Poems that you love

[Smiley]

“Mirror mirror on the wall. I'll always get up after I fall and whether I run, walk or crawl, I'll set my goals and achieve them all. Unknown”

[milo]

“Mirror mirror on the wall. I'll always get up after I fall and whether I run, walk or crawl, I'll set my goals and achieve them all. Unknown”

Actually, I think that is Chris Butler and I believe there may be some line breaks in it somewhere . . .

[Smiley]

Alright..

Mirror mirror on the wall.
I'll always get up after I fall
and whether I run, walk or crawl,
I'll set my goals and achieve them all.

Like that? And yes, it might be him.

[milo]

Alright..

Mirror mirror on the wall.
I'll always get up after I fall
and whether I run, walk or crawl,
I'll set my goals and achieve them all.

Like that? And yes, it might be him.

yah, I think that may be it.  Feel free to browse the thread to find poems other members past and present love

[Smiley]

Will do!

[milo]

Orpheus and Thelxepeia
or
The Song of the Silent Siren

by George Tolis

rape:
-n. rapine, plunder, seizure (obs.):
carnal knowledge of a woman without her legal consent.
-vt. to seize and carry off (obs.):
to commit rape upon:
to ravish or transport, as with delight (obs.).
-ns. ra´per; ra´pist.-adj. ra´ping, tearing prey (her.):
ravishing, delighting (obs.).
-n. a division of Sussex.
wild rape:
Charlock or Field-Mustard.

1.Prologue
This is not about feeble-wombed attempts to scrape
A few sunlit zephyrs from their perch on the cloud-break
Of rainbow-buoyed cumuli. These cries are silenter than the eyes
Of Philomela, unlidding from the darkling sycamore boughs that bow
To Celia's sorry wane. Pleasure has become dread's rose
Is the cuckoo nested in crumbled infrastructures: it lays
Its head parallel to the traffic lining the full
Motorways, Freud's twenty-first century mind gapping in the slip-shone
Crimson cracks of cat's eyes, a prophecy of the slip-road light
Of men resting their heads perpendicular to the sea
Of a headlight's anti-umbra. Ruin is didacted in Red
Sea central reservations; the X-sing
Of two auto routes; the collapsing of the free way; wax
Melting its taper into a self-annihilating anti-smile.
And when the fat has tremulously set
Into the brittle plaster of the past, escape becomes the kiss
Of history's pillaged hills. The capital hands reach action
Bloody into inheritance's reserves, trying to collate
Natural safety, gathering from the stores of certainty's mile.
Tarmac claws reach out and rend the beautiful
Truth, once a pastoral Arcadia, now upset
By wheedling service stations, smogging factories, the burst grape
Under the cemented tongue-crush of civilization. Daybreak
Cannot kiss away the tears of morning, when it wakes
A deeper dimness in the heart of humanity's blight.
This is about how the Orphean Lyre can sing
Of tranquility in the fastening waves of the sea;
Of positive capability in the rejected white-swan
Purity that was once held in the harboured
Hands of poetry. I have charted capitalist glory's rise
In a ravel of wretched memories and I bow
Under the roll of its Stygian brouillard, which plays
Mutiny with our bones. This is a prayer that Psyche's dark is
Not a violated husk lashing nakedly in irrecoverable throws.

2.Brighton
London was becoming a blur of twilight
Zone high-rise office blocks. I decided a break
Was the gem of decision, the billowing easy
Of the ocean's massage, a reach for the dextrose
Revitality of Brighton. The monastery of the uncloistered
Channel would unfetter the claustrophobia of polluted skies.
Taking the M23 south, meadows soon made a laze
Of the memory of gray monotony, with a traipse
Of mustard-yellow charlock, in the careful
Leas quilting Surrey. The mega-road cut an incision
Ominously through the hills, shadowed in the rising
Walls of a cliff-cut swell, but the sunshine won
A battle and restored the temporary blackish-
Ness to forgetful interment. The ashy elbow
Curves swathed gently downwards, as if the sea could deflate
Terrain into its lapping arms. Soon the wind's mill
Of salt breeze coasted the solemn quacks
Of gulls to my ears, wrapping me in a slackened saline corset.
Apollo was sending his final arrows shooting from his bow
As I stepped onto the pebble-caltropped beach. The floozy
Caresses of white Nereids tried soothingly to placate
The stones into sand; the stones in turn rumbled derision
At her strokes, not knowing their eroding plight
Was in the future of her persistence. The sudden whacks
Of rock on bone drew my doe ears to its fretful
Sound and then I saw her: the horse-break


Poseidon met her feet for fin in the ambrose
End of day; she lay in the sun's last glaze,
Sulkily stacking sailor's skulls in the guise
Of a miniature Golgotha. The last daughter of Phorkys,
Thelxepeia, silkily in black-dyed clothing creped,
Immodestly divine and hybrid in her deceasing
Attire. As starlight began to glimmer in her roan
Hair, she caught my stare with a cat-suited smile
And gazed with the nebulous pockets of the Mariana Trench, carmine-fevered
And sorrowful, as if they were Hades' sole earthly faucets.
"Long time," I began feebly, the words buzzing like flies
In the moon-spilling air. My words shattered
In the crack of a flinted blow upon the sleazy,
Vacant stare of a faceless mariner. "This one, did he hate
Me when the rocks ripped a ragged hole, the waves' flays
And lashes rushed in and penetrated his vessel's unbreak-
Able flanks?" Without pause for reply, even one
Apologetic whisper, my cavern mouth was bouldered: "And this, crow's
Nest watcher, when he dropped like Hermes from a Zeus-thrown flight
Into the cracking timbers of the Armada? And when I beset
The Lusitania with a barrage of missiling cants? The icy missing
Dead of the Titanic? All my playthings, they all bow
And nod to the bitter swannish music, a simile
For the oscillations of the eternal tides, waned and waxed
In the pitch of my storm-filled aria. Undying attention,
Undying lovers, unquestioning in where their wreck is
Done lying." Her mounds of manacled Troiluses, graceful
In the necrological moonshine, tilted to her barnacled melodies, enrapt.
I heard a scream in every murmur of her voice, the cries,
Dreadful screams in a thickly-painted soundscape, of murdered
Men in a forest of falling masts. "Only the seraph
Of sunflowers and sun can wield the brush that daubs me undone
And slave to the emptiness of enchantment. You think your unlight
Verse can bring an early dusk to my morning transcendency?"
"I hate the filthy cloudy evening, I hate
The night, more hate the morning and you. Your words are loathful
To me, Apollic pawn; and how fares your wife's condition?"
Vine-strangled gloss greened my throat, offset
By the piston-tempest of her insult's bone-break.
Petty, though, I retorted: "The Muses must laugh and smile
To see how low your feather-plucked song has warbled in cussing."
But crystal tears of dried sea spray caught my blaze
In a pillared flashback of Eurydice. "Your words lilt me more than prose,
Orpheus, but suffering?" she spat, "In that you are not as acidly verbose.
Oh, all your anguished, bleeding angels look like cigarettes, as they kiss
The devils that cut their heads off, with a poet's ink-feathered axe."
"So tell me, which tree birthed the unholy sighs
Of your lilt; which forbidden fruit's mark is
On your tongue's bladeless hilt?" Now on
Her visage her heart left a passing template
And I feared she would turn on me with a new axe
Of felling rhythms. "You know nothing of sorrows,
Nothing, nothing." The syncopated delays
Of her crocus-forced words left me uneasy;
I could see the comma dotted on her lips, which pared
Like butterfly wings, nestling on a stanza break
For breath. "You ask why I turn to the russet
Tones of thorns, why my voice is the scrape
Of broken oars on half-sunken jags? Will your soulful
Lyre taunt me again since Jason found salvation
In that messianic fugue?" Life had cycled its mill,
Ground full circle now; her voice set alight
My silent submergence; her shoulders drooped willow boughs
As I sat. "This time I am listening. Please, sing."

3.London
"After: History only marred its pages with heroes, only remembered
The vanquisher. After the Argo passed and the satrap
Jason sailed on to destroy other women, the fretful
Laments of my sisters keened in miseried plosion.
Though we took one of your number, the coursing
Agony of Parthenope's suicide took delight
From the cascade of blood we lacerated from Zelion's wan,
Drowned squid, Butes. There seemed no cure for her demise,
But vengeance. No more Greek sailors waxed
The boast: "Aristen men hydor!" to their land's mile
Distance; we caught up Scylla in our swirl, set
Charybdis and our sister Gorgons on the crazy
Path of venom, till only black-sailed vessels braved the breaks,
In tribute to our family of funerary genii. The bowl
Of Poseidon's See was a bath for vampire prelates,
The blue-bloodless bodies were infinitely beached with stained inlays
Of the ocean's suckling teeth in them. Unbound verse arose,
In a hymn to homicide, a psalm to slaughter; a cacophonic hiss.
"I remember when he, Odysseus, appeared, surfing the slate
Rocks on a bitterly boarded trireme. The crew axed
Their duties like motor-energized echinoids, only messy
In the mouth-spat threats that scouted their sail's mile
To our Sicily. Then promises made true; the anchor set
And the disembarked intent swarmed and scoured
Our sonnetry into a broken prison. Destruction
Took undiscovered forms; what more can flies
Say to the pantheon's wantonness? We have been cursing
Them since Hades stole Persephone; we could not brake
That juggernaut of patriarchy then, why now? Just one
Voice survives; and that lacks, but longs to account for the rape
That repeats in the undertow wrapped about
The unstoppable engine of men. The wrecked reckless flight
I allied myself to has no record, the wrack is
Only in my mind, like an undocumented holocaust; it lays
An ovic nightmare in my sparsely stolen slumber, ever doubtful
In my weathered, naked, irrecoverable throws.
I dove into disappearance, but my feature's striking barb owes
Too much to the ensuing pursuit. By daylight
And dark Odysseus forced his hounds on, the scrape
Of his hooves in the hunt of a bushy trophy, the cracks
Of rigging rope whipping my vixen gauntlet. In full
Cry they curdled the screaming waves, tossing the white equine eyes
Into mad sweat and a suicide spray of daggered
Rain. Storms and stealth I cast behind, crossing
The deadliest vortexes with the discord of broken odes, till I knew an
Answer lay only in seeking the horizon's fractured sunset
And by scenting the sanguine horror of another daybreak,
All a salvation-stalking prayer, pleading to the gods to black his
Eyes with permanent charcoaled sleep. Those great heroes,
Honoured for avidity to blood, hostile to a peasants' smile,
Loyal only to the flower-strewn fields they sow corpses in, the weight
Of a sword-strike on a red-sweet jugular, or the curvation
Of their oars' thrust into the hearts of a blue salt water. They blaze,
Those men that died for Odysseus, as he did. They lust for frenzy;
Pangs for fire, famine, flood: tied to the red
Fog of their own masts, begging to unleash madness miles
Into our shared world, claiming all with no need for a brake
On the surge of manic expression. Detestation grows,
As Odysseus knew; and when a man dies,
Someone is to blame. Someone will drop the final kiss
On a cold cheek and raise their head, the sequential
Of sadness to spite. He was carved in wood and set
His men to the same direction; the elements were truthful
To me in whittling their multitude, but my swan-
Song coarsened into a screech-owl howl as their delight
In vengeance bloomed barren of all fruit but the wracks
Of torture they could reward themselves with. The bow
Of his ship bent crooked in speed, sprouting scrabbling claws, the sea
Trailing the scars of the ruining harvest being reaped.
Soon he mounted each roiling crest alone, the sharp serrate
Of the prow gashing opaque foam, the leagues unlacing
Infinitely in exhaustion, his filthy desire ignoring my pleading lays.
The mouth of the Thames gulleted me, the page-break
From salt to fresh, soon stale. The sands of Margate were trampled,
submission-
Stamped by broiling whirlpool hooves; Moorgate acted thunder-voiced plays
Above, till, a fortnight dead from chase, the static-cascading, full
Clouds overturned, spilling onto the liquid mountains, valleys and ridges
unsmiled
In the bowl of Richmond's breached womb. Highbury excreted me into the
blight
Of Sin's spawn, barking death from the cribbed innards of the London dock's
Sprawl. Stalactitic scratches retina-plummeted to meet the stalagmite
Crests growling from the psychotic screeching of the Thames Daughters,
rising,
Meshing as a grotesquely barred cave. In the dim cavern of Westminster
Bridge, captured
In the barrel-burning flicker of a plastic-smoked rubbish fire, I could see
Him, presupposing, cunning. Smuttily gulping Scotch and moly in the
undisguised
Garb of a vagabond, he was deaf to my enervated tereuing; clogging earwax
Protruded like a stench down his stubble-spattered cheeks. Odysseus grabbed,
scraped
My tired scales on the glass-gouted ground, lurched me stomach-wards, elbow-
Propped on piss-covered tiles. That man on my back; the cyclopean fire that
set
A random rive of kraken-eyed incidences: the overabundance of history's rows
Of repeated cycles; a million to my one broken body left insanely scarred
and wan.

4.Brighton
The hand that writes this is a badly made bivouac
For sheltering the shiver-splintered voice of that tale. No gusset
In her armour was left unpierced; she tried to thread
Together a Circaean-assembled smile
That saw me transformed to tears. The glazed clays
Of her eyes were as chipped as the iguana-spiked plate
Armour she had slipped with such difficulties
To the unsoftened pebbles. My verse was a bow
Firing silence in the dark of midnight, the sea
The only angry ripple of her kindred suffering. Fed by slight
Breaths short in her chest, she remained beautiful
In a broken survival, wretched as the heartbreak
I felt when Cerberus was at my back again. Losing
Pace for the sunlight, life can always return to life, even to one
Like this. Just as my arms became a wrap
To soften her shuddering woes, so I use this pen; it throws
Its words around the form of a damaged timbre; its mission
Of comfort the only offering with which her tears to kiss.
Philosophy suffers in reality; if there is ever an easy
Escape from a razed existence, then find me someone
Who can release that noun, that object, the one that undiscovers the set
Of atrocities seared in a ravaged mind. Those theoretical voices glaze
The clay of life into gaudy angles, so the colour flies
Off the fragility encasing your anima, in draped
Associations of another man's wit, not your own shaped condition.
I cannot give you my verse, my own melody, as a way to break,
Shatter, then mend the jigsaw mentus from pained panic into a smile,
Abstracted from your soul-penetrated despair. Could I sing
Of joy in stone? - Then of water on stone and the alight of sunshine's kiss
Played on that trickled tune, that runs its freight
On the stony rhythmic bass of a solid promise - but a fretful
Sonic twist will hear the dark-boled whine of twilight
Traveled on the slaughter-stained river, that throws
A torrent along a war drum beat of bone. Your ears bow
To your emotion, your eyes to the gray-shaded perspex of a shuttered
Blindfold, sealing innocent vision from afflicted memory stacks.
But I have moved through time, petrified like water in an oxbow
Lake; and yet the turgid rumblings of fear unset-
Tled me. Curled, knees to breast, in the sulphured
Baths of Etna, a razor blade edge-balanced to fall its miles
To oblivion either way, I watched man, how he rose;
And even Kepler, Cornelius, they couldn't change natural discord, placate
Him from his ever-twirling in Ptolemaic circles of awful
Selfishness. In bloody crimson the sun and moon each waxed
Their tapering gloom till they burned to a phosphorescing
Abscess, shed on the gathered evidence of my prosecuting twilight
Chronicles. The sea ran its eddies, falling from each hell-kissed
Iris down my cheeks, as if they would restate gravity's
Case. The layered clouds were breaking
Dawn in their shadow-cast vapours, shelving the cinemation
Of the stars behind their racks. The day was climbing untrapped
From the hands of Hades and the dissentient sea
Flicked assegai waves, needle-crested, as one
At the pebbled rug of the beach, become a martyr it had to slay.
For twelve hours of a day, the world spins you quizzing
And questing for noon. Life brightens to life, as a scion
Sunflower will bend from shade to sustenance, its calyx curving to light.
And then twelve single peals of a bell will brake
Our progress, like strangers voices whispering tones of hate,
Revolving us into unhallowed midnight. But the moment where we can smile,
Where mortality pines for stasis, is the time-spliced drowse
Of a phantom between, the wish of iced parallels to the sun, a grasped
Eternity in a pivoted midday, or a witching hour, when motion
Gives to paralysis. You can stay trapped in the umbra-sea
Of night's high noon, earth's diametrous abyss blocking the bow
Of Apollo's warming arrows; or you can turn to axe
Your own sanctioning mast into its illusory splintered
Trivia. Lift from the limbo floor to the horizoning dawn sky and set
Your future in the impetus of the chameleon veil over your eyes.
When you cannot see, then smell the salubrious sun-kiss
Of embroidered fate, threaded through your own masterful
Fingers, until the tapestry of colours you weave is ablaze.
Your hands are unsanguined, bard, you have won
By example. The veil lifts in alleviation
And ventricled harmony valves my life's mill
Again. But the battle, not the war, is in its final throws.
Words; the mask the page wears to disguise its slate
Disfigurement. No matter the tree sacrificed so easy
By man's tools - Proserpine cypress, balsa-light
Ash, or Amazonian tropic - the poem is still as the axe
That cut the tree down: the cup of your mind, when full,
Empties itself to shroud the pulped lumber, the uncared
Liquid discarded uncaringly; so as black is
The Medean venom of Crowley's spring storms, bridal drapes
Of godful showers are scattered by Miltonic pieties.
Poetry is a tool, as good or as bad as the falset-
To voice that forges it. And when a Lydian lyre bows
To a high-picked tenor of unfelt danger, ignorance breaks
The unkept pitch in pieces. Sympathy, that tunes your lays,
But experience pales your song to nothing when I sing."
A misted oubliette seemed exorcised in the rise
Of the burning chariot of day, in the scrape
Of zephyrs against the blue-gapping cloud-break.
Her eyes, squinting mirrors of the ocean, gleamed from the bow-
Slit of her eyelids to gather the prism-split rose
Of optimism. A faint humming, like a lark satiate
In the morning, escaped the butterfly lips on her wan
Skin and her cheeks blushed as our eyes collided. The full
Ecstasy of the present had jilted her onyx lays
Into crumbled anaesthesia, taking cautious flight
Into the salt breeze. A moment of epiphany shone
In a microsecond, of clear sky and pure sea
Matched in equal tint, while the slivered red
Edge of the sun obliterated the last fizzing
Stars of pessimism back into Celia's bosom. The wax
Of discourse burned down and true light rose with her smile,
As our heads turned to meet and the keys
Of motion unlocked us from the frieze that time had set.

5.Envoi
The Sussex Sea slowed, slower, then ceased to drape
The once hard stones with its breakers. The expression
Of the pebbles was now one fine smoothed crescent bow
Of bay-stretched sand. The ripples froze in dipped smiles
And laughs, which carpeted red-orange sunlight
In a water-walked pathway, set in a warm, wax-
Soft texture. Two pairs of eyes took visionary skates
Across the immutable blaze. Together we found lips to sing
Of the dawn in hushful sigils, as we leaned together in a kiss.

[milo]

At Melville's Tomb
by Harold Hart Crane

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

[rowens]

by "       "



To Shakespeare


Through torrid entrances, past icy poles
    A hand moves on the page! Who shall again
Engrave such hazards as thy might controls ---
    Conflicting, purposeful yet outcry vain
Of all our days, being pilot, ---tempest, too!
    Sheets that mock lust and thorns that scribble hate
Are lifted from torn flesh with human rue,
    And laughter, burnished brighter than our fate
Thou wieldest with such tears that every faction
    Swears high in hamlet's throat, and devils throng
Where angels beg for doom in ghast distraction
    ---And fail, both! Yet thine Ariel holds his song:
    And that serenity that Prospero gains
    Is justice that has cancelled earthly chains.




Quaker Hill

Perspective never withers from their eyes;
They keep that docile edict of the Spring
That blends March with August Antarctic skies:
These are but cows that see no other thing
Than grass and snow, and their own inner being
Through the rich halo that they do not trouble
Even to cast upon the seasons fleeting
Though they should thin and die on last year’s stubble.


And they are awkward, ponderous and uncoy . . .
While we who press the cider mill, regarding them—
We, who with pledges taste the bright annoy
Of friendship’s acid wine, retarding phlegm,
Shifting reprisals (’til who shall tell us when
The jest is too sharp to be kindly?) boast
Much of our store of faith in other men
Who would, ourselves, stalk down the merriest ghost.


Above them old Mizzentop, palatial white
Hostelry—floor by floor to cinquefoil dormer
Portholes the ceilings stack their stoic height.
Long tiers of windows staring out toward former
Faces—loose panes crown the hill and gleam
At sunset with a silent, cobwebbed patience . . .
See them, like eyes that still uphold some dream
Through mapled vistas, cancelled reservations!


High from the central cupola, they say
One’s glance could cross the borders of three states;
But I have seen death’s stare in slow survey
From four horizons that no one relates . . .
Weekenders avid of their turf-won scores,
Here three hours from the semaphores, the Czars
Of golf, by twos and threes in plaid plusfours
Alight with sticks abristle and cigars.


This was the Promised Land, and still it is
To the persuasive suburban land agent
In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz
Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant.
Fresh from the radio in the old Meeting House
(Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.


What cunning neighbors history has in fine!
The woodlouse mortgages the ancient deal
Table that Powitzky buys for only nine-
Ty-five at Adams’ auction,—eats the seal,
The spinster polish of antiquity . . .
Who holds the lease on time and on disgrace?
What eats the pattern with ubiquity?
Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?


The resigned factions of the dead preside.
Dead rangers bled their comfort on the snow;
But I must ask slain Iroquois to guide
Me farther than scalped Yankees knew to go:
Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,
Wait for the postman driving from Birch Hill
With birthright by blackmail, the arrant page
That unfolds a new destiny to fill . . . .


So, must we from the hawk’s far stemming view,
Must we descend as worm’s eye to construe
Our love of all we touch, and take it to the Gate
As humbly as a guest who knows himself too late,
His news already told? Yes, while the heart is wrung,
Arise—yes, take this sheaf of dust upon your tongue!
In one last angelus lift throbbing throat—
Listen, transmuting silence with that stilly note


Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!
While high from dim elm-chancels hung with dew,
That triple-noted clause of moonlight—
Yes, whip-poor-will, unhusks the heart of fright,
Breaks us and saves, yes, breaks the heart, yet yields
That patience that is armour and that shields
Love from despair—when love forsees the end—
Leaf after autumnal leaf
break off,
descend—
descend—


To Emily Dickinson


You who desired so much--in vain to ask--
Yet fed you hunger like an endless task,
Dared dignify the labor, bless the quest--
Achieved that stillness ultimately best,

Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!
O sweet, dead Silencer, most suddenly clear
When singing that Eternity possessed
And plundered momently in every breast;

--Truly no flower yet withers in your hand.
The harvest you descried and understand
Needs more than wit to gather, love to bind.
Some reconcilement of remotest mind--

Leaves Ormus rubyless, and Ophir chill.
Else tears heap all within one clay-cold hill.



Exile


My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, —
No, — nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell',
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove's wings clung about my heart each night
With surging gentleness, and the blue stone
Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

---

In To Emily Dickinson, "fed your hunger" is what it says in my book. But it was uncollected and may be a draft.

[milo]

May as well add . . .

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

[rowens]

"Being, of all, least sought for: Emily, hear!"

I used that line in one of the poems I sent to Emily Browning back then. But I wrote "most sought".

However, I also wrote this in the letter that went with the poems:  "Emily, I have a confession to make. I really am a horse doctor. But marry me, and I'll never look at any other horse."

I typed the letter on yellow paper in the style of Lemony Snicket. And I later wrote some more poems to her while making the waiter at the Lyric Diner in New York pour me free refills of tea all night since I had nowhere to stay. I had a copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet on the table so people would figure I was strange but harmless.



I also used this poem as source material for some of the poems:


Time’s Dedication

by Delmore Schwartz 

My heart beating, my blood running,
The light brimming,
My mind moving, the ground turning,
My eyes blinking, the air flowing,
The clock’s quick-ticking,
Time moving, time dying,
Time perpetually perishing!
Time is farewell! Time is farewell!

Abide with me: do not go away,
But not as the dead who do not walk,
And not as a statue in the park,
And not as the rock which meets the wave,
But quit the dance from which is flowing
Wishes and turns, gestures and voices,
Angry desire and fallen tomorrow,
Quit the dance from which is flowing
Your blood and beauty: stand still with me.

We cannot stand still: time is dying,
We are dying: Time is farewell!

Stay then, stay! Wait now for me,
Deliberately, with care and circumspection,
Deliberately
Stop,
When we are in step, running together,
Our pace equal, our motion one,
Then we will be well, parallel and equal,
Running together down the macadam road,
Walking together,
Controlling our pace before we get old,
Walking together on the receding road,
Like Chaplin and his orphan sister,
Moving together through time to all good.

[Magpie]

Oh why not. Seeing as though I've just mentioned it in the forums. It is a classic.

William Blake -- The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears 
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

[rowens]

Guide

By A. R. Ammons
 
You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
when you arrive
you have gone too far:
at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:

you cannot
turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless:
no freedom to choose:

to be
you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:

the wind that is my guide said this: it
should know having
given up everything to eternal being but
direction:

how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:

to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:
wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
unity cannot do anything in particular:

are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.









Mission

A.R. Ammons

The wind went over
me
saying
      Why are you so distressed

Oh I said I
can’t seem to make
anything
      round enough to last

But why
the wind
said
      should you be so distressed

as if anything here belonged to you
as if anything here were your concern







For Emily Wilson

By A. R. Ammons

Such a long time as the wave idling gathers
lofts and presses forward into the curvature
of the height before one realizes that the

tension completes itself with a fall through air,
disorganization the prelude to the meandering
of another gather and hurl, the necessary:

ah, what can one make to absorb the astonishment:
you should have seen me the merchant at market
this morning: the people ogled me with severe

goggles: maids, buying in manners and measures
beyond themselves, stared into my goods and
then grew horror-eyed: wives still as distant

from day as a carrot from dinner took the
misconnection sagely, a usual patience:
peashells, I said, long silky peashells: cobs,

I said, long cobs: husks and shucks, I said:
one concerned person pointed out that my whole
economy was wrong; yes, I said, but I have

nothing else to sell: and I said to her, won't
you appreciate the silky beds where seeds
have lain: she had not come to that: and

how about this residence all the grains have
left: won't you buy it and think about it:
not for dinner, she said: rinds, I cried,

rinds and peelings: there was some interest
in those, as for a marmalade, but no one willing,
finally, to do the preparations: absurd, one

woman shouted, and then I grew serious: can you
do with that: but she was off before we fully
met: you should have seen me the merchant at

market this morning: will bankruptcy make a
go of it: will the leavings be left only: the
wave turns over and does not rise again, that wave.






Hymn

By A. R. Ammons


I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
    over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
          where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
    coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
    far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves









Dunes


By A. R. Ammons


Taking root in windy sand
    is not an easy
way
to go about
    finding a place to stay.

A ditchbank or wood's-edge
    has firmer ground.

In a loose world though
    something can be started—
a root touch water,
    a tip break sand—

Mounds from that can rise
    on held mounds,
a gesture of building, keeping,
    a trapping
into shape.

Firm ground is not available ground.












By Emily Dickinson


I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -





Substantial Planes

By A. R. Ammons

It doesn't
matter

to me
if

poems mean
nothing:

there's no
floor

to the
universe

and yet
one

walks the
floor.




Gravelly Run

By A. R. Ammons

I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
  of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self 
as to know it as it is known
  by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:

the swamp’s slow water comes 
down Gravelly Run fanning the long 
  stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between 
the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there, 
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
  spires could make
green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass 
jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:
  I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter 
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never 
heard of trees: surrendered self among
  unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

[wasellajam]

Came across this in practice threads as an example, love it for it's in the moment.

Terza Rima SW19

Over this Common a kestrel treads air
till the earth says mouse or vole. Far below
two lovers walking by the pond seem unaware.

She feeds the ducks. He wants her, tells her so
as she half-smiles and stands slightly apart.
He loves me, loves me not with each deft throw.

It could last a year, she thinks, possibly two
and then crumble like stale bread. The kestrel flies
across the sun as he swears his love is true

and, darling, forever. Suddenly the earth cries
Now and death drops from above like a stone.
A couple turn and see a strange bird rise.

Into the sky the kestrel climbs alone
and later she might write or he might phone.

Carol Ann Duffy

From the same thread:

Children of the Ark

We rumble toward the shore like ocean thunder -
first, a pair, then two by two by two.
Some come from towered skies, some come from under

city streets. Like tourists passing through
we don’t look up or pause, the sky is spanned
with gray, it twists into a churning screw.

We're strangers yet we stretch from hand to hand -
and shuffle, soaked and blind from rain. Ahead
just where the road gives way to banks of sand

are cars, abandoned, tail lights blinking red.
A taxi cab’s exhaust plumes spectre-free,
just like a stallion’s ghost then joins the dead.

Now thousands press on thousands press on me;
we all dissolve, as clay into the sea.

-milo

[milo]

Came across this in practice threads as an example, love it for it's in the moment.

Terza Rima SW19

Over this Common a kestrel treads air
till the earth says mouse or vole. Far below
two lovers walking by the pond seem unaware.

She feeds the ducks. He wants her, tells her so
as she half-smiles and stands slightly apart.
He loves me, loves me not with each deft throw.

It could last a year, she thinks, possibly two
and then crumble like stale bread. The kestrel flies
across the sun as he swears his love is true

and, darling, forever. Suddenly the earth cries
Now and death drops from above like a stone.
A couple turn and see a strange bird rise.

Into the sky the kestrel climbs alone
and later she might write or he might phone.

Carol Ann Duffy

From the same thread:

Children of the Ark

We rumble toward the shore like ocean thunder -
first, a pair, then two by two by two.
Some come from towered skies, some come from under

city streets. Like tourists passing through
we don’t look up or pause, the sky is spanned
with gray, it twists into a churning screw.

We're strangers yet we stretch from hand to hand -
and shuffle, soaked and blind from rain. Ahead
just where the road gives way to banks of sand

are cars, abandoned, tail lights blinking red.
A taxi cab’s exhaust plumes spectre-free,
just like a stallion’s ghost then joins the dead.

Now thousands press on thousands press on me;
we all dissolve, as clay into the sea.

-milo

The Duffy one is brilliant and it's been my life's dream to make it to the poems that you love thread so it's a double win for me!!!

[alonso ramoran]

I have trouble getting over The Wild Iris by Gluck, especially this poem from the collection:

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring--

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

[rowens]

The Keeper of Sheep II
Alberto Caeiro

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world…

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to be eye-sick)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.

To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think…









Atlantis
Hart Crane

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—
Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.
Up the index of night, granite and steel—
Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves—
Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
As though a god were issue of the strings. . . .


And through that cordage, threading with its call
One arc synoptic of all tides below—
Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—
“Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!”
—From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,
So seven oceans answer from their dream.


And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars
New octaves trestle the twin monoliths
Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths
Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!)—
Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
With silver terraces the humming spars,
The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.


Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime—
Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—
Pick biting way up towering looms that press
Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade
—Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link
What cipher-script of time no traveller reads
But who, through smoking pyres of love and death,
Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.


Like hails, farewells—up planet-sequined heights
Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre:
Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry
Of inchling aeons silence rivets Troy.
And you, aloft there—Jason! hesting Shout!
Still wrapping harness to the swarming air!
Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call,
Beams yelling Aeolus! splintered in the straits!


From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,
Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare—
Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
Of deepest day—O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm . . . !


We left the haven hanging in the night
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.
Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn,—
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.
And still the circular, indubitable frieze
Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!


O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.


Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth
Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—
O River-throated—iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.


Forever Deity’s glittering Pledge, O Thou
Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns
To wrapt inception and beatitude,—
Always through blinding cables, to our joy,
Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy:
Always through spiring cordage, pyramids
Of silver sequel, Deity’s young name
Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends.


Migrations that must needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,
O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—
Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—
(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)
Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!


So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star
That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings,
Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:
—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves. . . . ?
Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.















   . . .


Shells and shards make beauty of us each:
Sail (if the glaring crowd allows?) 
through such allowance,
of tunnel silent with complaints
or gulf that is high percentage 
of our fluid gravity—
or walk as God has given us wont
over a Bridge with the drama of 
the wasteland under, without side
or circumference,—to destiny
noncongruent with
the thunder, the stone
that see no life in March.

[wasellajam]

Tornado
for Andrea Gibson

I admit, you drove me crazy.
The careless way you’d salt a tomato,
no napkin or plate beneath it.
Just right over the floor,
your summer snow, trusting
someone else would sweep it.

And you never took your boots off.
Only ever used half a stevia packet.
The rest would collect in the crevices
of car doors, divots no vacuum could reach.
There was nothing you couldn’t fix
with duct tape, or shoelaces
stolen from other people’s shoes.

And you broke everything
you borrowed. All those stains
you called heart-shaped.
Plus you lost my heirlooms.
Not because you didn’t care,
but because you moved so fast,
like maybe you always knew
you would leave too soon—

so why waste a minute
screwing the cap back on
the pickle jar? Do you remember
how many times you thought
something was stolen?
That we’d been invaded?
Because you couldn’t wait
that extra breath to look.
You loved me

because I always found everything.
I always assured you:
nothing was taken from us.
Not even time.

It’s all such a mess—
how immaculate
the house is now.
All I want is you
tracking muddy bootprints
across my life.

Come back, fix this
with my missing shoelaces.
Why did I care
that we were walking
on salt?

Come home.
I will call it the beach.

-Megan Falley

[Truerenigma]

Tornado
for Andrea Gibson

I admit, you drove me crazy.
The careless way you’d salt a tomato,
no napkin or plate beneath it.
Just right over the floor,
your summer snow, trusting
someone else would sweep it.

And you never took your boots off.
Only ever used half a stevia packet.
The rest would collect in the crevices
of car doors, divots no vacuum could reach.
There was nothing you couldn’t fix
with duct tape, or shoelaces
stolen from other people’s shoes.

And you broke everything
you borrowed. All those stains
you called heart-shaped.
Plus you lost my heirlooms.
Not because you didn’t care,
but because you moved so fast,
like maybe you always knew
you would leave too soon—

so why waste a minute
screwing the cap back on
the pickle jar? Do you remember
how many times you thought
something was stolen?
That we’d been invaded?
Because you couldn’t wait
that extra breath to look.
You loved me

because I always found everything.
I always assured you:
nothing was taken from us.
Not even time.

It’s all such a mess—
how immaculate
the house is now.
All I want is you
tracking muddy bootprints
across my life.

Come back, fix this
with my missing shoelaces.
Why did I care
that we were walking
on salt?

Come home.
I will call it the beach.

-Megan Falley

[rowens]

Meta-A and the A of Absolutes
By Jay Wright



I write my God in blue.
I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts.
I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight.
I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath,
or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade,
at twilight, on the desert's steps.
Brown by day and black by night,
my God has wings that open to no reason.
He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes,
scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb
of light leaping from a fire.
Press him he bleeds.
When you take your hand to sacred water,
there is no sign of any wound.
And so I call him supreme, great artist,
judge of time, scholar of all living event,
the possible prophet of the possible event.
Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars,
blind men with their scars dulled by kola,
blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop,
blind men in corn, blind men in steel,
reason by their lights that our tongues
are free, our tongues will redeem us.
Speech is the fact, and the fact is true.
What is moves, and what is moving is.
We cling to these contradictions.
We know we will become our contradictions,
our complex body's own desire.
Yet speech is not the limit of our vision.
The ear entices itself with any sound.
The skin will caress whatever tone
or temperament that rises or descends.
The bones will set themselves to a dance.
The blood will argue with a bird in flight.
The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice,
brush and thrill to an old bone.
And yet there is no sign to arrest us
                                    from the possible.
We remain at rest there, in transit
from our knowing to our knowledge.
So I would set a limit where I meet my logic.
I would clamber from my own cave
into the curve of sign, an alphabet
of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason.
I am good when I am in motion,
when I think of myself at rest
in the knowledge of my moving,
when I have the vision of my mother at rest,
in moonlight, her lap the cradle of my father's head.
I am good when I trade my shells,
and walk from boundary to boundary,
unarmed and unafraid of another's speech.
I am good when I learn the world
through the touch of my present body.
I am good when I take the cove of a cub
                                            into my care.
I am good when I hear the changes in my body
echo all my changes down the years,
when what I know indeed is what I would
                                              know in deed.
I am good when I know the darkness of all light,
and accept the darkness, not as sign, but as my body.
This is the A of absolutes,
the logbook of judgments,
the good sign.




RED


The heart, catalectic though it be, does glow,
responds to every midnight bell within you.
This is a discourse on reading heat,
the flushed char of burned moments one sees
after the sexton's lamp flows
over the body's dark book.
There is suspicion
here that violet
traces of
sacrifice
stand
bare.




WIND


Through winter,
harmattan blacks the air.
My body fat with oil,
I become another star at noon,
when the vatic insistence
of the dog star's breath clings to me.
Though I am a woman,
I turn south,
toward the fire,
and hear the spirits in the bush.
But this is my conceit:
water will come from the west,
and I will have my trance,
                                        be reborn,
perhaps in a Mediterranean air,
the Rhone delta's contention
with the eastern side of rain.
In all these disguises,
I follow the aroma of power.
So I am charged in my own field,
to give birth to the solar wind,
particles spiraling around the line
                            of my body,
moving toward the disruption,
the moment when the oil of my star at noon
                                     is a new dawn.





Noah’s Raven

by W.S. Merwin


Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment, I never made promises.




Berryman

I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
 
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
 
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
 
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
 
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
 
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
 
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
 
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
 
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
 
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write


Baudelaire
By Delmore Schwartz 

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep,
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial,   
Having no relation to my affairs.   

Dear Mother, is any time left to us
In which to be happy? My debts are immense.
My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment.
I know nothing. I cannot know anything.   
I have lost the ability to make an effort.
But now as before my love for you increases.   
You are always armed to stone me, always:   
It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life
I am almost happy. The book, almost finished,   
Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument
To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.   

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me.   
Satan glides before me, saying sweetly:
“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today.   
Tonight you will work.” When night comes,   
My mind, terrified by the arrears,
Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence,   
Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.”
Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself   
With the same resolution, the same weakness.  
 
I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.   
I am sick of having colds and headaches:   
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems,   
The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office,
Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes,   
The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write   
“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write   
“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history
Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,
Although you cannot believe it necessary,
And doubt that the sum is accurate,
Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

[rowens]

NOTHING TO SAVE


DH Lawrence

There is nothing to save, now all is lost,
but a tiny core of stillness in the heart
like the eye of a violet.




SELF PITY


I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
***
TELL ME A WORD

Tell me a word
That you’ve often heard
Yet it makes you squint
If you see it in print!









Delfica
Gerard de Nerval

Do you know it, Dafné, this ancient romance,
At the foot of the sycamore, or under the white laurels,
Under the olive tree, the myrtle, or the trembling willows,
This love song that always begins again?...

Do you recognize the Temple with its immense peristyle,
And the bitter lemons where your teeth were imprinted,
And the grotto, fatal to unwary guests,
Where of the vanquished dragon sleeps the ancient seed?...

They will come back, those gods you always mourn!
Time will bring back the order of the old days;
The earth quivered with a prophetic breath...

However the Sibyl with the Latin face
Is still asleep under the arch of Constantine
"And nothing disturbed the severe portico."


Álvaro de Campos: Triumphal Ode

In the painful light of big electric factory-lamps
I have a fever and I write.
I write grinding my teeth, a beast for the beauty of this,
For the beauty of this thing wholly unknown to the ancients.

O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r!
Strong restrained spasm of furious mechanism!
In fury within and without myself,
Through all my nerves dissected, outside,
My nipples distended with everything I feel!
I have dry lips, O great modern noises,
From listening to you much too closely,
And my head burns, wanting to sing you
With an excessive expression of all my feelings,
An excess contemporaneous with you, O machines!

In fever, looking at motors as if at tropical Nature —
Vast human tropics of iron and fire and force —
I sing, and I sing the present, and also the past and the future,
Because the present is all the past and all the future
And Plato and Virgil are in machines and electric lights
Because the human Virgil and Plato had existed in other times,
And pieces of Alexander The Great from say the fiftieth century,
Molecules making the mind of Aeschylus feverish in the 100th century,
Moving through these transmission-belts and pistons and fliers,
Howling, grinding, whispering, clattering, clanking,
Becoming an excess of bodily caresses in a single caress in my soul.

Ah, to be able to express myself wholly the way a motor expresses itself!
Without completion, like a machine!
To go through life triumphantly like a late-model auto!
To at least be physically penetrated by all this,
Rend myself totally, open myself completely, make myself permeable
To the perfume of oil and heat and coal
Given off by this stupendous, black, artificial, insatiable flora!

Fraternity with every dynamic!
Promiscuous fury of being part-agent
Of the ferric, cosmopolite wheeling
Of strenuous railways,
Of the cargo-transport drudgery of boats,
Of the slow lubricious turning of derricks,
Of the disciplined tumult of factories,
And of the whispering near-silence and monotony of transmission belts!

European hours, producers, squeezed
Between mechanisms and useful tasks!
Great cities motionless in the cafes —
In the cafes — oases of noisy uselessness
Wherein are crystallized and precipitated
The gossip and gestures of The Useful,
And the wheels, the toothed wheels and the bearings of The Progressive!
New Soulless Minerva of quays and train-stations!
New enthusiasms of the Moment’s stature!
Plated keels of rippled steel lean smiling against dock
Or dry-dock, raised up, on the inclined planes of the ports!
Activity international, transatlantic, Canadian-Pacific!
Lights and feverish wasting of time in bars, in hotels,
In Longchamps and the Derbies and the Ascots,
And Piccadillies and Avenues de l’Opera
Entering the foundation of my soul!

Hé-la the streets, Hé-la the squares, Hé-la-ho la foule!
All the passersby stopping at the display-windows!
Businessmen, vagrants, exaggeratedly well-dressed crooks;
Evident members of aristocratic clubs;
Squalid dubious figures; paterfamilias, vaguely happy
And paternal down to the gold chain crossing their vests
From pocket to pocket!
Everything going by, everything unendingly going by!
Overly accentuated presence of coquettes;
Interesting banality (who knows if there’s something inside?)
Of the petit-bourgeois women, generally mother and daughter,
Walking in the street with some destination in mind,
The grace, feminine and false, of the pederasts going by, slowly;
And all the simply elegant people who promenade to be seen
And have a soul inside them, after all!
(Oh, I’d just love to pimp all this!)

Marvelous beauty of political corruption,
Delicious financial and diplomatic scandals,
Political aggression in the streets,
And now and then regicide’s comet
Illuminating with Prodigy and Fanfare
The ordinarily clear skies of quotidian Civilization!

Contradictory notices in the journals,
Political articles insincerely sincere,
News passez á-la-caisse, inordinate crimes —
Two columns of it continued on page two!
Fresh smell of typographic ink!
Newly hung posters, wet!

Yellow journalism in its white wrapper!
How I love you all, all, all,
How I love you in every way,
With my eyes and with my ears and with my smell
And with my touch (what palpating you represents to me!)
And with my intelligence like an antenna you make vibrate!
Ah, how all my senses are in heat for you!
Fertilizers, steam-threshers, agricultural advances!
Agronomochemistry! Commerce nearly a science!
O cases of traveling salesmen,
Traveling salesmen, Industry’s knights-errant,
Human extensions of factories and calm offices!

O merchandise in showcases! O mannequins! O latest models!
O useless articles everyone wants to buy!
Olá great department stores!
O neon advertisements appearing one after another, only to disappear!
Olá everything with which today constructs itself, with which today becomes different from yesterday!
Eh, reinforced concrete, cement mixer, new processes!
Progress of gloriously deadly armaments!
Armor, cannons, machine-guns, submarines, airplanes!
I love you, all and everything, like a beast.

I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly twisting my vision
In you, O great, banal, useful, useless things,
O utterly modern things,
O my contemporaries, actual and proximate form
Of the immediate system of the Universe!
New Revelation, metallic and dynamic, of God!

O factories, O laboratories, O music halls, O Luna-Parks,
O battleships, O bridges, O floating docks,
In my turbulent and incandescing mind
I possess you like a beautiful woman,
I possess you completely like a beautiful woman one doesn’t love,
Whom one meets randomly and finds very attractive.

Hé-la-ho façades of great stores!
Hé-la-ho elevators of great edifices!
Hé-la-ho ministerial reappointments!
Parliament, politics, relators of budgets,
Falsified budgets!
(A budget is as natural as a tree
And a parliament is as beautiful as a butterfly.)

Hé-la-ho the fascination with all of life,
Because everything is life, from the bright things in showcases
To the mysterious bridge of night between the stars
And the ancient solemn sea bathing the coasts
Just as compassionately
As when Plato was really Plato
In his real presence, in his flesh, with his soul inside,
Speaking with Aristotle who was not to be his disciple.

I could die ground up by a motor
With the delicious surrender felt by a woman possessed.
Hurl me into furnaces!
Shove me under trains!
Bludgeon me aboard ships!
Masochism through mechanism!
Sadism of whatever’s modern and me and the clamor!

Hoopla-ho jockey who’s just won the Derby,
Biting your bi-colored cap!
(To be so tall I couldn’t fit through any door!
Ah, for me, seeing is a sexual perversion!)

Hé-la, hé-la, hé-la, cathedrals!
Let me break my head against your corners
And be carried bloody through the streets
By people who have no idea who I am!

O tramways, funiculars, metropolitans,
Rub yourselves against me until I come!
Hilla! hilla! hilla-ho!
Guffaw full in my face,
O you automobiles crowded with roisters and whores,
O streets’ quotidian multitudes neither happy nor sad,
Anonymous multicolor river where I can’t bathe myself like I want to!
Ah, what complex lives, what things there are in every house!
Ah, to know all those lives in full, the difficulties with money,
Domestic squabbles, unsuspected debaucheries,
The thoughts you have all alone in your room,
The gestures you make when nobody’s watching!
Not knowing all this is not knowing anything, O rage,
O rage wasting my thin face
Like fever and lust and hunger,
Sometimes agitating my hands
In absurd crispations right in the middle of the rabble
In the streets full of encounters!

Ah, and the people, ordinary and dirty, who seem always the same,
Who use foul words as a matter of course,
Whose sons steal at the doors of groceries,
And whose daughters of eight — and I find this beautiful and I love it! —
Masturbate men of decent aspect in the stairwells.
The riffraff who walk the scaffolding and go home
Through alleyways almost unreal in their narrow putrefaction.
Marvelous human people living like dogs,
Beneath every moral system,
For whom no religion at all was made,
Nor art created,
Nor politics destined for them!
How I love you all, because you’re the way you are,
Neither immoral for all your lowness, nor bad, nor good,
Untouched by progress,
Marvelous fauna on the bed of the sea of life!

(At the pump in the yard of my house
The donkey walks at the wheel, walks at the wheel,
And the mystery of the world is just that size.
Wipe your sweat with your arm, discontented worker.
The sunlight smothers the silence of the spheres
And we all must die,
O somber crepuscular pine-groves,
Pine-groves where my childhood was something other
Than what I am today...)
But, ah, again, constant mechanical rage!
Again, mobile obsession of omnibuses.
Again the fury of being on every train at the same exact time
In every part of the world,
Of saying farewell aboard every ship
At this very instant loading iron or detaching from docks.
O iron, O steel, O aluminum, O burnished plates of steel!
O quays, O ports, O railways, O derricks, O tugboats!

Hé-la great rail disasters!
Hé-la collapsing mine-shafts!
Hé-la delicious shipwrecks of the great transatlantics!
Hé-la-ho revolutions here, there, all over everywhere,
Alterations to constitutions, wars, treaties, invasions,
Noise, injustice, violence, and maybe soon to come,
A great invasion of yellow barbarians into Europe,
And another Sun on a new Horizon!

What does it matter, but what does all this matter
In the fulgent blood-red contemporaneous noise,
The cruel and delicious noise of today’s civilization?
Everything obliterated except the Moment,
The Moment with the hot nude torso and a stoker,
The stridently noisy and mechanical Moment,
The dynamic Moment passing through every bacchant
Of iron and bronze in a drunken spree of metals.

Eia trains, eia bridges, eia hotels at dinnertime,
Eia apparata of every kind, ferrous, brute, and minimal,
Precision instruments, machines for grinding, for digging,
Motors, drillers, rotary engines!

Eia! eia! eia!
Eia electricity, the aching nerves of Matter!
Eia wireless telegraph, metallic affinity with the Unconscious!
Eia tunnels, canals, Panama, Kiel, Suez!
Eia all the past in the present!
Eia the whole future already in us! eia!
Eia! eia! eia!
Useful ferric fruits of the cosmopolitan factory-tree!
Eia! eia! eia, eia-ho-o-o!
I don’t even know if I exist inside. I whirl, I wheel, I engineer myself.
Couple me with every train.
Hoist me on every quay.
I whirl in every ship’s propellor.
Eia! eia-ho eia!
Eia! I am mechanical heat and electricity!
Eia! the rails, the machine-housings — Europe!
Eia and hurrah for me-all and everything, machines working, eia!

To leap with everything above everything! Hoopla!

Hoopla, hoopla, hoopla-ho, hoopla!
Hé-la! hé-ho! Ho-o-o-o-o!
Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z!

If only I could be everybody everywhere!


Hemingway Never Did This
Chuch Bukowski 

I read that he lost a suitcase full of manuscripts on a
train and that they never were recovered.
I can't match the agony of this
but the other night I wrote a 3-page poem
upon this computer
and through my lack of diligence and
practice
and by playing around with commands
on the menu
I somehow managed to erase the poem
forever.
believe me, such a thing is difficult to do
even for a novice
but I somehow managed to do
it.

now I don't think this 3-pager was immortal
but there were some crazy wild lines,
now gone forever.
it bothers more than a touch, it's some-
thing like knocking over a good bottle of
wine.

and writing about it hardly makes a good
poem.
still, I thought somehow you'd like to
know?

if not, at least you've read this far
and there could be better work
down the line.

let's hope so, for your sake
and
mine.