slow for death, and change
to stone. Or else too quick,

like candles in a fire. Giants
are lonely. We have waited long

for someone. By our waiting, surely
there must be someone at whose touch

our boughs would bend; and hands
to gather us; a spirit

to whom we are light as the hawthorn tree.
O if there is a poet

let him come now! We stand at the Pacific
like great unmarried girls,

turning in our heads the stars and clouds,
considering whom to please.

Frogs

The storm broke, and it rained,
And water rose in the pool,
And frogs hopped into the gutter,

With their skins of yellow and green,
And just their eyes shining above the surface
Of the warm solution of shine.

At night, when fireflies trace
Light-lines between the trees and flowers
Exhaling perfume,

The frogs speak to each other
In rhythm. The sound is monstrous,
But their voices are filled with satisfaction.

In the city I pine for the country;
In the country I long for conversation—
Our happy croaking.

Zbigniew Machej

[from A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, 1996]

Orchards in July

Waters from cold springs
and glittering minerals
tirelessly wander.
Patient, unceasing,
they overcome granite, layers
of hungry gravel, iridescent
precincts of clay. If they abandon
themselves to the black
roots it’s only to go
up, as high as possible
through wells hidden
under the bark of fruit trees. Through
the green touched with gray, of leaves,
fallen petals of white
flowers with rosy edges,
apples heavy with sweet redness
and their bitterish seeds.
O, waters from cold
springs and glittering
minerals! You are awaited
by a cirrus with a fluid,
sunny outline
and by an abyss of blue
which has been rinsed
in the just wind.

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

Betty Adcock

[from Betty Adcock's The Difficult Wheel, 1995]

The Woman Hidden in This Painting

Like a renegade summer she begins
to burn outside defining lines
almost as if a child’s hand traced
and lost her.
Window, leaf, bird, the stony hill
absorb her until the body’s only
a put-off dress, a color vanishing
so slowly the watcher in his trance
misses it entirely.

Now a lifting as if her arms are lifting,
a soaring sheer
stretch—and her skin is air.
Or say a string of beads has scattered
and the whole light gathers them
invisible in bright haze
as the pear that might have rested
where morning struck such shine from the table.

One rose gray feather on the sill
implies the silk-on-silk of dove call
she might hear. Just there,
the open curtain would brush her fingers
and the plain white cup obscure
her wrist unbraceleted.

One line might draw her back, a traveler again
in flesh upon a track of bone,
to cast against the sun-drenched wall
a shadow, dark heel knit to her heel,
time plangent in the bell-bright blue
shawl on her shoulder. See
how she was and will be here,
a dream staining the light the painter
has forgotten?

Beyond, beyond the half-open curtain,
the apron of grass is, and ribboning
paths hemstitched with chicory.
Farther still (O the eye is endless)
dark trees feather a restless sky.
She will return in this, a mist
at her throat, her arms reddened
with horizon. The gray of the hare’s flank
is the gray her eyes give back.

And pale. The face when we have seen it
will be pale beneath the glow
the wind’s pearls told her.
Presence, she whispers,
a changing
chink of weather in the window.

Susan Stewart

[from Susan Stewart's The Forest, 1995]

1931

Who would name a child for sorrow?
(There in Tiepolo’s drawing of the Christ,
his infant hand playing in
a basin’s steam.) Who, naming
the child, would give rise to this?
For the child is unacquainted,
unfamiliar, and hears
a name as just a shape, a random
softness. Who would that a sorrow
become a child, a shadow stiffening
in time? Something entered
like a mantle, a prior
contract—not burning
itself, but capable.

A. E. Stallings

[A. E. Stallings's Hapax 2006]

Visiting the Grave of Rupert Brooke

Island of Skyros, Greece

Rupert, this was where, I’m sure you knew,
The sea nymph Thetis took Achilles to,
And hid him, with his smooth cheek and gold curls,
Among the royal retinue of girls,
As any mother might, to save her son,
From war and death, by arrow or the gun.
Odysseus, recruiting, in disguise,
Set out for sale a range of merchandise,
Stuffs no princess easily resists—
Fine brocades, and bangles for the wrists,
All manner of adornments, silver, gold,
And set a blade among them, brazen, cold—
A simple trap that might catch any boy.
But only old men made it home from Troy.

Thorpe Moeckel

[from Thorpe Moeckel’s Odd Botany, 2002]

Living by Water

How many times can a man go to the river,
dip his hands in, touch them to his face,

face the wind, the sun, then touch the rocks
so as not to fall stepping across,

scrambling to a certain beach or grotto
where in going, in arriving, in every breath

between, the heart sheds foul layers —
greed, vanity — as if shale, the flakes

worked by gravity to sand, mineral —
water he spits, water he thirsts for;

how many before he’s holding the hands
of children, keeping them from falling in,

knowing they must, as a river must
not make a circle nor a man too easily believe

in rivers, no matter droughts known,
obscenities of flood, choking trout,

bloated fawns; no matter how many boats
pushed off — boats of sin,

redemption-boats — or bodies explored,
campsites slept with sounds of water

tucking behind every rock burst against;
how many before he must be carried there,

perhaps by a stranger, perhaps he’s the stranger now,
but not to the birds, beasts, flowers because

he’s forgotten their names, knows they were
never grateful of his awe, less of his pity.

Rae Armantrout

[from Rae Armantrout's The Pretext, 2001]

The Past

Sound
as a drum
or tight as a drum? Quick!

Is recognition
sentimental?

She never thought
when she was waiting tables
that there would be null sets.

People come first, but
categories outlast them.

She said, “If you’re gonna hire
the dummies, I quit!”

She thinks
this may be one
of those waitresses here.

Someone has probably mixed up
recognition with hatred.

Is she holding
a grudge,
a séance
or a piece of bread

which she won’t eat because
someone
has taken a bite of it?

James Richardson

[from James Richardson's Interglacial, this poem from his book Second Guesses, 1984]

As One Might Have Said

May, and O might,
updraft and spin of blossom, can
all our furl, human,
untwist for this ridiculous
rose-must and white—in love with trees?
What evolutions
crossed here—did ur-man
blow through cleft trunks,
that throw and wind-fear of his loins
cached now in his genes, so we
in the dazzle and torque of petals
say, say against
ourselves, I have walked in the churning
heart of a god?

Ron Rash

I’ve been reading novels written by the poet Ron Rash since they began appearing in 2003. The first, One Foot in Eden is so remarkable I read it twice in a week. His latest, The World Made Straight is also fine: begins with great tension, quietens to a deep study of major and minor characters, then rises to a finish as complex and irresolvable as life. Strongly recommend.

Marianne Boruch

[Marianne Boruch from Poetry Magazine, June 2006]

After the Moon

eclipsed itself, the rumor of darkness
true, the whole radiant business
almost over, only a line,
an edge, like some
stray part of a machine
                                   not one of us
can figure any more:
what it thrashed or cut, what it sewed
quietly together, what it scalded
or brought back from the dead. After this,
I came inside to sleep.
                                   But it’s the moon still,
pale run of it shaping
the door closed against the half-lit hall.
The eye is its own small flicker orbiting under the lid
a few hours.
                    Not so long,
bright rim,
giving up its genius
briefly, mountains under dark, craters
where someone, then no one
is walking.

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Mary Ruefle

[from Mary Ruefle's memling's veil, 1982]

Six Arguments with Kafka

1
The story about the white horse, Franz,
the one who lept out of your ear as you
awoke: admit it; another drowsy fantasy.
The truth is, it probably snowed during
the night, and the white walls took on
another octave of white. Nevertheless,
something with haunches has assembled
itself in front of me. I can’t go on
like this. Can you get it to move,
Franz? Pretend there’s a corral in
your inner ear. Any kind of nimble
leap will do.

2
You complained about a bit of singing on the floor
below you: what kind of behavior is that? There are
mice here, scratching a ledger on the inside wall,
and I have the indifference of an angel. I know the
difference between objects and things. Look out my
window, how the clouds knit themselves together like
an infant’s skull, evening closing over an object full
of things: it’s ingenious and unimportant. I am sure
there’s nothing alive here, yet in anything tortuous
I might find it. The horrible birds of early dawn, so
many screeching monkeys flitting from tree to tree!
The endless tossing of mice! And those men below you,
they still sing, pouring your sorrow out the window!
I’m barely surpassing the desire to join in.
On the pavement, another rotten peach, exposed to any
random glance: Franz, it’s your heart!

3
We have a lot in common: grenadine and seltzer,
paralyzation on the sofa, astonishment: there’s
something to take by the waist! Being left alone with a
sentence, the weight of which compels one to lie down.
I know the pleasure of an absent-minded doctor,
tapping around the heart as if he weren’t sure.
But I never shared your thirst for opera: it’s
pointless, a grand scale of semblance resembling
nothing. Every time you yielded to it, I was sick,
which seemed closer to everything than the gargling
of angels! At times, your own proximity carried a
certain stench: the night you didn’t want to join us
in the café: I haven’t forgotten. The truth is, I
was glad. You always spoiled my evening, looking around
the tables for a drinking vessel in the shape of a bird.

4
Another thing, Franz, I despised: how you moved
through the Goethehaus with the sadness of a
cow. Of course the garden had gone on growing
since his death! No remorse in that—it’s gone
right on growing since you died as well.
Whether you stood still or embarked, your guilt
was the same. It’s senseless to go on! Even the
prospect of visiting your grave bores me. Though
I might return to the coffee house in Milan, where
after discussing asphyxia and possible heart
injections, we went different ways. Later, I
came running out of another street almost into
your arms. Once more I saw your hands, your eyes:
quiet, dilapidated things. To spare me, you turned
away.

5
I am standing at the blackboard, Franz, writing
as many times as I can stand it as many times
as I can stand it. The things you carved on your
desk: they’re still here. Somewhere among the linked
initials and names that are still the names of the
students now, I found that scratched hardship
I am free to repeat myself. And like a real birth
you were always covered with filth and slime.
Nothing will tell you how to survive. Each moment
is done a different way. Once it was
a living angel, now the painted figurehead off
the prow of some ship suffices, and you can die
believing you have survived, but how will you know?
Franz, there are times I am sure it is something
I am trying to remember; then suddenly I am certain
it is something I am trying to forget.

6
I have lied, but it is a continuation of the lie
I always told you, that I might get the truth in
return. The truth is, I am not compelled to walk
about the streets talking to people. I have been
sitting at the window for seven months now, afraid
to sleep, keeping an eye on the uncertain weather.
There have been days without a single change, but I
have grown accustomed to the significance of every
piece of furniture. A few burrs of literature still
cling to my sleeve. They no longer matter. I’m set in
my ways: you wouldn’t recognize me. That place between my
eyes, where errors disappeared like magic, disappeared
like an error. And you, Franz, wrapped in a single long
bandage—you’re bound by the endless, my friend!
How I long for the old days! Once more, Franz, let’s
go out together and slit the throat of a sparrow.

Tomas Tranströmer

[from Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems 1954-1986]

Lamento

He put the pen down.
It lies there without moving.
It lies there without moving in empty space.
He put the pen down.

So much that can neither be written nor kept inside!
His body is stiffened by something happening far away
though the curious overnight bag beats like a heart.

Outside, the late spring.
From the foliage a whistling—people or birds?
And the cherry trees in bloom pat the heavy trucks on the way home.

Weeks go by.
Slowly night comes.
Moths settle down on the pane:
small pale telegrams from the world.

Adrienne Rich on "moral autism"

"America wants to forget the past, and the past in the present; and one result of that was Bitburg. Israeli denial is different. Years ago, I remember seeing, with great emotion, on the old Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Road, rusted tanks left from the 1948 war, on one of which was painted "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . ." But Palestinian memory has been violently obliterated. I fear for the kind of "moral autism" (Amos Oz's phrase) out of which both the United States and Israel, in their respective capacities of power, have made decisions leading to physical carnage and to acute internal disequilibrium and suffering."

[excerpted from Rich's keynote address to the New Jewish Agenda National Convention, Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 1985]

Adrienne Rich

[from Adrienne Rich's Blood, Bread, and Poetry]

There are betrayals in my life that I have known at the very moment were betrayals: this was one of them. There are other betrayals committed so repeatedly, so mundanely, that they leave no memory trace behind, only a growing residue of misery, of dull, accreted self-hatred. Often these take the form not of words but of silence. Silence before the joke at which everyone is laughing: the anti-woman joke, the racist joke, the anti-Semitic joke. Silence and then amnesia. Blocking it out when the oppressor’s language starts coming from the lips of one we admire, whose courage and eloquence have touched us: She didn’t really mean that; he didn’t really say that. But the accretions build up out of sight, like scale inside a kettle.