October 2011
3 posts
As long as you
know you don’t know,
not knowing’s not
what hurts,
it’s what
you don’t know you
don’t know that
finally gets
to you, right
in the old
solar plexis.
Philip Booth, Ganglia
And then he would lift this finest
of furniture to his big left shoulder
and tuck it in and draw the bow
so carefully as to make the music
almost visible on the air. And play
and play until a whole roomful of the sad
relatives mourned. They knew this was
drawing of blood, threading and rethreading
the needle. They saw even in my father’s
face how well he understood the pain
he...
The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?
Jack Kerouac, Haiku
September 2011
1 post
How often I went in for warmth and a doze
The newspaper room whilst my world outside froze
And I took out my sardine sandwich feast.
Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.
And the tramps and the madman and the chattering crone.
The smell of their farts could turn you to stone
But anywhere, anywhere was better than home.
The joy to escape from family and war.
But how can you have dreams?...
August 2011
1 post
[Voltaire closed a famous argument by claiming that a ship of war
and the grand opera were proof’s enough of civilization’s and
France’s progress, in his day.]
A lesser proof than old Voltaire’s, yet greater,
Proof of this present time, and thee, thy broad expanse, America,
To my plain Northern hut, in outside clouds and snow,
Brought safely for a thousand miles...
July 2011
5 posts
There’s a Polar Bear
In our Frigidaire—
He likes it ‘cause it’s cold in there.
With his seat in the meat
And his face in the fish
And his big hairy paws
In the buttery dish,
He’s nibbling the noodles,
He’s munching the rice,
He’s slurping the soda,
He’s licking the ice.
And he lets out a roar
If you open the door.
And it gives me a scare...
I have become very hairy all over my body.
I’m afraid they’ll start hunting me because of my fur.
My multicolored shirt has no meaning of love —
it looks like an air photo of a railway station.
At night my body is open and awake under the blanket,
like eyes under the blindfold of someone to be shot.
Restless I shall wander about;
hungry for life I’ll die.
Yet I...
Early summer rain—
houses facing the river,
two of them
Yosa Buson, Early Summer Rain
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing me a song, O Please!
A song of ships, and sailor men,
And parrots, and tropical trees,
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves.
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing of the things you know so well.
Amy Lowell, Sea Shell
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not...
June 2011
3 posts
Look how the same possibilities
unfold in their opposite demeanors,
as though one saw different ages
passing through two identical rooms.
Each thinks that she props up the other,
while resting wearily on her support;
and they can’t make use of one another,
for they cause blood to rest on blood,
when as in the former times they softly touch
and try, along the tree-lined walks,
to...
To the sagging wharf
few ships could come.
The population numbered
two giants, an idiot, a dwarf,
a gentle storekeeper
asleep behind his counter,
and our kind landlady—
the dwarf was her dressmaker.
The idiot could be beguiled
by picking blackberries,
but then threw them away.
The shrunken seamstress smiled.
By the sea, lying
blue as a mackerel,
our boarding house was streaked
as...
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,
White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
Philip Larkin, Cut Grass
February 2011
2 posts
Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,
Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.
Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monster
Are dissolving.
Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.
There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.
Wallace Stevens, from Pecksniffiana: Fabliau of Florida
1
GIVE me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling,
Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape,
Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content,
Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I...
January 2011
1 post
That tree said
I don’t like that white car under me,
it smells gasoline
That other tree next to it said
O you’re always complaining
you’re a neurotic
you can see by the way you’re bent over.
Allen Ginsberg, Those Two
October 2010
12 posts
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
Charles Simic, Watermelons
My dear Telemachus,
The Trojan War
is over now; I don’t recall who won it.
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland.
But still, my homeward way has proved too long.
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.
I don’t know where I am or what this place
can be. It would appear...
How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
sleeps with all the rings—
a series of burnt circles—
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-colored tail.
I should like to sleep like a cat,
with all the fur of time,
with a tongue rough as flint,
with the dry sex of fire;
and after speaking to...
First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its...
I gotta
buy me a new
girdle.
(I’ll buy
you one) O.K.
(I wish
you’d wig-
gle that way
for me,
I’d be
a happy man)
I GOTTA
wig-
gle for this.
(You pig)
William Carlos Williams, Après le Bain
When with closed eyes in autumn’s eves of gold
I breathe the burning odours of your breast,
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest
Bathed in the sun’s monotonous fires, unfold.
Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs
Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down,
Where men are upright, maids have never grown
Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows.
Led by that perfume to...
The eager note on my door said “Call me,”
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!
Funny, I thought, that the lights...
That night after I had met Owen, I walked across campus to my halls, re-hashing the events of the evening. My friends had gone on ahead, appropriately tipsy for a Friday night, and I trailed behind, listening to the sounds of their boisterous voices bouncing off the cobbles. The February forecast had warned of snow and I was looking upwards for it, but it seemed a clear night. The glass in the...
At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the sun mounted high, we were among dry-stone walls and ashlar houses. It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine - as Sebastian promised, they were delicious...
I am Hamlet the Dane,
skull-handler, parablist,
smeller of rot
in the state, infused
with its poisons,
pinioned by ghosts
and affections,
murders and pieties,
coming to consciousness
by jumping in graves,
dithering, blathering.
Seamus Heaney, Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces
I boom-mumble I bass-blow
I hull-heavy I big/slow
I boat-bump I limpet-skin
I soft-sink I sky-swim
I sea-search I salt-swallow
I bone-backed I fluke-follow
I gulf-cross I listen-talk
I moon-map I wave-walk
I tail-turn I time-keep
I ship-wreck I song-seek
I blue-blood I grumble-sing
I fish-heart I...
June 2010
3 posts
prone, a fleeting death head -
one hand churlish - clutches the waffle spread to your knee;
the opposed holding tightly below
an oysterpearled lustre as sly streaks creep across
- one finger flutters, a filament -
you are marked and soft -
W. T. Beauville
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on...
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a...
May 2010
1 post
To break out of the chaos of my darkness
Into a lucid day, is all my will.
My words like eyes in night, stare to reach
A centre for their light: and my acts thrown
To distant places by impatient violence
Yet lock together to mould a path
Out of my darkness, into a lucid day.
Yet, equally, to avoid that lucid day
And to preserve my darkness, is all my will.
My words like eyes that flinch...
April 2010
3 posts
Michelangelo, every so often
we are together again on board the boat
that slipped down the flowing Amu Darya,
as with our teeth we cracked open
black sunflower seeds.
We were surrounded by ropes, oil drums,
and the bundles of gypsy women piled
in front of a pink sidecar.
All the while, sailors with long poles
kept us clear of the sandbanks.
Sitting on the side of the boat,
not knowing...
I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
Allen Ginsberg, An Eastern Ballad
once upon a time there was dust and I was dust and everything was dust and everything was me. Then there was something else and I was something else and everything was new -
Then there was air,
and air - and air! - and I had never lived before that moment when everything was scorched bright-light and everything hurt and I was something else, becoming-new, becoming-how, becoming. And there was...
March 2010
1 post
Proceeding eighty miles into the northwest wind, you reach the city of Euphemia, where the merchants of seven nations gather at every solstice and equinox. The boat that lands there with a cargo of ginger and cotton will set sail again, its hold filled with pistachio nuts and poppy seeds, and the caravan that has just unloaded sacks of nutmegs and raisins is already cramming its saddlebags with...
February 2010
2 posts
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white. He decided it glared much too whitely. He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength flush and in full glitter. He clawed and fluffed his rage up. He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old, Shadows flattened.
But...
There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep, And thro' the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the...
January 2010
2 posts
I said to her, darling, I said let’s LIVE and let’s LOVE and what do we care what those old purveyors of joylessness say? (they can go to hell, all of them) the Sun dies every night in the morning he’s here again you and I, now, when our briefly tiny light flicks out, it’s night for us, one single everlasting Night. Catullus V, tr. Frank Copley
The light is clear; The Eye at last must see itself Myself … I see: I see, I see I !
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
December 2009
47 posts
AND what is love? It is a doll dress’d up For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle; A thing of soft misnomers, so divine That silly youth doth think to make itself Divine by loving, and so goes on Yawning and doting a whole summer long, Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara, And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots; Then Cleopatra lives at number seven, And Antony resides in Brunswick...
Early one morning just before the sun was up I walked the long straight road beside the sea. The lambs, in pairs, black nose to black nose, sheltered cosy, calling, crying. Here and there a lark would rise to start his early song; and all along the way the wind made barbed wire fretted lace, black, blue and white, of man’s discarded plastic waste. Showing off his speed to me, a hooded crow...
And the soul of the rose went into my blood, As the music clash’d in the hall; And long by the garden lake I stood, For I heard your rivulet fall From the lake to the meadow and on to the wood, Our wood, that is dearer than all; From the meadow your walks have left so sweet That whenever a March-wind sighs He sets the jewelprint of your feet In violets blue as your eyes, To the...
From under the crunch of my man’s boot green oat-sprouts jut; he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout legging it most nimble to sprigged hedge of bramble, stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.
Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt up from delved worm-haunt; blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint he with rock splits open knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen rich, brown, sudden in...
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom.
Anaïs Nin, Risk
A casement high and triple-arch’d there was, All garlanded with carven imag’ries Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass, And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes, As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damask’d wings; And in the midst, ‘mong thousand heraldries, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings, A shielded scutcheon...
I am in need of music that would flow Over my fretful, feeling fingertips, Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips, With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low, Of some song sung to rest the tired dead, A song to fall like water on my head, And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow! There is a magic made by melody: A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and...
A GLIMPSE, through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room, around the stove, late of a winter night—And I unremark’d seated in a corner; Of a youth who loves me, and whom I love, silently approaching, and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand; A long while, amid the noises of coming and going—of drinking and oath and smutty...
The sun sets in molten gold. The evening clouds form a jade disk. Where is he? Dense white mist envelops the willows. A sad flute plays “Falling Plum Blossoms.” How many Spring days are left now? This Feast of Lanterns should be joyful. The weather is calm and lovely. But who can tell if it Will be followed by wind and rain?
Li Ching Chao, The Sun Sets in Molten Gold
How still, How strangely still The water is today, It is not good For water To be so still that way.
Langston Hughes, Sea Calm