fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

‘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}

[quasimodo1]

".....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"}

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

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}

[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

[TheFifthElement]

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.

[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.

[PrinceMyshkin]

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)

[TheFifthElement]

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

[TheFifthElement]

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)

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

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).

[quasimodo1]

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}

[firefangled]

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