fragments of contemporary poetry

In High Waters



Quartered, cleaned, this beautiful black wire looped

and
knotted
through the skin, the squash hung on the porch.
All September they puckered, cracked. Then they

were dry.
They clicked a little when the wind

made its way past them: hollow sounds, almost

pleasing—
cupped hands
clapping a bit for themselves when we weren't

looking.
November I drew them.
They had stopped changing.

I drew them landlocked. Canyons.
They scorned the rivers that had abandoned them.
Four phases of some moon, I drew them. Four

rowboats run
aground.
Four, leashed to their piling, nudging each other

from time to time. Four sails
learning to quarter wind, gather way—what

cunning, what
incredible
patience! We brought them indoors to a large nail
in the kitchen. I drew them again, four ships in a

rice-paper
storm,

four rocks narrowly avoided by the sailor, who,
thanks to them finds his way home.
Four sailors' memories of the same girl. Now
you would cook them. Soaked in water, salt, they

would
plump up.

How nice to have things out of season. Summer

squash
caught in our winter, there is snow outside
like you would not believe.
Whole trees are buried beneath waves, becalmed.

The world

is everywhere able to flow into itself without

damage
or confusion. ... {excerpt}


Copyright © Jorie Graham [from Ploughshares]

A Happy Childhood


Babies do not want to hear about babies; the like to be told of giants and castles.
Dr. Johnson

No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo


My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air


like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved
like this. The air is tight to my nervous body.
I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded


soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily.
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing
to myself all day like a fieldful of August


insects, just things I whisper, really,
a trance in sneakers. I’m learning
to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school,


I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air
goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself,
a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road-


side park. I love to be called for dinner.
Spot goes out and I go in and the lights
in the kitchen go on and the dark,


which also has a body like a cloud’s,
leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow
I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges. {first part of long poem}

SHE IS IN THE PAST, SHE HAS THIS GRACE

My mother looks at her watch,
As if to look back over the curve
Of her life, her slackening rhythms:
Nobody can know her, how she lost herself
Evening after evening in that after,
Her hourly feelings, the repetition,
Delay and failure of her labour
Of mourning. The steps space themselves
Out, the steps pass, in the mists
And hesitations of the summer,
And within a space which is doubled,
One of us has passed through the other,
Though one must count oneself three,
To figure out which of us
Has let herself be traversed.

Nothing advances, we don’t move,
We don’t address one another,
I haven’t opened my mouth
Except for one remark,
And what remark was that?
A word which appeases the menace
Of time in us, reading as if
I were stripping the words
Of their ever-mortal high meaning.

She is in dark light, or an openness
That leads to a darkness,
Embedded in the wall
Her mono-landscape
Stays facing the sea
And the harbour activity,
Her sea-conscience being ground up
With the smooth time of the deep,
Her mourning silhouetted against
The splendour of the sea
Which is now to your left,
As violent as it is distant
From all aggressive powers
Or any embassies. ... {excerpt}

Blue Juniata



Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide
scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch
empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here
there is no house at all—


only the bones of a house,
lilacs growing beside them,
roses in clumps between them,
honeysuckle over;
a gap for a door, a chimney
mud-chinked, an immense fireplace,
the skeleton of a pine,


and gandy dancers working on the rails
that run not thirty yards from the once door. ...





...for sometimes a familiar music hammers
like blood against the eardrums, paints a mist
across the eyes, as if the smells of lilacs,
moss roses, and the past became a music
made visible, a monument of air. {excerpts}


Malcolm Cowley, “Blue Juniata” from Blue Juniata: A Life. Copyright © 1985

Meta-A and the A of Absolutes



I write my God in blue.
I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts.
I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight.
I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath,
or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade,
at twilight, on the desert's steps.
Brown by day and black by night,
my God has wings that open to no reason.
He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes,
scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb
of light leaping from a fire.
Press him he bleeds.
When you take your hand to sacred water,
there is no sign of any wound.
And so I call him supreme, great artist,
judge of time, scholar of all living event,
the possible prophet of the possible event.
Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars,
blind men with their scars dulled by kola,
blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop,
blind men in corn, blind men in steel,
reason by their lights that our tongues
are free, our tongues will redeem us.
Speech is the fact, and the fact is true.
What is moves, and what is moving is.
We cling to these contradictions.
We know we will become our contradictions,
our complex body's own desire.
Yet speech is not the limit of our vision.
The ear entices itself with any sound.
The skin will caress whatever tone
or temperament that rises or descends.
The bones will set themselves to a dance.
The blood will argue with a bird in flight.
The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice,
brush and thrill to an old bone.
And yet there is no sign to arrest us
from the possible.
We remain at rest there, in transit
from our knowing to our knowledge.
So I would set a limit where I meet my logic.
I would clamber from my own cave
into the curve of sign, an alphabet
of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. ... {excerpt}




[Jay Wright, “Meta-A and the A of Absolutes” from

Transfigurations: Collected Poems (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Copyright ©

2000 by Jay Wright]

Song



I make the drive, walk the corporate walk,
To do what I must and give what I got.
I turn the chrome knob and I fill my slot.
I talk and I joke, a regular guy
I input and output and rarely ask why.


It's pasta and wine at home in my flat.
It's voice mail and e-mail, then feed the stray cat.
Sometimes I go out and chat up the girls.
Some want to tango, some manage a smile.
Some come home and have safe sex for a while.


My sweet IRA, my 401-k,
Let me buy tickets to games, to a play—
I go with the gang and don't get involved.
I fly to St. Croix and stare at the sea.
I travel first class. No day-tripper me. ... {excerpt}

‘Be Music, Night’



Be music, night,
That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs


Be a hand, sea,
That her dreams may watch
Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world


Be a voice, sky,
That her beauties may be counted
And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
Into the mirror of her loveliness


Be a road, earth,
That her walking may take thee
Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires ... {excerpt}

".....Restoration
knows no half measure. It will
not stop when the treasured and lost
bronze horse remounts the steps.
Even this horse will founder backward
to coin, cannon, and domestic pots,
which themselves shall bubble and
drain back to green veins in stone.
And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, ever more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost."
{last part of "All Shall be Restored"}

JERSEY RAIN
Now near the end of the middle stretch of road
What have I learned? Some earthly wiles. An art.
That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad,
That once had seemed so easy to tell apart.

The source of art and woe aslant in wind
Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches.
What roadbank gullies and ruts it doesn't mend
It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches.

It spends itself regardless into the ocean.
It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:
Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,
The chilly liquefaction of day to night,

The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:
It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,
Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.
I feel it churning even in fair weather ... {excerpt}

A Raft of Grief

The raft that means “a great number” is not related
at all to the raft that carries people or their possessions
in the water. The two words are homonyms.
—Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins

If only there were a boat,
low and long and loaded
with all we’d brought or built:
the fatal inattentions,
anxieties and tics
that time had sanctified,
our good and bad intentions,
rages, lapses, and aches.
If only it were that easy,
to stand only ankle-
deep in the sullied water, ... {excerpt}

Seven Poems

1

At the edge
of the body’s night
ten moons are rising.

2.

The scar remembers the wound.
The wound remembers the pain.
Once more you are crying.

3.

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

4.

My body lies down
And I hear my own
voice lying next to me.

5.

The rock is pleasure
and it opens
and we enter it
as we enter ourselves
each night.

7.

I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.

{excerpt}

—Mark Strand from Darker

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by firefangled

Seven Poems

1

At the edge
of the body’s night
ten moons are rising.

2.

The scar remembers the wound.
The wound remembers the pain.
Once more you are crying.

3.

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

4.

My body lies down
And I hear my own
voice lying next to me.

5.

The rock is pleasure
and it opens
and we enter it
as we enter ourselves
each night.

7.

I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.

{excerpt}

—Mark Strand from Darker

---

Mark Strand is not a poet I know, though after reading this he is a poet I think I should know. These are wonderful, thanks Firefangled.

Oh Fire, I agree with Fifth, these poems are just great! I studied one poem by Mark Strand last year, I loved it, it was strange:

Eating poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement steps and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.

Akahito (trans. K. Rexroth)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sweets America

Oh Fire, I agree with Fifth, these poems are just great! I studied one poem by Mark Strand last year, I loved it, it was strange:

Eating poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement steps and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

---

Ah yes! I have read this poem. It is excellent, thanks for posting Sweets :)

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You would be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen-nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume

and knew

what good it is

to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar...

(extract: The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife, Michael Ondaatje)

Squarings

When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne
Of “the wishing chair” at Giant’s Causeway,
The small of your back made sense of the firmament.

Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple-tree,
You gathered force out of the world-tree’s hardness.
If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,
The rocks and wonder of the world were only
Lava crystallized, salts of the earth

The wishing chair gave savour to, its kelp
And ozone sharpening your outlook
Beyond the range of possibility.

*

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould
Around the terra cotta water-crock

Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

*

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.

The places I go back to have not failed
But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley
I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling

The very currents memory is composed of,
Everything accumulated ever
As I took squarings from the tops of bridges

Or the banks of self at evening.
Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.
Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

*

Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear
Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,
The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed

Where gaunt ones in their shirt-sleeves stooped and dug
Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks —
Apparitions now, yet active still

And territorial, still sure of their ground,
Still interested, not knowing how far
The country of the shades has been pushed back.

How long the lark has stopped outside these fields
And only seems unstoppable to them
Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.

{first four stanzas}

Top ten poetry collections as represented by Small Press Distributers-- ( www.spdbooks.org )-- 1) “Complete Minimal Poems,” by Aram Saroyan (Ugly Duckling).
2) “Poeta en San Francisco,” by Barbara Jane Reyes (Tinfish).
3) “All That’s Left,” by Jack Hirschman (City Lights).
4) “You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am,” by Tao Lin (Action).
5) “The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story,” by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta).
6) “Lobster With Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” by Michael Cirelli (Hanging Loose).
7) “The Evolution of a Sigh,” by R. Zamora Linmark (Hanging Loose).
8) “Lyric Postmodernisms,” edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath).
9) “Incubation: A Space for Monsters,” by Bhanu Kapil (Leon Works).
10) “Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath,” by Benjamin S. Grossman (Ashland Poetry).

The Parade


How exhilarating it was to march
along the great boulevards
in the sunflash of trumpets
and under all the waving flags—
the flag of ambition, the flag of love.

So many of us streaming along—
all of humanity, really—
moving in perfect step,
yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

How stimulating the scenery of the world,
the rows of roadside trees,
the huge curtain of the sky.

How endless it seemed until we veered
off the broad turnpike
into a pasture of high grass,
headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.
{excerpt}

Ah! Michael Ondaatje. Wonderful poet and the Cinnamon Peeler is an amazing book. Thanks Fifth for postingt this poem.

Charles Simic is unusual to say the least. If I have said this before or posted this poem of his forgive me. He is strange and the residing Poet Laureate of the United States. He is Charles Bukowski with attention to details.


Pastoral Harpsichord

…Poor reception, that’s the one
Advantage we have here,
I said to the mutt lying at my feet
And sighing in sympathy.
On another channel the preacher
Came chaperoned by his ghost
When he shut his eyes full of tears
To pray for dollars.

“Bring me another beer,” I said to her ladyship,
And when she wouldn’t oblige,
I went out to make chamber music
Against the sunflowers in the yard. {excerpt}


—Charles Simic, from Walking the Black Cat

THE BORDERS
To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My mother—I mean my daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me—she appeared within me.
And my mother did not enter me.
When she lay down, to pray, on me,
she was always ferociously courteous,
fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,
but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of my
body fell, the barrier of my spirit.
She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wanted
ardently to please her, I would say to her
what she wanted to hear, as if I were hers.
I served her willingly, and then
became very much like her, fiercely
out for myself. -- {excerpt}

Wherein Obscurely


On the road with billowing poplars,
In a country flat and desolate
To the far-off gray horizon, wherein obscurely,
A man and a woman went on foot,

Each carrying a small suitcase.
They were tired and had taken off
Their shoes and were walking on
Their toes, staring straight ahead.

Every time a car passed fast,
As they're wont to on such a stretch of
Road, empty as the crow flies,
How quickly they were gone--

{excerpt}

Making Your Own Eclipse
The word comes from a Greek word
for ‘abandonment’: we catch an untraceable
fire already kindled in another.

When night falls suddenly
for such a short period
in the clearest skies of the day

as a second darkening,
they could not have known
that what they were seeing was the Moon

acting as a screen.
For blue does not mean
its sensation in us, but the power

in it, the behaviour of the aligning
light in the pleasure-journey
of the obedient morning.

Across Ireland the blueness will drop
to temperatures of dusk,
a gentle east wind

will blow birds silent,
and stars along the Path
of Totality will decorate

the late forenoon.
Bleating flocks and fearful herds
will unexpectedly return to their stables

and patterns of light and dark
will tremble over the ground.
We will keep looking

at the fleecy space,
you curled up with your head
on my knee, saying, We

have been cheated, the twenty-
four seconds are passing and it
is much worse than we expected.

Then there will be the subtle
tension as the Moon begins
to creep into your face, .....{half of this poem}

Piute Creek



One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air. ... {excerpt}

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by quasimodo1

Piute Creek



One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air. ... {excerpt}

---

:thumbs_up Yeaaaaah!! I love how nature is described in this, the greatness and meditative aspect of the rocks still standing there after million summers...

Here's one by Galway Kinnell:

Cemetary Angels

On these cold days
they stand over
our dead, who will
erupt into flower as soon
as memory and human shape
rot out of them, each bent
forward and with wings
partly opened as though
warming itself at a fire.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by firefangled

Charles Simic is unusual to say the least. If I have said this before or posted this poem of his forgive me. He is strange and the residing Poet Laureate of the United States. He is Charles Bukowski with attention to details.

—Charles Simic, from Walking the Black Cat

---

Quasi, your PM is correct. The current Poet Laueate is now Kay Ryan.

I modeled my thesis in oral literature of the Ojibwa after a similar work by Gary Snyder on an analysis of a Northwest American Native story. It was when Turtle Island (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1975) was first published and I discovered this poem, which at the time, had the effect of answering many questions that had swam in the pool of my mind for years.

Snyder was known to have often rescued road kill from having an ignoble final days or transition to the life that awaited them. As was customary of more civilized societies than our own, the death of animals was by choice or survival was respected by transforming every possible part of the animal into something that continued to live through its use. This poem involved a gray female fox from which Snyder and his son were removing the pelt...Thus, this excerpt...

One Should Not Talk To a Skilled Hunter About What Is Forbidden By the Buddha
- Hsiang-yen

...
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel
a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

Above Pate Valley


.....—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years. -- {excerpt|

The Bather

Where the path to the lake twists out of sight,
A puff of dust, the kind bare feet make running,
Is what I saw in the dying light,
Night swooping down everywhere else.

A low branch heavy with leaves
Swaying momentarily where the shade
Lay thickest, some late bather
Disrobing right there for a quick dip—

(Or my solitude playing a trick on me?)
Pinned hair coming undone, soon to float
As she turns on her back, letting
The dozy current take her as it wishes

Beyond the last drooping branch
To where the sky opens
Black as the water under her white arms,
In the deepening night, deepening hush,

The treetops like charred paper edges,
Even the insects oddly reclusive..... {excerpt}

Prism

I.
Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changing –

2.
Dirt. Fragments
of blistered rock. On which
the exposed heart constructs
a house, memory: the gardens
manageable, small in scale, the beds
damp at the sea’s edge –

7.
From the pierced clouds, steady lines of silver.

Unlikely
yellow of the witch hazel, veins
of mercury that were paths of the rivers –
Then the rain again, erasing
footprints in the damp earth.

An implied path, like
a map without a crossroads.

9.
A night in summer. Outside,
sounds of a summer storm. Then the sky clearing.
In the window, constellations of summer.

I am in bed. This man and I,
we are suspended in the strange calm
sex often induces. Most sex induces.
Longing, what is that? Desire, what is that?
In the window, constellations of summer.
Once I could name them.

10.
Abstracted
shapes, patterns.
The light of the mind. The cold, exacting
fires of disinterestedness, curiously

blocked by earth, coherent, glittering
in air and water,

the elaborate
signs that said now plant, now harvest –

I could name them, I had names for them:
two different things.

19.
The room was quiet.
That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing.

In the same way, the night was dark.
It was dark, but the stars shone.

The man in bed was one of several men
to whom I gave my heart. The gift of the self,
that is without limit.
Without limit, though it recurs.

The room was quiet. It was an absolute,
like the black night.

Extract from Prism (Averno)

"Abstracted
shapes, patterns.
The light of the mind. The cold, exacting
fires of disinterestedness, curiously

blocked by earth, coherent, glittering
in air and water," Great posting, TheFifthElement, I'm just now getting to appreciate some of her work.

Work Song



This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.


That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.


The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.


{3 of 4 stanzas, from Poetry Magazine}

From the Last Canto of Paradiso
by Dante Alighieri

xxxiii, 46-48, 52-66


As I drew nearer to the end of all desire,
I brought my longing's ardor to a final height,
Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure,


Entered more and more the beam of that high light
That shines on its own truth. From then, my seeing
Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight


Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing—
As when the dreamer sees and after the dream
The passion endures, imprinted on his being


Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same:
Inside my heart, ... {excerpt}


Translated from the Italian by Robert Pinsky

To. W. P.



I


Calm was the sea to which your course you kept,
Oh, how much calmer than all southern seas!
Many your nameless mates, whom the keen breeze
Wafted from mothers that of old have wept.
All souls of children taken as they slept
Are your companions, partners of your ease,
And the green souls of all these autumn trees
Are with you through the silent spaces swept.
Your virgin body gave its gentle breath
Untainted to the gods. Why should we grieve,
But that we merit not your holy death?
We shall not loiter long, your friends and I;
Living you made it goodlier to live,
Dead you will make it easier to die.


II


With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, your mellow ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,—
What I keep of you, or you rob of me. ... {2 of 4 stanzas}

.....My former former wife has become a unique poet;
most of my work,
such as it is is done.
Full moon was October second this year,
I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck
white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine
owl hoots and rattling antlers,
Castor and Pollux rising strong
—it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts!
that even our present night sky slips away,
not that I’ll see it.
Or maybe I will, much later,
some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,
that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the
“narrow painful passageway of the Bardo”
squeeze your little skull
and there you are again


waiting for your ride

{last half of this poem, Waiting for your Ride, by Gary Snyder}

I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head,
the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,
so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,
name O’Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;
but this Caribbean so choke with the dead
that when I would melt in emerald water,
whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,
I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,
dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,
so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month
in the Seamen’s Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.
When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,
when I saw my worries with that other woman,
I wept under water, salt seeking salt,
for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword
cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! --- {fromThe Schooner 'Flight'
by Derek Walcott }

Goodbye to Tolerance
by Denise Levertov


.....And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.


It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.


Goodbye, goodbye,
your poems
shut their little mouths,
your loaves grow moldy,
a gulf has split
the ground between us,
and you won’t wave, you’re looking
another way.
We shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies,
your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, un-
balanced? ... then
how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy ... {excerpt}


Denise Levertov, “Goodbye to Tolerance” from Poems 1972-1982. Copyright © 1975 by Denise Levertov.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jun/poets.htm

"Discovering" Young Poets
How some of the best-known poets of this century

got that way

by Peter Davison

William Stafford is a master. He belongs to that category of artists the Japanese have named national treasure. He offers works of art as well as sharp ideas about the craft. One of the most amazing gifts to poetry is his theme of the golden thread. He believes that whenever you set a detail down in language, it becomes the end of a thread...and every detail—the sound of the lawn mower, the memory of your father's hands, a crack you once heard in the lake ice, the jogger hurtling herself past your window—will lead you to amazing riches.

William Blake said:

I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

I asked Stafford one day. “Do you believe that every golden thread will lead us through Jerusalem’s wall, or do you love particular threads?” He replied, “No, every thread…only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.”

—From the Introduction to William Stafford’s The Darkness Around Us Is Deep by Robert Bly.


If I could Be Wallace Stevens

The octopus would be my model—
It wants to understand; it prowls
The rocks a hundred ways and holds
Its head aloof but not ignoring .
All its fingers value what
They find. “I’d rather know,” they say.
“I’d rather slime along than be heroic.”

My pride would be to find out; I’d
bow to see, play the fool,
ask beg, retreat like a wave—
but somewhere deep I’d hold the pearl,
never tell… {excerpt}

—William Stafford, from The Darkness Around Us Is Deep