fragments of contemporary poetry

Rae Armantrout
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From this point on,

it's a lattice

of ends



disguised as means:



the strangler fig,



the anteater.



3



I've developed the ability

to revise

what I'm waiting for



so that letter

becomes dinner

gradually



while the contrapuntal

nodding

of the Chinese elm leaves



redistributes

ennui

{parts 1 to 3 of this poem: from Jubilat}

I threw my arms about those shoulders...
Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells. ...{excerpt} title=first line

Galatea Encore
As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond
a statue stands white like a blight of winter.
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins
and outs of centuries, pestered heather.
That's what coming full circle means -
when your countenance starts to resemble weather,
when Pygmalion's vanished. ... {excerpt}

TINY WARRIOR

.....You never saw me
Your eyes were closed so tight
They say you put up quite a fight
Somehow your life was over before it had begun and
Gently did I touch and kiss your tiny-fingered hand
Born too soon
You never saw the silver moon
Or the light of a summer's day
Last night I dreamt a gathering of eagles
Had come
To spirit you away
Born too soon
Your tender heart
Could not beat
To the pulsing rhythm
Of life's taut drum

Nikolai 1982-1983 {excerpt}

A SUMMER OF HUMMINGBIRDS

Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of

Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe,

and Martin Johnson Heade.

By Christopher Benfey. (author of review)

Illustrated. 287 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/

Miller-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin---

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

On Gossamer Wings



By LAURA MILLER
Published: May 4, 2008

WILD NIGHTS!

Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson,

Twain, James, and Hemingway.

By Joyce Carol Oates.

238 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95. ------

first chapter...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/bo...tml?ref=review

s/first-chapter-wild-nights.html?ref=review

---------The Dying of the Light (review title)
The John F. Kennedy Library
Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Mary, on safari in

1953.
By BRENDA WINEAPPLE
Published: April 20, 2008

ONE YEAR
When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone's bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
and started to wash a corner of his stone.
Then a black and amber ant
ran out onto the granite, and off it,
and another ant hauled a dead
ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.
Ants ran down into the grooves of his name
and dates, down into the oval track of the
first name's O, middle name's O,
the short O of his last name,
and down into the hyphen between
his birth and death--little trough of his life. ... {excerpt}

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/ar...s&oref=slogin# -- Jason Shinder, 52, Poet and the founder of the Y.M.C.A.'s National Writer's Voice program.

Inevitably the science community and global warming have created some poetry (what else is there to do while you wait for the fireball). In a science blog of the nytimes, you can look at a digital photo of the interior of a rock and come up with your own poem. This one by Andrew C. Revkin is posted on "dotearth" -- "Perhaps we tamed fire. Perhaps fire tamed us. Certainly we are still seduced by that glowing dance of a thousand roseate veils, whether in the shimmering heat of the hearth or the growl of the V-8.
While water soothes and nourishes, fire empowers. The astonishing magic of controlled combustion, facilitated by Earth’s just-right atmosphere and ample stores of fuels, has allowed humans to transform from scattered gatherers into a gathering global force.
Fire transports us, and in return we transport fire. Together, for better and worse, we have made the world our own." http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/20...ery-and-earth/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/bo...l?8bu&emc=bua2 New review/essay on Charles Simic from the NYTimes...dated today.

Welcome Back Quasimodo1, good trip?

hey JBI, outstanding trip. Just sort of getting back into the groove. Let me check out what's up with the Poetry Book Club thread.

For A Coming Extinction


Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours


{excerpt}

A Physics

When you get down to it, Earth
has our own great ranges
of feeling-Rocky, Smoky, Blue-
and a heart that can melt stones.

The still pools fill with sky,
as if aloof, and we have eyes
for all of this-and more, for Earth's
reminding moon. We too are ruled

by such attractions-spun and swaddled,
rocked and lent a light. We run
our clocks on wheels, our trains
on time. {excerpt}

WHAT HE THOUGHT


We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. "What does mean this 'flat drink?' someone asked.
What is "cheap date?" (Nothing we said lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we


could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past. ... {excerpt} [ for more information on Heather McHugh-- http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/P...Hugh/index.cfm ]

I’m an unreliable witness
I zone out


Hail, storm and tempest
you’re marooned
in our marriage


again—


Have wizards knotted
snarls in our nerves,
nooses in our dreams?


Daughter born
in the land of granite
and cod’s head,
we can’t help where we live


A Nor’easter


again—

{from the collection Squandermania and the poem

"Marooned"} link:

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.3/belieu.php

Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun



A book is a suicide postponed.


--Cioran



Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.

I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.

As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person. ... {excerpt}

STROKE
The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn

the buried meaning in the grave: here
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of its tense
the slow seconds and quick centuries
of sex. ... {excerpt}

The Miracle of the Actual



While the poet was falling in love with people she hadn't met

certain Vietnamese were in their third generation of the torment of Agent Orange

which crafts real people like Picassos, joints in all directions, limbs ending.

Lingers at least fifty years like heartbreak, and breaks the mighty imagination

over angles like the Atlantic shatters clams on the jetties up and down New Jersey.



We kept expecting as a society for time to stop and let us into the air conditioning

to ponder and take our ease upon the new-aged recliners of the seventies.

Beholding the fine view, we would devise the humane, unbend some crooks.

It seemed like things were improving when reporters took a break writing about them,

we cannot believe in the population of China and think the scientists extremists.



The lovers Shirin and Khosro fell in love just hearing about each other

so long ago you could claim it never happened, or was a myth

and crossed Anatolia missing each other six or seven times, once,

Khosro saw her bathing and the sight of her back was enough to ruin him

for two or three more crossings until she finally arrived and lost her beauty

for him but not to him at the hand of some angry nephew. .....................{excerpt, from the Adirondack Review}

BY THE DEAD


PRIDE that sat on the beautiful brow,
Scorn that lay in the arching lips,
Will of the oak-grain, where are ye now?
I may dare to touch her finger-tips!
Deep, flaming eyes, ye are shallow enough;
The steadiest fire burns out at last.
Throw back the shutters, -- the sky is rough,
And the winds are high, -- but the night is past.

Mother, I speak with the voice of a man;
Death is between us, -- I stoop no more;
And yet so dim is each new-born plan,
I am feebler than ever I was before, --
{Anonymous . Selected Poems from The Atlantic

Monthly} ------------------------------------------- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/mo...c/AnoAtla.html



.....A small database of anonymous poems

SONG FOR A MOUNTAIN-CLIMBER
Pure indifference
moves otherwise. It’s unconditional:
a little fling cannot diminish it:
impartially it flies from everything,

from man’s investments, and
his dearth. The thought that God
might care for us is
terrifying: ought

to keep us hooked on earth. ... {EXCERPT}

- new poetry by August Kleinzahler - title of the review above




By STEPHEN BURT
Published: May 25, 2008

- new poetry by August Kleinzahler - title of the review above




By STEPHEN BURT
Published: May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/bo...=1&oref=slogin

For The Twentieth Century


Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy

boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button:—

...Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti

you are alive again,—

the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer

bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is

in all but Szigeti's hands

*
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for

it made you pattern ... {excerpt}

F. Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bolingen Prize for poetry

Poetry May 2007 Atlantic Monthly


by Wyatt Prunty

1950

"Then let him ride in the bed of the truck
and wave the world home." That was the old man's answer.
So I made my small-fist climb up back
Of the cab, to see things in reverse and hear
The wind generalizing hedgerows and oaks,
And watch the avenues of fields that broke
Whenever a hedge gave out and sudden farm
Emerged, dogs barking alarm—
As we kept up that way,
Under the shade that tunneled and played
And deepened the road. But where were we going?
I never remember; only,
I owned cattle and barn, the loosely planked bridges
That rattled like drums, limbs flicking the sky,
And gravel busy under the musical tires;
Till filled with what ticked by, I wanted the entire
List of it, ... {excerpt} -- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200705/prunty-poem

We Lived in a Hug, Shivering with Cold
Tomaz Salamun
Issue 184, Spring 2008



..... On handcarts
(wheelbarrows) there are

blue baby
bags. An unguaranteed
growth ring is left

on the asphalt.
The gadget with which
you fatten

your ears,
rubbed out from sky
lights. The other

will understand all of this
when he takes the time.
The Danube will open its graves.

—Translated from Slovenian
by Brian Henry and the author



{excerpt from the Paris Review}

Jazz Fan Looks Back
by Jayne Cortez


I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium
Jazz at the Philharmonic

I cut my hair into a permanent tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues
& Blakey drummed militant messages in
soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones ... {excerpt}

MIND

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. ... {excerpt}

FLOATING BRIDGES
Oh what a crush of People
Invisible, reborn
Make their way to into this garden
For their eternal rest

Every step we take on earth
Brings us to a new world
Every foot supported
On a floating bridge

I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads

And steadily our feet
Keep walking and creating
Like enormous fans
These roads in embryo {excerpt}

SUITE FOR RED RIVER GORGE



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



I. Whistling Arch
(Arch in Formation)

In high winds air rushing through the low opening whines, giving the arch its name. This whine is something that happens very rarely.
—Kentucky’s Land of the Arches: The Red River Gorge

Here geologic time tumbles
from the sandstone face in great slabs
of rock, progress marked
on some same clock keeping pace
with glaciers, the passing of comets,
volcano formation.

The stone’s lonely O frames
mountaintop, dark gorge,
catches a patch of white sky
in its aperture. It shows
where time was, and now passed

sings its only hymn to a congregation
of centipede and snake, blackbird
perched on an ancient laurel,
trillium unfurled,
its pale ear pressed to the stars. {Part I of three from Lynnell Edwards poem}

SLEEPING IN BLUE
I lean into you,
we bury down
in the dunes

the breeze holds
like a whisper
you stroke my brown knees

your fingers
are my unspoken thoughts

the silence is sensuous,
suffuses like
scent of sandalwood ... {excerpt}

Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (A Story for Children)

Issue 184, Spring 2008



1.
If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there,
if I call out to myself come here
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things
a boat, and watch myself over the waters come rowing,
but, crossing the midpoint between shores,
out in the middle of the colorless lake,
no longer approaching, no longer coming closer,
disappear, where am I now, has my boat capsized?

2.
Infinite capacity for love in the smallest detail;
infinite suffering in the innermost reality;
large mind in even the dumbest, mutest object;
destiny in an object that stands still;
heart in the middle of the gray, motionless water;
the largest sadness in the world in a groaning buoy;
in a buoy and the bird overhead, huge sadness,
and yet I hop from place to place as though I’m weightless.

3.
When I picture my father I see the surface of the moon,
plains of moon-stuff chalk-dust papers shredded
by a paper shredder, snowbanks of shredded paper,
nobody to organize it all, no way to “moralize the day
out of its aimlessness,” nobody with a Shop-Vac handy
slowly to turn the whiteness into pattern and form,
revealing, as a chisel reveals in the marble,
a figure, a woman’s figure, an expression of bliss—

4.
now that that big nonentity the moon is in my mind
the clichés for representing Earth are hereby banished—
a hundred open-ended poems, abrupt transitions, high tones
grating against the low, unsorted experience;
sex beside the holy man defiled by sex,
the pig pile of ways you can get high, right there
beside the dawn and how you badly want to kill yourself,
the fleer, the road that unravels like a banner before him—

5.
and the child’s attention fixed upon the animal book,
and all the animals in the book intent upon dinner
or eyeing some harbinger cloud forever, permanently
dejected because some little stone turned their child
to stone, weeping big mule or owl tears as though
the child never turned the page, the sun never shone
again bringing larkspurs, gentian, and the mule-boy
reunited with mule mommy and daddy just in time to end,

6.
but the mule on page four will always be sad, the owl
overhead will always mourn for the mule in his sadness,
nobody will ever bring news of page eighteen when mule-boy
returns from the dead, and the child reading the book
will always preside like a sinister god over these animals,
always dipping in and out of their moods like a snacker,
a little sadness to tide you over until suppertime,
a little elegiac owl, some time at the grief picnic . . . ...


{excerpt...from the Paris Review}

Poems of Depth

--for Gerardo Deniz, based on his "20,000 Places Under Our Mothers," based on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

1.

O Ned your name is Land and it’s not anywhere near you;
you’re free in your captivity, holy paradox!
You tire of walking around the submarine,
of looking out at the luminous waters,
brimming with the phosphorescent zoophytes, tiny noctilucae, starfish and aurelias
you know not how to classify.
You’re bored with the sea breeze and the occasional horizon.
O harpooner, how did you land where the only bread is a replacement,
breadfruit?
What creatures are you shooting in your mind?
How you manage to stop the hand, and instead reach for the diving suit.

2.

The crew members hush when the captain’s right hand comes in.
Nemo knows he’s no one;
he enforces, forces.

Is he a double, or an appendage?
The closest of them all.
And if the captain were left-handed?
He says "Less paradigmatic,"
more so, more so.

Underwater’s reign is verticality.
Conseil hears the master’s cry and immediately asks
"Has it bitten you, Monsieur?"

"I’d pay with a limb to own the treasure I just found."
The cannibals throw stones; destroy it.
Destroy the left-handed shell, growing awkward against the clock.

Aronnax takes this lightheartedly; water being less dense,
certainly. He’ll plunge. Nemo hears no news about the incident.

{excerpt)

My Carmelite Family


It had taken me more than an hour
To come to life, under the rose-encrusted
Influence of the star-driven morning.

A blue a bit too pastel, with all its accessories,
A colour he could not have given us
In a hundred years, familiar but shallow,

Intense but guarded, multipled the sensations
Of his different flesh, though not
My ability to return the increased gaze.

Breathtakingly tactile, his beautiful
Carnal mask distanced the white reserve
Of the paper, yet brought it closer

To his cornerstones, the perfect control
Of his hands' immense fresco about to move. ... {excerpt}

"Ships in the night"
Half-past midnight, hours to go till five.
Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Fair Isle, Bailey
echo confirmation I'm alive.


Half-ignored at two and seven daily
shipping forecasts beat the bounds of light,
track the channels where the moon shines palely:


Humber, Biscay, Fisher, German Bight -
haunts of kittiwake and golden plover -
sound the deepest reaches of my night.


While I'm tossing, turning, thrashing over,
strung out taut with sleepless eyes shut fast,
Plymouth, Portland, Dogger, Wight and Dover


sing me senseless, lashed to nightmare's mast. ...

{excerpt} -- http://www.interpretershouse.org.uk/

THE GAZING EYE FALLS THROUGH THE WORLD

—for Ono No Komachi, 834-880 A. D.

Philadelphia, almost dawn. The Delaware stares
Back like lilies. In their ten thousand sets of eyes

A hawk's claw moon again, hung barely,

And there goes a train clearing snow
For someone beautiful. And while she isn't sure

Why, she's dreaming of moving again
While a Japanese poem whisks by in shapes the snow makes:

As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world.

The heart does break.

Ono No Komachi did not beg for her beauty back
On the streets of Kyoto, and the boys running
Past her did not throw carp at her feet,

Nor did they force her to see her age anymore
Than she already had, for she was fire, only

Smarter. Yet, I exist, is the line she hides.

Her eyes, hazel if the sun glanced her face
As she turned away from the street and toward the sea,

Would tell it another way, distilling, as they had for years,
The Sea of Japan until it was a shawl draped across her back,

Its wind carrying the scent of a snuffed candle, until
She was a little snow drifting onto white paper

Containing no lines . . .

~

A stack of white paper, in fact, packed
In a box and taken cross-country.

Even if this story weren't true, I'd still tell it.

{excerpt} ---- blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry.htm

Selection from "City Terrace Field Manual" ..... "What's a little riot between friends? So I stabbed you with a screwdriver between pauses in the ammunition going off, popping of metal canisters burning and exploding? How could I be expected to know if the gunshots in your house were mine? This is life in the big city, free market of desire: you'll thank me in the end. Sure, you may need a little radiation therapy for a fiber-optic plug in your brain. Sure, your kids whine for technicolor mercy in some crystal cathedral a lifetime after toking up as they choked. There's nothing wrong with that--nothing wrong with every Chino-Facility-for-Men Day. Besides, footprints on your face give you a wise look, creases beside your mouth distinguished as headlines. I acknowledge your deepest feelings for me, or the most shallow, what sludge! I don't hold it against you that I had to throw you to the ground, kick you repeatedly. So you broke a few bones? My clothes are clean, no bother. Hey, no diminished affection for your loss of skin. I will not light your children on fire with a molotov cocktail today. I appreciate your concern. My best to you and yours. No one is home to take your call." ..... {excerpt from one prose poem}

"Counting the Dead"


a review
By JOEL BROUWER
Published: June 22, 2008
RISING, FALLING, HOVERING

By C. D. Wright.

97 pp. Copper Canyon Press. $22.
{latest collection by an unpredictable poet} http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/bo...l?8bu&emc=bua2

iNCARNATION

When the Holy One stepped from endless order
into the chaos of our days, it was winter.
Weather blew everywhere. Time itself was dying.
The squirrel, with a tail soft as breath,
curled inside the maple trunk.

The cold stayed. Five-fingered leaves pressed the ground,
their stems perpendicular, thin wrists above each flame-tipped palm.
Cataclysm scanned the days; like any future, like our own. ... {excerpt}

Purgatorio, Canto XXIX

Singing the way a lady sings in love,
she continued, after saying the last word,
"Blessèd are they whose sins are covered,"

and like the nymphs who once wandered alone
through the shadows of the forest, one
longing to see, one avoiding the sun

then she went, against the flow of the river,
walking along the bank, and I went with her,
following her small steps with my own small steps.

We had not taken a hundred steps between us
when the banks turned to the right as one,
so that I was facing the east again.

And we had not gone far in that direction
when the lady turned around toward me
saying, "My brother, look and listen."

And all at once there was a shining
that raced through the great forest on all sides
making me wonder whether it was lightning,

but whereas lightning is gone as swiftly
as it comes, this stayed, shining brighter and brighter,
and in my mind I was saying, "What can this be?"

And running through the luminous air was
a sweet melody, so that a good zeal
led me to blame Eve for her recklessness,

that there, where the earth and heaven obeyed,
a woman, alone, and who had just been made,
could not bear to be veiled by anything.

If she had only stayed devoutly under
her own, I could have tasted these pleasures
beyond words earlier, and for longer.

While I walked on among so many
first-fruits of eternal happiness,
enraptured, and longing for still greater joys,

before us, the air under the green boughs
came to be like a fire blazing
and we could hear that the sweet sound was singing.

Oh, most holy virgins, if I have endured
fasting, cold, and vigils for you ever,
need drives me now to ask for the reward.

Now is the time for Helicon to brim over
and Urania to help me with her choir
to put into verse things hard to hold in thought.

A little farther, seven golden trees
appeared as an illusion the long space
gave rise to, that was still between us,

but when I had come so near to them that
the common object which deceives the sense
lost none of its features because of distance,

the faculty that nourishes the discourse
of reason saw that they were candlesticks
and heard "Hosanna" in the singing voices.

Above us flamed the beautiful panoply,
far brighter than the moon in the clear sky
at midnight in the middle of the month.

Full of wonder, I turned around toward
the good Virgil, and he answered
with a look as amazed as my own.

Then I turned my face to the high things again
moving so slowly in our direction
that newly wed brides would have overtaken them.

The lady scolded me: "Why are you so
intent on the living lights that you pay no
attention to what there is behind them?"

Then I saw people coming after them
as after their leaders; they were dressed in white
and here there was never whiteness like that.

The water held my image on my left
and like a mirror showed me my own left
in a reflection, when I looked at it.

When I was at a point along the bank
where my distance from them was only
the river’s width, I stood still, the better to see,

and I saw the flames moving ahead, leaving
the air painted behind them, and they
looked the way pennons do, streaming

so that overhead was striped with seven
bands, in all the colors which the sun
makes his bow from, and Delia her girdle.

Those standards went back farther than I
could see, and to my mind there seemed to be
ten paces between the outer ones.

Under a sky as beautiful as I
have said came four and twenty elders, and they
walked two by two, wearing crowns of lilies.

All of them were singing, "Blessèd are you
among the daughters of Adam, and to
all eternity may your beauty be blessed."

After the flowers and other tender growth
opposite to me on the other shore
were without those elect people once more,

in the way star succeeds star in heaven
four animals came following them, each one
wearing green leaves made into a crown.

Each one of them was winged with six wings,
the feathers full of eyes, and Argo’s eyes,
if they were living, would be like those.

I will not waste more rhymes describing their
forms, reader, for I am pressed by another
demand that does not leave me scope for this,

but read Ezekiel who portrays them as
he saw them, out of the cold places
coming with wind and cloud and fire,

and as in his pages you will find them
so were they here, all except for the wings,
where John is with me and departs from him. ... {excerpt}