The Hour of Poetry

Anne Carson

2012-01-30T09:38:00.002+01:00

6.1

When my brother died (unexpectedly) his

widow couldn't find a phone number for me among his

papers until two weeks later. While I swept my porch

and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening

with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly

towards me across the sea.

Nox by Anne Carson; 2010

Jim Moore

2012-01-30T09:11:00.002+01:00

ON THE DAY AFTER

The old woman who lives across the street

runs her vacuum

on the day after Christmas,

cleaning up after the silence

of the day before.

Two small geraniums in the window

lean into one another

like people whispering at a funeral:

signs of life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

2012-01-30T09:00:00.005+01:00

Now the hour bows down, it touches me, throbs

metallic, lucid and bold:

my senses are trembling. I feel my own power –

on the plastic day I lay hold.

Until I perceived it, no thing was complete,

but waited, hushed, unfulfilled.

My vision is ripe, to each glance like a bride

comes softly the thing that was willed.

There is nothing too small, but my tenderness paints

it large on a background of gold,

and I prize it, not knowing whose soul at the sight,

released, may unfold . . .

[Poems from The Book of Hours]

Claudia Emerson

2008-03-19T08:29:00.000+01:00

THE SPANISH LOVER

There were warnings: he had, at forty, never
married; he was too close to his mother,
calling her by her given name, Manuela,
ah, Manuela⎯like a lover; even her face

had bled, even the walls, giving birth to him;
she still had saved all of his baby teeth
except the one he had yet to lose, a small
eyetooth embedded, stubborn in the gum.

I would eat an artichoke down to its heart,
then feed the heart to him. It was enough
that he was not you⎯and utterly foreign,
related to no one. So it was not love.

So it ended badly, but to some relief.
I was again alone in my bed, but not
invisible as I had been to you⎯
and I had learned that when I drank sherry

I was drinking a chalk-white landscape, a distant
poor soil; that such vines have to suffer; and that
champagne can be kept effervescent by putting
a knife in the open mouth of the bottle.

Late Wife Poems by Claudia Emerson; Louisiana State University Press

Carol Ann Duffy

2008-03-09T14:45:00.001+01:00

PRAYER

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer ⎯
Rocakall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

2008-03-09T14:42:00.001+01:00

MOMENTS OF GRACE

I dream through a wordless, familiar place.
The small boat of the day sails into morning,
past the postman with his modest haul, the full trees
which sound like the sea, leaving my hands free
to remember. Moments of grace. Like this.

Shaken by first love and kissing a wall. Of course.
The dried ink on the palms then ran suddenly wet,
a glistening blue name in each fist. I sit now
in a kind of sly trance, hoping I will not feel me
breathing too close across time. A face to the name. Gone.

The chimes of mothers calling in children
at dusk. Yes. It seems we live in those staggering years
only to haunt them; the vanishing scents
and colours of infinite hours like a melting balloon
in earlier hands. The boredom since.

Memory’s caged bird won’t fly. These days
we are adjectives, nouns. In moments of grace
we were verbs, the secret of poems, talented.
A thin skin lies on the language. We stare
deep in the eyes of strangers, look for the doing words.

Now I smell you peeling an orange in the other room.
Now I take off my watch, let a minute unravel
in my hands, listen and look as I do so,
and mild loss opens my lips like No.
Passing, you kiss the back of my neck. A blessing.

Carol Ann Duffy

2008-03-09T14:38:00.001+01:00

VALENTINE

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
A wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful
as we are,
for as long as we are.

Alice Oswald

2008-02-22T05:26:00.000+01:00

Pruning in Frost

Last night, without a sound,
a ghost of a world lay down on a world,

trees like dream-wrecks
coralled with increments of frost.

Found crevices
and wound and wound
the clock-spring cobwebs.

All life’s ribbon frozen mid-fling.

Oh I am
stone thumbs,
feet of glass.

Work knocks in me the winter’s nail.

I can imagine
Pain, turned heron,
could fly off slowly in a creak of wings.

And I’d be staring, like one of those
cold-holy and granite kings,
getting carved into this effigy of orchard.

From The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile

ARSENIJ TARKOVSKY

2008-01-28T11:17:00.000+01:00

IGNATYEVO FOREST

The last leaves' embers in total immolation
Rise into the sky; this whole forest
Seethes with irritation, just as we did
That last year we lived together.

The path you take is reflected in our tear-filled eyes,
As bushes are reflected in the murky flood-lands.
Don't be difficult, don't touch, don't threaten,
Don't offend the forest silence by the Volga.

You can hear the old life breathing:
Clumps of mushrooms growing in damp grass -
Though gnawed to the very core by slugs,
They still inflame the skin.

All our past is like a threat -
Look, I'm coming, watch, I'll kill you!
The sky shivers and holds a maple, like a rose, -
May it burn still stronger - right into your eyes.

Anne Carson

2008-01-24T11:31:00.000+01:00

From The Beauty of the Husband. A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

XII.

You want to see how things were going from the husband’s point of view⎯
let’s go round the back,
there stands the wife
gripping herself at the elbows and facing the husband.
Not tears he is saying, not tears again. But still they fall.
She is watching him.
I’m sorry he says. Do you believe me.
Watching.
I never wanted to harm you.
Watching.
This is banal. It’s like Beckett. Say something!
I believe

your taxi is here she said.
He looked down at the street. She was right. It stung him,
the pathos of her keen hearing.
There she stood a person with particular traits,
a certain heart, life beating on its way in her.
He signals to the driver, five minutes.
Now her tears have stopped.
What will she do after I go? he wonders. Her evening. It closed his breath.
Her strange evening.
Well he said.
Do you know she began.
What.

If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you.
Why.
To tell it to.
Perfection rested on them for a moment like a calm lake.
Pain rested.
Beauty does not rest.
The husband touched his wife’s temple
and turned
and ran
down
the
stairs.

Carol Ann Duffy

2008-01-16T17:44:00.000+01:00

Correspondents

When you come on Thursday, bring me a letter. We
have
the language of stuffed birds, teacups. We don’t have
the language of bodies. My husband will be here.
I shall inquire about your wife, stirring his cup
with a thin spoon, and my hand shall not tremble.
Give me the letter as I take your hat. Mention
the cold weather. My skin burns at the sight of you.

We skim the surface, gossip. I baked this cake and you
eat it. Words come from nowhere, drift off
like the smoke from his pipe. Beneath my dress, my
breasts
swell for your lips, belly churns to be stilled
by your brown hands. The secret life of Gulliver,
held down by strings of pleasantries. I ache. Later
your letter flares up in the heat and is gone.

Dearest Beloved, pretend I am with you . . . I read
your dark words and do to myself things
you can only imagine. I hardly know myself.
Your soft, white body in my arms . . . When we part,
you kiss my hand, bow from the waist, all passion
patiently restrained. Your servant, Ma’am. Now you
write
wild phrases of love. The words blur as I cry out once.

Next time we meet, in drawing-room or garden,
passing our letters cautiously between us, our eyes
fixed carefully on legal love, think of me here
on my marriage-bed an hour after you’ve left.
I have called your name over and over in my head
at the point your fiction brings me to. I have kissed
your sweet name on the paper as I knelt by the fire.

Carol Ann Duffy

2008-01-11T06:16:00.000+01:00

TEA

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid streams in your china cup.

Or when you’re away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions – sugar? – milk? –
and the answers I don’t know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes, and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea’s names. Which tea would you like? I say
but it’s any tea for you, please, any time of day,

as the women harvest the slopes
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

YOSANO AKIKO (1878-1942)

2008-01-10T12:30:00.000+01:00

Black hair
Tangled in a thousand strands.
Tangled my hair and
Tangled my tangled memories
Of our long nights of lovemaking.

***

Press my breasts,
Part the veil of mystery,
A flower blooms there,
Crimson and fragrant.

***

Not speaking of the way,
Not thinking of what comes after,
Not questioning name or fame,
Here, loving love,
You and I look at each other.

***

Left on the beach
Full of water,
A worn out boat
Reflects the white sky
Of early autumn.

Sappho

2008-01-10T08:23:00.000+01:00

*Fragment 31

He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing ⎯oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead ⎯or almost
I seem to me.

*Poetarum Lesborium Fragmenta (Oxford 1955)

Anne Carson

2008-01-10T08:16:00.000+01:00

Lines

While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.
Paperclips
in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks
longingly
of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.
Out
the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,
love
of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling
faster
now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I
want
to tell her ⎯sign of God’s pity. She won’t keep me
she says, she
won’t run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The
paperclips
are immortally aligned. God’s pity! How long
will
it feel like burning, said the child trying to be
kind.

Kraków

2008-01-10T08:13:00.000+01:00

[Place Nowy]

by John Berger

I have never been in this square before and I know it by heart, or rather I know by heart the people who are selling things in it. Some of them have regular stalls with awnings to keep the sun off their goods. It is already hot, hot with the blurred, gnat heat of the Eastern European plains and forest. A foliage heat. A heat full of suggestions, that does not have the assurance of a Mediterranean heat. Here nothing is certain. The nearest thing to certainty is a grandmother.

Other sellers ⎯ all of them women ⎯ have come from the outlying villages with their produce in baskets or buckets. They do not have stalls and are sitting on stools they brought with them. A few stand. I wander between them.

Lettuces, red radishes, horseradishes, cut dill like green lace, small knobby cucumbers which in this heat grow in three days, new potatoes, their skins, with a little powdered earth on them, the colour of grandchildren’s knees, stick-celery with its cleansing toothbrush smell, cuttings of liveche, which the men, drinking vodka, swear is an incomparable aphrodisiac for women as well as men, bunches of young carrots swapping fern jokes, cut roses mostly yellow, cottage cheeses, which the rags pegged to the clothes line in their gardens still smell of, wild green asparagus that the children were sent to look for near the village cemetery.

The professional traders have naturally acquired all the trading tricks for persuading the public that golden opportunities never come twice. The women on their stools, by contrast, propose nothing. They are immobile, expressionless, and rely on their own simple presence to guarantee the quality of what they have brought to see from their own gardens.

I wander between them. Different ages. Different builds. Eyes of different colour. No two women wearing the same kerchief. And each one of them has found, as she bends down to cut chives or pull out dogtooth weed or pick red radishes, her own way of protecting, of favouring, the small of her back, so that its intermittent aches do not become chronic. When they were younger it was their hips which absorbed shock of events, now it is their shoulders which have to do so.

Andrew Motion

2008-01-08T09:05:00.000+01:00

The Message

In Memory of Sarah Raphael

I.

A crystal mid-winter Saturday dawn
and the names of things the same

as things themselves: flash-over frost
sealing my garden square; the ash tree

perfectly matched by its ghost in mist;
unshakeable hush through the street.

I take it all in as I climb the stairs
to my room, completely at home

yet free of cash and jacket I need
before I go out to the world.

And here on my desk is the toad-head
jewel in my telephone winking.

Why should I answer it now? This moment
is mine. But I do. I answer it feeling

the terror which started inside me
a lifetime ago, and that’s how I hear

you are dead. The peaceable street;
the ash in its trance; the frost:

these all look exactly the same. What’s new
is the crash of them splitting apart from their names.

2.

I rang your number
and heard your voice
on the answerphone ⎯
un-deliberate grace

in a message-rush,
and your hasty fall
on the word good-bye,
though you were well

when you set it down,
and never knew
how it might endure,
outliving you

like the travelling light
of a snuffed-out star
spearheaded to meet
the ignorant stare

of us below,
who blink and look,
and are not sure
which things to take

in our little mist
of breath-by-breath
as signs of life
and which of death.

3.

In your telephone
the tape has been changed, and now the glib machine
remembers only a new regime.

In your desk
a tidy number of unopened letters lie
bearing your name and the brand of missing days.

In your studio
the bubble-cartons of all your brilliant ideas
have reached the ceiling, and stuck, and will not stir.

In your children’s room
the spine of our favourite book is aching to bend
open, and let the story end.

Jorie Graham

2008-01-07T11:31:00.000+01:00

Mind

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. The city
draws the mind in streets,
and streets compel it
from their intersections
where a little
belongs to no one. It is
what is driven through
all stationary portions
of the world, gravity's
stake in things, the leaves,
pressed against the dank
window of November
soil, remain unwelcome
till transformed, parts
of a puzzle unsolvable
till the edges give a bit
and soften. See how
then the picture becomes clear,
the mind entering the ground
more easily in pieces,
and all the richer for it.

Mary Oliver

2008-01-07T11:26:00.000+01:00

Singapore

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women's restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that's not possible, a fountain
rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don't doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
and fly down to the river.
This probably won't happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn't.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

James Merill

2008-01-06T10:55:00.000+01:00

The Broken Home

Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening's mild gold leaf.

In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what's left of my life.

I have thrown out yesterday's milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.

Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.

Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We'd felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was "in his prime"
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack

No matter whom—Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.

Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,

Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,

And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

Tonight they have stepped out onto the gravel.
The party is over. It's the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.

She: Charlie, I can't stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you'll bury us all!

A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I'm afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time's child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,

When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth's no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide-open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper—cream, medallioned
With pink and brown—brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds, and Emma, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.

The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling's allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

Some Fruit as Remembered by the Dead

2007-12-30T14:11:00.000+01:00

by John Berger

[Nearly everything Berger writes reads like a prose poem. These delicate prose pieces are extracted from his “fictional memoir” Here is Where We Meet.]

Greengages

We looked for greengages every year during the month of August. Frequently they disappointed. Either they were unripe, fibrous, almost dry, or else they were over-soft and mushy. Many were not worth biting into, for one could feel with one’s finger that they did not have the right temperature: a temperature unfindable in Celsius or Fahrenheit: the temperature of a particular coolness surrounded by sunshine. The temperature of a small boy’s fist.

The boy is somewhere between eight and ten-and-a half years old, the age of independence, before the press of adolescence. The boy holds the greengage in his hand, brings it to his mouth, bites, and the fruit darts its tongue against the back of his throat so that he swallows its promise.

A promise of what? Of something that has not yet been named and he will soon name. He tastes a sweetness which no longer has anything to do with sugar, but with a limb which goes on and on, and seems to have no end. The limb belongs to a body which he can only see with his eyes shut. They body has three more limbs and a neck and ankles and is like his own; except that it is inside out. Through the limb without end flows a sap ⎯ he can taste it between his teeth ⎯ the sap of a nameless pale wood, which he calls girl-tree.

It was enough that one greengage in a hundred reminded us of that.

Yusef Komunyakaa

2007-12-30T13:24:00.000+01:00

We Never Know

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbed photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

A Personal Helicon

2007-12-30T13:19:00.000+01:00

by Seamus Heaney

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Autobiography of Red

2007-12-29T15:01:00.000+01:00

by Anne Carson

The extract below is from Carson’s novel in verse, a modern and often steamy, re-creation of an ancient Greek myth.

XVI . Grooming

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.

Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying,
Geryon please. The break in his voice
made Geryon think for some reason of going into a barn
first thing in the morning
when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still wet from the night.
Put your mouth on it Geryon please.
Geryon did. It tasted sweet enough. I am learning a lot in this year of my life,
thought Geryon. It tasted very young.
Geryon felt clear and powerful ⎯ not some wounded angel after all
but a magnetic person like Matisse
or Charlie Parker! Afterwards they lay kissing for a long time then
played gorillas. Got hungry.
Soon they were sitting in a booth at the Bus Depot waiting for food.
They had started to practice
their song (“Joy to the World”) when Herakles pulled Geryon’s head
into his lap and began grooming
for nits. Gorilla grunts mingled with breakfast sounds in the busy room.
The waitress arrived
holding two plates of eggs. Geryon gazed up at her from under Herakles’ arm.
Newlyweds? she said.

Ishigaki Rin: 2 poems

2007-12-28T05:08:00.000+01:00

AT THE BATHHOUSE

In Tokyo
At the public bathhouse the price went up to 19 yen and so
When you pay 20 yen at the counter
You get one yen change.

Women have no leeway in their lives
To be able to say that
They don’t need one yen
And so though they certainly accept the change
They have no place to put it
And drop it in between their washing things.

Thanks to that
The happy aluminum coins
Soak to their fill in hot water
And are splashed with soap.

One yen coins have the status of chess pawns
So worthless that they’re likely to bob up even now
In the hot water.

What a blessing to be of no value
In monetary terms.

A one yen coin
Does not distress people in the way a 1,000 yen note does
Is not as sinful as a 10,000 yen note
The one yen coin in the bath
With healthy naked women.

* * *

CLAMS

In the night I awoke.
The clams I bought yesterday
In a corner of the kitchen
With mouths open were alive.

‘When dawn comes
I’m going to gobble them all up
Every single one.’

I cackled
The cackle of a witch.
From that moment on
My mouth slightly open
I passed the night in sleep.

Translation by Leith Morton; 2005

Good King Wenceslas

2007-12-25T09:44:00.000+01:00

Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shown the moon that night,
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
Gathering winter fuel.

Hither, page, and stand by me.
If thou know it telling:
Yonder peasant, who is he?
Where and what his dwelling?
Sire, he lives a good league hence,
Underneath the mountain,
Right against the forest fence
By Saint Agnes fountain.

Bring me flesh, and bring me wine.
Bring me pine logs hither.
Thou and I will see him dine
When we bear the thither.
Page and monarch, forth they went,
Forth they went together
Through the rude wind's wild lament
And the bitter weather.

Sire, the night is darker now,
And the wind blows stronger.
Fails my heart, I know not how.
I can go no longer.
Ark my footsteps my good page,
Tread thou in them boldly:
Thou shalt find the winter's rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly.

In his master's step he trod,
Where the snow lay dented.
Heat was in the very sod
Which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
Wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor
Shall yourselves find blessing.

Galway Kinnell

2007-12-20T08:25:00.000+01:00

When One has Lived a Long Time Alone

When one has lived a long time alone,
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing to slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the poisoned urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a ling time alone.

Li-Young Lee

2007-12-18T22:07:00.000+01:00


Eating Together 

In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

Penelope Shuttle

2007-12-16T10:38:00.000+01:00

IN THE KITCHEN

A jug of water
has its own lustrous turmoil

The ironing board thanks god
for its two good strong legs and sturdy back

The new fridge hums like a maniac
with helpfulness

I am trying to love the world
back to normal

The chair recites its stand-alone prayer
again and again

The table leaves no stone unturned
The clock votes for the separate burial of hearts

I am trying to love the world
and all its 8,000 identifiable languages

With the forgetfulness of a potter
I’m trying to get the seas back on the maps
where they belong

secured to their rivers

The kettle alone knows the good he does,
Here in the kitchen, loving the world,
Steadfastly loving

See how easy it is, he whistles

Edna St. Vincent Millay

2007-12-12T13:13:00.000+01:00

[Written in 1931 while living on a farm in rural New York, isolated and often ill and despondent. ⎯Hayden Carruth]

Fatal Interview

II.

This beast that rends me in the sight of all,
This love, this longing, this oblivious thing,
That has me under as the last leaves fall,
Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.
The wound will heal, the fever will abate,
The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;
I shall forget before the flickers mate
Your look that is today my east and west.
Unscathed, however, from a claw so deep
Though I should love again I shall not go:
Along my body, waking while I sleep,
Sharp to the kiss, cold to hand as snow,
The scar of this encounter like a sword
Will lie between me and my troubled lord.

Masayo Koike: 2 poems

2007-12-11T20:37:00.000+01:00

Bathhouse

Late at night the Daikokuya bathhouse is quiet
An old woman bone-tired
Even naked unable to be free of dirt
Rattling the door
Comes in
From the nozzle of the shower with the tap loose
Water makes a dripping sound
Bare-footed the cool of the night softly steals in
From the high skylight
The water is rocking
Overflowing the edge of the bath
I
Pass no judgement
Like a log
I look at the female bodies
I saw
Naked backs, hips and backsides
Private parts
The water flowing over their bodies
Fallen head-hair
The many hollows of the female body
Water gathering there
Dripping down
I feel as if I have been looking at this
For years over and over again
I also saw the wall separating the men’s and women’s baths
And I took my time to make certain that
Like a wild beast
Nobody
Climbed from the men’s into the women’s bath
Or the other way
Amazed

***

A Short Poem about Daybreak

America, in a toilet in Santa Fe
Daybreak
I was urinating softly for a long long time
In the whole world
I felt as if there was only this sound and myself
Despite the fact that I was making the noise
Curiously it sounded as if it was coming from outside
As I was being consoled by it
Like an old woman’s unending story
I was
Waiting for it to end
But it would not
A time that doesn’t belong
To anyone
Anywhere
I wasn’t here,
I’m not alive,
I could even say this
Presently the sound ceased
In this room that had rapidly grown cold
A silent soul suddenly created
Is that me, is it me?
The temperature of life left in the shape of an invisible circle
Were you there?
Were you there in that room?
I was
I am alive
Long before then the questioning voice reached me

© 2001, Masayo Koike
From: Yoakemae Juppun
Publisher: Shichosha, Tokyo, 2001

© Translation: 2006, Leith Morton

Kiji Kutani

2007-12-10T11:27:00.000+01:00

Kiji Kutani is a 23 year old Japanese poet. The following poem was written when he was a high school student. To listen to him read click here.

Chill

The fading day lingers on,
wavers,
caught in a whirlpool with rifts in the grain.
From the tips of my toes
my whole body
burns with cold.
And the fading day lingers on.
A long beam of the setting sun shifts,
touching rough frost
frozen deep in my core.
As I bend down
to peer at its swaying orange edge
a sheet of brand-new
scrap paper enters my view —
even the unnecessary rip
left after I’d scribbled all over it:
emptiness engrained in the weft
of brand-new scrap
paper.

Some people, it is said,
see God when they close their eyes.
Once I had a friend
who told me he saw
a field of green foxtail, shoulder-high
stretching far into the distance
but
I’m ashamed to say that I myself
see nothing at all.
And yet
if it’s a matter of surrendering oneself completely
to nothingness,
I too yield my whole,
now sun-bereft
self.

Tamara Fulcher

2007-12-07T18:10:00.000+01:00

Choirsinger

My father said, So what do you do?
I stopped, and replied, I sing in the choir.
Choir? said Mother, That must take some work.
I said, It takes a lot,

And practice. He flicked his ash
Into the hearth and I tried to stand taller.
It fell as small snow. My shoes were tight.
Do you perform?
Not on my own, Ma, I said, But we do.
Who?
The choir. We are many. She dropped her head
As he made a noise.
Outside was getting in, between the drapes.

I wish you'd told us, she said,
We'd like to have known before now.
The fire cracked. He made the noise again,
Looking down.
We could have come to watch.
You can still come, I said, eager as a boy.

Oh, I don't know. He could still speak
To throw me off. He sucked on the end of it,
Chucked it in to burn. It's a bit late for that now.
Season's nearly over, eh.
There is no season, I said. There is no season,
Mother said, pushing in,
It's all the time. He rubbed his red hands fast.
Oh well, he said, You'll let us know how

You're getting along.
What do you sing? she said, craning up.
Oh, I said, Just songs. Everything.
Yes, we said, Yes. He was still looking
Down at the wood, white, shaking into air
And fading out of sight, out of being.
I saw her eyes were closed.

Published in Poetry Review, 95:4

Wallace Stevens

2007-12-06T18:42:00.000+01:00

Debris of Life and Mind

There is so little that is close and warm.
It is as if we were never children.

Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight
That it is as if we had never been young.

We ought not to be awake. It is from this
That a bright red woman will be rising

And, standing in violent golds, will brush her hair.
She will speak thoughtfully the words of a line.

She will think about them not quite able to sing.
Besides, when the sky is so blue, things sing themselves,

Even for her, already for her. She will listen
And feel that her color is a meditation,

The most gay and yet not so gay as it was.
Stay here. Speak of familiar things a while.

Rainer Maria Rilke

2007-12-05T12:21:00.000+01:00

Faces

Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke; Edited & Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Anne Carson

2007-12-04T07:29:00.000+01:00

Hero*

[extract]

I can tell by the way my mother chews her toast
whether she had a good night
and is about to say a happy thing
or not.

Not.
She puts her toast down on the side of her plate.
You know you can pull the drapes in that room, she begins.

This is a coded reference to one of our oldest arguments,
from what I call The Rules of Life series.
My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to
bed at night.

I open mine as wide as possible.
I like to see everything, I say.
What’s there to see?

Moon. Air. Sunrise.
All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up.
I like to wake up.

At this point the drapes argument has reached a delta
and may advance along one of three channels.
There is the What You Need Is A Good Night’s Sleep channel,

the Stubborn As Your Father channel
the random channel.
More toast I interpose strongly, pushing back my chair.

Those women! says my mother with an exasperated rasp.
Mother has chosen random channel.
Women?

Complaining about rape all the time⎯
I see she is tapping one furious finger on yesterday’s newspaper
lying beside the grape jam.

The front page has a small feature
about a rally for International Women’s Day⎯
have you had a look at the Sears Summer Catalogue?

Nope.
Why, it’s a disgrace! Those bathing suits⎯
cut way up to here! (she points) No wonder!

You’re saying women deserve to get raped
because Sears bathing suit ads
have high-cut legs? Ma, are you serious?

Well someone has to be responsible.
Why should women be responsible for male desire? My voice is high.
Oh I see you’re one of Them.

One of Whom? My voice is very high. Mother vaults it.
And whatever did you do with that little tank suit you had last year
the green one?
It looked so smart on you.

The frail fact drops on me from a great height
that my mother is afraid.
She will be eighty years old this summer.

Her tiny sharp shoulders hunched in the blue bathrobe
make me think of Emily Brontë’s little merlin hawk Hero
that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table when Charlotte wasn’t
around.

So Ma, we’ll go⎯I pop up the toaster
and toss a hot slice of pumpernickel lightly across onto her plate⎯
visit Dad today? She eyes the kitchen clock with hostility.

Leave at eleven, home again by four? I continue.
She is buttering her toast with jagged strokes.
Silence is assent in our code. I go into the next room to phone the
taxi.

My father lives in a hospital for patients who need chronic care
about 50 miles from here.
He suffers from a kind of dementia

characterised by two sorts of pathological change
first recorded in 1907 by Alois Alzheimer.
First, the presence in cerebral tissue

of a spherical formation known as neuritic plaque,
consisting mainly of degenerating brain cells.
Second, neurofibrillary snarlings

in the cerebral cortex and in the hippocampus.
There is no known cause or cure.
Mother visits him by taxi once a week

for the last five years.
Marriage is for better or for worse, she says,
this is the worse.

So about an hour later we are in the taxi
shooting along empty country roads towards town.
The April light is clear as an alarm.

As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object
existing in space on its own shadow.
I wish I could carry this clarity with me

into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce.
I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy.
These are my two wishes.

It is hard to find the beginning of dementia.
I remember a night about ten years ago
when I was talking to him on the telephone.

It was a Sunday night in winter.
I heard his sentences filling up with fear.
He would start a sentence⎯about weather, lose his way, start
another.
It made me furious to hear him floundering⎯

my tall proud father, former World War II navigator!
It made me merciless.
I stood on the edge of the conversation,

watching him thrash about for cues,
offering none,
and it came to me like a slow avalanche

that he had no idea who he was talking to.
Much colder today I guess. . . .
his voice pressed into the silence and broke off,

snow falling on it.
There was a long pause while snow covered us both.
Well I won’t keep you,

he said with a sudden desperate cheer as if sighting land.
I’ll say goodnight now,
I won’t run up your bill. Goodbye.

Goodbye.
Goodbye. Who are you?
I said into the dial tone.

At the hospital we pass down long pink halls
through a door with a big window
and a combination lock (5⎯25⎯3)

to the west wing, for chronic care patients.
Each wing has a name.
The chronic wing is Our Golden Mile

although mother prefers to call it The Last Lap.
Father sits strapped in a chair which is tied to the wall
in a room of other tied people tilting at various angles.

My father tilts least, I am proud of him.
Hi Dad how y’doing?
His face cracks open it could be a grin or rage

and looking past me he issues a stream of vehemence at the air.
My mother lays her hand on his.
Hello love, she says. He jerks his hand away. We sit.

Sunlight flocks through the room.
Mother begins to unpack from her handbag the things she has
brought for him,
grapes, arrowroot biscuits, humbugs.

He is addressing strenuous remarks to someone in the air between us.
He uses a language known only to himself,
made of snarls and syllables and sudden wild appeals.

Once in a while some old formula floats up through the wash⎯
You don’t say! or Happy Birthday to you!⎯
but no real sentence

for more than three years now.
I notice his front teeth are getting black.
I wonder how you clean the teeth of mad people.

He always took good care of his teeth. My mother looks up.
She and I often think two halves of one thought.
Do you remember that gold-plated toothpick

you sent him from Harrod’s the summer you were in London? she
asks.
Yes I wonder what happened to it.
Must be in the bathroom somewhere.

She is giving him grapes one by one.
They keep rolling out of his huge stiff fingers.
He used to be a big man, over six feet tall and strong,

but since he came to hospital his body has shrunk to the merest bone
house⎯
except the hands. The hands keep growing.
Each one now as big as a boot in Van Gogh,

they go lumbering after the grapes in his lap.
But now he turns to me with a rush of urgent syllables
that break off on a high note⎯he waits,

staring into my face. That quizzical look.
One eyebrow at an angle.
I have a photograph taped to my fridge at home.

It shows his World War II air crew posing in front of the plane.
Hands firmly behind backs, legs wide apart,
chins forward.

Dressed in the puffed flying suits
with a wide leather strap pulled tight through the crotch.
They squint into the brilliant winter sun of 1942.

It is dawn.
They are leaving Dover for France.
My father on the far left is the tallest airman,

with his collar up,
one eyebrow at an angle.
The shadowless light makes him look immortal,

for all the world like someone who will not weep again.
He is still staring into my face.
Flaps down! I cry.
His black grin flares once and goes out like a match.

The Glass Essay; Glass Irony and God; 1992

Robin Robertson

2007-12-02T21:48:00.000+01:00

What the Horses See at Night

When the day-birds have settled
in their creaking trees,
the doors of the forest open
for the flitting
drift of deer
among the bright crosiers
of new ferns
and the legible stars;
foxes stream from the earth;
a tawny owl
sweeps the long meadow.
In a slink of river-light
the mink’s face
is already slippery with yolk,
and the bay’s
tiny islands are drops
of solder
under a drogue moon.
The sea’s a heavy sleeper,
dreaming in and out with a catch
in each breath, and is not disturbed
by that plowt ⎯ the first
in a play of herring, a shoal
silvering open
the sheeted black skin of the sea.
Through the starting rain, the moon
skirrs across the sky dragging
torn shreds of cloud behind.
The fox’s call is red
and ribboned
in the snow’s white shadow.
The horses watch the sea climb
and climb and walk
towards them on the hill,
hear the vole
crying under the alder,
our children
breathing slowly in their beds.

Sharon Olds

2007-12-01T13:51:00.000+01:00

Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941

That winter, the dead could not be buried.
The ground was frozen, the gravediggers weak from hunger,
the coffin wood used for fuel. So they were covered with
something
and taken on a child’s sled to a cemetery
in the sub-zero air. They lay on the soil,
some of them wrapped in dark cloth
bound with rope like the tree’s ball of roots
when it waits to be planted; others wound in sheets,
their pale, gauze, tapered shapes
stiff as cocoons that will split down the center
when the new life inside is prepared;
but most lay like corpses, their coverings
coming undone, naked calves
hard as corded wood spilling
from under a cloak, a hand reaching out
with no sign of peace, wanting to come back
even to the bread made of glue and sawdust,
even to the icy winter and the siege.

Menno Wigman

2007-12-01T12:50:00.000+01:00

Window-Cleaner Sees Paintings

Cars, laughter, noises: everything’s shut out
at seven up. All I hear is my sponge

and squeaky wheezing from the steel from which
I hang. Sometimes a cloud will speak to me

or I guess what a seagull has to say.
The humans: busy, pale, mute, behind glass.

At eight up art. That girl inside, that laugh,
who’s spied on her so much that she, immune

to compliments, thus looks into my face?
When does that sparrow-hawk escape its frame?

I’m hanging like an ice-cold painting here
that no one notices, I toil and wipe,

unveil the view once more – remake month
after month the unfaked clouds again.

Look. Now sunlight creeps into my frame.

* * *

GLAZENWASSER ZIET SCHILDERIJEN

Auto’s, gelach, geraas: alles slaat dood
op zeven hoog. Ik hoor alleen mijn spons

en het verkouden knarsen van het staal
waaraan ik hang. Soms spreekt een wolk mij aan

of gis ik wat een meeuw te zeggen heeft.
De mensen: druk, wit, stemloos, achter glas.

Op acht hoog kunst. Dat meisje daar, die lach,
wie heeft haar zo bespied dat ze immuun

voor complimenten mijn gezicht in kijkt?
En wanneer breekt die sperwer uit zijn lijst?

Ik hang hier als een ijskoud schilderij
waar niemand oog voor heeft, ik poets en zwoeg

en maak het uitzicht vrij – schilder er maand
na maand onvervalste wolken bij.

Kijk. Daar kruipt al zonlicht in mijn lijst.

Translated from the Dutch by John Irons, 2007

Louise Glück

2007-11-30T23:14:00.000+01:00

The Pond

Night covers the pond with its wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among the minnows and the small
echoing stars. In the night air
the surface of the pond is metal.

Within, your eyes are open. They contain
a memory I recognize, as though
we had been children together. Our ponies
grazed on the hill, they were gray
with white markings. Now they graze
with the dead who wait
like children under their granite breastplates,
lucid and helpless:

The hills are far away. They rise up
blacker than childhood.
What do you think of, lying so quietly
by the water? When you look that way I want
to touch you, but do not, seeing
as in another life we were of the same blood.

Wallace Stevens

2007-11-29T09:05:00.000+01:00

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(This is one of my favourite poems --A)

Adrienne Rich

2007-11-29T07:01:00.000+01:00

The Middle-Aged

Their faces, safe as an interior
Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,
Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light
Of placid afternoon ⎯ their voices’ measure,
Their figures moving in the Sunday garden
To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,
Afflicted, haunted us. For to be young
Was always to live in other peoples’ houses
Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,
Was ours at second-hand and not for long.
The custom of the house, not ours, the sun
Fading the silver-blue Fortuny curtains,
The reminiscence of a Christmas party
Of fourteen years ago ⎯ all memory.
Signs of possession and of being possessed,
We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,
Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit
Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs
We must call ours: but twenty years of living
They could not give. Nor did they ever speak
Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,
The crack in the study window, or the letters
Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.
All to be understood by us, returning
Late, in our own time ⎯ how that peace was made,
Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.

Robert Lowell

2007-11-29T06:42:00.000+01:00

Epilogue

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme⎯
why are they no help to me now
I want to make something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

roar

2007-11-28T21:13:00.000+01:00

The lovely, always inspiring, Ms. Glamourpuss, has awarded this blog with “The Roar for Powerful Words”. As I can only take credit for the poems I’ve chosen, I should like to allow these very poets their say on what makes for good writing. My dearest thanks to Ms. Puss and for her two fabulous blogs I daily look forward to.

***

One of my favourite essays on poetry, “Once in a Poem”, is written by John Berger. A long time ago these words breathed life into me and I’ve not since forgotten them.

“Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

“Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.

“…Everything depends upon . . . how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principle and a presence.”

Next. Seamus Heaney in describing Robert Lowell’s final poems writes “… the reader is kept in the company of flesh and blood.” Helen Vendler writes of Lowell’s verse, “Finally, the test of a poem is that it be unforgettable, the natural held in the grip of vision.” For no other poet do these words ring most true. By these measures I too have tried, as a poet, to live by.

Third. Here ultimately is what Robert Lowell had to say about writing verse. The extract is from the poem “Epilogue”.

Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

***

My five nominations for the next recipients are forthcoming.

J.D. McClatchy

2007-11-26T09:43:00.000+01:00

Self-Portrait as Alcibiades

Draped in a touched-up matron's trailing purple,
I turn back to the haunch, the beaker, the guests.
They hate me and cannot do without me.
Their talk used to be of my pocket wars,
Of the ruined fleet and the satrap's water garden.
Tonight, it is of the god I mutilated.

She was being carried along the capital's edges
To ward off what entrails had threatened come dawn.
The slander has me slashing through the thick
Midnight mist across the gilded statue,
Her smiling face on the processional litter split
Into the past's pushovers, the future's penitence.

Why would I, who have no loyalties
But those to my sense of honor and of change,
Try to harm what others are forced to believe in?
The point is to keep what I shall want tomorrow.
If I pull back the drop on which the city is painted,
There is the moon, glistening in its recess.

Edwin Muir

2007-11-26T08:47:00.000+01:00

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Adam Zagajewski

2007-11-25T08:09:00.000+01:00

At night the monks sang softly
and a gusting wind lifted
spruce branches like wings.
I’ve never visited the ancient cities,
I’ve never been to Thebes
or Delphi, and I don’t know
what the oracles once told travellers.
Snow filled the streets and canyons,
and crows in dark robes silently
trailed the fox’s footprints.
I believed in elusive signs,
in shadowed ruins, water snakes,
mountain springs, prophetic birds.
Linden trees bloomed like brides
but their fruit was small and bitter.
Wisdom can’t be found
in music or fine paintings,
in great deeds, courage,
even love,
but only in all these things,
in earth and air, in pain and silence.
A poem may hold the thunder’s echo,
like a shell touched by Orpheus
as he fled. Time takes life away
and gives us memory, gold with flame,
black with embers.

Wallace Stevens

2007-11-24T14:39:00.000+01:00

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge.
Required, as a necessity requires.

(*posted today for the lovely Ms. Glamourpuss)

John Keats

2007-11-24T13:44:00.000+01:00

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d⎯see here it is
I hold it towards you⎯

Zbigniew Herbert

2007-11-24T11:59:00.000+01:00

Revelation

Two perhaps three
times
I was sure
I would touch the essence
and would know

the web of my formula
made of allusions as in the Phaedo
had also the rigour
of Heisenberg’s equation

I was sitting immobile
with watery eyes
I felt my backbone
fill with quiet certitude

earth stood still
heaven stood still
my immobility
was nearly perfect

the postman rang
I had to pour out the dirty water
prepare tea

Siva lifted his finger
the furniture of heaven and earth
started to spin again

I returned to my room
where is that perfect peace
the idea of a glass
was being spilled all over the table

I sat down immobile
with watery eyes
filled with emptiness
i.e. desire

If it happens to me once more
I shall be moved neither by the postman’s bell
nor by the shouting of angels

I shall sit
immobile
my eyes fixed
upon the heart of things

a dead star

a black drop of infinity

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz & Peter Dale Scott

Diving

2007-11-22T21:37:00.000+01:00

by Robin Robertson

The sudden sea is bright
and soundless: a changed channel
of dashed colour, scrolling
plankton, sea-darts, the slope
and loom of ghosts, something
slow and grey
sashaying through a school
of cobalt blue,
thin chains of silver fish
that link and spill and flicker away.

The elements imitate each other:
water-light playing on these stones
becomes a shaking flame; sunlight
stitches the rock-weed’s rust and green,
swaying, sea-wavering; one red
twist scatters a shoal like a dust of static
⎯ a million tiny shocks of white
dissolving in the lower depths.
The only sound
is the sea’s mouth and the ticking
of the myriad mouths
that feed within it, sipping the light.

Dreaming high over the sea-forest
⎯ the sea-bed green as a forest floor ⎯
through the columns of gold
and streams of water-weed,
above a world in thrall,
charting by light
as a plane might glide, slowly, silently
over woods in storm.

Donald Justice

2007-11-22T09:06:00.000+01:00

Bus Stop

Lights are burning
In quiet rooms
Where lives go on
Resembling ours.

The quiet lives
That follow us-
These lives we lead
But do not own-

Stand in the rain
So quietly
When we are gone,
So quietly...
And the last bus
Comes letting dark
Umbrellas out-
Black flowers, black flowers.

And lives go on.
And lives go on
Like sudden lights
At street corners

Or like the lights
In quiet rooms
Left on for hours,
Burning, burning.

Persimmons

2007-11-22T09:02:00.000+01:00

by Li-Young Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Norman McCaig

2007-11-20T19:58:00.000+01:00

Visiting Hour

The hospital smell
combs my nostrils
as they go bobbing along
green and yellow corridors.

What seems a corpse
is trundled into a lift and vanishes
heavenward.

I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to.

Nurses walk lightly, swiftly,
here and up and down and there,
their slender waists miraculously
carrying their burden
of so much pain, so
many deaths, their eyes
still clear after
so many farewells.

Ward 7. She lies
in a white cave of forgetfulness.
A withered hand
trembles on its stalk. Eyes move
behind eyelids too heavy
to raise. Into an arm wasted
of colour a glass fang is fixed,
not guzzling but giving.
And between her and me
distance shrinks till there is none left
but the distance of pain that neither she nor I
can cross.

She smiles a little at this
black figure in her white cave
who clumsily rises
in the round swimming waves of a bell
and dizzily goes off, growing fainter,
not smaller, leaving behind only
books that will not be read
and fruitless fruits.

Li-Young Lee

2007-11-20T15:24:00.000+01:00

A Story

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can't come up with one.

His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.

In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.

Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!

But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?

But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.

Seamus Heaney

2007-11-20T10:06:00.000+01:00

Night Drive

The smell of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France:
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smoldered out.
One by one small cafés shut.

I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.

Paul Muldoon

2007-11-20T10:04:00.000+01:00

The Misfits

I.

If and when I did look up, the sky over the Moy was the very same
gray-blue
as the slow lift
of steam-smoke over the seam
of manure on a midwinter morning. I noticed the splash of red lead
on my left boot as again and again I would bend
my knee and bury my head in the rich

black earth the way an ostrich
was rumoured to bury its head. My hands were blue
with cold. Again and again I would bend
to my left and lift
by one handle a creel of potatoes⎯King Edwards, gray as lead⎯
mined from what would surely seem

to any nine- or ten-year-old an inexhaustible seam.
My father wore a bag-apron that read, in capital letters, RICH.
My own capital idea, meanwhile, had sunk like a lead
balloon. “Blow all you like,” my father turned on me. “Talk till you’re blue
in the face. I won’t let you take a lift
from the Monk. Blow all you like. I won’t bend.”

The Leopard

2007-11-19T19:03:00.000+01:00

by Tomasi Di Lampedusa

[extraxt]

May, 1860

Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death; and during that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream, as she usually was.

Now, as the voices fell silent, everything dropped back into its usual order or disorder. Bendicò, the Great Dane, vexed at having been shut out, came barking through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer, and it was some time before she could sight the silvery Perseus swooping down to her aid and her kiss.

The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke. The troops of Tritons and Dryads, hurtling across from hill and sea amid clouds of cyclamen pink toward a transfigured Conca d’Oro,* and bent on glorifying the House of Salina, seemed suddenly so overwhelmed with exaltation as to discard the most elementary rules of perspective; meanwhile the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again. On the walls the monkeys went back to pulling faces at the cockatoos.

Beneath this Palermitan Olympus the mortals of the House of Salina were also dropping speedily from mystic spheres. The girls resettled the folds in their dresses, exchanged blue-eyed glances and snatches of schoolgirl slang; for over a month, ever since the “riots” of the Fourth of April, they had been home for safety’s sake from their convent, and regretting the canopied dormitories and collective coziness of the Holy Redeemer. The boys were already scuffling with each other for possession of a medal of San Francesco di Paola; the eldest, the heir, the young Duke Paolo, was longing to smoke and, afraid of doing so in his parents’ presence, was fondling the outside of his pocket in which lurked a braided-straw cigar case. His gaunt face was veiled in brooding melancholy it had been a bad day: Guiscard, his Irish sorrel, had seemed off form, and Fanny had apparently been unable (or unwilling) to send him her usual lilac-tinted billet-doux. Of what avail then, to him, was the Incarnation of his Savior?

Restless and domineering, the Princess dropped her rosary brusquely into her jet-fringed bag, while her fine crazy eyes glanced around at her slaves of children and her tyrant of a husband, over whom her diminutive body vainly yearned for loving dominion.

Meanwhile he himself, the Prince, had risen to his feet; the sudden movement of his huge frame made the floor tremble, and a glint of pride flashed in his light blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both human beings and their works.

Now he was settling the huge scarlet missal on the chair which had been in front of him during his recitation of the Rosary, putting back the handkerchief on which he had been kneeling, and a touch of irritation clouded his brow as his eye fell on a tiny coffee stain which had had the presumption, since that morning, to fleck the vast white expanse of his waistcoat.

Not that he was fat; just very large and very strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith’s for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop. But those fingers could also stroke and handle with the most exquisite delicacy, as his wife Maria Stella knew only too well; and up in his private observatory at the top of the house the gleaming screws, caps, and studs of the telescopes, lenses, and “comet-finders” would answer to his lightest touch.

The rays of the westering sun, still high on that May afternoon, lit up the Prince’s rosy skin and honey-colored hair; these betrayed the German origin of his mother, the Princess Carolina, whose haughtiness had frozen the easygoing Court of the Two Sicilies thirty years before. But in his blood also fermented other German strains particularly disturbing to a Sicilian aristocrat in the year 1860, however attractive his fair skin and hair amid all that olive and black: an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity in morals, and a propensity for abstract ideas; these, in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples, and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism.

In a family which for centuries had been incapable even of adding up their own expenditures and subtracting their own debts he was the first (and last) to have a genuine bent for mathematics; this he had applied to astronomy, and by his work gained a certain official recognition and a great deal of personal pleasure. In his mind, now, pride and mathematical analysis were so linked as to give him an illusion that the stars obeyed his calculations too (as, in fact, they seemed to be doing) and that the two small planets which he had discovered (“Salina” and “Speedy” he had called them, after his main estate and a shooting dog he had been particularly fond of) would spread the fame of his family through the empty spaces between Mars and Jupiter, thus transforming the frescoes in the villa from the adulatory to the prophetic.

Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.

That half hour between Rosary and dinner was one of the least irritating moments of his day, and for hours beforehand he would savor its rather uncertain calm.

With a wildly excited Bendicò bounding ahead of him he went down the short flight of steps into the garden. Enclosed between three walls and a side of the house, its seclusion gave it the air of a cemetery, accentuated by the parallel little mounds bounding the irrigation canals and looking like the graves of very tall, very thin giants. Plants were growing in thick disorder on the reddish clay; flowers sprouted in all directions, and the myrtle hedges seemed put there to prevent movement rather than guide it. At the end a statue of Flora speckled with yellow-black lichen exhibited her centuries-old charms with an air of resignation; on each side were benches holding quilted cushions, also of gray marble; and in a corner the gold of an acacia tree introduced a sudden note of gaiety. Every sod seemed to exude a yearning for beauty soon muted by languor.

But the garden, hemmed and almost squashed between these barriers, was exhaling scents that were cloying, fleshy, and slightly putrid, like the aromatic liquids distilled from the relics of certain saints; the carnations superimposed their pungence on the formal fragrance of roses and the oily emanations of magnolias drooping in corners; and somewhere beneath it all was a faint smell of mint mingling with a nursery whiff of acacia and the jammy one of myrtle; from a grove beyond the wall came an erotic waft of early orange blossom.

It was a garden for the blind: a constant offense to the eyes, a pleasure strong if somewhat crude to the nose. The Paul Neyron roses, whose cuttings he had himself bought in Paris, had degenerated; first stimulated and then enfeebled by the strong if languid pull of Sicilian earth, burned by apocalyptic Julys, they had changed into things like flesh-colored cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense, almost indecent, scent which no French horticulturist would have dared hope for. The Prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the Opera. Bendicò, to whom it was also proffered, drew back in disgust and hurried off in search of healthier sensations amid dead lizards and manure.

But the heavy scents of the garden brought on a gloomy train of thought for the Prince: “It smells all right here now; but a month ago . . .”

He remembered the nausea diffused throughout the entire villa by certain sweetish odors before their cause was traced: the corpse of a young soldier of the Fifth Regiment of Sharpshooters who had been wounded in the skirmish with the rebels at San Lorenzo and come up there to die, all alone, under a lemon tree. They had found him lying face downward in the thick clover, his face covered in blood and vomit, his nails dug into the soil, crawling with ants; a pile of purplish intestines had formed a puddle under his bandoleer. Russo, the agent, had discovered this object, turned it over, covered its face with his red kerchief, thrust the guts back into the gaping stomach with some twigs, and then covered the wound with the blue flaps of the cloak; spitting continuously with disgust, meanwhile, not right on, but very near the body. And all this with meticulous care. “Those swine stink even when they’re dead.” It had been the only epitaph to that derelict death.

*Conca d’Oro, literally “Golden Shell,” is the name of the hills encircling Palermo.

Wallace Stevens

2007-11-14T22:00:00.000+01:00

Sunday Morning

1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passion of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in the comforts of sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote as heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her rememberance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receeding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsered, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Abiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Xochiquetzal Candelaria

2007-11-13T20:51:00.000+01:00

Sappho

Fragments of her poems exist, a line
sometimes eight,
one scrap found stuffed in the mouth
of a mummified cat.
Let’s say we know this as we know the cat
once roamed
light-footed through a garden
of hyacinth and violets,
inking between the legs of guests,
sheer linen
dressed dancers, lute players.
Everyone drunk.
In one jump the cat lands on a white washed wall
between shards of broken glass
on a cliff giving way to the sea.
Its silver rimmed eyes
reflect the tincture of moonlight off water,
a lucency
that also falls through the branches of a fig tree
into the room of two women.
The older one
mouths something to herself over the young one’s
white breasts,
something like let me see this forever
before she cries for the simple way the breasts darken
as the shadows shift.
The young lover, who will leave by morning,
turns toward
the wall,
offers only her hair a dark,
a tangled nest,
the aging woman will remember,
and later call, despite the absence of light,
the evening star.
What kind of creature does this?
Reinvents the body despite the body’s rejection?
Imagines dust and debris
of love’s collapse to be great arms in the bed of the sky.
Who gathers
from hair constellations,
feeding them
to the hungry strays that call through the night air.

Sappho first appeard in Gulf Coast, Winter/Spring 2002, volume XIV, # 1.

My thanks to Fishouse poems.

Michael Donaghy

2007-11-10T12:53:00.000+01:00

Upon a Claude Glass

A lady might pretend to fix her face,
but scan the room inside her compact mirror -

so gentlemen would scrutinize this glass
to gaze on Windermere or Rydal Water

and pick their way along the clifftop tracks
intent upon the romance in the box,

keeping untamed nature at their backs,
and some would come to grief upon the rocks.

Don't look so smug. Don't think you're any safer
as you blunder forward through your years

straining to recall some aching pleasure,
or blinded by some private scrim of tears.

I know. My world's encircled by this prop,
though all my life I've tried to force it shut.

Don Paterson: 2 poems

2007-11-09T19:46:00.000+01:00

THE SPACE

after Cavafy

Those houses, cafes, bars ... the old purlieus
I've haunted, year after year -

I conjured you when I was happy, when I was sad:
you were my detail, my inner circumstance.

I have turned you into pure notion.

* * *

THE WRECK

But what lovers we were, what lover,
Even when it was all over -

the deadweight bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang

like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port

and watched our unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;

The candlelight strange on our faces
like the silent tiny blazes

And coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs

Into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,

Gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down

To mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back

To back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.

Louise Glück: 3 poems

2007-11-09T19:12:00.000+01:00

The Fear of Burial

In the empty field, in the morning,
the body waits to be claimed.
The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock--
nothing comes to give it form again.

Think of the body's loneliness.
At night pacing the sheared field,
its shadow buckled tightly around.
Such a long journey.

And already the remote, trembling lights of the village
not pausing for it as they scan the rows.
How far away they seem,
the wooden doors, the bread and milk
laid like weights on the table.

Portrait

A child draws the outline of a body.
She draws what she can, but it is white all through,
she cannot fill in what she knows is there.
Within the unsupported line, she knows
that life is missing; she has cut
one background from another. Like a child,
she turns to her mother.

And you draw the heart
against the emptiness she has created.

Happiness

A man and a woman lie on a white bed.
It is morning. I think
Soon they will waken.
On the bedside table is a vase
of lilies; sunlight
pools in their throats.
I watch him turn to her
as though to speak her name
but silently, deep in her mouth--
At the window ledge,
once, twice,
a bird calls.
And then she stirs; her body
fills with his breath.

I open my eyes; you are watching me.
Almost over this room
the sun is gliding.
Look at your face, you say,
holding your own close to me
to make a mirror.
How calm you are. And the burning wheel
passes gently over us.

From Descending Figure (Ecco Press, 1980)

Dream of the Huntress

2007-11-09T19:06:00.000+01:00

by Robin Robertson

It is always the same:

she is standing over me

in the forest clearing,

a dab of blood on her cheek

from a rabbit or a deer.

I am aware of nothing

but my mutinous flesh,

and the traps of desire

sent to test it—

her bare arms, bare

shoulders, her loosened hair,

the hard, high breasts,

and under a belt

of knives and fish-lures,

her undressed wound.

Every night the same:

the slashed fetlock,

the buckling under;

I wake in her body

broken, like a gun.

Louis MacNeice

2007-11-09T19:02:00.000+01:00

Autumn Journal

[Part XXIV]

Sleep serene, avoid the backward
Glance; go forward, dreams, and do not halt
(Behind you in the desert stands a token
Of doubt — a pillar of salt).
Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
And walk out promptly through the open door;
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
You need not wake again — not any more.
The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late
To dose the dead with honourable intentions:
If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;
The dead are dead as Nineteen-Thirty-Eight.
Sleep to the noise of running water
To-morrow to be crossed, however deep;
This is no river of the dead or Lethe,
To-night we sleep
On the banks of Rubicon — the die is cast;
There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.

The Park Drunk

2007-11-09T15:14:00.000+01:00

by Robin Robertson

He opens his eyes to a hard frost,
the morning's soft amnesia of snow.

The thorned stems of gorse
are starred crystal; each bud
like a candied fruit, its yellow
picked out and lit
by the low pulse
of blood-orange
riding in the eastern trees.

What the snow has furred
to silence, uniformity,
frost amplifies, makes singular:
giving every form a sound,
an edge, as if
frost wants to know what
snow tries to forget.

And so he drinks for winter,
for the coming year,
to open all the beautiful tiny doors
in their craquelure of frost;
and he drinks
like the snow falling, trying
to close the biggest door of all.

· From Swithering by Robin Robertson

Rilke

2007-11-08T13:29:00.000+01:00

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its powers. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark centre where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell; The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Robin Robertson

2007-11-06T11:13:00.000+01:00

Artichoke

The nubbed leaves
come away
in a tease of green, thinning
down to the membrane:
the quick, purpled
beginnings of the male.

Then the slow hairs of the heart:
the choke that guards its trophy,
its vegetable goblet.
The meat of it lies, displayed
up-ended, al-dente,
the stub-root aching in its oil.

Robert Lowell

2007-11-06T08:19:00.000+01:00

[extract]

Ulysses and Circe

I.
Ten years before Troy, ten years before Circe⎯⎯
things changed to the names he gave them,
then lost their names:
Myrmidons, Spartans, soldier of dire Ulysses . . .
Why should I renew his infamous sorrow?
He had his part, he thought of building
the wooden horse as big as a house
and ended the ten years’ war.
“By force of fraud,” he says, “I did
what neither Diomedes, nor Achilles son of Thetis,
nor the Greeks with their thousand ships . . .
I destroyed Troy.”

II.
What is more uxorious than waking at five
with the sun and three hours free?
He sees the familiar bluish-brown river
Dangle down her flat young forearm,
then crisscross. The sun rises,
a red bonfire,
weakly rattling in the lower branches⎯⎯
that eats like a locust and leaves the tree entire.
In ten minutes perhaps,
or whenever he next wakes up,
the sun is white as it mostly is,
dull changer of night to day,
itself unchanged, in war or peace.
The blinds give
bars of sunlight, bars of shade,
but the latter predominate
over the sincerity of her sybaritic bed.
She lies beside him,
a delicious, somnolent log. She says,
“Such wonderful things are being said to me⎯⎯
I’m such an old sleeper, I can’t respond …”

Randall Jarrell

2007-11-05T21:57:00.000+01:00

A Man Meets a Woman in the Street

Under the separated leaves of shade

Of the gingko, that old tree

That has existed essentially unchanged

Longer than any other living tree,

I walk behind a woman. Her hair's coarse gold

Is spun from the sunlight that it rides upon.

Women were paid to knit from sweet champagne

Her second skin: it winds and unwinds, winds

Up her long legs, delectable haunches,

As she sways, in sunlight, up the gazing aisle.

The shade of the tree that is called maidenhair,

That is not positively known

To exist in a wild state, spots her fair or almost fair

Hair twisted in a French twist; tall or almost tall,

She walks through the air the rain has washed, a clear thing

Moving easily on its high heels, seeming to men

Miraculous...Since I can call her, as Swann couldn't

A woman who is my type, I follow with the warmth

Of familiarity, of novelty, this new

Example of the type,

Reminded of how Lorenz's just-hatched goslings

Shook off the last remnants of the egg

And, looking at Lorenz, realized that Lorenz

Was their mother. Quaking, his little family

Followed him everywhere; and when they met a goose,

Their mother, they ran to him afraid.

Imprinted upon me

Is the shape I run to, the sweet strange

Breath-taking contours that breathe to me: "I am yours,

Be mine!"

Following this new

Body, somehow familiar, this young shape, somehow old,

For a moment I'm younger, the century is younger.

the living Strauss, his moustache just getting gray,

Is shouting to the players: "Louder!

Louder! I can still hear Madame Schumann-Heink-"

Or else, white, bald, the old man's joyfully

Telling conductors they must play Elektra

Like A Midsummer Night's Dream -like a fairy music;

Proust, dying, is swallowing his iced beer

And changing in proof the death of Bergotte

According to his own experience; Garbo,

A commissar in Paris, is listening attentively

To the voice telling how McGillicuddy me McGillivray,

And McGillivray said to McGillicuddy-no, McGillicuddy

Said to McGillivray-that is, McGillivray...Garbo

Says seriously: "I vish dey'd never met."

As I walk behind this woman I remember

That before I flew here-waked in the forest

At dawn, by the piece called Birds Beginning Day

That, each day, birds play to begin the day-

I wished as men wish: "May this day be different!"

The birds were wishing, as birds wish-over and over,

With a last firmness, intensity, reality-

"May this day be the same!"

Ah, turn to me

And look into my eyes, say: "I am yours,

Be mine!"

My wish will have come true. And yet

When your eyes meet my eyes, they'll bring into

The weightlessness of my pure wish the weight

Of a human being: someone to help or hurt,

Someone to be good to me, to be good to,

Someone to cry when I am angry

that she doesn't like Elektra, someone to start on Proust with.

A wish, come true, is life. I have my life.

When you turn just slide your eyes across my eyes

And show in a look flickering across your face

As lightly as a leaf's shade, a bird's wing,

That there is no one in the world quit like me,

That if only...If only...

That will be enough.

But I've pretended long enough: I walk faster

And come close, touch with the tip of my finger

The nape of her neck, just where the gold

Hair stops, and the champagne-colored dress begins.

My finger touches her as the gingko's shadow

Touches her.

Because, after all, it is my wife

In a new dress from Bergdorf's, walking toward the park.

She cries out, we kiss each other, and walk arm in arm

Through the sunlight that's much too good for New York,

The sunlight of our own house in the forest.

Still, though, the poor things need it...We've no need

To start out on Proust, to ask each other about Strauss.

We first helped each other, hurt each other, years ago.

After so many changes made and joys repeated,

Our first bewildered, transcending recognition

Is pure acceptance. We can't tell our life

From our wish. Really I began the day

Not with a man's wish: "May this day be different,"

But with the birds' wish: "May this day

Be the same day, the day of my life."

“A Man Meets a Woman in the Street” from THE COMPLETE POEMS by Randall Jarell

Ernest Hemingway

2007-11-03T12:10:00.000+01:00

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named aperitifs were advertised, but few people could afford then except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

Extract from A Moveable Feast

Bertrolt Brecht

2007-10-29T10:03:00.000+01:00

. . . from the Life of Others

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2
Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what's happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can't remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can't recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3
And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927) (S.H. transl.)
(Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232)

Under Milk Wood [excerpt]

2007-10-04T14:57:00.000+02:00

By Dylan Thomas

[ Silence ]

FIRST VOICE [ Very softly ]

: To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning, in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

Tulips

2007-10-03T11:40:00.000+02:00

by Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ----
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I hve no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Joseph Brodsky: Untitled

2007-10-03T11:11:00.000+02:00

A list of some observations. In a corner, it's warm.
A glance leaves an imprint on anything it's dwelt on.
Water is glass's most public form.
Man is more frightening than its skeleton.
A nowhere winter evening with wine. A black
porch resists an osier's stiff assaults.
Fixed on an elbow, the body bulks
like a glacier's debris, a moraine of sorts.
A millennium hence, they'll no doubt expose
a fossil bivalve propped behind this gauze
cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe,
mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge.

Thomas Kinsella

2007-09-29T09:18:00.000+02:00

Mirror in February

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy -
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.

Joseph Brodsky

2007-09-24T14:11:00.000+02:00

TÖRNFALLET

There is a meadow in Sweden
where I lie smitten,
eyes stained with clouds'
white ins and outs.

And about that meadow
roams my widow
plaiting a clover
wreath for her lover.

I took her in marriage
in a granite parish.
The snow lent her whiteness,
a pine was a witness.

She'd swim in the oval
lake whose opal
mirror, framed by bracken,
felt happy, broken.

And at night the stubborn
sun of her auburn
hair shone from my pillow
at post and pillar.

Now in the distance
I hear her descant.
She sings "Blue Swallow,"
but I can't follow.

The evening shadow
robs the meadow
of width and color.
It's getting colder.

As I lie dying
here, I'm eyeing
stars. Here's Venus;
no one between us.

Exposure

2007-07-20T13:40:00.000+02:00

by Seamus Heaney

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a clingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

A Prayer for My Daughter

2007-07-20T13:35:00.000+02:00

by William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's Wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour,
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come
Dancing to a frenzied drum
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty, and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass; for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness, and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen, being chosen, found life flat and dull,
And later had much trouble from a fool;
While that great Queen that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless, could have her way,
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful.
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise;
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree,
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound;
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
Oh, may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is heaven's will,
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Fish

2007-07-20T12:50:00.000+02:00

Xavier Villaurrutia (6 poems)

2006-07-20T07:55:00.000+02:00

(1903-1950)

POESÍA

Eres la compañía con quien hablo
de pronto, a solas.
te forman las palabras
que salen del silencio
y del tanque de sueño en que me ahogo
libre hasta despertar.

Tu mano metálica
endurece la prisa de mi mano
y conduce la pluma
que traza en el papel su litoral.

Tu voz, hoz de eco
es el rebote de mi voz en el muro,
y en tu piel de espejo
me estoy mirando mirarme por mil Argos,
por mí largos segundos.

Pero el menor ruido te ahuyenta
y te veo salir
por la puerta del libro
o por el atlas del techo,
por el tablero del piso,
o la página del espejo,
y me dejas
sin más pulso ni voz y sin más cara,
sin máscara como un hombre desnudo
en medio de una calle de miradas.

Reflejos, 1926

NOCTURNO SUEÑO

A Jules Supervielle

Abría las salas
profundas el sueño
y voces delgadas
corrientes de aire
entraban

Del barco del cielo
del papel pautado
caía la escala
por donde mi cuerpo
bajaba

El cielo en el suelo
como en un espejo
la calle azogada
dobló mis palabras

Me robó mi sombra
la sombra cerrada
Quieto de silencio
oí que mis pasos
pasaban

El frío de acero
a mi mano ciega
armó con su daga
Para darme muerte
la muerte esperaba

Y al doblar la esquina
un segundo largo
mi mano acerada
encontró mi espalda

Sin gota de sangre
sin ruido ni peso
a mis pies clavados
vino a dar mi cuerpo

Lo tomé en los brazos
lo llevé a mi lecho

Cerraba las alas
profundas el sueño

Nostalgia de la muerte, 1938

NOCTURNO ETERNO

Cuando los hombres alzan los hombros y pasan
o cuando dejan caer sus nombres
hasta que la sombra se asombra

cuando un polvo más fino aún que el humo
se adhiere a los cristales de la voz
y a la piel de los rostros y las cosas

cuando los ojos cierran sus ventanas
al rayo del sol pródigo y prefieren
la ceguera al perdón y el silencio al sollozo

cuando la vida o lo que así llamamos inútilmente
y que no llega sino con un nombre innombrable
se desnuda para saltar al lecho
y ahogarse en el alcohol o quemarse en la nieve

cuando la vi cuando la vid cuando la vida
quiere entregarse cobardemente y a oscuras
sin decirnos siquiera el precio de su nombre

cuando en la soledad de un cielo muerto
brillan unas estrellas olvidadas
y es tan grande el silencio del silencio
que de pronto quisiéramos que hablara

o cuando de una boca que no existe
sale un grito inaudito
que nos echa a la cara su luz viva
y se apaga y nos deja una ciega sordera

o cuando todo ha muerto
tan dura y lentamente que da miedo
alzar la voz y preguntar "quién vive"

dudo si responder
a la muda pregunta con un grito
por temor de saber que ya no existo

porque acaso la voz tampoco vive
sino como un recuerdo en la garganta
y no es la noche sino la ceguera
lo que llena de sombra nuestros ojos

y porque acaso el grito es la presencia
de una palabra antigua
opaca y muda que de pronto grita

porque vida silencio piel y boca
y soledad recuerdo cielo y humo
nada son sino sombras de palabras
que nos salen al paso de la noche

Nostalgia de la muerte, 1938

NOCTURNO MUERTO

Primero un aire tibio y lento que me ciña
como la venda al brazo enfermo de un enfermo
y que me invada luego como el silencio frío
al cuerpo desvalido y muerto de algún muerto.

Después un ruido sordo, azul y numeroso,
preso en el caracol de mi oreja dormida
y mi voz que se ahogue en ese mar de miedo
cada vez más delgada y más enardecida.

¿Quién medirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento
en que se funda el hielo de mi cuerpo y consuma
el corazón inmóvil como la llama fría?

La tierra hecha impalpable silencioso silencio,
la soledad opaca y la sombra ceniza
caerán sobre mis ojos y afrentarán mi frente.

Nostalgia de la muerte, 1938

DÉCIMA MUERTE

A Ricardo de Alcázar

I

¡Qué prueba de la existencia
habrá mayor que la suerte
de estar viviendo sin verte
y muriendo en tu presencia!
Esta lúcida conciencia
de amar a lo nunca visto
y de esperar lo imprevisto;
este caer sin llegar
es la angustia de pensar
que puesto que muero existo.

II

Si en todas partes estás,
en el agua y en la tierra,
en el aire que me encierra
y en el incendio voraz;
y si a todas partes vas
conmigo en el pensamiento,
en el soplo de mi aliento
y en mi sangre confundida,
¿no serás, Muerte, en mi vida,
agua, fuego, polvo y viento?

III

si tienes manos, que sean
de un tacto sutil y blando,
apenas sensible cuando
anestesiado me crean;
y que tus ojos me vean
sin mirarme, de tal suerte
que nada me desconcierte
ni tu vista ni tu roce,
para no sentir un goce
ni un dolor contigo, Muerte.

IV

Por caminos ignorados,
por hendiduras secretas,
por las misteriosas vetas
de troncos recién cortados,
te ven mis ojos cerrados
entrar en mi alcoba oscura
a convertir mi envoltura
opaca, febril, cambiante,
en materia de diamante
luminosa, eterna y pura.

V

No duermo para que al verte
llegar lenta y apagada,
para que al oír pausada
tu voz que silencios vierte,
para que al tocar la nada
que envuelve tu cuerpo yerto,
para que a tu olor desierto
pueda, sin sombra de sueño,
saber que de ti me adueño,
sentir que muero despierto.

VI

La aguja del instantero
recorrerá su cuadrante,
todo cabrá en un instante
del espacio verdadero
que, ancho, profundo y señero,
será elástico a tu paso
de modo que el tiempo cierto
prolongará nuestro abrazo
y será posible, acaso,
vivir después de haber muerto.

VII

En el roce, en el contacto,
en la inefable delicia
de la suprema caricia
que desemboca en el acto,
hay un misterioso pacto
del espasmo delirante
en que un cielo alucinante
y un infierno de agonía
se funden cuando eres mía
y soy tuyo en un instante.

VIII

¡Hasta en la ausencia estás viva!
Porque te encuentro en el hueco
de una forma y en el eco
de una nota fugitiva;
porque en mi propia saliva
fundes tu sabor sombrío,
y a cambio de lo que es mío
me dejas sólo el temor
de hallar hasta en el sabor
la presencia del vacío.

IX

Si te llevo en mí prendida
y te acaricio y escondo,
si te alimento en el fondo
de mi más secreta herida;
si mi muerte te da vida
y goce mi frenesí,
¡qué será, Muerte, de ti
cuando al salir yo del mundo,
deshecho el nudo profundo,
tengas que salir de mí?

X

En vano amenazas, Muerte,
cerrar la boca a mi herida
y poner fin a mi vida
con una palabra inerte.
¡Qué puedo pensar al verte,
si en mi angustia verdadera
tuve que violar la espera;
si en vista de tu tardanza
para llenar mi esperanza
no hay hora en que yo no muera!

Décima muerte y otros poemas no coleccionados, 1941

AMOR CONDUSSE NOI AD UNA MORTE

Amar es una angustia, una pregunta,
una suspensa y luminosa duda;
es un querer saber todo lo tuyo
y a la vez un temor de al fin saberlo.

Amar es reconstruir, cuando te alejas,
tus pasos, tus silencios, tus palabras,
y pretender seguir tu pensamiento
cuando a mi lado, al fin inmóvil, callas.

Amar es una cólera secreta,
una helada y diabólica soberbia.

Amar es no dormir cuando en mi lecho
sueñas entre mis brazos que te ciñen,
y odiar el sueño en que, bajo tu frente,
acaso en otros brazos te abandonas.

Amar es escuchar sobre tu pecho,
hasta colmar la oreja codiciosa,
el rumor de tu sangre y la marea
de tu respiración acompasada.

Amar es absorber tu joven savia
y juntar nuestras bocas en un cauce
hasta que de la brisa de tu aliento
se impregnen para siempre mis entrañas.

Amar es una envidia verde y muda,
una sutil y lúcida avaricia.

Amar es provocar el dulce instante
en que tu piel busca mi piel despierta;
saciar a un tiempo la avidez nocturna
y morir otra vez la misma muerte
provisional, desgarradora, oscura.

Amar es una sed, la de la llaga
que arde sin consumirse ni cerrarse,
y el hambre de una boca atormentada
que pide más y más y no se sacia.

Amar es una insólita lujuria
y una gula voraz, siempre desierta.

Pero amar es también cerrar los ojos,
dejar que el sueño invada nuestro cuerpo
como un río de olvido y de tinieblas,
y navegar sin rumbo, a la deriva:
porque amar es, al fin, una indolencia.

Canto a la primavera y otros poemas, 1948

Anne Carson

2006-07-19T10:38:00.000+02:00

FATHER'S OLD BLUE CARDIGAN

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair
where I always sit, as it did
on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.
I put it on whenever I come in,
as he did, stamping
the snow from his boots.
I put it on and sit in the dark.
He would not have done this.
Coldness comes from paring down from the moonbone in the sky.
His laws were a secret.
But I remember the moment at which I knew
he was going mad inside his laws.
He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.
He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way
to the top.
Not only because it was a hot July afternoon
but the look on his face—
as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning
for a long trip
on cold trains and windy platforms
will sit very straight at the edge of his seat
while the shadows like long fingers
over the haystacks that sweep past
keep shocking him
because he is riding backwards.

Leopardi

2006-07-15T14:50:00.000+02:00

L'infinito

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle
E questa siepe che da tanta parte
De'l ultimo orrizonte il guarde esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando interminati
Spazi di la da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete,
Io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando; e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e'l suon di lei. Cosi tra questa
Immensita s'annega il pensier mio:
E'l naufragar m'e dolce in questo mare.

THE INFINITE

It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.

Romance Sonámbulo

2006-07-08T11:58:00.000+02:00

By Federico García Lorca

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar

y el caballo en la montaña.

Con la sombra en la cintura

ella sueña en su baranda,

verde carne, pelo verde,

con ojos de fría plata.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Bajo la luna gitana,

las cosas la están mirando

y ella no puede mirarlas.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Grandes estrellas de escarcha

vienen con el pez de sombra

que abre el camino del alba.

La higuera frota su viento

con la lija de sus ramas,

y el monte, gato garduño,

eriza sus pitas agrias.

¿Pero quién vendra? ¿Y por dónde...?

Ella sigue en su baranda,

Verde came, pelo verde,

soñando en la mar amarga.

--Compadre, quiero cambiar

mi caballo por su casa,

mi montura por su espejo,

mi cuchillo per su manta.

Compadre, vengo sangrando,

desde los puertos de Cabra.

--Si yo pudiera, mocito,

este trato se cerraba.

Pero yo ya no soy yo,

ni mi casa es ya mi casa.

--Compadre, quiero morir

decentemente en mi cama.

De acero, si puede ser,

con las sábanas de holanda.

¿No ves la herida que tengo

desde el pecho a la garganta?

--Trescientas rosas morenas

lleva tu pechera blanca.

Tu sangre rezuma y huele

alrededor de tu faja.

Pero yo ya no soy yo,

ni mi casa es ya mi casa.

--Dejadme subir al menos

hasta las altas barandas;

¡dejadme subir!, dejadme,

hasta las verdes barandas.

Barandales de la luna

por donde retumba el agua.

Ya suben los dos compadres

hacia las altas barandas.

Dejando un rastro de sangre.

Dejando un rastro de lágrimas.

Temblaban en los tejados

farolillos de hojalata.

Mil panderos de cristal

herían la madrugada.

Verde que te quiero verde,

verde viento, verdes ramas.

Los dos compadres subieron.

El largo viento dejaba

en la boca un raro gusto

de hiel, de menta y de albahaca.

¡Compadre! ¿Donde está, díme?

¿Donde está tu niña amarga?

¡Cuántas veces te esperó!

¡Cuántas veces te esperara,

cara fresca, negro pelo,

en esta verde baranda!

Sobre el rostro del aljibe

se mecía la gitana.

Verde carne, pelo verde,

con ojos de fría plata.

Un carámbano de luna

la sostiene sobre el agua.

La noche se puso íntima

como una pequeña plaza.

Guardias civiles borrachos

en la puerta golpeaban.

Verde que te qinero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar.

Y el caballo en la montaña.

Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the mountain.

With the shade around her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

all things are watching her

and she cannot see them.

Green, how I want you green.

Big hoarfrost stars

come with the fish of shadow

that opens the road of dawn.

The fig tree rubs its wind

with the sandpaper of its branches,

and the forest, cunning cat,

bristles its brittle fibers.

But who will come? And from where?

She is still on her balcony

green flesh, her hair green,

dreaming in the bitter sea.

--My friend, I want to trade

my horse for her house,

my saddle for her mirror,

my knife for her blanket.

My friend, I come bleeding

from the gates of Cabra.

--If it were possible, my boy,

I'd help you fix that trade.

But now I am not I,

nor is my house now my house.

--My friend, I want to die

decently in my bed.

Of iron, if that's possible,

with blankets of fine chambray.

Don't you see the wound I have

from my chest up to my throat?

--Your white shirt has grown

thirsy dark brown roses.

Your blood oozes and flees a

round the corners of your sash.

But now I am not I,

nor is my house now my house.

--Let me climb up, at least,

up to the high balconies;

Let me climb up! Let me,

up to the green balconies.

Railings of the moon

through which the water rumbles.

Now the two friends climb up,

up to the high balconies.

Leaving a trail of blood.

Leaving a trail of teardrops.

Tin bell vines

were trembling on the roofs.

A thousand crystal tambourines

struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green,

green wind, green branches.

The two friends climbed up.

The stiff wind left

in their mouths, a strange taste

of bile, of mint, and of basil

My friend, where is she--tell me--

where is your bitter girl?

How many times she waited for you!

How many times would she wait for you,

cool face, black hair,

on this green balcony!

Over the mouth of the cistern

the gypsy girl was swinging,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

An icicle of moon

holds her up above the water.

The night became intimate

like a little plaza.

Drunken "Guardias Civiles"

were pounding on the door.

Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea.

And the horse on the mountain.

From The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, translated by William Logan. Published by New Directions, 1955.

XENIA (1964-1966)

2006-07-06T21:35:00.000+02:00

By Eugenio Montale, Translated from the Italian by Camillo Pennati, Frank Kermode

To My Wife

Dear little insect
whom for some reason they called fly[1]
this evening almost at dark
while I was reading the Deuteroisaiah
you reappeared beside me,
but without your glasses
you could not see me
nor could I without their glitter
recognize you in the dusk.

Without either glasses or antennae,
poor insect with wings
only in imagination,
a broken-backed bible but not all that
reliable either, the black of the night,
lightning, thunder and then
no storm. Or was it that
you had left so soon without
speaking? But it is ridiculous
to think you still had lips.

At the Saint James in Paris I shall have to ask
for a "single" room. (They do not like
unpaired guests.) So too
in the false Byzantium of your Venice
hotel; then at once to seek out
the telephone girls at their switchboard,
ever your friends; and off again,
the clockwork spring run down,
the longing to have you again, even if only
in a single gesture or habit.

We had planned a whistle
for the hereafter, a sign of recognition.
I try it out in the hope
that we are all dead already without knowing it.

I never understood if it were I who was
your faithful and distempered dog
or whether you were mine.
You weren't like that to others—rather a myopic insect
not at home amid the chatter
of high society. How naïve
those smart ones were—not knowing
that it was they who were your laughing-stock
nor that they were seen in the dark and detected
by an unerring sense of yours, by your
bat-like radar.

You never thought of leaving any trace
of yourself by writing prose or verse. It was
your charm—and then my self-disgust.
It was my dread as well: to be afterwards
pushed back by you into the croaking
slime of the neoterics.

The self-pity, the endless grief and anguish
of him who worships the down here yet hopes for and despairs
of another…. (Who dares say of another world?)
"Strange pity…." (Azucena, second act).[2]

Your speech so scanted, so unwary,
remains the only one I am satisfied with.
But its accent is changed, its color different.
I shall get used to hearing or deciphering you
in the ticking of the teleprinter,
in the coiling smoke of my Brissago
cigars.

Listening was your only way of seeing.
The telephone bill is next to nothing now.

"Used she to pray?" "Yes, she prayed to St. Anthony
because he helps one find
lost umbrellas and other items
of St. Hermes' wardrobe."
"Only for that?" "For her own dead too,
and for me." "That is enough," said the priest.

The memory of your weeping (mine was double)
is not enough to extinguish your bursts of laughter.
They were, so to speak, a foretaste of your private
Judgment Day, never, alas, to happen.

Spring comes out with its mole-like pace.
I shall no longer hear you talk of poisonous
antibiotics, of the ache in your thighbone,
or of your goods and chattels that a crafty legalism
fleeced you of.

Spring comes on with its fat mists,
with its long daylight, its unbearable hours.
I shall no longer hear you struggle with the gushing back
of time, of phantasms, of the logistical problems
of Summer.

Your brother died young; you were
the unkempt little girl staring at me
posed in the portrait's oval.
He wrote music, never published or performed,
now buried in a trunk or gone
for pulp. Perhaps someone is unconsciously
re-creating it, if what is written is written.
I loved him though I never knew him.
Except for you nobody remembered him.
I made no enquiries: now there is no point.
After you I was the only one left
for whom he ever existed. But we are able,
shadows ourselves—as you know—to love a shadow.

They say mine
is a poetry of unpertainingness.
But if it was yours it was someone's:
yours, who are no longer form but essence.
They say that poetry at its highest
praises the Whole in its flight;
they deny that the tortoise
can be faster than lightning.
You alone knew that motion
is not different from stillness,
that the void is fullness and the clear sky
the most diffused of clouds.
Thus I understand better your long journey
imprisoned in your bandages and plasters,
Yet it gives me no rest
to know that apart or together we are but one thing.

Notes

[1] Montale's wife was known to close friends as "La Mosca," the fly.

[2] The reference is to a character in Verdi's "Il Trovatore ."

Eugenio Montale

2006-07-05T11:30:00.000+02:00

LA BUFERA

"Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grands merveilles Leurs mains ne servent plus qu'à nous persecuter…."

AGRIPPA D'AUBIGNE: "A Dieu"
La bufera che sgronda sulle foglie
dure della magnolia i lunghi tuoni
marzolini e la grandine,

(i suoni di cristallo nel tuo nido
notturno ti sorprendono, dell'oro
che s'è spento sui mógani, sul taglio
dei libri rilegati, brucia ancora
una grana di zucchero nel guscio
delle tue palpebre)

il lampo che candisce
alberi e muri e li sorprende in quella
eternità d'istante—marmo manna
e distruzione—ch'entro te scolpita
porti per tua condanna e che ti lega
piú che l'amore a me, strana sorella,—
e poi lo schianto rude, i sistri, il fremere
dei tamburelli sulla fossa fuia,
lo scalpicciare del fandango, e sopra
qualche gesto che annaspa…

Come quando
ti rivolgesti e con la mano, sgombra
la fronte dalla nube dei capelli,

mi salutasti—per entrar nel buio.

Conrad Aiken

2006-07-02T08:10:00.000+02:00

From Time in the Rock, or Preludes to Definition

XI

Mysticism, but let us have no words,
angels, but let us have no fantasies,
churches, but let us have no creeds,
no dead gods hung in crosses in shop,
nor beads nor prayers nor faith nor sin nor penance:
and yet, let us believe, let us believe.

Let it be the flower
seen by the child for the first time, plucked without
thought
broken for love and as soon forgotten:

and the angels, let them be our friends,
used for our needs with selfish simplicity,
broken for love and as soon forgotten;

and let the churches be our houses
defiled daily, loud with discord,–
where the dead gods that were our selves may hang,
our outgrown gods on every wall;
Christ on the mantelpiece, with downcast eyes;
Buddha above the stove;
the Holy Ghost by the hatrack, and God himself
staring like Narcissus from the mirror,
clad in a raincoat, and with hat and gloves.

Mysticism, but let it be a flower,
let it be the hand that reaches for the flower,
let it be the flower that imagined the first hand,
let it be the space that removed itself to give place
for the hand that reaches, the flower to be reached–
let it be self displacing self
as quietly as a child lifts a pebble,
as softly as a flower decides to fall,–
self replacing self
as seed follows flower to earth.

Hsi Muren (2 poems)

2006-06-29T06:50:00.000+02:00

An Invitation

Should we go see the fireworks?
Let’s go

go see how

Fiery blossoms generate ever more fiery blossoms
Dreams procreate ever more dreams.

Together let’s walk along the desolate shore,

looking up at the night sky.

The wild ecstasy and piercing pains of life
All at this fleeting instant.

Like fireworks.

Seven Miles of Fragrance

["Seven miles of fragrance" is known in China as a plant with petite yellowish flowers of lingering fragrance.]

The rivers rush into sea.
The tides yearn for land.

By the fence of green trees and white flowers
We have so carelessly waved our good-byes.

Yet

twenty rough years afterward

Our spirits return here every night
When fanned by a gentle breeze
transfigured into a garden of rich aroma.

From Across the Darkness of the River, Green Integer 38

Portrait

2006-06-26T09:08:00.000+02:00

Galway Kinnell

2006-06-22T06:57:00.000+02:00

Wallace Stevens

2006-06-21T12:08:00.000+02:00

RE-STATEMENT OF ROMANCE

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Carl Sandburg

2006-06-19T21:32:00.000+02:00

Four Preludes On Playthings Of The Wind
The past is a bucket of ashes

1

The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

2

The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

3

It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
and paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
...and the only listeners left now
...are...the rats...and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, "Caw, caw,"
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, "Caw, caw,"
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are...the rats...and the lizards.

4

The feet of the rats
scribble on the doorsills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

The Simple Line

2006-06-19T21:25:00.000+02:00

By Laura Riding

The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,
Though the mind is meek.
To be aware inwardly
of brain and beauty
Is dark too recognizable.
Thought looking out on thought
Makes one an eye:
Which it shall be, both decide.
One is with the mind alone,
The other is with other thoughts gone
To be seen from afar and not known.

When openly these inmost sights
Flash and speak fully,
Each head at home shakes hopelessly
Of being never ready to see self
And sees a universe too soon.
The immense surmise swims round and round
And heads grow wise
With their own bigness beatified
In cosmos, and the idiot size
Of skulls spells Nature on the ground,
While ears listening the wrong way report
Echoes first and hear words before sounds
Because the mind, being quiet, seems late.
By ears words are copied into books,
By letters minds are taught self-ignorance.
From mouths spring forth vocabularies
To the assemblage of strange objects
Grown foreign to the faithful countryside
Of one king, poverty,
Of one line, humbleness.
Unavowed and false horizons claim pride
For spaces in the head
The native head sees outside.
The flood of wonder rushing from the eyes
Returns lesson by lesson.
The mind, shrunken of time,
Overflows too soon.
The complete vision is the same
As when the world-wideness began
Worlds to describe
The excessiveness of man.

But man's right portion rejects
The surplus in the whole.
This much, made secret first,
Now makes
The knowable, which was
Thought's previous flesh,
And gives instruction of substance to its intelligence
As far as flesh itself,
As bodies upon themselves to where
Understanding is the head
And the identity of breath and breathing are established
And the voice opening to cry: I know,
Closes around the entire declaration
With this evidence of immortality--
The total silence to say:
I am dead.

For death is all ugly, all lovely,
Forbids mysteries to make
Science of splendor, or any separate disclosing
Of beauty to the mind out of body's book
That page by page flutters a world in fragments,
Permits no scribbling in of more
Where spaces are,
Only to look.

Body as Body lies more than still.
The rest seems nothing and nothing is
If nothing need be.
But if need be,
Thought not divided anyway
Answers itself, thinking
All open and everything.
Dead is the mind that parted each head.
But now the secrets of the mind convene
Without pride, without pain
To any onlookers.
What they ordain alone
Cannot be known
The ordinary way of eyes and ears
But only prophesied
If an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,
Dies immediately
Of too plain beauty
Foreseen within too suddenly,
And lips break open of astonishment
Upon the living mouth and rehearse
Death, that seems a simple verse
And, of all ways to know,
Dead or alive, easiest.

Oda a los Calcetines / Ode to Socks

2006-06-17T07:04:00.000+02:00

by Pablo Neruda

Me trajo Mara Mori
un par de calcetines,
que tejió con sus manos de pastora,
dos calcetines suaves como liebres.
En ellos metí los pies
como en dos estuches
tejidos con hebras del
crepúsculo y pellejos de ovejas.

Violentos calcetines,
mis pies fueron dos pescados de lana,
dos largos tiburones
de ázul ultramarino
atravesados por una trenza de oro,
dos gigantescos mirlos,
dos cañones;
mis pies fueron honrados de este modo
por estos celestiales calcetines.

Eran tan hermosos que por primera vez
mis pies me parecieron inaceptables,
como dos decrépitos bomberos,
bomberos indignos de aquél fuego bordado,
de aquellos luminosos calcetines.

Sin embargo, resistí la tentación
aguda de guardarlos como los colegiales
preservan las luciernagas,
como los heruditos coleccionan
documentos sagrados,
resisti el impulso furioso de ponerlas
en una jaula de oro y darle cada
día alpiste y pulpa de melón rosado.

Como descubridores que en la selva
entragan el rarísimo venado verde
al asador y se lo comen con remordimiento,
estire los pies y me enfunde
los bellos calcetines, y luego los zapatos.
Y es esta la moral de mi Oda:
Dos veces es belleza la belleza,
y lo que es bueno es doblemente bueno,
cuando se trata de dos calcetines
de lana en el invierno.

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.

Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.

I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.

My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:

thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.

They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.

Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.

I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.

Like jungle
explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.

So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking about a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.

Louise Glück

2006-06-14T23:10:00.000+02:00

CELESTIAL MUSIC

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness—
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person—

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height—
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth—

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering—
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.

John Tobias (poem)

2006-06-10T08:36:00.000+02:00

Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity

During that summer
When unicorns were still possible;
When the purpose of knees
Was to be skinned;
When shiny horse chestnuts
(Hollowed out
fitted with straws
crammed with tobacco
stolen from butts
In family ashtrays)
Were puffed in green lizard silence
While straddling thick branches
Far above and away
From the softening effects
of civilization;

During that summer--
Which may never have been at all;
But which has become more real
Than the one that was---
Watermelons ruled.

Thick pink imperial slices
Melting frigidly on sun-parched tongues
Dribbling from chin;
leaving the best part,
The black bullet seeds,
To be spit out in rapid fire
Against the wall
Against the wind
Against each other;

And when the ammunition was spent,
There was always another bite;
It was a summer of limitless bites,
Of hungers quickly felt
And quickly forgotten
With the next careless gorging.

The bites are fewer now.
Each one is savored lingeringly,
Swallowed reluctantly.

But in a jar put up by Felicity,
The summer which maybe never was
Has been captured and preserved.
And when we unscrew the lid
And slice off a piece
And let it linger on our tongue;
Unicorns become possible again.

THE ROOM

2006-06-03T15:04:00.000+02:00

By W. S. Merwin

I think all this is somewhere in myself
The cold room unlit before dawn
Containing a stillness such as attends death
And from a corner the sounds of a small bird trying
From time to time to fly a few beats in the dark
You would say it was dying it is immortal

Laura Riding

2006-06-01T06:25:00.000+02:00

The Last Covenant

Roses are buds, and beautiful,
One petal leaning toward adventure.
Roses are full, all petals forward,
Beauty and power indistinguishable.
Roses are blown, startled with life,
Death young in their faces.
Shall they Die?
Then comes the halt, and recumbence, and failing.
But none says, 'A rose is dead.'
But men die: it is said, it is seen,
For man is a long, late adventure;
His budding is a purpose,
His fullness more purpose,
His blowing a renewal,
His death a cramped spilling
Of rash measures and miles.
To the rose no tears:
Which flee before the race is called.
And to man no mercy but his will
That he has had his will, and is done.
The mercy of truth—it is to be truth.

The Sick Man

2006-05-31T08:36:00.000+02:00

by Wallace Stevens

Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the south, bands of thousands of black men,
Playing mouth-organs in the night or, now, guitars

Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.

And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines

The words of winter in which these two will come together,
In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies,
The listener, listening to the shadows, seeing them,

Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him,
Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail,
The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken.

Poem By Derek Walcott

2006-05-28T06:47:00.000+02:00

XXVI

The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta.
I wear this cast from his kiln all over the house.
But I cherish its cracks like those of blue, wrinkled water.
A furnace has curled the knives of the oleander,
gnats drill little holes around a saw-toothed cactus,
and a branch of the logwood blurs with wild characters.
A small stone house waits on the steps. Its white porch blazes.
I will write down a secret being passed to me by the surf:
You shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle
flame in sunlight, weightless as woodsmoke that hazes
the sand with no shadow, if you wait long enough.
The skin that peels from my knuckles is like the scurf
on dry shoal, my palms have been sliced by the twine
of the lines I have pulled at for more than forty years.
My Ionia is the smell of burnt grass, the scorched handle
of a cistern in August squeaking to rusty islands,
the lines I love now have all their knots left in.
I leave my house open to a wind that has no shoes.
Through the stunned afternoon, when it's too hot to think,
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon-line
catches nothing. I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light, not Nike loosening her sandal,
a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.