Posts filed under 'Poetry'
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.
May 6th, 2007
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.
May 6th, 2007
Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.
May 6th, 2007
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.
May 6th, 2007
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)
May 6th, 2007
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium
Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.
So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.
July 3rd, 2006
The mind may sort it out and give it names–
When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring
The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true
That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop
For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes–
But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he has suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until they die.
May 10th, 2006
After dusk we go out. The dark powerful paw of the cape lies thrown out into the sea. We walk in swirls of human beings, we are cuffed around kindly, among soft tyrannies, everyone chatters excitedly in the foreign tongue. “No man is an island.” We gain strength from “them,” but also from ourselves. From what is inside that the other person can’t see. That which can only meet itself. The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent towards the good dark. A drink that bubbles in empty glasses. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.
May 10th, 2006
We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers.
White clouds refused to accept them, and the wind
Was too busy visiting sea after sea.
We did not succeed in interesting the animals.
Dogs, disappointed, expected an order,
A cat, as always immoral, was falling asleep.
A person seemingly very close
Did not care to hear of things long past.
Conversations with friends over vodka or coffee
Ought not be prolonged beyond the first sign of boredom.
It would be humiliating to pay by the hour
A man with a diploma, just for listening.
Churches. Perhaps churches. But to confess there what?
That we used to see ourselves as handsome and noble
Yet later in our place an ugly toad
Half-opens its thick eyelid
And one sees clearly: “That’s me.”
April 23rd, 2006
Beauty doesn’t only reside in bodies
but bodies present the strongest evidence
of its presence and cruelty
as it flies away. A million maggots
wriggle the giraffe’s wound. The flood
leaves behind its mud in the lunette.
I’m tired of this real estate agent,
says Beauty, and leaps into the lumpish
baby just as one moves from the walk-through
above the city of singing garbage men
to the hear-the-waves-from-here beach shack.
It is true that wherever Beauty goes
it will not stay, but can it be delayed?
Yes. Epoxy. Zipper replaced, neck
adjusted, avoidance of UV rays.
Can Beauty come back when it hath gone?
Yep. After adolescence. Look at this tree
that was beautiful when its blossoms
twittered in the leftward breeze but
then went through a bark-scab, leaf-
splotched phase but now is beautiful again
albeit kinda spooky. So you can see
death is no guarantee one way or the other.
The monkey pulls his beard, the tenor
loses his ping, the sports car smashed
to a dot. Faulkner in and out of print.
Bell bottoms. The tree stands on its chunk
of dirt hurtling through the void,
not even holding onto a strap. Dreams
are oblong, squeezed between dark columns.
In the hallways run a hundred children
in blue capes.
April 23rd, 2006
maggy and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and
milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;
and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and
may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
its always ourselves we find in the sea
April 14th, 2006
The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.
October 16th, 2005
Not to posterity
that would be senseless
they might all be monsters
the high commission
gives clear warning
the powers military staffs
that monsters will follow
with no brains
therefore not to posterity
but to those who
at this very moment
multiply with their eyes shut
not to posterity
I address these words
I speak to politicians
who won’t read me
to bishops
who won’t read me
to generals
who won’t read me
I speak to the so-called ‘ordinary people’
who won’t read me
I shall speak to all
who do not read me
nor hear nor know
nor need me
They do not need me
but I need them
October 16th, 2005
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
October 16th, 2005
The first snowfall this year
having my picture taken by you
out on the prairie
the curving form the plough made
on the contour of fields
everything you need to create
a mythology
the distant farm
the bullet riddled sign that reads
Texaco Gasoline
the gradual whitening of fields
the whole world abandoning itself
for a new form
standing in front of your camera
after my life burned down
I stood on the tip of one finger
eating fire
October 15th, 2005
but that no one will love as I did
the oak tree out my boyhood window,
the mother who set herself
so stubbornly against life,
the sister with her serious frown
and her wish for someone at her side,
the father with his dreamy gaze
and his left hand idly buried
in the fur of his dog.
And the dog herself,
that mournful look and huge appetite,
her need for absolute stillness
in the presence of a bird.
I know how each of them looks
when asleep. And I know how it feels
to fall asleep among them.
No one knows that but me,
No one knows how to love the way I do.
October 15th, 2005
It was a fine Leghorn egg,
and inside, unexpectedly, was the city
of Byzantium. Even from that height
he could see the flash of bedding
at the windows, the lump of Hagia Sophia,
and blue flags on the enormous city walls.
Clearly it was midsummer. Right,
he thought, remembering about love.
Not wanting the responsibility.
Watching the flies begin at it.
August 15th, 2005
Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels.
Which only we can translate into flesh.
The language to which we alone are native.
Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat,
instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus.
We go into the deadfall of the body,
our hearts in their marvelous cases
and discover new belfries everywhere.
I continued toward the Minotaur to keep
the thread taut. And suddenly, now,
immense flowers are coloring all
my stalked body. Making wine of me.
As bells get music of metal in the rain.
The prey I am willingly prospers.
The exile that comes on comes too late.
I go to it as Adam, singing across paradise.
August 15th, 2005
The sky
on and on,
stone.
The Mediterranean
down the cliff,
stone.
These fields,
rock.
Dead weeds
everywhere.
And the weight
of sun.
In the weeds
an old woman
lifting off
snails.
Near
two trees
of ripe figs.
The heart
never fits
the journey.
Always
one ends
first.
August 15th, 2005
I’d never seen pain so bland.
Smack, though I didn’t call it smack
in 1959, had eaten his technique.
His white-water right hand clattered
missing runs nobody else would think
to try, nor think to be outsmarted
by. Nobody played as well
as Powell, and neither did he,
stalled on his bench between sets,
stolid and vague, my hero,
his mocha skin souring gray.
Two bucks for a Scotch in this dump,
I thought, and I bought me
another. I was young and pain
rose to my ceiling, like warmth,
like a story that makes us come true
in the present. Each day’s
melodrama in Powell’s cells
bored and lulled him. Pain loves pain
and calls it company, and it is.
August 15th, 2005
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