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192,118
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29990/the-hunter-delirious-with-an-infected-wound
|
Richard Outram
|
The Hunter Delirious with an Infected Wound
|
POBTRY
RICHARD OUTRAM
THE HUNTER DELIRIOUS WITH
AN INFECTED WOUND
Must I relinquish what I most revere;
Close as membrane, quicker than this cell?
An ancient stricture causes me to fear
A rude device: I have before me Hell,
With all its incommensurable Host
Who have no Vision, History or Ghost!
Once, pondering on Love, in winter-wind
That drove the night into an iron crown
About my head, I was no longer blind.
What can I say, save that a veil fell down
And left me gibbering? My God, I scent
Such terror in my native element!
I was a stripling and a lewd girl came
From nowhere: she swayed, naked, in the light
That wounded us: we played a bawdy game
Whereby, in time, she claimed a victor's right:
And as I knelt to part her fleecy lips,
I found a web of thorns about her hips!
I knocked on dead wood: and a childish prayer
Occurred to me, so numbering every One
With utter certainty, I shuddered there
For such a blasphemy: that day is done!
I recognize a subtle, lethal pull;
An inclination to be merciful.
The branches glitter and the moist earth shakes:
I tremble with a distant measured tread.
What is this rudimentary brute that wakes
And lumbers after water? I lay dead
Until he gored my testicles and pain
Embraced and burnt me into life again!
Each day at dawn, somehow beyond despair,
I watch them stir and peck; small vital things
Fluffed up for warmth: and must inflame the air
To send them out on incandescent wings!
And always, with the moon's abrupt rebirth,
They plummet, black and wizened, back to earth.
Bitter, bitter, I have had to turn
From those rare creatures darkly understood!
Is this the human ultimate concern;
To goad to death, in a sequestered wood,
A rabid mongrel-dog? Or challenge with
The brute fact of my Being, my own Myth?
|
162,250
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13920/with-child
|
Florence Kiper Frank
|
With Child
|
NEW LIFE
WITH CHILD
Ah, I am heavy now and patient,
Moving as the dumb, tamed animals move, ploddingly,
Burdened, burdened ;
Knowing ahead of me the iron pain-yet am I dumb and
patient.
A stillness is thick and heavy upon me . . .
Waiting . . .
Inevitably you unfold within me.
Sudden I am smitten with terror-
How shall I carry the burden of a soul!
|
221,852
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46431/let-evening-come
|
Jane Kenyon
|
Let Evening Come
|
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
|
233,988
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54312/variations-done-for-gerald-van-de-wiele-56d234838e371
|
Charles Olson
|
Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele
|
I. Le Bonheur
dogwood flakes
what is green
the petals
from the apple
blow on the road
mourning doves
mark the sway
of the afternoon, bees
dig the plum blossoms
the morning
stands up straight, the night
is blue from the full of the April moon
iris and lilac, birds
birds, yellow flowers
white flowers, the Diesel
does not let up dragging
the plow
as the whippoorwill,
the night's tractor, grinds
his song
and no other birds but us
are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux!
Délires!
What soul
is without fault?
Nobody studies
happiness
Every time the cock crows
I salute him
I have no longer any excuse
for envy. My life
has been given its orders: the seasons
seize
the soul and the body, and make mock
of any dispersed effort. The hour of death
is the only trespass
II. The Charge
dogwood flakes
the green
the petals from the apple-trees
fall for the feet to walk on
the birds are so many they are
loud, in the afternoon
they distract, as so many bees do
suddenly all over the place
With spring one knows today to see
that in the morning each thing
is separate but by noon
they have melted into each other
and by night only crazy things
like the full moon and the whippoorwill
and us, are busy. We are busy
if we can get by that whiskered bird,
that nightjar, and get across, the moon
is our conversation, she will say
what soul
isn't in default?
can you afford not to make
the magical study
which happiness is? do you hear
the cock when he crows? do you know the charge,
that you shall have no envy, that your life
has its orders, that the seasons
seize you too, that no body and soul are one
if they are not wrought
in this retort? that otherwise efforts
are efforts? And that the hour of your flight
will be the hour of your death?
III. Spring
The dogwood
lights up the day.
The April moon
flakes the night.
Birds, suddenly,
are a multitude
The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms
are thrown to the ground, the wind
the rain forces everything. Noise-
even the night is drummed
by whippoorwills, and we get
as busy, we plow, we move,
we break out, we love. The secret
which got lost neither hides
nor reveals itself, it shows forth
tokens. And we rush
to catch up. The body
whips the soul. In its great desire
it demands the elixir
In the roar of spring,
transmutations. Envy
drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul
-that they are not one-
the matutinal cock clangs
and singleness: we salute you
season of no bungling
|
191,394
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29628/the-moral
|
William Carlos Williams
|
The Moral
|
Just junk
is what it amounts to
now-a-days
the sleeve
doesn't hold on the shaft
but slips
so that
nothing holds
firm any more
|
211,882
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39900/native
|
Jessica Hornik
|
Native
|
A hundred skies passed in a day; the one
world was bare. The trees, asterisks
marking the places your eye wandered
along the bottom of the sky, resisted
the wind's urge to pinwheel them westward.
The meadow, dry and beige as a beach,
for weeks had likened itself to a
strangely tinted snow, and so was ready.
It seemed if you were to follow the road
off the edge of the scene, you might alight
in a forbidden springtime, whose absolute
negative these acres had to be. And yet
you would not about-face, abandon this
about-to-be, you whose forehead
was a mountain bluff marked for first snows,
so cold had it been for days behind your eyes.
Ah, winter! stalled like Orion on the horizon,
foot caught on a hook of mountain,
eyeing the rise of the cold plate of moon.
|
192,898
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30381/countryside
|
Josephine Miles
|
Countryside
|
Apart from branches in courtyards and small stones
The countryside is beyond me.
I can go along University Avenue from Rochester to Sobrante
And then the Avenue continues to the Bay.
Often I think of the dry scope of foothill country,
Moraga Hill, Andreas, Indian country, where I was born
And where in the scrub the air tells me
How to be born again.
Often I think of the long rollers
Breaking against the beaches
All the way down the coast to the border
On bookish cressets and culverts blue and Mediterranean.
There I break
In drops of spray as fine as letters
Blown high,
But waking am the shore they break upon.
Both the dry talkers, those old Indians,
And the dry trollers, those old pirates
From around the Horn, say something,
But mostly in the courts it's louder talking
Gavel rapping, and procedural dismays.
Still where we are, and where we call and call,
The long rollers of the sea come in
As if they lived here. The dry Santa Ana
Sweeps up the town and takes it for a feast.
Then Rochester to El Sobrante is a distance
No longer than my name.
|
252,775
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/158384/passerine
|
Henk Rossouw
|
Passerine
|
The salt marsh pale
green near the conifer
broadleaf and
the I who walks into
a refuge in silence
as if gazing at the blue
flame of being
-language's pilot light-
this I is
seen by an owlblur
first, wings cast
like a net onto the late
afternoon. A surge inside
as if owl prey
bursts out my chest-thicket
to hide-a small dun
terror amid summer trees.
The owl, near
enough to declaw,
to index- Strix varia -
denies my presence,
his pellets under
the red spruce dense
with vole fur
and regurgitated crab.
I'm a broken animal-
nothing eats me.
If my hair were often
coiled in the shit
of something larger,
would it make the night
night? Something to be
in awe of other
than language's fire.
|
253,947
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/160480/the-age-of-unreason
|
Jennifer Chang
|
The Age of Unreason
|
when I was a small child
I did dream of murder
a girl named V-
who made friends effortlessly
wore purple
and was not unkind to me not once
I have never told this to anyone
must I identify her race
or only mine I was small then
as small as those five children
killed in 1989
in Stockton CA
by an ordinary man
who thought of the shooting
as an expiation
for the loss in Vietnam
for the loss of esteem
for white men for reasons
that have nothing to do with hate
claims the scholar
standing before us in the lecture hall
it is not personal in fact there is no feeling
I write it down not personal no feeling
and try to formulate an intelligent question
except I hate
that I've never heard this history before
and hate that an ordinary man
will somehow find war in anything
and call it valor
call it sacrifice five black-eyed children
look back at us from the scholar's slide
death lighting their faces eternal
they look like me or worse
like my children
who are playing elsewhere
in another schoolyard
all our names missing from the pages of history
after interviewing the survivors
the scholar paused his research for ten years
waiting or unable to bear it or the first
draft was a blank page a silence in the lecture hall
saturated in time
silence
outraged by the problem of diction what word
might begin what word could
how do we ask history a question
is not the question I want to ask
and yet I write it down I remember
about Vietnam my civics teacher said we won
I remember as children
I did not want to play war
but my brother did in the woods behind our house
where we found an abandoned shed
the sunken roof revealing a slice of sky
bedsheet soaked in rainwater
no kerosene two old-time lamps
overturned on the floor
where fungus spawned a kind
of lawn the mossy walls
the perpetual damp
we had crept in through a window
my sleeve catching on a shard of glass
that once formed a perfect pane he pointed
to the enemy perched in a silver maple just outside
and my hands became a pistol
aiming at dusk-laced leaves I am remembering this
in the lecture hall
as I weigh the difference between ruin
and play
even as children
we knew the truth
though knew it only lyrically
that some wanted us dead
that marked by difference
we became to some
trespassers usurpers an alien pestilence
our very game
plundered nothing ours
it is happening
a voice urges another hero into battle
and who's to say it isn't there
the voice the hero or the battle
I cannot see it
but I feel it
the scholar explains
it happens every day
and lists the children's names
as if into the majestic field
of a winter schoolyard
they will now march sons and daughters of war
we were never the enemy
we never lost the war
by dinnertime we were home again
anthems whirling in our heads
knowledge we did not want
we did not ask who lived here
or why they left or how we knew
such emptiness could be ours
what was it that St. Augustine said the children
need a metaphysics
we cannot have one
|
197,358
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32614/the-new-house
|
Greg Kuzma
|
The New House
|
I wake up on a morning of tired leaves.
Various collapse has ringed the house.
And in the dimming shadows of the trees
the cats grow fond of everything they see.
What was my hope to be another place?
And night, the dreams I set loose from
the window gather home, to sit in perches
on the eaves. They don't know where they're
wanted, and, fatter every day, they seem to say
how much they want to stay, and take the
color and the shape of birds that are the
natives of this place. I don't know what
it was I could have said to them, last
month, last year, however long ago I thought
the better of myself to keep on moving,
even if by stealth alone, some part of me
snuck out to track the stars. Everything,
from the bills with my name and new address
on them, to my son's complete assurance
on the stairs, says here, this is enough
and where you are.
|
241,618
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58554/september-56d23d07abf4e
|
Deborah Landau
|
September
|
Dazzling emptiness of the black green end of summer no one
running in the yard pulse pulse the absence.
Leave them not to the empty yards.
They resembled a family. Long quiet hours. Sometimes
one was angry sometimes someone called her "wife"
someone's hair receding.
An uptick in the hormone canopy embodied a restlessness
and oh what to do with it.
(How she arrived in a hush in a looking away and not looking.)
It had been some time since richness intangible
and then they made a whole coat of it.
Meanwhile August moved toward its impervious finale.
A mood by the river. Gone. One lucid rush carrying them along.
Borderless and open the days go on-
|
208,630
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38264/inside
|
Chana Bloch
|
Inside
|
Is it blue
inside a bluebird? the child said.
Then he told me: A baby's head is all stuffed
with hair. It keeps growing out, frizzy,
till it gets used up. That's why
old men are bald.
TUESDAY
The moment the doctor. Looks like.
No way to. Scrubbed hands
scooping. The size of. At the mercy
of the body. And to carry it
inside for years, sealed,
without even. But if. Not to know
your own. There have been
cases. Dear God
I don't believe in. But
what would I. Tuesday. The sun
leaves its snail's trace across. It's
the waiting that
|
238,360
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56842/sideshow-56d239b8bbfb2
|
Danez Smith
|
sideshow
|
Have I spent too much time worrying about the boys
killing each other to pray for the ones who do it
with their own hands?
Is that not black on black violence?
Is that not a mother who has to bury her boy?
Is it not the same play?
The same plot & characters?
The curtain rises, then:
a womb
a boy
a night emptied of music
a trigger
a finger
a bullet
then:
lights.
It always drives the crowd to their feet.
An encore
of boy after boy
after sweet boy - their endless, bloody bow.
They throw dirt on the actors like roses
until the boys are drowned by the earth
& the audience doesn't remember
what they're standing for.
|
210,206
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39056/saying-farewell-to-the-displays-in-the-carnegie-museum
|
Robert Gibb
|
Saying Farewell to the Displays in the Carnegie Museum
|
Zuni. Arapaho. Dakota.
The nations displayed in booths
In their dim, third-story room
Where mannikins were grouped
In poses: women weaving
Baskets and rugs, warriors in robes,
Priests in mid-rapture amid the slack
Lulled beadwork of the snakes.
Here, where time was geologic,
I'd find them at the same pursuits
As always, as though shaped
By an enormous patience.
They made you invisible.
Like the other plunder, they taught
How seeing was a way of inhabiting
Time. I know, they were clichés,
Fixed in ıgth-century niches,
Stolid as though carved from wood.
They were like the movies, all wrong
Even when rightly arrayed
In breechcloths and moccasins,
The frescoed vistas against which
They were set. And yet they were also
An amplitude in the world I knew
Of swing shifts and row homes,
Smoke in pillars above the mills.
Owing them, I came to say farewell,
But the room was already closed.
Peering through a crack,
I could see worktables and coils
Of rope among the half-dismantled
Booths, that figure I'd known
Since childhood, stripped naked
On the floor, chipped leg there
Before it, like the bodies at Pine
Ridge, only so much more wreckage.
|
173,552
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20263/new-mexico-processional
|
Axton Clark
|
New Mexico Processional
|
The sky withdraws from sunset into blue,
And the bleeding mountains drain away,
Blue as the receding thunderheads
That crouch in the ranges, pale
As phantom peony-buds unfolded.
The earth draws up the night in its veins, like sap,
Out to the branching peaks; the plains are pools
Where liquid darkness lies and rises,
Climbing the canyons, drowning the aspen and pinyon,
Drowning the red palisades on the mesas.
So all the swift harsh corners vanish, so
All clattering things are stilled, the mask of day
Puts off deceit with light in silence:
And the gods live.
First come the messenger moths to the cloistering screens
Where men have taken to fort with their spark of day
And sit entrenched in callous houses.
And he who has strength to see
Rises like the dark and goes
From his walls to the circle of undeceiving night,
Hearing the voices of the gods calling;
He who has flesh puts off deceit from his tongue,
And cleanses his sight, and opens his nostrils, and kneels
Under naked stars, stark in the spirit.
Then all the cottonwoods and the locusts stir,
The mountain-sides are hearths of windy song,
The shrilling crickets chorus a welcome:
And the gods come.
This is no scant procession, no puny file:
From every rock and tree they come, from all
The buttes and all the sturdy mountains,
Up from the cracking soil and down from the stars,
From the infinite blue-black spaces lost along sky,
Surging together like surf from the ocean.
Who kneels is grown an island crowned with awe,
Steadfast among the vast immortal throng.
|
193,430
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30647/for-wcw
|
Harvey Shapiro
|
For WCW
|
HARVEY SHAPIRO
FOR WCW
Now they are trying to make you
The genital thug, leader
Of the new black shirts-
Masculinity over all!
I remember you after the stroke
(Which stroke? I don't remember which stroke.)
Afraid to be left by Flossie
In a hotel lobby, crying out
To her not to leave you
For a minute. Cracked open
And nothing but womanish milk
In the hole. Only a year
Before that we were banging
On the door for a girl to open,
To both of us. Cracked,
Broken. Fear
Slaughtering the brightness
Of your face, stroke and
Counter-stroke, repeated and
Repeated, for anyone to see.
And now, grandmotherly,
You stare from the cover
Of your selected poems-
The only face you could compose
In the end. As if having
Written of love better than any poet
Of our time, you stepped over
To that side for peace.
What valleys, William, to retrace
In memory after the masculine mountains,
What long and splendid valleys.
|
175,718
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21537/moon-magic
|
Winona Montgomery Gilliland
|
Moon Magic
|
THE FAITHFUL SHADOW
MOON MAGIC
Floating in a sea of silver light,
The wood lies dreaming
Of the sweet miracle that late
Set the frogs drumming;
Of how the brook, but yesterday a lake,
Is now a thin
Trickle of sleepy song, more like
A ribbon than
The torrent that it was; of how,
Each one in turn,
Flowers have bloomed and gone; the haw;
The red-bud, torn
From some bright evening sky. One tall
Old linden-tree
Is blooming now; the night-winds tell
The moths to try
Her honey; like a luminous cloud,
A gauzy freight,
They cling there, and the murmuring tree is clad
With spirit fruit.
|
205,366
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36627/card-game
|
Michael Spence
|
Card Game
|
Shadows fill the arroyo
When the Sadnesses gather.
In their deck, the joker
Grins tight as lockjaw.
The moon their one light,
It pales the only hands
They ever hold in theirs.
Rum they drink is dark
As rivers in caves-it scalds
Their throats, stings their tongues
With soot. Snapping
Its slit wrist, Suicide
Deals. Hunger bets
Its ribcage and bloated belly.
Moaning, Despair shakes
Its head, passes. A smell
Of flesh rotting as Disease
Unwinds its gangrene shroud.
Suicide lays down
Its rope, frayed and stained.
The bet spirals, the mound
Growing like a mass grave.
Suicide calls. They spread out
The cards, face up-each one
A piece of yours.
|
161,988
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13771/the-island
|
Robert Alden Sanborn
|
The Island
|
THE ISLAND
Upon a silent island
In your bosom I am shut.
I wandered on the island
In a pale noon, and a hut
I found within the island
Dusk of willow, elm and fern-
Alone amid the island,
A shadow in an urn.
It is a fairy island-
I never shall escape
Until the willowed island
Shall change its wistful shape;
Until the urn shall shatter,
And the shadow slake
The frail wish of the sleeper,
And she shall wake.
I dare not stir the island
Silence with a happy word;
I dread to shake the island
With a plea that may be heard;
So in sleep I keep the island,
Mate its dream with one mine own,
Lest into life the island break,
And leave me all alone.
|
215,730
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41827/gable-end
|
David Wheatley
|
Gable End
|
Té Tir na nOg ar chil an Tt...
Their day never to come they have gone to the wall.
Like holy beggars they seem to have lost all will.
Their love affair with the future has made them ill,
the people who speak neither English nor Irish
and stand the ground only they could cherish
by the gable end of the last house of the parish,
shouldering their burden not to be borne,
the people who are neither native nor foreign.
Somewhere among these streets my mother was born
and now I too return to prod at the past,
content if I can be the unnoticed guest
and drop dead letters to myself in the post,
delivered and thrown away at the gable end
as I must have been, to end up lost and found
sharing my postcode with the rain and wind.
I paint myself into the tightest corner
and, though I could not be a slower learner,
mouth the slogans on each flag and banner
that I might join the gable-end people
at last, surrendering to their appeal
and saying a prayer beneath their dreary steeple,
though they believe in neither church nor God
but only the straw on which they make their bed,
outcast on the world. Yet they seem glad.
And we too are glad, making ourselves at home
among the averted gaze, the grating hymn,
the shout in the back street, the sanctified harm,
the shopping centre and the tourist trail:
security discreet; all of it real,
only our appetite for it still on trial,
and the signs in which we saw it all foretold-
Quis Separabit, What We Have We Hold-
urgently redundant, self-fulfilled
like us and fading as we lose all will,
our day come and gone, the pair of us still
with nowhere to shelter but this gable wall.
|
162,498
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14052/song-poppies-paramour
|
Haniel Long
|
Song ("Poppies paramour...")
|
ON THE ROAD
SONG OF YOUNG BURBAGE
The goat that rubbed my knees last night
And left his- ancient smell
Maddened my heart that I was what
A hornéd goat could tell.
For if his favor singled me
Out of the passing crowd,
I know I'm not too well disguised
Nor yet too worldly proud.
Most difficult it is today
Beneath a coat and vest:
I fear my old identity
May fade with all the rest.
But I'll go back to hill and sky
And hold a colloquy:
I need those ancient presences
Whose tumult still is-me!
THE HERD BOY
The night I brought the cows home
Blue mist was in the air,
And in my heart was heaven
And on imy lips a prayer.
|
174,158
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20612/of-this-kind
|
Sherman Conrad
|
Of This Kind
|
Please, please remember that the earth, salt-cheap and rusty,
Locks up solid sunlight in its gold
In the copper-silver-bronze veined ruggedly
Glinting in the sluice of the patient miner ;
And that the inner earth has too its flowers -
Emeralds, ruby-stones, flower colors
Jammed and crystaled, mineral gardens
Of glass undentable flowers.
Since what I am and have for you is of this kind,
I beseech you, loving you and wanting also love,
I beseech you to consider the prospector -
Why he stakes a claim, how motivated works the earth
Until his wealth lies found.
|
238,784
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57067/hymn-to-life-56d23a30164a9
|
Timothy Donnelly
|
Hymn to Life
|
There were no American lions. No pygmy mammoths left
or giant short-faced bears, which towered over ten feet high
when rearing up on their haunches. There were no stout-
legged llamas, stilt-legged llamas, no single Yukon horse. The last
of the teratorns, its wingspan broader than the room in
which I'm writing now, had long since landed on a tar pit's
surface and was lost. There might be other things to think of
strobing in the fume or sometimes poking through the thick of it
like the tiny golden toads once so prevalent in the cloud
forests north of Monteverde, only none of them were living
anywhere anymore. The last was seen on May 15, 1989, the week
Bon Jovi's "I'll Be There for You" topped Billboard's Hot 100.
Then it dropped to three. A teratorn might have fit in here
the long way come to think of it. A study claims it wasn't
climate change that killed the golden toad but a fungal epidemic
provoked by cyclical weather patterns. Little things like that
had a way of disappearing: thimbles, the Rocky Mountain
grasshopper, half the hearing in my patient ear. There were
no Eastern elk, no sea mink, and no heath hens, a distinct
subspecies of the prairie chicken. Once common to the coastal
barrens of New Hampshire down to Virginia, they're often thought
to have been eaten in favor of wild turkey at the inaugural
Thanksgiving feast. To work on my character I pretend to be
traveling Portsmouth to Arlington in modern garb at first,
then backwards into costumes of the past: tee shirt and shorts,
gray flannel suit, a cutaway jacket and matching breeches
tucked into boots, taupe velvet getup with ruffles and ribbons
streaming into Delaware till I'm buckled like a Puritan, musket
in hand, not half-famished, and there's plenty of heath hens
everywhere I look. But there were still no Carolina parakeets
and no Smith Island cottontails, a long contested subspecies
of the Eastern cottontail. These lost rabbits, somewhat shaggier
than their mainland cousins, were named for the barrier
island off the tip of Virginia's Eastern Shore, where Thomas Dale,
deputy governor of the Virginia Colony, set up a salt works
back in 1614, and not for the Chesapeake's other Smith Island
up in Maryland, birthplace of the Smith Island cake, that state's
only official dessert - a venerable confection whose pencil-
thin layers, numbering eight to twelve on average, lie divided
by a fudge-like frosting cooked for greater lastingness, making it
suitable for local oystermen to take with them on the long
autumn harvest. Smith Island in Washington offers nesting
sites for tufted puffins on its rocky cliff faces as well as rest
stations for migrant sea lions. Situated in Long Island Sound,
Connecticut's Smith Island is among that state's famed Thimble
Islands, a cluster of landmasses named for the thimbleberry,
cousin to the black raspberry. During the Revolutionary War,
the Thimbles were deforested to rid the sound of hiding
places for British ships. Alabama boasts no fewer than three
Smith Islands. Little can be said about the one in Minnesota's
Voyageurs National Park. Its neighboring islands include
Rabbit, Snake, Wolf, Wigwam, Sweetnose, and Twin Alligator
down here on the American side, and Little Dry, Big, and Big Dry
up on the Canadian. Tomorrow should be 82° and sunny
but it won't be. The blue pike cavorted through the waters
of the Great Lakes no longer. Ditto the somber blackfin cisco.
Overfishing, pollution, and the introduction of nonnative
species did both fish in as early as 1960 and '70, respectively.
There were no spectacled cormorants, no Goff's pocket gophers,
and no Ainsworth's salamanders, a species known to us only
through two specimens found on Ainsworth family property
in Mississippi on June 12, 1964. That same day Nelson Mandela
was sentenced to life in prison. I remember the feeling of
another kind, the way they alternately lay limp in my hands
then pleaded to be free. They took naps in the dampness
of softened logs. There's a fine dirt, a dust I guess, that collects
under the rug I'm sitting on. I think the rough weave of it
acts as rasp to our foot-bottoms then sieve to what it loosens.
There were no Caribbean monk seals, eight of which no less
than Christopher Columbus killed for food in 1494, and therefore
no Caribbean monk seal nasal mites, an objectively hideous
arachnoid parasite that resided nowhere but in the respiratory
passages of the Monachus tropicalis . When it occurs to me I
sweep it up. Back in the day they used to darken our skies
in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles in length, enough to feather
the air from Fall River down to Philadelphia, their peak
population hovering above five billion, or 40% of the total
roll of birds in North America, but there were no remaining
passenger pigeons, the last of their red eyes having shut
in Cincinnati on September 1, 1914. Her name was Martha.
Martha Washington went by Patsy as a child. Her pet raccoon
was Nosey. Cozumel Island's pygmy raccoon is actually a distinct
species and not, like the Barbados raccoon, a subspecies
of the common. There might be as few as 250 of the former
hidden in the mangroves or prowling the wetlands for ghost
crabs and lizards, whereas the latter was last seen in '64
when one was struck dead by a car in Bathsheba, a fishing village
built on Barbados's eastern shore, magnet for hurricanes
and pro surfers, its foamy white waters calling to mind
the milk baths rumored to have kept Solomon's mother so
perilously beautiful. First the milk's lactic acid would have
acted as an exfoliant, gently removing layers of the dead,
dry skin to uncover younger, fresher skin waiting like artwork
in Dunkirk underneath, then the milk's natural fat content
would restore moisture lost to the exacting atmosphere
of biblical Jerusalem, whose name in Hebrew, yireh shalem ,
means "will see peace." Most versions of the story make her
into an exhibitionist but the Midrash says Bathsheba, modest,
was washing behind a wicker screen when Satan, seizing
opportunity, appeared as a red bird to David who, cocksure
with projectiles now, aimed the stone in his hands at the bird
but hit the screen instead, splitting it in half and thereby
revealing our bather, the wife of Uriah the Hittite at the time
but not for much longer. All these gains and losses, so mysterious
from a distance, held together it has felt by nothing stronger
than momentum, like a series of bicycle accidents or a pattern
in the pomegranate, come to hint at a logic in time, but whether
it's more fitting to say that they promise to reveal it or else
threaten to is debatable. Attempts to stem the vast mosquito
population in salt marshes abutting Kennedy Space Center
on Florida's Merritt Island, technically a peninsula but more like
a question mark of land flopped into the Atlantic, devastated
the dusky seaside sparrow. Its last known specimen died
on June 17, 1987, when the ballad "Always" by Atlantic Starr
dominated radio. Mosquitoes would have taken to the nasty
Olduvai water hole around which two clans of hominids battle
at the start of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 : A Space Odyssey . This is after
the first monolith shows up. The film's monoliths are artifacts
of alien origin, identical in ratio but varying in size, designed
to provoke large-scale changes in human life. As when it dawns
on the wiry leader of the clan the first monolith appears to
to bludgeon the other to death with a leg bone. Later on he hurls it
into the air to celebrate his power, the image of its tumbling
weaponhood at half-speed match-cutting to that of a long
white nuclear satellite angled in orbit against the scintillant
anthracite of space. Pan right to the Earth, a quarter of it silvery
blue in the corner, aloofly beautiful for sure but only a pale
idea of a planet when set beside photographs taken years later
by the crew of Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972, annus finalis
for the Lake Pedder earthworm, bush wren, and possibly
the Toolache wallaby as well, long considered among kangaroos
to have been the most elegant. The sapphire blue, the ochre
of Africa, the chalk-white spirals convolving as if an ice cap's
wispy tentacles. They were killed for fur, sport, and frequently
with the aid of greyhounds, who hunt mostly by way of sight
as opposed to scent. Then the Earth is at the left as the satellite
approaches it almost dozily to the opening bars of Strauss's
Blue Danube , first performed on February 15, 1867, in the now
defunct Diana Ballroom. In my own Diana Ballroom, named
not for the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and chastity
directly, but by way of the two-kilometer lunar crater christened
in her honor in 1979, declivity in whose embrace my ballroom
trembles comfortably, I boost my chi by remembering to breathe
deep, to eat oatmeal, ginger, and figs, and to commit myself
to a custody of wildflowers, up to and including the maroon
perfume of the chocolate cosmos, a non-self-pollinating species
whose every plant now in bloom is a clone of the selfsame
specimen uprooted from a cubic foot of Mexico back in 1902.
Likewise the last known Rocky Mountain locust ever to appear
appeared alone that year on a prairie up in Canada, whereas
decades before a glistering storm of them blanketed an area
vast as California, matter-of-factly devouring buckwheat, barley,
strawberries, apple trees, fence posts, and even the laundry
wildly flapping away on the line, the sound of "millions of jaws
biting and chewing" setting a nation's nerves on edge, or at least
Laura Ingalls Wilder's, if we're to believe her On the Banks
of Plum Creek , first of three books spectered by prototypical
beeotch Nellie Oleson. Cloudiness persists regarding the difference
between locust and grasshopper. Typically I keep a number
of soaps on hand and seem to know by instinct which of them
to reach for. In gingham and curls Nellie Oleson was played
by Alison Arngrim in the 1970s TV adaptation. The Wife of Bath
was also an Alyson. An Angrim is father to the outlaw Gorlim
in Tolkein's Middle-earth mythos. They say to run the tap
as hot as you can stand. Fast forward a century to April 16, 2002,
and dance anthem "Hot in Herre" by Cornell Haynes Jr., better
known to us as Nelly, reaches number one and reigns there
seven weeks. Miss Oleson, elder offspring of the local retailer,
is based on no fewer than three distinct historical persons.
Produced by The Neptunes, "Hot in Herre" samples Neil Young's
record "There's a World" and lifts its hook from an infinitely
more upbeat "Bustin' Loose" by Chuck Brown. Later on or earlier
in 2002, up a slope in dewy Mauna Loa, a Nelly somewhere
on the radio, the last pair of noncaptive Hawaiian crows flew
into the category known as "extinct in the wild." "We are leaving,
we are gone," Young sings wanly atop percussion and strings
courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra. "Come with us
to all alone." 'Alala is the word for the Hawaiian crow in Hawaiian.
No fewer than twenty 'alala chicks were hatched last year in
a breeding facility at San Diego Zoo. Jack Nitzsche coproduced
and also played piano. "Bustin' loose to my love Jones," declares
the late great Brown, dead in Baltimore mid-May of that year.
"Bustin' loose to each his own." He traded cigarettes for a guitar
while serving time in Virginia's historic Lorton Reformatory.
An average daytime temperature of 89°. He was father to the style
of music known as go-go, so-called because the sound, Brown
was said to have said, "just goes and goes." But there were no
dire wolves, no Florida black wolves, and no Texas reds,
although the red, morphologically midway between the gray
and the coyote, has been bred in captivity down on South Carolina's
Bulls Island since 1987, year Tim Tebow was born and Andy
Warhol died. Likewise the year in which the films Precious , Fargo ,
and American Psycho are set. "It can be hard to tell," the Times
admits of the thousands who once posed for photographs in
the posture known as "Tebowing," if they intended to celebrate
or to mock the quarterback for his much-publicized virtuous ways.
Nor were there any of the subspecies indigenous to Canada's
Banks Island, Earth's twenty-fourth largest island, upon which
the first confirmed wild hybrid of the polar bear and grizzly
was found and shot in 2006. The island also has the distinction
of its treelessness, and of being home to fleets of musk oxen.
Times I count myself among them if more comfortable in my bulk
I still can't get around the funk of us. Our ancient mouths
set to decimating herbages. In times of risk we assume the O-
shaped formation around our wobbly young. A sense of calm
or guiltlessness blows in. Then it's back to business with another
cup of coffee, hot beverage held to have been first drunk in
these parts in 1668, when frothy infusions of the slow-roasted bean
spiked with costly cinnamon sticks and honey grew popular
along New Amsterdam's foggy docks. In tide pools to the north
eelgrass limpets affixed to eelgrass blithely at the time, unaware
an insidious slime mold campaign would in centuries inflict
catastrophe on their habitat, making them the first marine
invertebrate dissolved in the historical era, the last of its kind
plucked while the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building whistled up
past the Woolworth like a startled monk's apocalyptic vision
of a cloud-bound train. It began in 1929. Sir Hubert Wilkins,
Arctic explorer, advocated in The Advertiser for submarine
technology as tomorrow's answer to the Northwest Passage's
pack ice question. Ice had heretofore kept a surface-travel route
troublingly out of reach, even after its putative discovery
by Sir Robert McClure, who on his eastward voyage spotted
from atop a windy Banks Island promontory the westmost
landmass mapped three decades earlier by Sir William Parry.
McClure later lent his name, understood to translate to "son of a
sallow lad," to a lunar crater whose diameter spans over
twelve times that of Diana, but only a quarter that of the big
kahuna Tycho, where a second monolith appears. This one emits
a painful radio signal to a third, which orbits like an onyx
football field around Jupiter. Rewind 150 years and McClure's
HMS Investigator , like a Musca domestica on a runway paved
with flypaper, has come to a full stop in the blind white grip of ice.
It felt like 1768. There were no Steller's sea cows, the tame
kelp-nibbling cousins to the manatee, albeit double their size,
and there were no great auks. The last known pair of them
was claimed on July 3, 1844 by poachers hired by a merchant
itching for tchotchkes to ornament an office. Three long
winters later, rescue sledges bundled McClure and crew up
and sped them back to the claps of Britain. Soon Banks Island's
musk ox population whittled down to nil as their flesh gave
way to the hungry Inuit who trekked up to 300 miles to strip
McClure's abandoned ship before the ice crushed her completely,
folding her metals into Mercy Bay. "I took him by the neck
and he flapped his wings," the poacher said. "He made no cry."
Inuit shaped Investigator 's copper and iron into spear- and arrow-
heads as well as knife blades, chisels, and harpoons like those
depicted in lithographs in the mitts of seal hunters patiently
stationed at breathing holes in the ice. But there were no
broad-leaved centaury plants, no western sassafras, and no
Galapagos amaranth, cousin to the seabeach amaranth. Its tiny
spinach-like leaves once bounced along dunes from South
Carolina to Massachusetts till habitat loss, insensitive beach-
grooming tactics, and recreational vehicles slashed figures
drastically. When ice decides it must feel like being splintered
from a multiplex of tightness that pains but holds together.
Aerial shot of 1961. Year submarine thriller K-19 and Saving
Mr. Banks are set in. Kennedy is president. The cloud of a hundred
musk oxen migrating back to Banks Island rises plainly as
narrow-leafed campion, a handful of whose seeds had slept
30 millennia before being found in 2007 in a ruined system of
ground squirrel burrows. Surveys will report up to 800
heads in 1967 and a thousand more in 1970. All matter thunder-
cracking belowdecks: hoof of earth into water, water over
air, air under water and up. So that the vessel, broken, settles
onto sea stars on the floor. The seeds were sown successfully
under grow lights in Siberia, deep in whose permafrost
international high-fiving scientists discovered a fully intact
woolly mammoth carcass. To enlarge my sympathy I attempt
to picture the loud tarp tents around the digging site, the lamp-
lengths they putter away to, the costs. By 1994, estimates
on the island ran as high as 84,000, over half the musk oxen
alive at the time, but paging ahead five years we see numbers
speedily hunted back down to 58,000, or as many pounds
of "fine ground beef" called back by California's Central Valley
Meat Company when "tiny pieces of plastic" were found
nestling in it like the voice of Katy Perry, whose hit "Roar"
was everywhere repeating we would hear it. "Called back,"
says Emily Dickinson's epitaph. One scientist says to the other,
"What's that?" The other says, "Do you feel it, Slovo? A certain
category of effect. Difficult to describe and yet a certain category
of effect is still possible. You'd think it would have wizened
in our atmosphere by now, or withdrawn in sickness or mere
tedium into the cold shell of itself in the manner of a what,
yes, a gastropod, the very figure of a recluse, secular of course,
anthropomorphic misnomer because its foot is not actually
its stomach, witness the oblong rocksnail, still another thought
extinct due to rampant habitat loss but no, not yet, Alabama
graduate student Nathan Whelan just now located a specimen
kayaking down the Cahaba River, misplaced modifier Slovo
it is the student in the kayak, not the snail, badum tish , but
amid the mist and as if against this vanishment of dodos a certain
category persists, not unlike a last known pair of Middlemist's
Red camellia, a cultivar sent as rootstock to England from
China by John Middlemist in 1804." Note: One is in a garden
in New Zealand, where the laughing owl is no longer, thanks
largely to cats. Its call has been described as "a loud cry
made up of a series of dismal shrieks frequently repeated,"
"a peculiar barking noise ... just like the barking of a young dog,"
"precisely the same as two men 'cooeying' to each other
from a distance," and "a melancholy hooting note," to quote
The Owl Pages, sweet dream of a website whose first FAQ asks,
"I've seen an owl, can you tell me what kind it is?" The other
Middlemist's Red, long presumed barren, resides in a nursery
somewhere in Britain, and stalwart through its hardships,
it has begun to bloom again. The remains of the Investigator
found in 2010 were well preserved by the pristine cold waters
of the Canadian Arctic. And yet no one's idea of red includes
the hue of Middlemist's camellia, which is instead a true
pink, or some might even say a rose. Mallarmé would just say
"flower" and from oblivion there would arise musically a flower
absent from all bouquets. "Whoever reaches into a rosebush,"
Lou Andreas-Salomé supposed, "may seize a handful of flowers;
but no matter how many one holds, it's only a small portion
of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience
the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush,
because we cannot possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if
we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole
bush itself - only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown
to us, and we are left alone." Endangered coastal roses seek
some subtler way of putting it. "All the roses in the world," Rilke
gushed to Salomé - whose Galilean namesake, it's often over-
looked, didn't desire the head of John the Baptist for herself but
was told to ask for it by her mother, Herodias, whose union
with Herod Antipas, at once her uncle and her brother-in-law,
John declared unlawful - "bloom for you and through you."
Forget-me-nots bloom unhindered in Heidelberg, where Max Wolf
spied in 1905 a so-called "minor planet" he named 562 Salome.
That these odd bodies spatter the galaxy like pollen shaken
from a central flower, or like honeybees tumbling along with us
around the sun, I never knew until a visit to the Minor Planet
Center website at a turning point like April 1543. I think I saw
upwards of 3500 were spotted last month alone. "Nature is
an inexplicable problem," Emily Brontë wrote in 1842 in French
in a confection titled "The Butterfly." "It exists on a principle
of destruction." Lepidopterists are scouring Florida's pine forests
and gentle costal jungles on the trail of five butterfly species
feared as good as gone. They were never listed as endangered
and still aren't known to be extinct. These are their names:
Zestos skipper. Rockland Meske's skipper. Zarucco duskywing.
Bahamian swallowtail. Nickerbean blue. "I love you," wrote Salomé,
"with all your harms," who died in her sleep shortly after
the Gestapo destroyed her library, in her poem "Hymn to Life."
Her friend Nietzsche liked the poem so much he set it to music.
I've listened to it and can't say I like it but I'm listening to it
again as I try to finish. I promised Lynn I'd put the dishes away
before the babysitter arrives but it looks like I won't be a person
of my word tonight. I had meant to write about the imperial
woodpecker of Mexico. The red gazelle. I told my friend Dottie
when saddened in the predawn I have seen the people pushing
small mountains of soda cans in their shopping carts stop
in front of my recycling, open one bag after another of empty
metal and glass, dig through them, take what they need and shut
the bags back up with so much care it has destroyed me. I remember
bathing my daughter when she was two and how I stopped
short thinking if I were gone tomorrow she wouldn't even
remember. The year was 2007. Radio waves associated with
cell phones may not have been contributing to recent declines in
bee population. "And if you must destroy me," says the poem,
"I'll tear myself away from you / as I would leave a friend."
When there was time to put away the dishes, they were gone.
|
162,986
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14337/perspicuity
|
Robert M. McAlmon
|
Perspicuity
|
Pirouettes
My plane
To the moon's
Perigee ;
Papilionaceously
Lingers in its aura's
Phosphorescency ;
Then, mutable ever,
Flits to Mars' perihelion.
O plane polytheistic!
Atavistic
In etherealism,
Seeking planets
Phantasmagorical,
Into pellucid
Pleonasm of space
I float
Evanescently.
Near the sheer blaze
Of the sun,
The translucent phlegm
Of my being
Reveals that I
Am the penumbra
Of the universe.
|
168,934
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17667/defeat-56d20a718253c
|
Alva N. Turner
|
Defeat
|
Kenneth Fearing
DEFEAT
His hand was slow,
But he borrowed favor
From the opportunities of the unexpected,
And strength from feeble health,
And cunning from the long years,
Till the slowness of his hand
Was the flourish of success.
|
221,604
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46279/xi-mon-january-1736-hath-xxxi-days
|
Benjamin Franklin
|
XI Mon. January [1736] hath xxxi days.
|
Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion,
Instead of Truth they use Equivocation,
And eke it out with mental Reservation,
Which to good Men is an Abomination.
Our Smith of late most wonderfully swore,
That whilst he breathed he would drink no more;
But since, I know his Meaning, for I think
He meant he would not breath whilst he did drink.
|
190,848
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29351/while-you-sleep
|
Lucile Adler
|
While You Sleep
|
The fox runs under a snowy sky,
Rusty dark, his plumed tail
High in the rimed grasses.
The wind rises
As you dream little leaves with cold berries
Packed in silver boxes,
And a woman hard as an unripe berry
In a red dress who says,
"Will you help?"
And you run like the fox
Away through white frozen fields
To sink in a bed of green boughs
Crying "Help!" in your dream
And looking about you lest
That berry-bright woman
In her thick dress accuse you
Of what? Vanity? Safety?
But she has gone; wind
From the snowy field brushes
Your cheek with joy
As you sleep under the rosy rug.
The fox runs away,
His rusty brush dark
In the frosty white grasses
That, melting, might expose him to morning.
|
222,246
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46677/early-occult-memory-systems-of-the-lower-midwest
|
B. H. Fairchild
|
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest
|
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father's Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night , on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.
Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road . Roustabouts shouting from the crow's nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford's blue hood. Blue, this blue.
Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time's dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world .
|
177,564
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22518/poem-the-farmers-sit-with-cats
|
Warren Ramsey
|
Poem
|
The farmers sit with cats upon their laps.
Let us get pets and raise them just like that.
Not our great fear, infinite animal
Nosing the raw fog, pawing the blunt hill,
Gross body filling valleys, flattened head
Pushing our doors and threatening our windows.
This kind of dragon that began the world
Will surely end it if we stay insane.
Now know it is a creature of ourselves.
Our guts have fed it and our heads its home.
At dark cock-crow we cried and let it be.
All day it swelled upon the outside hills.
Instead of dreading what returns at night
Stiffen at morning and prevent the birth.
The game of darts, the cider on the shelf,
The winter politics and peasant jokes,
Plain things despised at seventeen or so
By wrong inductions from our friend Flaubert,
Be praised and be the symbols of our health.
Tl help you with the cooking and the house,
On fine days dig the garden, hope for Spring.
Cat purr. Fire snore. Be sleepy, me and you.
Poor Faust and Helen! -we have earned this too:
The fireside blindness and the morning view.
Warren Ramsey
THREE WAVES
Three waves washed up from the sea,
|
173,804
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/20402/episode
|
Henry W. Rago
|
Episode
|
Furious the fire that ate his heart,
And wild the thunder in his breast;
But the road was long and hard and flat
That stretched incessant to the West.
Deaf to the songs of windows open
And blind to the lights along his way,
He wandered, knowing only a picture,
Only a song he heard one day.
The claws within him tore his flesh:
A voice within him shouted hunger:
The wild birds flew the other way.
He looked ahead, and journeyed longer.
There was a flower in the dawn,
White and fresh and brightly wet-
He stooped, afraid to touch its softness,
And all within him cried for it.
What beauty to remember now!
He wanders yet: alone, but knowing
He found the flower he had longed for-
And left it growing.
|
162,140
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13859/a-song-of-no-consequence
|
Willard Wattles
|
A Song of No Consequence
|
This too delicious burden,
This too persistent urge,
This aching and this beauty,
And the answer of her breast:
This is her glowing guerdon,
And this my utter rest.
Take loveliness and wonder,
Take splendor and take pain,
Clean lightning and brave thunder,
The silver slant of rain,
And one white flower thereunder
That lifts her face again.
Love, love, love, love-
The morning star is slain.
|
246,739
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146511/talk-to-the-undertaker
|
D. A. Powell
|
Talk to the Undertaker
|
let's say you want flowers
you should have flowers
let's say you want forever
you should have flowers
let's say he should have
you in and out by tuesday
and if you want flowers
you should have flowers
and the flowers will stay
fresh until tuesday you say
yes that's the way it's done
should you want flowers
|
172,478
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19654/a-fig-for-selene
|
Josephine Pinckney
|
A Fig for Selene
|
Charlotte went walking in the park at evening
While the dusk hung there, windowed west with sun
And east with moon that overlooked the wall.
Said she:
What if the moon be ashes?
They say the moon is arid
Cinders of dead volcanoes.
What if her light be feigning
And gloze this brick I am treading
With rosy-silver mocking?
What if the dead be dead
And vanished altogether,
And loveliness be but ashes?
Slowly Charlotte travelled the brick walk,
Cutting a rose-pale circle in the grass
That breathed upon her with a warm night-smell-
The multitudinous, the living grass.
Soon he will come to meet me-
(Quick blood halts and listens!)
Come like a big dark bird
Flown in from a bare bright world. |
He will feather me soft with silence,
Nest me in with possession,
Scatter the ashen moonshine . . .
Blood still pounds in its tunnels,
Courses in hidden splendor
Like running flame in the pulses-
What if the moon be ashes!
Josephine Pinckney
ONE SAVAGE WORD
He, sad brother of darkness,
And she, drab sister of sin,
Tore from the crumbling evening
|
245,791
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143762/ark-parting
|
Jay Macpherson
|
Ark Parting
|
You dreamed it. From my ground
You raised that flood, these fears.
The creatures all but drowned
Fled your well of tears.
Outward the fresh shores gleam
Clear in new-washed eyes.
Fare well. From your dream
Tonly shall not rise.
|
193,058
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30461/locked
|
Robert Pack
|
Locked
|
Locked in the clock of my brain, ears
Cringe at cricket-chirps, foot-screeps
On the pebble path. A starved god
Squats in my mind, twitching, watching,
Waiting to die. After the waft
Of mown lawn, my spirit springs free
As'a genie, floats out spiraling.
Eyes browse at the blurted moon-rise
Of elephant, parading clouds; my west arm
Arcs over to the east, circusing yes
Follow me, my love, where mist hills, hefted
Like"dinosaurs, lift through the night.
I will give everything away.
|
223,044
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47169/mighty-forms
|
Brenda Hillman
|
Mighty Forms
|
The earth had wanted us all to itself.
The mountains wanted us back for themselves.
The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us;
that's why it happened as it did, the split
as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . .
Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street
and the tube that held the trout-colored train
and the cords of action from triangular buildings
and the terraced gardens that held camelias
shook and shook, each flower a single thought.
Mothers and children took cover under tables.
I called out to her who was my life.
From under the table-I hid under the table
that held the begonia with the fiery stem,
the stem that had been trying to root, that paused
in its effort-I called to the child who was my life.
And understood, in the endless instant
before she answered, how Pharaoh's army, seeing
the ground break open, seeing the first fringed
horses fall into the gap, made their vows,
that each heart changes, faced with a single awe
and in that moment a promise is written out.
However we remember California later
the earth we loved will know the truth:
that it wanted us back for itself
with our mighty forms and our specific longings,
wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn't;
the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted,
the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed
during the shaking lasted, the painting released
by the wall, the mark and hook we placed
on the wall, and the nail, and the memory
of driving the nail in, these also lasted-
|
230,036
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52038/poetry-56d23032f1dc5
|
Lydia Huntley Sigourney
|
Poetry
|
Morn on her rosy couch awoke,
Enchantment led the hour,
And mirth and music drank the dews
That freshen'd Beauty's flower,
Then from her bower of deep delight,
I heard a young girl sing,
'Oh, speak no ill of poetry,
For 'tis a holy thing.'
The Sun in noon-day heat rose high,
And on the heaving breast,
I saw a weary pilgrim toil
Unpitied and unblest,
Yet still in trembling measures flow'd
Forth from a broken string,
'Oh, speak no ill of poetry,
For 'tis a holy thing.'
'Twas night, and Death the curtains drew,
'Mid agony severe,
While there a willing spirit went
Home to a glorious sphere,
Yet still it sigh'd, even when was spread
The waiting Angel's wing,
'Oh, speak no ill of poetry,
For 'tis a holy thing.'
|
227,594
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50456/behold-the-grave-of-a-wicked-man
|
Stephen Crane
|
"Behold, the grave of a wicked man"
|
Behold, the grave of a wicked man,
And near it, a stern spirit.
There came a drooping maid with violets,
But the spirit grasped her arm.
"No flowers for him," he said.
The maid wept:
"Ah, I loved him."
But the spirit, grim and frowning:
"No flowers for him."
Now, this is it -
If the spirit was just,
Why did the maid weep?
|
240,254
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57838/prop-rockery
|
Emily Rosko
|
Prop Rockery
|
We were thinking of starting a band,
all lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery.
This one would be gem, that one
metamorphic, the rest pebbles and some
laboratory-grown, semi-precious stones. The trees
were in it for the long-run; they swayed or stood
stoic, sheltered what they could. We made the cast
as an idle grouping: we played the trump, the idiot,
the glue. We backdropped with hearts hardly
beating, our eyes set straight in our heads: the bombed-
out school kids, the oilfields scrubbed in turns. We chewed
the fat amongst ourselves. You said, this place
should be more festive: a lightning bolt, a snail, a fraud. I set
a crumb aside for the local roof rat; you tallied the droppings,
the amputees, the gold. I blew my top when you lost
"Dominion." You said, what can be done? It's gone,
it's gone. Wind started in through the rift-way, buzzed
over our slate-blue bones. All the leaves have aged
with kindness, all our pretend
looped and windowed raggedness went largely
unseen. We were on stage the whole performance, held
our breath for the final moments with cheeks rent
and red. No neck was slit on our backs; no distraught
lover jumped from our cliff's edge. There was a stirring backstage
we could sense it: a temptress, some anger, some
sin. Weeds came thick around us. The act
had been bungled sorely. We withheld our opinions, sat in wait.
We were good for a throwing.
|
185,472
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26608/poets-wish-tr-by-william-jay-smith
|
Valery Larbaud
|
My Muse
|
VOL. LXXXV No. 5
FOUNDED 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE
four poems of a multimillionaire
MY MUSE
Of Europe I sing, her railroads and theatres,
Her constellations of cities, and yet
I bring to my poems the spoils of a new world:
Shields of rawhide painted in garish colors,
Red-skinned girls, canoes of scented wood, parrots,
Arrows feathered with green, blue, and yellow,
Pure gold necklaces, strange fruits, carved bows,
And everything that followed Columbus in Barcelona.
You possess the force, my poems, oh, my golden poems,
And the surge of tropical flora and fauna,
All the majesty of my native mountains,
The horns of the bison, the wings of the condor!
The Muse who inspires me is a Creole lady,
Or rather the passionate slave the horseman carries
Attached to his saddle, slung across its crupper
Pell-mell with precious stuffs, gold vases and carpets,
And you are conquered by your prey, O llanero!
My friends recognize in my poems
My voice with its familiar after-dinner intonations.
(All one has to know is where to put the stress.)
I am operated on by the invincible laws of rhythm,
I do not understand them myself: they are there.
O Diana, Apollo, supreme neurasthenic
Savage deities, is it you who dictate these strains,
Or is it but an illusion, something
Purely of myself-a borborygm, a rumbling in my
bowels?
|
178,278
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22887/southern-mammy-sings
|
Langston Hughes
|
Southern Mammy Sings
|
Miss Gardner's in de garden,
Miss Yardman's in de yard,
Miss Michaelmas is at de mass
And I am gettin' tired!
Lawd!
lam gettin' tired.
The nations they is fightin
And the nations they done fit.
Sometimes I think that white folks
Ain't worth a little bit.
No, m'am!
Ain't worth a little bit.
Last week they lynched a colored boy.
They hung him to a tree.
That colored boy ain't said a thing
But us all should be free.
Yes, m'am!
Us all should be free.
Not meanin' to be sassy
And not meanin' to be smart-
But sometimes I think that white folks
Just ain't got no heart.
No, m'am!
Just ain't got no heart.
|
202,298
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35088/rebecca-at-play
|
Miller Williams
|
Rebecca at Play
|
She lies in the grass and spreads her golden hair
across the grass, as if for simple joy
in being what she is, quietly aware
that she is not a tree or horse or boy.
|
187,090
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/27429/inside-the-angel
|
Jay Macpherson
|
Inside the Angel
|
Formless we meet and struggle like the sea.
We touch and bind, but all our cords are sand.
Above in the sad head, deserted stand
Bones of arcade, cellar and gallery,
A solid city; and the living band
Of language coldly stars the vault its floor.
But one remembers what we were before,
You my crowned palace, I your fathomed land,
And the containing angel sets our loss a shore.
|
221,926
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46472/little-father
|
Li-Young Lee
|
Little Father
|
I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won't drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.
|
223,128
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47261/into-battle
|
Julian Grenfell
|
Into Battle
|
The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight,
And who dies fighting has increase.
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from glowing earth;
Speed with the light-foot winds to run
And with the trees to newer birth;
And find, when fighting shall be done,
Great rest, and fulness after dearth.
All the bright company of Heaven
Hold him in their bright comradeship,
The Dog star, and the Sisters Seven,
Orion's belt and sworded hip:
The woodland trees that stand together,
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridges end.
The kestrel hovering by day,
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they,
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.
The blackbird sings to him: "Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another;
Brother, sing."
In dreary doubtful waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers; -
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!
And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind,
And only joy of battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind,
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.
The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.
|
193,690
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30777/the-city-56d2143fb79c9
|
Tom Clark
|
The City
|
Bewildered, frightened, flattered and alarmed
By and at its speed and heat, you have not yet
Learned the fuel of this bonfire is yourself,
A very heavy tuition of sparks is needed
To keep everything going, and this is what
Causes the exhaust of your Muse these days
To evaporate miles ahead of you, a threatening
Premonition pennoning against the sun's button.
The skywriters appear greasy, superannuated.
Through steamed glasses you see your own words
On the clouds-no, even the word "clouds" is
Banished by the white aqua of sun fizz.
The words there now say you are
One of the bugs in these racing cars whose forays
Create a dynamo of shadowy menace,
The only shadow there is here.
Knowing this, and that wisdom elevates,
You have not yet learned to look down on
The city.
But you do, through wet hot
Sleep's notch you look down on the city and see
Sticky threads tucked into place, a web,
By myriad legions of shiny and demented bugs.
To look down on THAT
Is worth sweating here for, also, it is to be
A part of the blue up there you almost forgot.
|
214,894
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41408/escaping-savonarola
|
Roberta Spear
|
Escaping Savonarola
|
They say his voice was thin,
his speech rutted
like a country path as he
damned them all, promising
a place for their souls
as small and dark as a thimble.
No wonder they fled,
even the bravest Florentine,
if only to their gardens
outside the walls where
the sunflower and fennel
swayed peacefully.
Pleasure was everything.
The flood of his words
must have quickened their pace,
some fleeing even further
with their casks of wine
and feather bedding to
the starry meadows of Futa Pass.
There, like raven and wren,
they nestled together
and the cries of hell
seemed far away.
Witchgrass, lavender,
shadowy pockets of birch
and pine, each gentle
curve up the hillside brings
above it all. I peer down
from a bluff on the small
fires of men flaring
in the city below: bright
ribbon of the autostrada,
emberous streetlamps
wreathing the squares where
once the pyres of books,
false hair and meters
of red satin smouldered
and were swept away.
At the summit, a small cafe
and a few survivors who
still remain. The old men
bent over the usual game
of cards turn to us with
the only question they can
remember: not, Are they saved?
but, Is he dead yet?
And, Can they go home?
Yes ... and no, I think,
eyeing the pig splayed on
the marble counter where
a girl is assembling
my sandwich. The braised
sow hoards in her lumberous
folds the true secret
of transcendence: a blind eye
and an indifference to air
which makes passion possible.
Save your breath, the sow
might say to those men grumbling
over a card up the sleeve,
a pot missing lire.
They would never believe
that just a few steps from
where they once lived, the ashes
mounding into pyramids,
the paving stones were now
the river, the threats
had conceded to the silence
of the singed tongue.
Now, a fragrance rose:
garlic, tobacco, cologne.
Their old rooms in which
the chairs and tables waiting
patiently over the years
had finally given up,
knowing as the window knew
with its gaze on those
distant peaks, that once
they had ascended, they would
never come back down.
|
209,590
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/38745/insomnia-56d21c3156fa9
|
Jon Loomis
|
Insomnia
|
Sleep waits in its velvet dress,
the nightbirds grieve, the dark lawn
stretches into dogwood trees. My wife
breathes slowly through her mouth, blue sheet
gathered at pale breasts. The telephone
rests in its hard bed, the dog dreams,
the house ticks and sighs. All day long,
all night the steel rain, but now
it stops. Small water
ticks from spatulated leaves. The planet
turns, my wife turns. Sleep lies between us
like an old love, longed for in the dark.
SUSAN HAHN
INSOMNIA
Every night is the longest day -
I cannot turn away or rest.
Like the girl awake and lost
on the brambly path
into the twisted forest,
I am caught between the blazing
roses and the waiting crone
at her doorstep. I look up
from my pillow, alone,
and see you,
the lover, asleep
in your casket-
eyes, hands, penis
finally at rest. The world
drifts sightless, while I wander
the lit rooms, sit in each
chair and stare into the blind
windows. Past time
I see you returned, young
and perfect, and I come back
once more to bed, my body
open and asking
you in, pray
the hag has faded
into her hut,
so we can lie together and fit
into the luxurious darkness.
|
248,687
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/150251/black-notes-on-genre-for-my-beloved
|
Rukmini Bhaya Nair
|
Black Notes on Genre for My Beloved
|
i poetry
Pull down the crows from the sky
Piya, summer's blood is barely dry
What is a poem if it cannot try
To call you a ****ing ***** or die
Whispering in your arms, this lie
When Kabira met Keats, he said:
Our poems make canopies overhead
Always
Or, beloved, if I told you
We are words
And the spaces between us
Make poetry
Would you not say
Piya, why the fuss?
We knew it was thus
Always
sun's
amber
squirt
or
piss's
intricate
stains
on
indian
walls
voice's
uncertain
trickle
down
page's
length
small
syllables
entombed
in
marble
vastness
kisses
kismet
some
call
this
poetry
Others declare it's a fact! Check it out on Google or Wiki or just about anywhere.
India is the only country in the whole wide world with an ocean named after it
Where cunning gods tricked flatfoot demons into parting with sublunary nectar
Placed in mythic textual jars no human hands could ever touch and lightning
Struck dead in the water lovelorn whales keening in decibels no biped ear might
Fathom and red coral crumbled to depths in which no ship anchored and grainy
Infinities of sand queried: what's any poem but this endless curving water body?
Always
Okay, all right, I think I get it
But, Piya, this universal shit
Kaavya, dhvani, and infinite woe
This my clownish, doggerel show
It is not poetry, nor Indian
And I cannot call it English
Except the crows insist it is, it is
Always, the cawing
Poetry does not sell!
Which may be just as well
No bourgeois form, this
Shaped like a kiss
At the world's dawn
Was a tulip poem born
Maybe it was the dawn
Always
When that first turtle
Space-time loaded
On its crenellated back
Limped gamely ashore
A love poem took shape
Out of thin air and lack
And that, Piya, was that
Always
ii prose
Pull down the crows from the sky, Piya!
Long before those roads diverged
They cawed above the yellow woods:
Syntax is wing and body! Surge
Of air pushing a weight of words
Had we no prose, Piya, we could not ask why!
Why, Piya, why?
iii epic
Of the epic, we demand feats great gods
Cannot perform but men easily accomplish.
When the Ramayana went to Bali, the gods
Mounted stilts, casting huge shadows on dim
Walls, and the crows crashed from the sky
That was history, Piya
iv tragedy
Everything happens offstage
Clytemnestra's scream, Draupadi's rage
Catharsis rehearsing softly in the wings
Then the crow-garbed chorus troops in and sings
Fate, Piya, is a funny thing
v comedy
Beloved, if I told you how the rangeela women
Of Barsana curse and beat their cowering men
At Lathmar Holi, would you ever stop laughing then?
Even the crows, Piya, cheer!
vi novel
1864: the first Indian novel in English, Rajmohan's Wife
Black and white make gray: the long, postcolonial twilight
Crows are early birds, Piya
vii tweet
Twitter 2006: in this electrifying handholding, our new, pterodactyl longings
& language in its 6-inch grave unmaking president & slave
Characters reveal character, my sweet
|
181,208
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24392/perspectives-of-the-lonesome-eye
|
James Merrill
|
Perspectives of the Lonesome Eye
|
In a green twilight the avenues of our love
Are shadowed by an unseen running child;
Pennanted, the tower pointing informed perspectives
Discloses how the emotions are least artless
When most experienced. And the grand lonesome
Artifice is needed to mask the primitive
Sensation. If wholly within or without, artless
Is what the eye sees. Disbelieving in perspectives,
The earliest artist is the child, the child
Holding the handsome beetle to the lonesome
Glass, unafraid to mingle primitive
Sensation with science, profane with sacred love.
The canvases like landscapes in a lonesome
Eye flicker upon the iris, the primitive
'Sensation altered, enhanced by love, but love
Of a peculiar kind, not passion but perspectives
Seen through the glass of personal feeling, not artless:
Binding the duplicate verities of the child.
Or take the pointillists--how their perspectives
Illustrate through complexity the artless
Plein-air delight, expound the primitive.
Sensation with lucidity that a child
Could understand; yet, not unlike love,
Always about to fail, expose the lonesome,
The more than lonesome terror beyond the child,
The void without nuance, abyss with love
Curiously insignificant, as the artless
Shows through the careful device of dots, perspectives,
In all its fearful rawness the. primitive
Sensation. Catastrophe. . We wander, lonesome,
Each of us, in the gallery, lonesome.
And there is no arrangement of perspectives,
We feel occasionally, will cause these primitive
Longings to meet harmoniously. O child
Within us, do not be artful or artless,
Speak to us clearly, in any language: love.
. Perhaps the primitive is the least lonesome.
Perhaps the child has never once been artless,
Bound by perspectives, we are loosed by love.
|
211,998
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39958/the-tempo-room
|
William Matthews
|
THE TEMPO ROOM
|
Chapel Hill, NC, March, 1967
The jukebox blared "A Whiter Shade of Pale."
Three thousand students burbled in the quad
rallying pep for the basketball squad,
but we dissidents gathered over ale
and spurned (our specialty) that crap. "After
the revolution," I heard from the next booth,
"TI be a printer and multiply truth."
I didn't stifle my harsh laughter.
Well, I was young, but there's a cure for that.
But why deride the boy I sprouted from?
He did the best I could. It's wrong to spy
on him like this-I wrench my eyes away
like ripping a Band-Aid off. May his glum
night be done, and soon, and out of sight.
|
205,924
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/36907/old-stories-tr-by-kimon-friar
|
Yannis Kondos
|
Old Stories
|
The ancient warriors rose
and with their short swords
beat on the door. Earth
and rust fell from their bodies. Savage faces
in the little light of the moon.
They sought for a woman with red hair who had
lured them into snares with wine and caresses.
They didn't know her name or her tribe.
I opened without much interest. Their dry eyes
looked inside. I showed them your death
certificate. They left. I remained, however,
in history for a while. Then I put on my armor,
took up my sword, went into the other room
and hacked you to pieces.
|
190,788
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/29321/grey-olives
|
Antonio Machado
|
Grey Olives
|
Grey olives
bleached track.
The sun has drained back
the colour of the plain;
and the evil days'
essence of dust
into her memory
dries downwards through me.
|
164,800
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/15369/gargoyles-of-notre-dame
|
Henry H. Bellamann
|
Gargoyles of Notre Dame
|
POEMS
GARGOYLES OF NOTRE DAME
I watch them shuttle and weave and run
Like dust before a scolding wind:
Boats on the water,
Leaves on the bank,
And men on the streets and square.
Leaves and snow and leaves again,
And men.
Boats to the sea,
Leaves to the wind,
Men to gibbet and whéel-
To thrones,
To bed,
To Pére Lachaise.
Muddy tracks in the snow,
And blood on the wheel,
And rotting leaves on the tiles-
The wind and rain will sweep them away
As a soft curled plume might sweep
Flecks from a silken gown.
Shuttle and weave and run-
Boats to the sea,
Leaves to the wind
And men to Pére Lachaise.
|
163,560
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14677/burdens
|
William Haskell Simpson
|
Burdens
|
Burden of water jars,
Borne up steep trails;
Burden of babies,
Asleep in thonged cradles.
And a heaped-up load of loving,
Carried lightly,
Over all the trails
To the end of them.
|
166,062
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/16082/madonna-di-campagna
|
Alfred Kreymborg
|
Madonna di Campagna
|
These sonnets were composed in isolation,
from Fanuary to Fune, 1922,
in the village of Madonna di Campagna,
on Lago Maggiore,
at the foot of the Simplon Pass,
in the Alps of Lombardy.
MADONNA DI CAMPAGNA
Madonna Di Campagna is the name
They christened their few hovels and a church,
And their small roads cross others in the search
For further stones to consecrate her fame;
The mountains over mountains now acclaim
A hope with which the stars, from dawn to age,
Illuminate the skies, from page to page,
In scrolls these humans fancy pray with flame!
The village has no further roundelays-
The folk are lazier, the atmosphere
Weighs drowsily beneath the golden haze:
What work have they ahead, whose past lies clear,
Except to raise some earth to scatter those
Whom the Madonna gathers for repose?
|
182,002
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24806/in-egypts-land
|
Arthur J. Bull
|
In Egypt's Land
|
I cannot hold the river in my hand;
Nor meet the malice of the Pyramid;
I do not know where robber Time is hid,
Nor can I sift his secret from the sand.
O, that there is a secret I know well,
I cannot see, I do not understand;
There is revolt in this despotic land,
And in the desert, space is citadel.
There is a line of courage in this light,
A sword of anger striking this despair,
And in the nothing, everything begun:
I see the writhing river from a height,
Time, wounded, staggers in the flaming air,
And vainly frowns the everlasting stone.
|
184,406
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26060/double-sonnet
|
Anthony Hecht
|
Double Sonnet
|
I recall everything, but more than all,
Words being nothing now, an ease that ever
Remembers her to my unfailing fever,
How she came forward to me, letting fall
Lamplight upon her dress till every small
Motion made visible seemed no mere endeavor
Of body to articulate its offer,
But more a grace won by the way from all
Striving in what is difficult, from all
Losses, so that she moved but to discover
A practice of the blood, as the gulls. hover,
Winged with their life, above the harbor wall,
Tracing inflected silence in the tall
Air with a tilt of mastery and quiver
Against the light, as the light fell to favor
Her coming forth; this chiefly I recall.
It is a part of pride, guiding the hand
At the piano in the splash and passage
Of sacred dolphins, making numbers human
By sheer extravagance that can command
Pythagorean heavens to spell their message
Of some unlooked-for peace, out of the common;
Taking no thought at all that man and woman,
Lost in the trance of lamplight, felt the presage
Of the unbidden terror and bone hand
Of gracelessness, or the unspoken omen
That yet shall render all, by its first usage,
Speechless, inept, and totally unmanned.
|
180,100
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/23817/gastropod-at-prayer
|
Hoyt H. Hudson
|
Gastropod at Prayer
|
Hoyr HUDSON
GASTROPOD AT PRAYER
Hereout from my smooth twig oozes dim dumb being
out from me, the center, out of my snug house
feeling far, scenting, and by fond faith seeing
beyond this bush where I am come to browse
thereward through the garden to my God who walks
about it, guards it, knows it as I cannot know,
cherishing me allwhile, furnishing the lush stalks
I toil at munching on, smoothing the paths I go
whereon I lay, for praise of Him, my gummy trail.
Accept, tall God, this laud from me, your snail.
My track is for His glory and my service is
to strip His bushes, quell the poison-breathing flowers,
and check all spreading flat enormities
that threat His garden-and my garden: it is ours.
He drenches it with juices I may suck and live,
contrives my spiral-growing tight and gritty shell:
what should I wish but serve Him, what but give
my muscled self to glide His errands well?
My speed is yours, big God, my strength, my jaws,
Authenticate my labor. Humble me to your laws.
Hoyt Hudson
|
194,044
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30954/boy-in-sunlight
|
Malcolm Cowley
|
Boy in Sunlight
|
FOUNDED IN IQOI2 BY HARRIET MONROE
VOLUME CXII NUMBER 3
JUNE 1968
MALCOLM COWLEY
A COUNTRYSIDE
1918-1968
BOY IN SUNLIGHT
The boy having fished alone
down Empfield Run from where it started on stony ground,
in oak and chestnut timber,
then crossed the Nicktown Road into a stand
of bare-trunked beeches ghostly white in the noon twilight-
having reached a place of sunlight
that used to be hemlock woods on the slope of a broad valley,
the woods cut twenty years ago for tanbark
and then burned over, so the great charred trunks
lay crisscross, wreathed in briars, gray in the sunlight,
black in the shadow of saplings hardly grown
to fishing-pole size: black birch and yellow birch,
black cherry and fire cherry-
having caught four little trout that float, white bellies up,
in a lard bucket half-full of lukewarm water-
having unwrapped a sweat-damp cloth from a slab of pone
to eat with dewberries picked from the heavy vines-
now sprawls above the brook on a high stone,
his bare scratched knees in the sun, his fishing pole beside him,
not sleeping but dozing awake like a snake on the stone.
Waterskaters dance on the pool beneath the stone.
A bullfrog goes silently back to his post among the weeds.
A dragonfly hovers and darts above the water.
The boy does not look down at them
or up at the hawk now standing still in the pale-blue mountain
sky,
and yet he feels them, insect, hawk, and sky,
much as he feels warm sandstone under his back,
or smells the punk-dry hemlock wood,
or hears the secret voice of water trickling under stone.
The land absorbs him into itself,
as he absorbs the land, the ravaged woods, the pale sky;
not to be seen, but as a way of seeing;
not to be judged, but as a law of judgment;
not even to remember, but stamped in the bone.
"Mine," screams the hawk, "Mine," hums the dragonfly,
and "Mine," the boy whispers to the empty land
that folds him in, half-animal, half-grown,
still as the sunlight, still as a hawk in the sky,
still and relaxed and watchful as a trout under the stone.
|
233,436
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53987/banking-coal
|
Jean Toomer
|
Banking Coal
|
Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coal
To start the Fire, did his part well;
Not all wood takes to fire from a match,
Nor coal from wood before it's burned to charcoal.
The wood and coal in question caught a flame
And flared up beautifully, touching the air
That takes a flame from anything.
Somehow the fire was furnaced,
And then the time was ripe for some to say,
"Right banking of the furnace saves the coal."
I've seen them set to work, each in his way,
Though all with shovels and with ashes,
Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;
Whereupon they'd crawl in hooded night-caps
Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone
Would die, but like as not spiced tongues
Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up,
Never strong, to anyone who cared to rake for them.
But roaring fires never have been made that way.
I'd like to tell those folks that one grand flare
Transferred to memory tissues of the air
Is worth a like, or, for dull minds that turn in gold,
All money ever saved by banking coal.
|
167,652
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/16953/chang-fu
|
Marjorie Allen Seiffert
|
Chang-Fu
|
In the celestial city of Chang-Fu
There is a palace of jade
That the cool winds blow through
On summer afternoons. . . . I am afraid
I'll never see the city of Chang-Fu.
To journey across the Chinese sea,
And enter a palace gate,
Takes courage and a golden key. .. .
It is too late;
Only a key of iron was given to me.
A key of iron that opened every door
Whereon I knocked,
But the tall dragon-gates before
The city of Chang-Fu are locked,
Are locked to iron keys forevermore.
|
171,792
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19260/poem-for-a-dark-girl
|
William Closson Emory
|
Poem for a Dark Girl
|
She that dove into a somber pool
of sleep; breasts like silver pain
to kiss; flesh to burn cold fire.
And her song like a scarlet bird
flashing through a brilliant sky.
The shimmer of bodies twisting slowly
through the cool green dimness
down and down, and a far bell booming.
There is water rushing over pebbles
into laughing peace.
I not alone but with her comforted.
|
254,103
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/160695/quarantine-64ad8a3adc5b2
|
Franny Choi
|
Quarantine
|
Because I did not have to smell the cow's fear,
because I did not have to pin the man, watch his eyes
go feral, because I did not have to drag the stones
that formed in the child's body, because I did not sheathe
my hands in dank soil, or skirt the machine's battering, the needles
knitting my lower back, because when the factory collapsed
I smelled no smoke, and no one made me kneel at the cop's boots
and count the pulse slowing beside me as every sound
soured, because my hands have never had to resist being comforted
by the warmth of blood, because the plastic-
wrapped meat and the mousetraps, because my job
was to stay clean and thankful and mostly imaginary, I have been stealing
what little I can:
onions. sandpaper. handfuls of skin.
the dumpster's metal groan. hurried breath. hot knives.
|
1,546,744
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54669/february-snow
|
Francisco Aragón
|
February Snow
|
The tint of the sky between sunset and night.
And wandering with you and your nephew
in that maze, half-lost- Madrid
of the Austrias -looking for Plaza of the Green
Cross where, days before you arrived,
an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels
straddling the curb, and so the van
heading for the barracks that morning
had to slow to squeeze
past . . . Back at the hotel your mom
is holding up her gift-Amethyst, she says
admiring how light
when passing through a prism
bends. At his window that morning before we began
my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift
and descend, settling on roofs and cars.
And I think of you and your wife
and daughter: getting to see Madrid
in white, your visit winding down, and how
I had wanted that lesson to end
to get to the park-Retiro, they say, is the city's
one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps
cease
when grass is completely covered
as if walking on a cloud. The year before
on a visit from the coast, a friend
sitting at a window
watched the flakes flutter
and fall, dissolving before reaching
the ground-aguanieve, he said
while from a town near Seville
B-52s were lifting off . . .
I was in a trance that week
though like most things the war
in the Gulf was soon another
backdrop, like the string of car bombs
the following year. And yet that morning
as soon as I heard, something led me
not to the park but down
to City Hall, workers in the street
evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached
the site-of course it was cordoned
off, the spray of glass, the heap
of twisted metal, and so later learned their names
their lives. Of the five
there was one: a postal clerk who
as a boy, would plunge his hands
into the white, the cold
a sweet jolt
whenever he got to touch
the stuff, scooping
it tightly into a ball
like the ones he would dodge and throw
years later
at his wife-to-be: those weekends,
those places-away from city air-
a release . . . Miraflores, Siete
Picos, Rascafría . . . It's in
his blood , she would come to say
chatting with a neighbor
about his thing for snow-the way it falls
softly, blanketing roofs
and groves, villages
nestled in the Sierra's
hills: it is February
and she is picturing him
and the boy, up there now
playing, horsing around
|
230,204
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52127/the-unruly-child
|
Bob Perelman
|
The Unruly Child
|
There is a company called Marathon Oil, mother,
Very far away and very big and, again, very
Desirable. Who isn't? Back connecting pure dots,
Fleecy intelligence lapped in explanatory sound
The faces make difficult.
Learn the language.
That beautiful tongue-in-cheek hostage situation:
My mind, up close, in pjs, and I use it.
Wanting to fuck an abstraction nine times in a row,
Continuous melismata, don't stop, don't stop, no name, no picture.
There is a series of solids, mother,
Called people, who rise to the transparent obtainable
Solo windows, mornings, afternoons,
And there are military operations called
Operation Patio, Operation Menu.
It is the individuals who finally get the feel of the tenses.
So that it may snow, has to snow on the muddy corpse.
There is a boundary, mother, very far away and very
Continuous, broken, to interrogate civilians, the self,
The text, networks of viewers found wanting a new way
To cook chicken, why not?, to kill while falling asleep.
There is the one language not called money, and the other not called explosions.
|
215,992
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41958/the-shoes-56d22053e5807
|
Brent Pallas
|
The Shoes
|
When they first came
their mouths agape
their bodies shining
like beetles about to stir
every edge poised
for the multitude of steps
some moment
of leaping not yet taken
their hides stiff
shielding some tenderness
within, warming
to the creak of movement
over penitent steps
or dusty wastes, unyielding
tasks or stony memorials
of waiting
through the heat of day's
quiet middle, every icy
threshold or soggy spring
their heels flush with pavement,
their soles flung aside only
for love, all the tattered
maps of their seams, every
unforgiving rub.
|
212,212
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/40065/apple-slump
|
Paul Muldoon
|
APPLE SLUMP
|
The bounty-threat of snow
in October. Our apple-mound
some boxer fallen foul
of a right swing
waiting for his second to throw-
the sound, turn up the sound-
that mean little towel
into the ring.
JACK MYERS
|
200,642
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34257/fragments-56d217adb3d18
|
John Cotton
|
Fragments
|
15
Remembered summers are the smell of nettles,
The sun rebaking brick and the air afloat
With small flies, while spring was always cow parsley
And the nesting of birds. So we observe
The seasons while awaiting that event
Which acknowledges none. Though windows
Of a classroom which overlooked a cemetery
Made clear seasonal increases in business
And the nature of tributes.
16
Now old friends of an age keep going
And each funeral feels more like my own.
So seize the moment! Yet, what is it?
Writing before breakfast in a small garden
In Tregowis when a swish like that of water
Tells it is seven: the gentle footed cows
On their way for milking. While somewhere
In Ampurias Francesca quietly irons
In the cool of morning before work begins.
17
These are it then, unobtrusive, easily missed.
Eliot in the rose garden. This is not
To ignore the true giving of flesh and mind.
Yet one act of kindness, a touch of hand or breast,
Can mean more than nights of passionate gymnastics,
And as I write this, from the tree above me
The over-ripe plums fall softly to rot.
Oh come! Not so sad, love, there's good stuff still in us,
|
215,482
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41703/the-death-of-the-self
|
Linda Pastan
|
The Death of the Self
|
DECEMBER 2002
LINDA PASTAN
THE DEATH OF THE SELF
Like discarded pages
from the book
of autumn, the leaves
come trembling down
in red and umber,
each a poem
or story,
an unread letter.
Think of the fires _
in ancient Alexandria,
the voluminous smoke
of parchment burning.
Open your arms
to the dying colors,
to the fragile
beauties
of November.
Deep in the heart
of buried acorns,
nothing is lost.
|
237,462
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56346/going-home-new-orleans
|
Sheryl St. Germain
|
Going Home: New Orleans
|
Some slow evenings when the light hangs late and stubborn in the sky,
gives itself up to darkness slowly and deliberately, slow cloud after slow cloud,
slowness enters me like something familiar,
and it feels like going home.
It's all there in the disappearing light:
all the evenings of slow sky and slow loving, slow boats on sluggish bayous;
the thick-middled trees with the slow-sounding names-oak, mimosa, pecan, magnolia;
the slow tree sap that sticks in your hair when you lie with the trees;
and the maple syrup and pancakes and grits, the butter melting
slowly into and down the sides like sweat between breasts of sloe-eyed strippers;
and the slow-throated blues that floats over the city like fog;
and the weeping, the willows, the cut onions, the cayenne, the slow-cooking beans with marrow-thick gravy;
and all the mint juleps drunk so slowly on all the slow southern porches,
the bourbon and sugar and mint going down warm and brown, syrup and slow;
and all the ice cubes melting in all the iced teas,
all the slow-faced people sitting in all the slowly rocking rockers;
and the crabs and the shrimp and crawfish, the hard shells
slowly and deliberately and lovingly removed, the delicate flesh
slowly sucked out of heads and legs and tails;
and the slow lips that eat and drink and love and speak
that slow luxurious language, savoring each word like a long-missed lover;
and the slow-moving nuns, the black habits dragging the swollen ground;
and the slow river that cradles it all, and the chicory coffee
that cuts through it all, slow-boiled and black as dirt;
and the slow dreams and the slow-healing wounds and the slow smoke of it all
slipping out, ballooning into the sky-slow, deliberate, and magnificent.
|
214,354
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41138/revengers-tragedy
|
Jane Yeh
|
Revenger’s Tragedy
|
REVENGER'S TRAGEDY
You don't return my calls. In a month of missing days
Everything thwarts me, even the curls of my hair freeze;
My skin sheds, leaving flakes on my wool sweater. We are
erratic
Both, changing with the weather, but you think of it
As an astronomical progression. Last year you called me
Your little sunflower. Eleven blizzards later I think of how
To get you: calculating mercury, sighting along
constellations,
Rehearsing the lines of a paid assassin-not know me, my
Lord?
You cannot choose! I bide time,
Hoarse-tongued & blue as poison, the double
Line of my eyes gone to slits. I hate like a tooth hurts,
At the root. I will startle the bones
From their sockets, they will crack like glass
& catch in your throat. I will dazzle
Your heart from its cage. The lungs will knock & clap
Together in the empty place. The applause will make you
rattle.
|
206,852
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/37373/timeline
|
J. Allyn Rosser
|
Timeline
|
The first June I thought I would die of heartbreak
for a boy who didn't sufficiently appreciate a girl
who spent spare hours studying the section titled
"Stranger in Town" in Spanish in a Nutshell (}Socorro!
iMe han robado!) and Practical Chinese Conversation
(Hsia-yu pu ch'ing-t'ien, "It's not a fine day
when it rains") you nearly died of spinal meningitis
in Paris. And when my car spun out of control
on the way back to college after seven months in Boston
as a dropout manqué, you were packing to move to Boston
where your life would become so rich with friends
and compatible intellects that you suspected marriage
was the logical next step in this ladder of happiness.
At the moment I decided to teach myself shorthand,
having dropped out for good for the second time,
you were working in the back of a bookstore
dreaming up a woman who could understand Nietsche
in German, not once forgetting the z in his name,
and who could write you celebratory poems
that wouldn't sound tinny. And when I threw
my spiral dictation notebook at the fast-talking
TV anchorman, you were forgetting to remove
your red spiral notebook from a phone booth-
a loss you would mourn all your life. And it's true
that the week I entered law school you'd begun to look
at your wife's male friend with slightly altered eyes.
But is it possible that the very afternoon
I decided to quit law school for romantic reasons,
you discovered you were drinking a beer you didn't want,
and feeling bored with marriage, or merely numb?
While I helped, more or less, to push my sister's car
up the blizzarded mountain in my wedding dress,
you were upstairs in your father's house in Vermont
reading Kafka while everyone else was out skiing
in perfect conditions.
Wen shih ch'u tsai na-erh? Where is the information desk?
Of course, when I moved out that first summer,
under a shower of words hissed sharply enough
to be heard over all the neighbors' sprinklers, you
were still either bored or merely numb. And later
that same summer when I moved back in, carrying
grounds for divorce in the deepest pocket of my heart-
that's right, moved back in, an emotional gesture I still
can't swallow in retrospect, but have proof of-
you were writing about a mistress you didn't have.
And wasn't it ta-hou-nien, or "year after year after
the next," that I picked up the note left on my car seat
about the woman my husband had been lying about-
or so the note said-
just as you were thinking about not having children
for a while? Then the argument about his children
being his children, and the subsequent silent meal
I don't remember cooking or eating, at which moment
you were just carrying the window fan we still have
into your new apartment in the strange city
to which I would move the next time I left him.
|
200,348
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/34110/mountain-of-the-holy-cross-san-juan-range
|
Reg Saner
|
Mountain of the Holy Cross: San Juan Range
|
I
I rise through the holocaust of an old burn.
As if fire improving its past
each smatter of aspen leaf draws its pale green trunk
some 20, 30 feet up-the branches sassy
with a chitter and fluff of jays. Once, when it was still
a breathing universe, these aspen limbs trembled
that their wood had been nailed
to the death of a god.
Above, edge and jut. 10-acre pre-Cambrian thrust
taking wing on warps grotesque and plausible
as those continuous proofs of the insane.
2
Like hosts escaped from the pallid
fingers of priests, the sun haloes in flecks
of high cottonwood lint drifting east with root systems
in quest of themselves. Because the hardest places
to touch are those where nothing has died
or not nearly enough, I wish them valleys, and climb
toward the ice couloirs glittering like starlight
kindled in basalt, through wind-smells
musky with pools, through the billowing saxifrage-
aimless and deep as missing turns
of some maze. As if of this one
blueprinting each thumb.
3
How I love these shaken tussocks of vetch, eddies and
flowings
of woodgrain blazed into relief by grit!
Its knurl on tamarisk root.
The quarter-sized sparkles of quartz pretending
to fit my hand like lost gifts. Here where reason
is all we have, and can never call us home
merely to dream of their power
seems to use it.
4
Which is how we arrive
at the fabulous, out of an Illinois child who supposed
each mountaintop far to the west stood waiting
to tell him its story
turning out to be summit rock and a brain thinned
to this pillar of gnats
till its lung-beat catches up, letting me clear
and simplify with a view
whose only sound is scuffed air.
5
My parka hoodflap rackets one cheek with windburn
and sandpaper weather easing fracture lines
of whatever they knew. Miles below
through the systole, diastole of water vapor and heat
tempering the sky, tuning the distance for us
pine forest goes blue from eating blue dust
and stone sleep.
And the snowfields flash.
6
And my eye over its nimbus of granite broken
somehow into tongues that make multitude
and solitude identical terms
is an immense detail
centering 360 degrees of haze peaks.
So this is the map.
7
Drifting in the still wheel of everything
giving rise to speech, I read it to say what we are
must always be where.
And my name's the edge of an intricate
hole the wind wants back. A pulse of burnt air,
a breath taken in, given up in this dream
that I came, and for no reason I know
was blessed by what cannot bless.
|
177,106
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22283/and-times-there-are
|
Rupert Hodge
|
And Times There Are
|
TWO POEMS
: AND TIMES THERE ARE
And times there are when I know my flesh is clay,
All feeling reaped, and footsteps of the mind
Clogged and impossible, so that for me
Your August weather is like a child's laugh
I do not understand, although tears move
Unwitting at its beauty. And in grief
I see the passionate mind halted in shame.
But for today my flesh O far outgoes
All earthy presage. Quicksilver I am
To your every breath, my love, and to your thought
As water instantly to the least wind.
And mind, no longer fumbling, no more caught
In the blunt clay, childs it with tendril sentences
Of fingertip speech to climb our silences.
BLIND :
|
196,540
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32204/ego-56d215b90e50b
|
Robert Siegel
|
Ego
|
Has thrust his nose under every board,
smelt out every wild carrot and white grub,
stucco'd the dirt with his tracks from side
to side, rubbed smooth the corner
posts, left his pink, red-bristled hide
on every barb of five strands of wire;
chewed the bark from the one scrub pine
that pitches a ghost of shade at noon,
bangs incessantly the metal trough-lid
at off-hours, chuffs down the white meal
raising a cloud around his ears, and cleans
each cob with the nicety of a Pharisee
tooth for tooth, squeezing contentedly
his small bagpipe voice as he mashes
corn with a slobbery leer and leaves
turds like cannonballs across a battlefield.
Meanwhile his little pink eye is
periscoped on the main chance-
the gate ajar, the slipped board,
the stray ducky that flusters through the wire-
saliva hanging from his mouth like a crown jewel.
His jowls shake with mirth under the smile
that made a killing on the market, won the fifth caucus,
took the city against all odds.
No wonder we shake at the thought of his getting out
of his square patch, electrify the wire,
(At night we hear him thump his dreams
on the corrugated tin hut and shudder,
the single naked bulb burning
through our sleep like his eye!,)
take special dietary precautions against
his perpetual rut, except that March day
we drag the yearling sow to him
through mud up to his hocks. From that handseling
comes the fat litter-the white one for the Fair,
the spotted black to be slaughtered in November.
We don't show him to most neighbors-sometimes
to relatives, after picking them asparagus or straw-
berries. In June, framed by clover and bees
stringing out the sun under a blue sky
sugared with little clouds, he is, in his way,
quite grand, the enormous rusty blimp
of his body supporting intelligent
waggish cars, regally lidded eyes and
a pink, glistening snout
ready to shove up the privates of the world.
|
185,446
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26595/lily
|
Neil Weiss
|
Lily
|
two poems
LILY
When you rose in your dirndle skirt,
it was as if summer seas
spoke up in the spout of your blouse,
and your face was a moon on these.
Where you sat was a lily pad
underneath, set up for an easel:
each rising bell of water froze
a bubble for maternities.
Children were possible
between your knees, the ritual-
your fears, subject to these,
would hold them off a little longer.
Your thighs in my mind at your rising,
the billow about your hips-
pity stabbed with knowledge an instant!
though the moment would never stand.
But you did. And a bird flew the mesh
into a dissolving brew of whiteness,
my mind empty, and your shoulder
beauty-marked, a little older.
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245,445
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142216/poet-and-professor-overture
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Paul Engle
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Poet and Professor Overture
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IOWA WORKSHOP
POET AND PROFESSOR OVERTURE
HINNY-"a hybrid between a stallion and an ass" (Web-
ster). The result of the union is sterile.
Agreed-the creative force must be present or none of
God's creature can reproduce, poem or offspring. No quan-
tity of concentrated vitamins or suggestive hormones will
make a mule fertile. No quantity of concentrated kindness
or suggestive harshness will make no-talent fertile. (Now
and then I read a poem which makes me feel that the
writer must have had just such a quaint ancestry as the
unfortunate animal above, for it sings with a similar vio-
lence of voice; but it is reassuring to know that the blood
line has little chance of becoming firmly established. )
The wicked aspect of human nature is that you can graft
bone and transplant the eye itself but you cannot with the
tenderest surgery give an imagination to the stolid man,
The presence of so many poets at our American colleges
means that many people believe poets are born, but they can
be half-made. The creative talent cannot be created, but
once it is discovered it can be shaped and nourished and
matured. But is there not a danger here? Will every talent
be bent in the direction which is the teacher's own, rather
than being helped to find its own native direction? I think
this is a real danger and that it has happened. In the teach-
ing of poetry, as in all our human experience, variety is a
powerful virtue. No form or attitude must be imposed; dare
the young poet to find his own. Refer him always to the
great examples, shove his poem up against the valid verse
of his own time, but honor his pains by letting them work
the words in their own obstinate way.
The hope in criticizing a young poet's writing is to make
him his own self-critic. Knock the tenderness toward his
own poems out of him before the remote critic knocks the
poems out of him. A poet's adolescence begins when he can
Jook at a new poem ruthlessly. With some this occurs amaz-
ingly young, with some it is sadly delayed, and some die
without having had their poetic voice change.
But I was arguing above that poetry is not merely glan-
dular, that whatever secretion of the mind causes it can,
to a limited degree, be affected. This is why poets are at
colleges, in the effort to affect not simply the old concerns
of study, things factual and speculative, but things imagina-
tive as well. This has not happened in the world's history
before. In the end, it may be the one unique quality Amer-
ica contributes to education. It may have arisen because of
our peculiar need to organize all human activity, or because
of our sense that anything is a proper concern of a univer-
sity, whether determining the sex of little chicks or the hex
of folklore.
The college may give the poet a small community where
he can live congenially, in the security of practising his art
as a respectable trade. Let it be a place where the uncertain
poet can find confidence and the too sure poet can be
knocked down a few times. In a country with American
distances we need such communities scattered from coast
to coast.
The young writer has always looked to the older for
advice ("load every rift with ore"), and the college has
now formalized this relationship a little. But as important
as teaching is the fact that young poets instruct each other,
by plain association, by counter criticism in class, by watch-
ing the way in which each sweats out the tangles of word
by word and line by line. The teacher is lucky too, for he
learns by the sudden thrust of insight from his students,
from the unexplainable, quick brilliance of line from a poet
who has toiled u to that moment in the stony fields of the
trite and the dull
. Naturally, you can't treat the writing of poetry as if it
were a course, say, in history, where a student can gather
facts and attitudes and offer a paper which is essentially
"true" as far as the opinions of historians go. A poem is not
a study of a problem, but a strange melting together of
sound in the ear, of conception in the mind, of impulse in
the nervous system, of old actions mired in the memory.
The most the teacher can do is to probe the body of the
IOWA WORKSHOP
poem for lesions that corrupt the working of phrase, image,
rhythm, tone, theme-to verify, with his limited power,
whether the poem is "true" to itself. And with his objective
eyes he can find a weakness of word a day, a month, or
years earlier than the poet himself might find it. Here is
the teacher's usfulness-to find the good in a poem, how-
ever slight it may be, and to urge the young poet to thrust
his verse in that direction (as much as this can be done
consciously; but holding it in the mind will surely affect the
unconscious shapers of language in the deep part of the
mind). His usefulness is also to slash at the awkwardness,
the unoriginal word or attitude, the sentimental, the flat;
in brief, to heighten the poet's own awareness of his virtues
and faults, to give him the alertness to affect wisely that
portion of the writing of poetry which is avaliable to the
mind at work.
How to do this? Not, at Iowa, by assignments; not an
isolating of rhythm, as such, but always the writing of a
complete poem, for rhythm is never divisible from the mat-
ter it mimics. Any figure of speech, any adjective, any
irony, is conditioned by the total intent of the poem, and is
to be considered always in relation to that. Student poems
are mimeographed the previous week so that every student
may read them in advance of class. The poems are anony-
mous with the hope of avoiding reluctance to criticize and
embarrassment of the poet himself. (But often in the heat
of controversy the poet gives himself away and joins the
debate on his own work, with results both helpful and hi-
larious.) By immersion in a continuing How of concern for
improving his own poems and those of his fellows, the whole
creating mind of each separate poet may be, however
slightly, displaced toward a finer art.
At Iowa we do not believe in a writing course by itself,
but consider a close, analytical reading of literature, old
and modern, as a solid help to the beginning writer. There
are courses for this purpose tied in with the writing pro-
gram, but in addition poems are often taken apart in the
writing class, usually because a student's poem offers simi-
lar situations of intent or language and the established poem
will help him see his own quality, or his lack of it.
But ideas of "classroom" and of "teaching" do not belong
in this sort of thing. It is as personal as face to face. The
fact that at the University of Iowa a student may submit
groups of poems or short stories instead of the usual piece
of research as thesis for any advanced degree, and that
there is a degree particularly designed for the creative
writer (the Master of Fine Arts), means that there must be
some formal arrangement of hours and credits. But the effec-
tive work is informal, poet to poet, face to face.
The poems from Iowa are not the selected best of a year
or two, but those available this autumn. In the Spring of
1951 the best poems of the season were published in a
booklet, Poems From The Iowa Poetry Workshop (The
Prairie Press, Iowa City, $1.00), and various others from
the class have been eliminated by acceptance for Poetry,
The Kenyon Review, and other magazines. Furthermore, I
have left out poems superior to some I have included, in
order to print examples by as many members of the class
as possible, rather than to print only the very best, which
would have meant fewer poets and more poems by them.
I should like to add that any program of creative work
in writing at the University of Iowa is made Possible only
by the good will of Department Head and administration,
in itself a significant (or shocking) development in educa-
tion. I am still astonished to find a University disposed to
look at a poet as an honest man, and as quick to give a
fellowship to him as to a student wanting to study the mat-
ing of opossums (do they hang from high branches in mid-
air?), the reading habits of Republican voters (is there a
habit?), or the violent rages of the atom when properly
tickled (the poet is an exploder and a rager too).
There are poets here who were writing sentimental trash
a short time ago. They are suddenly, sharply better. This is
the hope and purpose of a poetry workshop. But there are
still flabby lines and stanzas. We must tighten them to-
morrow.
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237,146
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56170/pluralisms
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Anna Maria Hong
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Pluralisms
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to challenge sleep to go against
the one-eyed god
of victimhood:
Polyphemus by way of Redon
rising, open eye ripe
with stupid gazing.
How dare you look at me?
plural tense: now and then, to bed and back again and
one more war.
The oral rinse of moral sense can lift the fence
of expectation, expand the dome
of tolerance. I, too, arose from
the unthinkable, used to Nobody
responding loud as circumstance.
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181,822
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/24713/horace-hawspice-at-a-desk-in-denmark-street
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Nicholas Moore
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Horace Hawspice at a Desk in Denmark Street
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A MAGAZINE OFVERSE
VOL. LXX NO. II
MAY 1947
THREE POEMS
HORACE HAWSPICE AT A DESK IN DENMARK STREET
H™ at my desk I sit alone and brood.
Alone, alone . . . the darkening sky is grey
With rain; the high plumes fall and I recall
Pleasures of summer, gone that distant day-
Then She was darling in my arms who now
Torments me, whom I brood upon, who looks
So marvelous, and was my wonder then.
Now I alone sit with my thoughts and books,
Unable more to think, unable now
To hold her image as I used to hold
It marvelous and bright before my mind.
The body that I loved turned to me cold,
And given to another, and the mind
Filled with new pleasures from another's love;
'What matter now that She swears love to me?
I am alone; the ticking minutes prove
My loneliness, and where am I to turn?
I turn to Helen and to fields of Troy
And hear again those furious angry men
In tumult. But again those eyes destroy,
And all the visions of the past are gay
With an illusory glory. Then as now,
The She triumphant bent men to her will,
And broke lightly each deeply-pleaded vow.
I know my She is no such heroine;
The easier the love the easier
It goes. I am distraught forever now,
My love too great to fly again to her;
For love that meets love smaller than itself
Dies. What though she renew her love for me?
I who was true remain the same for her,
But she cannot be still the same to me.
NICHOLAS MOORA
Better that she go back and take her stupid
And thoughtless lover; better that she lie
With him again, and have her foolish pleasures.
I here, who see the rain fall from the sky,
Tear after tear, am sorry, brood with books,
Try to be gay, forget, and love her still
But clouds cover and fill the whole bright sky,
And I am mad to find her beautiful.
I find her beautiful, but still the image
Fails. She is gone from me. The act is done;
And in my mind repeats continually.
Even with her now I shall be alone.
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210,934
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39423/rounders
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Joan Newmann
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Rounders
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In memory of William Turner
The field in new hay-
Cut hedges for the burning-
Front grass, warm smell on dusk dew.
And my uncle running to bowl.
My aunts, in short-sleeved dresses, laughing like girls.
Even my mother, saying we should go in,
Caught and held the ball my brother hit,
Coming at her like an orb of solid darkness;
A child-skill remembered somewhere between
knuckle and fist.
Flowers taking in their petals; heavy honeyed
Night scent of turkcap lilies;
Whisper of mist on sycamore leaves-
And my uncle running out of the dimness,
Night cry of roosting birds,
Swinging his arms in a fierceness:
From his hand the gentle
Fall of ball upon my astounded, waiting bat.
'Rounders: a child's bat-and-ball game, one forerunner of
baseball
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228,328
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/50911/loners
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Jean Follain
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Loners
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The door-latch is always stubborn
beyond it dozes a beast
tinged by the fire
they know who is walking
the curve of the road
by their footsteps alone
glance at the fancy lamp
hanging from the sooty ceiling
a green and speckled plant withers
a child who has wandered cries
beneath a long low sky
and at last the snow comes on.
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236,608
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55857/as-is
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Nicholas Friedman
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As Is
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Just north of town, a quaint Sargasso Sea
for bric-a-brac: the barn, itself antique,
spills over with a grab-bag panoply
of outworn stock revalued as "unique."
Typewriters tall as headstones fill the loft
where they've been ricked away like sacks of grain;
a coffer yawns the must of oak-gone soft-
when one man, squinting, lifts the lid to feign
intrigue. Nearby, his wife surveys the smalls:
art deco bangles bright as harpsichords,
a glut of iron trivets, Christmas balls,
Depression glass and warping Ouija boards.
One man's junk is another's all the same.
They don't buy much, but that's not why they came.
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202,246
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/35062/miss-caroline
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Rennie McQuilkin
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Miss Caroline
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Oh there was an old lady who lived in
a room about the size of her
(to wit, as tiny as a mouse)
in the biggest house
on the swankest street in Livonia, N.Y.
And it wasn't that Mr. wouldn't let her
out (though he wouldn't). It was just
she was a witch, she knew it, she knew it.
And so she powdered pale, wrote poetry,
and took to riding the banister
when guests came by, descending whoosh,
a bellying of petticoats.
She even learned to curdle milk
with a scream like this AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH.
Halloweens when ghosts and goblins
dared her door, she knew enough to
scare them properly, then smiled so big
she lit them safely down the street
and safely home and stayed with them
as long as long could be.
She was a treat the children hid
where parents never went.
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238,716
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57031/the-house-on-moscow-street
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Marilyn Nelson
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The House on Moscow Street
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It's the ragged source of memory,
a tarpaper-shingled bungalow
whose floors tilt toward the porch,
whose back yard ends abruptly
in a weedy ravine. Nothing special:
a chain of three bedrooms
and a long side porch turned parlor
where my great-grandfather, Pomp, smoked
every evening over the news,
a long sunny kitchen
where Annie, his wife,
measured cornmeal
dreaming through the window
across the ravine and up to Shelby Hill
where she had borne their spirited,
high-yellow brood.
In the middle bedroom's hard,
high antique double bed
the ghost of Aunt Jane,
the laundress
who bought the house in 1872,
though I call with all my voices,
does not appear.
Nor does Pomp's ghost,
with whom one of my cousins believes
she once had a long and intimate
unspoken midnight talk.
He told her, though they'd never met,
that he loved her; promised
her raw widowhood would heal
without leaving a scar.
The conveniences in an enclosed corner
of the slant-floored back side porch
were the first indoor plumbing in town.
Aunt Jane put them in,
incurring the wrath of the woman
who lived in the big house next door.
Aunt Jane left the house
to Annie, whose mother she had known
as a slave on the plantation,
so Annie and Pomp could move their children
into town, down off Shelby Hill.
My grandmother, her brother, and five sisters
watched their faces change slowly
in the oval mirror on the wall outside the door
into teachers' faces, golden with respect.
Here Geneva, the randy sister,
damned their colleges,
daubing her quicksilver breasts
with gifts of perfume.
As much as love,
as much as a visit
to the grave of a known ancestor,
the homeplace moves me not to silence
but to righteous, praise Jesus song:
Oh, catfish and turnip greens,
hot-water cornbread and grits.
Oh, musty, much-underlined Bibles;
generations lost to be found,
to be found.
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230,538
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52328/long-marriage
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Gerald Fleming
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Long Marriage
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You're worried, so you wake her
& you talk into the dark:
Do you think I have cancer , you
say, or Were there worms
in that meat , or Do you think
our son is OK , and it's
wonderful, really-almost
ceremonial as you feel
the vessel of your worry pass
miraculously from you to her-
Gee, the rain sounds so beautiful,
you say- I'm going back to sleep .
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1,579,453
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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1579453/a-desert-memory
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Bertrand N. O. Walker
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A Desert Memory
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Lonely, open, vast and free,
The dark'ning desert lies;
The wind sweeps o'er it fiercely,
And the yellow sand flies.
The tortuous trail is hidden,
Ere the sand-storm has passed
With all its wild, mad shriekings,
Borne shrilly on its blast.
Are they fiends or are they demons
That wail weirdly as they go,
Those hoarse and dismal cadences,
From out their depths of woe?
Will they linger and enfold
The lone trav'ler in their spell,
Weave 'round him incantations,
Brewed and bro't forth from their hell?
Bewilder him and turn him
From the rugged, hidden trail,
Make him wander far and falter,
And tremblingly quail
At the desert and the loneliness
So fearful and so grim,
That to his fervid fancy,
Wraps in darkness only him?
The wind has spent its fierce wild wail,
The dark storm-pall has shifted,
Forth on his sight the stars gleam pale
In the purpling haze uplifted.
And down the steep trail, as he lists,
He hears soft music stealing;
It trembling falls through filmy mists,
From rock-walls faint echoes pealing.
Whence comes this mystic night-song
With its rhythm wild and free,
With is pleading and entreaty
Pouring forth upon the sea
Of darkness, vast and silent,
Like a tiny ray of hope
That oft-times comes to comfort
When in sorrow's depths we grope?
'Tis the An-gu, the Kat-ci-na,
'Tis the Hopi's song of prayer,
That in darkness wards off danger,
When 'tis breathed in the air;
Over desert, butte, and mesa,
It is borne out on the night,
Dispelling fear and danger,
Driving evil swift a-flight.
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225,462
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48887/spring-snow
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Linda Gregerson
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Spring Snow
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A kind of counter-
blossoming, diversionary,
doomed, and like
the needle with its drop
of blood a little
too transparently in
love with doom, takes
issue with the season: Not
(the serviceberry bright
with explanation) not
(the redbud unspooling
its silks) I know I've read
the book but not (the lilac,
the larch) quite yet, I still
have one more card to
play. Behold
a six-hour wonder: six
new inches bedecking the
railing, the bench, the top
of the circular table like
a risen cake. The saplings
made (who little thought
what beauty weighs) to bow
before their elders.
The moment bears more
than the usual signs of its own
demise, but isn't that
the bravery? Built
on nothing but the self-
same knots of air
and ice. Already
the lip of it riddled
with flaws, a sort
of vascular lesion that
betokens-what? betokens
the gathering return
to elementals. (She
was frightened
for a minute, who had
planned to be so calm.)
A dripline scoring
the edge of the walk.
The cotton batting blown
against the screen begun
to pill and molt. (Who
clothed them out of
mercy in the skins
of beasts.) And even
as the last of the
lightness continues
to fall, the seepage
underneath has gained
momentum. (So that
there must have been a
death before
the death we call the
first or what became
of them, the ones
whose skins were taken.)
Now the more-
of-casting-backward-than-of-
forward part, which must
have happened while I wasn't
looking or was looking
at the skinning knives. I think
I'll call this mercy too.
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197,822
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/32847/the-weak
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Greg Kuzma
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The Weak
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So much that is weak has survived
and lives out its long wondrous days
with only the least of annoyance.
The grim and holy, the loud and reckless,
pass them, making their great surface
disruptions. So much that is weak and
slight has bloomed beneath the dark brow
of the storm. Rage, rage, or whisper,
' everything fades. The tall trees of the
yard, the small dry walnut shells.
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173,002
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/19944/desert-moonlight
|
Allen Seiffert
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Desert Moonlight
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A rustle of leaves through the Suara
Where trees have yet to grow;
The silver sand between
Waits for the shadow to go.
The moon shines down on Death
Among those prickery plants
As a rattler writhes his way
Into a deadly dance.
A distant dog is baying
And a coyote answers his moan.
The cactus is outlined sharply
On ground as gray as a bone.
And the rattler glides in circles
And then into elipses,
Fantastical geometry
In a kingdom of eclipses.
The blackness of the hills
Is blacker than Satan's mind,
But the blackness of the shadows
Is ink of a different kind:
It is an ominous dark
That holds a hundred eyes;
[ 198 ]
It is the frenzied dark
Seen in a madman's eyes.
Not for all the gold
That man could ever plight
Would I go out alone
On a moonlit desert night.
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214,256
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/41089/stationed
|
Albert Goldbarth
|
Stationed
|
It's the other ones, who soon enough return
to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest
to their own deaths-in their gaiety
and everyday distraction, they're so open
and unguarded . . . anything could enter them;
could claim them. It's the ones who weep
incessantly that are saved for now, the ones
who have taken a little of it
into their systems: this is how
inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult,
a job: it requires time to complete.
And the tears?-the salt
of the folk saying,
that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers
and keeps a bird from flying;
keeps it stationed in this world.
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170,860
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/18741/gods-hands
|
Robert Liddell Lowe
|
God's Hands
|
God's hands, I think, are pale and cool
As stars entangled in a pool.
A lily's flesh is not so white
As they, nor is the fragile flight
Of birds so swift. But hands, be they
Those of divinity or clay,
Cannot resist the sharp desire
To finger flame and play with fire.
So field and flood will end in flame,
For gods, like boys, must have their game.
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244,779
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92575/three-anonymous-poems
|
Sherod Santos
|
Three Anonymous Poems
|
Dates unknown
THE BIRTH OF CHRIST
To find heaven in a cattle stall-
No, to find something stranger still,
To find heaven's vault has been unroofed
By an infant in a feeding trough.
TO PRIAPUS
It's to you, great God of gardens, that Potamon
Leaves his billhook, bush-harrow, threshing-sledge,
A sickle for harvesting artichokes, the thread-
Bare coat that held off both the wind and rain,
His suntanned, oxhide, weatherproof boots, a wood-nibbed
Dibble for setting sprouts, and the mattock
That in the dog days he'd keep ready to unblock
The rocked-in sluice and irrigate the beds.
INVITATION TO OBLIVION
Why was I born? Where did I come from?
How do I happen to be where I am?
Knowing nothing, how can I learn anything?
I was nothing, and yet I was born.
And before too long l'Il be nothing again,
Nothing at all, of no value whatever,
And such is the lot of everyone. And so,
I say, brim the mixing bowls with wine,
For only in oblivion is oblivion braved.
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432,053
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/144533/i-would-drive-to-your-grave
|
Leslie Harrison
|
[I would drive to your grave]
|
I would drive to your grave but your grave is the crash
the froth foam pebbles small rocks the sand smoothed
soothed each rising each leaving tide you lie in the ocean
the water in the waves your home the stern the back
the wake of a boat those curled white lines of leaving
I would visit your grave but your grave is a single blue
afternoon of passing isles the green and granite shores
I would come to your grave but your grave is the fire
oh mother it is cold tonight and I have no heart
for this burning for the fine sift of ash which is all
that comes back all that comes after I would visit
your house but your things are missing are missing
your touch as your eyes failed I brought you lights
and I would see again that brightness I would drive
to your grave but I am your grave your marker
oh mother I am your stone
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195,132
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/31500/the-wonders-of-the-arm
|
Michael Benedikt
|
The Wonders of the Arm
|
I
This arm. It lies on the table like an old musical instrument or a
dishmop, smoking a cigarette this time. I'm glad it is here but
the question is, what shall I use it for?
It will express my will, or my whim, as words will; it's free.
I say something or my arm does something.
There it goes again, traveling across this empty space again in
order to pat the head of the lady who happens to be sitting next
to me; or perhaps I risk linking arms with my dear friends,
my leery familiars, the poets; my colleagues who do not know
now that they are comrades
Besides that, in the last five hours it has had a sufficiently varied
schedule, writing a check, unzipping a dress, waving hello and
goodbye, shaking the hand at the end of it, mixing drinks,
lighting joints, and so forth,
Or admonishing the universe with uplifted Socratic finger.
Of course, sometimes it becomes my own admirer, I find myself
patting myself on the back
Or shaking hands with my own hand, and agreeing to vote for
it next November 4th. Fortunately, election day is November
7th
2
Just think how efficient the arm is; imagine how it would be if
whenever something had to be done by the hand of man, both
arms always had to be moving and participating, simultane-
ously doing the same thing.
O the arm is very practical! It seldom engages in wasted motion.
The fact of the matter is, it usually ends up doing more than one
thing with the same gesture.
For example, if I lift up a cigarette from this ashtray in front of
me, I am apt to tap off the ashes while doing so
When reaching across the desk to answer the telephone while it
is ringing, the arm may pause en route several times to neaten
up objects scattered on the tabletop
If I turn the pages of any book, I may also use it to scratch the
palm of the hand that is turning
Before, when I was patting your head, I might also have reached
down with my long, playful and inquisitive index finger to
tap you suddenly but gently on the nose.
But that's the arm for you, it loves experience, it loves and hates,
laughs and cries at the same time, helps and hurts; one thing
we must admit, it is not single-minded after all, you can't
really say that the arm is half-assed.
Moreover: not only can the arm do two things at once, but
sometimes each thing can have a double effect. For example,
a Boy Scout arm may help a feeble old pensioner across the
street, while in the meantime dreaming of seizing her legacy
But there it is again, that's the arm for you all over, incorrigible,
indefatigable, and though it sometimes gets tired or changes
its mind two or three times, it loves what it fears and hopes
to overcome its fears, it likes life
3
It is time to let your own arm wander now; let your dear arm
depart, like inspiration's guiding star, like the muse's inter-
mittent illumination, let it depart, hand spread wide, fingers
and thumb outstretched, like the lark of lyric poetry
Let it touch everything and depart everywhere
Each finger being like a little ship, each finger a traveler with a
little knapsack of nail on its back, loaded with blood vessels
and sensitivity
And each thumb a tiny Columbus commanding
The four famous ships of his fleet, the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa-
Maria and also the other famous ship which nobody but me
knows about and which sunk in the original harbor at Genoa.
Oh yes not only do I praise every single finger of the hand on the
arm, but also the thumb thereof
And some day we will compose other poems in this series, poems
like "The Wonders of the Waist," "The Joy of the Abdomen,"
"The Miracle of Nostrils," "The Delights of Legs," "Pleasure
of the Tibia and the Fibula," or even a "Wisdom of the Human
Forehead"
But for now as you know, we do not trust the mind.
Let us compose our first new poems by sending them with
fingers outstretched, here and elsewhere, like explorers of the
future, to wander the keys of our typewriter
And so we will complete the body of our work.
|
177,272
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22367/girl-on-a-bicycle
|
Troy Garrison
|
Girl on a Bicycle
|
The blue-enameled body of the slender beast
Is alive, with the pulse of movement,
Between her thighs;
Sunlight splashes from the wheels
As she sends it through a brilliant puddle;
Its nickeled antlers seem entangled
In the flowering of her breasts.
Seemingly she is borne, against her will, away
From me, like Europa by the bull; |
Only her smile, as intimate
And impersonal as the sun,
Is left reflected on my lips-
And the street becomes a shell
From which the tender meaning's flown.
|
175,858
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21619/when-apples-on-the-lilac
|
David Schubert
|
When Apples on the Lilac
|
BRASS BAND! PEASANT DANCES! EXHIBITION BOXING!
INDIAN BUDGING! FISH POND! BALLOON MAN!
CLOWN! A COCOANUT SHY! HORSESHOE PITCHING!
ARCHERY! HIT THE MARK - WIN A PRIZE!
MAGICIAN |! CHARLIE CHAPLIN MOVIES!
FORTUNE TELLER! FLOWERS AND PLANTS FOR SALE!
BRING THE CHILDREN IN THE AFTERNOON !
BRING YOURSELF IN THE EVENING!
DANCE WITH FRIENDS IN THE EVENING!
WITH THE TRUNKLESS MAN IN THE MOON!
SEDUCTIVE TUNES! IRRESISTIBLE ORCHESTRA! SAIL
FOR THE BALI ISLES IN A DINNER PAIL!
ADULTS 50 CENTS, 25 CENTS CHILDREN!
FREE DIRECTIONS FOR THE LONESOME PINE TRAIL!
The factory whistle blew and I remembered
The tent pitched in the vacant lot where I
Crept Saturdays to watch the Baptist Revival
And saw the Preacher knock the Devil out
While the tent leaped in the moon like a silver trout.
Outside the hoky poky man chipped ice
And while the voices droned like flies
With bottles full of hair tonic he placed
The color all around. I hugged my slice
Of water and I saw where Gabriel (dressed
In corduroy) laced Mrs. Johnson's shoes.
The organ-grinder with the parrot used to come
Out of a child's ear. We heard him blocks away.
Before the box began we knew the play.
His organ box had a sign, "Hearts mended here!"
Two hearts were intertwined in crayon. The parrot
Picked the pennies from our fingers and like
A tragedian gravely dropped them in a cup.
They tinkled a moment - were still -
And all the music was gathered for the till
Except the scattered chords we used to whistle.
O Mr. Medium Man - Italian - hurdy gurdy man -
Your little box spilt heaven and the parrot
Told fortunes on small name cards.
We all grew up to be President in the White House,
Preferably though, in a Log Cabin or -
Best of all - an aviator
On a fire net. Where is the nickel garret
We entered and could stroke Polly parrot?
A Ford sedan explored original skies -
The paper airplane sinks, freighted with lies -
The long ears of a child a jackass' ears -
Why does your face, Van, change to another's?
And Jesus leaning on a hydrant in the noon
On the lame street where the men stood
Into the moon, into back office doors -
Upon the air he watched their faces die,
Or sprawling on the windows like glass flies,
And pity like an adolescent cries -
Crossing the street - self-conscious awkward tears
For love!... Love that moved the stars
Begs at the corner and a hag's face wears.
|
160,900
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13152/the-beckoning-moon
|
Frances Shaw
|
The Beckoning Moon
|
I went to the hills for courage,
But the hills have made me weak;
I went to the hills for high resolves
And the wisest words to speak.
There were bonfires down in the valley,
And a beckoning moon in a tree;
So I sped a flame-winged messenger
To call you back to me.
|
163,212
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14475/the-home-coming-56d20838c060f
|
George Marian
|
The Home-Coming
|
They come back!-
Up the great street,
To the drum-beat and the heart-beat
And the thud of tramping feet;
To the lightning and the thunder
Of the nation in the street.
They come back
From that heart-breaking
Terrible leave-taking,
From the cold lips
Of the unquiet sea, and the lips
Of the dead children of the ships,
From the unending waiting
Wrapped in that death unending,
And the quick charging
Into what mess
Of bloodiness,
They come back!
O hearts that bled,
See-they are not dead!
They come back! They come back!
They come back!
Up the great street,
To the drum-beat and the heart-beat
And the sense of shadow feet,
To the tear-drops and the heart-stops
Of the pale ones in the street,
March the ghosts
Of all the hosts
'That went but come not back.
From the heart-breaking
Terrible leave-taking,
From the hell
Where they fell,
From that ghastly night ride,
And the lonesome row of beds where they died,
They come back
Up the great street,
To the drum-beat and the heart-beat
And the music of the street,
To the laurel wreath of tears
And the crown of honor of cheers
From the nation in the street
For the smooth brow
And the still feet.
O hearts that bled,
And bleed and bleed,
For your dead
Who to our utter need
Gave what they had,
Forgive
If we who see our loved ones live
To-day rejoice
With straining arms and husky voice!
Forgive, forgive!
They come back.
Up the great street
To the madness of the gladness
Of the people in the street,
The wounded come
Home.
From the heart-breaking
Terrible leave-taking
They come back
To the memory and the aching.
O you of the torn flesh,
Now when you hear our cheering and our cry
Of welcome, do not glaze your eye
With that strange wondering why
You did not die!
The empty earth about you
Could not endure without you!
You are the faith that's in us, and the seeing
Beyond ourselves into our utmost being.
They come back,
Up the thousand streets,
To the uproar and the furore
And the wild joy of the streets,
To the lightning and the thunder
And the rainbow in our hearts,
Then shout, throats, and brasses, blare!
And flags and bugles, tear the air!
For here go
Heroes of heroes, they who dare
For dreams give things-
Flowers and houses and love
For the vision of
The spirit that is in them.
Blow, flags, and bugles, blow!
Here where our heroes go
All of the most beautiful and great-
The poems and the music of all time,
The sense that there is something that's sublime-
Are marching up the street!
Up the great street,
To the drum-beat and the heart-beat,
And the cadence of their feet;
Up the great street,
From what heart-breaking
Terrible leave-taking,
From what bloodless treachery
And what bloody butchery,
They come back veiled in their victory!
George Marian
[203],
|
193,800
|
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/30832/death-and-the-maiden-56d2144e0be45
|
Dick Gallup
|
Death and the Maiden
|
Travel gets us through the breach
Wearing it down On the water
This picture comes back
The blue letter folded beside the bowl
You heard about it
Those lights on the water
It was a geographical joke
A big ugly antique
Good morning. It was sky
In the English manner
It was by then a civilian
By which our hands return
Looking down in the mouth
Like the feelings of this rustic life
A field of earth plants
Where she was alive
In the goatskins
Standing out in an open field
When appearance reaches
And then leaves the story
Like a baked glistening afternoon
But only for a minute
|
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