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| George Oppen [New Directions] |
from George Oppen's New Collected Poems:
Discrete Series
I
This room,
the circled wind
Straight air of dawn
low noon
The darkness. Not within
The mound of these
is anything
To fit the prying of your lips
Or feed their wide bright flowering.
And yet will movement so exactly fit
Your limbs ——
as snow
Fills the vague intricacies of the day, unlit:
So will your arms
fall in the space
Assigned to gesture
(In the momentless air
The distant adventurous snow.)
II
When, having entered ——
Your coat slips smoothly from your shoulders to the waiter:
How, in the face of this, shall we remember,
Should you stand suddenly upon your head
Your skirts would blossom downward
Like an anemone.
III
As I lift the glass to drink,
I smell the water: Suddenly,
The summer.
When my socks will be thick in my shoes
And the room's noise will go dim behind me
As I lean out a high window,
My hands on the stone.
Myth of the Blaze [excerpt]
night — sky bird's world
to know to know in my life to know
what I have said to myself
the dark to escape in brilliant highways
of the night sky, finally
why had they not
killed me why did they fire that warning
wounding cannon only the one round I hold a
superstition
because of this lost to be lost Wyatt's
lyric and Rezi's
running through my mind
in the destroyed (and guilty) Theatre
of the War I'd cried
and remembered
boyhood degradation other
degradations and this crime I will not recover
from that landscape it will be in my mind
it will fill my mind and this is horrible
death bed pavement the secret taste
of being lost
dead
clown in the birds'
world what names
(but my name)
. . .
read "The Mind's Own Place," Oppen's essay on poetics, here
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