http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/bo...html?ref=books
Printable View
POEM How the Pope is Chosen by James Tate http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=179801
5/6/10... a review by David Orr --- Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/bo...html?ref=books
...from the Los Angeles Times: "What made Dylan Roar" ... http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,2403126.story
FROM THE DRESSING-ROOM
Left to itself, they say, every foetus
would turn female, staving in, nature
siding then with the enemy that
delicately mixes up genders. This
is an absence I have passionately sought,
brightening nevertheless my poet’s attic
with my steady hands, calling him my blue
lizard till his moans might be heard
at the far end of the garden. For I like
his ways, he’s light on his feet and does
not break anything, puts his entire soul
into bringing me a glass of water, ...
{one of two stanzas}
THE ALBERT CHAIN
Like an accomplished terrorist, the fruit hangs
from the end of a dead stem, under a tree
riddled with holes like a sieve. Breath smelling
of cinnamon retires into its dream to die there.
Fresh air blows in, morning breaks, then the mists
close in; a rivulet of burning air
pumps up the cinders from their roots,
but will not straighten in two radiant months
the twisted forest. Warm as a stable,
close to the surface of my mind,
the wild cat lies in the suppleness of life,
half-stripped of its skin, and in the square
beyond, a squirrel stoned to death
has come to rest on a lime tree.
I am going back into war, like a house
I knew when I was young: I am inside,
a thin sunshine, a night within a night,
getting used to the chalk and clay and bats
swarming in the roof. Like a dead man
attached to the soil which covers him,
I have fallen where no judgment can touch me,
its discoloured rubble has swallowed me up.
For ever and ever, I go back into myself:
I was born in little pieces, like specks of dust,
only an eye that looks in all directions can see me.
I am learning my country all over again,
how every inch of soil has been paid for
by the life of a man, the funerals of the poor. ...
{two of four stanzas}
BIG CITY SPEECH
Use meAbuse me Turn wheels of fire on manhole hotheads Sing meSour me Secrete dark matter’s sheen on our smarting skin Rise and shineIn puddle shallows under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd somnambulists and sleepyheads Wake usSpeak to us Bless what you’ve nurtured in your pits the rats voles roaches and all outlivers of your obscene ethic and politics Crawl on usFall on us you elevations that break and vein down to sulfuric fiber-optic wrecks through drill-bit dirt to bedrock Beat our browsFlee our sorrows Sleep tight with your ultraviolets righteous mica and drainage seeps your gorgeous color-chart container ships and cab-top numbers squinting in the mist
© 2009, W.S. Di Piero
THE PARABOLIC BALLAD
My life, like a rocket, makes a parabola
flying in darkness, -- no rainbow for traveler.
There once lived an artist, red-haired Gauguin,
he was a bohemian, a former tradesman.
To get to the Louvre
from the lanes of Montmartre
he circled around
as far as Sumatra!
He had to abandon the madness of money,
the filth of the scholars, the snarl of his honey.
The man overcame the terrestrial gravity,
The priests, drinking beer, would laugh at his "vanity":
"A straight line is short, but it is much too simple,
He'd better depict beds of roses for people."
And yet, like a rocket, he flew off with ease
through winds penetrating his coat and his ears.
He didn't fetch up to the Louvre through the door
but, like a parabola,
pierced the floor!
Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola.
{excerpt} - { http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-77/?ref=books } - { http://zhurnal.lib.ru/a/alec_v/voncollhtm.shtml }
NOX
By Anne Carson
Illustrated. Unpaged. New Directions. $29.95 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/bo...tml?ref=review --- Review By BEN RATLIFF
Published: June 3, 2010 "Lamentation"
a review of "One More Theory about Happiness" by Paul Guest: review entitled "The Art of Pain" by Christopher R. Beha 6/3/10 / 202pp Ecco/Harper Collins 21.99 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/bo...html?ref=books
LIMITS
Only he
Remembered the day we met
And only I
The day we said goodbye:
“Last day of June, our first blackberry pie,”
He always said.
A wood fire in the summer kitchen,
The hottest day.... A squall in the bedroom.
I can’t remember.
Nor he,
The December cube of clay,
The storm the day before,
How the bare trees
Played Giant Step in the dawn wind,
Or how
On the other bed, rhythmically
Touching her knuckles to the wall,
My mother slipped forever into fantasy.
Only he
Remembered the spoken hate
(Its change too sheepish to impart)
Saw daggers still growing
In bristling clump out of my heart.
{EXCERPT}
NOTES: This poem is part of a special section of Poetry magazine's May issue
Source: Poetry (May 2010).
Excerpt from "Nervous System"
When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?
You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out
and that’s just
today
Tomorrow it could be different
When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying
on a windowsill
The voices of my friends
in the sunlight
All of us running around
outside of our
deaths
--- http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/300...ading_room.cfm
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/bo...tml?ref=review Review of THE ANTHOLOGIST by Nicholson Baker (review entitled "Ryme and Unreason" by David Orr, September 1, 2009) Also, excerpt from the book... { http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/bo...rr-t.html?_r=1 } -- published September 4, 2009. "Novels about poetry are a dodgy proposition. After all, novelists already have a near monopoly on narrative and discursive fiction — turf once claimed by poetry — and it seems almost impolite for our prose writers, having triumphed so thoroughly over their sister art, to set themselves up as tour guides to poetry’s dwindling estate. And let’s face it, stories involving poets tend to be hokey or, worse, excruciatingly literary." quote from the review
But Cummings saw it clearly, though he said he did not go to the Soviet Union with any specific agenda in mind. Early in the book, he has this conversation, which he transcribed in his idiosyncratic style with a hotel clerk:
“Have you any rooms?” I said.
“Yes” (not at all disagreeably).
“How much are they?”
“five dollars. But that includes breakfast.”
“Five… The redfox leans toward me. Why do you wish to go to Russia?
because I’ve never been there.
(He slumps,recovers). You are interested in economic and sociological problems?
no.
Perhaps you are aware that there has been a change of government in recent years?
yes(I say without being able to suppress a smile).
And your sympathies are not with socialism?
may I be perfectly frank?
Please!
I know almost nothing about these important matters and care even less.
(His eyes appreciate my answer). For what do you care?
my work.
Which is writing?
and painting.
What kind of writing?
chiefly verse;some prose.
Then you wish to go to Russia as a writer and painter? Is that it?
no;I wish to go as myself.
(An almost smile). Do you realize that to go as what you call Yourself will cost a great deal?
I’ve been told so.
{from ‘EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia’ }http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...eecummings.jpg
ENDLESS INTER-STATES
1
They go down to the expressways, baskets
In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels
And watering cans, they go down to pick
Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down
In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing
By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those
Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down
Remembering the glide of automobiles, the
Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching,
Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s
In the trunk of the car. They go down, past
The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport
Soil from deep in the earth, and are content
To have the day before them, are content to imagine
Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures
Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of
Plant life, sustainable abundance,
An idea of sufficient that is global. Or,
Because cars now move on rails underground,
The elevated roads are covered in earth,
Vines drape around belts of green, snake
Through cities, overgrown and teeming
With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall
Of our own devising, and the night
Watchmen with their machine guns
Keeping humans, the intoxicated,
Out. I am sorry for this version, offer
You coffee, hot while there is still
Coffee this far north, while there is still news
To wake up to, and seasons
Vaguely reminiscent of seasons.
2
Web-toed she walks into the land, fins
Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation
A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau,
Quaint, at least that is my dream of her,
Big shouldered, out there daydreaming
The world into existence, pleasuring herself
With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake
But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping
In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by
Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she
Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries
To reattach things, but why? What if the world
Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing?
She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets
Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling
Itself on to the next.
3
Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless.
She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is
Always picking up after someone. But what? What
Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus
Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing
Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and
Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns,
Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out,
Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers
In the knotted oak, classic movies run on
The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred
Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over,
She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular,
Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a
Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked.
It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature
Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl
Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal
Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death
As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned.
Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic
Self and sees mariners floating, Ben
Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting
From the river bank, planked skirts on Front,
China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic
Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good.
Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching
Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move
Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other
Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities.
{excerpt, 3 of 6 parts} { http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/queyras/ }http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...eyras_sina.jpg
September 1961
This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.
The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones
have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.
They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy
learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"--Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been
happening to me"--
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness
twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.
They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given
the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck
has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can't reach
the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,
follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,
and away into deep woods. ... --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...seLevertov.jpg
{excerpt}
Evening Hawk
From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.
The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.
Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.
Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. ... {excerpt}
Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren.
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...nnWarren-1.jpg
Source: From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (1985) ---
AN IMPROVISATION FOR ANGULAR MOMENTUM
Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...watercolor.jpg
alive, musical! ...
{excerpt & self-portrait, watercolor}
Jayne Cortez: Online Poems
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There It Is
And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...line_poems.htm --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...respitters.jpg
Chinese Whispersby John Ashbery
John Ashbery
And in a little while we broke under the strain:
suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,
like any tree in any forest.
Mute, the pancake describes you.
It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim.
It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,
always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.
It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.
The governor general
called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,
knew it was going to be around for a long time,
even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees
onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again
when all memory of it had been expunged
from the common brain.
Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.
A boyfriend in the next town had one
but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.
Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:
I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,
so dense
not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.
What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,
yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides
and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,
blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.
Camera obscuras,
too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people
who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?
All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
less noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time.
How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
careless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out,
put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
before anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro
of collapsing clouds.
How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.
More
keeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace
from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.
There is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,
but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried
in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.
I yell to the ship’s front door,
wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.
I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them. ... {excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...nAshberyco.jpg
Tenderness and Rot by Kay Ryan
Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.
No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.
One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.
{excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...an-niagara.jpg
Explorers Cry Out Unheard
What I have in mind is the last wilderness.
I sweat to learn its heights of sun, scrub, ants,
its gashes full of shadows and odd plants,
as inch by inch it yields to my hard press.
And the way behind me changes as I advance.
If interdependence shapes the biomass,
though I plot my next step by pure chance
I can’t go wrong. Even willful deviance
connects me to all the rest. The changing past
includes and can‘t excerpt me. {excerpt} ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/ny...html?ref=books
Marie Ponsot, “Explorers Cry Out Unheard” from The Bird Catcher. Copyright © 1998 by Marie Ponsot. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...n_robert-1.jpg BENDING THE BOW
We've our business to attend Day's duties,
bend back the bow in dreams as we may
til the end rimes in the taut string
with the sending. Reveries are rivers and flow
where the cold light gleams reflecting the window upon the
surface of the table,
the presst-glass creamer, the pewter sugar bowl, the litter
of coffee cups and saucers,
carnations painted growing upon whose surfaces. The whole
composition of surfaces leads into the other
current disturbing
what I would take hold of. I'd been
in the course of a letter – I am still
in the course of a letter – to a friend,
who comes close in to my thought so that
the day is hers. My hand writing here
there shakes in the currents of... of air?
of an inner anticipation of...? reaching to touch
ghostly exhilarations in the thought of her.
At the extremity of this
design
"there is a connexion working in both directions, as in
the bow and the lyre"–
only in that swift fulfillment of the wish
that sleep
can illustrate my hand
sweeps the string. ... {excerpt}
-- { http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...line_poems.htm }
The Cats Will Know
Rain will fall again
on your smooth pavement,
a light rain like
a breath or a step.
The breeze and the dawn
will flourish again
when you return,
as if beneath your step.
Between flowers and sills
the cats will know.
There will be other days,
there will be other voices.
You will smile alone.
The cats will know.
You will hear words
old and spent and useless
like costumes left over
from yesterday’s parties.
You too will make gestures.
You’ll answer with words—
face of springtime,
you too will make gestures.
The cats will know,
face of springtime;
and the light rain
and the hyacinth dawn
that wrench the heart of him
who hopes no more for you—
they are the sad smile... {excerpt} http://www.poetryfoundation.org/arch...html?id=182021
Translated by Geoffrey Brock
... http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...are-pavese.jpg Cesare Pavese
Pro Femina
ONE
From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women.
How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie
The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters.
Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.
Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices
Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart:
Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted
To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner—
“Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,
As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those
Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it.
While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,
Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines.
Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery
Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient
Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male—
I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions
Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen,
Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.
I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine
But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me.
Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,
Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken,
Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known
Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;
Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions;
We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,
“Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance
In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades
Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence
And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,
Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!
{excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...olyn_kizer.jpg
W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/bo...html?ref=books --- Song of Three Smiles
Let me call a ghost,
Love, so it be little:
In December we took
No thought for the weather.
Whom now shall I thank
For this wealth of water?
Your heart loves harbors
Where I am a stranger.
Where was it we lay
Needing no other
Twelve days and twelve nights
In each other’s eyes? ... {excerpt}
Portrait of the Author
Cesare Pavese
to Leone
The window that faces this street is always
an empty abyss. The summer blue overhead
seems firmer somehow, with its passing cloud.
Here, nobody passes. It’s just us sitting here.
My colleague—who stinks—is sitting beside me
on the public street, and without moving his body
he strips off his pants. I take off my sweater.
The stones beneath us are cold, and my colleague
likes this, and I look at him, and nobody passes.
And suddenly, framed in the window, a woman,
brightly colored. Maybe she noticed the stink
and wanted to see. My colleague stands and looks back.
He has a sort of continuous beard from his face
to his ankles, it covers what pants do and pokes out
through his sweater. That beard stinks all by itself.
When he jumped through the window, into the dark,
the woman vanished. My eyes wander up
toward the nice solid strip of sky—it’s naked too.
I don’t stink, since I don’t have a beard. The stones
are cold on the skin of my back, which women like
because it’s so smooth: what don’t women like?
But no women pass by. Some ***** passes by
followed by a male whose fur is rain-drenched
and stinks bad. The smooth cloud in the sky
looks down, unmoving: it resembles a leaf pile.
My colleague has found himself supper tonight.
Women treat you well when you’re naked. At last
a kid appears from around the corner. He’s smoking,
he’s got curly hair, tough skin, and legs like an eel,
like me. Some fine day, the women will want
to take off his clothes and sniff for the good stink.
I stick out a foot as he passes. He falls to the ground,
and I ask for a cig. We smoke there in silence.
Translated by Geoffrey Brock ---
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...rePavese-1.jpg
Broken Pot Used as Writing Material
Re-entry to your econiche
Is like the beautifying of a cathedral.
One reads these cloths of stem stitch,
Laid or couched stitch as natural numbers,
One reads a clock from twelve to six
Asserting that they moved when they didn’t.
Boundaries shift for the whole hand,
The left must close a pattern guided
By the right, since signals from the two eyes
Fail to recognise an everyday face.
{excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...hMcGuckian.jpg
In Media Universe, Poetry’s Small Planet
By DANA JENNINGS
Published: July 22, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/bo..._r=1&ref=books
"Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming central electric station that holds the hydraulic pressure of a mountain chain and the electric power of a vast horizon, synthesised in marble distribution panels bristling with dials, keyboards and shining communicators. These panels are our only models for the writing of poetry." from the Guardian article... http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010...els-technology
from The Nerve Meter
(Antonin Artaud) An actor is seen as if through crystals.
Inspiration in stages.
One musn’t let in too much literature.
I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.
I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point
—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality
(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),
and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—
in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled
—are lost in the shadows of man.
In sleep, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs.
Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes.
It must be understood that all of intelligence is only a vast contingency, and that one can lose it, not like a lunatic who is dead, but like a living person who is in life and who feels working on himself its attraction and its inspiration (of intelligence, not of life).
The titillations of intelligence and this sudden reversal of contending parties.
Words halfway to intelligence.
This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought.
This dialogue in thought.
The ingestion, the breaking off of everything.
And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.
To find oneself again in a state of extreme shock, clarified by unreality, with, in a corner of oneself, some fragments of the real world.
{excerpt}
Hi Quasimodo
I've not looked at this thread before, but flicking through i can see that this must be a labour of love for you. It's certainly a great resource.
:thumbsup:
Retroduction to American History
Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,
The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness; sleep
Collects all weary nothings and lugs away the towers,
The pinnacles of dust that feed the subway.
What stiff unhappy silence waits on sleep
Struts like an officer; tongues next-door bewitch
Themselves with divination; I like a melancholy oaf
Beg the nightly pillow with impossible loves.
And abnegation folds hands, crossed like the knees
Of the complacent tailor, stitches cloaks of mercy
To the backs of obsessions.
Winter like spring no less
Tolerates the air; the wild pheasant meets innocently
The gun; night flouts illumination with meagre impudence.
In such serenity of equal fates, why has Narcissus
Urged the brook with questions? Merged with the element
Speculation suffuses the meadow with drops to tickle
The cow’s gullet; grasshoppers drink the rain.
Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. Vocabulary
Becomes confusion, decoration a blight; the Parthenon
In Tennessee stucco, art for the sake of death. Now
(The bedpost receding in stillness) you brush your teeth
“Hitting on all thirty-two;” scholarship pares
The nails of Catullus, sniffs his sheets, restores
His “passionate underwear;” morality disciplines the other
Person; every son-of-a-***** is Christ, at least Rousseau;
Prospero serves humanity in steam-heated universities, three
Thousand dollars a year. Simplicity, Flamineo, is obscene;
Sunlight topples indignant from the hill.
In every railroad station everywhere every lover
Waits for his train. He cannot hear. The smoke
Thickens. Ticket in hand, he pumps his body
Toward lower six, for one more terse ineffable trip,
His very eyeballs fixed in disarticulation. The berth
Is clean; no elephants, vultures, mice or spiders
Distract him from nonentity: his metaphors are dead. ...
{excerpt}
The one whose Reproach I Cannot Evade
She sits in her glass garden
and awaits the guests -
The sailor with the blue tangerines
the fish clothed in languages
the dolphin with a revolver in its teeth.
Dusk enters from stage left:
its voice falls like dew on the arbor.
Tiny bells
sway in the catalpa tree.
What is it she hopes to catch in her net
of love? Petals? Conch-shells?
The night-moth? She does not speak.
Tonight, I tell her, no one comes;
you wait in vain.
Yet at eight precisely
the moon opens its theatric doors,
an arm rises from the fountain,
the music box, face down
on her tabouret, swells and bursts
its cover - a tinkling flood of
rice moves over the table.
She smiles at me, false believer,
smiles and goes in, leaving
the garden empty and my thighs
half-eaten by the raging twilight.
George Hitchcock
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/obitu...poets__96.html