Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda [Fabreeze]

from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, ed. Mark Eisner:

Ode to a Watch in the Night

In the night, in your hand

my watch glowed

like a firefly.

I heard

its ticking:

like a dry whisper

it arose

from your invisible hand.

Then your hand

returned to my dark breast

to gather my sleep and its pulse.

The watch

went on cutting time

with its little saw.

As in a forest

fragments of wood,

tiny drops, pieces

of branches or nests

fall

without changing the silence,

without ending the cool darkness,

so

from your invisible hand

the watch went on cutting

time, time,

and minutes fell

like leaves,

fibers of broken time,

little black feathers.

As in the forest

we smelled roots,

somewhere water released

a fat drop

like a wet grape.

A little mill

was grinding the night,

the shadow whispered

falling from your hand

and filled the earth.

Dust,

earth, distance,

my watch in the night

was grinding and grinding

from your hand.

I put

my arm

under your invisible neck,

under its warm weight,

and in my hand

time fell,

the night,

little noises

of wood and forest,

of divided night,

of fragments of shadow,

of water that falls and falls:

then
sleep fell

from the watch and from

your two sleeping hands,

it fell like the dark water

of the forests,

from the watch

to your body,

from you toward countries,

dark water,

time that falls

and runs

inside us.

And that’s how it was, that night,

shadow and space, earth

and time,

something that runs and falls

and passes.

And that’s how all the nights

go over the earth,

leaving only a vague

black odor.

A leaf falls,

a drop

on the earth

muffles its sound,

the forest sleeps, the waters,

the meadows,

the bells,

the eyes.

I hear you and you breathe,

my love,

we sleep.

[translated by Stephen Mitchell]

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa [Genius]

from Yusef Komunyakaa’s Debriefing Ghosts:

A Reed Boat

The boat's tarred and shellacked to a water-repellent finish, just sway-dancing with the current's ebb, light as a woman in love. It pushes off again, cutting through lotus blossoms, sediment, guilt, unforgivable darkness. Anything with half a root or heart could grow in this lagoon.

There's a pull against what's hidden from day, all that hurts. At dawn the gatherer's shadow backstrokes across water, an instrument tuned for gods and monsters in the murky kingdom below. Blossoms lean into his fast hands, as if snapping themselves in half, giving in to some law.

Slow, rhetorical light cuts between night and day, like nude bathers embracing. The boat nudges deeper, with the ease of silverfish. I know by his fluid movements, there isn't the shadow of a bomber on the water any more, gliding like a dream of death. Mystery grows out of the decay of dead things — each blossom a kiss from the unknown.

When I stand on the steps of Hanoi's West Lake Guest House, feeling that I am watched as I gaze at the boatman, it's hard to act like we're the only two left in the world. He balances on his boat of Ra, turning left and right, reaching through and beyond, as if the day is a woman he can pull into his arms.

Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov [A Longhouse Birdhouse]

from Denise Levertov’s Relearningthe Alphabet:

What Wild Dawns There Were

What wild dawns there were

      in our first years here

when we would run outdoors naked

to pee in the long grass behind the house

             and see over the hills such streamers,

             such banners full of fire and blue (the blue

             that is Lilith to full day’s honest Eve) —

What feathers of gold under the morning star

      we saw from dazed eyes before

stumbling back to bed chilled with dew

to sleep till the sun was high!

Now if we wake early

      we don’t go outdoors — or I don’t —

      and you if you do go

      rarely call me to see the day break.

I watch the dawn through glass: this year

             only cloudless flushes of light, paleness

             slowly turning to rose,

             and fading subdued.

We have not spoken of these tired

risings of the sun.

Mad Song

My madness is dear to me.

I who was almost always the sanest among my friends,

one to whom others came for comfort,

now at my breasts (that look timid and ignorant,

                that don’t look as if milk had flowed from them,

                years gone by)

cherish a viper.

                       Hail, little serpent of useless longing

that may destroy me,

that bites me with such idle

needle teeth.

I who am loved by those who love me

for honesty,

to whom life was an honest breath

                           taken in good faith,

I’ve forgotten how to tell joy from bitterness.

Dear to me, dear to me,

blue poison, green pain in the mind’s veins.

How am I to be cured against my will?

Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov [Poetry Society of America]

from Denise Levertov’s The Great Unknowing:

Memory demands so much

Memory demands so much,

it wants every fiber

told and retold.

                          It gives and gives

but for a price, making you

risk drudgery, lapse

into document, treacheries

of glaring noon and a slow march.

Leaf never before

seen or envisioned, flying spider

of rose-red autumn, playing

a lone current of undecided wind,

lift me with you, take me

off this ground of memory that clings

to my feet like thick clay,

exacting gratitude for gifts and gifts.

Take me flying before

you vanish, leaf, before

I have time to remember you,

intent instead on being

in the midst of that flight,

of those unforeseeable words.


Once Only

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we'd do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every initiation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
               did happen in our lives, our stories
               are not drab with its absence: but don't
expect now to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body-halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

Warp

Warp

Down a black hole is where I go

to bank the fire, to make it flare,

the light creates this extraordinary halo

round each & every friend qua foe.

Blinkered, second geared

down a black hole is where I go,

outside’s a world of TV snow.

Inside, the haunts of hibernating bears

where light creates this extraordinary halo.

I don’t look up or say hello

except to white rabbits, pair by pair

down a black hole is where we go,

the answer to everything a simple no.

Stepping a deep woods trail, a deer

bears the light of this extraordinary halo

pierced by a poisoned arrow,

sirens & furies fired it there.

Down a black hole is where I go,

the light creates this extraordinary halo.

Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan [Poetry Foundation]

from Anselm Berrigan’s Notes from Irrelevance:

Armed with an early

termination fee, a

delusion with regard

to neither denying

nor being of the past,

a lazy fly to center,

a transcription of

a stain on the soul

of the off-looker

. . . In

that we’re waiting on

the okapi to organize

and go on strike, or

counterstrike. In that I

am waiting for the stuffed

okapi, the evil kitty, the

frozen hop, the spineless

doggy, the tubby fox

with babe to organize

and resist. I don’t think

the destructive will aimed

on the inside is elusive

if one is sensitive, but

the tangle of sentences

is hard on the eyelids.

. . . I like

to pay for time as I go

or am just used to doing

so and currently willing

to remark upon it under

the rubric of being

personal, though it’s

just as personal to wipe

my dirty hands across

these pinkened eyes or

pluck that bug from

my wind, both banal

gestures devoid of

disgust.

. . . I’m a child

programmed to punish

the world.

. . . there’s at least a

germ of truth in there

infecting my psyche.

. . . it’s necessary

to finally renounce violence

everywhere in one’s life

but in one’s self-accusations

isn’t it.

Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis [Reuters]

from Lydia Davis's Can't and Won't:

Handel

I have a problem in my marriage, which is that I simply do not like George Frideric Handel as much as my husband does. It is a real barrier between us. I am envious of one couple we know, for example, who both love Handel so much they will sometimes fly all the way to Texas just to hear a particular tenor sing a part in one of his operas. By now, they have also converted another friend of ours into a lover of Handel. I am surprised, because the last time she and I talked about music, what she loved was Hank Williams. All three of them went by train to Washington, D.C., this year to hear Giulio Cesare in Egitto. I prefer the composers of the nineteenth century and particularly Dvořák. But I’m pretty open to all sorts of music, and usually if I’m exposed to something long enough. I come to like it. But even though my husband puts on some sort of Handel vocal music almost every night if I don’t say anything to stop him, I have not come to love Handel. Fortunately, I have just found out that there is a therapist not too far from here, in Lenox, Massachusetts, who specializes in Handel-therapy, and I’m going to give her a try. (My husband does not believe in therapy and I know he would not go to a Dvořák-therapist with me even if there was one.)

Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw [University of Arizona]

from Anne Shaw's Dido in Winter:

Unruly Clock

How strangely things unmoor themselves.
For instance, overhead: shadow of a bird
without a bird. As paint peels back
from the porch front, cloud-thread
raveled out against the blue. How my body
craves extinction. Yours, a tenderness.
On top of or below. As the preposition
wanders from its noun. The lip
and its restriction. You, the fricative angel
in my bed. How a bulb turns on
in the farmhouse: a private
radiance. And the body's rapt attention,
apparent slips of tongue. Some truths
I kidnap back into the dark. My realm
of unbecoming, kingdom of shatter and thrust. Fields
in the side view plated now with water over loam.
The little clatter the mind makes, and each
peculiar crevice of a heart. Such beds of flood
and thistle: their many endings, turnings,
passings-through. Then all my slick retractions
flattering a passage through the skull. There is luck
and luck's remission, there are freckled hands
on locks, tallow-meshes hanging in the trees. And the bees
relentless, hungry now, summer or its semblance
bent in sad arrival, creeping charlie tiny in the lawn —


In Motion

Alone on Sunday afternoon, I watch the dog's paws twitching as he sleeps.
His dream turns like a newsreel, simple chase
between snapped branches, lurching toward a sky,
the path irrelevant, his prey a prayer, the blue flame of his being
flared to high. Call it small recurrent animal, this dream
that all dogs dream, like that relentless dream of ropes and stays
in which I turn my body like a filmstrip
to the light. Yes, pin me
to the window, watch me jerk
from frame to animated frame. Each small, belabored increment. Each day
a pink sun moving south against the wall
glides through the strictures of winter. The camera
lucida or obscura. Here are my lumpy socks, my unmade bed. No tragedy
in these particulars. But friends, when I sit at your table
there's a voice in me that says Give
up. Give up. It pumps along like a half-dead frog.
Ladies and gentlemen, it says, this train has left the station. Wave
to your friends on the platform. You may begin
to panic at any time.

Plainsong

[photo by Tova Olivia Pappas]

Plainsong

The penny dropped

falls to silence

where I remain for a long time

copper greening

at the bottom of an empty vase.

What fits me alone?

What to claim?

What to carry into wilderness —

a cliff, a ridge, a blind corner

antler splinted,

foxes at low windows,

pantry gutted by sly invaders.

Disturbed cats

flee to high places.

Feral we pace, unceasing

noon, dusk, dawn

blunder makes a music play —

riotous dance.

Owls & night-coiled snakes

outside the cracked glass
stare.

Susan Howe

[Prufrock's Dilemma]

from Susan Howe's The Midnight:

Ten thousandth truth
Ten thousandth impulse
Do not mince matter
as if tumbling were pat
parable preached in
hedge-sparrow gospel
For the lily welcomes
Owl! art thou mad?
Why dost thou twit me
with foreknowledge

To this the Nihtegale
gave answer that twig
of thine thou shouldst
sing another tune Owl
Still in Ovid cloth of
scarlet the Owl and her
"Old Side" blue thread
Listen! Let me speak!
the Wren replied I do
not want lawlessness . . .

Evening for the Owl
spoke wisely and well
willing to suffer them
and come flying night
from the Carolingian
mid owl falcon fable
In their company saw
all things clearly wel
Unfele I could not do

Nihtegale to the taunt
Owl a preost be piping
Overgo al soke iseon
sede warme inome nv
still one bare word
Go he started mid ivi
Grene al never ne nede
Song long ago al so
sumere chorless awey

Thomas Watson

from Thomas Watson’s Hecatompathia:

Passion XL

I joy not peace, where yet no war is found;

I fear, and hope; I burn, yet freeze withal;

I mount to heav’n, yet lie but on the ground;

I compass nought, and yet I compass all:

  I live her bond, which neither is my foe,

  Nor friend; nor holds me fast, nor lets me go;

Love will not that I live, nor lets me die;

Nor locks me fast, nor suffers me to scape;

I want both eyes and tongue, yet see and cry;

I wish for death, yet after help I gape;

  I hate myself, but love another wight;

  And feed on grief, in lieu of sweet delight;

At selfsame time I both lament and joy;

I still am pleas’d, and yet displeased still;

Love sometimes seems a God, sometimes a Boy;

Sometimes I sink, sometimes I swim at will;

  Twixt death and life, small difference I make;

  All this dear Dame befalls me for thy sake.

H. D.

H. D. [Poetry Foundation]

from H. D.'s Asphodel:

The world's good word, the institute, — that's the Institut de France. The Institute. Carl and Bertrand Gart getting books, pamphlets from the Institute, French Binomial Theorems. Mathematics is a language common to all people — dots and dashes — why don't we all speak a common language of dots and dashes and colours? Why must we be divided, hating each other, never understanding? There ought to be a sort of Spiritual Esperanto, all understanding each other but then how tiresome because French things are French. French things are more French obviously than anything American could ever be American. What is American? That's just it. Asking us to be something that has never yet been defined. I am a Frenchman. O yes then go die for it, for that visible, embodied thing you call la patrie. La patrie is visible. It has made those peonies on that cart shine with that luminous rose in alabaster light. France. France has made those peonies different from any other and our flowers at home were always Dutch tulips, English roses, O la France rose had to have a name, a tag to get really across to us, to make us really love it. The Seine. This is the Seine. Fancy calling the little built up island the Ile de France. Of France. Of all of France. The island of France. Islands. The island in the river where we had picnics, called Calypso's island and I asked my dear old Bert who Calypso was and he said a goddess out of a Greek poem. That was the first time I had ever heard of a goddess. "Who was she? What is one?" "What is what, Bird?" (They call me Bird.) "Why that, what you said, something about less God." "O ho, ho." Bert didn't laugh like that but how do you think of people when they laugh? It's a sort of cringing, a sort of crinkling, a sort of twisting. It's letting go. Bert let go, leaned against the rail of the bridge. (We were on our way up what we called, the mountains, for what we called, pansy violets.) O ho, ho. That is no sound for laughter. But how write laughter? Bertrand laughed. He was always immensely thin, immensely tall. Laughing. "How kind of your big brother to take you, such a little girl up the mountains." "Yes to get pansy violets." Bert laughing. "A goddess as a — god — less, a God — less. Less what, Birdlet?" "It was you who said it, not me. I didn't say anything about any less." "You did, oracle. You said a goddess —" And he was at it again. Twisting a long leg around another long leg. What was he about then. But here we are, not there. Here we are standing on a bridge over the Seine, the galleries of the Louvre to the left ladies and gentlemen and the famous Notre Dame across a little in the distance. Here we are in France. How ever did we get here? What is France? What is French? A sort of (obviously) Esperanto of the Spirit.

Of Shine

Of Shine

The heron’s bill grasps

one end of shine

frog or fish or snake

a slap at morning-misted air.

Down the hawk plunges

talons bent to steal

the prey precipitous gone

to gullet or ground.

Four great wings batter

hoist & haul away.

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine [StarTribune]

from Claudia Rankine's Citizen:

You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world’s had a lot of practice. No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. The headaches begin then. Don’t wear sunglasses in the house, the world says, though they soothe, soothe sight, soothe you.

The head’s ache evaporates into a state of numbness, a cave of sighs. Over the years you lose the melodrama of seeing yourself as a patient. The sighing ceases; the headaches remain. The sighing ceases; the headaches remain. You hold your head in your hands. You sit still. Rarely do you lie down. You ask yourself, how can I help you? A glass of water? Sunglasses? . . .

The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed? . . .

Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go. Come on. Come on. Come on. In due time the ball is going back and forth over the net.

Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth [syracuse.com]

from Hayden Carruth’s Selected Essays:

without doubt much of the best poetry in our century, especially in America, has been composed according to notions of free metric. Pound was the master. He kept the measure — often in the Cantos a four-stress line — he kept alive our anticipation of the beat, he was always aware of line values, very keenly aware; yet by using every device of phrasing, including rests and stops, he also kept alive our sense of the spontaneity and natural harmony of poetic language, never forced, never imprecise. His influence is pervasive. It seems to me that the three closest followers of Charles Olson — Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan — come nearer to Pound in the metrical practices I have just described than they do to Olson or Williams himself. . . .

Not long ago when I was reading Whitman with some graduate students, we all agreed that we were too inhibited vocally to chant the poems as Whitman himself doubtless did. Our grandparents and great-grandparents were taught to read poetry as poetry. No doubt many excesses were committed — gestures, declamatory extravagance, etc. — but why did we throw out the baby with the bath water? Now we are afraid to read even our own finicky poems for the vocal acuities they might possibly contain. Our voices are atrophied, no tension in them, no resonance or timbre. . . .

the “power to reason” means the “will to dominate.” Intelligence is the perversion of instinct. We cannot use it, but we must somehow, by force of self-denial or power of self-transcendence, bring it into consonance with the superiority of non-intelligence.

John Balaban

John Balaban [YouTube]

For the Missing in Action

Hazed with harvest dust and heat
the air swam with flying husks
as men whacked rice sheaves into bins
and all across the sunstruck fields
red flags hung from bamboo poles.
Beyond the last treeline on the horizon
beyond the coconut palms and eucalyptus
out in the moon zone puckered by bombs
the dead earth where no one ventures,
the boys found it, foolish boys
riding their buffaloes in craterlands
where at night bombs thump and ghosts howl.
A green patch on the raw earth.
And now they've led the farmers here,
the kerchiefed women in baggy pants,
the men with sickles and flails, children
herding ducks with switches--all
staring from a crater berm; silent:
In that dead place the weeds had formed a man
where someone died and fertilized the earth, with flesh
and blood, with tears, with longing for loved ones.
No scrap remained; not even a buckle
survived the monsoons, just a green creature,
a viny man, supine, with posies for eyes,
butterflies for buttons, a lily for a tongue.
Now when huddled asleep together
the farmers hear a rustly footfall
as the leaf-man rises and stumbles to them.

Andrew Grace

Andrew Grace [Shenandoah]

from Andrew Grace's Shadeland:

Grant Wood, oil on hardboard, 1934

1.

Noon. A thresher waits
to wash the debris from his face into
a stone bowl. His hair is stiff
with lice. A rooster
missed its hour, tries
to scream the sun back down; it is Iowa,
1892. A draft horse the color
of zinc tongues it own shadow.
The thresher is about to join a table
of men — fourteen of them, as in the Last Supper —
in the house
for lunch. The string of Xs
formed by the backs of the men’s overalls marks a negation.
They lift the offering to their
mouths: blood, flesh;
coffee, rabbit.

2.

Their minds are on process:
thrash, shake, winnow. Two thousand
bushels bagged in a pigeon-crusted loft.
Two thousand to go.
Man in the hopper,
man on the stack of moth-gutted
wheat. Two horses lashed to the ends
of a rafter, the drugged circumference
of their labor turns the machine.
The man in the hopper
pushes wheat into a chute, which separates
grain from chaff. A boy clears the waste.
A shroud of white moths rises
from his arms.

3.

The thresher’s forehead is the color of torn roots, his face
and neck empurpled by sun, spelled only by quick
reshufflings of cirrus.
He is not
unhappy, only
afflicted by variables. Hail, rust,
blight, eyespot,
black chaff,
pink seed, flood, endless depth of sky, endless dark of his bedroom
in which the eye drowns.

4.

Ornate wallpaper, the smell of cooked meat
like the flush of warmth back
to a cold extremity:
women bring bowls
to the table, men in
fellowship with men as a reward for labor.
But for every spotless rack
of cerulean china
there is a night
when the rooster
conjures a false dawn;
in its intervals
silence rages in the English garden;
candle flames like commas
prolong the dark. This is why
aprons are bleached daily,
why the barn is scrubbed as reclamation from
scat and sun, why
each man asks for more meat, more labor
as if bodies
are made to be consumed.

5.

To chew the roots of cowbane is a way out. Laudanum under
the sink is
a way out. Also, the concept
of being a metaphor
for wheat:
when torn open: raw, prone material
that broken across
a machine or a winter
is malleable to
any use; touch me and blue shale beneath
us is tamped an inch
towards the underworld.
What if they did not want
a way out? Night’s oaks swallow wrens, so dark
the barn is imperceptible. To sit at that
table emptied of its men is to
learn to take solace in what pours
from the window’s open mouth.

6.

The last man raises
his face from the bowl. The prairie
is both hurtling and
standing still. It will
not rearrange itself no
matter how deeply he scrawls his attention
over it. He takes in the thick
concussions of light.
He is drawn back to the barn
and past it, where pheasants explode
from the ditches. He is not hungry
anymore. Someone will take his seat
at the table. Someone will lower their head
and ask the Lord to be made
more bare to the sun.
A clot of moths unravels
across the man’s eyes. He asks for no other
veil over the stillness.
And the Lord
provides.

Harryette Mullen

Harryette Mullen [M/ELT]

from Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary:

Fancy Cortex

Reading Jayne Cortez

I’m using my plain brain to imagine her fancy cortex. As if my Lowly mollusk could wear so exalted a mantle as her pontifex Pallium. As if the knots and tangles of my twisted psyche could mesh with her intricate synaptic network of condensed neural convolutions. As if my simple chalk could fossilize the memory of her monumental reefs of caulifloral coral. As if my shallow unschooled shoals could reckon the calculus of her kink’s brainwave tsunami. As if the pedestrian software of my mundane explorer could map as rounded colonies the terra incognita of her undiscovered hemispheres. As if the speculative diagnosis of my imaging technology could chart the direction of her intuitive intellect. As if the inquisitive iris of my galaxy-orbiting telescope could see as far as her vision. As if the trained nostrils of my nacro-bloodhound could sniff out what she senses in the wind. As if my duty-free bottle of jerk sauce could simulate the fire ant picante that inflames her tongue of rage. As if the gray matter of my dim bulb could be enlightened by the brilliance of her burning watts. As if her divergent universification might fancy the microcosm of my prosaic mind.

Music for Homemade Instruments

I dug you artless, I dug you out. Did you re-do? You dug me less, art. You dug, let’s do art. You dug me, less art. Did you re-do? If I left art out, you dug. My artless dug-out. You dug, let art out. Did you re-do, dug-out canoe? Easy as a porkpie piper-led cinch. Easy as a baby bounce. Hop on pot, tin pan man. Original abstract, did you re-do it? Betting on shy cargo, strutting dimpled low-cal strumpets employ a hipster to blow up the native formica. Then divided efficiency on hairnets, flukes, faux saxons. You dug, did you re-do? Ever curtained to experiment with strumpet strutting. Now curtains to milk laboratory. Desecrated flukes & panics displayed by mute politicians all over this whirly-gig. A well known mocker of lurching unused brains, tribal & lustrous diddlysquats, Latin dimension crepe paper & muscular stacks. Curtains for perky strumpets strutting with mites in the twilight of their origami funkier papoose. Thanks for patting wood at flatland. Thanks for bamboozle flukes at Bama, my seedy medication. Thanks for my name in the yoohoo. Continental camp-out, percolating throughout this whirly-gig on faux saxon flukes. Artless, you dug. Did you re-do?

But we are a house

But we are a house

foundered on a hillside

bottomed in a creek & crowned

by century redwoods. We are walled

w/ eyes recording weather,

dawn, Anna's hummingbirds & silver

fungi, fox & coyote, tomato-

gobbling fawn w/ parent

(parent another kind of house).

We don’t recall the hares &

Germán’s dogs in fruitless chase,

a hundred parrots grazing

out the north window of that red-roof

pale green house, vacant now

& likely wind burned, dust bunnied,

the dying willow once hung

w/ parrots a ghost beside

a second-story stained-glass eye

incandescent w/ desire to gain

someone new’s affection.

                                          But here

in what you call present time we are

a blue-roof pale brown, say it — beige

call it bone house. Is it so unlikely

you can learn to love us?

two coyotes

coyote @ UCSC [Santa Cruz Pumas]

two coyotes cross

the driveway, eyeball the cat

disappear downslope