poetry poems
Kenneth Koch, "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"
1 I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer. I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do and its wooden beams were so inviting. 2 We laughed at the hollyhocks together and then I sprayed them with lye. Forgive me. I simply do no know what I am doing. 3 I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years. The man who asked for it was shabby and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold. 4 Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg. Forgive me. I was clumsy and I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus William Carlos Williams Every single human being lives for them self. Sometimes, the pain and tragedy one person is facing goes unnoticed to the rest of the world.
According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry of the year was awake tingling 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
William Wordsworth, "Lines"
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.*—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 10 These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, 20 Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind 30 With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight 40 Of all this unintelligible world Is lighten'd:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. 50 If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the wood How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguish'd though[t,] With many recognitions dim and faint, 60 And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, 70 Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me 80 An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour 90 Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, 100 A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,* And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 110 The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while 120 May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 130 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our chearful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee: and in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind 140 Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance, If I should be, where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence, wilt thou then forget 150 That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake.
William Carlos Williams: This is just to say love poem
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
Dream #14: John Berryman
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored means you have no Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature, Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes as bad as achilles, who loves people and valiant art, which bores me. And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Frost at midnight All seasons, the speaker proclaims, shall be sweet to his child, whether the summer makes the earth green or the robin redbreast sings between tufts of snow on the branch;
The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft, How oft, at school, with most believing mind, Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear Most like articulate sounds of things to come! So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! And so I brooded all the following morn, Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: Save if the door half opened, and I snatched A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, For still I hoped to see the stranger's face, Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the intersperséd vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, And in far other scenes! For I was reared In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
bob hicock
building a joke: about war, satire
Kate Daniels :War photograph detachment from the situation and in disgust acknowledges the absence of concern we feel for those in countries in conflict as we continue with our own daily routines.
A naked child is running along the path toward us, her arms stretched out, her mouth open, the world turned to trash behind her. She is running from the smoke and the soldiers, from the bodies of her mother and little sister thrown down into a ditch, from the blown-up bamboo hut from the melted pots and pans. And she is also running from the gods who have changed the sky to fire and puddled the earth with skin and blood. She is running--my god--to us, 10,000 miles away, reading the caption beneath her picture in a weekly magazine. All over the country we're feeling sorry for her and being appalled at the war being fought in the other world. She keeps on running, you know, after the shutter of the camera clicks. She's running to us. For how can she know, her feet beating a path on another continent? How can she know what we really are? From the distance, we look so terribly human.
Leda and the swan: W.B. Yeats
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden Bad things tend to be surrounded by - well, by lots of good things. Sunny skies. Beautiful trees. Pretty, pretty people. With all of that good stuff around, who's going to notice when something bad is going on a few feet away?
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The God on inattention By averill curdy
After the trumpets, after the incense There were nights insomnia fathered gods I then rejected as too angry or distracted, Or whose appetite for submission revealed Their own lack of faith. Say our names, All synonyms for trust. Others spoke In sugared paradox: To know is to know All. To not know all is not to know. To know All requires that you know very little, But to know that little you have to know All . And for a while, it's true, I burned in the dark fires of ambivalence, My attention consumed like oxygen. I'd wake up tired, as I had with the married man Whose strictures and caprice begat, And begat, and begat, and begat My love for him, harvesting the same Silence from my bed. Who listens To my penitential tune? Who accepts My petitions for convenient parking, For spring, for the self illuminated Across a kitchen table, for . . . for Fortitude? I've heard a voice, I'm sure, Advising me to drop this sentimental farce. Only to hold the smoke of their names Again in my mouth I'd resurrect The dead, or adopt the gods orphaned By atheists, except the gods they've made From disbelief no one's faith could tolerate. Refusing to make the same mistake Just once, I've cried out to the dark Many names, most given up as routinely As the secrets of friends. If you're a cup Will my lips profane your own? If a comb Will I feel your teeth against my neck? If a wall I will be darker than your shadow. And if a door I will unlatch you, letting in All the little foxes from the vineyard.
Jack Gilbert: measuring the tiger
Barrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans. Water buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mud outside Mandalay. Pantocrater in the Byzantium dome. The mammoth overhead crane bringing slabs of steel through the dingy light and roar to the giant shear that cuts the adamantine three-quarter-inch plates and they flop down. The weight of the mind fractures the girders and piers of the spirit, spilling out the heart's melt. Incandescent ingots big as cars trundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling off the brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela River below, night's sheen its belly. Silence except for the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday. What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant. Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.
Dulce et Decorum Est by wilfred owen dying soldier
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares(2) we turned our backs And towards our distant rest(3) began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots(4) Of tired, outstripped(5) Five-Nines(6) that dropped behind. Gas!(7) Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets(8) just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime(9) . . . Dim, through the misty panes(10) and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering,(11) choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12) Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13) To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.(15)
Death Fugue- Paul Celan
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling he whistles his hounds to come close he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground he orders us strike up and play for the dance Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening we drink and we drink A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margeurite your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play he grabs for the rod in his belt he sawings it his eyes are blue jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening we drink and we drink a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margeurite your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers He shouts play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then in smoke to the sky you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air he plays with his vipers and daydreams der Tod is ein Meister aus Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Shulamith
The rites for cousin vit Gwendolyn Brooks An elegy for a woman who was so alive while she was living, it seems impossible that she could be dead
Carried her unprotesting out the door. Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her, That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her, The lid's contrition nor the bolts before. Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, She rises in the sunshine. There she goes, Back to the bars she knew and the repose In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes. Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge. Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.
The windhover: Gerard Manley Hopkins The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey.
I CAUGHT this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5 As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10 Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Yet do I Marvell: Countee Cullen ability to make worthwhile contributions to something as highbrow as art in America, this speaker finds a reason to marvel at his identity as both a poet and an African American.
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind, And did He stoop to quibble could tell why The little buried mole continues blind, Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die, Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus To struggle up a never-ending stair. Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels His awful hand. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
Ozymandias Percy Byshee Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."
John Ashbery: this economy
In all my years as a pedestrian serving juice to guests, it never occurred to me thoughtfully to imagine how a radish feels. She merely arrived. Half-turning in the demented twilight, one feels a sour empathy with all that went before. That, needless to say, was how we elaborated ourselves staggering across tracts: Somewhere in America there is a naked person. Somewhere in America adoring legions blush in the sunset, crimson madder, and madder still. Somewhere in America someone is trying to figure out how to pay for this, bouncing a ball off a wooden strut. Somewhere in America the lonely enchanted eye each other on a bus. It goes down Woodrow Wilson Avenue. Somewhere in America it says you must die, you know too much.
Robinson Jeffers: Credio
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual Appalling presence, the power of the waters. He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism. Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only The bone vault's ocean: out there is the ocean's; The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage; The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
Tortures by Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing has changed. The body is susceptible to pain, it must eat and breathe air and sleep, it has thin skin and blood right underneath, an adequate stock of teeth and nails, its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable. In tortures all this is taken into account. Nothing has changed. The body shudders as it shuddered before the founding of Rome and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are as they were, it's just the earth that's grown smaller, and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall. Nothing has changed. It's just that there are more people, besides the old offenses new ones have appeared, real, imaginary, temporary, and none, but the howl with which the body responds to them, was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence according to the time-honored scale and tonality. Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances. Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same. The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away, its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up, it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds. Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries, the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers. Amid these landscapes traipses the soul, disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away, alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, while the body is and is and is and has no place of its own.
John Ashbery: Not beyond All conjecture
Oblivion scattereth her poppy, and besides it's time to go inside now, feed the aggressive pets, forgive our trespasses for trespassing against us. Other times monotony is like a cave, the air is fresh, tedium tonic. We lie in a museum of helpful objects, leaning toward the accomplishment of a small, complicated task, like sailors in rigging. Something no American has yet achieved.
Robinson Jeffers: Hurt hawks
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to use the sky forever but live with famine And pain a few days: cat nor coyote Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curs of the day come and torment him At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him; Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him. II I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail Had nothing left but unable misery From the bones too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. We had fed him for six weeks, I gave him freedom, He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
John Ashbery: words to that effect
The drive down was smooth but after we arrived things started to go haywire, first one thing and then another. The days scudded past like tumbleweed, slow then fast, then slow again. The sky was sweet and plain. You remember how still it was then, a season putting its arms into a coat and staying unwrapped for a long, a little time. It was during the week we talked about deforestation. How sad that everything has to change, yet what a relief, too! Otherwise we'd only have looking forward to look forward to. The moment would be a bud that never filled, only persevered in a static trance, before it came to be no more. We'd walked a little way in our shoes. I was sure you'd remember how it had been the other time, before the messenger came to your door and seemed to want to peer in and size up the place. So each evening became a forbidden morning of thunder and curdled milk, though the invoices got forwarded and birds settled on the periphery.
William Blake: The Tyger mystical knowledge, God, and the sublime (big, mysterious, powerful, and sometimes scary.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare sieze the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Robison Jeffers: Oh lovely rock
We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork. The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood, Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices. We lay on gravel and kept a little camp-fire for warmth. Past midnight only two or three coals glowed red in the cooling darkness; I laid a clutch of dead bay-leaves On the ember ends and felted dry sticks across them and lay down again. The revived flame Lighted my sleeping son's face and his companion's, and the vertical face of the great gorge-wall Across the stream. Light leaves overhead danced in the fire's breath, tree-trunks were seen: it was the rock wall That fascinated my eyes and mind. Nothing strange: light-gray diorite with two or three slanting seams in it, Smooth-polished by the endless attrition of slides and floods; no fern nor lichen, pure naked rock...as if I were Seeing rock for the first time. As if I were seeing through the flame-lit surface into the real and bodily And living rock. Nothing strange...I cannot Tell you how strange: the silent passion, the deep nobility and childlike loveliness: this fate going on Outside our fates. It is here in the mountain like a grave smiling child. I shall die, and my boys Will live and die, our world will go on through its rapid agonies of change and discovery; this age will die, And wolves have howled in the snow around a new Bethlehem: this rock will be here, grave, earnest, not passive: the energies That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above: and I, many packed centuries ago, Felt its intense reality with love and wonder, this lonely rock.
John Ashbery: Homeless heart
When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stumbling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.
Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind: Sir Thomas Wyatt Picked out plainly in diamond lettering there is a collar around the neck of the hind. The collar says 'do not touch me, as I belong to Caesar, and I am wild, though I seem tame.'
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, hélas, I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind. Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain. And graven with diamonds in letters plain There is written, her fair neck round about: Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
single room by Averill Curdy
Years ago, I suspected I might end Alone and imagined myself, fierce, Stalwart, walking these beaches With a driftwood staff. But not this. In the one saucepan, which tilts toylike On its base, I boil water for coffee. To answer silence, I narrate the minutes: Rinse the pan, put away groceries; Between me and the Oreos I'll create Dramas of temptation and resistance. I came upon a sea lion, given up In the dunes, inveigling scavengers. Flayed, It lay gelid, flushed, freaked with sand, At the crease of transformation— Organ, orchid, odalisque. The gulls Moved like sharpening knives above A too-elaborate meal for one who eats Alone. Behind the dunes, the Pacific roars, Approaches, and withdraws, reaching For something, for anything—everything— But not for this.
The preservation of meat by Averill curdy
dusk had erased the farthest blue hills when he was caught the low chronic fever of a fox running through the orchard, and found the fox's windfall fruit, a dove. with a small incision between its legs. he draws the intestines like straw-colored silk from a bobbin, following the thread back to the hand of his dying wife, plucked from where it lay on the quilt, Glut as a late plum. his visions of her body, then, before he'd fainted: A hive decocting in monstrous sugars. noting a fine verdigris ring corroding The dark pupil, he sets aside the eyes. using a crow quill he forces a passage down the throat, into the body he stuffs with niter, salt, and indian pepper. an elegy of tender violations: fingers spread feathers like petals relaxing the perfume of gunpowder that rouses him from his dream of work to surprise, There, upon his own, the face of the fox, Robbed, wretched, and cunning
When I was beautiful By Averill curdy
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