Every so often he jumps, just to make it clear that he is essentially immobile. The jump is in some way like a heartbeat; careful observation makes it plain that the whole of the toad is a heart.
Clamped in a hunk of cold mud, the toad sinks into the winter like a mournful chrysalis. He wakes in the spring knowing that he has not changed into anything else. Dried to his depths, he is more a toad than ever. He waits in silence for the first rains.
And one fine day he heaves himself out of the pliant earth, heavy with moisture, swollen with spiteful sap, like a heart tossed onto the ground. In his sphinxlike posture there is a secret proposition of exchange, and the toad’s ugliness appalls us like a mirror.
Posted in Arreola, Juan Jose, Poetry.
Over the balcony eave, seaside,
One after another, the rockets arc
Barely into view, each sudden thud
Rollmg from behind the brickface.
We used to say the rockets “burst,â€
As though speaking of someone’s heart—
Star-beam, dream-light, bright spokes
Wheeling, falling in a sort of glory.
One summer, in an orchard in Manteca,
The scent of peaches was like fog,
The dust rose and settled like fog,
And both of us went waving sparklers.
You ran on, out farther, tracing
Spirals high in the air. They stayed
Long after the light went, after you
And the heavy, sweet trees were one.
Now I close my eyes and find only
Traces of those wiry figures burned
Into the night. They are fading as
They must, and as they always do.
Whatever shines, however briefly,
We tend toward and love perhaps,
Grounded as we are in the literal—
The powder, the ashes the earth.
Posted in Poetry, Smith, Arthur.
Like a candle through a keyhole
shoved, burning towards knownwheres–
Always the days unstay me.
I need to have admired more those symmetries which preach
each seed is buried beneath a flower,
each weed above a wound.
Posted in Knott, Bill, Poetry.
Nathan had hit Paula, but I’m not sure if that was true or as what everyone assumed. Living with Nathan seemed the same as being hit.
[...]
Nathan’s indifference to consequence: first he had it, then it went away, then it came back and killed him. It’s shape that makes a person’s life interesting. When Nathan ducked into my room, pulled down his pants, and set fire to his pubic hair, he seemed to do it without thought. It was just a crazy idea that had struck him. Then he left and the smell would hang there. You could almost see it as bits of black ash drifted down over my books and papers. I hated to brush them away with my bare hand. Nobody liked him for it. Burning the Black Forest was an absurdity without issue, except to the dean and those jocks who get excited by what they didn’t understand. It wasn’t a graceful action, but it was done with a kind of grace. It wasn’t the action of a guy who feels he must work sixteen hours a day to keep people from yelling at him, a guy who wakes up before the crows to think about mortgage payments, health insurance, life insurance, his kids’ college education, and how he’s going to pay for his retirement. Does Nathan’s son have any of that? Sometimes I hope he’s hairy like his father, just a ball of thick black hair. And when Nathan’s foot had swollen up to the size of a basketball, what did he think then? I imagine him sitting in his hut with the Indians hovering outside the door. He had a terrible fever and was sweating his guts out. There must have been flies all over the place. Was he afraid? I like to think he didn’t care. An ex-wife who hated him, a child he didn’t know, his foot as big as a basketball– I liked to think that Nathan didn’t even feel fear. That’s how he stays fixed in my mind: indifferent to consequence. It’s something we like to hear that other people can do. I mean, even if we can’t imagine it for ourselves, don’t we want to believe it’s possible?
Posted in Dobyns, Stephen, Fiction.
But seriousness had amounted to Jason Plover’s trademark. He had been a tall, heavyset man fond of wearing a thick tweed overcoat, which made his figure resemble a rolled-up mattress. When he walked he like to set his entire foot flat upon the ground before lifting it for the next step. His heavy tread was well known in the English department at Tufts, where he had taught for fifteen years. He had vast black eyebrows that he could wield as a samurai wields his sword. One position showed scorn, another superiority, and a third deep thought. There are many writers in the Boston area. Toss a stone in a public place and you are likely to hit one. But for seriousness–sheer, bullying, heavy-lidded, I’m-the-most-important-poet-on-God’s-green-acre seriousness–Jason Plover had the rest of the writers beat.
Now all was changed.
The headline in the Boston Herald read Plummeting Porker Pulverizes Poet.
[...]
There was something about these stories that made time seem causal, and Harriet realized she was attempting to repair her sense of causality. Her husband’s death appeared to lie outside causality. The malignant Demiurge who hangs life’s carrot before our eyes had been having his or her little joke. What do we do with an extremely serious poet? We kill him with a falling pig. Those people who had laughed at the manner of her husband’s death: shouldn’t they have been terrified? Didn’t Jason’s death indicate an awful truth about the cosmos–that if it has a divine direction, then its prime mover is whimsy?
[...]
She thought of her husband’s seriousness, how he wore it like a garment. Most often his laughter had been ironic or sarcastic or superior. His laughter had been judgmental and, as a result, all his laughter had been serious. Was it possible to laugh without any element of judgment? Jason Plover’s life had been an edifice built to demonstrate the solemnity of his endeavor. Poor Jason, killed by a falling pig; his death had overturned the premises of his life.
[...]
Harriet Spense considered how Franklin yearned for the fame that had resulted in her husband’s ultimate trivialization. She found herself laughing. She put her hands on her knees, leaned her head back, and gasped for breath. It was neither a guffar nor the hysterical shriek of nervousness. It was the laugh of someone whose solemnity has been overthrown, the laugh that erases every other concern. Our plans, our memories, our fears are all replaced by a peculiar yet distinctive hooting. To some it sounds like a mob of crows; to others, a donkeys bray. In fact, it is the sound of the world disappearing as all the content is sucked from our heads, to be replaced–briefly; oh, too briefly–by a happy vacancy. And doesn’t this sustain us? Doesn’t it provide the strength to let us bear up our burden and continue our mortal journey?
Posted in Dobyns, Stephen, Fiction.
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away –
but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
Posted in Poetry, Szymborska, Wyslawa.
It begins in the crux of beam and insulation,
Behind the sepia portraits of ancestors
On the bedroom wall. A wire burns through
Its cloth sleeve, overwhelmed
By demands of modern current.
It splits into two antennae,
Two probes in close space.
A spark shoots and sows in a post,
Then it starts to race –
Hungry, reckless,
Through the dry skeleton of the house.
Go to the wall. Can you see it?
Every episode is different.
Will it burn a seam or hole
To reach the open air?
You have to evacuate the family, but no one
Wants to go. And when they are dead,
And you are contemplating
The sticks, the wheezing ashes,
The iron pots melted to pools on the lawn,
The authorities will say it was structural.
Now that you think of it,
There were warning signs, gestures:
A flaming toaster,
A persistent aggressiveness.
On the littered ground in hindsight
You devise solutions.
What if you’d paid it more attention,
Sworn off sleep, made tea –
Could you have quelled it?
What if you’d stood nightly by the wall,
Felt around for the heat,
Drawn a cold, wet cloth across the surface,
And, speaking soft words,
Held it?
Posted in Hannah, Sarah, Poetry.
Attentive as one is to a whisper, the children wade through standing water, uncertain of its depth or source. They find and salvage a sogged train schedule. For their short lives the depot has been boarded shut. One has a flair for death and can fashion a noose from corn silk. One keeps an archive of diaries. One is the movie extra a camera seeks out, lingers on. One reads the subtitles aloud before the characters speak. One imagines sleep to be a furnished room. One imagines rain on the rolled hay, the must of empty stables, the tin-edge of blood on the tongue. By schema and classifications, they are a sister and a brother. Waylaid between this puddle and the next, one creates a theory of the spectral. One fingers through a cache of candies. One is plump and ready for the oven. One could not even flavor a stock pot. One is the overlooked subject. One is a language of mishearings. They cling to the hitherto unknown. When they dissect the bird they find nothing of the song.
Posted in Pankey, Eric, Poetry.
… a possible music
lifts through the panic of dismay -
it’s the blue of all the flowers of your body,
the brain stem, the clitoris, the tongue,
the wrist vein, the channels of the heart, the dying lips,
reaching to their likeness in the sky, in the sky’s waters -
you can’t lift it out of your flesh
because it won’t exist, but it flowers past you.
It opens the places you’ve always been,
house, fire, glass, bed, water,
tree, night,
the child’s glance which strews your transparencies
across a field of colours you have no name for,
the profane ash of touch
darkening your tongue, the dream of imperishable silver
which wakes to another dream, a boat departing
from an unmapped shore, and your crumbling words, unable
to hold even one drop of light.
Posted in Croggon, Alison, Poetry, Writers on Writing.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Posted in Snippets, Valery, Paul.
I urged students to believe that the merit of reading a great poem, play, or novel consisted in the pleasure of gaining access to deeply imagined lives other than their own. Over the years, that opinion, still cogent to me, seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. Students seem to be convinced that their own lives are the primary and sufficient incentive. They report that reading literature is mainly a burden. Those students who think of themselves as writers and take classes in “creative writing†to define themselves as poets or fiction writers evidently write more than they read, and regard reading as a gross expenditure of time and energy. They are not open to the idea that one learns to write by reading good writers.
Posted in Ozick, Cynthia, Writers on Writing.
All of us can ask directions or remark that it looks like snow. When we wish to embody in language a complex of feelings or sensations or ideas, we fall into inarticulateness; attempting to speak, in the heat of love or argument, we say nothing or we say what we do not intend. Poets encounter inarticulateness as much as anybody, or maybe more: They are aware of the word’s inadequacy because they spend their lives struggling to say the unsayable. From time to time, in decades of devotion to their art, poets succeed in defeating the enemies of ignorance, deceit, and ugliness. The poets we honor most are those who—by studious imagination, by continuous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language—publish in their work the unsayable said.
Posted in Hall, Donald, Writers on Writing.
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head
in the space between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done or hiding
from power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens the splitting
between love and action I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence
Posted in Poetry, Rich, Adrienne.
When I queried my parent-writer friends about this issues [trying to manage parenting and writing], I was shocked by how quickly everyone responded, and I decided to read all the emails in one sitting. This session left me feeling a sort of gorgeous despair. There was a grandeur to our experience that was like reading letters from some besieged fortification– The Alamo maybe, or Masada– where everyone accepted defeat but still believed in the glory of the cause. My friends shared with me a kind of inspired cluelesness that speaks not only to the experience of parenthood, but also to the experience of writing.
Posted in Barden, Dan, Writers on Writing.
and I notice in our fathers’ poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn’t fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we’d turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.
Posted in Hicok, Bob, Poetry.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Posted in Gray, Thomas, Poetry.
Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.
Posted in Donne, John, Poetry.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Posted in Auden, W. H., Poetry.
There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.
Posted in Wilde, Oscar, Writers on Writing.
Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts.
Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
(translation by Kenneth Rexroth)
Posted in Poetry, Tu Fu.