Poems that you love

[rowens]

Charlottesville Nocturne

The late September night is a train of thought, a wound
That doesn’t bleed, dead grass that’s still green,
No off-shoots, no elegance,
                                              the late September night,
Deprived of adjectives, abstraction’s utmost and gleam.

It has been said there is an end to the giving out of names.
It has been said that everything that’s written has grown hollow.
It has been said that scorpions dance where language falters and
                                                                                          gives way.
It has been said that something shines out from every darkness,
                                                                that something shines out.

Leaning against the invisible, we bend and nod.
Evening arranges itself around the fallen leaves
Alphabetized across the back yard,
                                                          desolate syllables
That braille us and sign us, leaning against the invisible.

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.
Morning arrives and that’s it.
                                                    Sunlight darkens the earth.

---

I don't love this poem.

It actually added to my unhappiness.

But then I wrote that For Daphne poem, which is how people deal.

I think I had already written that poem but I don't know.

I read, out loud, my poem, Summer in Autumn, that night.

There was a tv newscrew there interviewing people for some reason.

There was a lot of reasons I acted the fool that night.


I fabricated a hate crime so I could go to jail because it was raining.

I just pretended to hate someone who didn't exist. That was all it took.

---

Geoffrey Hill

Holy Thursday

Naked, he climbed to the wolf's lair;
He beheld Eden without fear,
Finding no ambush offered there
But sleep under the harbouring fur.

He said: 'They are decoyed by love
Who, tarrying through the hollow grove,
Neglect the seasons' sad remove.
Child and nurse walk hand in glove

As unaware of Time's betrayal,
Weaving their innocence with guile.
But they must cleave the fire's peril
And suffer innocence to fall.

I have been touched with that fire,
And have fronted the she-wolf's lair.
Lo, she lies gentle and innocent of desire
Who was my constant myth and terror.'

[rowens]

The Hill
Mark Strand

I have come this far on my own legs,
missing the bus, missing taxis,
climbing always. One foot in front of the other,
that is the way I do it.

It does not bother me, the way the hill goes on.
Grass beside the road, a tree rattling
its black leaves. So what?
The longer I walk, the farther I am from everything.

One foot in front of the other. The hours pass.
One foot in front of the other. The years pass.
The colors of arrival fade.
That is the way I do it.

[Wjames]

The Double Bell of Heat by David Berman

Midway down Walnut Street
a yellow sign says Slow Deaf Child,
with the silhouette of a running boy

painted over the bent and dented surface.
Just the post, rusted to black,
gives the story away.

The child must have grown up
and left the neighborhood a long time ago.

And now there's this sign.

You can imagine his parents going
to the city clerk's office.

The paperwork is strange and complex,
languishing in office out-bins,
drifting through council meetings.

One spring morning the boy sees two city workers
get out of a truck and set the bright sign
in the patch of grass between the sidewalk and street.

He watches it out the window, knowing what it is,
watching it gather the world around it
like a mountain in the Bible.

Cars heed the sign, many drivers scanning to the left
and right hoping to catch sight of the deaf boy playing.

Some drivers imagine hitting him and slow down even more.
They play out the scene, what they would say,
how their lives would change.

And the years pass, even for the little deaf boy.

He gets married, has kids.
Maybe moves to a village in New England
with stone walls and candle makers.

You can imagine him returning to the old neighborhood.
Driving down on a fall afternoon into the quiet center of things,
gently braking before this old streetsign.

He would do that, he would come back.
As if it had been written twice.

[rowens]

And,


The Cradle Logic of Autumn
Jay Wright

En mi país el Otoño nace de una flor seca,
de algunos pajaros; . . .
o del vaho penetrante de ciertos rios de la llanura.
—Molinari, “Oda a una larga tristeza”

Each instant comes with a price, the blue-edged bill
on the draft of a bird almost incarnadine,
the shanked ochre of an inn that sits as still
as the beavertail cactus it guards (the fine
rose of that flower gone as bronze as sand),
the river's chalky white insistence as it
moves past the gray afternoon toward sunset.
Autumn feels the chill of a late summer lit
only by goldenrod and a misplaced strand
of blackberries; deplores all such sleight of hand;
turns sullen, selfish, envious, full of regret.

Someone more adept would mute its voice. The spill
of its truncated experience would shine
less bravely and, out of the dust and dunghill
of this existence (call it hope, in decline),
as here the blue light of autumn falls, command
what is left of exhilaration and fit
this season's unfolding to the alphabet
of turn and counterturn, all that implicit
arc of a heart searching for a place to stand.
Yet even that diminished voice can withstand
the currying of its spirit. Here lies—not yet.

If, and only if, the leafless rose he sees,
or thinks he sees, flowered a moment ago,
this endangered heart flows with the river that flees
the plain, and listens with eye raised to the slow
revelation of cloud, hoping to approve
himself, or to admonish the rose for slight
transgressions of the past, this the ecstatic
ethos, a logic that seems set to reprove
his facility with unsettling delight.
Autumn might be only desire, a Twelfth Night
gone awry, a gift almost too emphatic.

Logic in a faithful light somehow appeases
the rose, and stirs the hummingbird's vibrato.
By moving, I can stand where the light eases
me into the river's feathered arms, and, so,
with the heat of my devotion, again prove
devotion, if not this moment, pure, finite.
Autumn cradles me with idiomatic
certainty, leaves me nothing to disapprove.
I now acknowledge this red moon, to requite
the heart alone given power to recite
its faith, what a cradled life finds emblematic.

---

A. R. Ammons' dedication from Sphere



I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:
the wind tore about this
way and that in confusion and its speech could not
get through to me nor could I address it:
still I said as if to the alien in myself
    I do not speak to the wind now:
for having been brought this far by nature I have been
brought out of nature
and nothing here shows me the image of myself:
for the word tree I have been shown a tree
and for the word rock I have been shown a rock
for stream, for cloud, for star
this place has provided firm implication and answering
    but where here is the image for longing:
so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts:
I flaked the bark of stunt-fir:
I looked into space and into the sun
and nothing answered my word longing:
    goodbye, I said, goodbye, nature so grand and
reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own element
and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am
as foreign here as If I had landed, a visitor:
so I went back down and gathered mud
and with my hands made an image for longing:
    I took the image to the summit: first
I set it here, on the top rock, but it completed
nothing; then I set it there among the tiny firs
but It would not fit:
so I returned to the city and built a house to set
the image in
and men came into my house and said
    that is an image for longing
and nothing will ever be the same again.




And,



 Viable


Motion's the dead giveaway,
eye catcher, the revealing risk:
the caterpillar sulls on the hot macadam

but then, risking, ripples to the bush:
the cricket, startled, leaps the
quickest arc: the earthwrom, casting,

nudges a grassblade, and the sharp robin
strikes: sound's the other
announcement: the redbird lands in

an elm branch and tests the air with
cheeps for an answering, reassuring
cheep, for a motion already cleared:

survival organizes these means down to
tension, to enwrapped, twisting suasions:
every act or non-act enceinte with risk or

prize: why must the revelations be
sound and motion, the point, too, moving and
saying through the scary opposites to death.

[rowens]

This is a good poem. None of the poems I post here are poems I love. I love women and trees, not poems. Both are cut down and spent on poems. This poem comes up a lot. It's the kind of poem people think Bukowski writes. It's the thing people who know they are poets write before they write poems, before they know that the poetry that they attack is the poetry they will be if they are given the chance.
And this is why this is a good poem. It's a poem that says all that poets who are poets but not yet writers wish to say. Bukowski made an art of it the way Jim Morrison made an art of being young and hot and having a deep voice in a college town. The way Maya Angelou made an art of being black and abused and afraid under a house in silence. The way Lewis Carroll talked nonsense, instead of doing what would be too much sense to an 11 year old girl. The way Christy Brown probably wouldn't have even thought to paint, had he had a hand at hand. 
And if Rimbaud went to Africa, So what?!, on this July spangled day. Bukowski dead in America. James Baldwin, a name few have heard, none have read. Here:

(What, you was expecting me not to make a connection between Rimbaud and black people?)


Why Rimbaud Went to Africa by Jim Carroll


poetry isn’t literary
poetry isn’t sure which fork to
use
poetry can’t name the parts of speech
fill out a grant application
logroll

poetry doesn’t like cappuccino
poetry doesn’t want to be printed in a
small press edition with its name on the
cover and get reviewed in 2 little magazines
read by 3 people
argued over by 8

poetry doesn’t care about glory
glory is nice but poetry figures it’s
dessert
poetry doesn’t want to get laid
poetry might want to get drunk but
that’s only self defense

poetry doesn’t want to traipse around Europe
and collect stray bits of wisdom
from ruined empires
that it can show like slides when it gets home
poetry has a headache

poetry is a slingshot
a war you can carry in your pocket
a better way to die
the kind of fire that never goes out
and never gives an inch

poetry wants to be on every street corner
hissing from the cracks in the sidewalks
from the columns of print in the newspapers
on the lips of people on buses going to their
miserable jobs in the morning

poetry wants to be
in the prayers of dogs and the
screams of acrobats
in the terror of politicians
and the dreams of beautiful women

poetry wants to be
an eye through which the world will see itself and
tremble
poetry doesn’t want to
die in the gutter
it already knows how

poetry doesn’t want to sparechange strolling professors
and millionaires
wear anything but blood

have conversations with college students about
the meaning of life

because a bad wind is coming
you can smell it in the air

the pollution of the cities
mixed with the odor of rotting souls

the wind will climb

it will have little sense of humor
it will not want cappuccino
or reviews
or girlfriends
or anything else

except the death of
everything we love

---

Somehow, anyhow. DH Lawrence can make even the silliest thing feel more polished, more real:

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!

[Kynaston Levitt]

The Noble Beast 


I know that writing this down 
doesn't mean anything 
or change anything.
Poetry is written by fools 
for fools.
At best it is layman halfwitted
and at worst it a self-important word game.
But also, spooning half a bag of sugar 
into cup of hot watery milk and coffee 
and eating a pile of reheated chips 
with a half bottle of Ketchup does
little for the soul—
nor does mowing lawns 
or worrying about the wrong people
smoking the wrong cigarettes in the wrong places
or the stock market's ups
or the stock market's downs
or the stock market's gone fucked itself
or buying the week's shopping
or new cars or washing machines
or those invisible stains
or kicking a Biro into a 63 year old man's lip, ear,
or selling real-estate or height buys
or caging animals or humans
or emptying other people's rubbish
or certifying them "insane" and 
filling their arms with detergent
or selling vaginal deodorant
or tooth picks or car wash or 
catching dogs or gassing dogs.
No man can convince me 
the tenure of these things 
are exactly loaded with some nobility 
or dignity.

[Kynaston Levitt]

This is probably my favorite poem ever written (right now).


Only Poets Piss In Sinks

She's a cold Seattle night.
—I can't be bothered to get out of bed 
and go all the way to the toilet, I tell her.
—It's only out through the Kitchen, she tells me. 
—If I'm at home I just open the window
and piss into the back yard. 
She lifts her head from the pillow and holds me
with her dark eyes.
—Really? She says. My ex boyfriend would never do a thing like that.
—No? I ask.
—No. He was very fastidious and would never piss out of a window.
—I don't always piss out of windows, I correct her,
                                            sometimes I piss in the sink, instead. 
She looks at me. 
—Well, he certainly wouldn't do that, either, she says. 
—Why not? I ask. 
—He just wasn't raised that way, she says.
—Well, nor was I!
—Then why do you do it?
I think for a second. 
—Because I'm a poet, I answer. Then laugh into the pillow.

[busker]

This is probably my favorite poem ever written (right now).


Only Poets Piss In Sinks

She's a cold Seattle night.
—I can't be bothered to get out of bed 
                                          and go all the way to the toilet, I tell her.
—It's only out through the Kitchen, she tells me. 
—If I'm at home I just open the window
and piss into the back yard. 
She lifts her head from the pillow and holds me
with her dark eyes.
—Really? She says. My ex boyfriend would never do a thing like that.
—No? I ask.
—No. He was very fastidious and would never piss out of a window.
—I don't always piss out of windows, I correct her,
                                            sometimes I piss in the sink, instead. 
She looks at me. 
—Well, he certainly wouldn't do that, either, she says. 
—Why not? I ask. 
—He just wasn't raised that way, she says.
—Well, nor was I!
—Then why do you do it?
I think for a second. 
—Because I'm a poet, I answer. Then laugh into the pillow.

It was going well till that last line.

[Kynaston Levitt]

This is probably my favorite poem ever written (right now).


Only Poets Piss In Sinks

She's a cold Seattle night.
—I can't be bothered to get out of bed 
                                          and go all the way to the toilet, I tell her.
—It's only out through the Kitchen, she tells me. 
—If I'm at home I just open the window
and piss into the back yard. 
She lifts her head from the pillow and holds me
with her dark eyes.
—Really? She says. My ex boyfriend would never do a thing like that.
—No? I ask.
—No. He was very fastidious and would never piss out of a window.
—I don't always piss out of windows, I correct her,
                                            sometimes I piss in the sink, instead. 
She looks at me. 
—Well, he certainly wouldn't do that, either, she says. 
—Why not? I ask. 
—He just wasn't raised that way, she says.
—Well, nor was I!
—Then why do you do it?
I think for a second. 
—Because I'm a poet, I answer. Then laugh into the pillow.

It was going well till that last line.

Seriously? The last line is what makes it.

[Miley]

Always Darker
by Georg Trakl

The wind, which moves purple treetops,

Is God's breath that comes and goes.

The black village rises before the forest;

Three shadows are laid over the field.

Meagerly the valley dusks

Below and silent for the humble.

A seriousness greets in garden and hall,

That wants to finish the day,

Piously and darkly an organ-sound.

Marie is enthroned there in blue vestment

And cradles her babe in hand.

The night is starlit and long.

[busker]

So This Is Nebraska
BY TED KOOSER

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

[Lizzie]

Sunday Morning

Crowded around the glowing open mouth
Of the electric oven, the children
Pull on clothes and eat brown-sugared oatmeal.

The broiler strains, buzzing to keep up
500 degrees, and the mother
Is already scrubbing at a dark streak

On the kitchen wall. Last night she'd been
Ironing shirts and trying her best to explain
Something important to the children

When the old mother cat's surviving
Two kittens' insistent squealing and scrambling
Out of their cardboard box began

To get to her. The baby screamed every time
The oldest girl set him on the cold floor
While she carried a kitten back to its place

Near the stove, and the mother cat kept reaching
For the butter dish on the table. Twice, the woman
Stopped talking and set her iron down to swat

A quick kitten away from the dangling cord,
And she saw that one of the boys had begun to feed
Margarine to his favorite by the fingerful.

When it finally jumped from his lap and squatted
To piss on a pale man's shirt dropped below
Her ironing board, the woman calmly stopped, unplugged

Her iron, picked up the grey kitten with one hand
And threw it, as if it were a housefly, hard
And straight at the yellow flowered wall

Across the room. It hit, cracked, and seemed to slide
Into a heap on the floor, leaving an odd silence
In the house. They all stood still

Staring at the thing, until one child,
The middle boy, walked slowly out of the room
And down the hall without looking

At his mother or what she'd done. The others followed
And by morning everything was back to normal
Except for the mother standing there scrubbing. 

~ Corrine Hales

[busker]

Sunday Morning

Crowded around the glowing open mouth
Of the electric oven, the children
Pull on clothes and eat brown-sugared oatmeal.

The broiler strains, buzzing to keep up
500 degrees, and the mother
Is already scrubbing at a dark streak

On the kitchen wall. Last night she'd been
Ironing shirts and trying her best to explain
Something important to the children

When the old mother cat's surviving
Two kittens' insistent squealing and scrambling
Out of their cardboard box began

To get to her. The baby screamed every time
The oldest girl set him on the cold floor
While she carried a kitten back to its place

Near the stove, and the mother cat kept reaching
For the butter dish on the table. Twice, the woman
Stopped talking and set her iron down to swat

A quick kitten away from the dangling cord,
And she saw that one of the boys had begun to feed
Margarine to his favorite by the fingerful.

When it finally jumped from his lap and squatted
To piss on a pale man's shirt dropped below
Her ironing board, the woman calmly stopped, unplugged

Her iron, picked up the grey kitten with one hand
And threw it, as if it were a housefly, hard
And straight at the yellow flowered wall

Across the room. It hit, cracked, and seemed to slide
Into a heap on the floor, leaving an odd silence
In the house. They all stood still

Staring at the thing, until one child,
The middle boy, walked slowly out of the room
And down the hall without looking

At his mother or what she'd done. The others followed
And by morning everything was back to normal
Except for the mother standing there scrubbing. 

~ Corrine Hales

Mother of the year, by the looks of it 
Quite brilliant.

[Kynaston Levitt]

Ars Poetica 
by Christian Wiman


1.

    —a plum and othering dusk,
something renunciatory in the light,
until the sparrow takes the old tree’s shape
and the trees untreed are everywhere.

If I could let go
If I could know what there is to let go
If I could chance the night’s improvidence
and be the being this hard mercy means.


2.

These lost and charnel thoughts
less thoughts than bits of stun
I suddenly find myself among;

that are the me I am when I am not
sleeked to reason and pacific despair
speak to me of a pain that saves,

some endmost ear to shrive the mind.

[Kynaston Levitt]

Small Victory
by Mark A Becker


Underneath our boxwood
the fox napped all day long,

and dreamed that life is good
now that our dog is gone.

[brynmawr1]

Solar
BY ROBIN BECKER

The desert is butch, she dismisses your illusions
about what might do to make your life
work better, she stares you down and doesn’t say
a word about your past. She brings you a thousand days,
a thousand suns effortlessly each morning rising.
She lets you think what you want all afternoon.
Rain walks across her mesa, red-tailed hawks
writhe in fields of air, she lets you look at her.
She laughs at your study habits, your orderly house,
your need to name her “vainest woman you’ve ever met.”
Then she turns you toward the voluptuous valleys,
she gives you dreams of green forests,
she doesn’t care who else you love.
She sings in the grass, the sagebrush, the small trees
struggling and the tiny lizards scrambling
up the walls. You find her when you’re ready
in the barbed wire and fence posts, on the scrub where you walk
with your parched story, where she walks, spendthrift,
tossing up sunflowers, throwing her indifferent
shadow across the mountain. Haven’t you guessed?
She’s the loneliest woman alive but that’s her gift;
she makes you love your own loneliness,
the gates to darkness and memory. She is your best, indifferent
teacher, she knows you don’t mean what you say.
She flings aside your technical equipment,
she requires you to survive in her high country
like the patient sheep and cattle who graze and take her
into their bodies. She says lightning, and
get used to it. Her storms are great moments
in the history of American weather, her rain remakes the world,
while your emotional life is run-off from a tin roof.
Like the painted clown at Picuris Pueblo
who started up the pole and then dropped into the crowd,
anonymous, she paws the ground, she gallops past.
What can you trust? This opening, this returning,
this arroyo, this struck gong inside your chest?
She wants you to stay open like the hibiscus
that opens its orange petals for a single day.
At night, a fool, you stand on the chilly mesa,
split open like the great cleft of the Rio Grande Gorge,
trying to catch a glimpse of her, your new, long-term companion.
She gives you a sliver of moon, howl of a distant dog,
windy premonition of winter.

---

A new favorite poet.

[rowens]

Directive
BY ROBERT FROST
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

---

Birches
BY ROBERT FROST
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

---

These two poems, if you like them, open you to everything Robert Frost wrote.

[Quixilated]

Written after Drinking Wine
by Tau Chyen

I built my shack
Amid the haunts of men,
And yet there is no noise
Of horse or carriage.

You ask,
“How can this be?”—
Any place becomes secluded
When the mind is far away.

I pluck chrysanthemums
By the eastern fence.
In the distance
I see the mountains to the south.

The light on the mountains
Is lovely at sunset,
Flocks of birds
Fly back together for the night.

In this
There is an intimation of Truth.
I want to express it,
But have forgotten all words.



———

(six Dynasties Period, about 400 A.D.)
(translation by Greg Whincup)

[rowens]

Those Asian folk understood the spirit of improvisational drunken poetry.

Some people used to claim that if it wasn't spontaneous, it wasn't poetry.

[rowens]

Hap
BY THOMAS HARDY
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!”

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so.  How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.


The Echo Elf Answers
BY THOMAS HARDY
How much shall I love her?
For life, or not long?
“Not long.”

Alas! When forget her?
In years, or by June?
“By June.”

And whom woo I after?
No one, or a throng?
“A throng.”

Of these shall I wed one
Long hence, or quite soon?
“Quite soon.”

And which will my bride be?
The right or the wrong?
“The wrong.”

And my remedy – what kind?
Wealth-wove, or earth-hewn?
“Earth-hewn.”




A Ballad of François Villon, Prince of All Ballad-Makers
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn
      Scarce risen upon the dusk of dolorous years,
First of us all and sweetest singer born
      Whose far shrill note the world of new men hears
      Cleave the cold shuddering shade as twilight clears;
When song new-born put off the old world's attire
And felt its tune on her changed lips expire,
      Writ foremost on the roll of them that came
Fresh girt for service of the latter lyre,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name!

Alas the joy, the sorrow, and the scorn,
      That clothed thy life with hopes and sins and fears,
And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn
      And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers
      Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears;
Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire,
When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire
      Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame
Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name!

Poor splendid wings so frayed and soiled and torn!
      Poor kind wild eyes so dashed with light quick tears!
Poor perfect voice, most blithe when most forlorn,
      That rings athwart the sea whence no man steers
      Like joy-bells crossed with death-bells in our ears!
What far delight has cooled the fierce desire
That like some ravenous bird was strong to tire
      On that frail flesh and soul consumed with flame,
But left more sweet than roses to respire,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name?

Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire,
A harlot was thy nurse, a God thy sire;
      Shame soiled thy song, and song assoiled thy shame.
But from thy feet now death has washed the mire,
Love reads out first at head of all our quire,
      Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name.



The Garden of Proserpine
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Here, where the world is quiet;
        Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
        In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
        A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
        And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
        For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
        And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
        And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
        Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
        And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
        No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
        Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
        For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name or number,
        In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
        All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
        Comes out of darkness morn.

Though one were strong as seven,
        He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
        Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
        In the end it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
        Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
        With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
        From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
        She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
            The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
        And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,
        The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
        And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
        Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,
        And joy was never sure;
To-day will die to-morrow;
        Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
        Weeps that no loves endure.

From too much love of living,
        From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
        Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
        Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
        Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
        Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
        In an eternal night.



Matilda Gathering Flowers
BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
            from the Purgatorio of Dante, Canto 28, lines 1-51

And earnest to explore within—around—
The divine wood, whose thick green living woof
Tempered the young day to the sight—I wound

Up the green slope, beneath the forest’s roof,
With slow, soft steps leaving the mountain’s steep,
And sought those inmost labyrinths, motion-proof

Against the air, that in that stillness deep
And solemn, struck upon my forehead bare,
The slow, soft stroke of a continuous ...

In which the ... leaves tremblingly were
All bent towards that part where earliest
The sacred hill obscures the morning air.

Yet were they not so shaken from the rest,
But that the birds, perched on the utmost spray,
Incessantly renewing their blithe quest,

With perfect joy received the early day,
Singing within the glancing leaves, whose sound
Kept a low burden to their roundelay,

Such as from bough to bough gathers around
The pine forest on bleak Chiassi’s shore,
When Aeolus Sirocco has unbound.

My slow steps had already borne me o’er
Such space within the antique wood, that I
Perceived not where I entered any more,—

When, lo! a stream whose little waves went by,
Bending towards the left through grass that grew
Upon its bank, impeded suddenly

My going on. Water of purest hue
On earth, would appear turbid and impure
Compared with this, whose unconcealing dew,

Dark, dark, yet clear, moved under the obscure
Eternal shades, whose interwoven looms
The rays of moon or sunlight ne’er endure.

I moved not with my feet, but mid the glooms
Pierced with my charmed eye, contemplating
The mighty multitude of fresh May blooms

Which starred that night, when, even as a thing
That suddenly, for blank astonishment,
Charms every sense, and makes all thought take wing,—

A solitary woman! and she went
Singing and gathering flower after flower,
With which her way was painted and besprent.

Bright lady, who, if looks had ever power
To bear true witness of the heart within,
Dost bask under the beams of love, come lower

Towards this bank. I prithee let me win
This much of thee, to come, that I may hear
Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna’s glen,

Thou seemest to my fancy, singing here
And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden when
She lost the Spring, and Ceres her more dear.

---

How still, how happy! Those are words
That once would scarce agree together;
I loved the plashing of the surge -
The changing heaven the breezy weather,

More than smooth seas and cloudless skies
And solemn, soothing, softened airs
That in the forest woke no sighs
And from the green spray shook no tears.

How still, how happy! now I feel
Where silence dwells is sweeter far
Than laughing mirth's most joyous swell
However pure its raptures are.

Come, sit down on this sunny stone:
'Tis wintry light o'er flowerless moors -
But sit - for we are all alone
And clear expand heaven's breathless shores.

I could think in the withered grass
Spring's budding wreaths we might discern;
The violet's eye might shyly flash
And young leaves shoot among the fern.

It is but thought - full many a night
The snow shall clothe those hills afar
And storms shall add a drearier blight
And winds shall wage a wilder war,

Before the lark may herald in
Fresh foliage twined with blossoms fair
And summer days again begin
Their glory - haloed crown to wear.

Yet my heart loves December's smile
As much as July's golden beam;
Then let us sit and watch the while
The blue ice curdling on the stream -

      Emily Jane Bronte


December 7, 1838.