[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.
17 July 2006
16 July 2006
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.
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]
[excerpted from Rich's keynote address to the New Jewish Agenda National Convention, Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 1985]
15 July 2006
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.
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.
Shirley Kaufman
[from Shirley Kaufman’s Rivers of Salt, 1993]
The Temples of Khajuraho (excerpt)
At the airport waiting for our plane,
we sat next to a Chinese man.
He took off his shoe and sock
and massaged his foot,
working his thumb and fingers
over the sole and delicate arch
of the instep. Then he held
his whole foot between his palms
and forgave it, rocking it
gently back and forth.
His hands seemed to know
what his foot wanted. . . .
Wild Flowers
After everything I’ve forgotten, now
on the other side of the world I hid in
as a child, it’s the same sun
running down my back, the same tick
of insects in the moist air.
When I stare into the tiny radiant pupil
of this blue-violet one and you say
eye of the madonna—the whole field
stares back in a golden nimbus,
leaves shine and the sweet quattrocento
faces I never prayed to.
There are daisies bunched in the grass,
red poppies, all the old flowers
I sang to, made chains from,
or sucked the milk out of,
shaggy and tender and on the verge.
And I’m down on my knees in the clover
where nothing has changed
or slipped through our fingers, still
looking for luck.
Three Songs of Love and Plenitude (excerpt)
2 To Know
Gönül says there is a special word
for know in Turkish which stands
for visual experience. To keep it
separate from the rest of knowing.
In Hebrew there are two words
with three meanings. Carnal,
as used in the Bible, and the others.
You have to be careful.
Now when you sit on the edge
of our bed, I know the smooth muscles
of your back in more than one language,
but I touch you just to be sure. . . .
The Temples of Khajuraho (excerpt)
At the airport waiting for our plane,
we sat next to a Chinese man.
He took off his shoe and sock
and massaged his foot,
working his thumb and fingers
over the sole and delicate arch
of the instep. Then he held
his whole foot between his palms
and forgave it, rocking it
gently back and forth.
His hands seemed to know
what his foot wanted. . . .
Wild Flowers
After everything I’ve forgotten, now
on the other side of the world I hid in
as a child, it’s the same sun
running down my back, the same tick
of insects in the moist air.
When I stare into the tiny radiant pupil
of this blue-violet one and you say
eye of the madonna—the whole field
stares back in a golden nimbus,
leaves shine and the sweet quattrocento
faces I never prayed to.
There are daisies bunched in the grass,
red poppies, all the old flowers
I sang to, made chains from,
or sucked the milk out of,
shaggy and tender and on the verge.
And I’m down on my knees in the clover
where nothing has changed
or slipped through our fingers, still
looking for luck.
Three Songs of Love and Plenitude (excerpt)
2 To Know
Gönül says there is a special word
for know in Turkish which stands
for visual experience. To keep it
separate from the rest of knowing.
In Hebrew there are two words
with three meanings. Carnal,
as used in the Bible, and the others.
You have to be careful.
Now when you sit on the edge
of our bed, I know the smooth muscles
of your back in more than one language,
but I touch you just to be sure. . . .
14 July 2006
Lynn Emanuel
[from Lynn Emanuel’s The Dig, 1992]
One Summer Hurricane Lynn Spawns Tornadoes as Far West as Ely
The storm with my name dragged one
heavy foot over the roads of the county.
It was a bulge in a black raincoat, pointed
and hard as the spike in a railroad tie;
it dipped like a dowser’s rod and screamed
like the express at the bend at Elko.
It made the night feverish and the sky
burn with the cold blue fire of a motel sign.
Oh that small hell of mine nipped at the town,
turned the roads to mud, lingered at the horizon,
a long clog, a sump. All sigh and lamentation,
the whole city of grief rose up to face that black
boot that waited to kick us open like a clay pot.
This Is the Truth
Now, this is the truth of that particular fiction,
sweet angel, I mean, she hopes you do not buy
all that sweet domesticity, that tenderness and yielding.
She remembers her father only vaguely,
the glittering wreckage of his black hair,
rinsed in oils, the sap of melting pomade
that leaked from his sideburns which he dabbed
with a hankie. He inhabited his armchair
like a black cloud. Glum. Cultivated.
His temper was a downed power line
that fishtailed back and forth across their lives.
Lethal Hits. Near Misses. To avoid it
they crept for miles over dangerous passes
to Ely, my precious, they had stolen a car,
and were on the run, sleeping in tacky motel
rooms, cooking on a hot plate,
terrified and poor at last, oh my darling girl,
as you can only be when you have become
a fugitive from domestic life and are blessed
with nothing that anyone could want,
free and out of luck and poor, poor at last.
One Summer Hurricane Lynn Spawns Tornadoes as Far West as Ely
The storm with my name dragged one
heavy foot over the roads of the county.
It was a bulge in a black raincoat, pointed
and hard as the spike in a railroad tie;
it dipped like a dowser’s rod and screamed
like the express at the bend at Elko.
It made the night feverish and the sky
burn with the cold blue fire of a motel sign.
Oh that small hell of mine nipped at the town,
turned the roads to mud, lingered at the horizon,
a long clog, a sump. All sigh and lamentation,
the whole city of grief rose up to face that black
boot that waited to kick us open like a clay pot.
This Is the Truth
Now, this is the truth of that particular fiction,
sweet angel, I mean, she hopes you do not buy
all that sweet domesticity, that tenderness and yielding.
She remembers her father only vaguely,
the glittering wreckage of his black hair,
rinsed in oils, the sap of melting pomade
that leaked from his sideburns which he dabbed
with a hankie. He inhabited his armchair
like a black cloud. Glum. Cultivated.
His temper was a downed power line
that fishtailed back and forth across their lives.
Lethal Hits. Near Misses. To avoid it
they crept for miles over dangerous passes
to Ely, my precious, they had stolen a car,
and were on the run, sleeping in tacky motel
rooms, cooking on a hot plate,
terrified and poor at last, oh my darling girl,
as you can only be when you have become
a fugitive from domestic life and are blessed
with nothing that anyone could want,
free and out of luck and poor, poor at last.
13 July 2006
Gibbons Ruark
[from Gibbons Ruark’s A Program for Survival, 1971]
The Spring
The car works the road into a lather
Of dust that falls through the glittering lens
Of sky till the world is washed by another
Weather. Trees that shivered their black bones open
Into flapping leaf-tents, the thick shade spreads
And fills the cross-work shadows of branches.
Sunken water rises and inflates the heads
Of mushrooms as the earth’s stiff sponge eases
Under my feet and the warm grass prickles.
I come to the flowers that tell me to turn
Down the breezy tunnel of trees until
The teeth of the fence turn white and turn
Me again and I am through the loosening
Gate and kneeling at the spring. I feel them
Watch me from the porch where they are talking,
Rocking. The sweet mist rises to the rim
Of the bricked-in hollow. I take the stone
Steps one at a time, clinging to the mossy
Side till every flicker of sun is gone
And I cup my hands to swallow the chilly
Spout springing from the bottom. I can hear
Dry birds’ voices babble down from the grass
And I dip my face again in the water.
They are calling. Before they call the last
Time I press my ear to the cooling
Wall and listen. I go up into the sun.
One is in the white swing, two are rocking.
I climb the steps to where they rock me one
By one in the bony hollows of their laps
And brush my cheek with their papery lips.
The Spring
The car works the road into a lather
Of dust that falls through the glittering lens
Of sky till the world is washed by another
Weather. Trees that shivered their black bones open
Into flapping leaf-tents, the thick shade spreads
And fills the cross-work shadows of branches.
Sunken water rises and inflates the heads
Of mushrooms as the earth’s stiff sponge eases
Under my feet and the warm grass prickles.
I come to the flowers that tell me to turn
Down the breezy tunnel of trees until
The teeth of the fence turn white and turn
Me again and I am through the loosening
Gate and kneeling at the spring. I feel them
Watch me from the porch where they are talking,
Rocking. The sweet mist rises to the rim
Of the bricked-in hollow. I take the stone
Steps one at a time, clinging to the mossy
Side till every flicker of sun is gone
And I cup my hands to swallow the chilly
Spout springing from the bottom. I can hear
Dry birds’ voices babble down from the grass
And I dip my face again in the water.
They are calling. Before they call the last
Time I press my ear to the cooling
Wall and listen. I go up into the sun.
One is in the white swing, two are rocking.
I climb the steps to where they rock me one
By one in the bony hollows of their laps
And brush my cheek with their papery lips.
11 July 2006
Yusef Komunyakaa
[from Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau]
Sappers
Opium, horse, nothing
sends anybody through concertina
this way. What is it in the brain
that so totally propels a man?
Caught with women in our heads
three hours before daybreak,
we fire full automatic
but they keep coming,
slinging satchel charges
at our bunkers. They fall
& rise again like torchbearers,
with their naked bodies
greased so moonlight dances
off their skin. They run
with explosives strapped
around their waists,
& try to fling themselves
into our arms.
Prisoners
Usually at the helipad
I see them stumble-dance
across the hot asphalt
with crokersacks over their heads,
moving toward the interrogation huts,
thin-framed as box kites
of sticks & black silk
anticipating a hard wind
that’ll tug & snatch them
out into space. I think
some must be laughing
under their dust-colored hoods,
knowing rockets are aimed
at Chu-Lai—that the water’s
evaporating & soon the nail
will make contact with metal.
How can anyone anywhere love
these half-broken figures
bent under the sky’s brightness?
The weight they carry
is the soil we tread night & day.
Who can cry for them?
I’ve heard the old ones
are the hardest to break.
An arm twist, a combat boot
against the skull, a .45
jabbed into the mouth, nothing
works. When they start talking
with ancestors faint as camphor
smoke in pagodas, you know
you’ll have to kill them
to get an answer.
Sunlight throws
scythes against the afternoon.
Sappers
Opium, horse, nothing
sends anybody through concertina
this way. What is it in the brain
that so totally propels a man?
Caught with women in our heads
three hours before daybreak,
we fire full automatic
but they keep coming,
slinging satchel charges
at our bunkers. They fall
& rise again like torchbearers,
with their naked bodies
greased so moonlight dances
off their skin. They run
with explosives strapped
around their waists,
& try to fling themselves
into our arms.
Prisoners
Usually at the helipad
I see them stumble-dance
across the hot asphalt
with crokersacks over their heads,
moving toward the interrogation huts,
thin-framed as box kites
of sticks & black silk
anticipating a hard wind
that’ll tug & snatch them
out into space. I think
some must be laughing
under their dust-colored hoods,
knowing rockets are aimed
at Chu-Lai—that the water’s
evaporating & soon the nail
will make contact with metal.
How can anyone anywhere love
these half-broken figures
bent under the sky’s brightness?
The weight they carry
is the soil we tread night & day.
Who can cry for them?
I’ve heard the old ones
are the hardest to break.
An arm twist, a combat boot
against the skull, a .45
jabbed into the mouth, nothing
works. When they start talking
with ancestors faint as camphor
smoke in pagodas, you know
you’ll have to kill them
to get an answer.
Sunlight throws
scythes against the afternoon.
10 July 2006
Ted Hughes
[from Ted Hughes's Crow]
Crow’s Theology
Crow realized God loved him—
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
And he realized that God spoke crow—
Just existing was His revelation.
But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?
And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?
Crow realized there were two Gods—
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.
Crow’s Nerve Fails
Crow, feeling his brain slip.
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.
Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he’s visibly black?
How can he fly from his feathers?
And why have they homed on him?
Is he the archive of their accusations?
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?
Or their unforgiven prisoner?
He cannot be forgiven.
His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes
Heavily he flies.
Littleblood
O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains.
Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
Eating the medical earth.
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
O littleblood, drumming in a cow’s skull
Dancing with a gnat’s feet
With an elephant’s nose with a crocodile’s tail.
Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death’s mouldy tits.
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.
Crow’s Theology
Crow realized God loved him—
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.
And he realized that God spoke crow—
Just existing was His revelation.
But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?
And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?
Crow realized there were two Gods—
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.
Crow’s Nerve Fails
Crow, feeling his brain slip.
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.
Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood
Till he’s visibly black?
How can he fly from his feathers?
And why have they homed on him?
Is he the archive of their accusations?
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?
Or their unforgiven prisoner?
He cannot be forgiven.
His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes
Heavily he flies.
Littleblood
O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains.
Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
Eating the medical earth.
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
O littleblood, drumming in a cow’s skull
Dancing with a gnat’s feet
With an elephant’s nose with a crocodile’s tail.
Grown so wise grown so terrible
Sucking death’s mouldy tits.
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.
05 July 2006
Frank Bidart
If you know (and possibly dislike) recent Bidart, take a look at some early Bidart, 1966-1967, from Golden State, an excerpt from a poem titled "California Plush":
. . .
He [my father] was, of course, mistrustful, knowing I was bored,
knowing he had dragged me up here from Bakersfield
after five years
of almost managing to forget Bishop existed.
But he soon became loquacious, ordered a drink
and settled down for
an afternoon of talk . . .
He liked Bishop: somehow, it was to his taste, this
hard-drinking, loud, visited-by-movie-stars town.
“Better to be a big fish in a little pond.”
And he was: when they came to shoot a film,
he entertained them; Miss A——, who wore
nothing at all under her mink coat; Mr. M——,
good horseman, good shot.
“But when your mother
let me down” (for alcoholism and
infidelity, she divorced him)
“and Los Angeles wouldn’t give us water any more,
I had to leave.”
We were the first people to grow potatoes in this valley.”
When he began to tell me
that he lost control of the business
because of the settlement he gave my mother,
because I had heard it
many times,
in revenge, I asked why people up here drank so much.
He hesitated. “Bored, I guess.
—Not much to do.”
And why had Nancy’s husband left her?
In bitterness, all he said was:
“People up here drink too damn much.”
And that was how experience
had informed his life.
“So now I think I’ve learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.
I am a little nervous yet.”
. . .
I think of Proust, dying
in a cork-lined room, because he refuses to eat
because he thinks that he cannot write if he eats
because he wills to write, to finish his novel
—his novel which recaptures the past, and
with a kind of joy, because
in the debris
of the past, he has found the sources of the necessities
which have led him to this room, writing
—in this strange harmony, does he will
for it to have been different?
. . .
. . .
He [my father] was, of course, mistrustful, knowing I was bored,
knowing he had dragged me up here from Bakersfield
after five years
of almost managing to forget Bishop existed.
But he soon became loquacious, ordered a drink
and settled down for
an afternoon of talk . . .
He liked Bishop: somehow, it was to his taste, this
hard-drinking, loud, visited-by-movie-stars town.
“Better to be a big fish in a little pond.”
And he was: when they came to shoot a film,
he entertained them; Miss A——, who wore
nothing at all under her mink coat; Mr. M——,
good horseman, good shot.
“But when your mother
let me down” (for alcoholism and
infidelity, she divorced him)
“and Los Angeles wouldn’t give us water any more,
I had to leave.”
We were the first people to grow potatoes in this valley.”
When he began to tell me
that he lost control of the business
because of the settlement he gave my mother,
because I had heard it
many times,
in revenge, I asked why people up here drank so much.
He hesitated. “Bored, I guess.
—Not much to do.”
And why had Nancy’s husband left her?
In bitterness, all he said was:
“People up here drink too damn much.”
And that was how experience
had informed his life.
“So now I think I’ve learned all I want
after I have learned all this: this sure did teach me a lot of things
that I never knew before.
I am a little nervous yet.”
. . .
I think of Proust, dying
in a cork-lined room, because he refuses to eat
because he thinks that he cannot write if he eats
because he wills to write, to finish his novel
—his novel which recaptures the past, and
with a kind of joy, because
in the debris
of the past, he has found the sources of the necessities
which have led him to this room, writing
—in this strange harmony, does he will
for it to have been different?
. . .
04 July 2006
Denise Levertov
Marianne Boruch, In the Blue Pharmacy, reprints and discusses this poem by Denise Levertov from Relearning the Alphabet]
An Embroidery (IV) Swiss Cheese
(after a lost poem, 1947)
Lost wooden poem,
cows and people wending
downmountain slowly
to wooden homesteads
cows first, the families
following calmly their swaying,
their pausing, their moving ahead in dreamy
constancy.
Children asleep in the arms of old men,
healthy pallor of smooth cheeks facing
back to high pastures left for the day,
are borne down as the light
waits to leave.
Upper air glows with motes color of hay,
deep valley darkens.
Lost poem, I know
the cows were fragrant
and sounds were of hooves and feet on earth,
of clumps of good grass torn off, to chew
slowly; and not much talk.
They were returning
to wooden buckets, to lantern-beams
crisp as new straw.
Swiss cheese with black bread,
meadow, wood walls, what
did I do with you, I'm looking
through holes, in cheese, or
pine knotholes, and
who were those peaceful folk, the poem
was twenty years ago, I need it now.
An Embroidery (IV) Swiss Cheese
(after a lost poem, 1947)
Lost wooden poem,
cows and people wending
downmountain slowly
to wooden homesteads
cows first, the families
following calmly their swaying,
their pausing, their moving ahead in dreamy
constancy.
Children asleep in the arms of old men,
healthy pallor of smooth cheeks facing
back to high pastures left for the day,
are borne down as the light
waits to leave.
Upper air glows with motes color of hay,
deep valley darkens.
Lost poem, I know
the cows were fragrant
and sounds were of hooves and feet on earth,
of clumps of good grass torn off, to chew
slowly; and not much talk.
They were returning
to wooden buckets, to lantern-beams
crisp as new straw.
Swiss cheese with black bread,
meadow, wood walls, what
did I do with you, I'm looking
through holes, in cheese, or
pine knotholes, and
who were those peaceful folk, the poem
was twenty years ago, I need it now.
03 July 2006
poets of the month
If you don't know about Poetry Net's poet of the month, you should.
Check out the poet of the month archives, for example, October, 2004, James Richardson, particularly his #5 and #6 aphorisms:
"All work is the avoidance of harder work."
"When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing."
Check out the poet of the month archives, for example, October, 2004, James Richardson, particularly his #5 and #6 aphorisms:
"All work is the avoidance of harder work."
"When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing."
02 July 2006
Kerri Webster
[from Kerri Webster's We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone]
Lexicon
There’s a word for sadness that dwells in the small
of the back, the dell where you bury your chin. You mark
the page where the animal comes down to drink
from stale water. There’s a word for release born of grief,
tempered with soapy musk in the creases. There is no
gazelle. There’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours,
a figure of speech for ellipsis that starts at the throat
and sashays night continents, skirting veldt, dwelling eons
in tundra where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder.
You rise several times to drink from the sink’s moony
white, under-pipes moaning like vast mammals
shimmying through canyons of sea ice, somewhere
a ledger that measures the damp of the sheets,
charts all things alluvial between first longing
and loss, breviary of the subzero plains where I toss,
insomniac, missing. There’s phrase for absence gullied
just short of reckoning, ghost-damaging your rising
and falling weight inside me, there’s a verb for slow peril
logged in a commonplace book dog-eared and oily—
finger, finger. You mark the chapter where drowning
mirages into understanding, the whole book stab-stitched
or was it accordioned, a flaunt of unfolding and the pilgrim
drinking from a dirty glass.
Lexicon
There’s a word for sadness that dwells in the small
of the back, the dell where you bury your chin. You mark
the page where the animal comes down to drink
from stale water. There’s a word for release born of grief,
tempered with soapy musk in the creases. There is no
gazelle. There’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours,
a figure of speech for ellipsis that starts at the throat
and sashays night continents, skirting veldt, dwelling eons
in tundra where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder.
You rise several times to drink from the sink’s moony
white, under-pipes moaning like vast mammals
shimmying through canyons of sea ice, somewhere
a ledger that measures the damp of the sheets,
charts all things alluvial between first longing
and loss, breviary of the subzero plains where I toss,
insomniac, missing. There’s phrase for absence gullied
just short of reckoning, ghost-damaging your rising
and falling weight inside me, there’s a verb for slow peril
logged in a commonplace book dog-eared and oily—
finger, finger. You mark the chapter where drowning
mirages into understanding, the whole book stab-stitched
or was it accordioned, a flaunt of unfolding and the pilgrim
drinking from a dirty glass.
01 July 2006
Samuel Beckett
[from Samuel Beckett's Molloy]
the sea loomed high in the waning sky . . .
Smoke, sticks, flesh, hair, at evening, afar, flung about the craving for a fellow. I know how to summon these rags to cover my shame. I wonder what that means. . . .
not that seeing matters but it's something to go on with . . .
It is in the tranquility of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion that was my life. . . .
the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present . . .
in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. . . .
I began to think, that is to say to listen harder . . .
there is never a last by the sea . . .
the sea loomed high in the waning sky . . .
Smoke, sticks, flesh, hair, at evening, afar, flung about the craving for a fellow. I know how to summon these rags to cover my shame. I wonder what that means. . . .
not that seeing matters but it's something to go on with . . .
It is in the tranquility of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion that was my life. . . .
the present tense, when speaking of the past. It is the mythological present . . .
in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. . . .
I began to think, that is to say to listen harder . . .
there is never a last by the sea . . .
30 June 2006
Jay Hopler
[from Jay Hopler's Green Squall, winner of the 2005 Yale Younger Poets Prize, judged by Louise Gluck]
And the Sunflower Weeps for the Sun, Its Flower
1
There is a hole in the garden. It is empty. I envy it.
Emptiness: the only freedom there is
In a fallen world.
2
Father Sunflower, forgive me — . I have been so preoccupied with
my backaches and my headaches,
With my sore back and my headaches and my beat-skipping heart,
I have ignored the subtle huzzah of the date palms and daisies, of
the blue daze and the date palms —
3
Or don’t forgive me, what do I care?
I am tired of asking for forgiveness; I am tired of being frightened
all the time.
I want to run down the street with a vicious erection,
Impaling everything, screaming obscenities
And flapping my arms; fuck the date palms,
Fuck the daisies —
4
As a man, I am a disappointment, I know that.
Is it my fault I was born in shadow? Through the banyan trees,
An entourage of slovenly blondes
Comes naked and begging —
5
My days fly from me as though from a murderer.
Can you blame them?
Behind us, the house is empty and quiet as light.
What have I done, Mother,
That I should spend my life
Alone?
Self-Portrait with Whiskey and Pistol
1
Of all the things this day turned out to be, a celebration of me
was not one of them.
2
Maybe if I surrounded myself with prostitutes and strippers, my
celibacy would feel less like a lack and more like an act
Of heroic self-denial.
3
My life and I live in the trees and share a tail.
4
Our stomach turns its peach pit to the moon!
5
Even if it’s true, what they say, that love is never a waste of time
no matter how impossible the object,
You wouldn’t know it from living.
On this street.
6
How disappointing it all is!
The lemon trees, the banyan trees, the sky —
How disappointing it all is.
7
Look, the Great Poet of Solitude is pruning his roses!
(Even the way he does nothing is monstrous.)
8
O birds! O birds! Be not stingy with thy feathers white, I am
washing my hands!
9
Cloudy or not, here I come —
And the Sunflower Weeps for the Sun, Its Flower
1
There is a hole in the garden. It is empty. I envy it.
Emptiness: the only freedom there is
In a fallen world.
2
Father Sunflower, forgive me — . I have been so preoccupied with
my backaches and my headaches,
With my sore back and my headaches and my beat-skipping heart,
I have ignored the subtle huzzah of the date palms and daisies, of
the blue daze and the date palms —
3
Or don’t forgive me, what do I care?
I am tired of asking for forgiveness; I am tired of being frightened
all the time.
I want to run down the street with a vicious erection,
Impaling everything, screaming obscenities
And flapping my arms; fuck the date palms,
Fuck the daisies —
4
As a man, I am a disappointment, I know that.
Is it my fault I was born in shadow? Through the banyan trees,
An entourage of slovenly blondes
Comes naked and begging —
5
My days fly from me as though from a murderer.
Can you blame them?
Behind us, the house is empty and quiet as light.
What have I done, Mother,
That I should spend my life
Alone?
Self-Portrait with Whiskey and Pistol
1
Of all the things this day turned out to be, a celebration of me
was not one of them.
2
Maybe if I surrounded myself with prostitutes and strippers, my
celibacy would feel less like a lack and more like an act
Of heroic self-denial.
3
My life and I live in the trees and share a tail.
4
Our stomach turns its peach pit to the moon!
5
Even if it’s true, what they say, that love is never a waste of time
no matter how impossible the object,
You wouldn’t know it from living.
On this street.
6
How disappointing it all is!
The lemon trees, the banyan trees, the sky —
How disappointing it all is.
7
Look, the Great Poet of Solitude is pruning his roses!
(Even the way he does nothing is monstrous.)
8
O birds! O birds! Be not stingy with thy feathers white, I am
washing my hands!
9
Cloudy or not, here I come —
29 June 2006
Laura Jensen
[from Laura Jensen’s Bad Boats]
Subject Matter
On the good day, it cracks out,
the recognizable fowl that falls in love with you,
nothing to offer but itself in your eyes.
When you keep walking it starts after, helpless,
unrejectable. It would never harm you, you are certain.
Someone has seen one go fighting, taking a chevron
in lieu of the humming garden. Roses are red
because their ears are burning.
Someone hears the ocean and repeats its sound.
In your favorite country, the one no one remembers yet,
the hen, the duck, the other ones that settle—
all of them are minor deities. It is with composure
that they see flocks turn to the other mothers,
the peculiar foreigners they look in the eye.
Subject Matter
On the good day, it cracks out,
the recognizable fowl that falls in love with you,
nothing to offer but itself in your eyes.
When you keep walking it starts after, helpless,
unrejectable. It would never harm you, you are certain.
Someone has seen one go fighting, taking a chevron
in lieu of the humming garden. Roses are red
because their ears are burning.
Someone hears the ocean and repeats its sound.
In your favorite country, the one no one remembers yet,
the hen, the duck, the other ones that settle—
all of them are minor deities. It is with composure
that they see flocks turn to the other mothers,
the peculiar foreigners they look in the eye.
28 June 2006
Charles Simic
[from Charles Simic's Selected Early Poems]
Explorers
They arrive inside
The object at evening.
There's no one to greet them.
The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into their own minds.
They write in their journals:
The sky and the earth
Are of the same impenetrable color.
If there are rivers and lakes,
They must be under the ground.
Of the marvels we sought, no trace.
Of the strange new stars, nothing.
There's not even wind or dust,
So we must conclude that someone
Passed recently with a broom . . .
As they write, the new world
Gradually stitches
Its black thread into them.
Eventually nothing is left
Except a low whisper,
Which might belong
Either to one of them
Or to someone who came before.
It says: "I'm happy
We are finally all here . . .
Let's make this our home."
Explorers
They arrive inside
The object at evening.
There's no one to greet them.
The lamps they carry
Cast their shadows
Back into their own minds.
They write in their journals:
The sky and the earth
Are of the same impenetrable color.
If there are rivers and lakes,
They must be under the ground.
Of the marvels we sought, no trace.
Of the strange new stars, nothing.
There's not even wind or dust,
So we must conclude that someone
Passed recently with a broom . . .
As they write, the new world
Gradually stitches
Its black thread into them.
Eventually nothing is left
Except a low whisper,
Which might belong
Either to one of them
Or to someone who came before.
It says: "I'm happy
We are finally all here . . .
Let's make this our home."
26 June 2006
Linda Gregg
[from Linda Gregg's Too Bright to See]
We Manage Most When We Manage Small
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
We Manage Most When We Manage Small
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
19 June 2006
15 June 2006
Tomas Transtromer
[from Tomas Transtromer's Selected Poems 1954-1986]
Breathing Space July
(translated by Robert Bly)
The man who lies on his back under huge trees
is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.
He sways back and forth,
he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.
The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against
the water.
Docks get old faster than men.
They have silver-gray posts and boulders in their gut.
The dazzling light drives straight in.
The man who spends the whole day in an open boat
moving over the luminous bays
will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp
as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.
Breathing Space July
(translated by Robert Bly)
The man who lies on his back under huge trees
is also up in them. He branches out into thousands of tiny branches.
He sways back and forth,
he sits in a catapult chair that hurtles forward in slow motion.
The man who stands down at the dock screws up his eyes against
the water.
Docks get old faster than men.
They have silver-gray posts and boulders in their gut.
The dazzling light drives straight in.
The man who spends the whole day in an open boat
moving over the luminous bays
will fall asleep at last inside the shade of his blue lamp
as the islands crawl like huge moths over the globe.
12 June 2006
more Robert Hass
[excerpted from "Songs to Survive the Summer" in Praise]
*
The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world.
*
*
The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world.
*
11 June 2006
Robert Hass
[from Robert Hass's Praise]
Like Three Fair Branches
From One Root Deriv’d
I am outside a door and inside
the words do not fumble
as I fumble saying this.
It is the same in the dream
where I touch you. Notice
in this poem the thinning out
of particulars. The gate
with the three snakes is burning,
symbolically, which doesn’t mean
the flames can’t hurt you.
Now it is the pubic arch instead
and smells of oils and driftwood,
of our bodies working very hard
at pleasure but they are not
thinking about us. Bless them,
it is not a small thing to be
happily occupied, go by them
on tiptoe. Now the gate is marble
and the snakes are graces.
You are the figure in the center.
On the left you are going away
from yourself. On the right
you are coming back. Meanwhile
we are passing through the gate
with everything we love. We go
as fire, as flesh, as marble.
Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.
Like Three Fair Branches
From One Root Deriv’d
I am outside a door and inside
the words do not fumble
as I fumble saying this.
It is the same in the dream
where I touch you. Notice
in this poem the thinning out
of particulars. The gate
with the three snakes is burning,
symbolically, which doesn’t mean
the flames can’t hurt you.
Now it is the pubic arch instead
and smells of oils and driftwood,
of our bodies working very hard
at pleasure but they are not
thinking about us. Bless them,
it is not a small thing to be
happily occupied, go by them
on tiptoe. Now the gate is marble
and the snakes are graces.
You are the figure in the center.
On the left you are going away
from yourself. On the right
you are coming back. Meanwhile
we are passing through the gate
with everything we love. We go
as fire, as flesh, as marble.
Sometimes it is good and sometimes
it is dangerous like the ignorance
of particulars, but our words are clear
and our movements give off light.
10 June 2006
Charles Simic
[from Charles Simic's Jackstraws]
Non-Stop War with Bugs
An ideal hideout under my bed
To make big plans, grow brazen,
Crawl in and out of my nose
As I lie with my eyes tightly shut
Dreaming of a world
Beyond these sad appearances.
Teeny dadaists on the march,
You're sly and most witty
As you disrupt my rare moments
Of calm, making me perform
Showstopping contortions
To reach after you with a slipper
In a fit of unbecoming frenzy.
Non-Stop War with Bugs
An ideal hideout under my bed
To make big plans, grow brazen,
Crawl in and out of my nose
As I lie with my eyes tightly shut
Dreaming of a world
Beyond these sad appearances.
Teeny dadaists on the march,
You're sly and most witty
As you disrupt my rare moments
Of calm, making me perform
Showstopping contortions
To reach after you with a slipper
In a fit of unbecoming frenzy.
09 June 2006
Samuel Beckett
[from Samuel Beckett’s Collected Poems in English and French; this 1938 poem an English one]
Ooftish
offer it up plank it down
Golgotha was only the potegg
cancer angina it is all one to us
cough up your T.B. don’t be stingy
no trifle is too trifling not even a thrombus
anything venereal is especially welcome
that old toga in the mothballs
don’t be sentimental you won’t be wanting it again
send it along we’ll put it in the pot with the rest
with your love requited and unrequited
the things taken too late the things taken too soon
the spirit aching bullock’s scrotum
you won’t cure it you won’t endure it
it is you it equals you any fool has to pity you
so parcel up the whole issue and send it along
the whole misery diagnosed undiagnosed misdiagnosed
get your friends to do the same we’ll make use of it
we’ll make sense of it we’ll put it in the pot with the rest
it all boils down to blood of lamb
Ooftish
offer it up plank it down
Golgotha was only the potegg
cancer angina it is all one to us
cough up your T.B. don’t be stingy
no trifle is too trifling not even a thrombus
anything venereal is especially welcome
that old toga in the mothballs
don’t be sentimental you won’t be wanting it again
send it along we’ll put it in the pot with the rest
with your love requited and unrequited
the things taken too late the things taken too soon
the spirit aching bullock’s scrotum
you won’t cure it you won’t endure it
it is you it equals you any fool has to pity you
so parcel up the whole issue and send it along
the whole misery diagnosed undiagnosed misdiagnosed
get your friends to do the same we’ll make use of it
we’ll make sense of it we’ll put it in the pot with the rest
it all boils down to blood of lamb
05 June 2006
Charles Simic
[from Charles Simic's Wonderful Words, Silent Truth]
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. . . . where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. . . .
The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying . . .
It’s not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather what they show and reveal. The literal leads to the figurative, and inside every poetic figure of value there’s a theater where a play is in progress. . . .
The poem that thinks . . .
The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again.
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one’s walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc. . . . where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear. . . .
The poem is the place where one hears what the language is really saying . . .
It’s not so much what the words mean that is crucial, but rather what they show and reveal. The literal leads to the figurative, and inside every poetic figure of value there’s a theater where a play is in progress. . . .
The poem that thinks . . .
The poem is an attempt at self-recovery, self-recognition, self-remembering, the marvel of being again.
let's get this guy a van
Michael O'Connell is a long time, good friend of a good friend of mine. He has muscular dystrophy and needs a handicap-equipped van.
Marianne Moore
Melanchthon
Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view is a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary? The sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints makes me very gray, but I am used
to it, it may
remain there; do away
with it and I am myself done away with, for the
patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
there to begin
with. This elephant-skin
which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of
the coconut, this piece of black glass through which no light
can filter—cut
into checkers by rut
upon rut of unpreventable experience—
is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
hairy-toed. Black
but beautiful, my back
is full of the history of power. Of power. What
is powerful and what is not. My soul shall never
be cut into
by a wooden spear; through-
out childhood to the present time, the unity of
life and death has been expressed by the circumference
described by my
trunk; nevertheless I
perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it
has its center
well nurtured—we know
where—in pride; but spiritual poise, it has its center where?
My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of
the wind. I see
and I hear, unlike the
wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made
to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear;
that tree-trunk without
roots, accustomed to shout
its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact
by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that
spiritual
brother to the coral-
plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to
the I of each
a kind of fretful speech
which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is
black earth preceded by a tendril? Compared with those
phenomena
which vacillate like a
translucence of the atmosphere, the elephant is
that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first
time, a substance
needful as an instance
of the indestructibility of matter; it
has looked at electricity and at the earth-
quake and is still
here; the name means thick. Will
depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no
beautiful element of unreason under it?
Openly, yes,
with the naturalness
of the hippopotamus or the alligator
when it climbs out on the bank to experience the
sun, I do these
things which I do, which please
no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-
merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object
in view is a
renaissance; shall I say
the contrary? The sediment of the river which
encrusts my joints makes me very gray, but I am used
to it, it may
remain there; do away
with it and I am myself done away with, for the
patina of circumstance can but enrich what was
there to begin
with. This elephant-skin
which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of
the coconut, this piece of black glass through which no light
can filter—cut
into checkers by rut
upon rut of unpreventable experience—
is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the
hairy-toed. Black
but beautiful, my back
is full of the history of power. Of power. What
is powerful and what is not. My soul shall never
be cut into
by a wooden spear; through-
out childhood to the present time, the unity of
life and death has been expressed by the circumference
described by my
trunk; nevertheless I
perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after
all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it
has its center
well nurtured—we know
where—in pride; but spiritual poise, it has its center where?
My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of
the wind. I see
and I hear, unlike the
wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made
to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear;
that tree-trunk without
roots, accustomed to shout
its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact
by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that
spiritual
brother to the coral-
plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light
becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to
the I of each
a kind of fretful speech
which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is
black earth preceded by a tendril? Compared with those
phenomena
which vacillate like a
translucence of the atmosphere, the elephant is
that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first
time, a substance
needful as an instance
of the indestructibility of matter; it
has looked at electricity and at the earth-
quake and is still
here; the name means thick. Will
depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no
beautiful element of unreason under it?
02 June 2006
Rachel Hadas
[from Rachel Hadas's Halfway Down the Hall]
Still Life in Garden
Speechless, considering, feet well apart:
exactly how my mother would take root
deep in the garden, so you stand. It’s early;
a summer day spreads out.
Bushier by the hour, long wavering rows
form lines and paths and furrows as of thought
marking a brow.
It’s a small garden; no
reason for amazement if you tread
neatly in the footsteps of the dead.
Stealthily day by day
tomatoes, beans, cucumbers take on gloss
and heft, and everything seems effortless,
except the digging, planting, weeding—plus
the same vague tenderness,
the deep and inexhaustible green brood
you now are lost in, standing where she stood.
Still Life in Garden
Speechless, considering, feet well apart:
exactly how my mother would take root
deep in the garden, so you stand. It’s early;
a summer day spreads out.
Bushier by the hour, long wavering rows
form lines and paths and furrows as of thought
marking a brow.
It’s a small garden; no
reason for amazement if you tread
neatly in the footsteps of the dead.
Stealthily day by day
tomatoes, beans, cucumbers take on gloss
and heft, and everything seems effortless,
except the digging, planting, weeding—plus
the same vague tenderness,
the deep and inexhaustible green brood
you now are lost in, standing where she stood.
01 June 2006
Emily Dickinson
(779)
The Service without Hope —
Is tenderest, I think —
Because ’tis unsustained
By stint — Rewarded Work —
Has impetus of Gain —
And impetus of Goal —
There is no Diligence like that
That knows not an Until —
The Service without Hope —
Is tenderest, I think —
Because ’tis unsustained
By stint — Rewarded Work —
Has impetus of Gain —
And impetus of Goal —
There is no Diligence like that
That knows not an Until —
Carl Phillips
[from Carl Phillips's Cortège]
A Touring Man Loses His Way
With all the wreckage
of vacation, of an assembled life
in tow, we drive
into this town on
narrowing roads whose names
run verticals up whited stone markers,
suddenly there,
haunting the intersections.
To the right,
in the rush of open vents,
the map crackles idly,
draped and puckering over
her thighs, wide-slung in sleep;
the rich blue interstate prowls
over one knee, and licks
resignedly
the wobbly stick shift.
Above the dust horizon
of dash, and stranded travel-cups,
the sea comes rearing;
then we descend, and the waves
seem to rise from
the quaver of tar and heat
and broken fluorescence.
I say:
“this road,
the road, a
road”
to no one specifically.
Her head wanders from
the headrest, strays
toward the ground sheen of safety glass.
The unamazing thought occurs just
under the wheel-hum
I have no idea what I am doing
I have no idea where I am going.
With increasingly waning trust
I grip the wheel—this seems
primary, this feels
correct—and shoulder
by instinct into the hurtling road
that bends, unbends,
buckles through this land: a coast,
shingles flashing, weathering.
A Touring Man Loses His Way
With all the wreckage
of vacation, of an assembled life
in tow, we drive
into this town on
narrowing roads whose names
run verticals up whited stone markers,
suddenly there,
haunting the intersections.
To the right,
in the rush of open vents,
the map crackles idly,
draped and puckering over
her thighs, wide-slung in sleep;
the rich blue interstate prowls
over one knee, and licks
resignedly
the wobbly stick shift.
Above the dust horizon
of dash, and stranded travel-cups,
the sea comes rearing;
then we descend, and the waves
seem to rise from
the quaver of tar and heat
and broken fluorescence.
I say:
“this road,
the road, a
road”
to no one specifically.
Her head wanders from
the headrest, strays
toward the ground sheen of safety glass.
The unamazing thought occurs just
under the wheel-hum
I have no idea what I am doing
I have no idea where I am going.
With increasingly waning trust
I grip the wheel—this seems
primary, this feels
correct—and shoulder
by instinct into the hurtling road
that bends, unbends,
buckles through this land: a coast,
shingles flashing, weathering.
30 May 2006
William Carlos Williams
[excerpt from "Tract"]
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral . . .
Walk behind—as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly—
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What—from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us—it will be money
in your pockets.
Go now
I think you are ready.
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral . . .
Walk behind—as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly—
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What—from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us—it will be money
in your pockets.
Go now
I think you are ready.
John Canaday
[from John Canaday's The Invisible World]
A Fast of God’s Choosing
For ye have brought us forth into this wilderness,
to kill this whole assembly with hunger.
— Exodus 16:3
Past one and still no vendor’s cart in sight,
no minimarts here on the Freedom Trail.
My hollow belly moans a kind of song,
like the west wind whistling hosannas
under the vault of the Old South Meeting House:
“When hunger sucks the marrow from your bones,
whittle an octave’s worth of fingering
along your fibula and then your soul
will pipe a song to make you weep for God.
And though tears linger on the desert of your lips,
resist their salty frankness, for it masks
a deeper thirst than you should care to know.
No, do not speak. Words speak of damnable
conceit. Which of us knows God’s ways? Your lips
should crack with thirst before you fold your breath
in speech. Thank God when he humiliates
your flesh beyond the compass of mere words.
A plump blackberry like a ripe bon mot
could spell damnation if it made you think
the fullness of a summer afternoon
meant jack. The scent of summer honeysuckle
blinds us to an everlasting emptiness
that mortal hunger only echoes. Praise
God for the deserts, famines, droughts with which
he seasons us when we wax fit. And bless
these vacant words as well. Inhabit them.”
A Fast of God’s Choosing
For ye have brought us forth into this wilderness,
to kill this whole assembly with hunger.
— Exodus 16:3
Past one and still no vendor’s cart in sight,
no minimarts here on the Freedom Trail.
My hollow belly moans a kind of song,
like the west wind whistling hosannas
under the vault of the Old South Meeting House:
“When hunger sucks the marrow from your bones,
whittle an octave’s worth of fingering
along your fibula and then your soul
will pipe a song to make you weep for God.
And though tears linger on the desert of your lips,
resist their salty frankness, for it masks
a deeper thirst than you should care to know.
No, do not speak. Words speak of damnable
conceit. Which of us knows God’s ways? Your lips
should crack with thirst before you fold your breath
in speech. Thank God when he humiliates
your flesh beyond the compass of mere words.
A plump blackberry like a ripe bon mot
could spell damnation if it made you think
the fullness of a summer afternoon
meant jack. The scent of summer honeysuckle
blinds us to an everlasting emptiness
that mortal hunger only echoes. Praise
God for the deserts, famines, droughts with which
he seasons us when we wax fit. And bless
these vacant words as well. Inhabit them.”
19 May 2006
Alice Friman
[from Alice Friman's The Book of the Rotten Daughter]
After Shooting the Barbados Ram
Because his neighbor’s boy wanted the horns
he whacked off the top of the head
straight across
leaving the brain in the grass—
two tablespoons of squiggle
and the brain pan
lined in ivory, empty except for the flies.
I watch because I must,
not because my grinning brother-in-law
waving his bloody knife
shoves the scene in my face—the ram
strung up by the hind legs
then slit down the middle, the insides
tumbling out into a tub. The one
undescended testicle, knuckle big
and hard as love,
flushed from its hiding place at last.
The body, the hide, adding up to nothing
but a magician’s coat emptied of its tricks.
Any two-bit fly buzzy in emerald
is more than this.
But it’s the brain I come back to,
separated from the white fibrous fingers
that cradled it, suspended it
easy in a jelly. The Dura Mater.
The enduring mother, holding—
idiot or saint—whatever she’s got.
Mama the dependable, tough as bungee straps
or a stevedore’s net, hanging on
to her freight until the final dock.
I kneel in the grass,
run my fingers over the brain’s empty casing,
think of my father, gone not even a month.
A meningioma, they said. A thickening
of the outer lining. The Dura Mater.
The tough mother who never quits—
who quit. Took up weaving in her boredom,
knitting her own cells into a pile of pillows
then turned, the way milk turns,
the way any mother left alone in the dark
might turn, a pillow in her hands.
They said it was slow growing, decades maybe,
but now, having reached the pons, the bulb
at the base of the brain—.
Look, they said, how the brain struggles
in a narrowed, pinched-in space, rummages
for what it can no longer remember:
the old triggers fired off easy as pop-guns
for ninety years—pump, pump, breathe.
I kneel over the ram’s motherless brain
the way I bent over him, holding the hand
that for sixty-two years refused mine,
singing the song he never sang for me.
The crusted mouth. The lolling tongue.
The eyes unable to close
because the brain had forgotten how.
The breath still so sweet.
After Shooting the Barbados Ram
Because his neighbor’s boy wanted the horns
he whacked off the top of the head
straight across
leaving the brain in the grass—
two tablespoons of squiggle
and the brain pan
lined in ivory, empty except for the flies.
I watch because I must,
not because my grinning brother-in-law
waving his bloody knife
shoves the scene in my face—the ram
strung up by the hind legs
then slit down the middle, the insides
tumbling out into a tub. The one
undescended testicle, knuckle big
and hard as love,
flushed from its hiding place at last.
The body, the hide, adding up to nothing
but a magician’s coat emptied of its tricks.
Any two-bit fly buzzy in emerald
is more than this.
But it’s the brain I come back to,
separated from the white fibrous fingers
that cradled it, suspended it
easy in a jelly. The Dura Mater.
The enduring mother, holding—
idiot or saint—whatever she’s got.
Mama the dependable, tough as bungee straps
or a stevedore’s net, hanging on
to her freight until the final dock.
I kneel in the grass,
run my fingers over the brain’s empty casing,
think of my father, gone not even a month.
A meningioma, they said. A thickening
of the outer lining. The Dura Mater.
The tough mother who never quits—
who quit. Took up weaving in her boredom,
knitting her own cells into a pile of pillows
then turned, the way milk turns,
the way any mother left alone in the dark
might turn, a pillow in her hands.
They said it was slow growing, decades maybe,
but now, having reached the pons, the bulb
at the base of the brain—.
Look, they said, how the brain struggles
in a narrowed, pinched-in space, rummages
for what it can no longer remember:
the old triggers fired off easy as pop-guns
for ninety years—pump, pump, breathe.
I kneel over the ram’s motherless brain
the way I bent over him, holding the hand
that for sixty-two years refused mine,
singing the song he never sang for me.
The crusted mouth. The lolling tongue.
The eyes unable to close
because the brain had forgotten how.
The breath still so sweet.
18 May 2006
Sarah Maclay and Linda Bierds
[from Field, Number 69, Spring 2003]
The Marina, Early Evening
by Sarah Maclay
The sea is only a blue band,
reaching over its brother.
The sand is only a hard, brown sea.
Gulls open their beaks and nothing comes out.
One. Another. Three. The sea
is only a low cloud
wandering under its sister.
The cloud is only a high, gray sea.
The gulls seem to be praying.
They stand as still as a chess set.
Waves crawl onto the body, slither back.
Oh, the woman with red hair,
legs tall as stilts,
sings into the ocean.
Her song is only the mirror
of the broken wave.
Time and Space
by Linda Bierds
Deep space. The oblong, twinkleless stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants’ hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was —
ascension — at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,
cupped by a room-size celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trap door and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.
All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels
the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant — above, below — its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment —
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight — sufficient for the moment.
The Marina, Early Evening
by Sarah Maclay
The sea is only a blue band,
reaching over its brother.
The sand is only a hard, brown sea.
Gulls open their beaks and nothing comes out.
One. Another. Three. The sea
is only a low cloud
wandering under its sister.
The cloud is only a high, gray sea.
The gulls seem to be praying.
They stand as still as a chess set.
Waves crawl onto the body, slither back.
Oh, the woman with red hair,
legs tall as stilts,
sings into the ocean.
Her song is only the mirror
of the broken wave.
Time and Space
by Linda Bierds
Deep space. The oblong, twinkleless stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants’ hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was —
ascension — at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,
cupped by a room-size celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trap door and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.
All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels
the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant — above, below — its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment —
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight — sufficient for the moment.
16 May 2006
Laurie Sheck
[from Laurie Sheck's Amaranth]
Continuum
In my brothers’ arms I was lifted to be tossed in the water,
not to die but to be saved through disappearance.
I thought I heard them calling after me,
my absence would allow them to go on.
Because I no longer need to be touched
I deny them nothing, I watch them when they sleep
and keep them safe.
Sometimes I see their faces pressed into the water’s ceiling,
looking down and down as if to call me back.
Mostly I watch these walls.
Where my brothers live the houses hold their single pose,
the sky is luminous as snakeskin.
So often they find themselves walking near water—
that box planed smooth by sunlight.
Continuum
In my brothers’ arms I was lifted to be tossed in the water,
not to die but to be saved through disappearance.
I thought I heard them calling after me,
my absence would allow them to go on.
Because I no longer need to be touched
I deny them nothing, I watch them when they sleep
and keep them safe.
Sometimes I see their faces pressed into the water’s ceiling,
looking down and down as if to call me back.
Mostly I watch these walls.
Where my brothers live the houses hold their single pose,
the sky is luminous as snakeskin.
So often they find themselves walking near water—
that box planed smooth by sunlight.
15 May 2006
Carl Phillips
[from Carl Phillips's Riding Westward]
Falling
There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any
more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t
that was it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway
with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns
the grasses also traced, more subtly, below. As for
strangers: yes, and often, and—with few exceptions—
each desperate either to win back some kingdom he’d
lost, or to be, if only briefly, for once free of one. I did
what I could for them. They did—what they did . . . It was
as if we were rescuable, and worth rescuing, both, and
the gods had noticed this—it was as if there were gods—
and the sky meanwhile crowning every part of it, blue,
a blue crown . . . There’s a meadow I still go back to. It’s
just a meadow—with, sometimes, a stranger, passing
through, the occasional tenderness, a hand to my chest,
resting there, making me almost want to touch something,
someone back. I can feel all the wrecked birds—lying
huddled, slow-hearted, like so many stunned psalms,
against each other—start to stir inside me, their bits of
song giving way again to the usual questions: Why not
stay awhile here forever? and Isn’t this what you keep
coming for? and Is it? I’m tired of their questions. I’m
tired, I say to them—as, with all the sluggishness at first
of doing a thing they’d forgotten how to do, or forgotten
to want to, or had only hoped to forget, they indifferently
open, spread wide their interrogative, gray wings—
Falling
There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any
more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t
that was it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway
with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns
the grasses also traced, more subtly, below. As for
strangers: yes, and often, and—with few exceptions—
each desperate either to win back some kingdom he’d
lost, or to be, if only briefly, for once free of one. I did
what I could for them. They did—what they did . . . It was
as if we were rescuable, and worth rescuing, both, and
the gods had noticed this—it was as if there were gods—
and the sky meanwhile crowning every part of it, blue,
a blue crown . . . There’s a meadow I still go back to. It’s
just a meadow—with, sometimes, a stranger, passing
through, the occasional tenderness, a hand to my chest,
resting there, making me almost want to touch something,
someone back. I can feel all the wrecked birds—lying
huddled, slow-hearted, like so many stunned psalms,
against each other—start to stir inside me, their bits of
song giving way again to the usual questions: Why not
stay awhile here forever? and Isn’t this what you keep
coming for? and Is it? I’m tired of their questions. I’m
tired, I say to them—as, with all the sluggishness at first
of doing a thing they’d forgotten how to do, or forgotten
to want to, or had only hoped to forget, they indifferently
open, spread wide their interrogative, gray wings—
14 May 2006
Emily Dickinson
#1046
I’ve dropped my Brain – My Soul is numb –
The Veins that used to run
Stop palsied – ’tis Paralysis
Done perfected on stone
Vitality is Carved and cool.
My nerve in Marble lies –
A Breathing Woman
Yesterday – Endowed with Paradise.
Not dumb – I had a sort that moved –
A Sense that smote and stirred –
Instincts for Dance – a caper part –
An Aptitude for Bird –
Who wrought Carrara in me
And chiselled all my tune
Were it a Witchcraft – were it Death –
I’ve still a chance to strain
To Being, somewhere – Motion – Breath –
Though Centuries beyond,
And every limit a Decade –
I’ll shiver, satisfied.
[from Cristianne Miller's Emily Dickinson, A Poet’s Grammar]
In poetry, meaning may lie as much in the interaction of semantic content and form as in a message that can be isolated from the poem. The more a poem calls attention to its formal elements by various foregrounding techniques, the more the reader is likely to learn about its meaning from them. If we assume as a norm language that calls no attention to its formal properties by deviating from the conventions of formal communication (that is, an utterance intended solely to communicate a message), then Dickinson’s poetry is richly deviant.
I’ve dropped my Brain – My Soul is numb –
The Veins that used to run
Stop palsied – ’tis Paralysis
Done perfected on stone
Vitality is Carved and cool.
My nerve in Marble lies –
A Breathing Woman
Yesterday – Endowed with Paradise.
Not dumb – I had a sort that moved –
A Sense that smote and stirred –
Instincts for Dance – a caper part –
An Aptitude for Bird –
Who wrought Carrara in me
And chiselled all my tune
Were it a Witchcraft – were it Death –
I’ve still a chance to strain
To Being, somewhere – Motion – Breath –
Though Centuries beyond,
And every limit a Decade –
I’ll shiver, satisfied.
[from Cristianne Miller's Emily Dickinson, A Poet’s Grammar]
In poetry, meaning may lie as much in the interaction of semantic content and form as in a message that can be isolated from the poem. The more a poem calls attention to its formal elements by various foregrounding techniques, the more the reader is likely to learn about its meaning from them. If we assume as a norm language that calls no attention to its formal properties by deviating from the conventions of formal communication (that is, an utterance intended solely to communicate a message), then Dickinson’s poetry is richly deviant.
12 May 2006
Stanley Kunitz
[from Stanley Kunitz's The Collected Poems]
excerpt from Revolving Meditation
Imagination cries
That in the grand accountancy
What happens to us is false;
Imagination makes,
Out of what stuff it can,
An action fit
For a more heroic stage
Than body ever walked on.
I have learned
Trying to live
With this perjured quid of mine,
That the truth is not in the stones,
But in the architecture;
Equally, I am not deceived
By the triumph of the stuffing
Over the chair.
If I must build a church,
Though I do not really want one,
Let it be in the wilderness
Out of nothing but nail-holes.
excerpt from Revolving Meditation
Imagination cries
That in the grand accountancy
What happens to us is false;
Imagination makes,
Out of what stuff it can,
An action fit
For a more heroic stage
Than body ever walked on.
I have learned
Trying to live
With this perjured quid of mine,
That the truth is not in the stones,
But in the architecture;
Equally, I am not deceived
By the triumph of the stuffing
Over the chair.
If I must build a church,
Though I do not really want one,
Let it be in the wilderness
Out of nothing but nail-holes.
11 May 2006
the idea
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West
Laurie Sheck
[from Laurie Sheck's The Willow Grove]
Filming Jocasta
You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.
And the rope: umbilical, predatory,
how it hangs so strictly from the ceiling
while her robes waft with such softness against the backdrop
of the palace walls, harsh walls. As if to say, But once
she was a child, once swaddled, innocent, even she,
the long ago and ever after faintly beating in each cell.
Then bring the camera closer, closer in,
it is important not to lie. And show how the robes are crevices
of riddled light, how innocence is touched
by fraudulence; there is no other story, other text.
No music to accompany her body. Only the slow turning of the rope.
Only that score that is no score, how silence is the voice
of damage, its taped mouth.
And her shadow on the wall, freakish curtain oddly beating
in the wind, blurred inscription of some lost intention;
let the camera hold it for a moment, then move on.
Here is the empty room, how large it is, how drafty.
And her smallness, for a moment, so pitiful within it;
the room like a mouth that can't speak, like the silence her body
has become, her body like a severed tongue.
And then let her body and the room become a city
where the hallowed laws are quiet, the gated storefronts quiet.
And all throughout the city's central district
there are rows of display cases, necklaces glittering
on velvet covered cardboard shaped like collarbones and necks.
Blue velvet, diamonds, gold. And rings lined up in rows,
hat pins poised like silver birds, white gloves
on plaster hands. City that turns and turns
on its invisible cold rope, and the shadows of the awful tapered hands.
No one has found her yet,
her body white as streetglare, the cold glow of the unbought
still poised there, waiting to be bought. Her hands frozen
as if molded, waiting. But still there is the question of her face,
the horrible purple, the messyness of crime.
The way the eyes bulge out like vats of half-spilled
paint, innards churning in the wind.
Not even eyes now, really, but the aftermath of eyes,
exploded. At least the frozen hands are whole,
as if some innocence remained within them even to the end.
But there was no innocence in the eyes.
And the hands cannot cover them.
Filming Jocasta
You must not show her face. Only the hands
where each granite planetary knuckle
slowly pales as if submerged in water, stripped down as after seizure,
those hands that now hold nothing.
And the rope: umbilical, predatory,
how it hangs so strictly from the ceiling
while her robes waft with such softness against the backdrop
of the palace walls, harsh walls. As if to say, But once
she was a child, once swaddled, innocent, even she,
the long ago and ever after faintly beating in each cell.
Then bring the camera closer, closer in,
it is important not to lie. And show how the robes are crevices
of riddled light, how innocence is touched
by fraudulence; there is no other story, other text.
No music to accompany her body. Only the slow turning of the rope.
Only that score that is no score, how silence is the voice
of damage, its taped mouth.
And her shadow on the wall, freakish curtain oddly beating
in the wind, blurred inscription of some lost intention;
let the camera hold it for a moment, then move on.
Here is the empty room, how large it is, how drafty.
And her smallness, for a moment, so pitiful within it;
the room like a mouth that can't speak, like the silence her body
has become, her body like a severed tongue.
And then let her body and the room become a city
where the hallowed laws are quiet, the gated storefronts quiet.
And all throughout the city's central district
there are rows of display cases, necklaces glittering
on velvet covered cardboard shaped like collarbones and necks.
Blue velvet, diamonds, gold. And rings lined up in rows,
hat pins poised like silver birds, white gloves
on plaster hands. City that turns and turns
on its invisible cold rope, and the shadows of the awful tapered hands.
No one has found her yet,
her body white as streetglare, the cold glow of the unbought
still poised there, waiting to be bought. Her hands frozen
as if molded, waiting. But still there is the question of her face,
the horrible purple, the messyness of crime.
The way the eyes bulge out like vats of half-spilled
paint, innards churning in the wind.
Not even eyes now, really, but the aftermath of eyes,
exploded. At least the frozen hands are whole,
as if some innocence remained within them even to the end.
But there was no innocence in the eyes.
And the hands cannot cover them.
07 May 2006
Linda Gregg
[from Linda Gregg's Chosen by the Lion]
Aphrodite and the Nature of Art
I want a net made of iron to hold
what I am. I love artifice.
Hephaestus made the net that hoisted up
his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover.
Caught them in their gleaming hardness,
all ecstasy and soft, most secret flesh.
Good, she thought, at the root of her being
as she locked her ankles around the gardenia
that she is. While the two men yelled
at each other, the women filed out of the room
full of chaos as well as shape. Their husbands
stood amazed at what they were seeing,
the wonderful fish-like economy of her lower back,
seeing the links pressed into her body's delight
and leaving the imprint rose-colored on her
pale flesh. Hair swelling through some of the gaps
as the crippled maker raised them like a masterpiece
higher in the half-light of the vast room.
Aphrodite and the Nature of Art
I want a net made of iron to hold
what I am. I love artifice.
Hephaestus made the net that hoisted up
his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover.
Caught them in their gleaming hardness,
all ecstasy and soft, most secret flesh.
Good, she thought, at the root of her being
as she locked her ankles around the gardenia
that she is. While the two men yelled
at each other, the women filed out of the room
full of chaos as well as shape. Their husbands
stood amazed at what they were seeing,
the wonderful fish-like economy of her lower back,
seeing the links pressed into her body's delight
and leaving the imprint rose-colored on her
pale flesh. Hair swelling through some of the gaps
as the crippled maker raised them like a masterpiece
higher in the half-light of the vast room.
06 May 2006
Paul Celan via Popov & McHugh
[from Paul Celan's glottal stop]
Proverb on the Wall
Defaced (a renovated angel ceases to be)
a head comes into its own,
sharpsighted,
the astral
weapon
with its stock of memory
salutes
the
lions of its thought.
Proverb on the Wall
Defaced (a renovated angel ceases to be)
a head comes into its own,
sharpsighted,
the astral
weapon
with its stock of memory
salutes
the
lions of its thought.
05 May 2006
Gerald Barrax
[from Gerald Barrax's From a Person Sitting in Darkness]
Whose Children Are These?
1
Whose children are these?
Who do these children belong to?
With no power to watch over,
He looks at them, sleeping,
Exhaustion overwhelming hunger,
Barely protected with burlap from the cold
Cabin. Fear and rage make him tremble
For them; for himself, shame that he can do no more
Than die for them,
For no certain purpose. He heard about the woman,
Margaret Garner, in spite of the white folks' silence.
How she killed two of hers
To keep them from being taken back.
Killed herself after the others were taken back
Anyway. So she saved
Two. He couldn't save his Ellen and Henry.
Who do these belong to?
He doesn't dare kiss them
Now, but stands dreaming,
Willing these five back
To a place or forward to a time
He can't remember or imagine.
All he can do is find the place
He knows about. Leave now
Before dawn sets the white fields raging
And murders the North Star.
2
Grandsire, I kissed, blessed, chewed, and swallowed your rage
when I stood over the five you sent, warm in their beds,
and force-fed my stunned dumb soul to believe someone
owned, someone bought, someone sold at will
our children, Grandsire, I held them, I held them
as you could not, and revered that fierce mother
whose courage and whose solution I could not.
But we have not rescued them altogether.
We moved them through one dimension, from one killing
field to another on history's flat page,
1850s' slavery to 1980s' racism and murder.
Baraka has told us "They have made
this star unsafe, and this age, primitive,"
and it is so. I stood over each child sleeping
and looked at each child and wanted to know
who decides to break our hearts one by one by one.
The Greeks named it Tyche and made a goddess of chance.
Here they call it this god's "mysterious Will."
I have the children, but we have not saved them
from this primitive star, and I can't forgive.
10 September 1985
Whose Children Are These?
1
Whose children are these?
Who do these children belong to?
With no power to watch over,
He looks at them, sleeping,
Exhaustion overwhelming hunger,
Barely protected with burlap from the cold
Cabin. Fear and rage make him tremble
For them; for himself, shame that he can do no more
Than die for them,
For no certain purpose. He heard about the woman,
Margaret Garner, in spite of the white folks' silence.
How she killed two of hers
To keep them from being taken back.
Killed herself after the others were taken back
Anyway. So she saved
Two. He couldn't save his Ellen and Henry.
Who do these belong to?
He doesn't dare kiss them
Now, but stands dreaming,
Willing these five back
To a place or forward to a time
He can't remember or imagine.
All he can do is find the place
He knows about. Leave now
Before dawn sets the white fields raging
And murders the North Star.
2
Grandsire, I kissed, blessed, chewed, and swallowed your rage
when I stood over the five you sent, warm in their beds,
and force-fed my stunned dumb soul to believe someone
owned, someone bought, someone sold at will
our children, Grandsire, I held them, I held them
as you could not, and revered that fierce mother
whose courage and whose solution I could not.
But we have not rescued them altogether.
We moved them through one dimension, from one killing
field to another on history's flat page,
1850s' slavery to 1980s' racism and murder.
Baraka has told us "They have made
this star unsafe, and this age, primitive,"
and it is so. I stood over each child sleeping
and looked at each child and wanted to know
who decides to break our hearts one by one by one.
The Greeks named it Tyche and made a goddess of chance.
Here they call it this god's "mysterious Will."
I have the children, but we have not saved them
from this primitive star, and I can't forgive.
10 September 1985
29 April 2006
28 April 2006
Sarah Lindsay
[from Sarah Lindsay's Mount Clutter]
Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree
He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming
of a tree, dreaming of a tree
and its sound like a hush,
and it seemed he could open
his mouth when he woke and make the others
know something they didn't already know,
his tree. But he woke and he couldn't.
He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree
of his arms and called to the others,
but all he could say, all they could say,
was tree, not that one, no, not here,
tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.
Later a leopard dragged him some distance
and left him on the remains of his back,
his plucked face tilted up, and a seed
fell on the stub of his tongue
in his open mouth. Took root,
sent a finger between his teeth
that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness
and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed
on what was in his braincase
and mixed with the sky, and made
a sound in the wind that was
almost what he wanted.
Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree
He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming
of a tree, dreaming of a tree
and its sound like a hush,
and it seemed he could open
his mouth when he woke and make the others
know something they didn't already know,
his tree. But he woke and he couldn't.
He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree
of his arms and called to the others,
but all he could say, all they could say,
was tree, not that one, no, not here,
tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.
Later a leopard dragged him some distance
and left him on the remains of his back,
his plucked face tilted up, and a seed
fell on the stub of his tongue
in his open mouth. Took root,
sent a finger between his teeth
that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness
and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed
on what was in his braincase
and mixed with the sky, and made
a sound in the wind that was
almost what he wanted.
27 April 2006
Alice Fulton
[from Alice Fulton's Cascade Experiment]
My Diamond Stud
He’ll be a former cat burglar
because I have baubles
to lose. I’ll know him
by the black
carnation he’s tossing:
heads, he takes me,
stems, the same. Yes,
he’ll be a hitchhiker at this
roller-rink I frequent, my diamond
stud who’ll wheel up shedding
sparks & say “Ecoutez
bé-bé. I’m a member
of a famous folded trapeze
act. My agility is legend, etc.”
keeping his jeweler’s eye on
my gold fillings. He’ll know
what I really want: whipping
me with flowers, his fingers’ grosgrain
sanded smooth, raw
to my every move. For our tryst
we’ll go to travel-folder heaven
& buff-puff each other’s
calluses in valentine tubs.
He’ll swindle the black heart
between my thighs
dress me up in ultra-
suede sheaths, himself
in naugahyde. No,
leather. He’d never
let anything touch him
that wasn’t once alive.
My Diamond Stud
He’ll be a former cat burglar
because I have baubles
to lose. I’ll know him
by the black
carnation he’s tossing:
heads, he takes me,
stems, the same. Yes,
he’ll be a hitchhiker at this
roller-rink I frequent, my diamond
stud who’ll wheel up shedding
sparks & say “Ecoutez
bé-bé. I’m a member
of a famous folded trapeze
act. My agility is legend, etc.”
keeping his jeweler’s eye on
my gold fillings. He’ll know
what I really want: whipping
me with flowers, his fingers’ grosgrain
sanded smooth, raw
to my every move. For our tryst
we’ll go to travel-folder heaven
& buff-puff each other’s
calluses in valentine tubs.
He’ll swindle the black heart
between my thighs
dress me up in ultra-
suede sheaths, himself
in naugahyde. No,
leather. He’d never
let anything touch him
that wasn’t once alive.
26 April 2006
Susan Stewart
[from Susan Stewart's Poetry and the Fate of the Senses]
because poetic voice is informed by, often indeed formed by, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition, its volition is problematic — more problematic than, say, the production of discursive sentences in prose such as these. We will see that this doubled movement in poetic production, toward mastery on the one hand and toward being mastered on the other, has made poetry suspect as a force against reason and valued as a means of ecstasis. . . . Tactility, manipulation, and externalization remain the “touchstones” or reality . . . and the wind as a force of possession the vehicle of transport and self-transformation. . . .
What do we mean when we speak of “voice” in poetry? To indulge in such creative writing workshop clichés as that of “the poet finding his or her own voice” is to substitute a reifying and mystifying version of subjectivity for what is in fact most profound and engaging about poetic voice — that is, the plays of transformation it evokes beyond the irreducibility of its own grain, its own potential for silence. The “object” of my love for your voice emerges in the relation between my history and the uniqueness of your existence, the particular timbre, tone, hesitations, and features of articulation by which all the voices subject to your own history have shaped your voice’s instrument. In listening, I am listening to the material history of your connection to all the dead and the living who have been impressed upon you. The voice, with the eyes, holds within itself the life of the self — it cannot be another’s.
because poetic voice is informed by, often indeed formed by, the imperatives of rhythm and repetition, its volition is problematic — more problematic than, say, the production of discursive sentences in prose such as these. We will see that this doubled movement in poetic production, toward mastery on the one hand and toward being mastered on the other, has made poetry suspect as a force against reason and valued as a means of ecstasis. . . . Tactility, manipulation, and externalization remain the “touchstones” or reality . . . and the wind as a force of possession the vehicle of transport and self-transformation. . . .
What do we mean when we speak of “voice” in poetry? To indulge in such creative writing workshop clichés as that of “the poet finding his or her own voice” is to substitute a reifying and mystifying version of subjectivity for what is in fact most profound and engaging about poetic voice — that is, the plays of transformation it evokes beyond the irreducibility of its own grain, its own potential for silence. The “object” of my love for your voice emerges in the relation between my history and the uniqueness of your existence, the particular timbre, tone, hesitations, and features of articulation by which all the voices subject to your own history have shaped your voice’s instrument. In listening, I am listening to the material history of your connection to all the dead and the living who have been impressed upon you. The voice, with the eyes, holds within itself the life of the self — it cannot be another’s.
25 April 2006
Laurie Sheck
[from The Willow Grove by Laurie Sheck]
The Stockroom
I watch the boy shoot up.
His head woozes back, eyes fluttering lightly
into what land, what dreamy repetition, separateness, deferment,
grainy black and white of this sleep that is not sleep?
He closes his eyes but I still watch. I am a child. I do not know
who he is,
or how he’s wandered back
into the stockroom of this store. I am supposed to be up front
where it is light, helping to sell buttons, pencils, keys.
I am supposed to walk around in the safe glare,
the sharp-edged present tense.
But here in this dim room behind the aisles
the boy crawls slowly toward a wall
that used to be part of the bakery next door—brick ovens three
feet deep
with rounded tops like quaint old-fashioned doorways,
crumbling now, and damp, his head swaying like a battered stalk.
He leans back into the oven-dark and shivers,
scratches his cheek with one hand and then the other;
he smooths his itchy skin, scaly, purplish-red.
What tense is it he drifts in? What tense in which memories rise up
disguised so they won’t stun, mixing with this musty air,
these towers of cardboard boxes held in the eerie sway
of so much want? What tense in which we sit,
the boy and I, and do not speak, the dark like a god
and our small bodies like errors
the god wants to take back again, out of his created world?
And what tense in which the musty dampness holds the ovens
like moldy unrocked cradles, eye-holes, graves,
and street-cries skip and flare above our listening, but they are
muffled
from back here, as if they could not touch us, yet still here?
The drawers of the cash registers clack open again and again
like solved equations, while the boy breathes so softly,
his hands clutched into fists now
as if trying to protect something hidden, keep it safe.
There is the dark of his closed hands, there is the oven-dark,
and then the larger stockroom dark. I think there is no tense for this—
how he rubs his palms into his eyes
then slides his bony shoulders and thin face toward the light
of the narrow doorway, the long aisles
just out of sight, and then turns slowly back.
Land of transactions, of tactics, sirens, cries—
it is what waits outside this dark and doesn’t want to know this dark.
Aisles of clocks, of kitchenware, venetian blinds.
He looks up from the dimness and damp brick, his eyes drifting
—where?—
before me, into what abrogation, what refusal
of earthly terror, earthly place?
The Stockroom
I watch the boy shoot up.
His head woozes back, eyes fluttering lightly
into what land, what dreamy repetition, separateness, deferment,
grainy black and white of this sleep that is not sleep?
He closes his eyes but I still watch. I am a child. I do not know
who he is,
or how he’s wandered back
into the stockroom of this store. I am supposed to be up front
where it is light, helping to sell buttons, pencils, keys.
I am supposed to walk around in the safe glare,
the sharp-edged present tense.
But here in this dim room behind the aisles
the boy crawls slowly toward a wall
that used to be part of the bakery next door—brick ovens three
feet deep
with rounded tops like quaint old-fashioned doorways,
crumbling now, and damp, his head swaying like a battered stalk.
He leans back into the oven-dark and shivers,
scratches his cheek with one hand and then the other;
he smooths his itchy skin, scaly, purplish-red.
What tense is it he drifts in? What tense in which memories rise up
disguised so they won’t stun, mixing with this musty air,
these towers of cardboard boxes held in the eerie sway
of so much want? What tense in which we sit,
the boy and I, and do not speak, the dark like a god
and our small bodies like errors
the god wants to take back again, out of his created world?
And what tense in which the musty dampness holds the ovens
like moldy unrocked cradles, eye-holes, graves,
and street-cries skip and flare above our listening, but they are
muffled
from back here, as if they could not touch us, yet still here?
The drawers of the cash registers clack open again and again
like solved equations, while the boy breathes so softly,
his hands clutched into fists now
as if trying to protect something hidden, keep it safe.
There is the dark of his closed hands, there is the oven-dark,
and then the larger stockroom dark. I think there is no tense for this—
how he rubs his palms into his eyes
then slides his bony shoulders and thin face toward the light
of the narrow doorway, the long aisles
just out of sight, and then turns slowly back.
Land of transactions, of tactics, sirens, cries—
it is what waits outside this dark and doesn’t want to know this dark.
Aisles of clocks, of kitchenware, venetian blinds.
He looks up from the dimness and damp brick, his eyes drifting
—where?—
before me, into what abrogation, what refusal
of earthly terror, earthly place?
18 April 2006
Carol Peters
My friends and I have been writing prisoner's constraint poems. The poetic alphabet contains lower-case letters that have no ascenders or descenders. Mine from yesterday:
canoe winnow
-- for Jilly Dybka: a prisoner's constraint
we earn
a worn savior
a warm mirror
a woman's reassurance
we seize
moon sneezes
maize over rice
men in mouse ears
we examine
voice over
vicious winners
verses as manumission
we mean
noise in vain
noxious suasion
names as services
we cause
air waves
iron creases
excess nerves
we vow
raw manure
race winners
reason over worms
we rouse
an inner sense
an asinine caress
an onion’s sorrow
we woo
wee-oo
oo-wee-oo
canoe winnow
-- for Jilly Dybka: a prisoner's constraint
we earn
a worn savior
a warm mirror
a woman's reassurance
we seize
moon sneezes
maize over rice
men in mouse ears
we examine
voice over
vicious winners
verses as manumission
we mean
noise in vain
noxious suasion
names as services
we cause
air waves
iron creases
excess nerves
we vow
raw manure
race winners
reason over worms
we rouse
an inner sense
an asinine caress
an onion’s sorrow
we woo
wee-oo
oo-wee-oo
16 April 2006
15 April 2006
Louise Labé via Annie Finch
[from The Body of Poetry by Annie Finch]
Sonnet 18: Kiss Me Again
by Louise Labé
translated by Annie Finch
Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss
me again, with your richest, most succulent
kiss; then adore me with another kiss, meant
to steam out fourfold the very hottest hiss
from my love-hot coals. Do I hear you moaning? This
is my plan to soothe you: ten more kisses, sent
just for your pleasure. Then, both sweetly bent
on love, we'll enter joy through doubleness,
and we'll each have two loving lives to tend:
one in our single self, one in our friend.
I'll tell you something honest now, my Love:
it's very bad for me to live apart.
There's no way I can have a happy heart
without some place outside myself to move.
Sonnet 18: Kiss Me Again
by Louise Labé
translated by Annie Finch
Kiss me again, rekiss me, and then kiss
me again, with your richest, most succulent
kiss; then adore me with another kiss, meant
to steam out fourfold the very hottest hiss
from my love-hot coals. Do I hear you moaning? This
is my plan to soothe you: ten more kisses, sent
just for your pleasure. Then, both sweetly bent
on love, we'll enter joy through doubleness,
and we'll each have two loving lives to tend:
one in our single self, one in our friend.
I'll tell you something honest now, my Love:
it's very bad for me to live apart.
There's no way I can have a happy heart
without some place outside myself to move.
13 April 2006
Larry Levis
[from The Selected Levis by Larry Levis]
Fish
for Philip Levine
The cop holds me up like a fish;
he feels the huge bones
surrounding my eyes,
and he runs a thumb under them,
lifting my eyelids
as if they were
envelopes filled with the night.
Now he turns
my head back and forth, gently,
until I’m so tame and still
I could be a tiny plastic
skull left on the
dashboard of a junked car.
By now he’s so sure of me
he chews gum,
and drops his flashlight to his side;
he could be cleaning a trout
while the pines rise into the darkness,
though tonight trout
are freezing into bits of stars
under the ice. When he lets me go
I feel numb. I feel like
a fish burned by his touch, and turn
and slip into the cold
night rippling with neons,
and the razor blades
of the poor,
and the torn mouths on posters.
Once, I thought even through this
I could go quietly as a star
turning over and over
in the deep truce of its light.
Now, I must
go on repeating the last, filthy
words on the lips
of this shrunken head,
shining out of its death in the moon—
until trout surface
with their petrified, round eyes,
and the stars begin moving.
Fish
for Philip Levine
The cop holds me up like a fish;
he feels the huge bones
surrounding my eyes,
and he runs a thumb under them,
lifting my eyelids
as if they were
envelopes filled with the night.
Now he turns
my head back and forth, gently,
until I’m so tame and still
I could be a tiny plastic
skull left on the
dashboard of a junked car.
By now he’s so sure of me
he chews gum,
and drops his flashlight to his side;
he could be cleaning a trout
while the pines rise into the darkness,
though tonight trout
are freezing into bits of stars
under the ice. When he lets me go
I feel numb. I feel like
a fish burned by his touch, and turn
and slip into the cold
night rippling with neons,
and the razor blades
of the poor,
and the torn mouths on posters.
Once, I thought even through this
I could go quietly as a star
turning over and over
in the deep truce of its light.
Now, I must
go on repeating the last, filthy
words on the lips
of this shrunken head,
shining out of its death in the moon—
until trout surface
with their petrified, round eyes,
and the stars begin moving.
12 April 2006
James Meek
Thank you Jai Clare for pointing me at James Meek's novel, The People's Act of Love, long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. A fine read about imaginary real worlds: Siberia in the early years of the 20th century, a sect of castrates, a prison camp, cannibalism, the Czechoslovak Legion. A taste:
He touched one of the apprentices on the shoulder and the man got up and stood on a flat rock near the edge of the clearing. He stretched his arms out horizontally on either side and began to turn on one foot, quickly reacing such a speed that his body blurred, like a top, and he lost the appearance of a man. He looked to be of a lighter substance than the still world around him. I thought he might rise from the rock and begin to float up into the trees. A second apprentice walked over to him and, after some minutes spinning, the figure slowed, returned to its Earthly substance, and fell, sodden with sweat and with eyes closed, mumbling and smiling, into the arms of his fellow. . . .
At night when he couldn't sleep he'd kneel by my bed, put his hand under the blanket and stroke my ribs, running his fingertips in the troughs between them, rubbing the pit where my stomach'd been with the palm of his hand, kneading the hollow from hipbone to hipbone like a baker smearing dough. He said: "Do you want to know what I'm doing?" I said "No." He said: "I'm feeling for your heart." I lay still on my back and let him do it. I wanted to ask him for bread. I was afraid to. His fingers were rough and warm and down through the bones and flesh I could feel him shaking as he wept. Sometimes his tears fell on my face and I opened my mouth. He couldn't see in the darkness that I was drinking them. In the morning he'd take half my ration. . . .
11 April 2006
David Wojahn
[from Mystery Train by David Wojahn]
The Assassination of Robert Goulet as Performed by Elvis Presley:
Memphis 1968
That jerk's got no heart.—E. P.
He dies vicariously on "Carol Burnett,"
Exploding to glass and tubes while singing "Camelot."
Arms outstretched, he dies Las Vegas-ed in a tux,
As the King, frenzied in his Graceland den, untucks
His .38 and pumps a bullet in the set.
(There are three on his wall, placed side by side.)
The room goes dark with the shot, but he gets the Boys
To change the fuses. By candlelight he toys
With his pearl-handled beauty. Lights back on,
But Goulet's vanished, replaced by downtown Saigon:
Satellite footage, the Tet offensive,
Bodies strewn along Ky's palace fences.
Above a boy whose head he's calmly blown apart,
An ARVN colonel smokes a cigarette.
Elvis Moving a Small Cloud: The Desert Near Las Vegas, 1976
after the painting by Susan Baker
"Stop this motherfucking limo," says the King,
And the Caddie, halting, raises fins of dust
Into a landscape made of creosote,
Lizards, dismembered tires. The King's been reading
Again—Mind Over Matter: Yogic Texts
On Spiritual Renewal by Doctor Krishna
Majunukta, A Guide on How to Tap the
Boundless Mental Powers of the Ancients.
Bodyguards and hangers-on pile out.
His highness, shades off, scans the east horizon.
"Boys, today I'm gonna show you somethin'
You can tell your grandchildren about."
He aims a finger at Nevada's only cloud.
"Lo! Behold! Now watch that fucker move!"
The Assassination of Robert Goulet as Performed by Elvis Presley:
Memphis 1968
That jerk's got no heart.—E. P.
He dies vicariously on "Carol Burnett,"
Exploding to glass and tubes while singing "Camelot."
Arms outstretched, he dies Las Vegas-ed in a tux,
As the King, frenzied in his Graceland den, untucks
His .38 and pumps a bullet in the set.
(There are three on his wall, placed side by side.)
The room goes dark with the shot, but he gets the Boys
To change the fuses. By candlelight he toys
With his pearl-handled beauty. Lights back on,
But Goulet's vanished, replaced by downtown Saigon:
Satellite footage, the Tet offensive,
Bodies strewn along Ky's palace fences.
Above a boy whose head he's calmly blown apart,
An ARVN colonel smokes a cigarette.
Elvis Moving a Small Cloud: The Desert Near Las Vegas, 1976
after the painting by Susan Baker
"Stop this motherfucking limo," says the King,
And the Caddie, halting, raises fins of dust
Into a landscape made of creosote,
Lizards, dismembered tires. The King's been reading
Again—Mind Over Matter: Yogic Texts
On Spiritual Renewal by Doctor Krishna
Majunukta, A Guide on How to Tap the
Boundless Mental Powers of the Ancients.
Bodyguards and hangers-on pile out.
His highness, shades off, scans the east horizon.
"Boys, today I'm gonna show you somethin'
You can tell your grandchildren about."
He aims a finger at Nevada's only cloud.
"Lo! Behold! Now watch that fucker move!"
10 April 2006
Paul Celan, Albert Camus
What stood by you
appears on every shore
mown down
into another image.
- Paul Celan
Glottal Stop
translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
- Albert Camus
appears on every shore
mown down
into another image.
- Paul Celan
Glottal Stop
translated by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
- Albert Camus
07 April 2006
Ann Deagon
[from There Is No Balm in Birmingham by Ann Deagon; originally published by David R. Godine, 1978; second edition by St. Andrews Press, 1997]
Customs of the Esquimaux Women
They do not stalk the caribou
tall-boned over hard white.
Kneeling fur-trousered low to
the bleak of ice they cut one
pure hole, prise up its flat moon.
In under sea the muscled seal
like dark pigs root for air.
One woman loosens furs, dips one
bare breast into the breathing hole:
its nipple spurts a thread of scent.
Seal veer and rise, their snouts
nudge, nuzzle, strike. The woman
screams, they grapple, tug the black
clenched beast on ice, hack off
its head, the woman's cry still coming hoarse,
rhythmic.
Nights in the igloo she crouches,
softens stiff skin between her teeth.
Beside her in a shallow stone
seal blubber flickers the whole night.
Customs of the Esquimaux Women
They do not stalk the caribou
tall-boned over hard white.
Kneeling fur-trousered low to
the bleak of ice they cut one
pure hole, prise up its flat moon.
In under sea the muscled seal
like dark pigs root for air.
One woman loosens furs, dips one
bare breast into the breathing hole:
its nipple spurts a thread of scent.
Seal veer and rise, their snouts
nudge, nuzzle, strike. The woman
screams, they grapple, tug the black
clenched beast on ice, hack off
its head, the woman's cry still coming hoarse,
rhythmic.
Nights in the igloo she crouches,
softens stiff skin between her teeth.
Beside her in a shallow stone
seal blubber flickers the whole night.
06 April 2006
syntax
[from Sound and Form in Modern Poetry by Harvey Gross]
Syntax, the order of words as they arrange themselves into patterns of meaning, is the analogue to harmony in music. Like harmony, syntax generates tension and relaxation, the feelings of expectation and fulfillment that make up the dynamics of poetic life. Suzanne Langer remarks:
Syntax gives us the arc of “literal sense,” the articulations of meaning. Like harmony in music, syntax makes connections, strengthens ideas, and relates thematic material. Eliot himself emphasizes that music in poetry does not inhere in word melody and tone color, but in the harmony of meanings and connections:
The reverberation of words, their semantic resonances, are the shifting tones in the harmony of intersections and associations.
Eliot’s syntax carries the bass line of his prosody. Through a deliberate and idiosyncratic use of repeated grammar and repeated words, Eliot achieves qualities common to both music and poetry—the feelings of arrest and motion, of beginnings and endings, of striving and stillness.
————
(1) Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA, 1942), p. 261.
(2) T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 24-25.
Syntax, the order of words as they arrange themselves into patterns of meaning, is the analogue to harmony in music. Like harmony, syntax generates tension and relaxation, the feelings of expectation and fulfillment that make up the dynamics of poetic life. Suzanne Langer remarks:
The tension which music achieves through dissonance, and the reorientation in each new resolution to harmony, find their equivalents in the suspensions and periodic decisions of propositional sense in poetry. Literal sense, not euphony, is the “harmonic structure” of poetry; word melody in literature is more akin to tone color in music. (1)
Syntax gives us the arc of “literal sense,” the articulations of meaning. Like harmony in music, syntax makes connections, strengthens ideas, and relates thematic material. Eliot himself emphasizes that music in poetry does not inhere in word melody and tone color, but in the harmony of meanings and connections:
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words. . . . The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association. (2)
The reverberation of words, their semantic resonances, are the shifting tones in the harmony of intersections and associations.
Eliot’s syntax carries the bass line of his prosody. Through a deliberate and idiosyncratic use of repeated grammar and repeated words, Eliot achieves qualities common to both music and poetry—the feelings of arrest and motion, of beginnings and endings, of striving and stillness.
————
(1) Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA, 1942), p. 261.
(2) T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 24-25.
Pattiann Rogers
[from Firekeeper by Pattiann Rogers]
The Family Is All There Is
Think of those old, enduring connections
found in all flesh—the channeling
wires and threads, vacuoles, granules,
plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending
boles and coral sapwood (sugar-
and light-filled), those common ligaments,
filaments, fibers and canals.
Seminal to all kin also is the open
mouth—in heart urchin and octopus belly,
in catfish, moonfish, forest lily,
and rugosa rose, in thirsty magpie,
wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler,
yawning coati.
And there is a pervasive clasping
common to the clan—the hard nails
of lichen and ivy sucker
on the church wall, the bean tendril
and the taproot, the bolted coupling
of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater
on its morning squid, guanine
to cytosine, adenine to thymine,
fingers around fingers, the grip
of the voice on presence, the grasp
of the self on place.
Remember the same hair on pygmy
dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar,
covering red baboon, thistle seed
and willow herb? Remember the similar
snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose
and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar
whinny and shimmer found in river birches,
bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles,
in children playing at shoulder tag
on a summer lawn?
The family—weavers, reachers, winders
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air
and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders,
wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators—all
brothers, sisters, all there is.
Name something else.
The Family Is All There Is
Think of those old, enduring connections
found in all flesh—the channeling
wires and threads, vacuoles, granules,
plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending
boles and coral sapwood (sugar-
and light-filled), those common ligaments,
filaments, fibers and canals.
Seminal to all kin also is the open
mouth—in heart urchin and octopus belly,
in catfish, moonfish, forest lily,
and rugosa rose, in thirsty magpie,
wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler,
yawning coati.
And there is a pervasive clasping
common to the clan—the hard nails
of lichen and ivy sucker
on the church wall, the bean tendril
and the taproot, the bolted coupling
of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater
on its morning squid, guanine
to cytosine, adenine to thymine,
fingers around fingers, the grip
of the voice on presence, the grasp
of the self on place.
Remember the same hair on pygmy
dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar,
covering red baboon, thistle seed
and willow herb? Remember the similar
snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose
and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar
whinny and shimmer found in river birches,
bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles,
in children playing at shoulder tag
on a summer lawn?
The family—weavers, reachers, winders
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air
and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders,
wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators—all
brothers, sisters, all there is.
Name something else.
04 April 2006
Gerard Manley Hopkins
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, lét be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, lét be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’S not wrung, see you; unforseentimes rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.
03 April 2006
Cole Swensen
[from Goest by Cole Swensen]
The Future of Sculpture (excerpt)
Cy Twombly, Sculptures, National Gallery, Washington DC, 2001
The Future of Light
Give the box
back to the weal (the sun peeled) to a line, which is thin, to a dim
Give it back to him.
As the white brush brushes over you again you are counting time run
into the sun (until it equals)
Throw the sun into the box.
The box is painted white. By your own hand
the sun was hauled into view and proved to be
a pale thing off which the paint is flaking.
In Time the Wind Will Come and Destroy my Lemons
Rome 1987
Everything white is turning
into a white wall
And we . . .
The Future of Sculpture (excerpt)
Cy Twombly, Sculptures, National Gallery, Washington DC, 2001
The Future of Light
Give the box
back to the weal (the sun peeled) to a line, which is thin, to a dim
Give it back to him.
As the white brush brushes over you again you are counting time run
into the sun (until it equals)
Throw the sun into the box.
The box is painted white. By your own hand
the sun was hauled into view and proved to be
a pale thing off which the paint is flaking.
In Time the Wind Will Come and Destroy my Lemons
Rome 1987
Everything white is turning
into a white wall
And we . . .
Dave Smith
[from Little Boats, Unsalvaged by Dave Smith]
Most epithalamiums don't merit the ink, but here's an exception.
Oyster Beds
On the marriage of Lael and Hunter Eley
Wicked, I called them, ridged shells soft-folded, tide-shifters,
clingers to white dull walls of homes I could never live in, so
I thought. Then slipped among the inner rooms of shells, heaps,
pier-holders, little joists, sepulchral cities of families, quiet’s
blizzards of tiny fish, too, feeling’s shapes, edge schools
that pump and nudge and woo the eye that falls upon them.
These seemed easy to understand, crowds of dreamers in blue.
But I had no taste for what dark gouged, slurped, raked, beds
of lumps like saltwater foam some god commanded to be flesh.
I knew what they were. One in summer light opened on me.
Where it lay in water’s bed, sunning, I walked, not warned.
Then the white of bone slipped out, my foot’s blood flowed,
teased stain of me large, mysterious, that left on us surrounding
touch like a first kiss. Mud shone as if torched that day. Skins
of sails cut the harbor to a room, bobbers left shoes, watches,
rings, near-naked in light, walking sand, knee-deep flirting it.
For you I’d gone forth. Now I heard old words: come on, heart,
give the thing your try, blest are willed-together ones, sweeter
opening, and chillest tides strike seed. I walked swallowing in
your uplifted loving face, by marsh and hill, lying nights alive,
rivulets of salt scaling us, life’s mouth wide. We knew it. Gulp,
you said, it’s good. We would eat, be whole together, then rise up.
Most epithalamiums don't merit the ink, but here's an exception.
Oyster Beds
On the marriage of Lael and Hunter Eley
Wicked, I called them, ridged shells soft-folded, tide-shifters,
clingers to white dull walls of homes I could never live in, so
I thought. Then slipped among the inner rooms of shells, heaps,
pier-holders, little joists, sepulchral cities of families, quiet’s
blizzards of tiny fish, too, feeling’s shapes, edge schools
that pump and nudge and woo the eye that falls upon them.
These seemed easy to understand, crowds of dreamers in blue.
But I had no taste for what dark gouged, slurped, raked, beds
of lumps like saltwater foam some god commanded to be flesh.
I knew what they were. One in summer light opened on me.
Where it lay in water’s bed, sunning, I walked, not warned.
Then the white of bone slipped out, my foot’s blood flowed,
teased stain of me large, mysterious, that left on us surrounding
touch like a first kiss. Mud shone as if torched that day. Skins
of sails cut the harbor to a room, bobbers left shoes, watches,
rings, near-naked in light, walking sand, knee-deep flirting it.
For you I’d gone forth. Now I heard old words: come on, heart,
give the thing your try, blest are willed-together ones, sweeter
opening, and chillest tides strike seed. I walked swallowing in
your uplifted loving face, by marsh and hill, lying nights alive,
rivulets of salt scaling us, life’s mouth wide. We knew it. Gulp,
you said, it’s good. We would eat, be whole together, then rise up.
02 April 2006
David Wojahn
[from Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982 - 2004
by David Wojahn]
Radnóti in a Trench Coat
The lyric will be worked to death, on a work detail.
*
Worked until it’s trochees & ellipses for the State.
*
Worked to its Natural State, which is a trench coat filled with entrails.
*
Its grave could fill a soccer stadium. (Now hit delete.)
*
70,000 punctuation marks, virgules & a singing corpse, fortunate
*
to sing inside a trench coat in the Balkan snow.
*
Inside the pockets of the trench coat (now hit
*
enter), words that speak Hungarian, aligned in rows
*
like galley-slave oars. Row Row Row your trireme
*
to Actium to burn & sink. The lyric works until it drowns.
*
(Press undo & the program crashes.) The lyric’s brain
*
accommodates the bullet unsuccessfully. It comes
*
out the forehead & is lodged inside a tree. (Now press
*
exit, now press close.) Now the shovel & the black earth.
Note: Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), a victim of the Holocaust. His final poems were found in the pocket of his overcoat after his body had been exhumed from a mass grave.
by David Wojahn]
Radnóti in a Trench Coat
The lyric will be worked to death, on a work detail.
*
Worked until it’s trochees & ellipses for the State.
*
Worked to its Natural State, which is a trench coat filled with entrails.
*
Its grave could fill a soccer stadium. (Now hit delete.)
*
70,000 punctuation marks, virgules & a singing corpse, fortunate
*
to sing inside a trench coat in the Balkan snow.
*
Inside the pockets of the trench coat (now hit
*
enter), words that speak Hungarian, aligned in rows
*
like galley-slave oars. Row Row Row your trireme
*
to Actium to burn & sink. The lyric works until it drowns.
*
(Press undo & the program crashes.) The lyric’s brain
*
accommodates the bullet unsuccessfully. It comes
*
out the forehead & is lodged inside a tree. (Now press
*
exit, now press close.) Now the shovel & the black earth.
Note: Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), a victim of the Holocaust. His final poems were found in the pocket of his overcoat after his body had been exhumed from a mass grave.
Barbara Presnell
[from Unravelings by Barbara Presnell]
What a Woman Will Give Birth To
Two years after her
so-called spell,
two years of carrying her belly like a brick
and waking up nights to voices in her head,
to the everyday feeling she was just not herself,
doctors reopened the wound.
In the closet of her sunset womb
they found a pair of rusted scissors,
one white glove, a feather from
a mockingbird, three small marbles
(one cat's eye), size 38 Washington
Dee Cee overalls, a handful of baby teeth,
the Vienna boys choir singing "Ave Maria,"
a 1905 buffalo nickel,
the one hundred and twenty-first psalm.
Not long after they cleaned her
out and closed her up,
the emptiness they left behind
killed her.
Yesterday in Asheboro, NC, I studied with Barbara Presnell in a poetry workshop sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society . Thank you Bette Burgess for organizing and participating, Kay Fetner for the almond-coconut cupcakes, and all the other poets who participated.
What a Woman Will Give Birth To
Two years after her
so-called spell,
two years of carrying her belly like a brick
and waking up nights to voices in her head,
to the everyday feeling she was just not herself,
doctors reopened the wound.
In the closet of her sunset womb
they found a pair of rusted scissors,
one white glove, a feather from
a mockingbird, three small marbles
(one cat's eye), size 38 Washington
Dee Cee overalls, a handful of baby teeth,
the Vienna boys choir singing "Ave Maria,"
a 1905 buffalo nickel,
the one hundred and twenty-first psalm.
Not long after they cleaned her
out and closed her up,
the emptiness they left behind
killed her.
Yesterday in Asheboro, NC, I studied with Barbara Presnell in a poetry workshop sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society . Thank you Bette Burgess for organizing and participating, Kay Fetner for the almond-coconut cupcakes, and all the other poets who participated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)