fragments of contemporary poetry

Waiting

Was distinctly unglamorous.
A wince-making barrenness.
An eighteen-rib mule

Hungry unfed at the empty.
It wasn't an imaginary landscape.
But the morgue man bent

Over the young man asleep on a Lethean slab.
It was the season of quiet:
The quiet of death. The uneasy quiet

After the gasp in the middle
Of the terrible, terrible movie
That someone had made and kept showing... {excerpt}

"If Ryan's language is spare, her concerns are broad and philosophical. A typical Ryan poem begins with a proposition—'Everything contains some/ silence' or 'It's what we can't/ know that interests/ us." She explores old bromides, wondering what the fabric of life is like ("stretchy") or what it might be like to live on an island where silence is revered. Each poem twists around and back upon its argument like a river retracing its path; they are didactic in spirit, but a bedrock wit supports them. Here's "Green Hills," from The Niagara River, her sixth (and most recent) book:"

Their green flanks
and swells are not
flesh in any sense
matching ours,
we tell ourselves.
Nor their green
breast nor their
green shoulder nor
the langour of their
rolling over.

from http://www.slate.com/id/2196198/pagenum/all/#page_start

SOUTH OF MARS
It's over now. Part of the story
Has disappeared, into the void
Of something that has ended forever:
I know the exact place, behind the house,
A place where waves can be counted,
Seven hard cold waves,
Like the ones in the sea.
Undreamt of blues and marvellous
Greys set up a background,
A flat light and a mask of ocean salt,
For a sea full of inlets, harbours
And ravines, shipwrecks and sudden
Green splendours: green, I want you,
Green, I am half-full of seawater
Though far, far from the sea,
And the smoothest stone
Is a freshwater myth.
A cool oval breeze reaches me
From the sea, birds can fly in it,
And every half-minute comes the smell
Of the sea, newly cleaned, like a loaf of silver.
The sound of the sea fits inside
An orange in a wicker basket,
Or your face when it is still wet.
Its fine sand, of which there is very little,
Licks the shell of the sunset without
Waiting to go in, as if I had
A gold coin in my hand and didn't
Know how to let it go.
I'll do the whole thing in one breath,
And soon this house will be happier*
And more logical, without the dark
Corridor, without its quiet humble* plume
Of smoke that was warm blood
Mistaken inside a windowpane.
When you're all in the door of your house
With that sense of Saturday and garden gate,
You'll know there's no place I'd rather live,
To finish out the summer, the last days of August,
And the blessed September,
Above all, waking up,
And finding THAT.
Send me news how the sea is doing,
Wave-like wheat and wheat-like wave.
Remember me when you
Are at the beach, in that yacht
With the name of an island -
I would like the water to grow calm
For you and send blue telegrams.
My back to the frozen field
And just one star, I have the joy
Of thinking very differently than I did
Last summer, the year that the pillow
Was embroidered. Who would have said
That eight years later, I would look
For the timid city on the map
To see the mountain stripped of mist
And NOT look at the sea?
The church tower rock back and forth
Over the pitiable houses? A verbal
And musical ruin. I never understood
The number in your address this past
Season, your passport of smiles
Like a train without wheels*
Or wheels without a track.
Surrounded by corpulent trees
As if the tree had just been invented,
The woman who went to gather kindling
On the beach of day sits down
With all the excitement pruduced by jewels.
But anything is better than to remain
Seated in the window looking*
At the same landscape and its surprises. ... {excerpt}

*

From The Colossus and other Poems

FULL FATHOM FIVE

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's
coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard,
Far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrin-
Kling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form
suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in
Runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor
and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's
Ridgepole. ... {excerpt}

From The Colossus and Other Poems

THE COLOSSUS

I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
Other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails
Of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-
Color. ..... {excerpt}

From The Colossus and Other Poems

THE DISQUIETING MUSES

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald
head

In the hurricane, when father's twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
"Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don't care!"
But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadow stretched, the lights
Went out.

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and trills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear
Mother,

I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, Never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come
Here!
And I faced my traveling companions. ... {excerpt}

From The Colossus and other Poems

MUSSEL HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR

I came before the water-
Colorists came to get the
Good of the Cape light that scours
Sand grit to sided crystal
And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
Of the three fishing smacks beached
On the bank of the river's

Backtracking tail. I'd come for
Free fish-bait: the blue mussels
Clumped like bulbs at the grass-
root
Margin of the tidal pools.
Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt
Mud stench, shell guts, gulls'
Leavings;
Heard a queer crusty scrabble

Cease, and I neared the silenced
Edge of a cratered pool-bed.
The mussels hung dull blue and
Conspicuous, yet it seemed
A sly world's hinges had swung
Shut against me. All held still.
Though I counted scant seconds,

Enough ages lapsed to win
Confidence and safe-conduct
In the wary otherworld
Eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;
Small mud knobs, nudged from
Under,
Displaced their domes as tiny
Knights might doff their casques.
The crabs

Inched from their pygmy burrows
And from the trench-dug mud, all
Camouflaged in mottled mail
Of browns and greens. Each wore
one
claw swollen to a shield large
As itself--no fiddler-s arm
Grown Gargantuan by trade,

But grown grimly, and grimly
Borne, for a use beyond my
Guessing of it. Sibilant
Mass-motived hordes, they sidled
Out in a converging stream
Toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to
Meet the thin and sluggish thread

Of sea retracing its tide-
Way up the river-basin.
Or to avoid me. They moved
Obliquely with a dry-wet
Sound. With a glittery wisp
And trickle. Could they feel mud
Pleasurable under claws

As I could between bare toes?
That question ended it--I
Stood shut out, for once, for all,
Puzzling the passage of their
Absolutely alien
Order as I might puzzle
At the clear tail of Halley's

Comet coolly giving my
Orbit the go-by, made known
By a family name it
Knew nothing of. So the crabs
Went about their business, which
Wasn't fiddling, and I filled
A big handkerchief with blue

Mussels. From what the crabs saw,
If they could see, I was one
Two-legged mussel-picker.
High on the airy thatching
Of the dense grasses I found
The husk of a fiddler-crab,
Intact, strangely strayed above

His world of mud--green color
And innards bleached and blown off
Somewhere be much sun and wind;
There was no telling if he'd
Died recluse or suicide
Or headstrong Columbus crab
The crab-face, etched and set there,

Grimaced as skulls grimace: it
Had an Oriental look,
A samurai death mask done
On a tiger tooth, less for
Art's sake than God's. ... {excerpt}

from British contemporary poetry



from Exeunt

I

Drop Serene

He poured the warm, clear guck into the mould
in which he'd already composed, with tweezers,
dead wasps on an everlasting flower
or ants filling over a leaf. When it was cold
he slaved at the surface, softening the camber
till it sat with the row of blebs on his mantelpiece,
each with its sequestered populace
like a hiccup in history, scooped out of amber.

As if it might stall the invisible cursor
drawing a blind down each page of his almanac
or the blank wall of water that always kept pace,
glittering half an inch, half an inch from his back.
He was out in the garden, digging the borders
when it caught him, in a naturalistic pose.



II

Curtains

You stop at the tourist office in Aubeterre,
a columbarium of files and dockets.
She explains, while you flip through the little leaflets
about the chapel and the puppet-theatre,
that everything is boarded up till spring,
including — before you can ask — the only hotel.
A moped purrs through the unbroken drizzle.
You catch yourself checking her hands for rings.

{excerpt}

FISSION



The real electric lights light upon the full-sized
screen
On which the greater-than-life-size girl appears,
Almost nude on the lawn-- sprinklers on --
Voice-over her mother calling her name out -- loud --
Camera angle giving her lowered lids their full
Expanse -- a desert -- as they rise

Out of the shabby annihilation,
Out of the possibility of never-having-been-seen,
And rise,
Till the glance is let loose into the auditorium,
And the man who has just stopped in his tracks
Looks down
For the first

Time. Tick tock. It's the birth of the mercantile

Dream (he looks down). It's the birth of
The dream called NEW WORLD (looks down). She lies there. A corridor of light
Filled with dust
Flows down from the booth to the screen.
Everyone in here wants to be taken off

Somebody's list, wants to be placed on
Somebody else's list.
Tick. It is 1963. The idea of history is being
Outmaneuvered.
So that as the houselights come on -- midscene --
Not quite killing the picture which keeps flowing beneath,

A man comes running down the aisle
Asking for our attention --

Ladies and Gentlemen
I watch the houselights lap against the other light -- the tunnel
Of image-making dots licking the white sheet awake --
A man, a girl, her desperate mother -- daisies growing in the
Corner --

I watch the light from our real place
Suck the arm of screen-building light into itself
Until the gesture of the magic forearm frays,
And the story up there grays, pales -- them almost lepers now,
Saints, such
White on their flesh in
Patches -- her thighs like receipts slapped down on a
Slim silver tray,

Her eyes as she lowers the heart-shaped shades,
As the glance glides over what used to be the open,
The free,
As the glance moves, pianissimo, over the glint of day,
Over the sprinkler, the mother's voice shrieking like a grappling
Hook,
The grass blades aflame with being-seen, here on the out-
Skirts…..You can almost hear the click at the heart of
The silence

Where the turnstile shuts and he's in -- our hero --
The moment spoked,
Our gaze on her fifteen-foot eyes,
The man hoarse now as he waves his arms,
As he screams to the booth to cut it, cut the sound,
And the sound is cut,
And her sun-barred shoulders are left to turn

Soundless as they accompany
Her neck, her face, the
Looking-up.
Now the theater's skylight is opened and noon slides in.
I watch as it overpowers the electric lights,
Whiting the story out one layer further

Till it's just a smoldering of whites
Where she sits up, and her stretch of flesh
Is just a roiling up of graynesses,
Vague stutterings of
Light with motion in them, bits of moving zeros

In the infinite virtuality of light,
Some LIKENESS in it but not particulate,
A grave of possible shapes called likeness -- see it? -- something
Scrawling up there that could be skin or daylight or even

The expressway now that he's gotten her to leave with him --
(it happened rather fast) (do you recall) --

The man up front screaming the President's been shot, waving
His hat, slamming one hand flat
Over the open
To somehow get
Our attention,

In Dallas, behind him the scorcher -- whites, grays,
Laying themselves across his face --
Him like a beggar in front of us, holding his hat --
I don't recall what I did,
I don't recall what the right thing to do would be,
I wanted someone to love…..

There is a way she lay down on that lawn
To begin with,
In the heart of the sprinklers,
Before the mother's call,
Before the man's shadow laid itself down,

There is a way to not yet be wanted,

There is a way to lie there at twenty-four frames
Per second -- no faster --
Not at the speed of plot,
Not at the speed of desire --

THE ROAD OUT -- EXPRESSWAY -- HOTELS -- MOTELS --
To telling what on earth we'll have to marry marry marry ….

Where the three lights merged:
Where the image licked my small body from the front, the story playing

All over my face my
Forwardness,
Where the electric lights took up the back and sides,
The unwavering houselights,
Seasonless,

Where the long thin arm of day came in from the top
To touch my head
Reaching down along my staring face --
Where they flared up around my body unable to

Merge into each other
over my likeness,
Slamming down one side of me, unquenchable -- here static

There flaming --
Sifting grays into other grays --
Mixing the split second into the long haul --
Flanking me -- undressing something there where my body is
Though not my body --
Where they play on the field of my willingness,

Where they kiss and brood, filtering each other to no avail,
All over my solo
Appearance,
Bits smoldering under the shadows I make --
And aimlessly -- what we call free -- there

The immobilism sets in,
The being-in-place more a love than the being,
My father sobbing beside me, the man on the stage
Screaming, the woman behind us starting to
Pray,
The immobilism, the being-in-place more alive than

The being, .... {excerpt}


(1991)

AFTERIMAGES

*** I
However the image enters
its force remains within
my eyes
rockstrewn caves where dragonfish evolve
wild for life, relentless and acquisitive
learning to survive
where there is no food
my eyes are always hungry
and remembering
however the image enters
its force remains.
A white woman stands bereft and empty
a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson
recalled in me forever
like a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep
etched into my visions
food for dragonfish that learn
to live upon whatever they must eat
fused images beneath my pain.
*** II
The Pearl River floods through the streets of Jackson
A Mississippi summer televised.
Trapped houses kneel like sinners in the rain
a white woman climbs from her roof to a passing boat
her fingers tarry for a moment on the chimney
now awash
tearless and no longer young, she holds
a tattered baby's blanket in her arms.
In a flickering afterimage of the nightmare rain
a microphone
thrust up against her flat bewildered words
********* “we jest come from the bank yestiddy
****************** borrowing money to pay the income tax
****************** now everything's gone. I never knew
****************** it could be so hard.”
Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud
caked around the edges
her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation
unanswered
she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed
****************** “hard, but not this hard.”
Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her
hanging upon her coat like mirrors
until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside
snarling “She ain't got nothing more to say!”
and that lie hangs in his mouth
like a shred of rotting meat.
*** III
I inherited Jackson, Mississippi.
For my majority it gave me Emmett Till
his 15 years puffed out like bruises
on plump boy-cheeks
his only Mississippi summer
whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie
as a white girl passed him in the street
and he was baptized my son forever
in the midnight waters of the Pearl.
His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year
when I walked through a northern summer
my eyes averted
from each corner's photographies
newspapers protest posters magazines
Police Story, Confidential, True
the avid insistence of detail
pretending insight or information
the length of gash across the dead boy's loins
his grieving mother's lamentation
the severed lips, how many burns
his gouged out eyes
sewed shut upon the screaming covers
louder than life
all over
the veiled warning, the secret relish
of a black child's mutilated body
fingered by street-corner eyes
bruise upon livid bruise
and wherever I looked that summer
I learned to be at home with children's blood
with savored violence
with pictures of black broken flesh
used, crumpled, and discarded
lying amid the sidewalk refuse
like a raped woman's face.
A black boy from Chicago
whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi
testing what he'd been taught was a manly thing to do
his teachers
ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue
and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone
in the name of white womanhood
they took their aroused honor
back to Jackson
and celebrated in a whorehouse
the double ritual of white manhood
confirmed.
{3 of 4 parts}

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html...-Roethke65.pdf -- Review from August 23, 1964 of the collection: "The Far Field" written a year after Theodore Roethke's untimely death.

THE THIRD HOUR OF THE NIGHT

When the eye

When the edgeless screen receiving
light from the edgeless universe

When the eye first

When the edgeless screen facing
outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe

When the eye first saw that it

Hungry for more light
resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST

As if a dog sniffing

Ignorant of origins
familiar with hunger

As if a dog sniffing a dead dog

Before nervous like itself but now
weird inert cold nerveless

Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself

When the eye
first saw that it must die When the eye first

Brooding on our origins you
ask When and I say

Then


wound-dresser let us call the creature
driven again and again to dress with fresh
bandages and a pail of disinfectant
suppurations that cannot
heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal
wound-dresser
what wound is dressed the wound of being


Understand that it can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.
It alone knows you. It does not wish you well. {excerpt}

VITA NOVA

You saved me, you should remember me.
The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.
When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.
I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.
Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.
Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes
and then unused, buried.
Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes—
as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident— ... {excerpt}

A WALRUS TUSK FROM ALASKA

Arp might have done a version in white marble,
the model held aloft, in approximate awe:
this tough cross-section oval of tusk,
dense and cool as fossil cranium—
preliminary bloodshed condonable
if Inupiat hunters on King Island may
follow as their fathers did the bark of a husky,
echoes ricocheted from roughed-up eskers
on the glacier, a resonance salt-cured
and stained deep green by Arctic seas, whose tilting floor
mirrors the mainland’s snowcapped amphitheater.
Which of his elders set Mike Saclamana the task
and taught him to decide, in scrimshaw, what was so?
Netted incisions black as an etching
saw a way to scratch in living infinitives
known since the Miocene to have animated
the Bering Strait: one humpback whale, plump,
and bardic; an orca caught on the ascending arc,
salt droplets flung from a flange of soot-black fin ... ... {excerpt}

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

THE GENTLE

Delicate the syllables that release the repression;
Hysteria masks in the studied inane.
Horace the hiker on a dubious mission
Pretends his dead bunion gives exquisite pain.

The son of misfortune long, long has been waiting
The visit of vision, luck years overdue,
His laughter reduced the sing-song of prating,
A hutch by the EXIT his room with a view.
{excerpt}