1186. Brown Penny - William Butler Yeats

I whispered, "I am too young."

and then, “I am old enough”.

Wherefore I thew a penny

To find out if I might love.

“Go and love, go and love, young man,

If  the lady be young and fair”

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough 

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon.

1185. Nothing Is Lost - Noel Coward

Deep in the sub-conscious we are told

Lie all our memories, lie all the notes

Of all the music we have ever heard 

And all the phrases those we loved have spoken, 

Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,

Family jokes, outmoded anecdotes

Each sentimental souvenir and token

Everything seen, experienced, each word

Addressed to us in infancy before,

Before we we could even know or understand

The implications of our wonderland.

There they all are, the legendary lies

The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears

Forgotten debris of forgotten years

Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise

Before our world dissolves before our eyes

Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,

A word, a tune, a known familiar scent

And echo from the past when, innocent

We looked upon the present with delight

And doubted not the future would be kinder

A never knew the loneliness of night.

1184.Let No Charitable Hope - Elinor Wylie

Now let no charitable hope

Confuse my mind with images

Of eagle and of antelope

I am in nature none of these

I am, being human, born alone,

I am, being woman, hard beset,

I live by squeezing a stone

The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere

The years go by in single file;

But none has merited my fear,

And none has quite escaped my smile.

1183. The Silence Now - May Sarton

These days the silence is immense.

It is there deep down, not to be escaped.

The twittering flight of gold finches,

The three crows cawing in the distance

Only brush the surface of this silence

Full of mourning, the long drawn-out

Tug and sigh of waters never still—

The ocean out there and the inner ocean.

Only animals comfort because they live

In the present and cannot drag us down

Into those caverns of memory full of loss.

They pay no attention to the thunder

Of distant waves. My dog’s eager eyes

Watch me as I sit by the window thinking.

At the bottom of the silence what lies in wait?

Is it love? Is it death? Too early or too late?

What is it I can have that I still want?

My swift response is to what cannot stay,

The dying daffodils, peonies on the way,

Iris just opening, lilac turning brown

In the immense silence where I live alone.

It is the transient that touches me, old,

Those light-shot clouds as the sky clears,

A passing glory can still move to tears,

Moments of pure joy like some fairy gold

Too evanescent to be kept or told.

And the cat’s soft footfall on the stair

Keeps me alive, makes Nowhere into Here.

A the bottom of the silence it is she

Who speaks of an eternal Now to me.

1182. Poem For Nelson - Sylvia Miles

September 22, 2004

For Nelson: not a week has passed 

since you left us. That I haven’t

Missed your guileless southern smile

Your pile of shoes on the brick

Wall in the ivy-lined house

On the cobble-stoned square

In the Meat Packing District.

Had I known you wouldn’t stay.

I’d never have chastised you for

Your eye in the video camera,

And not on the world we were

Inhabiting so enjoyably.

You were there before these

Nosy hordes, Nelson—they

Will never know the joy you

Engendered in all of us, and how much

We all loved you!

           Your own Sylvia Miles 

1181. For Sylvia - Nelson Sullivan

For Sylvia, a million kisses.

Few are hits: most are misses.

What chance has a superstar

To hear the far-off praises?

She glides in starlight radiance,

A nebula of gravity

Dazzling! points of light condensed

To diamond clarity.

She sparkles in the universe

Aglow with life and wit and mirth

Her levity’s alarming! In short

She’s simply charming. She conquers

Where the strong are won’t

Merely to survive. 

1180. Castilian - Elinor Wyle

 

Velasquez took a pliant knife

And scraped his palette clean,

He said, “I lead a dog’g own life

Painting a king and queen.”

He cleaned his palette with oily rags

and oakum from Seville wharves,

“I am sick of painting painted hags

And bad ambiguous dwarves.”

“The sky is silver, the clouds are pearl,

Their locks are looped with rain

I will not paint Maria’s girl

For all the money in Spain”

H washed his face in water cold,

His hands in turpentine;

He squeezed out colour like coins of gold

And colour like drops of wine.

Each cooler lay like a little pool,

On the polished cedar wood,

Clear and pale and ivory-cool

Or dark as solitude

He burnt the rags in the fireplace

and leaned from the windows high;

He said, “I like that gentleman’s face

Who wears his cap awry.”

This is the gentleman, there he stands,

Castilian, sombre-caped,

With arrogant eyes, and narrow hands

Miraculously shaped. 

1179. Georgia O’Keeffe, “From the Faraway, Nearby,” 1937 - Camille Carter

Make no bones about it—

                           or better yet, make bones:

sand-borne, sun-bleached, bald-faced bones

naked but for a Southwest sky.

I began picking up bones

                              because there were no flowers.

More than enough to fill your pockets, a treasure

trove—in plain sight—atop sage-covered plains.

In the picture taken by your lover, you pose with them—

                            nestling them, caressing them, pressing them:

brush of bone against your cheekbone. Your eyes rolled back

in ecstasy—momentarily, you were someplace else.

Place was a metaphysics; the word “skeleton” meant “home.”

                           He will not follow you there. You return alone

to New Mexico, to your catacomb, curio cabinet stuffed

with canvases, with corpses.

It’s the summer of 1936 when you receive his letter:

              I worry ... the landscape makes you lonely ... 

But it is his logic that makes you lonely. You will not

bother to reply. Outside at dusk,

you paint the desert, the broken fence, a single

              chicken bone. Suddenly you are struck

to think how elemental they turned out to be,

your life’s preoccupations.

Where in the prism of  the painting antlers bloom,

              as ascendant and gnarled as branches,

sits the alien skull of the once-majestic stag,

his eye-sockets hollow but for your projections.

One night you dream you see yourself as if from far away,

              asleep and slumped on sand dunes the color of cream.

Walking backwards you watch with fascination as your body

fades into a hillock’s hump, is stifled by a sun-drenched sheet.