ENG 362 POEM ID QUIZ
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
Haikus
SYLVIA PLATH
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks. Their musk encroaches, circle after circle, A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in. Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees, You move among the many-breasted hives, My heart under your foot, sister of a stone. Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds. The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down. In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings To father dynasties. The air is rich. Here is a queenship no mother can contest —- A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings. In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye Round, green, disconsolate as a tear. Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg Under the coronal of sugar roses The queen bee marries the winter of your year.
SYLVIA PLATH
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new Whose names you meditate --- April snowdrop, Indian pipe, Little Stalk without wrinkle, Pool in which images Should be grand and classical Not this troublous Wringing of hands, this dark Ceiling without a star.
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
1 Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand- fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style, they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me; they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee. I have at one time or another been in love with my mother, 1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum), and 5 cousins. I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece (she sends me letters in large block print, and her picture is the only one that smiles at me). I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews, and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took off and caught a freight (they say). He's discussed each year when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in the clan, he is an empty space. My father's mother, who is 93 and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates (and death dates) in it, always mentions him. There is no place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown." 2 Each fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric messages, galvanizing my genes. Last yr/like a salmon quitting the cold ocean-leaping and bucking up his birth stream/I hitchhiked my way from LA with 16 caps in my pocket and a monkey on my back. And I almost kicked it with the kinfolks. I walked barefooted in my grandmother's backyard/I smelled the old land and the woods/I sipped cornwhiskey from fruit jars with the men/ I flirted with the women/I had a ball till the caps ran out and my habit came down. That night I looked at my grandmother and split/my guts were screaming for junk/but I was almost contented/I had almost caught up with me. (The next day in Memphis I cracked a croaker's crib for a fix.) This yr there is a gray stone wall damming my stream, and when the falling leaves stir my genes, I pace my cell or flop on my bunk and stare at 47 black faces across the space. I am all of them, they are all of me, I am me, they are thee, and I have no children to float in the space between.
ALLEN GINSBERG
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go **** yourself with your atom bomb. I don't feel good don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I'm sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I'm trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. I won't say the Lord's Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I'm addressing you. Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine? I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. I read it every week. Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again. Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers' Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don't really want to go to war. America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black ******s. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
Hard Rock / was / "known not to take no shit From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it: Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut Across his temple and plowed through a thick Canopy of kinky hair. The WORD / was / that Hard Rock wasn't a mean ****** Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head, Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back, Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose, Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status. And we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep, To see if the WORD was true. As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "He set The record for time in the Hole—67 straight days!" "Ol Hard Rock! man, that's one crazy ******." And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit. The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame. A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock From before shook him down and barked in his face. And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly, His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence. And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name, We told ourselves that he had just wised up, Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long, And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed. He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do, The fears of years, like a biting whip, Had cut deep bloody grooves Across our backs.
FRANK O'HARA
How funny you are today New York like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days (I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free all I want is a room up there and you in it and even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock they stay together for the rest of the day (what a day) I go by to check a slide and I say that painting's not so blue where's Lana Turner she's out eating and Garbo's backstage at the Met everyone's taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y why not the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense we're all winning we're alive the apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun they moved a day too soon even the stabbings are helping the population explosion though in the wrong country and all those liars have left the UN the Seagram Building's no longer rivalled in interest not that we need liquor (we just like it) and the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man can sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining oh god it's wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it's fine How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine. My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it's fine. Honest, I do. And I'd like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace And strut down the streets with paint on my face.
FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
ANNE SEXTON
It is a summer evening. The yellow moths sag against the locked screens and the faded curtains suck over the window sills and from another building a goat calls in his dreams. This is the TV parlor in the best ward at Bedlam. The night nurse is passing out the evening pills. She walks on two erasers, padding by us one by one. My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth. I will ignore the bed. I am linen on a shelf. Let the others moan in secret; let each lost butterfly go home. Old woolen head, take me like a yellow moth while the goat calls hush-a-bye.
FRANK O'HARA
It's my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches. There are cats playing in sawdust. On to Times Square, where the sign blows smoke over my head, and higher the waterfall pours lightly. A Negro stands in a doorway with a toothpick, languorously agitating. A blonde chorus girl clicks: he smiles and rubs his chin. Everything suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of a Thursday. Neon in daylight is a great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would write, as are light bulbs in daylight. I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini, è bell' attrice. And chocolate malted. A lady in foxes on such a day puts her poodle in a cab. There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
Lord she's gone done left me done packed / up and split and I with no way to make her come back and everywhere the world is bare bright bone white crystal sand glistens dope death dead dying and jiving drove her away made her take her laughter and her smiles and her softness and her midnight sighs— **** Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky **** the sea and trees and the sky and birds and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth **** marx and mao **** fidel and nkrumah and democracy and communism **** smack and pot and red ripe tomatoes **** joseph **** mary **** god jesus and all the disciples **** fanon nixon and malcolm **** the revolution **** freedom **** the whole mutha****ing thing all i want now is my woman back so my soul can sing
ANNE SEXTON
Many are the deceivers: The suburban matron, proper in the supermarket, list in hand so she won't suddenly fly, buying her Duz and Chuck Wagon dog food, meanwhile ascending from earth, letting her stomach fill up with helium, letting her arms go loose as kite tails, getting ready to meet her lover a mile down Apple Crest Road in the Congregational Church parking lot. Two seemingly respectable women come up to an old Jenny and show her an envelope full of money and promise to share the booty if she'll give them ten thou as an act of faith. Her life savings are under the mattress covered with rust stains and counting. They are as wrinkled as prunes but negotiable. The two women take the money and disappear. Where is the moral? Not all knives are for stabbing the exposed belly. Rock climbs on rock and it only makes a seashore. Old Jenny has lost her belief in mattresses and now she has no wastebasket in which to keep her youth. The standup comic on the 'Tonight' show who imitates the Vice President and cracks up Johnny Carson and delays sleep for millions of bedfellows watching between their feet, slits his wrist the next morning in the Algonquin's old-fashioned bathroom, the razor in his hand like a toothbrush, wall as anonymous as a urinal, the shower curtain his slack rubberman audience, and then the slash as simple as opening as a letter and the warm blood breaking out like a rose upon the bathtub with its claw and ball feet. And I. I too. Quite collected at cocktail parties, meanwhile in my head I'm undergoing open-heart surgery. The heart, poor fellow, pounding on his little tin drum with a faint death beat, The heart, that eyeless beetle, running panicked through his maze, never stopping one foot after the other one hour after the other until he gags on an apple and it's all over. And I. I too again. I built a summer house on Cape Ann. A simple A-frame and this too was a deception - nothing haunts a new house. When I moved in with a bathing suit and tea bags the ocean rumbled like a train backing up and at each window secrets came in like gas. My mother, that departed soul, sat in my Eames chair and reproached me for losing her keys to the old cottage. Even in the electric kitchen there was the smell of a journey. The ocean was seeping through its frontiers and laying me out on its wet rails. The bed was stale with my childhood and I could not move to another city where the worthy make a new life. Long ago there was a strange deception: a wolf dressed in frills, a kind of transvestite. But I get ahead of my story. In the beginning there was just little Red Riding Hood, so called because her grandmother made her a red cape and she was never without it. It was her Linus blanket, besides it was red, as red as the Swiss flag, yes it was red, as red as chicken blood, But more than she loved her riding hood she loved her grandmother who lived far from the city in the big wood. This one day her mother gave her a basket of wine and cake to take to her grandmother because she was ill. Wine and cake? Where's the aspirin? The penicillin? Where's the fruit juice? Peter Rabbit got chamomile tea. But wine and cake it was. On her way in the big wood Red Riding Hood met the wolf. Good day, Mr. Wolf, she said, thinking him no more dangerous than a streetcar or a panhandler. He asked where she was going and she obligingly told him There among the roots and trunks with the mushrooms pulsing inside the moss he planned how to eat them both, the grandmother an old carrot and the child a shy budkin in a red red hood. He bade her to look at the bloodroot, the small bunchberry and the dogtooth and pick some for her grandmother. And this she did. Meanwhile he scampered off to Grandmother's house and ate her up as quick as a slap. Then he put on her nightdress and cap and snuggled down in to bed. A deceptive fellow. Red Riding hood knocked on the door and entered with her flowers, her cake, her wine. Grandmother looked strange, a dark and hairy disease it seemed. Oh Grandmother, what big ears you have, ears, eyes, hands and then the teeth. The better to eat you with my dear. So the wolf gobbled Red Riding Hood down like a gumdrop. Now he was fat. He appeared to be in his ninth month and Red Riding Hood and her grandmother rode like two Jonahs up and down with his every breath. One pigeon. One partridge. He was fast asleep, dreaming in his cap and gown, wolfless. Along came a huntsman who heard the loud contented snores and knew that was no grandmother. He opened the door and said, So it's you, old sinner. He raised his gun to shoot him when it occurred to him that maybe the wolf had eaten up the old lady. So he took a knife and began cutting open the sleeping wolf, a kind of caesarian section. It was a carnal knife that let Red Riding Hood out like a poppy, quite alive from the kingdom of the belly. And grandmother too still waiting for cakes and wine. The wolf, they decided, was too mean to be simply shot so they filled his belly with large stones and sewed him up. He was as heavy as a cemetery and when he woke up and tried to run off he fell over dead. Killed by his own weight. Many a deception ends on such a note. The huntsman and the grandmother and Red Riding Hood sat down by his corpse and had a meal of wine and cake. Those two remembering nothing naked and brutal from that little death, that little birth, from their going down and their lifting up.
FRANK O'HARA
Now when I walk around at lunchtime I have only two charms in my pocket an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case when I was in Madrid the others never brought me too much luck though they did help keep me in New York against coercion but now I'm happy for a time and interested I walk through the luminous humidity passing the House of Seagram with its wet and its loungers and the construction to the left that closed the sidewalk if I ever get to be a construction worker I'd like to have a silver hat please and get to Moriarty's where I wait for LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and shaker the last five years my batting average is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 times last night outside birdland by a cop a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease but we don't give her one we don't like terrible diseases, then we go eat some fish and some ale it's cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like Henry James so much we like Herman Melville we don't want to be in the poets' walk in San Francisco even we just want to be rich and walk on girders in our silver hats I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go back to work happy at the thought possibly so
ANNE SEXTON
O Sylvia, Sylvia, with a dead box of stones and spoons, with two children, two meteors wandering loose in a tiny playroom, with your mouth into the sheet, into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer, (Sylvia, Sylvia where did you go after you wrote me from Devonshire about raising potatoes and keeping bees?) what did you stand by, just how did you lie down into? Thief — how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly and for so long, the death we said we both outgrew, the one we wore on our skinny breasts, the one we talked of so often each time we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston, the death that talked of analysts and cures, the death that talked like brides with plots, the death we drank to, the motives and the quiet deed? (In Boston the dying ride in cabs, yes death again, that ride home with our boy.) O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer who beat on our eyes with an old story, how we wanted to let him come like a sadist or a New York fairy to do his job, a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib, and since that time he waited under our heart, our cupboard, and I see now that we store him up year after year, old suicides and I know at the news of your death a terrible taste for it, like salt, (And me, me too. And now, Sylvia, you again with death again, that ride home with our boy.) And I say only with my arms stretched out into that stone place, what is your death but an old belonging, a mole that fell out of one of your poems? (O friend, while the moon's bad, and the king's gone, and the queen's at her wit's end the bar fly ought to sing!) O tiny mother, you too! O funny duchess! O blonde thing!
SYLVIA PLATH
Since Christmas they have lived with us, Guileless and clear, Oval soul-animals, Taking up half the space, Moving and rubbing on the silk Invisible air drifts, Giving a shriek and pop When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling. Yellow cathead, blue fish--- Such queer moons we live with Instead of dead furniture! Straw mats, white walls And these traveling Globes of thin air, red, green, Delighting The heart like wishes or free Peacocks blessing Old ground with a feather Beaten in starry metals. Your small Brother is making His balloon squeak like a cat. Seeming to see A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it, He bites, Then sits Back, fat jug Contemplating a world clear as water. A red Shred in his little fist.
ANNE SEXTON
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the grass blades you mention, the furniture you have placed under the sun. But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic. In this way, heavy and thoughtful, warmer than oil or water, I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole. I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone. Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion. Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say, and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound, to empty my breath from its bad prison. Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet, raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon, leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss, leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love whatever it was, an infection.
SYLVIA PLATH
Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless. The woods are a well. The stars drop silently. They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible. Nor do they send up fires where they fall Or any signal of distress or anxiousness. They are eaten immediately by the pines. Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort. And they are wan, dulled by much travelling. The smaller and more timid never arrive at all But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust. They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost. But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble, They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets. The Big Dipper is my only familiar. I miss Orion and Cassiopeia's Chair. Maybe they are Hanging shyly under the studded horizon Like a child's too-simple mathematical problem. Infinite number seems to be the issue up there. Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright I am overlooking them by looking too hard. Perhaps it is the season that is not right. And what if the sky here is no different, And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves? Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me. The few I am used to are plain and durable; I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth Or much company, or the mildness of the south. They are too puritan and solitary for that— When one of them falls it leaves a space, A sense of absence in its old shining place. And where I lie now, back to my own dark star, I see those constellations in my head, Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard. There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well. On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes And drink the small night chill like news of home.
SYLVIA PLATH
The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
ALLEN GINSBERG
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
SYLVIA PLATH
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair, The pink paint on the innocence of fear; Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. Cutting with knives served by their softest care, Served by their love, so barbarously fair. Whose mothers taught: You'd better not be cruel! You had better not throw stones upon the wrens! Herein they kiss and coddle and assault Anew and dearly in the innocence With which they baffle nature. Who are full, Sleek, tender-clad, fit, fiftyish, a-glow, all Sweetly abortive, hinting at fat fruit, Judge it high time that fiftyish fingers felt Beneath the lovelier planes of enterprise. To resurrect. To moisten with milky chill. To be a random hitching-post or plush. To be, for wet eyes, random and handy hem. Their guild is giving money to the poor. The worthy poor. The very very worthy And beautiful poor. Perhaps just not too swarthy? perhaps just not too dirty nor too dim Nor—passionate. In truth, what they could wish Is—something less than derelict or dull. Not staunch enough to stab, though, gaze for gaze! God shield them sharply from the beggar-bold! The noxious needy ones whose battle's bald Nonetheless for being voiceless, hits one down. But it's all so bad! and entirely too much for them. The stench; the urine, cabbage, and dead beans, Dead porridges of assorted dusty grains, The old smoke, heavy diapers, and, they're told, Something called chitterlings. The darkness. Drawn Darkness, or dirty light. The soil that stirs. The soil that looks the soil of centuries. And for that matter the general oldness. Old Wood. Old marble. Old tile. Old old old. Not homekind Oldness! Not Lake Forest, Glencoe. Nothing is sturdy, nothing is majestic, There is no quiet drama, no rubbed glaze, no Unkillable infirmity of such A tasteful turn as lately they have left, Glencoe, Lake Forest, and to which their cars Must presently restore them. When they're done With dullards and distortions of this fistic Patience of the poor and put-upon. They've never seen such a make-do-ness as Newspaper rugs before! In this, this "flat," Their hostess is gathering up the oozed, the rich Rugs of the morning (tattered! the bespattered. . . .) Readies to spread clean rugs for afternoon. Here is a scene for you. The Ladies look, In horror, behind a substantial citizeness Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart. Who, arms akimbo, almost fills a door. All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft- Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt. Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost. But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . . They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra, Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks, Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin "hangings," Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend, When suitable, the nice Art Institute; Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind. Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers So old old, what shall flatter the desolate? Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames And, again, the porridges of the underslung And children children children. Heavens! That Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League agree it will be better To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies, To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring Bells elsetime, better presently to cater To no more Possibilities, to get Away. Perhaps the money can be posted. Perhaps they two may choose another Slum! Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!— Where loathe-love likelier may be invested. Keeping their scented bodies in the center Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall, They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall, Are off at what they manage of a canter, And, resuming all the clues of what they were, Try to avoid inhaling the laden air.
FRANK O'HARA
even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together for the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully as the horse