792. The Wounded Wilderness Of Morris Graves - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

.
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

.
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

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

.
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

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

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

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.

785. Later - L. E. Sissman

Two last exhibits must be introduced
In evidence, if it please your honor. One,
Called "Two Comedians," painted at the end
Of Hopper's life, shows Pierrot, stage front,
Grim-lipped, in whiteface, presenting Pierrette
To an unseen audience; the figures are,
His wife said – following his death and soon
Before her own – intended to represent
The painter and his wife, Such comedy –
So high as to be cosmic – is perhaps
Played out in the second exhibit, "Sun
In an Empty Room," where the interiors
Of all his early years are fused in one
Apartment room movers have visited
With their pantechnicon of mise-en-scéne,
Taking away the givens of the past –
Bed, rugs, lamps, people, papers, chiffoniers –
And leaving a sizable memorial
To his life and to the state he lived it in:
A green tree blowing outside; streaming in
Through the two-light window, forming cream oblongs
On window wall and alcove wall and on
The bare wood floor, a shaft of morning sun
Peoples the vacuum with American light.

784. Brueghel In Naples - Diane Abse

.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: W. H Auden

Ovid would never have guessed how far
and father's notion about wax melting, bah!
It's ice up there. Freezing.
Soaring and swooping over solitary altitudes
I was breezing along (a record I should think)
when my wings began to moult not melt.
These days, workmanship, I ask you.
Appalling.

There's a mountain down there on fire
and I'm falling, falling away from it.
Phew, the sun's on the horizon
or am I upside down?

Great Bacchus, the sea is rearing
up. Will I drown? My white legs
the last to disappear? (I have no trousers on)
A little to the left the ploughman,
a little to the right a galleon,
a sailor climbing the rigging,
a fisherman casting his line,
and now I hear a shepherd's dog barking.
I'm that near.

Lest I have no trace
but a few scattered feathers on the water
show me your face, sailor,
look up fisherman,
look this way, shepherd,
turn around, ploughman.
Raise the alarm! Launch a boat!!

My luck. I'm seen
only by a jackass of an artist
interested in composition, in the green
tinge of the sea, in the aesthetics
of disaster––not in me.

I drown, bubble by bubble,
(Help, Save me!)
while he stands ruthlessly
before the canvas, busy busy,
intent on becoming an Old Master.

783. Annunciation - Kay Smith

for Kathy
(Artist Simone Martini, Sienese painter)

In all the old paintings
The virgin is reading––
No one know what,
When she is disturbed
By an angel with a higher mission,
Beyond books.

She looks up reluctantly,
Still marking the place with her finger.
The angel is impressive,
With red shoes and just
A hint of wing and shine everywhere.
Listening to the measured message
The Virgin bows her head,
Her eyes aslant
Between the angel and the book.

At the Uffizi
We stood
Before a particularly beautiful angel
And a hesitant Sienese Virgin,
We two sometimes woman.
Believing we could ignore
all messages,
Unobliged to wings or words,
We laughed in the vibrant space
Between the two,
somewhere in the angled focus
Of the Virgin's eye.

782. Rubins' Women - Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska - Rubens' Women (1)
Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Titanettes, female fauna,
naked as the rumbling of barrels.
They roost in trampled beds,
asleep, with mouths agape, ready to crow.
Their pupils have fled into flesh
and sound the glandular depths
from which yeast seeps into their blood.

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough
thickens in troughs, baths steam, wines blush,
cloudy piglets careen across the sky,
triumphant trumpets neigh the carnal alarm.

O pumpkin plump! 0 pumped-up corpulence
inflated double by disrobing
and tripled by your tumultuous poses!
O fatty dishes of love!

Their skinny sisters woke up earlier,
before dawn broke and shone upon the painting.
And no one saw how they went single file
along the canvas's unpainted side.

Exiled by style. Only their ribs stood out.
With birdlike feet and palms, they strove
to take wing on their jutting shoulder blades.

The thirteenth century would have given them golden haloes.
The twentieth, silver screens.
The seventeenth, alas, holds nothing for the unvoluptuous.

For even the sky bulges here
with pudgy angels and a chubby god -
thick-whiskered Phoebus, on a sweaty steed,
riding straight into the seething bedchamber.

Wislawa Szymborska - Rubens' Women (2)
Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Herculasses, a feminine fauna.
Naked as the crashing of barrels.
Cooped up atop trampled beds.
They sleep with mouths poised to crow.
Their pupils have retreated in the depths,
and penetrate to the heart of their glands,
trickling yeast into their blood.

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough bloats in a bowl,
baths are steaming, wines are blushing.
piglets of cloud are dashing across the sky,
trumpets neigh in physical alarm.

O pumpkinned, O excessive ones,
doubled by your unveiling,
trebled by your violent poses,
fat love dishes.

Their skinny sisters got up earlier,
before dawn broke within the painting,
and no one saw them walking single file
on the unpainted side of the canvas.

Exiles of style. Ribs all counted.
Birdlike feet and hands.
They try to ascend on gaunt shoulderblades.

The thirteenth century would have given them a golden backdrop.
The twentieth, a silver screen.
But the seventeenth has nothing for the flat-chested.

For even the sky curves in relief––
curvaceous angles, a curvaceous god––
a moustached Apollo astride a sweaty steed
enters the steaming bedchamber.

Wislawa Szymborska - The Women of Rubens (3)
Translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

Giantesses, female fauna,
naked as the rumbling of barrels.
They sprawl in trampled beds,
sleep with mouths agape for crowing.
Their eyes have fled into the depths
and penetrate to the very core of glands
from which yeast seeps into the blood.

Daughters of the Baroque. Dough rises in kneading–troughs,
baths are asteam, wines glow ruby,
piglets of cloud gallop across the sky
trumpets neigh an alert of the flesh.

O meloned, O excessive ones,
doubled by the flinging off of shifts,
trebled by the violence of posture,
you lavish dishes of love!

Their slender sisters had risen earlier,
before dawn broke in the picture.
No one noticed how, single file, they
had moved to the canvas's unpainted side.

Exiles of style. Their ribs all showing,
their feet and hands of birdlike nature.
Trying to take wing on bony shoulder blades.

The thirteenth century would have given them a golden background.
the twentieth––a silver screen.
The seventeenth had nothing for the flat of chest.

For even the sky is convex
convex the angels and convex the god––
mustachioed Phoebus who on a sweaty
mount rides into the seething alcove.

781. Waiting For Icarus - Muriel Rukeyser

.
He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the worst of all
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

780. The Sky - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

We should have started from this: the sky.
A window without a sill, frame, or pane.
An opening and nothing more,
but open wide.

I need not wait for a clear night
nor crane my neck
to examine the sky.
I have the sky at my back, at hand, and on my eyelids.
The sky wraps me snugly
and lifts me from below.

Even the highest mountains
are no nearer the sky than the deepest valleys.
There is no more sky in one place
than another.
A cloud is crushed by sky as ruthlessly as a grave.
A mole is as enraptured
as a wing-fluttering owl.
A object falling into a precipice
falls from the sky into sky.
Granular, liquid, craggy,
fiery and volatile
expanses of sky, crumbs of sky,
puffs and snatches of sky.
The sky is omnipresent
even in darkness under the skin.
I eat sky, I excrete sky.
I am a trap inside a trap,
an inhabited inhabitant,
an embraced embrace,
a question in answer to a question.

To divide earth and sky
is not the correct way
to consider this whole.
It merely allows survival
under a more precise address,
quicker to be found
if I were to be looked up.
My call words
are delight and despair.

779. January - Betty Adcock

.
Dusk and snow this hour
in argument have settled
nothing. Light persists,
and darkness. If a star
shines now, that shine is
swallowed and given back
doubled, grounded bright.
The timid angels flailed
by passing children lift
in a whitening wind
toward night. What plays
beyond the window plays
as water might, all parts
making cold digress.
Beneath iced bush and eave,
the small banked fires of birds
at rest lend absences
to seeming absence. Truth
is, nothing at all is missing.
Wind hisses and one shadow
sways where a window's lampglow
has added something. The rest
is dark and light together tolled
against the boundary-riven
houses. Against our lives,
the stunning wholeness of the world.

778. Sisyphus And The Sudden Lightness - Stephen Dunn

It was as if he had wings, and the wind
behind him. Even uphill the rock
seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried;
he'd come to depend on his burden,
wasn't sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange.
He stopped to pet a dog.
Yet he kept going forward, afraid
of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized
the gods must be gone, that his wings
were nothing more than a perception
of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him.

777. Letter to Dr. B--, Diane Ackerman

I have found you among the texts
(but not the textures) of your life,
in the library of your cunning,
where the abstracts of forty papers
open, one by one, like small windows
partly sealed by terminology's lacquer.
They reveal you both aloof and enthralled,
a restless mind of intersecting planes.
How can I resist the paper "Artist and Analyst"?
Yet I do, thinking it best to stay
within the frame we've chosen,
using the palette we invent,
creating a mosaic in motion.
Whenever I set a shard in place,
the mosaic evolves, blurs a moment,
then a new scene refines, throwing past into relief,
drawing present into mind.
So I will sacrifice my yen to know
the what and whim of you. Though my curiosity
is swelling like a Magellanic Cloud
filled with a luminous starfield of questions,
I'll sacrifice them on the altar of our ineffable
cause. A padded altar. A cause quilted with passion,
and insight whose razors cut clean as thrill.
A sacrifice intoxicating as any pill.

776. Thanks - Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska - Thank-You Note
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

I owe so much
to those I don't love.

The relief as I agree
that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I'm not
the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,
the freedom––
love can neither give
nor take that.

I don't wait for them,
as in window-to-door-and-back.
Almost as patient
as a sundial,
I understand
what love can't, and forgive
as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter
is just a few days or weeks,
not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,
concerts are heard,
cathedrals visited,
scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers
come between us,
the hills and rivers
can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit
if I live in three dimensions,
in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space
with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don't realize
how much they hold in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them a thing,"
would be love's answer
to this open question.

775. John & Mary - John Dunn

John & Mary had never met. They were like
two hummingbirds who also had never met.
—From A Freshman's Short Story

They were like gazelles who occupied different
grassy plains, running opposite directions
from different lions. They were like postal clerks
in different zip codes, with different vacation time,
their bosses adamant and clock-driven.
How could they get together?
They were like two people who couldn't get together.
John was a Sufi with a love of the dervish,
Mary of course a Christian with a curfew.
They were like two dolphins in the immensity
of the Atlantic, one playful,
the other stuck in a tuna net—
tow absolutely different childhoods!
There was simply no hope for them.
They would never speak in person.
When they ran across that windswept field
toward each other, they were like two freight trains,
one having left Seattle at 6:36 P.M.
at an unknown speed, the other delayed
in Topeka for repairs.
The math indicated that they'd embrace
in another world, if at all, like parallel lines.
Or merely appear kindred and close, like stars.

774. Night Morning - Grace Paley

.
To translate a poem
from thinking
into English
takes all night
night nights and days

English down
the best it can while
the mother's tongue Russian
omits the verb to be
again and again and
is always interfering
with the excited in-
dustrious brain wisely
the heart's beat asserts
control

also the newest English
argues with its old
singing ancestry
it thinks it know best

finally the night's
hard labor peers through
the morning window observes
snow birds the sun caught
in white and black winter
birches disentangles itself
addresses the ice-cold meadow
for hours on the beauty of
the color green

773. In Memory of M. B. - Anna Akhmatova

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.

772. Thomas Hardy - Lee Upton

.
There's not a chance.
Too late, he says. But it's never too late
for the poetry of regret.

Pines thicken with this rain.
Always, under complaint
storm clouds ride above

an ancient forest.
A child close to the earth
listens to the slow revolving of

accidents. Already the child knows
he is a ghost
and must practice becoming himself—

the cliff rising above him will not stop.
He's not one ghost but many,
and there's not enough pity in the world for them.

771. The Wolf's Postcript to 'Little Red Riding Hood' - Agha Shahid Ali

.
First, grant me my sense of history:
I did it for posterity,
for kindergarten teachers
and a clear moral:
Little girls shouldn't wander off
in search of strange flowers,
and they mustn't speak to strangers.
And then grant me my generous sense of plot:
Couldn't I have gobbled her up
right there in the jungle?
Why did I ask her where her grandma lived?
As if I, a forest-dweller,
didn't know of the cottage
under the three oak trees
and the old woman lived there
all alone?
As if I couldn't have swallowed her years before?
And you may call me the Big Bad Wolf,
now my only reputation.
But I was no child-molester
though you'll agree she was pretty.
And the huntsman:
Was I sleeping while he snipped
my thick black fur
and filled me with garbage and stones?
I ran with that weight and fell down,
simply so children could laugh
at the noise of the stones
cutting through my belly,
at the garbage spilling out
with a perfect sense of timing,
just when the tale
should have come to an end.

770. The Children - Joan Aleshire

(From Giovanni di Paolo's "Raising of Lazarus")

Before perspective or shadows or names ––
he is simply John son of Paul. Before mistakes
could be revised, each stroke was indelible
on the hardening wall. Before doubt,
or the consciousness of self before
the expression of doubt, the painter gave
to his flat, clear shapes a solid
definition –– Lazarus green from the grave,
with the odd, sheep-like eyes those Italians
thought eastern; the crowd at the tomb
one shape, a hilly landscape or a cloud
no gap between any figure and its neighbor,
lapping against the next.

Some heads have the gold scallop,
that coin the holy get; these are the ones
who stare awed and almost smiling
at the gaping tomb. But others, no haloes,
cover their noses; one even gags
at Lazarus' stench. Vomit sprays down
delicately on dotted lines from a red-rimmed
oval punctuated by chicklet teeth.
All of these doubters frown.

Christ stands at the center of course,
larger, welcoming Lazarus back
to the world –– the dark desert
with its mountains that loom darker,
more forbidding still. It will take faith,
or courage, to step from the ease of the tomb
toward those onlookers, into this landscape
where little lives. Christ
will be the magnet, but what drew me
most wasn't that expected beard and blessing
hand. The painter has added something on his own
to the scene –– two children, heads too large
for their bodies. He means them, the plaque says,
to be us, the watching world.

Back to back, almost joined, one looks
at the disciples, the faithful and Christ,
the other at Lazarus half-decayed.
One side all spirit and overcoming;
the other by what the body comes to
overcome. The heads, the heads
are what stopped me at this picture.
They look up so open-mouthed, in the way
of all children. You know, when they stumble
from sleep onto a scene they can make no sense of,
that paints itself as a fresco is painted:
instant, indelible in the soft blank wall.

769 - Three Figures Walking Through Grass

.
After impressionism we wade
through dabs from Monet's palette
orange and green
poppy and poplar
light hiking through meadows,
serial orgies of color
squirreled into his leafing shapes,
the mountains' hidden treasure
mined for the stillness
of a canvas we move upon
like grasses undulating in water
to refresh the tired eye
of the old man separating us
into creams and pinks, sleight
of the sun's brilliance,
blending us in all combinations
of three impossible things––
a symmetry unbounded
by his precise simulations
but framed by the hands
of a clock, as we trace
our shadows through this afternoon
and lengthen into night's erasure.

768. Archaic Torso of Apollo - Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated from the German by ?

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

767. The silent Movies - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

If there are angels
they probably don't read
our novels
about disappointed hopes.

I'm afraid -- unfortunately --
that they don't read our poems, either,
which are full of grudges toward the world.
The shrieks and twitches
of our plays
must -- I suspect --
bore them.

In their breaks from angel-work,
or rather non-human work
they prefer to watch
our comedians
from the age of the silent movies.

More than the lamenters
who tear their clothes
and gnash their teeth
they appreciate, I think,
the poor wretch
who grabs the drowning man by his toupé
or who eats his own shoelace out of starvation.

From the waist up: breasts and aspirations
and below a frightened mouse
in his pant leg.
Oh, yes
this must heartily amuse them.

Ring-around-the-rosies
transforms into running from the pursued.
The light in the tunnel
turns out to be the eye of a tiger.
A hundred catastrophies
are a hundred amusing sommersaults
above a hundred abysses.
If there are angels,
they should be convinced, I hope,
by merriment
swinging above terror,
not even calling "help, help"
because all this happens in silence.

I dare suppose
that they are clapping their wings
and that tears are flooding their eyes,
especially tears of laughter.

766. Solving The Puzzle - Steven Dunn

.
I couldn't make all the pieces fit,
so I threw one away.

No expectation of success now,
none of that worry.

The remaining pieces seemed
to seek their companions.
A design appeared.

I could see the connection
between the overgrown path
and the dark castle on the hill.

Something in the middle, though,
was missing.

It would have been important once.
I wouldn't have been able to sleep
without it.

765. For Thomas Hardy - Dennis Haskell

.
Start with simple things:
Grass, the earth, the roots of grass.

Perhaps meaning is found
Only in the minute perception
Of old and familiar objects.

What more do you have?
If you wish to discover
The Gods you must look
To things, not into
Your own mind.

And be specific: kikuyu, the dark soil.
Our discordinate minds
Shake at the roots:
If you wish to construct a religion
Choose nothing more solid than water.

Because this can be counted on
To move, and to capture
Every angle contained in colour.

Because everything breaks down
Into perception , the onrush of light
Running toward and across our eyes.

Because this is opposed to
The assumption that perfection exists
Whatever perfection might mean to us: hands
Untouched by wrinkles, grass
That spreads untiring shoots like green fingers
Whose knuckles never coarsen,
A life of no conceivable pain.

But the mind holds colour
Spreading from somewhere outside the mind;
Light breaks onto our eyes
And leaves us simple things: earth and water,
Suffering, joy, the roots
Of a coarse religion.

764. To the master Dōen Zenji - Robert Gray

.
Dōgen came in and sat on the wood platform,
all the people had gathered
like birds upon the lake.

After years, he'd come back from China,
and had brought no scriptures—he showed them
empty hands.

This was in Kyoto
at someone-else's temple. He said, All that's important
is the ordinary things.

Making the fire
to boil some bathwater, pounding rice, pulling the weeds
and knocking dirt from their roots,

or pouring tea—those blown scarves,
a moment, more beautiful than the drapery
in paintings by a Master.

—'It is this world of the dharmas
(the atoms)
which is the Diamond.'

*

Dōgen received, they say, his first insight
from an old cook at some monastery
in China,

who was hanging about on the jetty
where they docked—who had come down
to buy mushrooms,

among the rolled-up straw sails,
the fish-nets and brocade litters,
the geese in baskets.

High sea-going junk,
shuffling and dipping
like an official.

Dōgen could see
and empty shoreline, the pinewood plank of the beach,
the mountains

far-off
and dusty. Standing about
with his new smooth skull.

The horses' lumpy hooves clumped on the planks
of that jetty—they arched their necks
and dipped their heads like swans

manes blown about
like the white threads from off
the falling breakers:;

holding up their hooves as though they were tender,
the sea grabbing at
the timber below.

And the two Buddhists in all the shuffle got to bow,
The old man told him, Up there,
that place—

the monastery a cliff-face
in one of the shadowy hills—
My study is cooking;

no not devotion, not
any of your sacred books (meaning Buddhism). And Dōgen,
irate—

he must have thought
who is his old prick, so ignorant
of the Law,

and it must have shown.
Son, I regret
that you haven't caught on

to where it is one discovers
the Original Nature
of the mind and things

*

Dōgen said, Ideas
from reading, from people, from a personal bias,
toss them all out—

'discolourations.
You shall only discover by looking in
this momentary mind,'

And said, 'The Soto school
isn't one
of the many entities in buddhism,

you should not even use that name',
It is just sitting in mediation;
an awareness, with no

clinging to,
no working on, the mind.
It is a floating. Ever-moving. 'Marvellous emptiness.'

'Such zazen began a long time
before Buddha,
and will continue for ever.'

And upon this leaf one shall cross over
the stormy sea,
among the dragon-like waves.

763. Rapture - Galway Kinnell

.
I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven a.m.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,
bending to a low drawer, picking over
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east—what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,
rummaging in the same low drawer.
The clock shows eight. Hmmm.
With huge, silent effort of great,
mounded muscles the earth has been turning.
She takes a piece of silken cloth
from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls
of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,
as if she will be, all day among strangers,
looking down inside herself at our rapture.

762. Icarus - Valentin Iremonger

.
As, even to-day, the airman, feeling the plane sweat
Suddenly, seeing the horizon tilt up gravely, the wings shiver,
Knows that, for once, Daedalus has slipped up badly,
Drunk on the job, perhaps, more likely dreaming, high-flier Icarus,
Head butting down skidding along the light-shafts
Back,over the tones of the sea-waves and the slip-stream, heard
The gravel-voiced, stuttering trumpets of his heart
Sennet among the crumbling court-yards of his brain the mistake
Of trusting somebody else on an important affair like this;
And while the flat sea, approaching, buckled into oh! avenues
Of acclamation, he saw the wrong story fan out into history.
Truth, undefined, lost in his own neglect On the hills,
The summer-shackled hills, the sun spanged all day;
Love and the world were young and there was no ending:

But star-chaser, bit-time-going, chancer Icarus
Like a dog on the sea lay and the girls forgot him
And Daedalus, too busy hammering another job,
Remembered him only in pubs. No bugler at all
Sobbed taps for the young fool then, reported missing,
Presumed drowned, wing-bones and feathers on the tide
Drifting in casually, one by one.

761. Nothing's A Gift - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Walter Whipple

Nothing's a gift, everything is borrowed.
I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.
I will be forced
to pay for myself with myself,
to give my life for my life.

It has been appointed
that the heart must be returned,
and the liver, too,
and each individual finger.

It's too late to cancel the contract.
Debts will be extracted from me
along with my skin.

I wander this earth
amid a throng of fellow debtors.
Some are burdened by the obligation
of paying off their wings.
Others, like it or not,
are charged for their leaves.

The Debt side encumbers
each tissue in us.
There is no eyelash, no petiole
to keep forever.

The register is meticulous
and it's evident that
we are to be left with nothing.

I can't remember
where, when and why
I consented to open
this account.

The protest against this account
is what we call the soul.
And it is the only thing
not on the list.




-

760. In Trackless Woods - Richard Wilbur

.
In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find
Four great rock maples seemingly aligned,
As if they had been set out in a row
Before some house a century ago,
To edge the property and lend some shade.
I looked to see if ancient wheels had made
Old ruts to which the trees ran parallel,
But there were none, so far as I could tell-
There'd been no roadway. Nor could I find the square
Depression of a cellar anywhere,
And so I tramped on further, to survey
Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray
Or spirals in a pine cone, under trees
Not subject to our stiff geometries.

759. Stern Visage - Nina Nyhart

(after a painting my Paul Klee)

A man decides he doesn't want to die, he wants
to take a trip. It might be a long trip, he thinks,
so I'd better go alone. Or it might be short,
so I'll take my wife. They board the sailboat,
but at the first port of call his wife jumps ship.

It might be a long trip, he thinks, I'll get
another wife. He meets a woman, falls in love,
they marry, but soon she says she only wanted him
for fun, not this sailing stuff, and they part
at the next stop. The man thinks, The hell

with women. It might be a short trip or it might
be long. I'll take this little green moon
with me. It's portable, sheds light, and smiles
mysteriously. The moon seems contented and
the man keeps on sailing, So far, he reflects,

it's been a bit of a lark. But pretty soon
he begins to feel tired, older, a lot older.
The man thinks maybe the moon will keep him young.
Hey there, Little Moon, he says. The moon says
nothing. The man begins to feel desperate and

throws the moon overboard. But the moon bounces
back and shines its pale green light on him
The sea is growing rough and the moon remains
silent. It's the middle of the night, cold, bell
buoys clanging. Serious business, the man thinks.

The trip might be too long, it might be better
to cut it short. Who's responsible, anyway?
He grabs the moon, shakes it. There, Old Moon-face,
now what do you say? The moon says nothing.
But the man notices the moon is smaller than before.

About half its original size. The trip might be
long, the man thinks, or it might be short . . .
Lean up against me, Dear one, Shiny one, he says.

758. The Tapestry - Howard Nemerov

.
On this side of the tapestry
There sits the bearded king,
And round about him stand
His lords and ladies in a ring.
His hunting dogs are there,
And armed men at command.

On that side of the tapestry
The formal court is gone,
The kingdom is unknown;
Nothing but thread to see,
Knotted and rooted thread
Spelling a world unsaid.

Men do not find their ways
Through a seamless maze,
And all direction lose
In a labyrinth of clues,
A forest of loose ends
Where sewing never mends.

757. Beethoven's Quartet in C Major, Opus 59 - Linda Pastan

.
The violins
are passionately
occupied but it is the cellist

who seems to be
holding the music
in his arms, moving his bow

as if it were
a dowsing rod
and the audience
dying of thirst.

756. Drinking Wine - Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska - Drinking Wine (1)
Translated from the Polish by Graźyna Drabik and Sharon Olds

He looked, and gave me beauty,
and I took it as if mine.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I allowed myself to be
invented in the likeness
of the reflection in his eyes.
I am dancing, dancing
in the flutter of sudden wings.

A table is a table.
Wine is wine in a glass
that is just a glass and stands
standing on a table. While
I am imaginary
to the point of no belief,
imaginary
to the point of blood.

I am telling him
what he want to hear: ants
dying of love under
the constellation of the dandelion.
I swear that a white rose,
sprinkled with wine, sings.

I am laughing, tilting
my head carefully
as if checking an invention
I am dancing, dancing
in astonished skin, in
an embrace that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea-foam,
Minerva from Jove's head––
all were more real than I.

When he stops looking at me
I search for my reflection
on a wall. I see only
a nail from which a picture
has been removed

Wislawa Szymborska - Drinking Wine (2)
Translated from the Polish by ?

He looked at me, bestowing beauty,
and I took it for my own.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I let him invent me
in the image of the reflection
in his eyes. I dance, I dance
in an abundance of sudden wings.

A table is a table, wine is wine
in a wineglass, which is a wineglass
and it stands standing on a table
but I am a phantasm,
a phantasm beyond belief,
a phantasm to the core.

I tell him what he wants to hear––about ants
dying of love
under a dandelion's constellation.
I swear that sprinkled with wine
a white rose will sing.

I laugh, and tilt my head
carefully, as if I were testing
an invention. I dance, I dance
in astounded skin, in the embrace
that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea foam,
Minerva from the head of Jove
were much more real.

When he's not looking at me,
I search for my reflection
on the wall. All I see
is a nail on which a painting hun

755. This Way Out - Rui Pires Cabral

.
But is there a way out? Imagine
in insomnia the forests that grow
at such hours in other regions, the trains
that cross them to reach a destination
in the future of others.

Is there a way our? Imagine
night filled with violent cities,
the rumbling of engines in the subways
and rain falling on the black plastic
of strawberry fields, all the suffering
and uncertainty of the world.

And in the morning, look, it's a beautiful
day Your friends are getting up in the other room,
they're heading down to the kitchen to make coffee.

But is there a way out?

754. The Calm - David Wagoner

.
Drifting and mimicking the loss of the wind
With a loss of mind,
Left slack-sailed here in the sea, doing nothing at all
For days, we begin
Taking our lives uneasily. Only the daylight
And the cracked chronometer
Are moving. Though we turn away from the sun
Or rise under the moon
As if we were earth and tide, the rest is stillness.
If we broke our silence,
This palpable air would ripple obediently,
But our voices falter.
They melt on the sea, as brief as glints of starlight.
On the deep dry land
Why did we never think of the miles and miles
Under us, holding us?
Above half-leagues of water, we think of little
Else than how deeply
The two of us might sink, turning to food
For the thoughts of others.
We could have stayed on firmanent, on a desert
Where water waves goodbye,
Goodbye, and vanishes, a plain where it flows
On its own sight journeys,
Or on mountains where we could watch it frozen, toppling
(Instead of us) down cliffsides.
But here we huddle, surrounded. From miles below,
Now, come the monsters
Toward the glassy calm around us, uncoiling,
Lifting kelp-ragged
Slime-scaled snag-toothed cold impossible heads.
Eyes filled to the brim
With blankness, breaching and hulking, slewing toward us
Where we drift like lures.
Though they come closer, closer, blurred in the dark,
They never strike, never
Loom, ravenous, never thrash the surface
To break this mirror.

753. Alphabet Song - Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan - Alphabet Song

Like a train made up of 26 boxcars,
the alphabet drags such a heavy cargo
down the tracks, such strange,
compelling combinations

that we are left breathless, admiring
a world constructed of words
and sentences as much
as the sunsets and snowfalls

which perform their mysteries
before our distracted eyes.
Now we learn how alphabets of genes
produce jellyfish and roses

and the intricate brain
that invented language—then wrote
a poem which like a brief breeze
wafts over us and is gone.

752. Last Gods - Galway Kinnell

She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. she opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles , a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime—the intimacy
of the geographical. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth
She swallows it. He puts in another.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and talks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underearth
and murmurs her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human breast. Now in the lake
two faces, floating, see up
a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.

751. Vermeer - Howard Nemerov

.
Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat's cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold . . .
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

750. Vermeer - Tomas Tranströmer

.
No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall the
noise beginTomas Tranströmer - Vermeer
Translated from the Swedish by ?

No sheltered world . . . on the other side of the wall the
noise begins
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din
of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
of death that everyone must tremble for.

The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps into
the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions of
war

Away from there and straight through the wall into the
bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of Terra
Incognita.

Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.
The ears ring with either depth or height.
s
the tavern begins
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din
of bells
and the mentally disordered brother-in-law, the bearer
of death that everyone must tremble for.

The great explosion and the delayed tramp of rescuers
the boats that strut at anchor, the money that creeps into
the pocket of the wrong person
demands piled on demands
Cusps of gaping red flowers that sweat premonitions of
war

Away from there and straight through the wall into the
bright studio
into the second that goes on living for hundreds of years.
Paintings titled The Music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter --
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of Terra
Incognita.

Breathe calmly . . . An unknown blue material is nailed
to the chair.
The gold upholstery tacks flew in with unheard-of speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been anything but stillness.
The ears ring with either depth or height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall
that leaves every fact suspended
and holds the brush steady.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you sick
but it's necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself --
Whether you know it or not it's the same for everyone,
everyone except little children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has set itself on a slant against the wall.
It's like a prayer to emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
"I am not empty, I am open."

Tomas Tranströmer - Vermeer
Translated from the Swedish by ?

No protected world . . . Just behind the wall the noise begins,
the inn
with laughter and bickering, rows of teeth, tears, the din of bells
and the insane brother-in-law, the death-bringer we all must tremble for.

The big explosion and tramp of rescue arriving late.
the boats preening themselves on the straits, the money creeping down
in the wrong man's pocket
demands stacked on demands
gaping red flowerheads sweating premonitions of war.

And through the wall into the clear studio
into the second that's allowed to live for centuries.
Pictures that call themselves The music Lesson
or Woman in Blue Reading a Letter––
she's in her eighth month, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind is a wrinkled map of Terra Incognita.

Breathe calming . . . An unknown blue material is nailed to the chairs.
The gold studs flew in with incredible speed
and stopped abruptly
as if they had never been other than stillness.

Ears sing, from depth of height.
It's the pressure from the other side of the wall.
It makes each fact float
and steadies the brush.

It hurts to go through walls, it makes you ill
but is necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of yourself––
we know or we don't know but it's true for us all
except for small children. No walls for them.

The clear sky has leaned against the wall.
It's like a prayer to the emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers.
"I am not empty. I am open."

749. True Love - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

748. Angel - James Merrill

.
Above my desk, whirring and self-important
(Though not much larger than a hummingbird)
In finely woven robes, school of Van Eyck,
Hovers an evidently angelic visitor.
He points one index finger out the window
As winter snatching to its heart,
To crystal vacancy, the misty
Exhalations of houses and of people running home
From the cold sun pounding on the sea;
While with the other hand
He indicates the piano
Where the Sarabande No. 1 lies open
At a passage I shall never master
But which has already, and effortlessly, mastered me.
He drops his jaw as if to say, or sing,
"Between the world God made
And this music of Satie,
Each glimpsed through veils, but whole,
Radiant and willed,
Demanding praise, demanding surrender,
How can you sit there with your notebook?
What do you think you are doing?"
However he says nothing –– wisely: I could mention
Flaws in God's world, or Satie's; and for that matter
How did he come by his taste for Satie?
Half to tease him, I turn back to my page,
Its phrases thus far clotted, unconnected.
The tiny angel shakes his head.
There is no smile on his round, hairless face.
He does not want even these few lines written.

747. Our Turn - Rui Pires

Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

It's the cold that cripples us on a winter
Sunday, when hope is at its
rarest. There are certain fixations
of consciousness, things that wander
about the house searching for their place

and secretly they slip into a poem.
It's envelopes from the water
company, a knife smeared with butter
on the tablecloth, that trail we leave
behind us and decipher without effort
and to no advantage. It's the wait

and the delay. It's the streets so still
at newscast time and the clinking of
neighborhood cutlery. It's the nighttime
aimlessness of memory: it's the fear
of having lost, quite casually,

our turn

746. On A Painting By Rousseau - Weldon Kees

Father Juniers Dog-Cart, 1908
Rousseau, Henri (le Douanier)
Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris, France

The clouds seem neater than the trees.
The sky, like faded overalls,
Breaks the distances of sight;
And shadow that defines the curb
shelters the silhouette of dog
Who, waiting patiently beneath
The amazing carriage with tangerine wheels,
Is eyeless, though he seems to sense
The black Chihuahua that the pavement grows.

The street is bare. The hooves and mane
Of the posing horse and his speckled flanks
Flow back to the six in the cart he draws:
The idiot aunt and the girl in white
(A Ventriloquist's doll with a colorless wig),
And a sexless figure upon whose lap
A beast is squatting, macabre, blurred.

These four and the one in the yellow hat
Regard us with eyes like photographs
That have been shown us long ago.
––All but the man in the driver's seat,
His wax hands fastened on the reins,
Who, from the corners of his eyes,
Watches the horse he does not trust.

745. The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar's House - Howard Nemerov

In memory of the painters Paul Klee and Paul Terence Feeley

I
The painter's eye follows relation out.
His work is not to paint the visible,
He says, it is to render visible.

Being a man, and not a god, he stands
Already in a world of sense, from which
He borrows, to begin with, mental things
Chiefly, the abstract elements of language:
The point, the line, the plane, the colors and
The geometric shapes. Of these he spins
Relation out, he weaves its fabric up
So that it speaks darkly, as music does
Singing the secret history of the mind.
And when in this the visible world appears,
As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree,
All haunted here and there with the human face,
It happens as by accident, although
The accident is of design. It is because
Language first rises from the speechless world
That the painterly intelligence
Can say correctly that he makes his world,
Not imitates the one before his eyes.
Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores,
The terrifying forests where nightfall
Enfolds a lost and tired traveler.

And hence the careless crowd deludes itself
By likening his hieroglyphic signs
And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child.
That likeness is significant the other side
Of what they see, for his simplicities
Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones,
Final refinements of his thought made visible.
He is the painter of the human mind
Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness
That is in things, and not the things themselves.

For such a man, art is an act of faith:
Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,
And praise the practise; nor does he divide
Making from teaching, or from theory.
The three are one, and in his hours of art
There shines a happiness through darkest themes,
As though spirit and sense were not at odds.

II
The painter as an allegory of the mind
At genesis. He takes a burlap bag,
Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher.
He paints it black because, as he has said,
Everything looks different on black.

Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe,
And black because its volume is the void
Before the stars were. At the painter's hand
Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface,
And all his depths are on the face of it.

Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground
Of zero thickness stretched against the cold
Dark silence of the Absolutely Not
Material worlds arise, the colored earths
And oil of plants that imitate the light.

They imitate the light that is in thought
For mind relates to thinking as the eye
Relates to light. Only because the world
Already is a language can the painter speak
According to the grammar of the ground.

It is archaic speech, that has not yet
Divided out its cadences in words;
It is a language for the oldest spells
About how some thought rose into the mind
While others, stranger still, sleep in the world.

So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion
He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall.
And be the same rose still, the radiant in red.
He paints his language, and his language is
The theory of what the painter thinks.

III
The painter's eye attends to death and birth
Together, seeing a single energy
Momently manifest in every form,
As in the tree the growing of the tree
Exploding from the seed not more nor less
Than from the void condensing down and in,
Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree,
The great tree standing in the garden, say,
As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight,
Growing its green height from dark watered earth,
And as suspended weightless in the sky,
Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head.
He follows through the flowing of the forms
From the divisions of the trunk out to
The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf's fall.
His pencil meditates the many in the one
After the method in the confluence of rivers,
The running of ravines on mountainsides,
And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees
How things must be continuous with themselves
As with whole worlds that they themselves are not,
In order that they may be so transformed.
He stands where the eternity of thought
Opens upon perspective time and space;
He watches mind become incarnate; then
He paints the tree.

IV
These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee,
About how he in our hard time might stand to us
Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning
As patron of the practical intelligence of art,
And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings,
For all research that follows spirit where it goes.

That there should be much goodness in the world,
Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,
And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,
This is a subject for the steadiest meditations
Of the heart and mind, as for the tears
That clarify the eye toward charity.

So may it be to all of us, that at some times
In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,
And when impatience in the street and still despair at home
Divide the mind to rule it, there shall some comfort come
From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his

Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,
As the painter dreaming in the scholar's house,
His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,
The same dream that then flared before intelligence
When light first went forth looking for the eye.

744. Kissing Stieglitz Good-Bye - Gerald Stern

.
Every city in America is approached
through a work of art, usually a bridge
but sometimes a road that curves underneath
or drops down from the sky. Pittsburgh has a tunnel-
you don't know it-that takes you through the rivers
and under the burning hills. I went there to cry
in the woods or carry my heavy bicycle
through fire and flood. Some have little parks-
San Francisco has a park. Albuquerque
is beautiful from a distance; it is purple
at five in the evening. New York is Egyptian,
especially from the little rise on the hill
at 14-C; it has twelve entrances
like the body of Jesus, and Easton, where I lived,
has two small floating bridges in front of it
that brought me in and out. I said good-bye
to them both when I was 57. I'm reading
Joseph Wood Krutch again-the second time.
I love how he lived in the desert. I'm looking at the skull
of Georgia O'Keeffe. I'm kissing Stieglitz good-bye.
He was a city, Stieglitz was truly a city
in every sense of the word; he wore a library
across his chest; he had a church on his knees.
I'm kissing him good-bye; he was, for me,
the last true city; after him there were
only overpasses and shopping centers,
little enclaves here and there, a skyscraper
with nothing near it, maybe a meaningless turf
where whores couldn't even walk, where nobody sits,
where nobody either lies or runs; either that
or some pure desert: a lizard under a boojum,
a flower sucking the water out of a rock.
What is the life of sadness worth, the bookstores
lost, the drugstores buried, a man with a stick
turning the bricks up, numbering the shards,
dream twenty-one, dream twenty-two. I left
with a glass of tears, a little artistic vial.
I put it in my leather pockets next
to my flask of Scotch, my golden knife and my keys,
my joyful poems and my T-shirts. Stieglitz is there
beside his famous number; there is smoke
and fire above his head; some bowlegged painter
is whispering in his ear; some lady-in-waiting
is taking down his words. I'm kissing Stieglitz
good-bye, my arms are wrapped around him, his photos
are making me cry; we're walking down Fifth Avenue;
we're looking for a pencil; there is a girl
standing against the wall-I'm shaking now
when I think of her; there are two buildings, one
is in blackness, there is a dying poplar;
there is a light on the meadow; there is a man
on a sagging porch. I would have believed in everything.

743. Brueghel: The Triumph of Time - Howard Nemerov

Passing a Flemish village and a burning city
possible Babylon the Great, bringing the Spring
from Winter and any beginning to its end, there go
the actors in the ramshackle traveling show
that does whatever's done and then undoes it:
the horses of the sun and moon, stumbling on plate
and bullion, patiently pull the flat-bed wagon
where Cronos munches a child and the zodiac-encircled world
bears up a tree that blossoms half and withers half;
Death on a donkey follows, sloping his scythe,
and last a trumpeter angel on an elephant
is puffing the resurrection and the end of days.

Under the wheels, and under the animals' feet,
palette and book are broken with the crowns of kings
and the instruments of music, intimating to our eyes
by means of many examples the Triumph of Time,
which everything that is, with everything that isn't,
as Brueghel patiently puts it down, exemplifies.

742. Landscape - Wislawa Szymborska

.
In the old master's landscape,
the trees have roots beneath the oil paint,
the path undoubtedly reaches its goal,
the signature is replaced by a stately blade of grass,
it's a persuasive five in the afternoon.
May has been gently, yet firmly, detained,
so I've lingered, too. Why, of course, my dear,
I am the woman there, under the ash tree

Just see how far behind I've left you,
see the white bonnet and the yellow skirt I wear,
see how I grip my basket so as not to slip out of the painting,
how I strut within another's fate
and rest awhile from living mysteries.

741. On A Celtic Mask By Henry Moore - Horace Gregory

.
The burnished silver mask hangs in white air,
The eyes stick out, the lips raised in a smile:
Where eyes had been, the hawk-winged Hebrides,
Tall, weeping waves against their friendless shores,

Rain in small knives that cut the flesh away,
And Sun the sword that flashes from the sky:
Sea-lion-headed creatures stalk these islands,
And breed their young to stand before their graves.

A crying Magdalen sings from her grotto,
Precarious life-in-death between the waters ––
None see her breasts, flushed limbs and winding hair ––
The women hear her in the new moon's madness.

740. 50 Years - Linda Pastan

.
Though we know
how it will end:
in grief and silence,
we go about our ordinary days
as if the acts of boiling an egg
or smoothing down a bed
were so small
they must be overlooked
by death. And perhaps

the few years left, sun drenched
but without grand purpose,
will somehow endure,
the way a portrait of lovers endures
radiant and true on the wall
of some obscure Dutch museum,
long after the names
of the artist and models
have disappeared.

739. Lost Friends - Rui Pires Cabral

Translated fro the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

Friends carried off by life
are the most difficult to appease, the most
tyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land,
they sip the poison of silence and they grow
beyond all limits in the distance, a blind eye
to our loneliness. And to think that we were
brothers in arms, that we dug up buried treasure
from the same islands, from the most
barren of books. How things turn out.
Could all have been in vain? It seemed
that we were destined for the same
songs, for a more certain kind of love.
Well, well. And we cannot even understand
what happened.

738. Breughel's Winter - Rutger Kopland

Translated from the Dutch by James Brockway


Winter by Breughel, 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.

737. Brueghel's Snow - Anne Stevenson

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?

736. A Medieval Miniature - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by ?
Help! can anyone in the whole wide world send me this picture?

"Limbourg Brothers "Canonical Hours"

Up the verdantest of hills,
in this most equestrian of pageants,
wearing the silkiest of cloaks.

Toward a castle with seven towers,
each of them by far the tallest.

In the foreground, a duke,
most flatteringly unrotund;
by his side, his duchess
young and fair beyond compare.

Behind them, the ladies-in-waiting,
all pretty as pictures, verily,
then a page, the most ladsome of lads,
and perched upon his pagey shoulder
something exceedingly monkeylike,
endowed with the drollest of faces
and tails.

Following close behind, three knights,
all chivalry and rivalry,
so if the first is fearsome of countenance,
the next one strives to be more daunting still,
and if he prances on a bay steed
the third will prance upon a bayer,
and all twelve hooves dance glancingly
atop the most wayside of daisies.

Whereas whosoever is downcast and weary,
cross-eyed and out at elbows,
is most manifestly left out of the scene.

Even the least pressing of questions,
burgherish or peasantish,
cannot survive beneath this most azure of skies.

And not even the eaglest of eyes
could spy even the tiniest of gallows -
nothing casts the slightest shadow of a doubt.

Thus they proceed most pleasantly
through this feudalest of realisms.

This same, however, has seen to the scene's balance:
it has given them their Hell in the next frame.
Oh yes, all that went without
even the silentest of sayings.

735. True Love - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

734. Morning - Billy Collins

.
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on expresso—

maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins—
but mostly buzzing around the house on expresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows—
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

733. Nude Descending A Staircase - X. J. Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh--
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One-women waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.

732. A Portrait of the Reader with a Bowl of Cereal - Billy Collins

"A Poet . . . never speaks directly, as to someone
at the breakfast table." — Yeats


Every morning I sit across from you
at the same small table,
the sun all over the breakfast things—
curve of a blue-and-white pitcher,
a dish of berries—
me in a sweatshirt or robe,
you invisible.

Most days, we are suspended
over a deep pool of silence.
I stare straight through you
or look out the window at the garden,
the powerful sky,
a cloud passing behind a tree.

There is no need to pass the toast,
the pot of jam,
or pour you a cup of tea,
and I can hide behind the paper,
rotate in its drum of calamitous news.

But some days I may notice
a little door swinging open
in the morning air,
and maybe the tea leaves
or some dream will be stuck
to the china slope of the hour—

then I will lean forward,
elbows on the table,
with something to tell you,
and you will look up, as always,
your spoon dripping milk, ready to listen.

731. Horace - Book II. Ode 16

Translated from the Latin by Mark Strand

When storm clouds closing in darken the sea
and cover the moon and hide the stars that might
have guided him across rough waters, the sailor
prays for peace;

the battle-weary Thracians pray for peace,
the Parthians with their fancy daggers
pray for peace, but peace cannot be bought
with purple, gold or gems;

and peace cannot be won with rank or money,
neither one can ease the soul's distress,
the worries and the nagging fears that flit
about in paneled rooms.

A man can please himself with little, a salt dish
handed down for generations can gleam upon
the table, and his sleep will not be ruined by
the sordidness of greed.

So why do we waste our time chasing down
possessions? Why do we leave home and head south
to a foreign land, a foreign sun? Who really
can escape himself?

Trouble leaps aboard the rich man's brigantine,
outruns the fastest horse, the nimblest deer,
is swifter than Eurus, the bad-weather wind
responsible for storms.

We should be happy in the here and now
and unconcerned with what the future holds;
we should blunt the edge of sorrow with a smile.
There is no perfect joy.

Achilles met with death when was young,
Tithonus lived on to be the shadow of
his former self; and fate might give to me
what it withholds from you.

Your fields are filled with lowing herds of prime
Sicilian cattle, and from your stable you
can hear the whinnies of your racing mare;
the clothes you have are made

of wool twice-dyed in African purple, whereas
it is my lot to have a smallish house,
a gift for turning Greek verse into Latin,
and scorn for the envious

Translated from the Latin by Christopher Smart

TO GROSPHUS.
O Grosphus, he that is caught in the wide Aegean Sea; when a black tempest has obscured the moon, and not a star appears with steady light for the mariners, supplicates the gods for repose: for repose, Thrace furious in war; the quiver-graced Medes, for repose neither purchasable by jewels, nor by purple, nor by gold. For neither regal treasures nor the consul’s officer can remove the wretched tumults of the mind, nor the cares that hover about splendid ceilings. That man lives happily on a little, who can view with pleasure the old-fashioned family salt-cellar on his frugal board; neither anxiety nor sordid avarice robs him of gentle sleep. Why do we, brave for a short season, aim at many things? Why do we change our own for climates heated by another sun? Whoever, by becoming an exile from his country, escaped likewise from himself? Consuming care boards even brazen-beaked ships: nor does it quit the troops of horsemen, for it is more fleet than the stags, more fleet than the storm-driving east wind. A mind that is cheerful in its present state, will disdain to be solicitous any further, and can correct the bitters of life with a placid smile. Nothing is on all hands completely blessed. A premature death carried off the celebrated Achilles; a protracted old age wore down Tithonus; and time perhaps may extend to me, what it shall deny to you. Around you a hundred flocks bleat, and Sicilian heifers low; for your use the mare, fit for the harness, neighs; wool doubly dipped in the African purple-dye, clothes you: on me undeceitful fate has bestowed a small country estate, and the slight inspiration of the Grecian muse, and a contempt for the malignity of the vulgar.


American man of letters Franklin P. Adams (1881-1960) imitated Horace's ode in his collection of light verse In Other Words (1920).

Grosphus, a guy who's sailing in a tempest
On the Aegean when the moon is hidden --
He wants a rest, while stewing in his stateroom,
Weary and seasick.

Weary of war, what do the Thracians yearn for?
What seek the Medes, with quivers full of arrows?
What can't you buy with purple, gold or rubies?
Rest is the answer.

Not Morgan's cash, nor Rockefeller's money,
No blue-and-brass can drive away the willies
Caused by the care of elegant apartments,
Rugs and swell ceilings.

Wise the gazabe upon whose simple table
Old-fashioned truck like salt-and-pepper castors
Yet may be found. His bean is never bothered --
Sleeps like a hallboy.

Why do we fuss for one thing and another?
Why do we hike to Saranac or Newport?
How can a human leave himself behind him?
Answer: He cannot.

Worry can get a guy on the Olympic;
Worry can chase a colonel in the Army;
Swift as the wind, to use a new expression --
Care is some sprinter.

Merry and bright, the citizen who's cheerful
Won't worry much about to-morrow's breakfast.
"No one," he smiles, "who faces Time the pitcher
Wallops one thousand."

There was Achilles, cut off in his twenties,
And, au contraire, Tithonus was a hundred;
I may be lucky; you might be run over
Most any morning.

You've got a farm with fancy sheep and heifers;
You've got a mare all curry-combed and glossy;
Purple silk socks and purple fancy weskits --
You're a swell dresser.

And what has Fate, the undeceitful, slipped me?
Only a small apartment out in Harlem,
And, with a trick of turning snappy Sapphics,
Scorn for the roughneck.

730. Horace - Book I. Ode 11

Translated from the Latin by Heather McHugh

Don't ask, Clarice, we're not supposed to know
what end the gods intend for us.
Take my advice: don't gamble so
on horoscopes of Babylon. Far better just

to take what heaven might allot us, whether
it's winters galore, and more, until we're stiff,
or only the one wintertime to end all others,
grinding Tuscany Sea with its pumice of cliff.

Get wise. Get wine, and one good filter for it.
Cut that high hope down to size, and pour it
into something fit for men. Think less
of more tomorrows, more of this

one second, endlessly unique: it's
jealous, even as we speak, and it's
about to split again . . .


Translated from the Latin by Burton Raffel

Leucon, no one's allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don't ask, don't hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk. Take the present, the future's no one's affair.

729. Domestic Interior - Eavan Boland

The woman is as round
as the new ring
ambering her finger.
The mirror weds her.
She has long since been bedded.

There is
about it all
a quiet search for attention,
like the unexpected shine
of a despised utensil.

The oils,
the varnishes,
the cracked light,
the worm of permanence––
all of them supplied by Van Eyck––

by whose edict she will stay
burnished, fertile
on her wedding day,
interred in her joy.
Love, turn.

The convex of your eye
that is so loving, bright
and constant yet shows
only this woman in her varnishes,
who won't improve in the light.

But there's a way of life
that is its own witness:
put the kettle on, shut the blind.
Home is a sleeping child,
and open mind

and our effects,
shrugged and settled
in the sort of light
jugs and kettles
grow important by.