Poems that you love

[rowens]

The above poem:

There are three levels of irony:
The title, the quote and the body of the poem.

Using irony, no irony, beyond irony.

Beyond irony includes irony and everything else.

This is the case, strictly, with William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Irony is a plaything in poems like these. And completely serious. And beyond serious, because serious is subject to humor.

[rowens]

There's a poem by John Wilkinson, Tabulate. I don't feel like typing it up and can't find it online.
There are sections in it that work for me, in with me.
as if human had been hollowed out

I find things in that poem that connect to my poems. And I take that line out. And I make my poems corrupt his poem into meaning what it would mean, if that line was left out, and I was writing the poem.

The Wood Circle book this comes from has good parts in it. I haven't found much in it as a whole yet, but I've been playing with it for weeks, and some parts are working in me. So, I guess, working for me.

[rowens]

I like the simple quality of translated poems. The literal-quality, and how whatever music and depth is missing still comes through. You know it's there, at back of the translation.  

I changed the word 'life' to the word 'day' in the second stanza. It makes the whole thing better to me. 





I know well enough that this image
Fixed for ever in my mind
Is not you, but the shadow
Of love which exists in me
While my time is still not run out.

So you seem to me my love made visible,
Endowed by me with that very grace
Which makes me suffer, weep and despair
Of everything at times, but at others
Lifts me up to the zenith of our day,
Possessing the joys granted only
To the chosen few beyond the world.

And although I know this I then think
That without you, without the rare
Excuse which you gave me, my love,
Now a tenderness outside me,
Would today be there within
Sleeping still and lying in hope
Of someone who, at his call, at last
Would set it beating joyfully.

Then I thank you and say to you;
For this I came into the world, to await you;
To live because of you, as you live
Because of me, even though you do not know it,
Because of this deep love I have for you.

Luis Cernuda

[rowens]

Not always love, a fragment of Jack Spicer and a Weldon Kees poem.

Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless
signals. No
One listens 
          . . . . .

Last summer, in the blue heat,
Over the beach, in the burning air,
A legless beggar lurched on calloused fists
To where I waited with the sun-dazed birds.
He said, "The summer boils away. My life
Joins to another life; this parched skin
Dries and dies and flakes away,
Becomes your costume when the torn leaves blow."

--Thus in the losing autumn,
Over the streets, I now lurch
Legless to your side and speak your name
Under a gray sky ripped apart
By thunder and the changing wind.


And since I can't find Time's Dedication by Delmore Schwartz, this one will have to serve. 

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]

The Crosses Meet by Jay Wright
It says copyrighted material, but it's free in Google Books, and all the other things where poetry is used for poetry materials allows for poetry to be poetry for poetry to be learned about. 

[rowens]

Approaching Prayer

A moment tries to come in
Through the windows, when one must go
Beyond what there is in the room,

But it must come straight down.
Lord, it is time,

And I must get up and start
To circle through my father’s empty house
Looking for things to put on
Or to strip myself of
So that I can fall to my knees
And produce a word I can’t say
Until all my reason is slain.

Here is the gray sweater
My father wore in the cold,
The snapped threads growing all over it
Like his gray body hair.
The spurs of his gamecocks glimmer
Also, in my light, dry hand.
And here is the head of a boar
I once helped to kill with two arrows:

Two things of my father’s
Wild, Bible-reading life
And my own best and stillest moment
In a hog’s head waiting for glory.

All these I set up in the attic,
The boar’s head, gaffs, and the sweater
On a chair, and gaze in the dark
Up into the boar’s painted gullet.

Nothing. Perhaps I should feel more foolish,
Even, than this.
I put on the ravelled nerves
And gray hairs of my tall father
In the dry grave growing like fleece
Strap his bird spurs to my heels
And kneel down under the skylight.
I put on the hollow hog’s head
Gazing straight up
With star points in the glass eyes
That would blind anything that looked in

And cause it to utter words.
The night sky fills with a light

Of hunting: with leaves
And sweat and the panting of dogs

Where one tries hard to draw breath,
A single breath, and hold it.
I draw the breath of life
For the dead hog:
I catch it from the still air,
Hold it in the boar’s rigid mouth,
And see

A young aging man with a bow
And a green arrow pulled to his cheek
Standing deep in a mountain creek bed,
Stiller than trees or stones,
Waiting and staring

Beasts, angels
I am nearly that motionless now

There is a frantic leaping at my sides
Of dogs coming out of the water

The moon and the stars do not move

I bare my teeth, and my mouth
Opens, a foot long, popping with tushes

A word goes through my closed lips

I gore a dog, he falls, falls back
Still snapping, turns away and dies
While swimming. I feel each hair on my back
Stand up through the eye of a needle

Where the hair was
On my head stands up
As if it were there

The man is still; he is stiller: still
Yes.

Something comes out of him
Like a shaft of sunlight or starlight.
I go forward toward him

(Beasts, angels)

With light standing through me,
Covered with dogs, but the water
Tilts to the sound of the bowstring

The planets attune all their orbits

The sound from his fingers,
Like a plucked word, quickly pierces
Me again, the trees try to dance
Clumsily out of the wood

I have said something else

And underneath, underwater,
In the creek bed are dancing
The sleepy pebbles

The universe is creaking like boards
Thumping with heartbeats
And bonebeats

And every image of death
In my head turns red with blood.
The man of blood does not move

My father is pale on my body

The dogs of blood
Hang to my ears,
The shadowy bones of the limbs
The sun lays on the water
Mass darkly together

Moonlight, moonlight

The sun mounts my hackles
And I fall; I roll
In the water;
My tongue spills blood
Bound for the ocean;
It moves away, and I see
The trees strain and part, see him
Look upward

Inside the hair helmet
I look upward out of the total
Stillness of killing with arrows.
I have seen the hog see me kill him
And I was as still as I hoped.
I am that still now, and now.
My father’s sweater
Swarms over me in the dark.
I see nothing, but for a second

Something goes through me
Like an accident, a negligent glance,
Like the explosion of a star
Six billion light years off
Whose light gives out

Just as it goes straight through me.
The boar’s blood is sailing through rivers
Bearing the living image
Of my most murderous stillness.
It picks up speed
And my heart pounds.
The chicken-blood rust at my heels
Freshens, as though near a death wound
Or flight. I nearly lift
From the floor, from my father’s grave
Crawling over my chest,

And then get up
In the way I usually do.
I take off the head of the hog
And the gaffs and the panting sweater
And go down the dusty stairs
And never come back.

I don’t know quite what has happened
Or that anything has,

Hoping only that
The irrelevancies one thinks of
When trying to pray
Are the prayer,

And that I have got by my own
Means to the hovering place
Where I can say with any
Other than the desert fathers —
Those who saw angels come,
Their body glow shining on bushes
And sheep’s wool and animal eyes,
To answer what questions men asked
In Heaven’s tongue,
Using images of earth
Almightily:

PROPHECIES, FIRE IN THE SINFUL TOWERS,
WASTE AND FRUITION IN THE LAND,
CORN, LOCUSTS AND ASHES,
THE LION’s SKULL PULSING WITH HONEY,
THE BLOOD OF THE FIRST-BORN,
A GIRL MADE PREGNANT WITH A GLANCE
LIKE AN EXPLODING STAR
AND A CHILD BORN OF UTTER LIGHT —

Where I can say only, and truly,
That my stillness was violent enough,
That my brain had blood enough,
That my right hand was steady enough,
That the warmth of my father’s wool grave
Imparted love enough
And the keen heels of feathery slaughter
Provided lift enough,
That reason was dead enough
For something important to be:

That, if not heard,
It may have been somehow said.

James Dickey

[Semicircle]

The View From Halfway Down

The weak breeze whispers nothing
the water screams sublime.
His feet shift, teeter-totter
deep breaths, stand back, it’s time.

Toes untouch the overpass
soon he’s water-bound.
Eyes locked shut but peek to see
the view from halfway down.

A little wind, a summer sun
a river rich and regal.
A flood of fond endorphins
brings a calm that knows no equal.

You’re flying now, you see things
much more clear than from the ground.
It's all okay, or it would be
were you not now halfway down.

Thrash to break from gravity
what now could slow the drop?
All I’d give for toes to touch
the safety back at top.

But this is it, the deed is done
silence drowns the sound.
Before I leaped I should've seen
the view from halfway down.

I really should’ve thought about
the view from halfway down.
I wish I could've known about
the view from halfway down—

[rowens]

Dragon Country - Robert Penn Warren

[Tiger the Lion]

The View From Halfway Down

The weak breeze whispers nothing
the water screams sublime.
His feet shift, teeter-totter
deep breaths, stand back, it’s time.

Toes untouch the overpass
soon he’s water-bound.
Eyes locked shut but peek to see
the view from halfway down.

A little wind, a summer sun
a river rich and regal.
A flood of fond endorphins
brings a calm that knows no equal.

You’re flying now, you see things
much more clear than from the ground.
It's all okay, or it would be
were you not now halfway down.

Thrash to break from gravity
what now could slow the drop?
All I’d give for toes to touch
the safety back at top.

But this is it, the deed is done
silence drowns the sound.
Before I leaped I should've seen
the view from halfway down.

I really should’ve thought about
the view from halfway down.
I wish I could've known about
the view from halfway down—

The View From Halfway Down, BoJack Horseman
T
A reminder for everyone that even in a thread such as this one, poems that are not your own require appropriate credit. 

[rowens]

James Merrill: For Proust







You can't read Proust and not read Gerard de Nerval's, the redline under that name is like an intense passion, or for weak folks, lava.

Story, Sylvie.

Read Sylvie and, if you get into it, and when you come to the last sentence, after having read it all, it hurts you. It's a once in a lifetime experience, that story. 

And you see the difference in Nerval and Proust. Why Proust segregated his life and Nerval hanged himself in the midst.

[rowens]

A. R. Ammons poem.


The sap is gone out of the trees
in the land of my birth
and the branches droop
    The rye is rusty in the fields
and the oatgrains are light in the wind
The combine sucks at the fields
    and coughs out dry mottled straw
The bags of grain are chaffy and light

The oatfields said Oh
in the land of my birth
and Oh said the wheatfields as the dusting
combine passed over
and long after the dust was gone
    Oh they said
and looked around at the stubble and straw
The sap is gone out of the hollow straws
and the marrow out of my bones

brittle and dry
    and painful in this land

The wind whipped at my carcass saying
How shall I
    coming from these fields
water the fields of earth
    and I said Oh
    and fell down in the dust

[rowens]

I feel like an alien walking around the blistering hot landscape. Even the grass is gone from the trucks around the area digging with their tires and the machines throwing sawdust from the shredding trees. Yellow is laid down to grow more grass in some of those places and the yellow burns the eyes in the sun. Heat and no shade. And bright yellow and dry dirt. Yellow of the sun too close to home for comfort.
And the above poem, I trope in my world with the last scene of the 1970s The Man Who Fell To Earth, one of the last lines being Oh. And the music Artie, not Archie, Shaw, not straw.

[rowens]

D H Lawrence poem


You tell me I am wrong.
Who are you, who is anybody to tell me I am wrong?
I am not wrong.

In Syracuse, rock left bare by the viciousness of Greek women,
No doubt you have forgotten the pomegranate trees in flower,
Oh so red, and such a lot of them.

Whereas at Venice,
Abhorrent, green, slippery city
Whose Doges were old, and had ancient eyes,
In the dense foliage of the inner garden
Pomegranates like bright green stone,
And barbed, barbed with a crown.
Oh, crown of spiked green metal
Actually growing!

Now, in Tuscany,
Pomegranates to warm your hands at;
And crowns, kingly, generous, tilting crowns
Over the left eyebrow.

And, if you dare, the fissure!

Do you mean to tell me you will see no fissure?
Do you prefer to look on the plain side?

For all that, the setting suns are open.
The end cracks open with the beginning:
Rosy, tender, glittering within the fissure.

Do you mean to tell me there should be no fissure?
No glittering, compact drops of dawn?
Do you mean it is wrong, the gold-filmed skin, integument,
            shown ruptured?

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

[Semicircle]

Baaaaby.
Baby, she means nothing to me.
Okay? She means nothing to me.

I didn’t know you exist.
When I was with her,
I didn’t know you exist.

Okay? I didn’t know.
I didn’t know you exist.
I didn’t know. Okay?

If I knew you exist,
I would’ve never been with her.
Okay? I didn’t know you exist.

She means nothing.
It’s gone. It’s in the past.
Okay? It’s nothing.

She means nothing.
I don’t even know her.
I don’t even know who she is.

I don’t even know who I am
when I think about her, okay?
It’s like the world stops existing...

and the only thing that matters,
is... this moment.
Okay? She means nothing.

She means nothing to me, okay?
She’s a―she’s nothing.
She’s like a ghost that haunts me.

Forever.

She means nothing.
She means nothing!
She doesn’t even exist.

Okay? She’s no one.
She’s every person, and every―
She’s every man, woman and child.

She’s inanimate objects.
When I look at the floor, I see her face...
in the wood.

Okay? But she means nothing.
She means nothing to me.
I don’t know what she means.

It can’t be put into words;
what I feel for her. Okay?
It means nothing.

It’s meaningless.
She means: nothing.
There is no way to give it meaning,

this sensation that she gives me.
Okay? It means nothing.
It’s nothing.

Baby! She’s nothing;
she’s no one;
she doesn’t exist.

Okay? It’s like she’s my own, special imagination.
And when I think I am alone, all of a sudden, she is there.
And the question is, where do I end and where does she begin?

Right? She means nothing.
It’s crazy. Baby, it’s crazy, okay?
It’s crazy, and she means nothing.

Why are you―don’t worry about it, baby.
She’s no one.
She’s no one.

To give her a name would be to reduce her
to a physical being...
and she is much more than that.

Okay? But she is nothing.
She means nothing...
Baby! Baby, why―she means nothing to me.

Okay? She doesn’t mean a thing. To me.
She doesn’t mean anything.
She is everything, but she is not...

She does not exist in the strict sense,
that you and me exist.
She doesn’t exist; she’s not here; she’s not real.

So stop worrying about it, okay?
She means nothing to me.
Baby. Baby, baby, baby.

You are my only woman.
Okay? You are my only woman.
You are the only person that matters to me.

You are the only one that matters. Okay?
You are the only one I think about. Okay?
She means nothing.

She means: nothing.
She is no one.
She is nowhere. Okay?

She is in the water that I drink.
She is in the air that I breathe.
She is in space.

She is somewhere in space,
looking down on me, going:
“I see you. I. See you.”

She is the all-seeing,
all-knowing God...
of my world.

She means nothing.
I can’t―
I don’t know what she means.

--Justin Kuritzkes

[rowens]

---

W. C. Fields for President
                   by Emanuel Ravelli







Where I was growing up, the conservatives were all assholes;
when I went else where and dreamed, the liberals were all ass holes;
those who practiced art are assholes;
those who practiced magick are assholes :

and I want to fuck all of them

like a red indian stealing the women.


          WHOLE is the Light of all Stars and PlanetsThe Holy Names/Principles 'inform' the Gods/Planets/Functions
which guide the Angels/Stars/Constellations/Aspects which
regulate the Elements/Processes.
          The Djinn are conscious, enforced outlines of 
apparent Separateness that work as arbiters, handymen, and
laborers. Djinn buy their freedom with occasional assigned labor.
They are Angels who are conscious. They are both
Kings and Slaves. They get off on duality, duplicity and multiplicity.
          Angels are nonconscious pure Bliss.
          Genius is Angels and Djinn in the sense that 2=0.
          Genius is the nondual, noncontradictory guide Below
the Abyss.
          Genius is WHOLE in Play.
          Nonduality contains Duality. Mere Concepts/Contexts/
          Connotations. Language. Experience.
          This is Human Vitality.
          Conscientious Code-Style-Flow.
          here



                       . . .            . . .           . . . 



On one hand, I have a perfect, cohesive, coherent,
Magical Universe. On the other, I parade Nova active
Difference. On the third hand, I incite and ignite an
utter disruption of all metaphysics, ideology, language
                            Same and Different
          Both/And   Either/Or   Neither/Nor
             I AM ad hoc ad libitum

[TranquillityBase]

Good to hear from you, Revelli.

Thanks for the video, and turning us on to Etheridge Knight.

[rowens]

I invoked Dionysos today.
I came online.
I posted Eltheridge Knight before, another of his videos on YouTube a few years ago. I made a post with read-out-loud poems by James Merrill, Theo Roekthe, Charles Bukowski, Eldritch Night and All the Kings' Men Warren,

---

I posted this Response a long while before I posted the Abortion Post.

This is higher.

W O W

[rowens]

I read this poem the other day. W. S. Werwin wrote it. That W is upside -down. 

I'm  not I  posted it here, because it justifies a lot of the symbolism in my poems. 


The anti-story arc carries on the arc. Satanism carries on Christianity. Human language carries on what that is.

I have a Code. I won't rape or kill you; but I will be like ECW Raven and be audacious asshole beyond human experience.
I,

I am beyond, beyond my eye/Vision/I.
.

.

Not anyone uece


not Raven from jew


not raven from turd island


not anything




NOAH’S RAVEN

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.

---

I'm going to rewrite this poem changing one word:
NOAH’S RAVEN

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 mistakes.
That one word I changed makes it satanic.

---

Before I made that one-word change, it wasn't biblical.

Bible=Book, The Book.


The Bible is a satire.

---

Satan exists between belief systems.

The cork between the alcoholic and the sealed bottle


the board between the torture spike of the Jehovah's Witness and the cross of the friendly Baptist on the hill

the hymenblood between your best bud in highschool who took your soul mate's virginity and your current installment on earth


the head chopped off and the towers felled between watered down Islam and the real Middle Eastern thing

---

The Devil exists between promises and mistakes.
Othewr
sei

there is no Satan

but agon.


Ro, 20023

---

Ar 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.

---

Where I am, there's a park in town that has woods that has a gravel trail called Gravity Road.

The poem I just posted, I think about sometimes when I walk there

[Miley]

Etheridge Knight

Feeling Fucked Up

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white    crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

[TranquillityBase]

Gracias, Miley

I laughed out loud at "fuck red ripe tomatoes", but anyway, an amazing poem.  I'm going to find his poems in print.