Inward Bound Poetry

785. Do Not Expect - Dana Gioia

2012-01-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things

784. Face To Face - Tomas Tranströmer

2011-12-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

.
In February life stood still.
The birds refused to fly and the soul
grated against the landscape as a boat
chafes against the jetty where it’s moored.

The trees were turned away. The snow’s depth
measured by the stubble poking through.
The footprints grew old out on the ice-crust.
Under a tarpaulin, language was being broken down.

Suddenly, something approaches the window.
I stop working and look up.
The colours blaze. Everything turns around.
The earth and I spring at each other.

783. Letters From Yorkshire - Maura Dooley

2011-11-26T18:04:00.001-08:00

.
In February, digging his garden, planting potatoes,
he saw the first lapwings return and came
indoors to write to me, his knuckles singing

as they reddened in the warmth
It’s not romance, simply how things are.
You out there, in the cold, seeing the seasons

turning, me with my heartful of headlines
feeding words onto a blank screen.
Is your life more real because you dig and sow?

You wouldn’t say so, breaking ice on a waterbutt,
clearing a path through snow. Still, it’s you
who sends me word of that other world

pouring air and light into an envelope. So that
at night, watching the same news in different houses,
our souls tap out messages across the icy miles.

782. Sometimes - Sheenagh Pugh

2011-11-22T08:23:00.000-08:00

.
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost: green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen to you.

781. Black Snake - Mary Oliver

2011-10-24T13:33:00.001-07:00

.
The flat rock in the center of the garden
heats up every morning in the sun. Black
snake coils himself there neatly. He has
cousins who have teeth that spring up and
down and are full of the sap of death,
but what of that, so have we all. As for
his sporting life, there are many things
he can do and I have seen a few of them:
he can climb a tree and dangle like a red-
eyed rope out of its branches; he can swim;
he can catch a mouse and swallow it like
a soft stone. Also he can lie perfectly
still and stare with his lidless eyes in
the greatest hope: that you will not notice
him. If you do, however, he will loft his
chin and extrude the fray of his tongue,
which many find frightening. But tell me,
if you would praise the world, what is it
you would leave out? Besides, he is only
hoping that you will let him live his life.

And now that you have seen him, he looks
shyly at nothing and streams away into the
grass, his long body swaying like a suddenly
visible song.

780. Writing A Curriculum Vita - Wislawa Szymborska

2011-10-20T15:45:00.000-07:00

Writing A Curriculum Vita (1)
Translated from Polish by Graźyna Drabik and Austin Flint

What must you do?
You must submit an application
and enclose a Curriculum Vitae.

Regardless of how long your life is,
the Curriculum Vitae should be short.

Be concise, select facts.
Change landscapes into addresses
and vague memories into fixed dates.

Of all your loves, mention only the marital,
and of the children, only those who were born.

It's more important who knows you
than whom you know.
Travels––only if abroad.
Affiliations––to what, not why.
Awards––but not for what.

Write as if you never talked with yourself,
as if you looked at yourself from afar.

Omit dogs, cats, and birds,
mementos, friends, dreams.

State price rather than value,
title rather than content.
Shoe size, not where one is going,
the one you are supposed to be.

Enclose a photo with one ear showing.
What counts is its shape, not what it hears.

What does it hear?
The clatter of machinery that shreds paper.

Writing A Résumé (2)
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

What needs to be done?
fill out the application
and enclose the résumé.

Regardless of the length of life,
a résumé is best kept short.

concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.
Landscapes are replaced by addresses,
shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.

Of all your loves, mention only the marriage;
of all your children, only those who were born.

Who knows you matters more than whom you know.
Trips only if taken abroad.
Memberships in what but without why.
Honors, but not how they were earned.

Write as if you'd never talked to yourself
and always kept yourself at arm's length.

Pass over in silence your dogs, cats, birds,
dusty keepsakes, friends, and dreams.

Price, not worth,
and title, not what's inside.
His shoe size, not where he's off to,
that one you pass off as yourself.
In addition, a photograph with one ear showing.
What matters is its shape, not what it hears.
What is there to hear, anyway?
The clatter of paper shredders.

879. The Country - Billy Collins

2011-10-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

.
I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner.

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, one-time inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

878. The Cure At Troy (Excerpt) - Seamus Heaney

2011-09-09T13:39:00.001-07:00

.
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme

877. Dear George Orwell - L. E. Sissman

2011-09-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

Dear George Orwell,
I never said farewell.
There was too much going on:
Crabgrass in the lawn
and guests to entertain,
Light bantering with pain
(But wait till later on),
Love nightly come and gone.
But always in the chinks
Of my time (or the bank’s),
I read your books again.
In Schraffts’s or on the run
To my demanding clients,
I read you in the silence
Of the spell you spun.
My dearest Englishman,
My stubborn unmet friend,
Who waited for the end
In perfect pain and love
And walked to his own grave
With a warm wink and wave
To all; who would not pull
The trigger on the bull
Elephant, and who
Seeing his foe undo
His pants across the lines,
Did not blow out his brains;
Who served the Hotel X
As low man, slept in spikes
With tramps, in Rowton Houses
With pavement artists, boozers,
Boys, insomniacs;
Who spat on shams and hacks,
Loved in a raddled flat
Passing trains hooted at,
And died for what we are.
Farewell, Eric Blair.

876. I Am Trying To Get At Something Utterly Heart-broken - Anne Dillard

2011-09-01T18:04:00.000-07:00

Vincent van Gogh, letters, 1873-1890, edited I. Stone, 

translated Johanna van Gogh



		I



	At the end of the road is a small cottage,

	And over all the blue sky.

I am trying to get at something utterly heart-broken.



	The flying birds, the smoking chimneys,

	And that figure loitering below in the yard–

If we do not learn from this, then from what shall we learn?



	The miners go home in the white snow at twilight

These people are quite black. Their houses are small.

The time for making dark studies is short.	



	A patch of brown heath through which a white

	Path leads, and sky just delicately tinged,

	Yet somewhat passionately brushed.

We who try our best to live, why do we not live more? 



		II



	The branches of poplars and willows rigid like wire.

It may be true that there is no God here,

But there must be one not far off.	



	A studio with a cradle, a baby’s high chair.

Those colors which have no name

Are the real foundation of everything.



	What I want is more beautiful huts far away on the heath.

If we are tired, isn’t it then because

We have already walked a long way?



	The cart with the white horse brings

	a wounded man home from the mines.

Bistre and bitumen, well applied,

Make the colouring ripe and mellow and generous.



		III



	A ploughed field with clods of violet earth;

	Over all a yellow sky with a yellow sun.

So there is every moment something that moves one intensely.



	A bluish-grey line of trees with a few roofs.

I simply could not restrain myself or keep

My hands off it or allow myself to rest.



	A mother with her child, in the shadow

	Of a large tree against the dune.

To say how many green-greys there are is impossible.



	I love so much, so very much, the effect

	Of yellow leaves against green trunks.

This is not a thing that I have sought,

But has come across my path and I have seized it.

875. To Make A Summer - Josephine Miles

2011-08-18T15:15:00.001-07:00

Sandy says his high-school daughter
Keeps exclaiming joy, joy.
The burden of my joy lightens
With her exclamation.

It’s a generality, it takes
from my heart the sting of the singular, it sets moving
In the easy early Berkeley air
What we incommunicably share.

874. First Lines of Poems And No Further

2011-06-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

First lines of poems and no further or, ending at the beginning or, augh! or, . . .
“When my propane ran out”

“The drunk mechanic is happy to be in the ditch”

‘Should the vultures eat forget-me-nots?”

“I was living in a bowl of soup”

“Your wooden leg stood beside the bed”

“It was following me so I killed it”

“I despise the guys who are spies in disguise”

“Detachedly eying his severed hand”

“There once was a square, such a little square”

“The leaves from the tired trees blocked the drains”

“Where the hell am I?”

“Diem Sin Foo will mary you Madame LeFarge”

“When like the moon your face arose”

873. After the Treaty Between the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians Was Broken - Yannis Ritsos

2011-05-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

AFTER THUCYDIDES

Corinth, Argos, Sparta, Athens, Sicyon, and other (how many?)
     smaller cities—
the Greeks have become a thousand fragments; the great treaty has
      been broken;
everyone is enraged with everyone else—new meetings, meetings and
      more meetings, conferences;
yesterday’s friends and neighbors no longer greet each other in the
      street—
old grudges have come between them again; new alliances,
entirely opposite to earlier ones, are being sounded out, prepared.
      Deputations
arrive secretly at midnight; others leave. The statues of our heroes,
standing neglected in the city squares and gardens, are shat on by
      sparrows.
Group after group in the agora discuss our situation seriously,
exaltedly, passionately: Who gave them their orders? Who appointed
      them?
We, anyway didn’t choose them (Besides, how? And when? New
      bosses again? Who needs them?) April has arrived;
the small pepper trees on the sidewalks have turned green— a gentle
      green,
tender, childlike (moving to us) even if
rather dusty—the municipal service seems to be out of it,
no longer showing up in the afternoon to sprinkle the streets. But
      today,
on the portico surrounding the closed Council Chambers, the first
      swallow appeared unexpectedly,
and everybody shouted: “A swallow; look, a swallow; look a 
      swallow”—
everybody in unison, even the most violently opposed: “A swallow.”
      And suddenly
everybody fell silent, feeling alone, detached from the others, as
      though free,
as though united in continuity, within a communal isolation. And
      then
they understood that their only freedom was their solitude, but that
      too
(though imperceptible) unprotected, vulnerable, a thousand times
     entrapped, alone.

872. Spring Azures - Mary Oliver

2011-05-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

.
In spring the blue azures bow down
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.

Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows―
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking—

don’t seem enough to carry me through this world
and I think: how I would like

to have wings—
blue ones—
ribbons of flame.

How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.

And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.

Of course, he screamed,
and seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.

Well, who knows.
Who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.

Anyway, Blake the hosier’s son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city—
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,

to a life of the the imagination.

871. Turbulence - Adrienne Rich

2011-04-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

.
There’ll be turbulence. You’ll drop
your book to hold your
water bottle steady. Your
mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
may who ne’er hung there let him
watch the movie. The plane’s
supposed to shudder, shoulder on
like this. It’s built to do that. You’re
designed to tremble too. Else break
Higher you climb, trouble in mind
lungs labor, heights hurl vistas
Oxygen hangs ready
overhead. In the event put on
the child’s mask first. Breathe normally

870. So Much Happiness - Naomi Shihab Nye

2011-02-18T16:39:00.000-08:00

For Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

869. Monet Refuses The Operation - Lisel Mueller

2011-02-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

.
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken my all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

868. But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent - C. P. Cavafy

2011-01-11T13:55:00.000-08:00

Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn

"The gods perceive what lies in the future, and mortals, what occurs in the present, but wise men apprehend what is imminent."
-Philostratus, Life of Apolloniur of Tyans, VII, 7

Mortal men perceive things as they happen.
What lies in the future the gods perceive,
full and sole possessors of all enlightenment.
Of all the future holds, wise men apprehend
what is imminent. Their hearing,

sometimes, in moments of complete
absorption in their studies, is disturbed. The secret call
of events that are about to happen reaches them.
And they listen to it reverently. While in the street
outside, the people hear nothing at all.

867. The Great American Poem - Billy Collins

2010-12-04T17:43:00.000-08:00

.
If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually—one can only read so fast—
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem, not a novel,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.

866. Coda - Jason Shinder

2010-11-24T08:37:00.000-08:00

.
And now I know what most deeply connects us

after that summer so many years ago,
and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry,

and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common,

and it isn’t gratitude for every moment,
even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain,

though we are halfway through
it, or even the way you describe the magnificence

of being alive, catching a glimpse,

in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips,
though it is beautiful, it is; but it is

that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches

of what humans can find out about each other.

865. Hineni - Stanley F. Chyet

2010-11-18T20:56:00.000-08:00

.
here I am again
without much to offer by way of moral worth
I’ve a rich collection of defeats
maybe that’s to your liking?
I don’t know, do you?
if I’m to be quite frank
your likes and dislikes have never been
all that clear to me
presumably love is something you’re in favor of
and I’ve found it possible to love
but never without a certain anguish
whether that’s the way you intended it
or that’s a problem all my own
I can’t say, can you?
I’ve never wanted to pain others
I’ve never wanted to pain myself
I guess I can plead good intentions
but I needn’t tell you about good intentions
and the road to hell
I’ve often wondered: did you yourself intend
when you got it all going
that to live would be so complicated
to find a way in the world so hazardous?
did you have any idea at all
that living would involve such confusion
and such heartbreak?
I can’t be sure any of this will mean much to you
I can’t even be sure that your exist
as more than a figment of my own mysterious psyche
it’s a risk to open up to you
who knows, I may be branding myself a terrible fool
but whats not a risk? what’s guaranteed to be foolproof?
so here I am again
praying for some modest bravery
so that I can go on saying to you: here
I am again

864. Candles - C. P. Cavafy

2010-11-12T15:19:00.000-08:00

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Days to come stand in front of us
like a row of lighted candles—
golden, warm, and vivid candles.

Days gone by fall behind us,
a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles;
the nearest are smoking still,
cold, melted, and bent.

I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me,
and it saddens me to remember their original light.
I look ahead at my lighted candles.

I don’t want to turn for fear of seeing, terrified,
how quickly that dark line gets longer,
how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate.

863. The Laboratory - Wislawa Szymborska

2010-11-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

Translated by Walter Whipple

Did it all
happen in the laboratory?
Beneath one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Are we a trial generation?
Poured from one beaker to another,
shaken in retorts,
observed by something more than an eye,
each one individually
taken by forceps?

Or maybe otherwise:
no interventions.
The transformations occur on their own
in accordance with a plan.
The needle draws
the expected zigzags.

Maybe until now there was nothing interesting in us.
The control monitors are seldom switched on,
except when there's a war, and a rather big one at that,
several flights over the lump of clay called Earth,
or significant movements from point A to point B.

Or perhaps thus:
they only have a taste for episodes.
Look! a little girl on a big screen
is sewing a button to her sleeve.

The monitors begin to shriek,
personnel come running in.
Oh, what short of tiny creature
with a little heart beating on the inside!
What graceful dignity
in the way she draws the thread!
Someone calls out in rapture:
Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

862. The City - C. P. Cavafy

2010-10-22T13:28:00.001-07:00

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed then totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

861. Charles the great - Henri Kadusco

2010-10-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

.
Charles the great has come at last,
Come at last to stay.
He knows not where he’s going, though
He thinks he knows the way.

He thinks he knows the way to love,
Through flowered fields and highways.
He does not know what love is or
That I will love him always.

A pretty girl there waits for Charles,
To ease the pain and kiss his eyes,
To circle him with chains of love,
To show him love and make him wise.

Charles the great might disappear
while thinking you can see him.
But life is short and art is long,
And she can live without him.

860. Black Maps - Mark Strand

2010-09-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

.
Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

not the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,

the bleak, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

859. At Great Pond - Mary Oliver

2010-07-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

.
  At Great Pond
 the sun, rising, 
scrapes his orange breast
 on the thick pines, 
and down tumble
 a few orange feathers into 
the dark water. 
On the far shore
 a white bird is standing
 like a white candle — 
or a man, in the distance, 
in the clasp of some meditation — 
while all around me the lilies
 are breaking open again 
from the black cave 
of the night. 
Later, I will consider
 what I have seen —
 what it could signify —
 what words of adoration I might 
make of it, and to do this 
I will go indoors to my desk—
 I will sit in my chair —
 I will look back 
into the lost morning
 in which I am moving, now, 
like a swimmer, 
so smoothly,
 so peacefully,
 I am almost the lily —
 almost the bird vanishing over the water
 on its sleeves of night.

858. Love at First Sight (1)- Wislawa Szymborska

2010-07-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Both are convinced
that a sudden surge of emotion bound them together.
Beautiful is such a certainty,
but uncertainty is more beautiful.

Because they didn't know each other earlier, they suppose that
nothing was happening between them.
What of the streets, stairways and corridors
where they could have passed each other long ago?

I'd like to ask them
whether they remember-- perhaps in a revolving door
ever being face to face?
an "excuse me" in a crowd
or a voice "wrong number" in the receiver.
But I know their answer:
no, they don't remember.

They'd be greatly astonished
to learn that for a long time
chance had been playing with them.

Not yet wholly ready
to transform into fate for them
it approached them, then backed off,
stood in their way
and, suppressing a giggle,
jumped to the side.

There were signs, signals:
but what of it if they were illegible.
Perhaps three years ago,
or last Tuesday
did a certain leaflet fly
from shoulder to shoulder?
There was something lost and picked up.
Who knows but what it was a ball
in the bushes of childhood.

There were doorknobs and bells
on which earlier
touch piled on touch.
Bags beside each other in the luggage room.
Perhaps they had the same dream on a certain night,
suddenly erased after waking.

Every beginning
is but a continuation,
and the book of events
is never more than half open.

857. A Man Adrift on a Slim Spar - Stephen Crane

2010-07-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

A man adrift on a slim spar
A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle
Tented waves rearing lashy dark points
The near whine of froth in circles.
                  God is cold.

The incessant raise and swing of the sea
And growl after growl of crest
The sinkings, green seething, endless
The upheaval half-completed.
                 God is cold.

The seas are in the hollow of The Hand;
Oceans may be turned to a spray
Raining down through the stars
Because of a gesture of pity toward a babe.
Oceans may become grey ashes,
Die with a long moan and a roar
Amid the tumult of the fishes
And the cries of  the ships,
Because The Hand beckons the mice.

A horizon smaller than a doomed assassin’s cap,
Inky, surging tumults
A reeling, drunken sky and no sky
A pale hand sliding from a polished spar.
                  God is cold.

The puff of a coat imprisoning air:
A face kissing the water-death
A weary slow sway of a lost hand
And the sea, the moving sea, the sea.
                  God is cold.

856. Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played - Jack Gilbert

2010-06-11T13:41:00.000-07:00

.
We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not he wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

855. Daisies - Mary Oliver

2010-05-08T08:08:00.000-07:00

.
It is possible, I suppose, that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what I means. I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing. Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers. Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered. At my feet the white-petaled daisies display
the small suns of their center-piece - their, if you don't
mind my saying so - their hearts. Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots. What do I know.
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun
lights up willingly; for example - I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.

854. The Disquieting Muses - Mark Strand

2010-05-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.

Something is wrong; something about the air,
Its color; about the light, the way it glows.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.

The muses in their fluted evening wear,
Their faces blank, might lead one to suppose
Something about the silence of the square,

Something about the buildings standing there.
But no, they have no purpose but to pose.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.

What happens after that, one doesn’t care.
What brought one here—the desire to compose
Something about the silence of the square,

Or something else, of which one’s not aware,
Life itself, perhaps—who really knows?
Boredom sets in first, and then despair…
Something about the silence of the square.

853. Alexandrian Kings - C. P. Cavafy

2010-04-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

C. P. Cavafy - Alexandrian Kings (1)
Translated from the Greek by Theoharis C. Theoharis

The Alexandrians flocked
to view the children of Cleopatra,
Kaisarion and his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first time
had been brought out to the Gymnasium,
to be proclaimed kings there,
amidst the gleaming company of soldiers on parade.

Alexander—him they named king
of Armenia, Media, and the Parthians.
Ptolemy—him they named king
of Cilicia, Syria, and Phoenicia.
Kaisarion was standing furthest forward,
dressed in rose-toned silk,
on his belt paired lines of sapphires and amethysts,
his shoes laced by white
ribbons pinned with rose-blush pearls.
Him they named higher than the younger ones,
him they named King of Kings.

The Alexandrians certainly understood
that these were words and histrionics.

But the day was warm and poetic,
the sky a clear, wide blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium a
triumphant artistic feat,
the courtiers luxury at its crest,
Kairsarion all grace and beauty
(the son of Cleopatra, blood of the Lagids);
and the Alexandrians raced to the festive name-day,
and worked themselves into raptures, and called out
cheers in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
enchanted by the lovely spectacle—
even though they very clearly knew the value of these things,
what inane words make up these titled kings.

C. P. Cavafy - Alexandrian Kings (2)
Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

The Alexandrians turned out in force
to see Cleopatra’s children,
Kairsarion and his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first time
has been taken out to the Gymnasium,
to be proclaimed kings there
before a brilliant array of soldiers.

Alexander: they declared him
king of Cilicia, Syria, and Phoenicia.
Kairsarion was standing in front of the others,
dressed in pink silk,
on his chest a bunch of hyacinths,
his belt a double row of amethysts and sapphires,
his shoes tied with white ribbons
prinked with rose-colored pearls.
They declared him greater than his little brothers,
they declared him King of Kings

The Alexandrians know of course
that this was all mere words, all theatre.

But the day was warm and poetic,
the sky a pale blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium
a complete artistic triumph,
the courtiers wonderfully sumptous,
Kaisarion all grace and beauty
(Cleopatra’s son, blood of the Lagids);
and the the Alexandrians thronged to the festival
full of enthusiasm and shouted acclamations
in Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
charmed by the lovely spectacle—
though they knew of course what all this was worth,
what empty words they really were, these kingships.

852. Insomnia - Linda Pastan

2010-03-26T21:03:00.001-07:00

.
I remember when by body
was a friend.

when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.

The door to the future
had not started to shut,

and lying on my back
between cold sheets

did not feel
like a rehearsal.

Now what light is left
comes up—a stain in the east,

and sleep, reluctant
as a busy doctor,

gives me a little
of its time.

851. Sunrise - Mary Oliver

2010-03-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

.
You can
die for it -
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. but

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of china,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

850. A Meditation On John Constable - Charles Tomlinson

2010-03-01T15:14:00.000-08:00

"Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?"

––John Constable: The History of Landscape Painting

He replied to his own question, and with the unmannered
 Exactness of art; enriched his premises
By confirming his practice: the labour of observation
 In face of meteorological fact. Clouds
Followed by others, temper the sun in passing
 Over and off it. Massed darks
Blotting it back, scattered and mellowed shafts
 Break damply out of them, until the source
Unmasks, floods its retreating bank
 With raw fire. One perceives (though scarcely)
The remnant clouds trailing across it
 In rags, and thinned to a gauze.
But the next will dam it. They loom past
 And narrow its blaze. It shrinks to a crescent
Crushed out, a still lengthening ooze
 As the mass thickens, though cannot exclude
Its silvered-yellow. The eclipse is sudden,
 Seen first on the darkening grass, then complete
In a covered sky.
             Facts. And what are they?
He admired accidents, because governed by laws,
 Representing them (since the illusion was not his end)
As governed by feeling. The end is our approval
 Freely accorded, the illusion persuading us
That it exists as a human image. Caught
 By a wavering sun, or under a wind
Which moistening among the outlines of banked foliage
 Prepares to dissolve them, it must grow constant;
Though there, ruffling and parted, the disturbed
 Trees let through the distance, like white fog
Into their broken ranks, It must persuade
 And with a constancy, not to be swept back
To reveal what it half-conceals. Art is itself
 Once we accept it. The day veers. He would have judged
Exactly in such a light, that strides down
 Over the quick stains of cloud-shadows
Expunged now, by its conflagration of colour.
 A descriptive painter? If delight
Describes, which wrings from the brush
 The errors of a mind, so tempered
It can forgo all pathos; for what he saw
 Discovered what he was, and the hand––unswayed
By the dictation of a single sense––
 Bodied the accurate and total knowledge
In a calligraphy of present pleasure. Art
 Is complete when it is human. It is human
Once the looped pigments, the pin-heads of light
 Securing space under their deft restrictions
Convince, as the index of a possible passion,
 As the adequate gauge, both of the passion
And its object. The artist lies
 For the improvement of truth. Believe him.

849. A Primer of the Daily Round - Howard Nemerov

2010-02-19T07:54:00.000-08:00


A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives into town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
 Who happens just now to remember A
 Peeling an apple somewhere far away.

848. Of Simplicity - James Kavanaugh

2010-02-08T15:56:00.000-08:00

.
Simplicity calls
After all the schemings done,
Now that I've paid homage
To damn near everyone.
God should be satisfied,
Parents got their due.
My education's justified.
I proved myself to you.

Simplicity calls
Now that everyone's been paid,
But even so I hesitate
Because I'm still afraid.
One of these days,
I'll jump the last few walls:
Give no explanation
Save "Simplicity calls"!

847. Fidelity - Grace Paley

2010-01-31T13:34:00.000-08:00

.
After supper I returned to
my reading book I had
reached page one hundred
and forty two hundred and twenty
more to go I had been thinking that
evening as we spoke
early at dinner with a couple of young
people of the time dense improbable
life of that book in which I had become so comfortable
the characters were now my troubled companions
I knew them understood I could
reenter these lives without loss
so firm my habitation I scanned the shelves
some books so dear to me I had missed them
learned forward to take the work into
my hands I took a couple of deep breaths
thought about the acceleration of days
yes I could reenter them but . . .
No how could I desert that other whole life
those others in their city basements
Abandonment How could I have allowed myself
even thought of a half hour's distraction
when life had pages or decades to go
so much was about to happen to people
I already know and nearly loved

846. I Live My Life In Widening Circles - Rainer Maria Rilke

2010-01-24T15:26:00.000-08:00

.
I live my life in widening circles
that drift out over the things.
I may not achieve the very last,
but it will be my aim.

I circle around God, around the age-old tower;
I've been circling for millennia
and still I don't know: an I a falcon a storm,
or a sovereign song?

845. King Demetrius - C. P. Cavafy

2010-01-15T12:37:00.000-08:00

Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn
Not like a king, but like an actor, he exchanged his showy robe of state for a dark cloak, and in secret stole away.
Plutarch, Life of Demetrius

When the Macedonians deserted him,
and made it clear that it was Pyrrhus they preferred
King Demetrius (who had a noble
soul) did not—so they said—
behave at all like a king. He went
and cast off his golden clothes,
and flung off his shoes
of richest purple In simple clothes
he dressed himself quickly and left:
doing just as an actor does
who, when the performance is over,
changes his attire and departs.

844. The Caedmon Room - Allen Grossman

2010-01-03T14:45:00.000-08:00

.
Upstairs, one floor below the Opera House
(top floor of the building), is the Caedmon
room––a library of sorts. The Caedmon room
was empty of readers most of the time.
When the last reader left and closed the door,
I locked it and moved in for life. Right now,
I am writing this in the Caedmon room.
Caedmon was an illiterate, seventh-century
British peasant to whom one night a lady
appeared in a dream. She said to him, speaking
in her own language, "Caedmon! Sing me something!"
And he did just that. What he sang, in his
own language, was consequential––because
he did not learn the art of poetry
from men, but from God. For that reason,
he could not compose a trivial poem,
but what is right and fitting for a lady
who wants a song. These are the words he sang:
"Now praise the empty sky where no words are."
This was Caedmon's song. Caedmon's voice is sweet.
In the Caedmon room shelves groan under the
weight of his eloquent blank pages, Histories
of a sweet world in which we are not found.
Caedmon turned each page, page after page
until the last page––on which is written:
"To the one who conquers, I give the morning star."

843. Sunrise - Mary Oliver

2009-12-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

.
You can
die for it -
an idea,
or the world. People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light. but

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us? Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

842. The Laboratory - Wislawa Szymborska

2009-12-22T15:26:00.000-08:00

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Did it all
happen in the laboratory?
Beneath one lamp by day
and billions by night?

Are we a trial generation?
Poured from one beaker to another,
shaken in retorts,
observed by something more than an eye,
each one individually
taken by forceps?

Or maybe otherwise:
no interventions.
The transformations occur on their own
in accordance with a plan.
The needle draws
the expected zigzags.

Maybe until now there was nothing interesting in us.
The control monitors are seldom switched on,
except when there's a war, and a rather big one at that,
several flights over the lump of clay called Earth,
or significant movements from point A to point B.

Or perhaps thus:
they only have a taste for episodes.
Look! a little girl on a big screen
is sewing a button to her sleeve.

The monitors begin to shriek,
personnel come running in.
Oh, what short of tiny creature
with a little heart beating on the inside!
What graceful dignity
in the way she draws the thread!
Someone calls out in rapture:
Tell the Boss,
and let him come see for himself!

841. A Primer of the daily Round - Howard Nemerov

2009-12-17T08:59:00.000-08:00

A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives into town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
   Who happens just now to remember A
   Peeling an apple somewhere far away.

840. But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent - C. P. Cavafy

2009-12-11T16:52:00.000-08:00

839. Of Simplicity - James Kavanaugh

2009-12-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

838. Insomnia - Linda Pastan

2009-12-01T17:05:00.000-08:00

.
I remember when my body
was a friend.

when sleep like a good dog
came when summoned.

The door to the future
had not started to shut,

and lying on my back
between cold sheets

did not feel
like a rehearsal.

Now what light is left
comes up—a stain in the east,

and sleep, reluctant
as a busy doctor,

gives me a little
of its time.

837. To The Required Unknown - William Wehrmeister

2009-11-27T08:32:00.000-08:00

.
This world, with its flashing lights, and images, and blazing with speed
 gives us little time, and less to reflect, and worse does our lives impede
 so much so, that even to glance at a book, or any printed matter to read 
it drops from our hands, with nervous tics and birdlike jumps that bleed 
and betray only too well how this very second steals even that small seed
 of graciousness, of time well spent quietly and well, to soothe others need.

But at times, must we whether work, travel, or move to events accurst, 
yet must we stop, in force, for there is no other choice, no, this calls first,
 only breathing that never stops, and the human voice, and baking thirst 
wins precedence, for stopping brings only disaster, the horrid worst
 but, with that duress, there comes a surety, a certainty that knows erst
 a chance to be still and reflect, think deep thoughts, and write this verse.

836. Oatmeal - Galway Kinnell

2009-11-21T15:32:00.000-08:00

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if
  somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
  breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary
  companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal with
  John Keats.
Keats said I was right to invite him: due to its glutinous texture,
  gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unusual willingness to
  disintegrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is OK to eat it with an
  imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed
  memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if such porridges are not as wholesome as Keats claims,
  still, you can learn something from them.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
  "Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it––those were his words––
  "Oi ad a 'eck of a toime, "he said more or less, speaking
  through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck
  in his pocket, but when he got home he couldn't figure out the
  order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on
  a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn't sure
  to this day if they got if right
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between
  stanzas and the way here and there a line will go into the
  configuration  of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
  and peer about, and then lay itself down slightly off the mark,
  causing the poem to  move forward with God's reckless wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard
  about the scraps of paper on the table and tried shuffling
  some stanzas of his own but only made matters worse.
When breakfast was over John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the
  works lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn." I doubt if there
  is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him
  started on it and two the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed
  their clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by
  hours," came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him––drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into
  the glimmering furrows, muttering––and it occurs to me:
  maybe there is no sublime, only the shining of the amnion's
tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over
  from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and
  simultaneously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to
  invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.

835. Theodotus - C. P. Cavafy

2009-11-20T17:13:00.000-08:00

Translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn

If you are among the truly elect,
watch how you achieve your predominance.
However much you're glorified, however much
your accomplishments in Italy and Thessaly
are blazoned far and wide by governments,
however many honorary decrees
are bestowed on you in Rome by your admirers,
neither your elation nor your triumph will endure,
nor will you feel superior—superior how?—
when, in Alexandria, Theodotus brings you,
upon a charger that's been stained with blood,
poor wretched Pompey's head.

And do not take it for granted that in your life,
restricted, regimented, and mundane,
such spectacular and terrifying things don't exist.
Maybe at this very moment, into some neighbor's
nicely tidied house there comes—
invisible, immaterial—Theodotus,
bringing one such terrifying head.

834. I Am Too Close. - Wislawa Szymborska

2009-11-14T08:16:00.000-08:00

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

I am too close for him to dream of me.
I don't flutter over him, don't flee him
beneath the roots of trees. I am too close.
The caught fish doesn't sing with my voice.
The ring doesn't roll from my finger.
I am too close. The great house is on fire
without me calling for help. Too close
for one of my hairs to turn into the rope
of the alarm bell. Too close to enter
as the guest before whom walls retreat.
I'll never die again so lightly,
so far beyond my body, so unknowingly
as I did once in his dream. I am too close,
too close, I hear the word hiss
and see its glistening scales as I lie motionless
in his embrace. He's sleeping,
more accessible at this moment to an usherette
he saw once in a traveling circus with one lion,
than to me, who lies at his side.
A valley now grows within him for her,
rusty-leaved, with a snowcapped mountain at one end
rising in the azure air. I am too close
to fall from that sky like a gift from heaven.
My cry could only waken him. And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues. And I possessed
the gift of vanishing before astonished eyes,
which is the riches of all. I am too close,
too close for him to dream of me.
I slip my arm from underneath his sleeping head -
it's numb, swarming with imaginary pins.
A host of fallen angels perches on each tip,
waiting to be counted.

833. Pursery Rhyme - Gen. Isaac R. Sherwood

2009-11-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

(1835-1925)
(From: An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, 1929)

Sing a song of Europe,
   Highly civilized.
Four and twenty nations
   Wholly hypnotized.

When the battles open
   The bullets start to sing;
Isn't that a silly way
   To act for any King?

The Kings are in the background
   Issuing commands;
The Queens are in the parlor,
   Per etiquette's demands.

The bankers in the counting house
   Are busy multiplying;
The common people at the front
   Are doing all the dying.

832. A World To Do - Theodore Weiss

2009-11-09T15:02:00.000-08:00

“I busy too,” the little boy
said, lost in his book
about a little boy, lost
in his book, with nothing

but a purple crayon
and his wits to get him out.
“Nobody can sit with me,
I have no room.
                     I busy
too. So don’t do any noise.
We don’t want any noise
right now.”
               He leafs
through once, leafs twice;
the pictures, mixed with windy
sighs, grow dizzy,
                         world
as difficult, high-drifting
as the two-day snow that can
not stop.
            How will the bushes,
sinking deeper and deeper,
trees and birds, wrapt
up, ever creep
                   out again?
Any minute now the blizzard,
scared and wild, the animals
lost in it—O the fur,

the red-eyed claws, crying
for their home—may burst
into the room. Try words
he’s almost learned
                           on them?
He sighs, “I need a man here;
I can’t do all this work
alone.”
         And still, as though
intent on reading its own
argument, winter continues
thumbing through itself.

831. The Sun - Mary Oliver

2009-11-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

.
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone—
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance—
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
turned from this world—

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

830. Impressions - E. E. Cummings

2009-10-28T07:41:00.000-07:00

From: An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry, 1929

the hours rise up putting off stars and it is
dawn
into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems

on earth a candle is
extinguished          the city
wakes
with a song upon her
mouth having death in her eyes

and it is dawn
the world
goes forth to murder dreams . . . .

i see in the street where strong
men are digging bread
and i see the brutal faces of
people contented hideous hopeless cruel happy

and it is day,

in the mirror
i see a frail
man
dreaming
dreams
dreams in the mirror

and it
is dusk            on earth

a candle is lighted
and it is dark.
the people are in their houses
the frail man is in his bed
the city
sleeps with death upon her mouth having a song in her eyes
the hours descend
putting on stars . . . .

in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems.

829. Some Like Poetry (Four translations) - Wislawa Szymborska

2009-10-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Wislawa Szymborska - Some Like Poetry
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Maria Trzeciak

Some––
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there'd be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like––
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry––
but what sort of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving bannister.

Wislawa Szymborska - Some People Like Poetry (2)
Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Some people--
that is not everybody
Not even the majority but the minority.
Not counting the schools where one must,
and the poets themselves,
there will be perhaps two in a thousand.

Like--
but we also like chicken noodle soup,
we like compliments and the color blue,
we like our old scarves,
we like to have our own way,
we like to pet dogs.

Poetry--
but what is poetry.
More than one flimsy answer
has been given to that question.
And I don't know, and don't know, and I
cling to it as to a life line.

Wislawa Szymborska - Some People Like Poetry (3)
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Some people––
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Like––
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry––
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.

Wislawa Szymborska - Some Like Poetry (4)
Translated from the Polish by Regina Grol

Some -
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry -
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don't know and don't know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.

828. Brueghel's Snow (Six poems about the same picture)

2009-10-23T16:13:00.000-07:00

Rutger Kopland - Brueghel's Winter
Translated from the Dutch by James Brockway

Winter by Brueghel, the hill with hunters
and dogs, at their feet the valley with the village.
Almost home, but their dead-tired attitudes, their steps
in the snow––a return, but almost as
slow as arrest. At their feet the depths
grow and grow, become wider and further,
until the landscape vanishes into a landscape
that must be there, is there but only

as a longing is there.

Ahead of them a jet-black bird dives down. Is it mockery
of this labored attempt to return to the life
down there: the children skating on the pond,
the farms with women waiting and cattle?

An arrow underway, and it laughs at its target.

Anne Stevenson - Brueghel's Snow

Here in the snow:
three hunters with dogs and pikes
trekking over a hill,
into and out of those famous footprints -
famous and still.

What did they catch?
They have little to show
on their bowed backs.
Unlike the delicate skaters below,
these are grim, they look ill.

In the village, it's zero.
Bent shapes in black clouts,
raw faces aglow
in the firelight, burning the wind
for warmth, or their hunger's kill.

What happens next?
In the unpainted picture?
The hunters arrive, pull
off their caked boots, curse the weather
slump down over stoups. . .

Who's painting them now?
What has survived to unbandage
my eyes as I trudge through this snow,
with my dog and stick,
four hundred winters ago?

Joseph Langland - Hunters In The Snow: Brueghel

Quail and rabbit hunters with tawny hounds,
Shadowless, out of late afternoon
Trudge toward the neutral evening of indeterminate form.
Done with their blood-annunciated day
Public dogs and all the passionless mongrels
Through deep snow
Trail their deliberate masters
Descending from the upper village home in hovering light.
Sooty lamps
Glow in the stone-carved kitchens.

This is the fabulous hour of shape and form
When Flemish children are grey-black-olive
And green-dark-brown
Scattered and skating informal figures
On the mill ice pond.
Moving in stillness
A hunched dame struggles with her bundled sticks,
Letting her evening's comfort cudgel her
While she, like jug or wheel, like a wagon cart
Walked by lazy oxen along the old snowlanes,
Creeps and crunches down the dusky street.
High in the fire-red dooryard
Half unhitched the sign of the Inn
Hangs in the wind
Tipped to the pitch of the roof.
Near it anonymous parents and peasant girl,
Living like proverbs carved in the alehouse walls,
Gather the country evening into their arms
And lean to the glowing flames.

Now in the dimming distance fades
The other village; across the valley
Imperturbable Flemish cliffs and crags
Vaguely advance, close in, loom,
Lost in nearness. Now
The night-black raven perched in branching boughs
Opens its early wing and slipping out
Above the grey-green valley
Weaves a net of slumber over the snow-capped homes.
And now the church, and then the walls and roofs
Of all the little houses are become
Close kin to shadow with small lantern eyes.
And now the bird of evening
With shadows streaming down from its gliding wings
Circles the neighboring hills
Of Hertogenbosch, Brabant.

Darkness stalks the hunters,
Slowly sliding down.
Falling in beating rings and soft diagonals.
Lodged in the vague vast valley the village sleeps.

William Carlos Williams - The Hunters In The Snow

The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return

from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
sturdy hinters lead in

their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix

between his antlers the cold
inn yard is
deserted but for a huge bonfire

that flares wind-driven tended by
women who cluster
about it to the right beyond

the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen

a winter-stuck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture

Anne Stevenson - Brueghel's Snow

Here in the snow:
three hunters with dogs and pikes
trekking over a hill,
into and out of those famous footprints -
famous and still.

What did they catch?
They have little to show
on their bowed backs.
Unlike the delicate skaters below,
these are grim, they look ill.

In the village, it's zero.
Bent shapes in black clouts,
raw faces aglow
in the firelight, burning the wind
for warmth, or their hunger's kill.

What happens next?
In the unpainted picture?
The hunters arrive, pull
off their caked boots, curse the weather
slump down over stoups. . .

Who's painting them now?
What has survived to unbandage
my eyes as I trudge through this snow,
with my dog and stick,
four hundred winters ago?

Walter de la Mare - Brueghel's Winter

Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green
Wall in the wild, cold scene below.
Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea
In freezing quiet of winter show;
Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood
Curling, skating, and sliding go.
To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze;
Peasants; a watching child; and lo,
Muffled, mute--beneath naked trees
In sharp perspective set a-row--
Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant,
Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow;
And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air
Swoops into space a crow.
But flame, nor ice, nor piercing rock,
Nor silence, as of a frozen sea,
Nor that slant inward infinite line
Of signboard, bird, and hill, and tree,
Give more than subtle hint of him
Who squandered here life's mystery.

827. Reisebilder - Edoardo Sanguineti

2009-10-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

.
To the mini-skirted customs official who with sibyl-dove eyes honed in on me
in the interminable line of travelers in transit, I told the entire truth,
confined within a plywood separé-confessional: I said I have a son who
studies Russian and German and that Bonjours les ami, a four-volume French
course, was for my wife; I was ready to concede more: that I knew it had
been Rosa Luxemburg to launch the slogan "socialism or barbarism," and that
I could make up an impressive madrigal on the same; but I was sweating
as I searched my pockets in vain for the bill from the Operncafé; and then
suddenly you were there, even dragging in the kids, marvelous and marveling;
(we ordered you out with the same harsh gestures, my uniformed Beatrice of
democracy and myself); but the irreparable had already been consummated for me
there at the border between the two Berlins: forty-one-year-old seduced
by a police officer.

826. Invitation To Miss Marianne Moore - Elizabeth Bishop

2009-10-20T15:54:00.000-07:00

(Suggested by a poem of Pablo Neruda)

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
 please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
 please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
 please come flying.

Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
 Please come flying.

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire high-light,
with a black cape-full of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
 please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
 please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
 so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxi-cabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding into your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music fit for the musk deer,
 please come flying.

For whom the grim museums will behave
Like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
 please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at the game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
 please come flying.

With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with the grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
 please come flying.

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
 please come flying.

825. First Day of the Future - Galway Kinnell

2009-10-18T13:38:00.000-07:00

They always seem to come up
on the future, these cold, earthly dawns;
the whiteness and the blackness
make the flesh shiver as though it's starting to break.
But always it is just another day they illuminate
of the permanent present. Except for today.
A motorboat sets out across the bay,
a transfiguring spirit, its little puffy gasps
of disintegration collected
and hymned out in a pure purr of dominion.
It disappears. In the stillness again
the shore lights remember the dimensions of the black water.
I don't know about this new life.
Even though I burned the ashes of its flag again and again
and set fire to the ticket that might have conscripted me into its
       ranks forever,
and I squandered my talents composing my emigration papers,
I think I want to go back now and live again in the present time,
      back there
where someone milks a cow and jets of intensest nourishment go
       squawking into a pail,
where someone is hammering, a bit of steel at the end of a stick
       hitting a bit of steel, in the archaic stillness of an afternoon,
or somebody else saws a board, back and forth, like hard labor
in the lungs of one who refused to come to the very end.
But I guess I'm here. So I must take care. For here
one has to keep facing the right way, or one sees one dies, and one
       dies.

824. Song of one of the girls - Dorothy Parker

2009-10-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

Here in my heart I am Helen;
I'm Aspasia and Hero, at least.
I'm Judith, and Jael, and Madame de Stael;
I'm Salome, moon of the East.

Here in my soul I am Sappho;
Lady Hamilton am I, as well.
In me Recamier vies with Kitty O'Shea,
With Dido, and Eve, and poor Nell.

I'm of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.

823. Work Around Your Abyss - Henry Nouwen

2009-10-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

There is a deep hole in your being, like an abyss. You
will never succeed in filling that hole, because your
needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it
so that gradually the abyss closes.
   Since the hole is so enormous and your anguish
so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.
There are two extremes to avoid: being completely
absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so
many things that you stay far away from the wound
you want to heal.

822. Descartes's Loneliness - Allen Grossman

2009-10-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

.
Toward evening, the natural light becomes
intelligent and answers, without demur:
"Be assured! You are not alone. . . ."
But in fact, toward evening, I am not
convinced there is any other except myself
to whom existence necessarily pertains.
I also interrogate myself to discover
whether I myself possess any power
by which I can bring it about that I
who now am shall exist another moment.

Because I am mostly a thinking thing
and because this precise question can only
be from that thoughtful part of myself,
if such a power did reside within me
I should, I am sure, be conscious of it. . . .
But I am conscious of no such power.
And yet, if I myself cannot be
the cause of that assurance, surely
it is necessary to conclude that
I am not alone in the world. There is

some other who is the cause of that idea.
But if, at last, no such other can be
found toward evening, do I really have
sufficient assurance of the existence
of any other being at all? For,
after a most careful search, I have been
unable to discover the ground of that
conviction––unless it be imagined a lonely
workman on a dizzy scaffold unfolds
a sign at evening and puts his mark to it.

821. Apologies - Gwendolyn Mac Ewen

2009-10-05T07:15:00.000-07:00

from The T.E. Lawrence Poems

I did not choose Arabia; it chose me. The shabby money
That the desert offered us bought lies, bought victory.
       What was I, that soiled Outsider, doing
Among them? I was not becoming one of them, no matter
What you think. They found it easier to learn my kind
       of Arabic, than to teach me theirs.
And they were all mad; they mounted their horses and camels
       from the right.

But my mind's twin kingdoms waged an everlasting war;
The reckless Bedouin and the civilized Englishman
       fought for control, so that I, whatever I was,
Fell into a dumb void that even a false god could not fill,
       could not inhabit.

The arabs are children of the idea; dangle an idea
In front of them, and you can swing them wherever.
       I was also a child of the idea; I wanted
       no liberty for myself, but to bestow it
Upon them. I wanted to present them with a gift so fine
       it would outshine all other gifts in their eyes;
       it would be worthy. Then I at last could be
Empty.

You can't imagine how beautiful it is to be empty.
Out of this grand emptiness wonderful things must surely
       come into being.
When we set out, it was morning. We hardly knew
That when we moved we would not be an army, but a world.

820. A Night At The Opera - Charles Tomlinson

2009-10-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

When the old servant reveals she is the mother
   Of the young count whose elder brother
Has betrayed him, the heroine, disguised
   As the Duke's own equerry, sings Or'
Che sono, pale from the wound she has received
   In the first act. The entire court
Realize what has in fact occurred and wordlessly
   The waltz song is to be heard now
In the full orchestra. And we too,
   Recall that meeting of Marietta with the count
Outside the cloister in Toledo. She faints:
   Her doublet being undone, they find
She still has on the hair-shirt
   Worn ever since she was a nun
In Spain. So her secret is plainly out
   And Boccaleone (blind valet
To the Duke) confesses it is he (Or' son'io)
   Who overheard the plot to kidnap the dead
Count Bellafonte, to burn by night
   The high camp of the gipsy king
Alfiero, and by this stratagem quite prevent
   The union of both pairs of lovers.
Now the whole cast packs the stage
   Raging in chorus round the quartet- - led
By Alfiero (having shed his late disguise)
   And Boccaleone (shock has restored his eyes):
Marietta, at the first note from the count
   (Long thought dead, but finally revealed
As Alfiero), rouses herself, her life
   Hanging by a thread of song, and the Duke,
Descending from his carriage to join in,
   Dispenses pardon, punishment and marriage.
Exeunt to the Grand March, Marietta
   (Though feebly) marching, too, for this
Is the 'Paris' version where we miss
   The ultimate dènouement when at the command
Of the heroine (Pura non son') Bellafonte marries
   The daughter of the gipsy  king and . . .

819. Destruction - Joanne Kyger

2009-09-30T15:55:00.001-07:00

.
First of all do you remember the way a bear goes through
a cabin when nobody is home? He goes through
the front door. I mean he really goes through it. Then
he takes the cupboard off the wall and eats a can of lard.

He eats all the apples, limes, dates, bottled decaffeinated
coffee, and 35 pounds of granola. The asparagus soup cans
fall to the floor. Yum! He chomps up Norwegian crackers
stashed for the winter. And the bouillon, salt, pepper,
paprika, garlic, onions, potatoes.

He rips the Green Tara
poster from the wall. Tries the Coleman Mustard. Spills
the ink, tracks in the flour. Goes up stairs and takes
a shit. Rips open the water bed, eats the incense and
drinks the perfume. Knocks over the Japanese tansu
and the Persian miniature of a man on horseback watching
a woman bathing.

Knocks Shelter, Whole Earth Catalogue,
Planet Drum, Northern Mists, Truck Tracks, and
Women's Sports into the oozing water bed mess.

He goes down stairs and out the back wall. He keeps on going
for a long way and finds a good cave to sleep it all off.
Luckily he ate the whole medicine cabinet, including stash
of LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin, Amanita, Benzedrine, Valium
and aspirin.

818. Things of the Past - Theodore Weiss

2009-09-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

“Your great-grandfather was . . .”

And Mrs. C, our tart old Scots
landlady, with her stomping legs,
four bristles sprouted from her chin-
wart, she who briskly
chats away
about Montrose, founder of her clan,
as though she’s just now fresh
from tea with him,
regards you
incredulously, a bastard gargoyle
off some bastard architecture,
one grown topsy-turvy:
“Not to know
your great-grandfather! How do
you live? O you Americans!”
She
cannot see what freedom it affords,
your ignorance,
a space swept
clear of all the clutter of lives
lived.
And yet who can dismiss
her words entirely? It burdens too,
this emptiness,
pervasive presence
not a room away that, no matter
how you hammer at its wall,
refuses to admit you.
As though
you woke and in a place you thought
familiar,
then had a sense (what
is it that has been disturbed?)
of one you never met
yet somehow
knew—looks echoing among the dusty
pictures:
that myopic glass
reflecting, like a sunset lingered
inside trees,
a meditative smile:
a breath warm to your cheek,
your brow:
the hand (whose?)
moving on your blanket in a gesture
that you fail to recognize

yet know it as you know
the taste through oranges of sun-
light current in them still—

then gone as you began to stir.
And for a moment dawn seems lost
as in a mist, seems wistful

for a feeling it cannot
achieve . . . the sun breaks through,
an instant medleying the leaves.

817. Am I Not Among The Early Risers - Mary Oliver

2009-09-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

Am I not among the early risers
and the long-distance walkers?

Have I not stood, amazed, as I consider
the perfection of the morning star
above the peaks of the houses, and the crowns of the trees
blue in the first light?
Do I not see how the trees tremble, as though
sheets of water flowed over them
though it is only wind, that common thing,
free to everyone, and everything?

Have I not thought, for years, what it would be
worthy to do, and then gone off, barefoot and with a silver pail,
to gather blueberries,
thus coming, as I think, upon a right answer?

What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly
at the top of the field,
her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine,
has not already done?

What countries, what visitations,
what pomp
would satisfy me as thoroughly as Blackwater Woods
on a sun-filled morning, or, equally, in the rain?

Here is an amazement–––once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of  paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.

Above the modest house and the palace–––the same darkness.
Above the evil man and the just, the same stars.
Above the child who will recover and the child who will
not recover, the same energies roll forward,
from one tragedy to the next and from one foolishness to the next.

I bow down.

Have I not loved as though the beloved could vanish at any moment,
or become preoccupied, or whisper a name other that mine
in the stretched curvatures of lust, or over the dinner table?
Have I ever taken good fortune for granted?

Have I not, every spring, befriended the swarm that pours forth?
Have I not summoned the honey-man to come, to hurry,
to bring with him the white and comfortable hive?

And while I waited, have I not leaned close, to see everything?
Have I not been stung as I watched their milling and gleaming,
and stung hard?

Have I not been ready always at the iron door,
not knowing to what country it opens–––to death or to more life?

Have I ever said that the day was too hot or too cold
or the night too long and as black as oil anyway,
or the morning, washed blue and emptied entirely
of the second-rate, less than happiness

as I stepped down from the porch and set out along
the green paths of the world?

816. Memorandum Book - Primo Levi

2009-09-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann

    In such a night as this,
Of north wind and rain mixed with snow,
There is someone who drowses in front of a TV,
Someone who resolves to rob a bank.
  In such a night as this,
Distant as it takes light to travel in five days,
There is a comet that plummets onto us
From the black womb without height or depth.
The same one Giotto painted,
It will bring neither luck nor disasters,
But ancient ice and a reply, perhaps.
  In such a night as this
There is a half-mad old man,
Fine metalworker in his day,
But his day was not our day,
And now he sleeps at Ports Nuova, drinks.
  In such a night as this
Someone stretches out next to a woman
And feels he no longer has weight.
It's today that counts and not tomorrow,
And the flow of time pauses briefly.
  In such a night as this
Witches used to choose hemlock and hellebore
To pick by the light of the moon
And cook in their kitchens.
  In such a night as this
There's a transvestite on Corso Matteotti
Who would give a kidney and a lung
To grow hollow and become a woman.
  In such a night as this
There are seven young men in white lab coats,
Four of them smoking pipes.
They are designing a very long channel
In which to unite a bundle of protons
Almost as swift as light.
If they succeed, the world will blow up.
  In such a night as this
A poet strains his bow, searching for a word
That can contain the typhoon's force,
The secrets of blood and seed.

815. Cosmic Gall - John Updike

2009-09-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

'Every second, hundreds of billions of these neutrinos pass through each square inch of our bodies, coming from above during day and from below at night, when the sun is shining on the other side of the earth.' - (from 'An Explanatory Statement on Elementary Particle
Physics,' By M. A. Rudermand and A. H. Rosenfeld, in American Scientist)

Neutrinos, they are very small.
  They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
  To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
  Or photons through a sheet of glass.
  They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the substantial wall,
  Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
  And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
  Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
  And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed –– you call
  It wonderful; I call it crass.

814. In Distress - John Wagoner

2009-09-17T15:57:00.000-07:00

(Selected entirely from International Code of Signals, United States
Edition, published by U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office)

I am abandoning my vessel
Which has suffered a nuclear accident
And is a possible source of radiation danger.
   You should abandon your vessel as quickly as possible.
    Your vessel will have to be abandoned.
I shall abandon by vessel
Unless you will remain by me,
Ready to assist.
I have had a serious nuclear accident
And you should approach with caution.
The position of the accident is marked by flame.
The position of the accident is marked by wreckage.
   I need a doctor. I have severe burns.
    I need a doctor. I have radiation casualties.
    I require a helicopter urgently, with a doctor.
The number of injured or dead is not yet known.
Your aircraft should endeavor to alight
Where a flag is waved or a light is shown.
Shall I train my searchlight nearly vertical
On a cloud intermittently and, if I see your aircraft,
Deflect the beam upwind and on the water
To facilitate your landing?
 I do see any light.
You may alight on my deck; I am ready to receive you forward.
You may alight on my deck; I am ready to receive you amidship.
You may alight on my deck; I am ready to receive you aft.
    I am entering a zone of restricted visibility.
    You should come within visual signal distance.
I require immediate assistance; I have a dangerous list.
I require immediate assistance; I have damaged steering gear.
I require immediate assistance; I have a serious disturbance on board.
I require immediate assistance; I am on fire.
   What assistance do you require?
    Can you proceed without assistance?
    Boats cannot be used because of weather conditions.
    Boats cannot be used on the starboard side because of list.
    Boats cannot be used on the port side because of list.
    Boats cannot be used to disembark people.
    Boats cannot be used to get alongside.
    Boats cannot be used to reach you.
    I cannot send a boat.
I require immediate assistance; I am drifting.
I am breading adrift. I have broken adrift.
I am sinking.
   Did you see the vessel sink?
    Is it confirmed the the vessel has sunk?
    What is the depth of water where the vessel sank?
    Where did the vessel sink?
    I have lost sight of you.
My position is doubtful.
My position is ascertained by dead reckoning.
Will you give me my position?
   You should indicate your position by searchlight.
    You should indicate your position by smoke signal.
    You should indicate your position by rockets or flares.
My position is marked by flame.
My position is marked by wreckage.
Are you in the search area?
 I am in the search area.
Are you continuing to search?
 Do you want me to continue to search?
    I cannot continue to search.
I cannot save my vessel.
Keep close as possible.
I wish some persons taken off.
A skeleton crew will remain on board.
You should give immediate assistance to pick up survivors.
You should try to obtain from survivors all possible information.
   I cannot take off persons.
    There are indications of an intense depression.
    The wind is expected to veer.
    You should take appropriate precautions.
    A phenomenal wave is expected.
    I cannot proceed to the rescue.
    I will keep close to you during the night.
    Nothing can be done until daylight.

813. Letters of the Dead - Wislawa Szymborska

2009-09-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

Wislawa Szymborska - Letters of the Dead
from Wszelki Wypadek (Could Have), 1972
Translated from Polish by Vuyelwa Carlin

We read the letters of the dead like puzzled gods –
gods nevertheless, because we know what happened later.
We know what money wasn’t repaid,
the widows who rushed to remarry.
Poor, unseeing dead,
deceived, fallible, toiling in solemn foolery.
We see the signs made behind their backs,
catch the rustle of ripped-up wills.
They sit there before us, ridiculous
as things perched on buttered bread,
or fling themselves after whisked-away hats.
Their bad taste – Napoleon, steam and electricity,
deadly remedies for curable diseases,
the foolish apocalypse of St. John,
the false paradise on earth of Jean-Jacques . . .
Silently, we observe their pawns on the board
– but shifted three squares on.
Everything they foresaw has happened quite differently,
or a little differently – which is the same thing.
The most fervent stare trustingly into our eyes;
by their reckoning, they’ll see perfection there.

812. Ode To Arnold Schoenberg - Charles Tomlinson

2009-09-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

Ode To Arnold Schoenberg On a Performance of His Concerto for Violin

At its margin
   the river's double willow
       that the wind
variously
   disrupts, effaces
       and then restores
in shivering planes:
   it is
       calm morning.
The twelve notes
   (from the single root
       the double tree)
and their reflection:
   let there be
       unity––this,
however the winds rout
   or the wave disperses
       remains, as
in the liberation of the dissonance
   beauty would seem discredited
       and yet is not:
redefined
   it may be reachieved,
       thus to proceed
through discontinuities
   to the whole in which
       discontinuities are held
like the foam in chalcedony
   the stone, enriched
       by the tones' impurity.
The swayed mirror
   half-dissolves
       and the reflection
yields to reflected light.
   Day. The bell-clang
       goes down the air
and, like a glance
   grasping upon its single thread
       a disparate scene,
crosses and recreates
   the audible morning.
       All meet at cockcrow
when our common sounds
   confirm our common bonds.
       Meshed in meaning
by what is natural
   we are discontented
       for what is more,
until the thread
   of an instrument pursue
       a more than common meaning.
But to redeem
   both the idiom and the instrument
       was reserved
to this exiled Jew––to bring
   by fiat
       certainty from possibility.
For what is sound
   made reintelligible
       but the unfolding word
branched and budded,
   the wintered tree
       creating, cradling space
and then
   filling it with verdure?

811. Omen - Jon Swan

2009-09-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

You will not even notice our departure.

The small, falling like plump leaves
among the fallen leaves,
will lie indistinguishable, each with his song
locked in his throat.
The large, unable to climb, to soar,
will invisibly die in their high places,
which only the few sure-footed among you could scale.
Only the tame, safe in your cages, will for a time, survive.

We have, it would seem, outlived our purpose,
whose strokes in the sky taught you symbols
to preserve what you thought.
In those days, we seemed lines drawn by a wise god
as we flew, flocked,
presaging more than a change in season.
Each savior in turn had his holy bird,
his practical, heavenly messenger descending
to peck a seed from the ear or to seal some voice as divine.

We, who announced the birth of each sun,
who once were, to the discoverer,
true sign of the unseen,
longed-for land ahead, now may announce no new thing
save this darkness
which we, at your bidding, must enter.
We fall, as pit-birds fell, silent.
Their silence was always clear warning to you to turn back.
But you, hacking at shadows, still fail to hear us though we
cease to sing.

810. You - Jorge Luis Borges

2009-09-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

In all the world, one man has been born, one man has died.
To insist otherwise is nothing more than statistics, an impossible
   extension.
No less impossible than bracketing the smell of rain with your
   dream of two nights ago.
The man is Ulysses, Abel, Cain, the first to make constellations
   of the stars, to build the first pyramid, the man who contrived
   the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, the smith
   who engraved runes on the sword of Hengist, Einar Tamberskelver
   the archer, Luis de León, the bookseller who
   fathered Samuel Johnson, Voltaire's gardener, Darwin
   aboard the Beagle, a Jew in the death chamber, and, in
   time, you and I.
One man alone has died at Troy, at Metaurus, at Hastings, at
   Austerlitz, at Trafalgar, at Gettysburg.
One man alone has died in hospitals, in boats, in painful solitude, 
   in the rooms of habit and of love.
One man alone has looked on the enormity of dawn.
One man alone has felt on his tongue the fresh quenching of
   water, the flavor of fruit and of flesh.
I speak of the unique, the single man, he who is always alone.

809. 1938 - Pastor Niemöller

2009-09-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

       'First they came for the Jews
        And I did not speak out —
         Because I was not a Jew.

 Then they came for the communists
     And I did not speak out —
   Because I was not a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
     And I did not speak out —
 Because I was not a trade unionist.

     Then they came for me —
     And there was no one left
       To speak out for me.'

808. Ramon Gurthie - The Making of The Bear

2009-09-09T07:37:00.000-07:00

Perhaps for fear of saying to oneself,
“Why you rather than another?” or asking
why it should be done at all,
it is not good to plan such things too long.

No question others had more craft than I.
I had waited for the Old One to give the sign
to one of us, half hoping still his choice
might fall on me. But lately he had turned
to graving stags and reindeer on bits of antler—
art that for all his pains my clumsy fingers
could never seem to master. In any case,
his choice for cavern walls ran to pregnant cows,
bison, and ponies. That, and more and more
he favored places not too hard to get at.
“What’s the harm in having good work seen?”

Meanwhile the first full moon of spring was near.
      I can’t say why I chose the cave I did.
Passing that way one day, I’d seen it
and taken it for a badger’s hole until
I saw an owl rise from it and, listening close,
caught the voices of the water.

I set out before dawn and took along
well-scorched moss, and tallow, stone lamp, firestick
in a deer bladder lashed tight  with pitched sinews.
The flint I carried in a pouch tied to my wrist.
I crawled with hips and belly till I came
into a place where I could squat. There I made
my first light. The water sounded fairly near,
though the first spur I took was full of twists
that led me farther from it. I turned back.
Now, inching on a ledge with steep-sloped roof,
I struck a fissure where the torrent spouted.
I whispered to the spirit, filled my lungs,
and plunged.
  Swim? I doubt a salmon could
have swum it. I braced and fought for holds
in walls and ceiling to haul myself along,
still with no sign that anything but more
and wilder water lay ahead, a chance
a man must take. Half drowned, I reached a sweep
and lay there spewing out my lungs and caught between
terror of the dark and the solid feel
of rock beneath me. I could hope the bladder
still was staunch but dared not open it until
I knew my hands were dry. When at last I twirled
the firestick and coaxed the wick to flame,
I say the place was far too open
to waste good work on.

              I edged my way along a slit so barred
by stone icicles that I would have given up
when almost now in reach, I saw the wall
that I have known since childhood
yet never seen before. I saw it now
even to the scratches other men,
knowing the place for what it was, had made
ages before me. Some of their animals were not
like ours–––one hairy beast with two horns on his snout
was half glazed over by a layer of stone-ice.
Many of them were drawn overlapping others—
as mine would sprawl on theirs. None of them
was anything the size that I intended.

The stone was even-grained would take flint clean,
and yet not soft enough to flake with time.
Pressing my back against the other wall
to have full arm-room, I sketched him in—
a bear as big as living. I worked fast,
paused only when the need was to renew
the wick and tallow. First I got the spine—
that line where limberness and strength
of any living beast is—cut firmly,
the head scaled in and forelegs placed
before the tallow failed.
                                 Spilling down the torrent,
then guided most by slithering in my own tracks,
I found my way out—into moonlight. The sun,
it seemed, had set twice since I left.
Ate and slept but, lest
the bear be dimmed in  me, did not go in
to either of my women.
I told no one where I had been or why.

Next day I packed another bladder, taking
a good supply of moss and tallow, honey and nuts,
and other, heavier, newly beveled flints.
As a last thought, I went to see old Kill-Bear.
“Look like?” he puffed. “A bear? Why, you’ve seen bears
since you were a baby.” (And drawn them, too,
he might have said, since I could scratch earth
with a stick.) “Come now, you’ve seen those I killed.
Look like? Well, they’ve got hair all over them.
Stub tails, big paws and heads, and lots of teeth.”
I left the old fool bawling after me,
“hey, you ain’t found one, have you? You’re supposed
to tell me if you have. Don’t you go trying
to get my job by killing it yourself!”

I found the cave was easier going this time,
but the torrent sucked and swirled up to the ceiling.
I moved half into it to test its tug.
It grabbed me, and pulled by under. The bladder buoying me,
I found a shallow dome that let my nose just clear
the water. Strange, where with death so sure, I thought
not for my women or their young but for the bear
that I would heave unfinished. Him I commended
to the spirits of the dark.

                                    Slowly the water
ebbed, below my chin and then my shoulders.
It rose again and then as sudden fell.
                   I was on a rock shelf.
I had slept. The bladder was still with me.
The roar was gone, the water gurgled like a brook.

The new flints bit well. To give him weight,
I undergouged the belly and hindquarters.
A natural bulge I fashioned into head.
I gave him teeth and claws. Then last of all
he took on eyes and nostrils. When he began to breathe,
I stopped and snuffed the wick, safe in his
protection, slept.
                       Waking and making light the last time,
I scratched a spear mark on his flank as we were taught—
so shallow though that he would never feel it—
made him an offering of honey, nuts, and tallow,
ate some myself. The lamp and flints I left there.

Heft, strength, the saddle and the soles,
the rambling appetite, fur, the rolling amble,
the curious investigating “ Whoof!,”
the clatter of unretracting claws, the bear-play—
sliding on their rumps down clay banks into puddles,
standing erect and balancing vines across their noses—
patience to wait with poised paw
                  on a rock among the rapids
to snatch the salmon as they leap,
the good
bear-smell of being bears
  are what I had tried to make the flint say
  on the cavern wall.

  Ferocity and gentleness...

Your bear is one great fool and so is man!
I have seen a naked child in pigtails,
squealing her delight,
chase a full-grown bear splashing across the meadow—
and a half-grown cub stand up and brave
a dozen hunters with javelins and torches.

      Bison are better eating
      and their hides tan easier
      but you can’t laugh at a bison.

Beside the profound, absolute
dark of caves, our night seems noon.
Even beneath a starless sky
the eye makes out bulk and shapes,
but in winding scapes of underground,
where no sun’s light has ever shone,
finger may touch the lash
of open eye unseen.

                           There
in that total lack of light
is where my bear is.
No one will ever see him
but he still
is there.

807. As You Like It - Theodore Weiss

2009-09-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

An old master yourself now, Auden,
like that much admired Cavafy and those
older still, in this you were wrong.
                         People
are not indifferent, let alone oblivious,
to the momentary, great scene.
                         No,
like Mrs. Gudgeon, the smart little little char
come with our London flat,
                   listening
to the wireless, a most impressive array
of "the best minds"
              engaged in difficult,
arduous talk, and she intent on it,
to her husband's
           "What're you listening for?
You don't understand a word they say,"
rejoining
        "O I enjoy it, just the sound
of it, so musical, And anyway I take
from it whatever I like,
                then make of it,
in my own mind, whatever I will,"
like Mrs. Gudgeon
               most of us, watching
the moment, some spectacular event,
whether it be Icarus,
               Cleopatra consorting
with the streets, or the astronauts
cavorting on the moon,
                 bear off those bits
that we can use. This is the greatness
of each creature,
           the mouse at the Feast
of the Gods, one crumb doing for it
what heaped-up platters cannot do for Them.

806. As Much As You Can (1&2) - C. P. Cavafy

2009-09-04T14:23:00.000-07:00

C. P. Cavafy - As Much As You Can (1)
Translated from the Greek by ?

And even if you cannot make your life the way you want it,
this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can: don't cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.

Don't cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome.

C. P. Cavafy - As Long As You Can (2)
Translated from the Greek by Theoharis C. Theoharis

And even if you cannot make your life what you want,
for as long as you can at least
try to do this: do not trivialize it
in all the busy contacts of the world,
in all the swarm and gossip.

Do not trivialize it, hauling it,
roaming with it, always exposing it
to the pairings and relations
of everyday stupidity,
until it ends up irritating, stubborn as a beggar.

805. Six Years Later - Joseph Brodsky

2009-09-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

Translated, from the Russian, by Richard Wilber

So long had life together been that now
The second of January fell again
On Tuesday, making her astonished brow
Lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
   So that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
   A cloudless distance waiting up the road.

So long had life together been that once
The snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
That, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I’d shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
   Not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
   Would beat against my palm like butterflies.

So alien had all novelty become
That sleep’s entanglements would put to shame
Whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
That when my lips blew out the candle flame,
   Her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
   To join my own, without another thought.

So long had life together been that all
That tattered brood of papered roses went,
And a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
And we had money, by some accident,
   And tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
   The sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.

So long had life together been without
Books, chairs, utensils—only that ancient bed—
That the triangle, before it came about,
Had been a perpendicular, the head
   Of some acquaintance hovering above
   Two points which had been coalesced by love.

So long had life together been that she
And I, with our joint shadows, had composed
A double door, a door which, even if we
Were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
   Somehow, it would appear, we drifted right
   On through it into the future, into the night.

804. Surplus - Wislawa Szymborska

2009-09-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

Surplus (1)
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

A new star has been discovered,
which doesn't mean that things have gotten brighter
or that something we've been missing has appeared.

The star is large and distant,
so distant that it's small,
even smaller than others
much smaller than it.
Small wonder, then, if we were struck with wonder;
as we would be if only we had the time.

The star's age, mass, location––
all this perhaps will do
for one doctoral dissertation and
a wine-and-cheese reception
in circles close to the sky:
the astronomer, his wife, friends, and relations,
casual, congenial, come as you are,
mostly chat on earthbound topics,
surrounded by cozy earth tones.

The star's superb,
but that's no reason
why we can't drink to the ladies
who are incalculably closer.

The star's inconsequential.
It has no impact on the weather, fashion, final score,
government shake-ups, moral crises, take-home pay.

No effect on propaganda or on heavy industry.
It's not reflected in a conference table's shine.
It's supernumerary in the light of life's numbered days.

What's the use of asking
under how many stars man is born
and under how many in a moment he will die.

A new one.
"At least show me where it is."
"Between that gray cloud's jagged edge
and the acacia twig over there on the left."
"I see," I say.

Surplus (2)
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak

A new star has been discovered,
which doesn't mean it's gotten any brighter
or something missing has been gained.

The star is large and distant,
so distant, that it's small,
even smaller than others
a lot smaller than itself.
Surprise would be nothing surprising
if we only had time for it.

Star's age, star's mass, star's position,
all of that may be enough
for one doctoral thesis
and a modest glass of wine
in the circles close to the sky:
an astronomer, his wife, relatives, and colleagues,
a casual ambience, no dress code,
local topics fuel a down-to-earth conversation
and people are munching on terra chips.

A wonderful star,
but that's still no reason
not to drink to the ladies,
incomparably closer.

Star without consequences.
Without influence on weather, fashion, score of the game,
changed in government, income, or the crisis of values.

With no effect on propaganda or heavy industry.
Without reflection in the finish of the conference table.
An excess number for life's numbered days.

Why need we ask
under how many stars someone is born
and under how many they die a little while later?

A new one.
"At least show me where it is."
"Between the edge of that jagged grayish cloud
and the twig of that locust tree on the left."
"Oh," I say.

803. Permanently - Kenneth Koch

2009-09-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing––for example, "Although it was
  a dark rainy day then the Adjective walked by, I shall
  remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until
  the day I perish from the green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Think you, the pink pot of flowers on
  the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow,
  due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat––
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

802. A Fervor Parches You Sometimes - Kenneth Rexroth

2009-08-31T13:23:00.000-07:00


A fervor parches you sometimes,
And you hunch over it, silent,
Cruel, and timid; and sometimes
You are frightened with wantonness,
And give me your desperation.
Mostly we lurk in our coverts,
Protecting our spleens, pretending
That our bandages are our wounds.
But sometimes the wheel of change stops;
Illusion vanishes in peace;
And suddenly pride lights your flesh –
Lucid as diamond, wise as pearl –
And your face, remote, absolute,
Perfect and final like a beast's.
It is wonderful to watch you,
A living woman in a room
Full of frantic, sterile people,
And think of your arching buttocks
Under your velvet evening dress,
And the beautiful fire spreading
From your sex, burning flesh and bone,
The unbelievably complex
Tissues of you brain all alive
Under your coiling, splendid hair.

I like to think of you naked.
I put your naked body
Between myself alone and death.
If I go into my brain
And set fire to you sweet nipples,
To the tendons beneath your knees,
I can see far before me.
It is empty there where I look,
But at least it is lighted.

I know how your shoulders glisten,
How your face sinks into trance,
And your eyes like a sleepwalker's,
And your lips of a woman
Cruel to herself.
I like to
Think of you clothed, your body
Shut to the world and self contained,
Its wonderful arrogance
That makes all women envy you.
I can remember every dress,
Each more proud then a naked nun.
When I go to sleep my eyes
Close in a mesh of memory.
Its cloud of intimate odor
Dreams instead of myself.

801. In Love With Raymond Chandler - Margaret Atwood

2009-08-28T19:09:00.000-07:00


An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because of the
mangled bodies and the marinated cops and hints of eccentric sex, but
because of his interest in furniture. He knew that furniture could
breathe, could feel, not as we do but in a way more muffled, like the
word upholstery, with its overtones of mustiness and dust, its bouquet
of sunlight on aging cloth or of scuffed leather on the backs and
seats of sleazy office chairs. I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness,
satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his cold blond unbodied
murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating
crocodiles; of his chaises lounges, with their malicious pillows. He
knew about front lawns too, and greenhouses, and the interiors of cars.
  This is how our love affair would go. we would meet at a hotel, or
a motel, whether expensive or cheap it wouldn't matter. We would
enter the room, lock the door, and begin to explore the furniture,
fingering the curtains, running our hands along the spurious gilt frames
of the pictures, over the real marble or the chipped enamel of the
luxurious or tacky washroom sink, inhaling the odor of the carpets, old
cigarette smoke and spilled gin and fast meaningless sex or else the rich
abstract scent of the oval transparent soaps imported from England,
it wouldn't matter to us; what would matter would be our response to
the furniture, and the furniture's response to us. Only after we had
sniffed, fingered, rubbed, rolled on, and absorbed the furniture of the
room would we fall into each others' arms, and onto the bed (king-
size? peach-colored? creaky? narrow? four-postered? pioneer-quilted?
lime-green-chenille-covered?), ready at last to do the same things to
each other.

800. Reckless Poem - Mary Oliver

2009-08-28T18:53:00.000-07:00


Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.

It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers

somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.

Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
       tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
       is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
       until I came to myself.

And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
       red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.

799. The Crux of Martyrdom (Simone Weil) - Morri Creech

2009-08-24T07:48:00.000-07:00

[from Morri Creech's Field Knowledge, 2006]
Simone Weil at the sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England, 1943

It's not that she has given up desire
exactly; more like, it seems, the will to choose —
to swallow bread, potatoes, the ripe pear
a nurse has brought her, which she must refuse
for Christ's sake. Or for her people starving in France.
At first she stayed up late, with prayer and cigarettes,
wrote long lies full of tenderness to her parents

    I have never read the story of the barren fig tree
     without trembling. I think it is about me

telling of friends in London, the spring's rich blossoms;
yet no word about her health, her body's slow
failure. Day after day the doctors come
complaining of her stubbornness. They know
her. And she, their hopes. Still, she must not choose
to eat, must refuse everything save the logic
of refusal, which she cannot help but choose.

    the most beautiful life possible has always seemed
     to me one in which everything is determined

So her reason revolves along its course
toward that sure consummation for which she waits.
She waits and waits. Too tired now to rehearse
the poem where Love bade His guest to sit and eat,
she dreams of that attic room He led her to,
where bread was sweet, the wine like sun and soil,
and she could see, beyond the attic window,

    He entered my room and spoke: I understood
     that He had been mistaken in coming for me

a city's wooden scaffoldings, those boats
unladen by a river, and the sun
raging above the trees . . .
                                    The doctor's coats
Whisper by outside her door. She's alone.
No voice comes down to her; no hallowed word.
Even the headaches have stopped, which once held
her writhing in their vise. And yet she's stirred.

    when my headaches were raging, I sometimes
     had an intense desire to strike someone

Though it's late, and she's much too tired to write,
she can't quite still the current of ideas
or master her relentless appetite
for thought — philosophy, the worst disease
of a religious mind, perhaps her one
error. For hours she wrestles those abstruse
geometries, turning her whole attention

    I will consider men's actions and appetites
     as though they were lines, surfaces, and volumes

to the crux of martyrdom. French soldiers
and citizens in thousands have since gone,
quietly or not, to their deaths; how can her
own starvation measure against the ones
who could not choose to choose? Even her days
of factory work — yes, she's felt the strain
of labor, sweating near the furnaces

    perhaps He must use even worthless objects
     for His purposes: I must tell myself these things

that scorched her hands and fingers long before
Christ, like a migraine, seized her steady mind;
yet always she could have left. And now the war
has jilted her, denying her the blind
hand of necessity. She's made her choice.
The nurse bends down to take her pulse, offering
a sip of tea; but still she must refuse.

    if I only had to stretch out my hand to grasp
     salvation, I would not put my hand out

And though she's grown too weak to hold a cup
or spoon, she closes her eyes and sees that room,
that attic room, where she was told to sup,
and the long table shimmers, awaiting Him
who will offer her bread, although she must refuse
until He seat her there among the least
and feed them, too, who have no power to choose —

    Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back

till the Lord whose bread is hunger sets the feast.

798. Shemà - Primo Levi

2009-08-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

Translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann

  You live secure
    In your warm houses,
    Who return at evening and find
    Hot food and friendly faces

        Consider whether this is a man,
       Who labours in the mud
       Who knows no peace
       Who fights for a crust of bread
       Who dies at a yes or a no.
       Consider whether this is a woman,
       Without hair or name
       With no more strength to remember
       Eyes empty and womb cold
       As a fog in winter

    Consider that this has been:
    I command these words to you.
    Engrave them on your hearts
    When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
    When you go to bed, when you rise,
    Repeat them to your children.
    Or may your house crumble,
    Disease render you powerless,
    Your offspring avert their faces from you.

797. Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing - Robert Duncan

2009-08-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?
hid away in the heat like wrath
      conceald in Love’s face,
or the seed, Eris in Eros,
      key and lock
of what I was?        I could not speak
      the releasing
word.        For into a dark
      matter he came
and askt me to say what
      I could not say.        "I .."

All the flame in me stopt
      against my tongue.
My heart was a stone, a dumb
      unmanageable thing in me,
a darkness that stood athwart
      his need
for the enlightening, the
      "I love you" that has
only this one quick in time,
      this one start
when its moment is true.

Such is the sickness of many a good thing
that now into my life from long ago this
refusing to say I love you has bound
the weeping, the yielding, the
      yearning to be taken again,
into a knot, a waiting, a string

so taut it taunts the song,
it resists the touch. It grows dark
to draw down the lover’s hand
from its lightness to what’s
      underground.

796. Mr. Eliot's Day - Robert Francis

2009-08-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

(Impressions upon perusing "The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot")

At 8:00 he rises, bathes, and dresses,
And very privately confesses.

At 9:00 he breaks fast with his host
On café noir and thin dry toast.

At 10:00, as one who bears the Grail,
A maid brings him his morning mail.

At 11:00, town. He offers thanks
At one old church and two old banks.

At 12:00, still in the mood of prayer,
He drops into a deep club chair.

At 1:00 he's lunching with a bishop
On spring lamb garnished with true hyssop.

At 2:00 the poet starts to nod,
Now toward, and now away from, God.

At 3:00 he wakes and makes repair
Of the strict parting of his hair.

At 4:00, back at his host's estate,
He picks a rose and ponders fate.

At 5:00, over a cocktail glass,
He is reminded of the Mass.

At 6:00 he and his favorite cat
Hold a brief, metaphysical chat.

At 7:00, with a distinguished sinner
And well-known saint, he faces dinner.

At 8:00 the three men still converse
On why the world is so much worse.

At 9:00, for lighter recreation,
They play charades on In-car-na-tion.

At 10:00, alone, robed in a jaunty
Dressing gown, he's deep in Dante.

11:00 strikes. Now hoots the owl.
He leaves the house for a deep, dark prowl.

At 12:00 he mounts, with measured tread,
The penitential stairs to bed

795. The Bubble - William Allingham

2009-08-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

See, the pretty Planet!
  Floating sphere!
Faintest breeze will fan it
  Far or near;

World as light as feather;
  Moonshine rays,
Rainbow tints together,
  As it plays;

Drooping, sinking, failing,
  Nigh to earth,
Mounting, whirling, sailing,
  Full of mirth;

Life there, welling, flowing,
  Waving round;
Pictures coming, going,
Without sound.

Quick now, be this airy
  Globe repelled!
Never can the fairy
  Star be held.

Touched––it in a twinkle
  Disappears!
Leaving but a sprinkle,
  As of tears.

794. Father's Voice - William Stafford

2009-08-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

"No need to get home early;
the car can see in the dark."
       He wanted me to be rich
       the only way we could,
       easy with what we had.

And always that was his gift,
given for me ever since,
      easy gift, a wind
      that keeps on blowing for flowers
      or birds wherever I look.

World, I am your slow guest,
one of the common things
     that move in the sun and have
     close, reliable friends
     in the earth, in the air, in the rock.

793. Mud Trail - Scott Cairns

2009-06-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

.
I'd been walking the mud trail, the mud
leaping out the sides of my boots for hours.
I was thinking I was alone, surrounded
only by the high reach of douglas fir
and cedar. I think it was a change
in the air I noticed first, a warmer,
heavier scent of animal, I was
alone in a small clearing,
then I was not alone and was
surrounded by a hundred elk rising,
or a single elk rising a hundred
times. And the forest was a moving river
of elk, none of them hurrying away, but all
slowly feeling ahead, and beginning
their journey to the east, a hundred times
the same journey.
Miles from there,
they would rest, bed down among
huckleberry and salal, all of them
pulling in their hundred sets of hooves, lowering
a hundred velvetted heads, waiting
for whatever sign of word that calls them
all together to rise again.

792. The Wounded Wilderness Of Morris Graves - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

2009-06-22T16:38:00.000-07:00

.
The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves
is not the same wild west
the white man found
It is a land that Buddha came upon
from a different direction
It is a wild white nest
in the true mad north
of introspection
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die
glimpsing in their dying fall
all life's memory
of existence
and with grave chalk wing
draw upon the leaded sky
a thousand threaded images
of flight

It is the night that is their 'native habitat'
these 'spirit birds' with bled white wings
these droves of plover
bearded eagles
blind birds singing
in glass fields
these moonmad swans and ecstatic ganders
trapped egrets
charcoal owls
trotting turtle symbols
these pink fish among mountains
shrikes seeking to nest
whitebone drones
mating in air
among hallucinary moons

And a masked bird fishing
in a golden stream and an ibis feeding
'on its own breast'
and a stray 'Connemara Pooka'
(life size)
And then those blown mute birds
bearing fish and paper messages
between two streams
which are the twin streams
of oblivion
wherein the imagination
turning upon itself
with white electric vision
refinds itself still mad
and unfed
among the Hebrides

791. The Tall Figures of Giacometti - May Swenson

2009-06-19T07:26:00.000-07:00

.
We move by means of our mud bumps.
We bubble as do the dead but more slowly.

The products of excruciating purges
we are squeezed out thin hard and dry.

If we exude a stench it is petrified sainthood.
Our feet are large crude fused together

solid like anvils. Ugly as truth is ugly
we are meant to stand upright a long time

and shudder without motion
under the scintillating pins of light

that dart between our bodies
of pimpled mud and your eyes.

790. The Great Wave - Donald Finkel

2009-06-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

The Great Wave at Kamagawa
Katsushika Hokusai (1823)

But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation, and suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A trained observer carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a dilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt. (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art)

It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky.

In the painter's sea
All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.
But the innocent bystander, he merely
'Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing': hidden
Behind a screen we hear his cry.
He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,
But he cannot see below Fuji
The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches
His claws against strangers. He is
Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.
He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat
Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.

789. Landscape With The Fall of Icarus - William Carlos Williams

2009-06-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

788. Ithaca - C. P. Cavafy, 5th translation

2009-06-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

Translated from the Greek by Theoharis C. Theoharis

As you set out toward Ithaca,
hope the way is long,
full of reversals, full of knowing.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon you should not fear,
never will you find such things on your way
if your thought says lofty, if refined
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonains and Cyclops,
savage Poseidon you will not meet,
if you do not carry them with you in your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Hope the way is long.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, with what joy,
you shall enter first-seen harbors;
may you stop at Phoenician bazaars
and acquire the fine things sold there,
nacre and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes, every kind there is,
as much as you can abundant sensual perfumes;
may you go to many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn again from those educated.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what has been ordained for you.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts many years;
and you dock an old man on the island,
rich with all that you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to give you wealth.
Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not fooled you.
Having become so wise, with so much experience,
you will have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.

787. Possible Answers to Prayer - Scott Cairns

2009-05-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

786. Eavan Boland - From the Painting ‘Back from Market’ by Chardin

2009-05-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

Dressed in the colours of a country day -
Grey-blue, blue-grey, the white of seagulls’ bodies -
Chardin’s peasant woman
Is to be found at all times in her short delay
Of dreams, her eyes mixed
Between love and market, empty flagons of wine
At her feet, bread under her arm. He has fixed
Her limbs in colour, and her heart in line.

In her right hand, the hindlegs of a hare
Peep from a cloth sack; through the door
Another woman moves
In painted daylight; nothing in this bare
Closet has been lost
Or changed. I think of what great art removes:
Hazard and death, the future and the past,
This woman’s secret history and her loves -

And even the dawn market, from whose bargaining
She has just come back, where men and women
Congregate and go
Among the produce, learning to live from morning
To next day, linked
By common impulse to survive, although
In surging light they are single and distinct,
Like birds in the accumulating snow.