fragments of contemporary poetry

David Eggleton
The Weather Bomb
February began with firewatch skies,
a glare that flared off of hot metal cans,
gangs of lawn-mowers chanting mantras,
and an anticyclone calm which lasted for days.


Then came a sky that swelled like sludge.
Slowly, as if lockjawed, on the bludge,
rain fronted up just to lair about,
before turning whirling dervish on Valentine’s Day.


All night the storm bustled, strong as a haka.
Dawn sobbed out stories of baby raindrops,
backpacked in from the Tasman Sea blast zone,
only to thump down hard on Wellington.


{first stanzas of long poem by New Zealand poet David Eggleton}

~GEORGE EKLUND~





HOMAGE TO JIM



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



At the broken gate
Of the supreme composition
He could not come to the phone.
The radiation had burned his throat.
I reasoned he didn't have to say a thing.
For the affected there is no plot.
The radiation had burned the cranial nerves. {excerpt/beginning lines, from the Valparaiso Poetry Review}

-How Despair may be Transformed into a Diamond-
As payment for your colour storm
An acid sky blackens every flower.
You feel your breath touching down
And hold on to the voice you know
On each lip corner, two now frozen
Hedges to your country.

{first stanza of this poem}

-Emily Noether's Theorem-

Poets are divided according to the rivers
That are closest to their home. He glances
At the lance in the lance-rack,
At his ago, the site of a single-hearth house,
Which must come down in the bloomed fields,
Thorns, earth broom and overgrown grass.

{first stanza of this poem...from the publication Masthead}

The Wissahickon spills endlessly, like the night love poured through me, nearly, I thought,
uncontainable as it rushed from my fingers and out the window into people passing on the street,
over fire hydrants, pigeons, and boom boxes, through police cars, stop signs, and cockroaches,
between two dogs circling in heat. I did not need an answer then.
I would have understood the indifferent delight of the ducks. But I asked,
and my question scattered like mercury, into a million trembling globules
magnetic with yearning.

-- Deidra Greenleaf Allan
{ending of a poem called "Vigils: The Night Watch"}

JMW TURNER



In 1842, unable to still his panic

at the stormcloud that was about to

consume the 19th Century,

John Ruskin invented JMW Turner,

who, in turn, invented light.

Not the light of the Sistine or Toledo

but the clouded light of an eye for gravity,

a love of particles and suspense,

the light we see and are seen through.



Ruskin learned his art on a rug,

on his hands and knees, alone.

There is pattern in discipline

and in the reverse.

There should be in this letter

I have tried to write for a year; always interrupted

by rumors of wars and your latest.

Alone now, I start again, arranging proportions,

diminishing loss. I will finish.

Turner did his best with age,

when he could hardly see at all.

With a flourish, I keep this:

{first part of this poem published in the Adirondack Review}

{from the Paris Review}
Issue 178, Fall 2006



Tension

“Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension.”
—Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

{beginning stanzas of this poem/ two new poems by Billy Collins can be found in this issue}

Visitations
{from the Paris Review}
Issue 172, Winter 2004


There in the shrine at Lourdes
Embellished with old crutches, splints, and canes
(Freely abandoned by the cured,
The scoured of sins, the shorn and healed of pains)

It is said the Madonna once
Cloaked in compassionate blue and full of grace,
Showed up from nowhere there in France,
Conferring a special virtue on that place;

And that at scattered sites
Throughout the world (though only, be it said,
Where the faithful worshiped and their rites
All were observed) appearances were made.

{Three stanzas from the start of this longish poem by the late Anthony Hecht} {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct21.html ...obituary}

{Kenyan Review, Winter 2006, volume XXVIII, NUMBER ONE..first part of this long poem by Meena Alexamder}


Torn Grass


Childhood is a hot country, Amma lives there.
The sky has turned the color of torn grass.

Remember the calf dragged away to Chenganacheri Fair?
Tiny tottering thing, snout wet with gooseberry juice.

You crouched in the dirt, staring and staring ,
Refused to come back in.

We had spiced pomfret, mangoes so ripe their sweat
Stained the damask tablecloth my dying mother left me.

Your grandfather’s shadow hit the veranda.
He sat in his armchair, chewing on a cheroot.

Clouds swelled the mirror, broke its rosewood frame.
I saw my dead mother.

EPISTLE TO NERUDA
Superb,
Like a seasoned lion,
Neruda buys bread in the shop.
He asks for it to be wrapped in paper
And solemly puts it under his arm:
"Let someone at least think
that at some time
I bought a book…"
Waving his hand in farewell,
like a Roman
rather dreamily royal,
in the air scented with mollusks,
oysters,
rice,
he walks with the bread through Valparaiso.
He says:
" Eugenio, look!
You see--
over there, among the puddles and garbage,
standing up under the red lamps
stands Bilbao-with the soul
of a poet -- in bronze.
Bilbao was a tramp and a rebel.
Originally
they set up the monument, fenced off
by a chain, with due pomp, right in the center,
although the poet had lived in the slums.
{First one fifth of this long poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko}

A Sudden Rain in the Green Mountains



for Jessica Bennett

Plush hills, the raw materials, fall away.

The soaking clay

In which the serried oaks, the picturesque

And swaybacked pines, elected to evolve,

The famous marble in its bare reserve,


Vanish like guesses in these verticals

Whose heft at dusk

Blurs rooks to ridges, veils the bicycles

And splashes where they lean hard into curves.

Looming like crowds, such weather makes its world;

{First two stanzas of this poem by Stephan Burt, cr from the Boston Review, 1993-2005, subtitle to this publication...A Political and Literary Forum}

Inspiration

The common paths by which we walk and wind
Unheedful, but perhaps to wish them done,
Though edged with brier and clotbur, bear behind
Such leaves as Milton wears or Shakespeare won.
Still, could we look with clear poetic faith,
No day so desert but a footway hath,
Which still explored, though dimly traced it turn,
May yet arrive where gates of glory burn:
Nay, scarce an hour of all the shining twelve
But to the inmost sight may ope a valve
On those hid gardens where the great of old
Walked from the world and their sick hearts consoled
{first lines of this poem}

MÖBIUS, The Poetry Magazine 2007



THE LAST ALGONQUIN IN OUR VILLAGE
The sun rises with its concomitant clarities.
It is Columbus Day, and the last Algonquin brave
In our village fondly paddles his kayak along
A bay-like inlet up the Hudson River
Where a swan, iceberg white, fastidious as
A ghost, rides the waves like a ballerina.
She is no pet, but she deigns to accept a plum
Our Indian disembarks and sits outside
His house and works on a pair of moccasins
For me, his only customer. ...

{excerpt from this poem}

The Monster of Mr Cogito


1

Lucky Saint George
from his knight's saddle
could exactly evaluate
the strength and movements of the dragon

the first principle of strategy
is to assess the enemy accurately

Mr Cogito
is in a worse position
he sits in the low
saddle of a valley
covered with thick fog

through fog it is impossible to perceive
fiery eyes
greedy claws
jaws

through fog
one sees only
the shimmering of nothingness



{excerpt from the beginning of this long poem}

THE CITY LIMITS
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue...
{first stanzas of this poem}