From: hwajin@iphasew.com (Hwa-Jin Bae)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: ef-u-cee-kay (was Re: tell me if it hurts)
Date: 17 Dec 92 07:13:45 GMT
Organization: Interphase West, Santa Clara, CA

In article <1992Dec16.171245.18062@news.acns.nwu.edu> marek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski) writes:
>In article <BzBvCn.4BI@iphasew.com> hwajin@iphasew.com (Hwa-Jin Bae) writes:
>>
>>
>>	a city not a town
>>	-----------------

 [... an unsatisfying poem (of mine) deleted ... ]

>
>Ah.  Yet another poem to break/denude/pluck at Jennifer's pure heart.
>2 marks, and not just for using fuck with grace and precsion.
>

the first time i ever read the word 'fuck' in a poem was years ago
in a bookstore -- fortunately, it was used in the most appropriate
way by the great Galway Kinnell (see below) -- in my case, it was
not i per se, who chose the word, but an actual poster displayed
right next to the memorial for the late rosebud woman who was one of the
people's park and homeless activists.  and neither the word itself nor
the entire poem was intended to convey any political message --
rather,  personal reflection on one's surroundings... if any... if you
care.  anyway, hopefully the following will allow more people
to search out for Kinnell's poetry  -- as someone told me once --
it is quite r.a.p'ish actually...





	The Waking
	----------

			From _The Past_, Galway Kinnell


	What has just happened between the lovers,
	who lie now in love-sleep under the memory
	of owls calling in the deeper love-sleep of the woods --
	call exhaled, answer inhaled, call exhaled,
	answer inhaled, back and forth, and so on,
	until one, calling faster, overtakes the other
	and the two suddenly whoo together in a single
	shimmering harmonic -- is called "lovemaking".
	But the lovers who come exalted to their trysts,
	who come to each other from opposite directions
	along a path by the sea, through the pines,
	meet, embrace, go up from the sea,
	make love, lie crushed into each other
	under the all-golden sky already deep-blueing
	its moon and stars into shining, know
	they don't "make" love, which is, was, will be,
	but are earth-creatures chosen by moon-pull 
	to live and flow and -- here no other word will do --
	fuck one another forever if possible across the stars.
	But this word, perhaps first heard when lovers
	dropped a stone into the sea at night
	and out in the dark a mullet leapt and fell back,
	sounding an answer that reverberated in them,
	has had the map of the almost-last pathway left
	craving its way back to the beginning sinned out of it.
	The true word, if it exists, exists inside the tongue
	and from there must make every word, even consciousness,
	even all of forgetting, remember: as when
	flamingoes change feeding places on a marsh
	and there is a moment -- after the first to fly
	has put its head underwater in the new place
	and before in the old place the last
	lifts its head to see the rest have gone --
	when, scattered with pink bodies, the sky
	becomes all one vast remembering.  They still hear,
	in the distance, the steady crushing and uncrushing
	of bedsprings; and perhaps only imagine a sonata
	in which violins' lines remember into the room
	the writhing and shifting of sexual bodies.
	The already-memory of what has just happened
	is their deja-prevu of the existence
	of existence.  They lie with heads touching,
	thinking themselves back across the blackness
	that converts back to use of world-light
	those who have lived one moment by love-light.
	One the brightening sheet their bodies re-form
	-- golden heaps the true embrace ripple-sluiced
	out of the night.  The bed, caressed threadbare,
	worn almost away, is now one more place on earth
	where such inner light as humans can shine with
	seeps up into us.  The eyelids,
	which love the eyes and must lie-on-them to sleep,
	open: This is a bed.  That is a fireplace.
	That is last morning's breakfast tray,
	which nobody has yet bothered to take away.
	This face -- too rich in feeling to have lived past
	the world in which it is said, "Ni vous sans moi,
	ni moi sans vous", so blatantly archaic 
	this day might be breaking in the Middle Ages --
	is the illusion randomness chooses
	to smile into existence, now, on this pillow.
	The lovers don't have words to know this through.
	The scraps of poetry they do have mean less
	in the in-the-tongue language than "want a cracker"
	or "pieces of eight" in ours.  Through tears
	they see more truly than the dry-eyed the motes
	cross, mingle, collide, lose their way, in this puff
	of ecstatic dust.  Now the tears overwhelm the eyes,
	wet their faces, drain quickly away
	into their smiles.  One leg hangs off the bed.
	He is still inside her.  His big toe
	sticks into the pot of strawberry jam.  "Oh migod!"
	They laugh.  They have to remind themselves how to.
	They kiss while laughing and hit teeth
	and remember they are bones and at once laugh
	naturally again.  A clock is ticking.  The feeling --
	perhaps it is only a feeling, perhaps due
	to living always in the same lifetime
	with only dying things -- that time passes,
	comes over them.  They get up,
	put on clothes, go out.  They are not in the street
	yet, however, but for a few moments longer
	still in their elsewhere, on a riverbank
	standing with their arms around each other in the aura
	the earth has when it remembers its former beauty.
	Something in them -- the past -- belongs
	to the away-going water and must flow away
	into time to come forver.  It does not yet surpise them
	that they are wood-nymph and river-spirit,
	who can speak for mute things and name them.
	River birds ... honk.  Sounds arrive fully formed
	into their mouths ... Bleecker ... Carmine ... Avenue
	of the Americas ... An ambulance sirens
	a shroud-whitened body toward St. Vincent's.
	A police car running the red lights parodies
	in high pitch the owls of paradise.  The lovers enter
	the ordinary day the ordinary world
	providentially provides.  Their pockets ring.
	Good.  For now askers and beggarmen
	come up to them needing change for breakfast.