fragments of contemporary poetry

There are two line indents that Lit-Net can't produce, L4 and L12

Prayer


Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. ...{excerpt}

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/...t-Laureate.php Finally a great modern poet gets some recognition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/bo...pagewanted=all -- Some samples of her work, nyt web extra.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/bo...tml?ref=review

Outsider Art
by Kay Ryan


Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said—
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people. ... {exceprt}

What a great thread, Quasi. There are so many wonderful contemporary poets out there, it is difficult to come in contact with them all independently.


The Lord and the General Din of the World


The kids are shrieking at the edge of the pool,
their angelic faces twisting. They like
to shriek—they like to make the Great Dane bellow.
When he cannot stand it any longer, he jumps
the wall and chases them, still screaming, in.

And under all this now a steady grating—
A plastic bottle of blue cheese dressing
Scraping up against the concrete gutter,
Bobbing off the aqua, sun-flicked waves
The kids have made by jumping.

And there’s a man here from Afghanistan
who hasn’t cut his greasy hair since he was driven mad.
His name is Simon. He looks just like The Christ.
Walks up and down beside the pool, oblivious
To screams and barking. He gestures as he talks,
Whispers and pontificates. No one is listening.

Lord, is the general din of the world your own?
Something that is good in me is crumbling… {excerpt}

To the Memory



of J.S. Bach because on bad nights
I take my three brown dogs to bed
with a box of crackers, which we share
while I sing them their favorite song:

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
when their shepherd guards them well.
Sheep may safely graze on pasture…

I have lived by how this is funny.
I address myself to the dead now.

My body thinks she is the moon—the moon
as remembered against the metal bars
of a bridge whose arc we trust
the more the less we can.

From a distance the cars move to music.
From a distance the world sings back.

My body thinks she is the moon
but she is a clown and I
am all music and unbearably
weighted down. ... {excerpt}


© Jane Mead

IMMANENCE



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


Antibellum Plantation, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia



We leave the one-room schoolhouse
with the double meaning of its woodenness
spelled out in ranks of hair-shirt oaken
benches and plank-top desks without a blemish
of utility. No inkwells, no pencil minders to give
them purpose. It is a place of the truly elementary—
of bone-tired inertia and of rote, and educative homilies
about the patriot saints. On the slatted wall
above the teacher's desk, the Father of His Country
still presides from the unfinished portrait
by Gilbert Stuart. Disembodied head, dead white
on a black ground of rusty satin. It speaks to dark eternity,
bright virtue: the mythic cherry tree; the bitter winter
of faithfulness, Philadelphia locked up like an English gaol;
the patience to stick till the screw turned tight
at Yorktown. Did the hardness or the homilies prepare
those boys of 1850 for Sunday strolls to come,
ranked like Continentals, into the rifle's obliterating jaws?

My wife has four-leaf clover on her mind.
I've never seen one, and she abhors the vacuum
of my skepticism. She prays that God will let us find
this unicorn of flora, and as we walk the well-groomed lawn,
she plucks one up, a tiny Intercession. Yet there's another:
I stoop, incredulous, and here it is, the four plump lobes
like the fingers of a cartoon hand. I laugh the sinner's
incongruous guffaw, while she thanks God, He
who helps our unbelief. I think how I want to be with her
when lightning X-rays open spaces, or the car knifes
across four lanes of highway, the shattering median,
the onrushing flail of steel. Then I recall those war-
dead Southern boys, bent to their hard-assed catechism,
their Calvinist Lives of the Saints—
three hundred thousand war-dead boys. ... {excerpt}

[from the Valparaiso Poetry Review]

IN THE VILLAGE OF MY ANCESTORS


.....Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too {excerpt}

CIVILIZATION
Send your army home to their wives and children.
It is late. Your soldiers are burdened, thirsty.
Lock the doors, the windows, and here in darkness
lie down beside me.

Speak of anything we possess in common:
ground or law or sense. Only speak it softly.
Spiders crawl the crevices. Violent voices
ruin their balance,

and they’ll fall – intuit – upon our faces,
where I fear them most. But you’ve heard this terror,
and my midnight phobias always move you –
cause to remain here. ... {excerpt}

In High Waters



Quartered, cleaned, this beautiful black wire looped

and
knotted
through the skin, the squash hung on the porch.
All September they puckered, cracked. Then they

were dry.
They clicked a little when the wind

made its way past them: hollow sounds, almost

pleasing—
cupped hands
clapping a bit for themselves when we weren't

looking.
November I drew them.
They had stopped changing.

I drew them landlocked. Canyons.
They scorned the rivers that had abandoned them.
Four phases of some moon, I drew them. Four

rowboats run
aground.
Four, leashed to their piling, nudging each other

from time to time. Four sails
learning to quarter wind, gather way—what

cunning, what
incredible
patience! We brought them indoors to a large nail
in the kitchen. I drew them again, four ships in a

rice-paper
storm,

four rocks narrowly avoided by the sailor, who,
thanks to them finds his way home.
Four sailors' memories of the same girl. Now
you would cook them. Soaked in water, salt, they

would
plump up.

How nice to have things out of season. Summer

squash
caught in our winter, there is snow outside
like you would not believe.
Whole trees are buried beneath waves, becalmed.

The world

is everywhere able to flow into itself without

damage
or confusion. ... {excerpt}


Copyright © Jorie Graham [from Ploughshares]

A Happy Childhood


Babies do not want to hear about babies; the like to be told of giants and castles.
Dr. Johnson

No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo


My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air


like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved
like this. The air is tight to my nervous body.
I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded


soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily.
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing
to myself all day like a fieldful of August


insects, just things I whisper, really,
a trance in sneakers. I’m learning
to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school,


I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air
goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself,
a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road-


side park. I love to be called for dinner.
Spot goes out and I go in and the lights
in the kitchen go on and the dark,


which also has a body like a cloud’s,
leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow
I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges. {first part of long poem}

SHE IS IN THE PAST, SHE HAS THIS GRACE

My mother looks at her watch,
As if to look back over the curve
Of her life, her slackening rhythms:
Nobody can know her, how she lost herself
Evening after evening in that after,
Her hourly feelings, the repetition,
Delay and failure of her labour
Of mourning. The steps space themselves
Out, the steps pass, in the mists
And hesitations of the summer,
And within a space which is doubled,
One of us has passed through the other,
Though one must count oneself three,
To figure out which of us
Has let herself be traversed.

Nothing advances, we don’t move,
We don’t address one another,
I haven’t opened my mouth
Except for one remark,
And what remark was that?
A word which appeases the menace
Of time in us, reading as if
I were stripping the words
Of their ever-mortal high meaning.

She is in dark light, or an openness
That leads to a darkness,
Embedded in the wall
Her mono-landscape
Stays facing the sea
And the harbour activity,
Her sea-conscience being ground up
With the smooth time of the deep,
Her mourning silhouetted against
The splendour of the sea
Which is now to your left,
As violent as it is distant
From all aggressive powers
Or any embassies. ... {excerpt}

Blue Juniata



Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide
scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch
empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here
there is no house at all—


only the bones of a house,
lilacs growing beside them,
roses in clumps between them,
honeysuckle over;
a gap for a door, a chimney
mud-chinked, an immense fireplace,
the skeleton of a pine,


and gandy dancers working on the rails
that run not thirty yards from the once door. ...





...for sometimes a familiar music hammers
like blood against the eardrums, paints a mist
across the eyes, as if the smells of lilacs,
moss roses, and the past became a music
made visible, a monument of air. {excerpts}


Malcolm Cowley, “Blue Juniata” from Blue Juniata: A Life. Copyright © 1985

Meta-A and the A of Absolutes



I write my God in blue.
I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts.
I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight.
I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath,
or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade,
at twilight, on the desert's steps.
Brown by day and black by night,
my God has wings that open to no reason.
He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes,
scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb
of light leaping from a fire.
Press him he bleeds.
When you take your hand to sacred water,
there is no sign of any wound.
And so I call him supreme, great artist,
judge of time, scholar of all living event,
the possible prophet of the possible event.
Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars,
blind men with their scars dulled by kola,
blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop,
blind men in corn, blind men in steel,
reason by their lights that our tongues
are free, our tongues will redeem us.
Speech is the fact, and the fact is true.
What is moves, and what is moving is.
We cling to these contradictions.
We know we will become our contradictions,
our complex body's own desire.
Yet speech is not the limit of our vision.
The ear entices itself with any sound.
The skin will caress whatever tone
or temperament that rises or descends.
The bones will set themselves to a dance.
The blood will argue with a bird in flight.
The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice,
brush and thrill to an old bone.
And yet there is no sign to arrest us
from the possible.
We remain at rest there, in transit
from our knowing to our knowledge.
So I would set a limit where I meet my logic.
I would clamber from my own cave
into the curve of sign, an alphabet
of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. ... {excerpt}




[Jay Wright, “Meta-A and the A of Absolutes” from

Transfigurations: Collected Poems (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Copyright ©

2000 by Jay Wright]