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Resurrection by Michael Mckimm
As the cod that's cooked in a mountain
of salt comes out delicate as butter, a fur
of disappearances, unrecognisable,
so have I buried the book of our lives
in the salt mines of Cheshire, twenty
miles of white tunnels, two hundred feet deep. (excerpt)
from http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/
Thanks q1 for introducing me to Terrance Hayes. I followed the link to another link and then heard him reading his poems. :)
Waipounamu (Wall Poem)
Hoisting history on his back like a sugar-sack,
the swagger strides along greenstone trails.
All night the crib creeks are humming home,
and drowned towns float in their canvas shrouds.
They are just the ghosts of their original selves,
an emotional investment looted by snow-melt for
schemes to answer the Question of Illumination.
To tap this yearning for a golden age,
singing shepherds held wisps of tussock
which curled like lighted Chinese joss-sticks
on the fan-tan tables of sly-grog dens,
frozen in that glacier known as the past.
In the forgotten graveyards, hair grows into grass,
while wind sifts the sweet vernal over and over,
like diggers letting gold dust pour through their fingers.
The Kingston Flyer is chuffing
on the Great Northern Railway to Wakatipu.
John Turnbull Thompson cut the runholders loose
with a panoramic survey and the confidence of a faithhealer
in the middle of Queen Victoria's Royal Century,
when the boom-time harvest of Celtic place-names
seeded Central like a nouveau-Hibernian dialect
from Balclutha to Gimmerburn to Glendhu Bay.
Winter arrives on time in a glitzblitz of powdery snow.
The hoar-frost is a Quarztopolis of ice crystals,
turning weeping willows into frozen chandeliers. ...{excerpt}
TERM
At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through ...{excerpt} --- Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/p...erwin/term.htm
Bella Akhmadulina, Bold Voice in Russian Poetry, Dies at 73 By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: November 29, 2010 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/wo..._r=1&ref=books
THE GREAT LAMENT OF MY OBSCURITY THREE
where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica ...{excerpt}
PERISHABLE, IT SAID
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
hunger, sorrow, fears— ...{excerpt}
MATHEMATICS
I have envied those
who make something
useful, sturdy—
a chair, a pair of boots.
Even a soup,
rich with potatoes and cream.
Or those who fix, perhaps,
a leaking window:
strip out the old cracked putty,
lay down cleanly the line of the new.
You could learn,
the mirror tells me, late at night,
but lacks conviction.
One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.
I look at this
borrowed apartment—
everywhere I question it,
the wallpaper’s pattern matches.
Yesterday a woman
showed me
a building shaped
like the overturned hull of a ship,
its roof trusses, under the plaster,
lashed with soaked rawhide,
the columns’ marble
painted to seem like wood.
Though possibly it was the other way around?
I look at my unhandy hand,
innocent,
shaped as the hands of others are shaped.
Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really. ...{excerpt}
ANOTHER RIVER
The friends have gone home far up the valley
of that river into whose estuary
the man from England sailed in his own age
in time to catch sight of the late forests
furring in black the remotest edges
of the majestic water always it
appeared to me that he arrived just as
an evening was beginning and toward the end
of summer when the converging surface
lay as a single vast mirror gazing
upward into the pearl light that was
already stained with the first saffron
of sunset on which the high wavering trails
of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were
no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide
and the current for a moment seemed to hang
still in balance and the creaking and knocking
of wood stopped all at once ...{excerpt}
A Conversation With W.S. Merwin
Often a poet's contribution to his national literature is measured by awards, fellowships, and grants. W.S. Merwin's importance in the world of literature runs deeper and broader than acclaim and recognition. Merwin, as a historic figure, serves as a link from Pound and Auden (Auden selected Merwin's first book, A Mask for Janus, for the 1952 Yale Younger Poet Series) to the contemporary scene. However, it would be a mistake to view Merwin's growth as a mere rejection of contemporary neoclassicism for the pursuit of "daring experiments in metrical irregularity and thematic disorganization" of the sixties. His concern for discipline remains paramount. What makes his poetry attractive is more than an intangible charm. In Merwin, there is something to be learned.
Merwin has published nine books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Moreover, he has written plays, essays, and radio scripts. Merwin has made a large part of his living by translating French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. His Selected Translations 1948-1968 won the P.E.N. Translation Prize for 1968. Merwin's latest work is Unframed originals (Athenaeum, 1982), his third book of prose. -Jim Brock
{interview -- http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/...ews/merwin.htm }
BREAD {for Wendell Berry}Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching
somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch
have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding
have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step ...{excerpt}
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}