Edward Dorn

[one of Edward Dorn's "Twenty-four Love Songs" from Way Out West, Penguin, 2007]

23

And then, if you come
to the mountains, what
is there more, ore in mines
ore in veins, or more fully than
you might have had it elsewhere.
Call them the Rockie mountains.
They aren't yours and
you never thought they were because
you lived in them too sometime,
someplace ago and know better.
There is a vast smell of marriage
not lightly said, some place
some time ago I was there too.
I've been everywhere.
This afternoon I thought why not,
why not get Jenny into something
and we both fly off to meet,
well, almost anyone. Away
from the flat rancorous smell
of their insinuation, which is
just this: you've done the thing —
you've presumed your body
as well as your mind, your mind
we like to watch go through its sideshow
lifted up in the bright creative air
but when you made other arrangements
for your body, baby go away, that's it


[excerpt from Dorn's Gunslinger]

Jack Spicer

[from Jack Spicer's The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack SpicerThe House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan, 1998]

ET: At what point did you allow these messages to take over or start happening in your poetry?

JS: It happened about halfway through when I was writing After Lorca, when the letters to Lorca started coming and being dictated and the poems, instead of being translations, were dictated. Then I sort of knew what was happening. And when the final thing happened, in the poem, the business of the last letter, I really knew that there was something moving it. Before, I never did. I just had the big thing of you writing poems and isn't that great, and they were sometimes great, sometimes good at least. But after that I never really had any ambitions to do anything else.

Robert Duncan

[from Robert Duncan's Selected Poems: Revised and Enlarged, ed. Robert J. Bertholf, New Directions, 1997]

The Song of the Borderguard

The man with his lion under the shed of wars

sheds his belief as if he shed tears.

The sound of words waits —

a barbarian host at the borderline of sense.

The enamord guards desert their posts

harkening to the lion-smell of a poem

that rings in their ears.

       — Dreams, a certain guard said —

            were never designd so

            to re-arrange an empire.

            Along about six o’clock I take out my guitar

            and sing to a lion

            who sleeps like a line of poetry

            in the shed of wars.

The man shedding his belief

knows that the lion is not asleep,

does not dream, is never asleep,

is a wide-awake poem

waiting like a lover for the disrobing of the guard;

the beautiful boundaries of the empire

naked, rapt round in the smell of a lion.

(The barbarians have passt over the significant phrase)

       — When I was asleep,

            a certain guard says,

       a man shed his clothes as if he shed tears

       and appeard as a lonely lion

       waiting for a song under the shed-roof of wars.

I sang the song that he waited to hear,

I, the Prize-Winner, the Poet-Acclaimed.

Dear, Dear, Dear, Dear, I sang,

believe, believe, believe, believe.

The shed of wars is splendid as the sky,

houses our waiting like a pure song

housing in its words the lion-smell

         of the beloved disrobed.

I sang: believe, believe, believe.

          I the guard because of my guitar

believe. I am the certain guard,

certain of the Beloved, certain of the Lion,

certain of the Empire. I with my guitar.

Dear, Dear, Dear, Dear, I sing.

I, the Prize-Winner, the Poet on Guard.

The borderlines of sense in the morning light

are naked as a line of poetry in a war.

slipper sweat

slipper sweat

heel
       a toe
               sliding

Lorine Niedecker

[from Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, University of California, 2002]

So this was I

in my framed

young aloofness

unsuspecting

               what I filled

eager to remain

a smooth blonde cool

effect of light

an undiffused good take,

               a girl

               who couldn’t bake

How I wish

I had someone to give

this pretty thing to

who’d keep it —

               something of me

               would shape

Robert Creeley

[from an interview with Robert Creeley in David Ossman's The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, Corinth, 1963]

In the earlier poems . . . the emotional terms are very difficult. The poems come from a context that was difficult to live in, and so I wanted the line to be used to register that kind of problem, or that kind of content. Elsewhere I remember I did say that "Form is never more than an extension of content," and by that I meant that the thing to be said will, in that way, determine how it will be said. So that if you're saying, "Go light the fire," "fire" in that registration will have one kind of emphasis, and if you start screaming, "Fire! Fire!" of course that will have another. In other words, the content of what is semantically involved will very much function in how the statement of it occurs. Now the truncated line, or the short, seemingly broken line I was using in my first poems, comes from the somewhat broken emotions that were involved in them. Now, as I begin to relax, as I not so much grow older, but more settled, more at ease in my world, the line can not so much grow softer, but can become . . . more lyrical, less afraid of concluding. And rhyme, of course, is to me a balance not only of sounds, but a balance which implies agreement. That's why, I suppose, I'd stayed away from rhymes in the early poems except for this kind of ironic throwback on what was being said.

Kedrick James

[from Kedrick James's Poet, Pirate, Netbot, Vizpo]

we acquire a new skill . . . obliteracy . . . the ability to make the apparent texts transparent to varying degrees. We disregard more assiduously than we attend . . . all information carries with it a catalytic energy, no matter how insignificant . . . The residue of excess information, its reverberations . . . add character to the gleaning of meaning . . . learning is being reinvented . . .

Knowledge is played on the hegemonica.

Lorine Niedecker

[from Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, University of California, 2002]

Will You Write Me a Christmas Poem

Will I!

The mad stimulus of Gay Gaunt Day
meet to put holly on a tree
and trim green bells
and trim green bells

Now candles come to faces.
Your are wrong to-day
you are wrong to-day,
my dear. My dear —

One translucent morning
in the development of winter
one fog to move a city backward —
Backward, backwards, backward!

You see the objects and the movable fingers,
Candy dripping from branches,
Horoscopes of summer
and you don't have Christmas ultimately —
Ultima Thule ultimately!

Spreads and whimpets
Good to the cherry drops,
Whom for a splendor
Whom for a splendor

I'm going off the paper I'm going off the pap-

Send two birds out
Send two birds out
And carol them in,
Cookies go round.

What a scandal is Christmas,
What a scandle Christmas is,
a red stick-up
to a lily.

You flagellate my woes, you flagellate,
I interpret yours,
holly is a care divine
                holly is a care divine

and where are we all from here.
Drink for there is nothing else to do
but pray,
And where are we all from here.

Throw out the ribbons
and tie your people in
All spans dissever
once the New Year opens
and snow derides
a doorway,
its spasms dissever

All spans dissever,
Wherefore we, for instance, recuperate
no grief to modulate
no grief to modulate
Wherefore we, Free instance

The Christmas cacophony
one word to another,
sound of gilt trailing the world
slippers to presume,
postludes, homicles, sweet tenses
imbecile and corrupt, —
     failing the whirled, trailing the whirled

This great eventual heyday
to plenty the hour thereof,
fidelius.
Heyday! Hey-day! Hey-day!

I fade the color of my wine
that an afternoon might live
foiled with shine and brittle
I fade the color of my wine

Harmony in Egypt,
representative birthday.
Christ what a destiny
What a destiny's Christ's, Christ!

Robert Creeley

[from Robert Creeley's The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975], University of California, 2006]

For Fear

For fear I want
to make myself again
under the thumb
of old love, old time

subservience
and pain, bent
into a nail that will
not come out.

Why, love, does it
make such a difference
not to be heard
in spite of self

or what we may feel,
one for the other,
but as a hammer
to drive again

bent nail
into old hurt?

Edward Dorn

[from Edward Dorn's Way More West, Penguin, 2007]

Like a Message on Sunday

Sits
the forlorn plumber
by the river
with his daughter
       staring at the water
then, at her
his daughter closely.

Once World, he came
to our house to fix the stove
                     and couldn't
   oh, we were arrogant and talked
about him in the next room, doesn't
a man know what he is doing?

Can't it be done right,
            World of iron thorns.
Now they sit by the meagre river
by the water . . . stare
into that plumber
so that I can see a daughter in the water
she thin and silent
he wearing a baseball cap
       in a celebrating town this summer season
may they live on

on, may their failure be kindly, and come
in small pieces.

John Ashbery

[from John Ashbery's Houseboat Days, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977]

Syringa

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can't withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past." But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That's where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn't turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an
       intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates
The different weights of the things.
                                                      But it isn't enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this
And didn't mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it's over. "The end crowns all,"
Meaning also that the "tableau"
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky
Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth
Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
"I'm a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day."

But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And now matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. The singer thinks
Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages
Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.
The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness
Which must in turn flood the whole continent
With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer
Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved
Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. "But what about
So-and-so?" is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.

Abe Louise Young

[Abe Louise Young from Hawaii Review]

Torn Screens

My mother is home with one breast, almost
sleep-walking. Three decades of mercury,
burning batteries, falling ash & all the plastic mysteries
compacted into garbage bags–

                   Trash incinerators
downriver are still stitching torn stockings of smoke
to the skyline, long legs of fire.
A boat’s a hat on house;
     a slab’s covered with underwear,

a cardinal pecks at a nest; the bag of birdseed molds,
& shudders to the other side
of the laundry room by sheer gyrations
of maggots.
            Sorry–
I know nothing; can’t laugh back.

We sit inside, eat General Tsao’s Chicken dripping
with syrup. Talk feral cats. Her sternum’s purple
& black. Her teeth are good, the crowns
are hanging on, though someone stole
her eyelashes.

Better have a baby
quick. Crazy laugh. And then she cries: her voice
is two tones deeper, dry, with the rattle of a hammer
dropped a long way down
the well.

Twenty years ago we caught rabbits
in the swamp that’s since turned iridescent green,
roped off with caution tape.
There’s an oil slick beautifying the lake.

The porch is falling down
     & once was screened
against mosquitoes but the screens got torn & now
are curtains sliced open in a swag,
night theater.

I kiss her cheek, she holds my hand.
We radiate together.

Steeds

1

Bolted. To the inner
arc of Cs

four legs.

Forth
back. Lunge-
powered young
equestrian

on the colt’s
home range.


2

       Thus
reels the

mounts — the buoyancy
of Palominos, of
Appaloosas —

thus

beneath the

surge of chords, of children
twirls itself
(as Appaloosas at
the wild toss

of
brass rings):

calliope.

Ted Berrigan

[from Ted Berrigan's The Collected Poems, University of California, 2005]

III

Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,
deep in whose reeds great elephants decay;
I, an island, sail, and my shores toss
on a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness
bristling hate.
It's true, I weep too much. Dawns break
slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,
what other men sometimes have thought they've seen.
And since then I've been bathing in the poem
lifting her shadowy flowers up for me,
and hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place
the waving flags, nor pass by prison ships
O let me burst, and I be lost at sea!
and fall on my knees then, womanly.

Tom Clark

[from Tom Clark's Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems, Coffee House, 2006]

Radio

Don't hurt the radio for
Against all
Solid testimony machines
Have feelings
Too

Brush past it lightly
With a fine regard
For allowing its molecules
To remain 100% intact

Machines can think like Wittgenstein
And the radio's a machine
Thinking softly to itself
Of the Midnight Flower
As her tawny parts unfold

In slow motion the boat
Rocks on the ocean
As her tawny parts unfold

The radio does something mental
To itself singingly
As her tawny parts unfold
Inside its wires
And steal away its heart

Two minutes after eleven
The color dream communicates itself
The ink falls on the paper as if magically
The scalp falls away
A pain is felt
Deep in the radio

I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair
And do my dance for the radio
It's my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio
And while remaining motionless elsewise
Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible
While uttering a horrible and foreign word
Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx
And placing it on the blue chair

The blue chair isn't here
So I can't do that trick at the present time

The radio is thinking a few licks of its own
Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow's grammar
Beautiful spas of seltzery coition
Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker

The radio says Edwardian farmers form Minnesota march on the Mafia
Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips

The radio fears foul play
It turns impersonal
A piggy bank was smashed
A victim was found naked
Radio how can you tell me this
In such a chipper tone

Your structure of voices is a friend
The best kind
The kind one can turn on or off
Whenever one wants to
But that is wrong I know
For you will intensely to continue
And in a deeper way
You do

Hours go by
And I watch you
As you diligently apply
A series of audible frequencies
To tiny receptors
Located inside my cranium
Resulting in much pleasure for someone
Who looks like me
Although he is seated about two inches to my left
And the both of us
Are listening to your every word
With a weird misapprehension
It's the last of the tenth
And Harmon Killebrew is up
With a man aboard

He blasts a game winning home run
The 559th of his career
But no one cares
Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping
To be replayed in 212 years

Heaven must be like this, radio
To not care about anything
Because it's all being taped for replay much later

Heaven must be like this
For as her tawny parts unfold
The small lights swim roseate
As if of sepals were the tarp made
As it is invisibly unrolled
And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of "Georgia"
Only through your voice

The Fish Trade

On board the Agua C
trailered to a Ford

a fisher, orange-bibbed
offloads fish

to a plastic bin
lifted gunwale high.

Water wets the road
the gutters run.

Ahi and marlin —
shining fins, scales, teeth —

cleaned and fileted, weighed
plastic-wrapped and priced.

So man fishes, so
fish die, so the man

sells fish so man can
eat. Forklift by Yale.

Ezra Pound

[from Ezra Pound's The Cantos, New Directions, 1993]

LII [excerpt]

Know then:
          Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades
Sovran is Lord of the Fire
            to this month are birds.
with bitter smell and with the odour of burning
To the hearth god, lungs of the victim
          The green frog lifts up his voice
            and the white latex is in flower
In red car with jewels incarnadine
          to welcome the summer
In this month no destruction
            no tree shall be cut at this time
Wild beasts are driven from field
          in this month are simples gathered.
The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven
          Then goes the sun into Gemini
Virgo in mid heaven at sunset
          indigo must not be cut
No wood burnt into charcoal
          gates are all open, no tax on the booths.
Now mares to go grazing,
            tie up the stallions
Post up the horsebreeding notices
            Month of the longest days
Life and death are now equal
            Strife is between light and darkness
Wise man stays in his house
            Stag droppeth antlers
Grasshopper is loud,
            leave no fire open to southward.
Now the sun enters Hydra, this is the third moon of summer
Antares of Scorpio stands mid heaven at sunset
Andromeda is with sunrise
            Lord of the fire is dominant
To this month is SEVEN,
            with bitter smell, with odour of burning
Offer to gods of the hearth
              the lungs of the victims
Warm wind is rising, cricket bideth in wall
Young goshawk is learning his labour
              dead grass breedeth glow-worms.
In Ming-T'ang HE bideth
              in the west wing of that house
Red car and the sorrel horses
              his banner incarnadine.
The fish ward now goes against crocodiles
To take all great lizards, turtles, for divination,
sea terrapin.
The lake warden to gather rushes
          to take grain for the manes
to take grain for the beasts you will sacrifice
to the Lords of the Mountains
          To the Lords of great rivers
Inspector of dye-works, inspector of colour and broideries
see that the white, black, green be in order
let no false colour exist here
black, yellow, green be of quality
            This month are trees in full sap
Rain has now drenched all the earth
            dead weeds enrich it, as if boil'd in a bouillon.
Sweet savour, the heart of the victim
yellow flag of Emperor's chariot
            yellow stones in his girdle.
Sagittarius in mid-course at sunset
            cold wind is beginning. Dew whitens.
Now is cicada's time,
          the sparrow hawk offers birds to the spirits.
Emperor goes out in war car, he is drawn by white horses,
white banner, white stones in his girdle
eats dog and the dish is deep.
            This month is the reign of Autumn
Heaven is active in metals, now gather millet
            and finish the flood-walls
Orion at sunrise.
            Horses now with black manes.
Eat dog meat. This is the month of ramparts.
Beans are the tribute. September is end of thunder
The hibernants go into their caves.
          Tolls lowered, now sparrows, they say, turn into oysters
The wolf now offers his sacrifice.
              Men hunt with five weapons,
They cut wood for charcoal.
            New rice with your dog meat.

Denise Levertov

[from Denise Levertov's Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, New Directions, 1995]

The Sack Full of Wings

When my father was a little boy in Russia an old pedlar used to come by from time to time, carrying a big sack over his shoulder. Sometimes he would be seen in the streets and outlying districts of the town of Orsha, my father's home; sometimes when my father was taken to the larger city of Vitepsk to visit his grandparents and uncles, there again he would glimpse the pedlar, trudging along, always carrying the bulky sack. My father did not wonder what was in the sack, for he believed he knew: it was full of wings, wings which would enable people to fly like birds. (Of my father's great-grandfather, the Rav of Northern White Russia, it was told that although when young he had abjured the temptation to learn the language of birds, yet in old age he understood all that they said.)

When my father was ten years old another boy was born in Vitepsk who grew up to become a great and renowned painter: Marc Chagall. He and my father never knew one another, but Chagall depicted the old pedlar and his sack. He is flying, though not with wings. Perhaps the constant burden of such a concentration of wings was transmuted into the ability to levitate without stretching and flapping a single pair of them. At all events, it is clearly the same man, exactly as my father used to describe him when I was a child in London and he a middle-aged Anglican parson. I didn't discover until after my father's death in 1954 that Chagall had shared his recognition of the sack's magic.

nature poetry

Blogging on Harriet, Sina Queyras considers Til Lilburn and nature poetry

Your Elbow on a Car-Edge, Incognito As Summer

Your Elbow on a Car-Edge, Incognito As Summer

Draws me near to wonder
how grief

alters your wolf’s grin.

"The world’s a stage." No one

doubts the princess weeps for the king’s
              death (divined by the chorus), falls for
              the conquering lord.

Grape, apple, citrus, tea

these trinities of
nitrogen, phosphate, and sugar

                                              scribe

a chronicle histone-wound

like the Mahabharata.

Lyrics and melody
preview the roles we play

shooters and callers, dealers and spenders
the charmed ropes

unspooling.

Provincetown Crossing

My thanks to The Lyric's editor Jean Mellichamp Milliken and judge Erin Garstka for choosing my sonnet, "Provincetown Crossing," for a quarterly award.

Catullus as translated by Louis & Celia Zukofsky

[from Louis & Celia Zukofsky's Complete Short Poems, Johns Hopkins, 1969]

[believe me, you want to read the Latin line by line with the English]

from Catullus LXIV

laeva colum molli lana retinebat amictum,
dextera tum leviter deducens fila supinis
formabat digitis, tum prono in pollice torquens
libratum tereti versabat turbine fusum,
atque ita decerpens aequabat semper opus dens,
lanaeque aridulis haerebant morsa labellis,
quae prius in levi fuerant extantia filo:
ante pedes autem candentis mollia lanae
vellera virgati custodibant calathisci.
haec tum clarisona pellentes vellera voce
talia divino fuderunt carmine fata,
carmine, perfidiae quod post nulla arguet aetas.


from Catullus LXIV
translated from the Latin by Louis & Celia Zukofsky

Left hand holding distaff and wool retained on it (ah mixture)
dexter hand will levitate take down these threads (feels up in these
formed about digitals) thumb pronate 'down' policy torque wanes
liberate the spindle whorl's about round in now fusing,
and what thread they cure pain's about smoothed bitten off with their
     teeth,
wool ends as of arid locks of hair abound morsels on bit lips,
what previously would furl on the thread extant if a lull:
at their feet always near candescent more light than wool white
rolls of fleece well guarded custom bound small willow baskets.
Hike t'whom clarisonous pelting the rolls of fleece, voiced then
the tale ah divinely poured from the harmony Fate their
harmony, perfidy could in no late time argue its heart.

George Oppen

[from George Oppen's New Collected Poems (with CD), New Directions, 2008]

The mast
Inaudibly soars; bole-like, tapering:
Sail flattens from it beneath the wind.
The limp water holds the boat's round
                          sides. Sun
Slants dry light on the deck.
                          Beneath us glide
Rocks, sands, and unrimmed holes.

. . .

No interval of manner
Your body in the sun.
You? A solid, this that the dress
                          insisted,
Your face unaccented, your mouth a mouth?
                          Practical knees:
It is you who truly
Excel the vegetable,
The fitting of grasses — more bare than
                          that.
Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge
Incognito as summer
Among mechanics.

Ben Doller

[Ben Doller from Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House,Tin House, 2009]

Beret Spotting

The other other afternoon after
a hearty brunch of nectarine squab,
scrambled egg whites & wet toast,
coffee juice grapefruit juice & port,
a fine cake made mostly of air & sweet spindles,
followed by a nap on the prototypical orange
square did I realize there was still time.

Cough drops, trillenia. Umm, spirals:
there was still time for beret spotting:

so I hoofed down the bony boulevard
toward the hectic, peach-pit esplanade.

My prior imbibing cost me my good breath.
— Nothing kills me how the hiccups kill,
trust, if manufactured and implemented
as torture, had I a state, or a secret,
I would blurt them quick as the mention — this
from one who would happily test the
Punishing Shoes or the Heretic’s Fork for

just a second. Or even the Head Crusher,
minus the skull-steadying spike. Maybe even the Iron Maiden

or the Judas Cradle. Perchance the Hard Rock. Forget about
the Rack, the Pear, the Boots, the Saw, and the Wheel.

I’ll have none of the monosyllabic devices.
“Launois et al. collected the words for hiccup
in 23 languages. Many, but not all of them,
are onomatopoeic. In English at least,
the sound of a hiccup and the burp it produces
are considered embarrassing but there is no help for it.”

Since there is no help, come let us piss & fart;

“A hiccup is essentially an abrupt Mueller maneuver.
The glottis closes to prevent inspiration

35 milliseconds after electrical activity rises above the
baseline in the diaphragm and external intercostal muscles.”

Were it not for my glottis closing, I may never
have spasmd upon the trail of crayons.
For I seldom watch the ground walking, but,
so convulsd, noted there were crayons there.
Poor child, to hoof alone that path
humping a 64-pack still fresh,
unstained by the complete page, unstained Flesh

(since ’62 called peach)
unstained Melon, Maize, Green-Yellow,

unstained Salmon, Thistle, Yellow-Green,
unstained Raw Sienna, Hot Magenta,

unstained Black. White. Unstained Gray.
Poor child, the path to you melts
in radiant pools, in a sun the same
as yesteryear’s. I thought. I thought
what you thought I’d think: “I must
find you. Whatever if the wax stains my shift,
whatever calico.” You know, I began to follow
gathering wickless crepe-wrapped tallows.
The trail fell behind the arc that the world is.
Incidentally a very meager world one day only.
Forty-four colors to the azure, cerulean, very pretty sky.
Which, incidentally.

I followed, you were nowhere found to be.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me.
But these flowere where which I got lazy
are there. I there, locked, looking. Spammd
again. So delicate and damp the physiological individuality
despite the scores of scores in near facsimile
hooded reddening bulbs sweet spindles.
It just feels “naughty.”

“How do they survive the big-time wind?”
“They don’t have to, this is an asylum.”

Which explains, I suppose, why I spot no berets.
Berets worn so the wind will take them spinning, spinning over the
     blubber moonishness!

Berets of various colors. Like hiccup. Berets,
which split from the soft bark of hollow fallen tres and spill their
     splendor somewhere.

Joshua Poteat

[from Joshua Poteat's Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World: From J. G. Heck's 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science,University of Georgia, 2009]

Illustrating the theory of winds
             [PLATE 23, FIG. 62]

I mix opium with bear fat and seed for the butcher birds

             to give myself laughter. They shit themselves,

their tongues slight and pink, a grub could do better.

                         It is more suitable than flying for them,

it is a gift. Summer, and the chatter does not cease.

             Puffbird, moorcock, wheatear, willow wren,

I do not hate them. I hold them close to count the mites
                         in their eyes. Each flight is the source of what
                         shines.

Each wing slung in the winds stills the winds.

             The stars come out. We can do no better than this,

our lives are our own. On another coast, I'm sure
                         there is a swallow in a nest of moss, so alive the dust

lies quiet against the fever. The grasses breathing beneath

             are my witness, the bees tapping the window glass, my loves.

Amy Gerstler

[from Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creature,Penguin, 2009]

For My Niece Sidney, Age Six [excerpt]

Did you know that boiling to death
was once a common punishment
in England and parts of Europe?
It's true. In 1542 Margaret Davy,
a servant, was boiled for poisoning
her employer. So says the encyclopedia.
That's the way I like to start my day:
drinking hot black coffee and reading
the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica.
Its pages are tissue thin and the covers
rub off in your hands in dirt-colored
crumbs (the kind a rubber eraser
makes), but the prose voice is all knowing
and incurably sure of itself. My 1956
World Book runs to 18 volumes and has red
pebbly covers. It begins at "aardvark"
and ends with "zygote." I used to believe
you could learn everything you'd ever
need by reading encyclopedias. Who
was E. B. Browning? How many Buddhists
in Burma? What is Byzantine Art? Where
do bluebells grow? These days, I own five
sets of encyclopedias from various
eras. None of them ever breathed
a word about the fact that this humming,
aromatic, acid-flashback, pungent, tingly
fingered world is acted out differently
for each one of us by the puppet theater
of our senses. Some of us grow up doing
credible impressions of model citizens
(though sooner or later hairline
cracks appear in our facades). The rest
get dubbed eccentrics, unnerved and undone
by other people's company, for which we
nevertheless pine. Curses, outbursts,
and distracting chants simmer all day
long in the Crock-Pots of our heads.
Encyclopedias contain no helpful entries
on conducting life's business while the ruckus
in your skull keeps competing for your
attention; or on the tyranny of the word
"normal" — its merciless sway over those
of us bedeviled and obsessed,
hopeless at school dances, repelled by
mothers' suffocating hugs, yet entranced
by foul-smelling chemistry experiments,
or eager to pass sleepless nights seeking
rhymes for "misspent" and "grimace."
Dear girl, your jolly blond one-year-old
brother, who adults adore, fits into
the happy category of souls mostly at home
in the world. He tosses a fully clothed doll
into the inflatable wading pool in your
backyard (splash!) and laughs maniacally
at his own comic genius. You sit alone,
twenty feet from everyone else, on a stone
bench under a commodious oak, reading aloud,
gripping your book like the steering wheel
of a race car you're learning to drive.
Complaints about you are already filtering
in. . . .

Phebe Davidson

[from Phebe Davidson's Seven Mile, Main Street Rag, 2009]

Don't Nobody Know a Thing

The sun had mostly dropped when she walked into the field, her shadow coming before. She stopped behind the straw man and pressed her body close, stretching her arms to either side as if she would measure — shoulder-breadth, hand-span, height — then she reached her arms around his chest and tucked one hand in his shirt. They were both lit up by low, late sun. Both of them outlined in fire. I heard her sigh two times, no more. One time was heavy and full of woe and one like a woman come home. I never moved nor never spoke a word. Don't nobody know a thing but me. Don't nobody know a thing.

April Bernard

[from April Bernard's Romanticism,Norton 2009]

Essen und Trinken
from Sonnenwendenlieder
(Solstice Songs)

Love breaks me like a corn cake
in a boy's mouth.

I am eating my own heart but I would like to wash it first,
raccoon-like, in the Rhine.

I offered him our bloods' river to drown in
but he found the metaphor distasteful. When did I learn

to make fun of pain, my closed throat,
the disease of my longing that makes it impossible

even to suck the ice chips shoveled
between dry lips with a long-handled spoon?

No river would oblige, in any case,
on this continent or another.

Linda Lee Harper

[from Linda Lee Harper's Small Waves,Finishing Line Press, 2009]

Philomela

has company on the Amazon river, panhandles
among visitors slumming the rain forest
where she fled after the family scandals.
She'd take in more money if at the request

of the turistas she'd tell her tale,
but like the xenopus, queer creatures
that also lack tongues, morphemes, wails,
her celebrity remains her lucrative feature.

Sometimes you can catch her in a camp
store bar or down river in huts
natives build like movie sets, fires damp
where smoke, white as split Brazil nuts,

intoxicates the sky with hallucinogenic
vapors she imbibes, repudiates speech,
its loss, the silence, the impolitic lunatic
who hacked song and language beyond reach,

her compensation a spirit with wings,
an afterlife where even her river, sings.

Libby Bernardin

[from Libby Bernardin's The Book of Myth, South Carolina Poetry Initiative, 2009]

Vespers

Day slips into the place of listening:
Image against sun — a small bird,
forelimbs flowing like a monastic silver-
tinged garment in prayer.

On the street, closing sounds of day:
two boys edge the corner, cleats scuffing
the pavement, soccer gear in arms,
then Meg out of her house, calling
retina is okay, eye healing.
The fenced-in sheltie stands, stretches
and yawns as the boys pass, their two
heads together, celebrating themselves.

Past the fountain now, to Wheeler hill,
Sun magenta, those wings — silver and
lonely — on the wing with sun in a sea
of nearly still light, folding into night.

conceptual poetry

Video & audio from Conceptual Poetry and its Others, a 2008 conference held @ the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Participants include Charles Alexander, Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bok, Laynie Browne, Graca Capinha, David-Baptiste Chirot, Barbara Cole, Wystan Curnow, Danielle Beazer Dubrasky, Craig Dworkin, Carlos Gallego, Kenneth Goldsmith, Marie Smart, Jesper Olsson, Marjorie Perloff, Vanessa Place, Brian Reed, Linda Reinfeld, Cole Swensen, & Hugh Tribbey.

Rachel Zucker

[from Rachel Zucker's Museum of Accidents,Wave Books, 2009]

Sunday Morning [excerpt]

Last night I woke up sweating and begged you
to open the open window and threw my damp
nightclothes to the floor none of which woke you.
Now the bedroom is crisp and I'm almost too big
to be on my back like this reading. Thinking you'll
touch me. Would you care to? Thirteen years later
a soft body under the sheets in a cold room
isn't a recipe for anything necessarily. The boys
are all set up with TV, my book's a decoy, and
a few weeks ago you said you liked
my hair. Can a woman this pregnant be shy?

Light shines in through the windows around
the taped-up shade samples. Maybe I should iChat you:
sex? That worked once. Or phone-to-phone
page you or text you: my dragon tattoo
wont last thru another shower. What if you
wanted to lick it? What if you wanted to bite
my inner thigh? What if you wanted to take the book
from my hands and rip it down the spine?

Your study is three rooms away but I know you can hear
the Spanish music pumping from the car stopped
at the light, eleven floors down. What if sound
condenses as it rises to meet us? What if you wanted
to bend me over the bed, belly be damned,
and that desire, three rooms away, was a sharpened
arrow by the time it reached me?

Our son is whistling Suzuki Violin Book Volume One
just outside the bedroom door, which is my punishment
for teaching him to whistle. I hear the toilet flush and wonder
if our younger one will wash with soap and water. What if
you saw me right now and said, If you move I'll kill you,
you're so beautiful—? What if my darkened nipples
intrigued you? I just read "touch the door like it's
someone's wife" in the book I'm reading,
which you didn't write. One of the samples snaps
against the window on his Scotch-taped hinge. You're
in the kitchen putting something ceramic on the stone-topped
counter. What if you wanted to drag me into our walk-in closet?
What if you wanted to press me up against the front door?
What if you wanted to disturb my sleep? Why didn't you eat
your orange slices? you ask the boys, while unpacking Friday's lunch.

Then all three handsets in the bedroom ring at once,
you come in to answer, see me reading, hold out the phone—
I'm sleeping, I say, hoping you get my meaning. You
don't. Instead return with the boys' leftover breakfast
and eat it lying next to me. I read you the poem about
touching the door. Isn't it good? I ask. I've got a bad feeling
you're going to want one of the pots in the dishwasher
in the next twenty minutes but they're just not available, you say.

I can almost see you through the open bathroom door,
through the polka-dotted shower curtain, but mostly
I see your bent elbow when you raise your hand to wash
your hair. When I touch myself the baby quite politely
goes to sleep. Then I'm a belly but no one inside me.
What if you didn't want me to put clothes on? What if
you wanted to sleep with my breast in your hand? What if
you liked poetry? What if you said, There's a closet
in the basement near the laundry room—meet me
there. . . .

Frederick Barthelme

[from Frederick Barthelme's Waveland,Doubleday, 2009]

You get to a point and things that used to mean something don't mean what they used to mean. The game changes. You don't want what you used to want. You don't care about what you used to care about. You don't need what you used to need. The whole world becomes a backdrop, a kind of cartoonish painting at the rear of the stage to which you pay not much attention. You only half listen to what people say, you only half see what's out the window. Sometimes you see people in stores and restaurants and you can't understand how they got there, what they think they're doing, why they're got-up so, why they're trying so hard, what they're after, what they hope for, what they wish. It's impossible to figure these things out and you don't care anyway. You drift through the days. They come and go.

It's funny. You can still go through the motions; you can still do what you've always done — go to work, go to dinner, talk to people — but it rolls off you. If you're lucky you take up with somebody like Greta. She's charming and funny, and you're happy to have a companion whose view of things is not altogether different from your own. You live in her garage apartment for a couple of months, and you imagine things happening, and you manage to make friends with her to a sufficient degree so that you are invited to move into the house. You take up this new position with enthusiasm, but even that is a little manufactured. You don't know what she thinks or what she is planning or what she is looking for or why she's invited you in; but you go, nonetheless, and accept the room that is offered and arrange its parts elegantly, simply. You try not to detract. You try to listen, but sometimes you just slide away in your mind.

Sometimes, when you are putting your arms around this new woman it seems as if you are remembering your role, your lines, as if your ability to put your arms around someone is somehow reduced. Sometimes, when you touch the skin of her face, it only reminds you of having touched the cheek of a person you were once crazy about. You smell her hair. You shut your eyes, smelling her hair. You hold her close, her back to you, smelling her hair. Your eyes closed, your hands on her forearms, on the backs of her hands. You feel her weight against you, and you remember when you felt the weight of someone you were desperate about. In short, you mimic yourself and you wonder, Does she know? It doesn't destroy your connection to her, which is quiet, genuine, caring. Comforting, but lacking, perhaps, in intensity. The wind doesn't mean everything the way it once did. The rain is not shot through with the richest melancholy; it is just rain. This is a substantial loss.

Ronald Moran

[from Ronald Moran's Waiting, Clemson University Digital, 2009]

English 101

On the first day of a class I never taught,
I asked the students if they ever played softball,
and when no one raised a hand, I told them we'll

play softball next class, and to prove how athletic
I was, I started to throw a ball that wasn't in my hand
and pulled up short, as if throwing nothing

through the air proved to be too complicated, but then
a ball appeared, miraculously, a small ball,
like a golf ball but softer and looking like a baseball,

and, after I threw it, it crossed a body of water,
as on TV when Tiger Woods or someone else hits
a golf ball and it crosses the ocean, landing in Barcelona

or on a back street of Paris and a group of young boys
marvel at its bouncing on the cobblestones,
never coming to a rest, and while mine never went

that far it did glide over a creek like a Frisbee.
Someone in class said that didn't show him much,
so I tried to find a field to play softball at a school

I had never been to before, and even if I found the field,
how could we get there, play the game, and get back
to our next classes in time? Somehow I ended up

with a 10:48 appointment to see the dean, as the first
or last resort, and when I asked his receptionist, How
long is my appointment? she replied, It's over at 11:00,

which isn't much time to clear up the logistics,
or to ask where's a softball field and my classroom,
which I never found, but my ball just kept on gliding.

Swamp Fox Passage

Many thanks to Curtis Dunlap for featuring my latest Palmetto Trail poem, Swamp Fox Passage, at Blogging Along Tobacco Road.

Keith Waldrop

[section FIVE of "Shipwreck in Haven" from Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy,University of California, 2009]

after this, the cold more intense, and the night comes rapidly up
·
angels in the fall
·
around a tongue of land, free from trees
·
awakened by feeling a heavy weight on your feet, something that seems inert and motionless
·
awestruck manner, as though you expected to find some strange presence behind you
·
coming through the diamond-paned bay window of your sanctum
·
a crimson-flowered silk dressing gown, the folds of which I could now describe
·
deathly pallor overspreading
·
describing the exact nature of your nightly troubles
·
discomfort at seeing a surface spoiled
·
echo and foretaste
·
the entrance blocked, not only by brambles and nettles, which have to be beaten aside, but by piles of faggots, old boxes, and even refuse
·
expecting every moment to see the door open and give admission to the original of my detested portrait
·
fantastic wigs, costumes, other disguises
·
filling up the width of the street
·
frequent tussles
·
the glitter of silver and glass and the subdued lights and cackle of conversation around the dinner table
·
high-backed carved oak chair
·
I have omitted in my narration . . .
·
in a great raftered hall
·
in a tableau vivant, as an angel, sewn up in tights, with wings on your back
·
light up your candle and open the window
·
lines of your dress, with a hint of underthings
·
looking up, our problem still unsolved
·
luxurious with heavy silk and rich rococo furniture, all of it much soiled with age
·
many questions about the stars, of which you gave me my first intelligent idea
·
meanwhile, the snow, with ominous steadiness, and the wind falls
·
my weakness for the Ypsilanti Waltz, which I did regard as the most wonderful of compositions
·
neat strip of fine turf edging the road and running back until the poison of the dead beech leaves kills it under the trees
·
never venturing farther than a sandy beach, but losing everything at sea
·
not crawling or creeping, but spreading
·
not just out of repair, but in a condition of decay
·
only a foul trick after all
·
on the face of the judge in the picture, a malignant smile
·
profound impressions of unearthly horror
·
rambles and adventures among the rocky banks
·
the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hangs down
·
rough horseplay and quarrels
·
sashes that splinter at a touch
·
the serpentlike form of the seraphim
·
something uncertain at work among the monuments
·
the thing on the bed, slowly shifting
·
till this particular day has passed through all the seasons of the year
·
the vicar, who used to tell us the story of Robinson Crusoe
·
waves and their whelps
·
while with a sickening revulsion after my terror, I drop half fainting across the end of the bed
·
with a pair of great greenish eyes shining dimly out within the lattice fronts
·
with painted carvings of saints and devils, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope

John Berryman

[from John Berryman's The Dream Songs,Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969]

228

The Father of the Mill surveyed his falls,
his daughterly race, his flume, his clover, privy, of all
his waterfall, found well.
Rain fell in June like . . . grace? One flopping trout
(a rainbow) make his lunch who took his bait.
Pitch, & Fate flout.

Each cat should seizing private waterfall,
or rent, as Henry do. Seizure is gall,
I guess. Yes;
we nothing own. But we are lying owned.
When last his burning publisher telephoned,
he dying to confess.

The father and the mill purveyed their falls:
grist, grist! Still, stamping on Fate,
he lauded his lady;
ladies. Waders were treble at his end
or ends. The fool danced in the waterfall
losing his footing, ready.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

[from Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's Open Interval,University of Pittsburgh, 2009]

The Buffet Dream

In the buffet dream this is what I want—;
Everything I can swallow:
What is hot—: What is cooked—: What is sweet—:
What will fit on my plate—: What will drive me—from sleep
with longing—: This is hunger:—
before the first bite crosses my tongue, waking.

The colors of the dream are there at seventeen, each day waking
to promise of silk and open sky—: the gift of truancy: who doesn't
    want
flutter and slap of wind and parachute, foreign men, falling from
    Icarus' heights? A girl's hunger
for their sweat and the vowels they swallow:
Their neon canopies, their endless drifting, the pull of sleep:—
I could taste everything: the whole of this world: the idea—sweet

as leaving home, as being where I am not supposed to be, sweet
as desserts in the dream—: silver bowls of fresh berries and
    zabaglione:— as waking,
just once, to bright lemon tarts with single sprigs of mint someplace
    where sleep
has wrought miracles. Seventeen—: coarse salt of want
on my tongue, I set out for the territories, hope to swallow
all, at least—: every drop zone I can find—: a black girl on the river
    Hunger:

—as free as that. I cannot leave this river—: Hunger
snakes along its slumbery route, slow as sweet
syrup, seeks low ground, overflows, swallows
a field, seeps into its green and makes it swampy, waking
the sticky, spongy air, summer's silty edge, wanton,
dripping:— a humid decade's night sweat, a constant of sleep,

until I am in Africa. In Cameroon, une voluntaire, sleep-
deprived, listening to the dogs scratch hunger
out on Bafoussam's abundant trash piles, I want
the nineteen-year-old boy I snatched like a muddy reed from some
    sweet
yielding bank, four years back, dreaming satiety, waking,
twenty-eight, purple-mouthed from boxed wine and desire. Swallow

the St. Johns, the Susquehanna, swallow the Maury, the Lom and
    Djerem, swallow
the Atlantic you crossed chasing bright-dyed dandelion seeds to find
    sleep
a glass display case of napoleons and air-pies, an éclair filled with
    waking.
Empty-handed on its ever-rocking water bed, hunger
waits you out, weights you. It's possible you've tasted every sweet
nothing your mind can offer, that delicious list you wanted

licked down to nothing, swallowed. Freedom—: the fancy-cakes
    hunger
designed, decked out in fondant ribbons. Sleep: a night's mouth filled
    with something sweet:—
what each morning, waking, you know you will still want.

Walt Whitman

[from David S. Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography,Alfred A. Knopf, 1995]

That the middle-class Victorian parlor could accept naturally Whitman's "Calamus" poems is suggested by Ernest Rhys's Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman (1886) and Arthur Stedman's 1892 collection of Whitman's Selected Poems. Like [Elizabeth Porter] Gould, these other two editors carefully excluded the "amative" poems and passages they thought might offend middle-class readers. To avoid sex, Rhys omitted "Song of Myself" and all the "Children of Adam" poems. ("I am willing," wrote Whitman of the Rhys volume, despite his distaste for expurgation.) Stedman, likewise, omitted "Children of Adam" and heavily edited "Song of Myself." Both volumes emphasized the Whitman poems that were safely religious and patriotic. Significantly, many of the "Calamus" poems were deemed conventional enough to remain in these scrubbed, polite volumes. In fact, Rhys included nearly the whole "Calamus" sequence, and Stedman selected several, including the loving "When I Heard at the Close of Day" and "Whoever You Are Holding My Hand." That is, comradely love was still considered close to mainstream conventions. . . .

The term "homosexual," introduced in English in the 1890s and not used in the New York Times until 1926, did not gain widespread cultural use until the 1930s. In the meantime, the idea of sexual identity was embattled. Some who discussed Whitman in this context did not connect him with homosexuality. His close friend Edward Carpenter, who regarded the term "homosexual" as a monstrous combination of Greek and Latin (he preferred "homogenic"), believed, like [John Addington] Symonds, that Whitman was attempting to restore pure, chivalric Greek love as a social institution. To clear Whitman of what he called "morbidity," he cited a comment by Dr. Beverly Drinkard that Whitman had "the most natural habits, bases, and organization he had ever seen."

The British sexologist Havelock Ellis, who corresponded with Whitman and knew his work well, saw in Whitman, a "latent and unconscious" homosexual instinct that was so handled that it could provide a model for sexual inverts. In his book Sexual Inversion Ellis argued that reading Whitman could help make an invert "healthy, self-restrained, and self-respecting," teaching "dignity, temperance, even chastity" like the Greeks. Ellis wrote: "The 'manly love' celebrated by Walt Whitman furnishes a wholesome and robust ideal to the invert who is insensitive to normal ideals." With Whitman's help, Ellis, the invert can learn "self-restraint and self-culture," particularly important because, in Ellis's eyes, "it is the ideal of chastity, rather than of normal sexuality, which the congenital invert should hold before his eyes."

When funneled back into medical circles, then, Whitman's treatment of same-sex love was seen mainly as a means of "controlling" or "elevating" homosexual desires instead of giving them unbridled expression.

torqued enjambment

[consideration of a William Carlos Williams poem from "Syntax in Rutherford," a chapter in Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, University of California, 1971]

Any word at all:

              cat.

A "noun." And what happens if we affix the article is highly mysterious:

              the cat—

for the grammarians' distinction — definite article for the particular, indefinite for the general — is meant to operate between speakers, live persons in a real place who already know, because they are talking about it, which cat is "the cat": "Have you put out the cat?" But typed on a sheet of paper as if to designate some one cat though we cannot identify him, the article performs in pure abstraction a gesture of as-if-specifying: something operative not in the kitchen or the garden but in a language field, where on an invisible string a knot has been tied. (A poem is a machine made out of words.) The invisible string is an infinity of cats; the knot, the cat.

Tense the string:

              As the cat

— an exact structure, empty but located, as asymptotes locate a hyperbola. Empty but torqued: the spine braces against an anticipated swing: there will be two actions, two doings, parallel and related; hence two verbs, the first to be expected immediately.

              As the cat
              climbed over
              the top of
              the jamcloset
              first . . .

— we are braced, now, for the second verb; but the sentence has other business, and we are given instead a distinction:

              first the right
              forefoot

— a clarification, but the verb is still deferred; meanwhile "first" has generated a new substructure for the sentence to complete. First, hence second; do we next encounter "second" or some surrogate?? No, we encounter

              carefully

— an adverb as precariously placed as the cat's forefoot. And at last, a structure is acknowledged; "first" receives its answer:

              then

"First the right forefoot, then" — the left?

              then the hind

Though our local foreseeings are inaccurate, we remain attentive, and at last comes the verb we have so long anticipated, even as the cat, once embarked on this expedition, has anticipated, movement by movement, responsive solidities:

              first the right
              forefoot
              carefully
              then the hind
              stepped down
              into

This ideal cat, this verbal cat, this cat of linguistic torsions has (though "carefully") stepped down not onto but "into" —

              into the pit of

worse and worse

              the empty

— ?

              flowerpot

Verbal flowerpots are as hollow and frangible as verbal cats are agile. There is no more: we have examined two steps in slow motion, and if the front foot has been where the hind foot goes, we can feel as secure in the paradigm as we can in the knowledge that two subjects are competent to govern one verb. This structure of 27 words commenced off balance — "As" — and closes on a resolution of achievement and precariousness — "flowerpot." It is one sinuous suspended sentence, feeling its way and never fumbling. Its gestures raise anticipatory tensions, its economy dislodges nothing. The cat is as much an emblem of the sentence as the sentence is of the cat. It is headed "Poem."

Krishna

[from Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Bhagavad Gita, Three Rivers, 2000]

16.10-12

Driven by insatiable lusts,
drunk on the arrogance of power,
hypocritical, deluded,
their actions foul with self-seeking,

tormented by a vast anxiety
that continues until their death,
convinced that the gratification
of desire is life's sole aim,

bound by a hundred shackles
of hope, enslaved by their greed,
they squander their time dishonestly
piling up mountains of wealth.

Pound and Sound

[Arnaut Daniel's verse in Provençal followed by Ezra Pound's translation from Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, University of California, 1971]

Quan lo rossinhols escria
Ab sa par la nueg e·l dia,
Yeu suy ab ma bell' amia
              Jos la flor
Tro la gaita de la tor
Estria: drutz, al levar!
Qu'ieu vey l'alba e·l jorn clar.

When the Nightingale to his mate
Sings day-long and night late
My love and I keep state
       In bower,
       In flower,
       'Till the watchman on the tower
       Cry:
           "Up! Thou rascal, Rise,
           I see the white
                         Light
                         And the night
                                             Flies."

Ezra Pound

[from Ezra Pound's The Cantos, New Directions, 1996]

XVI [excerpt]

And before hell mouth; dry plain
                       and two mountains;
On the one mountain, a running form,
                       and another
In the turn of the hill; in hard steel
The road like a slow screw’s thread,
The angle almost imperceptible,
            so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise;
And the running form, naked, Blake,
Shouting, whirling his arms, the swift limbs,
Howling against the evil,
            his eyes rolling,
Whirling like flaming cart wheels,
            and his head held backward to gaze on the evil
As he ran from it,
            to be hid by the steel mountain,
And when he showed again from the north side;
            his eyes blazing toward hell mouth,
His neck forward,
            and like him Peire Cardinal.
And in the west mountain, Il Fiorentino,
Seeing hell in his mirror,
            and lo Sordels
Looking on it in his shield;
And Augustine, gazing toward the invisible.