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SENTENCINGS
A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.
* * *
Blinded by light or black cloth—
so many ways
not to see others suffer.
* * *
Too much longing:
it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.
* * *
From very far or very close—
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.
* * *
As if putting arms into woolen coat sleeves,
we listen to the murmuring dead.
* * *
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...Hirshfield.jpg
Any point of a circle is its start:
desire forgoing fulfillment to go on desiring. ...{excerpt}
INSOMNIA
Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love. ...{excerpt - two of three stanzas}
IN THESE SOFT TRINITIES
Whenever I see two women
crowned, constellated friends
it is as if three birch trees wept together
in a field by a constant spring.
The third woman isn’t there
exactly, but just before them a flame
bursts out, then disappears
in a blurred, electric shining
that lifts my hair like an animal’s.
In an aura of charged air I remember
my poor mother turned into royalty,
my sister and me in bobby socks
endlessly, all summer long
calling each other Margaret Rose
and Lillibet, Lillibet, Lillibet,
pretending to be princesses...
Now, swollen into these tall blooms
like paper cutouts in water,
in each new neighborhood garden
always, two women talking
nod their three curly heads together:
with bits of dirt on their foreheads, speckled
iris, flaming poppy
in the backyard dynasties of the multiflora
it is the famous funeral photograph
of the Dowager Queen, Queen Mother, stunned Young Queen,
three stepping stones in marble
that haunt me forever, clear
and mysterious as well water, the weight of it
in a bronze bucket swinging
powerfully from my hand.
As the plumcolored shadow rises,
full as a first child in the orchard,
the lost gardening glove on the path,
the single earring tucked
in an odd corner of the purse and then found
here double themselves, then triple:
in these soft trinities
the lives that begin in us
are born and born again like wings. ...{excerpt}
THE RETURN don’t go to sleep, don’t
Dear, the road is long yet
don’t go too near
the forest’s enticements, don’t lose hope
write the address
in snowmelt on your hand
or lean on my shoulder
as we pass the hazy morning
lifting the transparent storm curtain
we’ll arrive at where we are from
a green disk of land
around an old pagoda
there I will guard
your weary dreams
and drive off the flocks of nights
leaving only bronze drums, and the sun
as beyond the pagoda
tiny waves quietly
crawl up the beach
and draw back trembling {translated from the Chinese by Aaron Crippen}
THE INDOORS IS ENDLESS
It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.
The grindstones are turning in Europe’s windmills.
The wild geese are flying northwards.
Here is the north, here is Stockholm
swimming palaces and hovels.
The logs in the royal fireplace
collapse from Attention to At Ease.
Peace prevails, vaccine and potatoes,
but the city wells breathe heavily.
Privy barrels in sedan chairs like paschas
are carried by night over the North Bridge.
The cobblestones make them stagger
mamselles loafers gentlemen.
Implacably still, the sign-board
with the smoking blackamoor.
So many islands, so much rowing
with invisible oars against the current!
The channels open up, April May
and sweet honey dribbling June.
The heat reaches islands far out.
The village doors are open, except one.
The snake-clock’s pointer licks the silence.
The rock slopes glow with geology’s patience.
It happened like this, or almost.
It is an obscure family tale
about Erik, done down by a curse
disabled by a bullet through the soul.
He went to town, met an enemy
and sailed home sick and grey.
Keeps to his bed all that summer.
The tools on the wall are in mourning.
He lies awake, hears the woolly flutter
of night moths, his moonlight comrades.
His strength ebbs out, he pushes in vain
against the iron-bound tomorrow.
And the God of the depths cries out of the depths
‘Deliver me! Deliver yourself!’
All the surface action turns inwards.
He’s taken apart, put together.
The wind rises and the wild rose bushes
catch on the fleeing light. ...{excerpt}
"The Best of It: New and Selected Poems" by Kay Ryan (Grove: 288 pp., $24). A lifelong Californian (and U.S. poet laureate from 2008-2010), Ryan creates poetry that is spare, laconic, awash with word play, but with a fierceness underneath. This collection frames the brilliance of her career. {one of his ten best books of 2010} -- by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic, December 19, 2010 -- http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...0,722150.story
Poetry by Terrance Hayes, Connie Wanek, Lisa Robertson & James Schuyler -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/bo...ew/Burt-t.html -- LIGHTHEAD
By Terrance Hayes.
Penguin Poets. Paper, $18.
ON SPEAKING TERMS
By Connie Wanek.
Copper Canyon. Paper, $15.
LISA ROBERTSON’S MAGENTA SOUL WHIP
By Lisa Robertson.
Coach House. Paper, $14.95.
OTHER FLOWERS
Uncollected Poems.
By James Schuyler. Edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28.
NEW FOLK
I said Folk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.
After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When
and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers
come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?"
We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple
ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end
of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple
where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened
by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled
a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents.
...{excerpt}
AMARYLLIS
A flower needs to be this size
to conceal the winter window,
and this color, the red
of a Fiat with the top down,
to impress us, dull as we've grown.
Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb
half above the soil
stuck out its green tongue
and slowly, day by day,
the flower itself entered our world,
closed, like hands that captured a moth,
then open, as eyes open,
and the amaryllis, seeing us,
was somehow undiscouraged.
It stands before us now
as we eat our soup; ...{excerpt}
THE BLUET
And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr's table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: ...{excerpt}
AFTER US
I don't know if we're in the beginning
or in the final stage.
-- Tomas Tranströmer
Rain is falling through the roof.
And all that prospered under the sun,
the books that opened in the morning
and closed at night, and all day
turned their pages to the light;
the sketches of boats and strong forearms
and clever faces, and of fields
and barns, and of a bowl of eggs,
and lying across the piano
the silver stick of a flute; everything
invented and imagined,
everything whispered and sung,
all silenced by cold rain.
The sky is the color of gravestones.
The rain tastes like salt, and rises
in the streets like a ruinous tide. ...{excerpt}
REQUIEM FOR THE PLANTAGENET KINGS
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.
Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/vi...-culture-15564 ------- from Commentary Magazine ---- T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture
Joseph Epstein
November 2010 ------- “The dissociation of sensibility” is a reminder that Eliot, as he himself noted, launched “a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world.” Among these were “objective correlative” and “the auditory imagination.” Then there are all those sentences of his that, once read, are never forgotten:
“He had a mind so fine no idea can violate it” (this of Henry James).
“The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”
“The progress of an artist is a continual self--sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least somethingdifferent.”
Variation On a Theme by Rilke
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me–a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic–or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
from Light: Blue Poles
Tonight, away begins to go
farther away, and the dream
what do we know of the dream
metallic leaps Jackson Pollock
silvery streams Jackson Pollock
I gaze across the sea
see in the distance your walk and you
pass the Pacific, distant and blue
phallus and Moloch pace my view
on into otherness
on into otherness?
are we in the world after or before
are we or are we not magnetic force
it is apparently me you inform: ...{excerpt}
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/ar...3fs/TJiPje3Axw ----- Janine Pommy Vega, Restless Poet, Dies at 68 -- By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: January 2, 2011 --- "Janine Pommy Vega, a poet and intimate of the Beat generation luminaries Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky whose lifelong quest for transcendence took her to San Francisco in the 1960s and ona pilgrimage to neolithic goddess-worship sites in the 1980s, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Willow, N.Y. She was 68." from the obituary --
--- http://books.google.com/books?id=X_A...page&q&f=false -- for some of her poems --
BUCKDANCER'S CHOICE
So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler
In the invalid’s bed: my mother,
Warbling all day to herself
The thousand variations of one song;
It is called Buckdancer’s Choice.
For years, they have all been dying
Out, the classic buck-and-wing men
Of traveling minstrel shows;
With them also an old woman
Was dying of breathless angina,
Yet still found breath enough
To whistle up in my head
A sight like a one-man band,
Freed black, with cymbals at heel,
An ex-slave who thrivingly danced
To the ring of his own clashing light
Through the thousand variations of one song
All day to my mother’s prone music,
The invalid’s warbler’s note,
While I crept close to the wall
Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter,
Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break ...{excerpt}
THE DUSK OF HORSES
Right under their noses, the green
Of the field is paling away
Because of something fallen from the sky.
They see this, and put down
Their long heads deeper in grass
That only just escapes reflecting them
As the dream of a millpond would.
The color green flees over the grass
Like an insect, following the red sun over
The next hill. The grass is white.
There is no cloud so dark and white at once;
There is no pool at dawn that deepens
Their faces and thirsts as this does.
Now they are feeding on solid
Cloud, and, one by one,
With nails as silent as stars among the wood
Hewed down years ago and now rotten,
The stalls are put up around them.
Now if they lean, they come
On wood on any side. Not touching it, they sleep.
No beast ever lived who understood
What happened among the sun's fields,
Or cared why the color of grass
Fled over the hill while he stumbled,
Led by the halter to sleep
On his four taxed, worthy legs.
Each thinks he awakens where
The sun is black on the rooftop,
That the green is dancing in the next pasture,
And that the way to sleep ...{excerpt}
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20385
DEW LIGHT
Now in the blessed days of more and less
when the news about time is that each day
there is less of it I know none of that
as I walk out through the early garden
only the day and I are here with no
before or after and the dew looks up
without a number or a present age
{ https://www.aprweb.org/poem/dew-light }
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=128239404 --- This PBS link has poems
from Merwin's "The Shadow of Sirius" collection. Also, interview with Merwin on the program
"Fresh Air". For a complete transcript of the interview...
{http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=128239404} --- Title ...<
'Sirius' Poetry From New Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin.
THE HEAVEN OF ANIMALS
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open.
To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
The richest wood,
The deepest field.
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey
May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life, ...{excerpt}
SOFTEST OF TONGUES
To many things I've said the word that cheats
the lips and leaves them parted (thus: prash-chai
which means "good-bye") -- to furnished flats, to streets,
to milk-white letters melting in the sky;
to drab designs that habit seldom sees,
to novels interrupted by the din
of tunnels, annotated by quick trees,
abandoned with a squashed banana skin;
to a dim waiter in a dimmer town,
to cuts that healed and to a thumbless glove;
also to things of lyrical renown
perhaps more universal, such as love.
Thus life has been an endless line of land
receding endlessly.... And so that's that,
you say under your breath, and wave your hand,
and then your handkerchief, and then your hat.
To all these things I've said the fatal word,
using a tongue I had so tuned and tamed
that -- like some ancient sonneteer -- ... {excerpt} {for the rest of this classic poem... http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...ov/tongues.htm }
A STOPWATCH AND AN ORDNANCE MAP
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
At five a man fell to the ground
And the watch flew off his wrist
Like a moon struck from the earth
Marking a blank time that stares
On the tides of change beneath.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map.
He stayed faithfully in that place
From his living comrade split
By dividers of the bullet
Opening wide the distances
Of his final loneliness.
All under the olive trees.
A stopwatch and an ordnance map. ...{excerpt}
MADRIGAL IN TIME OF WAR
Beside the rivers of the midnight town
Where four-foot couples love and paupers drown,
Shots of quick hell we took, our final kiss,
The great and swinging bridge a bower for this.
Your cheek lay burning in my fingers’ cup;
Often my lip moved downward and yours up
Till both adjusted, tightened, locksmith-true:
The flesh precise, the crazy brain askew.
Roughly the train with grim and piston knee
Pounded apart our pleasure, you from me;
Flare warned and ticket whispered and bell cried.
Time and the locks of bitter rail divide.
For ease remember, all that parted lie:
Men who in camp of shot or doldrum die,
Who at land’s-end eternal furlough take
—This for memento as alone you wake.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/455367/Poetry/overview --- from South Korea ---- --- POETRY ---- the movie --- http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/02/11.../11poetry.html = Full Review - NYT --
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/bo..._r=1&ref=books ---- a review -- Poems of Pain, the Raw and the Remembered --- By DANA JENNINGS
Published: February 9, 2011 ---- "EVERY RIVEN THING" by Christian Wiman -- 93pp, Farrar, Straus & Giroux -- $24
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/bo...c=me&ref=books ---- PAUL VIOLI --- OBITUARY entitled "Paul Violi, A Poet both Wry and Sly, dies at 66" -- by William Grimes, April 15, 2011 --- http://www.paulvioli.com/ --- Violi poem... "Counterman" -- http://www.cstone.net/~poems/countvio.htm --
the day the saucers came
by: NEIL GAIMAN
That day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn't notice it because
That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because
On the saucer day, which was the zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-man's nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because
On the saucer-zombie-battling gods day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across the land, and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because
That day, the saucer day the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day, the day the great winds came
And snows, and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling us we would obey, the day
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of the Time Machine day,
You didn't notice any of this because
you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,
wondering if I was going to call.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- On Poetry
How Poets Achieve Their Styles -- By DAVID ORR
Published: April 22, 2011
---
How It Happens
The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us
— W.S. MERWIN, poet laureate of the United States and author, most recently, of “The Shadow of Sirius,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2009
http://www.salon.com/books/laura_mil...4/05/david_orr --- David Orr on Contemporary Poetry --- salon.com ------- Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011 20:30 ET
Modern poetry made less terrifying
Critic David Orr explains the mysteries and marvels of contemporary verse and the people who write it. {review of BEAUTIFUL AND POINTLESS} by David Orr -- 18.71 ...a guide to modern poetry
http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...42-octavio-paz --- Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42
Interviewed by Alfred Mac Adam --- The Paris Review Interviews... --- Summer, 1991 --
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2..._fact_goodyear ---
The Literary Life
The Moneyed Muse
What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry?by Dana Goodyear
February 19, 2007
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1MZyCqHCY --
FOR THE LAST WOLVERINE
They will soon be down
To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping
The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned
To extinction, tearing the guts
From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat
The heart, and from it, have an idea
Stream into his gnarling head
That he no longer has a thing
To lose, and so can walk
Out into the open, in the full
Pale of the sub-Arctic sun
Where a single spruce tree is dying
Higher and higher. Let him climb it
With all his meanness and strength.
Lord, we have come to the end
Of this kind of vision of heaven,
As the sky breaks open
Its fans around him and shimmers
And into its northern gates he rises
Snarling complete in the joy of a weasel
With an elk’s horned heart in his stomach
Looking straight into the eternal
Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all
My way: at the top of that tree I place
The New World’s last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving
Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame
And mingle them, crackling with feathers,
In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary
Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice screaming that it cannot die,
That it has come back, this time
On wings, and will spare no earthly thing:
That it will hover, made purely of northern
Lights, at dusk and fall
On men building roads: ... {excerpt}
LIKE A SCARF
The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing;
most likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.
The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they
should receive all the credit that is their due.
When I asked one of the doctors for a corkscrew
he produced one without a moment's hesitation.
And it was a corkscrew of the finest craftsmanship,
very shiny and bright not unlike the doctor himself.
"We'll be conducting our picnic under the great oak
beginning in just a few minutes, and if you'd care
to join us we'd be most honored. However, I understand
you have your obligations and responsibilities,
and if you would prefer to simply visit with us
from time to time, between patients, our invitation
is nothing if not flexible. And, we shan't be the least slighted
or offended in any way if, due to your heavy load,
we are altogether deprived of the pleasure
of exchanging a few anecdotes, regarding the mentally ill,
depraved, diseased, the purely knavish, you in your bughouse,
if you'll pardon my vernacular. O yes, and we in our crackbrain
daily rounds, there are so many gone potty everywhere we roam,
not to mention in one's own home, dead moonstruck.
Well, well, indeed we would have many notes to compare
if you could find the time to join us after your injections."
My invitation was spoken in the evenest tones,
but midway through it I began to suspect I was addressing
an imposter. I returned the corkscrew in a nonthreatening manner.
What, for instance, I asked myself, would a doctor, a doctor of the mind,
be doing with a corkscrew in his pocket?
This was a very sick man, one might even say dangerous.
I began moving away cautiously, never taking my eyes off of him.
His right eyelid was twitching guiltily, or at least anxiously,
and his smock flapping slightly in the wind. ...{excerpt}
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
(Translated By Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. ...{excerpt}
THE MAN-MOTH Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the
moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast
properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on
the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. ...{excerpt}
Eurydice
By H. D. (1886–1961)
I
So you have swept me back,
I who could have walked with the live souls
above the earth,
I who could have slept among the live flowers
at last;
so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back
where dead lichens drip
dead cinders upon moss of ash;
so for your arrogance
I am broken at last,
I who had lived unconscious,
who was almost forgot;
if you had let me wait
I had grown from listlessness
into peace,
if you had let me rest with the dead,
I had forgot you
and the past.
II
Here only flame upon flame
and black among the red sparks,
streaks of black and light
grown colourless;
why did you turn back,
that hell should be reinhabited
of myself thus
swept into nothingness?
why did you glance back?
why did you hesitate for that moment?
why did you bend your face
caught with the flame of the upper earth,
above my face?
what was it that crossed my face
with the light from yours
and your glance?
what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,
the fire of your own presence?
What had my face to offer
but reflex of the earth,
haycinth colour
caught from the raw fissure in the rock
where the light struck,
and the colour of azure crocuses
and the bright surface of gold crocuses
and of the wind-flower,
swift in its veins as lightning
and as white.
III
Saffron from the fringe of the earth,
wild saffron that has bent
over the sharp edge of earth,
all the flowers that cut through the earth,
all, all the flowers are lost;
everything is lost,
everything is crossed with black,
black upon black
and worse than black,
this colourless light.
IV
Fringe upon fringe
of blue crocuses,
crocuses, walled against blue of themselves,
blue of that upper earth,
blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,
lost;
flowers,
if I could have taken once my breath of them,
enough of them,
more than earth,
even than of the upper earth,
had passed with me
beneath the earth;
if I could have caught up from the earth,
the whole of the flowers of the earth,
if once I could have breathed into myself
the very golden crocuses
and the red,
and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,
the whole of the golden mass,
the whole of the great fragrance,
I could have dared the loss. ...{excerpt}
La Figlia che Piange
O quam te memorem virgo ...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
{ La Figlia che Piange } - the girl who cries ---
{ O quam te memorem virgo... } - from Virgil: what am I to call you maiden? (... For you do not have a mortal face.)
Source: Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)