fragments of contemporary poetry

[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.


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

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

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}

[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}

[Sweets America]

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}

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.

[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.

[firefangled]

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.

[quasimodo1]

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|

[quasimodo1]

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}

[TheFifthElement]

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)

[quasimodo1]

"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.

[quasimodo1]

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}

[quasimodo1]

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

[quasimodo1]

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}