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Satires of Circumstance in Fifteen Glimpses VIII: In the Study

He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there, A type of decayed gentility; And by some small signs he well can guess That she comes to him almost breakfastless. "I have called — I hope I do not err — I am looking for a purchaser Of some score volumes of the works Of eminent divines I own, — Left by my father — though it irks My patience to offer them." And she smiles As if necessity were unknown; "But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles I have wished, as I am fond of art, To make my rooms a little smart, And these old books are so in the way." And lightly still she laughs to him, As if to sell were a mere gay whim, And that, to be frank, Life were indeed To her not vinegar and gall, But fresh and honey-like; and Need No household skeleton at all.

Thomas Hardy

Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Class,Money & Economics

[little tree]

little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, only don't be afraid look the spangles that sleep all the year in a dark box dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine, the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads, put up your little arms and i'll give them all to you to hold every finger shall have its ring and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy then when you're quite dressed you'll stand in the window for everyone to see and how they'll stare! oh but you'll be very proud and my little sister and i will take hands and looking up at our beautiful tree we'll dance and sing "Noel Noel"

E. E. Cummings

Nature,Trees & Flowers,Christmas

The Night Piece, to Julia

Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee, The shooting stars attend thee; And the elves also, Whose little eyes glow Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. No Will-o'-th'-Wisp mis-light thee, Nor snake or slow-worm bite thee; But on, on thy way, Not making a stay, Since ghost there's none to affright thee. Let not the dark thee cumber; What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light, Like tapers clear without number. Then Julia let me woo thee, Thus, thus to come unto me; And when I shall meet Thy silv'ry feet, My soul I'll pour into thee.

Robert Herrick

Love,Desire,Infatuation & Crushes,Romantic Love,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Men & Women

A Thanksgiving to God, for his House

Lord, Thou hast given me a cell Wherein to dwell, A little house, whose humble roof Is weather-proof: Under the spars of which I lie Both soft, and dry; Where Thou my chamber for to ward Hast set a guard Of harmless thoughts, to watch and keep Me, while I sleep. Low is my porch, as is my fate, Both void of state; And yet the threshold of my door Is worn by th' poor, Who thither come and freely get Good words, or meat. Like as my parlour, so my hall And kitchen's small; A little buttery, and therein A little bin, Which keeps my little loaf of bread Unchipp'd, unflead; Some brittle sticks of thorn or briar Make me a fire, Close by whose living coal I sit, And glow like it. Lord, I confess too, when I dine, The pulse is Thine, And all those other bits, that be There plac'd by Thee; The worts, the purslain, and the mess Of water-cress, Which of Thy kindness Thou hast sent; And my content Makes those, and my beloved beet, To be more sweet. 'Tis Thou that crown'st my glittering hearth With guiltless mirth; And giv'st me wassail-bowls to drink, Spic'd to the brink. Lord, 'tis Thy plenty-dropping hand That soils my land; And giv'st me, for my bushel sown, Twice ten for one; Thou mak'st my teeming hen to lay Her egg each day; Besides my healthful ewes to bear Me twins each year; The while the conduits of my kine Run cream, for wine. All these, and better, Thou dost send Me, to this end, That I should render, for my part, A thankful heart, Which, fir'd with incense, I resign, As wholly Thine; But the acceptance, that must be, My Christ, by Thee.

Robert Herrick

Relationships,Home Life,Religion,Christianity,God & the Divine,Thanksgiving

To Anthea, who may Command him Anything

Bid me to live, and I will live Thy protestant to be; Or bid me love, and I will give A loving heart to thee. A heart as soft, a heart as kind, A heart as sound and free, As in the whole world thou canst find, That heart I'll give to thee. Bid that heart stay, and it will stay, To honour thy decree; Or bid it languish quite away, And 't shall do so for thee. Bid me to weep, and I will weep, While I have eyes to see; And having none, yet I will keep A heart to weep for thee. Bid me despair, and I'll despair, Under that cypress tree; Or bid me die, and I will dare E'en death, to die for thee. Thou art my life, my love, my heart, The very eyes of me; And hast command of every part, To live and die for thee.

Robert Herrick

Love,Infatuation & Crushes,Romantic Love,Relationships,Men & Women

Upon Julia's Clothes

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows That liquefaction of her clothes. Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see That brave vibration each way free, O how that glittering taketh me!

Robert Herrick

Love,Desire,Infatuation & Crushes,Relationships,Men & Women

Upon the Loss of his Mistresses

I have lost, and lately, these Many dainty mistresses: Stately Julia, prime of all; Sappho next, a principal; Smooth Anthea, for a skin White, and heaven-like crystalline; Sweet Electra, and the choice Myrrha, for the lute, and voice; Next, Corinna, for her wit, And the graceful use of it; With Perilla; all are gone; Only Herrick's left alone For to number sorrow by Their departures hence, and die.

Robert Herrick

Love,Classic Love,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Men & Women

What Kind of Mistress He would Have

Be the mistress of my choice, Clean in manners, clear in voice; Be she witty, more than wise, Pure enough, though not precise; Be she showing in her dress, Like a civil wilderness, That the curious may detect Order in a sweet neglect; Be she rolling in her eye, Tempting all the passers by; And each ringlet of her hair, An enchantment, or a snare, For to catch the lookers on; But herself held fast by none. Let her Lucrece all day be, Thais in the night, to me. Be she such, as neither will Famish me, nor overfill.

Robert Herrick

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Men & Women

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, I heard a Negro play. Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway. . . . He did a lazy sway. . . . To the tune o’ those Weary Blues. With his ebony hands on each ivory key He made that poor piano moan with melody. O Blues! Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool. Sweet Blues! Coming from a black man’s soul. O Blues! In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan— “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor. He played a few chords then he sang some more— “I got the Weary Blues And I can’t be satisfied. Got the Weary Blues And can’t be satisfied— I ain’t happy no mo’ And I wish that I had died.” And far into the night he crooned that tune. The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Langston Hughes

Living,Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Race & Ethnicity

Meg Merrilies

Old Meg she was a Gipsy, And liv'd upon the Moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors. Her apples were swart blackberries, Her currants pods o' broom; Her wine was dew of the wild white rose, Her book a churchyard tomb. Her Brothers were the craggy hills, Her Sisters larchen trees— Alone with her great family She liv'd as she did please. No breakfast had she many a morn, No dinner many a noon, And 'stead of supper she would stare Full hard against the Moon. But every morn of woodbine fresh She made her garlanding, And every night the dark glen Yew She wove, and she would sing. And with her fingers old and brown She plaited Mats o' Rushes, And gave them to the Cottagers She met among the Bushes. Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen And tall as Amazon: An old red blanket cloak she wore; A chip hat had she on. God rest her aged bones somewhere— She died full long agone!

John Keats

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Mythology & Folklore

Lui et Elle

She is large and matronly And rather dirty, A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year And put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs, When food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth Like sudden curved scissors, And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, And having the bread hanging over her chin. O Mistress, Mistress, Reptile Mistress, Your eye is very dark, very bright, And it never softens Although you watch. She knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, Reptile mistress. Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, You are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, Dapper beside her, And ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look, His, poor darling, is almost fiery. His wimple, his blunt-prowed face, His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs, So striving, striving, Are all more delicate than she, And he has a cruel scar on his shell. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, And with a grim, reptile determination, Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy Of horizontal persistence. Little old man Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, And hanging grimly on, Letting go at last as she drags away, And closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face. Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle. And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, The immune, the animate, Enveloped in isolation, Forerunner. Now look at him! Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself In his effort toward completion again. Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris, The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces, And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell. Their two shells like domed boats bumping, Hers huge, his small; Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, And stumbling mixed up in one another, In the race of love — Two tortoises, She huge, he small. She seems earthily apathetic, And he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue. While I, I pity Monsieur. "He pesters her and torments her," said the woman. How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I. What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, Conceptionless. His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not As her earthen mound moves on, But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin, Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell, And drags at these with his beak, Drags and drags and bites, While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.

D. H. Lawrence

Relationships,Pets

The Mosquito

When did you start your tricks Monsieur? What do you stand on such high legs for? Why this length of shredded shank You exaltation? Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me, Stand upon me weightless, you phantom? I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory In sluggish Venice. You turn your head towards your tail, and smile. How can you put so much devilry Into that translucent phantom shred Of a frail corpus? Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air, A nothingness. Yet what an aura surrounds you; Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind. That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: Invisibility, and the anæsthetic power To deaden my attention in your direction. But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer. Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air In circles and evasions, enveloping me, Ghoul on wings Winged Victory. Settle, and stand on long thin shanks Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware, You speck. I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air Having read my thoughts against you. Come then, let us play at unawares, And see who wins in this sly game of bluff. Man or mosquito. You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist. Now then! It is your trump It is your hateful little trump You pointed fiend, Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear. Why do you do it? Surely it is bad policy. They say you can't help it. If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent. But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. Blood, red blood Super-magical Forbidden liquor. I behold you stand For a second enspasmed in oblivion, Obscenely ecstasied Sucking live blood My blood. Such silence, such suspended transport, Such gorging, Such obscenity of trespass. You stagger As well as you may. Only your accursed hairy frailty Your own imponderable weightlessness Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching. Away with a pæan of derision You winged blood-drop. Can I not overtake you? Are you one too many for me Winged Victory? Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you? Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

D. H. Lawrence

Relationships,Pets

Tortoise Gallantry

Making his advances He does not look at her, nor sniff at her, No, not even sniff at her, his nose is blank. Only he senses the vulnerable folds of skin That work beneath her while she sprawls along In her ungainly pace, Her folds of skin that work and row Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves. And so he strains beneath her housey walls And catches her trouser-legs in his beak Suddenly, or her skinny limb, And strange and grimly drags at her Like a dog, Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency. Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed. Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation And doomed to partiality, partial being, Ache, and want of being, Want, Self-exposure, hard humiliation, need to add himself on to her. Born to walk alone, Forerunner, Now suddenly distracted into this mazy side-track, This awkward, harrowing pursuit, This grim necessity from within. Does she know As she moves eternally slowly away? Or is he driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window, All knowledgeless? The awful concussion, And the still more awful need to persist, to follow, follow, continue, Driven, after æons of pristine, fore-god-like singleness and oneness, At the end of some mysterious, red-hot iron, Driven away from himself into her tracks, Forced to crash against her. Stiff, gallant, irascible, crook-legged reptile, Little gentleman, Sorry plight, We ought to look the other way. Save that, having come with you so far, We will go on to the end.

D. H. Lawrence

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Pets

Tortoise Shout

I thought he was dumb, I said he was dumb, Yet I've heard him cry. First faint scream, Out of life's unfathomable dawn, Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim, Far, far off, far scream. Tortoise in extremis. Why were we crucified into sex? Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves, As we began, As he certainly began, so perfectly alone? A far, was-it-audible scream, Or did it sound on the plasm direct? Worse than the cry of the new-born, A scream, A yell, A shout, A pæan, A death-agony, A birth-cry, A submission, All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn. War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian, Why was the veil torn? The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane? The male soul's membrane Torn with a shriek half music, half horror. Crucifixion. Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh! Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck And giving that fragile yell, that scream, Super-audible, From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth, Giving up the ghost, Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost. His scream, and his moment's subsidence, The moment of eternal silence, Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once The inexpressible faint yell — And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret. So he tups, and screams Time after time that frail, torn scream After each jerk, the longish interval, The tortoise eternity, Agelong, reptilian persistence, Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm. I remember, when I was a boy, I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake; I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring; I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters; I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul; I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight; I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible; I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats; I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning And running away from the sound of a woman in labor, something like an owl whooing, And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb, The first wail of an infant, And my mother singing to herself, And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death, The first elements of foreign speech On wild dark lips. And more than all these, And less than all these, This last, Strange, faint coition yell Of the male tortoise at extremity, Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life. The cross, The wheel on which our silence first is broken, Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence Tearing a cry from us. Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement, Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found. Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost, The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment, That which is whole, torn asunder, That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

D. H. Lawrence

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Pets

A Youth Mowing

There are four men mowing down by the Isar; I can hear the swish of the scythe-strokes, four Sharp breaths taken: yea, and I Am sorry for what's in store. The first man out of the four that's mowing Is mine, I claim him once and for all; Though it's sorry I am, on his young feet, knowing None of the trouble he's led to stall. As he sees me bringing the dinner, he lifts His head as proud as a deer that looks Shoulder-deep out of the corn; and wipes His scythe-blade bright, unhooks The scythe-stone and over the stubble to me. Lad, thou hast gotten a child in me, Laddie, a man thou'lt ha'e to be, Yea, though I'm sorry for thee.

D. H. Lawrence

Living,Coming of Age,Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Men & Women,Philosophy

In Memory of a Child

I The angels guide him now, And watch his curly head, And lead him in their games, The little boy we led. II He cannot come to harm, He knows more than we know, His light is brighter far Than daytime here below. III His path leads on and on, Through pleasant lawns and flowers, His brown eyes open wide At grass more green than ours. IV With playmates like himself, The shining boy will sing, Exploring wondrous woods, Sweet with eternal spring. V Yet, he is lost to us, Far is his path of gold, Far does the city seem, Lonely our hearts and old.

Vachel Lindsay

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Philosophy,Funerals

Two Old Crows

Two old crows sat on a fence rail. Two old crows sat on a fence rail, Thinking of effect and cause, Of weeds and flowers, And nature's laws. One of them muttered, one of them stuttered, One of them stuttered, one of them muttered. Each of them thought far more than he uttered. One crow asked the other crow a riddle. One crow asked the other crow a riddle: The muttering crow Asked the stuttering crow, “Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle? Why does a bee have a sword to his fiddle?” “Bee-cause,” said the other crow, “Bee-cause, B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.” Just then a bee flew close to their rail:— “Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.” And those two black crows Turned pale, And away those crows did sail. Why? B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause. B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause. “Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ZZZZZZZZ.”

Vachel Lindsay

Relationships,Pets

Strange Meeting

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,— By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” “None,” said that other, “save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair, But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold, The pity of war, the pity war distilled. Now men will go content with what we spoiled. Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress. Courage was mine, and I had mystery; Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. “I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . .”

Wilfred Owen

Living,Death,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

The Sailor's Grave at Clo-oose, V.I.

Out of the winds' and the waves' riot, Out of the loud foam, He has put in to a great quiet And a still home. Here he may lie at ease and wonder Why the old ship waits, And hark for the surge and the strong thunder Of the full Straits, And look for the fishing fleet at morning, Shadows like lost souls, Slide through the fog where the seal's warning Betrays the shoals, And watch for the deep-sea liner climbing Out of the bright West, With a salmon-sky and her wake shining Like a tern's breast, — And never know he is done for ever With the old sea's pride, Borne from the fight and the full endeavour On an ebb tide.

Marjorie Pickthall

Living,Death,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Song: “Full fathom five thy father lies” 

(from The Tempest) Full fathom five thy father lies;

William Shakespeare

Living,Death,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Song: “Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings”

(from Cymbeline) Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings, And Phoebus 'gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chaliced flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With every thing that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise: Arise, arise.

William Shakespeare

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Song: “O Mistress mine where are you roaming?”

(from Twelfth Night) O Mistress mine where are you roaming? O stay and hear, your true love's coming, That can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers' meeting, Every wise man's son doth know. What is love, 'tis not hereafter, Present mirth, hath present laughter: What's to come, is still unsure. In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me sweet and twenty: Youth's a stuff will not endure.

William Shakespeare

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Classic Love,Desire,Infatuation & Crushes,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Philosophy

Song: “Orpheus with his lute made trees”

(from Henry VIII) Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing:To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Music,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology,Heroes & Patriotism

Song: “Take, oh take those lips away”

(from Measure for Measure) Take, oh take those lips away, That so sweetly were forsworn, And those eyes: the breake of day, Lights that do mislead the Morn; But my kisses bring again, bring again, Seals of love, but sealed in vain, sealed in vain.

William Shakespeare

Love,Heartache & Loss,Infatuation & Crushes,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships

Song: “Under the greenwood tree”

(from As You Like It) Under the greenwood treeWho loves to lie with me,And turn his merry noteUnto the sweet bird's throat,Come hither, come hither, come hither: Here shall he see No enemyBut winter and rough weather.

William Shakespeare

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Weather,Winter

Peter Quince at the Clavier

I Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna: Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. II In the green water, clear and warm, Susanna lay. She searched The touch of springs, And found Concealed imaginings. She sighed, For so much melody. Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering. A breath upon her hand Muted the night. She turned— A cymbal crashed, And roaring horns. III Soon, with a noise like tambourines, Came her attendant Byzantines. They wondered why Susanna cried Against the elders by her side; And as they whispered, the refrain Was like a willow swept by rain. Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame Revealed Susanna and her shame. And then, the simpering Byzantines Fled, with a noise like tambourines. IV Beauty is momentary in the mind— The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Wallace Stevens

Living,The Mind,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Music

The Land of Nod

From breakfast on through all the day At home among my friends I stay, But every night I go abroad Afar into the land of Nod. All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do — All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams. The strangest things are there for me, Both things to eat and things to see, And many frightening sights abroad Till morning in the land of Nod. Try as I like to find the way, I never can get back by day, Nor can remember plain and clear The curious music that I hear.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Mythology & Folklore

Looking Forward

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great, And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees You playing round the garden trees, So you may see, if you will look Through the windows of this book, Another child, far, far away, And in another garden, play. But do not think you can at all, By knocking on the window, call That child to hear you. He intent Is all on his play-business bent. He does not hear; he will not look, Nor yet be lured out of this book. For, long ago, the truth to say, He has grown up and gone away, And it is but a child of air That lingers in the garden there.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Living,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Reading & Books,Mother's Day

I Grant You Ample Leave

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations "I grant you ample leavegrant you ample leave In other words, to let you express your grand opinion To use the hoaryhoary Ancient, worthy of respect for its age formula 'I am' Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But fill the void with definition, 'I' Will be no more a datumdatum A single piece of data or information than the words You link false inferencefalse inference In philosophy and logic, an inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. Inferences are typically evaluated to be valid or invalid. with, the 'Since' & 'so' That, true or not, make up the atom-whirlatom-whirl The orbital paths of electrons around the nucleus. Resolve your 'Ego'‘Ego’ Latin for “I”., it is all one web With vibrant ether clotted into worlds: Your subject, self, or self-assertive 'I' Turns nought but object, melts to molecules, Is stripped from naked Being with the rest Of those rag-garments named the Universe. Or if, in strife to keep your 'Ego' strong You make it weaver of the etherial lightetherial light Heavenly light, Space, motion, solids & the dream of Time — Why, still 'tis Being looking from the dark, The core, the centre of your consciousness, That notes your bubble-worldbubble-world : sense, pleasure, pain, What are they but a shifting otherness, Phantasmal fluxPhantasmal flux A fantastic, ghostlike stream or flow of moments? —"

George Eliot

Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Sciences

In a London Drawingroom

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. For view there are the houses opposite Cutting the sky with one long line of wall Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch Monotony of surface & of form Without a break to hang a guess upon. No bird can make a shadow as it flies, For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung By thickest canvass, where the golden rays Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye Or rest a little on the lap of life. All hurry on & look upon the ground, Or glance unmarking at the passers by The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages All closed, in multiplied identity. The world seems one huge prison-house & court Where men are punished at the slightest cost, With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.

George Eliot

Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

The Smile

There is a Smile of Love And there is a Smile of Deceit And there is a Smile of Smiles In which these two Smiles meet And there is a Frown of Hate And there is a Frown of disdain And there is a Frown of Frowns Which you strive to forget in vain For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core And it sticks in the deep Back bone And no Smile that ever was smild But only one Smile alone That betwixt the Cradle & Grave It only once Smild can be But when it once is Smild Theres an end to all Misery

William Blake

Living,Love,Infatuation & Crushes,Realistic & Complicated,Romantic Love,Relationships

What Light Destroys

Today I’m thinking of St. Paul—St. Paul, who orders us, Be perfect. He could have said, Touch your elbow to your ears, except that if you broke your arm, then snapped your neck, you might could manage it. The death inside the flawed hard currency of what we touch bamboozles us, existing only for that flaw, that deathward plunge that’s locked inside all form, till what seems solid floats away, dissolves, and these poor bastard things, no longer things, drift back to pure idea. And when, at last, we let them go we start to pity them, attend their needs: I almost have to think to keep my own heart beating through the night. I have a wife and four pink boys. I spin on all this stupid metaphysic now because last afternoon we visited some friends in town. After the pecan pie, I drank until my forehead smacked the table, and woke to find my shirt crusted with blood. When Mary didn’t yell at me, I knew she finally understood that I was gone, dissolving back. As we rode home, I tried to say, I’m sorry, Hon. The carriage bucked across the mud-dried ruts and I shut up. And she, in August heat, just sat, head cocked as if for chills hidden in the hot, damp breeze, as if they were a sound, time merely distance. O Death, I know exactly where it is— your sting. And, Grave, I know your victory. That night, around the tents, the boys caught fireflies, pinched them in half, and smeared them on their nails, then ran through pine-dark woods, waving their hands. All I could hear was laughter, shouts. And all that I could see for each one of my sons were ten blurs of faint, artificial light, never too far apart, and trembling. Like fairies, magic, sprites, they ran and shouted, “I’m not real! I’m not real!” The whole world fell away from me—perhaps I was still drunk— as on the night Titania told dazed Bottom, “Put off your human grossness so, and like an airy spirit go.” But even then the night could not hold long against the light, and light destroys roots, fog, lies, orchids, night, dawn stars, the moon, delusions, and most magic. And light sends into hiding owls, fireflies, and bats, whom for their unerring blunder, I adore the most of all night fliers. But owls, hid in a hickory, will hoot all day, and even the moon persists, like my hangover, some days till almost noon, drifting above the harsh, bright, murderous morning light—so blue, so valuable, so much like currency that if the moon were my blue coin, I’d never spend it.

Andrew Hudgins

Relationships,Nature,Religion,Faith & Doubt

Minor Miracle

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood memory. I was cycling with a male friend, through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again, a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign, hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels. My partner called, “Hey, that was a 4-way stop!” The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled, “You fucking niggers!” And sped off. My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads. We remounted our bikes and headed out of town. We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon between two fields of almost-ripened wheat bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s lace when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking. We stopped, closed ranks, made fists. It was the same truck. It pulled over. A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out: greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful of martial arts techniques. “What did you say back there!” he shouted. My friend said, “I said it was a 4-way stop. You went through it.” “And what did I say?” the white guy asked. “You said: ‘You fucking niggers.’” The afternoon froze. “Well,” said the white guy, shoving his hands into his pockets and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot, “I just want to say I’m sorry.” He climbed back into his truck and drove away.

Marilyn Nelson

Relationships,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Niobe

How like the sky she bends above her child, One with the great horizon of her pain! No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild, No weeping cloud, no momentary rain, Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief, That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb. She stoops in pity above the labouring earth, Knowing how fond, how brief Is all its hope, past, present, and to come, She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth. Through that fair face the whole dark universe Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro’ one white flower; And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse The gods, but cannot die before their hour, Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head Bows over all earth’s graves. It was her cry Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways With children’s blood ran red. Her silence towers to Silences on high; And, in her face, the whole earth’s anguish prays. It is the pity, the pity of human love That strains her face, upturned to meet the doom, And her deep bosom, like a snow-white dove Frozen upon its nest, ne’er to resume Its happy breathing o’er the golden brace That she must shield till death. Death, death alone Can break the anguished horror of that spell. The sorrow on her face Is sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone; She knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell. Ah, yet, her woman’s love, so vast, so tender, Her woman’s body, hurt by every dart, Braving the thunder, still, still hide the slender Soft frightened child beneath her mighty heart. She is all one mute immortal cry, one brief Infinite pang of such victorious pain That she transcends the heavens and bows them down! The majesty of grief Is hers, and her dominion must remain Eternal. Grief alone can wear that crown.

Alfred Noyes

Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

Immortal Sails

Now, in a breath, we’ll burst those gates of gold, And ransack heaven before our moment fails. Now, in a breath, before we, too, grow old, We’ll mount and sing and spread immortal sails. It is not time that makes eternity. Love and an hour may quite out-span the years, And give us more to hear and more to see Than life can wash away with all its tears. Dear, when we part, at last, that sunset sky Shall not be touched with deeper hues than this; But we shall ride the lightning ere we die And seize our brief infinitude of bliss, With time to spare for all that heaven can tell, While eyes meet eyes, and look their last farewell.

Alfred Noyes

Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Social Commentaries,Mythology & Folklore,Farewells & Good Luck,Toasts & Celebrations

Woodcut

It is autumn but early. No crow cries from the dry woods. The house droops like an eyelid over the leprous hill. In the bald barnyard one horse, a collection of angles Cuts at the flies with a spectral tail. A blind man’s Sentence, the road goes on. Lifts as the slope lifts it. Comes now one who has been conquered By all he sees. And asks what—would have what— Poor fool, frail, this man, mistake, my hero? More than the hands on the lines and the back aching, The daily wrestle with the angel in the south forty, More than this forever lonely round Round hunger and impotence, the prickly pair: Banker or broker can have dreamed no fate More bankrupt than this godlike heresy Which asks of love more leave than extended credit, Needs comradeship more than a psalm or surely these Worn acres even if over them Those trained to it see signs of they say God.

Thomas McGrath

Nature,Fall,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

The Topography of History

All cities are open in the hot season. Northward or southward the summer gives out Few telephone numbers but no one in our house sleeps. Southward that river carries its flood The dying winter, the spring’s nostalgia: Wisconsin’s dead grass beached at Baton Rouge. Carries the vegetable loves of the young blonde Going for water by the dikes of Winnetka or Louisville, Carries its obscure music and its strange humour, Its own disturbing life, its peculiar ideas of movement. Two thousand miles, moving from the secret north It crowds the country apart: at last reaching The lynch-dreaming, the demon-haunted, the murderous virgin South Makes its own bargains and says change in its own fashion. And where the Gulf choirs out its blue hosannas Carries the drowned men’s bones and its buried life: It is an enormous bell, rung through the country’s midnight. * * * Beyond the corrosive ironies of prairies, Midnight savannas, open vowels of the flat country, The moonstruck waters of the Kansas bays Where the Dakotas bell and nuzzle at the north coast, The nay-saying desolation where the mind is lost In the mean acres and the wind comes down for a thousand miles Smelling of the stars’ high pastures, and speaking a strange language— There is the direct action of mountains, a revolution, A revelation in stone, the solid decrees of past history, A soviet of language not yet cooled nor understood clearly: The voices from underground, the granite vocables. There shall that voice crying for justice be heard, But the local colorist, broken on cliffs of laughter, At the late dew point of pity collect only the irony of serene stars. * * * Here all questions are mooted. All battles joined. No one in our house sleeps. And the Idealist hunting in the high latitudes of unreason, By mummy rivers, on the open minds of curst lakes Mirrors his permanent address; yet suffers from visions Of spring break-up, the open river of history. On this the Dreamer sweats in his sound-proof tower: All towns are taken in the hot season. How shall that Sentimentalist love the Mississippi? His love is a trick of mirrors, his spit’s abstraction, Whose blood and guts are filing system for A single index of the head or heart’s statistics. Living in one time, he shall have no history. How shall he love change who lives in a static world? His love is lost tomorrow between Memphis and the narrows of Vicksburg. But kissed unconscious between Medicine Bow and Tombstone He shall love at the precipice brink who would love these mountains. Whom this land loves shall be a holy wanderer, The eyes burned slick with distances between Kennebunkport and Denver, minted of transcience. For him shall that river run in circles and The Tetons seismically skipping to their ancient compelling music Send embassies of young sierras to nibble from his hand. His leaves familiar with the constant wind, Give, then, the soils and waters to command. Latitudinal desires scatter his seed, And in political climates sprout new freedom. But curst is the water-wingless foreigner from Boston, Stumping the country as others no better have done, Frightened of earthquake, aware of the rising waters, Calling out “O Love, Love,” but finding none.

Thomas McGrath

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Independence Day

Nocturne Militaire

Miami Beach: wartime Imagine or remember how the road at last led us Over bridges like prepositions, linking a drawl of islands. The coast curved away like a question mark, listening slyly And shyly whispered the insomniac Atlantic. But we were uncertain of both question and answer, Stiff and confused and bemused in expendable khaki, Seeing with innocent eyes, the walls gleaming, And the alabaster city of a rich man’s dream. Borne by the offshore wind, an exciting rumor, The legend of tropic islands, caresses the coast like hysteria, Bringing a sound like bells rung under sea; And brings the infected banker and others whose tenure Is equally uncertain, equally certain: the simple And perfect faces of women—like the moon Whose radiance is disturbing and quite as impersonal: Not to be warmed by and never ample. They linger awhile in the dazzling sepulchral city, Delicately exploring their romantic diseases, The gangster, the capitalist and their proteg

Thomas McGrath

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Moonlight: Chickens On The Road

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech, I awoke to see my mother’s hair set free of its pincurls, springing out into the still and hurtling air above the front seat and just as suddenly gone. The space around us twisted, and in the instant before the crash I heard the bubbling of the chickens, the homely racket they make at all speeds, signifying calm, resignation, oblivion. And I listened. All through the slash and clatter, the rake of steel, shatter of glass, I listened, and what came was a blizzard moan in the wind, a wail of wreckage, severed hoses and lives, a storm of loose feathers, and in the final whirl approximating calm, the cluck and fracas of the birds. I crawled on hands and knees where a window should have been and rose uneven in November dusk. Wind blew a snow of down, and rows of it quivered along the shoulder. One thin stream of blood oozed, flocked in feathers. This was in the Ozarks, on a road curving miles around Missouri, and as far as I could see, no light flickered through the timber, no mail box leaned the flag of itself toward pavement, no cars seemed ever likely to come along. So I walked, circled the darkening disaster my life had come to, and cried. I cried for my family there, knotted in the snarl of metal and glass; for the farmer, looking dead, half in and half out of his windshield; and for myself, ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris, glass slitting little blood-stars in my soles, my arm hung loose at the elbow and whispering its prophecies of pain. Around and around the tilted car and the steaming truck, around the heap of exploded crates, the smears and small hunks of chicken and straw. Through an hour of loneliness and fear I walked, in the almost black of Ozark night, the moon just now burning into Missouri. Behind me, the chickens followed my lead, some fully upright, pecking the dim pavement for suet or seed, some half-hobbled by their wounds, worthless wings fluttering in the effort. The faintest light turned their feathers phosphorescent, and as I watched they came on, as though they believed me some savior, some highwayman or commando come to save them the last night of their clucking lives. This, they must have believed, was the end they’d always heard of, this the rendering more efficient than the axe, the execution more anonymous than a wringing arm. I walked on, no longer crying, and soon the amiable and distracted chattering came again, a sound like chuckling, or the backward suck of hard laughter. And we walked to the cadence their clucking called, a small boy towing a cloud around a scene of death, coming round and round like a dream, or a mountain road, like a pincurl, like pulse, like life.

Robert Wrigley

Living,Health & Illness,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Pets

Pre-Text

(for Douglas, at one) Archaic, his gestures hieratic, just like Caesar or Sappho or Mary’s Jesus or Ann’s Mary or Jane Austen once, or me or your mother’s you the sudden baby surges to his feet and sways, head forward, chin high, arms akimbo, hands dangling idle, elbows up, as if winged. The features of his face stand out amazed, all eyes as his aped posture sustains him aloft a step a step a rush and he walks, Young Anyone, his lifted point of view far beyond the calendar. What time is it? Firm in time he is out of date— like a cellarer for altar wines tasting many summers in one glass, or like a grandmother in whose womb her granddaughter once slept in egg inside grandma’s unborn daughter’s folded ovaries.

Marie Ponsot

Living,Parenthood,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Philosophy,Mother's Day

Winter

I don’t know what to say to you, neighbor, as you shovel snow from your part of our street neat in your Greek black. I’ve waited for chance to find words; now, by chance, we meet. We took our boys to the same kindergarten, thirteen years ago when our husbands went. Both boys hated school, dropped out feral, dropped in to separate troubles. You shift snow fast, back bent, but your boy killed himself, six days dead. My boy washed your wall when the police were done. He says, “We weren’t friends?” and shakes his head, “I told him it was great he had that gun,” and shakes. I shake, close to you, close to you. You have a path to clear, and so you do.

Marie Ponsot

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

On the Existence of the Soul

How confident I am it is there. Don’t I bring it, As if it were enclosed in a fine leather case, To particular places solely for its own sake? Haven’t I set it down before the variegated canyon And the undeviating bald salt dome? Don’t I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled Shell bellies, shore boulders, on the sight Of the petrel motionless over the sea, its splayed Feet hanging? Don’t I make sure it apprehends The invisibly fine spray more than once? I have seen that it takes in every detail I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders. I have listed for it the comings and goings Of one hundred species of insects explicitly described. I have named the chartreuse stripe And the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax And the multiple eye. I have sketched The brilliant wings of the trumpet vine and invented New vocabularies describing the interchanges between rocks And their crevices, between the holly lip And its concept of itself. And if not for its sake, why would I go Out into the night alone and stare deliberately Straight up into 15 billion years ago and more? I have cherished it. I have named it. By my own solicitations I have proof of its presence.

Pattiann Rogers

The Infirmament

An end is always punishment for a beginning. If you’re Catholic, sadness is punishment for happiness, you become the bug you squash if you’re Hindu, a flinty space opens in your head after a long night of laughter and wine. For waking there are dreams, from French poetry, English poetry, for light fire although sometimes fire must be punished by light which is why psychotherapy had to be invented. A father may say nothing to a son for years. A wife may keep something small folded deep in her underwear drawer. Clouds come in resembling the terrible things we believe about ourselves, a rock comes loose from a ledge, the baby just cries and cries. Doll in a chair, windshield wipers, staring off into the city lights. For years you may be unable to hear the word monkey without a stab in the heart because she called you that the summer she thought she loved you and you thought you loved someone else and everyone loved your salad dressing. And the daffodils come up in the spring and the snow covers the road in winter and the water covers the deep trenches in the sea where all the time the inner stuff of this earth surges up which is how the continents are made and broken.

Dean Young

Relationships,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Mythology & Folklore

I Am But a Traveler in This Land & Know Little of Its Ways

Is everything a field of energy caused by human projection? From the crib bars hang the teething tools. Above the finger-drummed desk, a bit lip. The cyclone fence of buts surrounds the soccer field of what if. Sometimes it seems like a world where no one knows what he or she is doing, eight lanes both directions. How about a polymer that contracts in response to electrical charge? A swimming pool on the 18th floor? King Lear done by sock puppets? Anyone who has traveled here knows the discrepancies between idea and fact. The idea is the worm in the tequila and the next day is the fact. In between may be the sacred—real blood from the wooden virgin’s eyes, and the hoax— landing sites in cornfields. Maybe ideas are best sprung from actions like the children of Zeus. One gives us elastic and the omelette, another nightmares and SUVs. There’s considerable wobble in the system, and the fan belt screams, waking the baby. Swaying in the darkened nursery, kissing the baby-smelling head: good idea! But also sadness looking at the sea. The stranded whale, guided out of the cove by tugboats, turns and swims back in. The violinist will not let go her violin which is 200 years old and still on the train thus she is dragged down the track. By what manner is the soul joined to the body? Answer: an arm connecting a violin to a violinist. According to Freud, there are no accidents. Astrologists and Presbyterians agree for different reasons. You fall down the stairs with a birthday cake. You try to fit a blunderbuss into a laptop. Human consciousness: is it the projector or the screen? They come in orange jumpsuits and spray the grass so everything dies but the grass. It is too late to ask Kafka what he thinks. Sometimes they give you a box of ash, a handshake, and the rest is your problem. In one version, the beggar turns out to be a king and grants the poor couple a castle and a moat and two silver horses said to be sired by the wind. That was before dentistry, which might have been a better gift. You did not want to get sick in the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th or 18th centuries. So too the 19th and 20th were to be avoided but the doctor coming to bleed you is the master of the short story. After the kiss from whom he will never know, the lieutenant, going home, touches a bush in which birds are singing.

Dean Young

The Body,Nature,Arts & Sciences

Shamanism 101

Like everyone, I wanted my animal to be the hawk. I thought I wanted the strength to eat the eyes first then tear into the fuse box of the chest and soar away. I needed help because I still cowered under the shadow of my father, a man who inspected picture tubes five out of seven nights, who woke to breakfast on burnt roast except the two weeks he’d sleep on a Jersey beach and throw me into the gasoline-sheened waves. I loved him dying indebted not knowing to what, thinking his pension would be enough, released not knowing from what, gumming at something I was afraid to get close enough to hear, afraid of what I was co-signing. So maybe the elephant. The elephant knows when one of its own is suffering up to six miles away. Charges across the desert cognizant of the futility. How can I be forgiven when I don’t know what I need forgiving for? Sometimes the urges are too extreme: to slap on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal is the tiger. Or shark. Or centipede. But I know I’m smaller than that, filling notebooks with clumsy versions of one plaint, one pheromonal call, clamoring over a crumb that I think is the world, baffled by the splotch of one of my own crushed kind, almost sweet, a sort of tar, following a trail of one or two molecules, leaving a trail of one or two molecules.

Dean Young

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore

Possible Answers to Prayer

Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind. Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient. Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them. Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you— these must burn away before you’ll apprehend how near I am, with what fervor I adore precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.

Scott Cairns

Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

Recitation

He did not fall then, blind upon a road, nor did his lifelong palsy disappear. He heard no voice, save the familiar, ceaseless, self-interrogation of the sore perplexed. The kettle steamed and whistled. A heavy truck downshifted near the square. He heard a child calling, and heard a mourning dove intone its one dull call. For all of that, his wits remained quite dim. He breathed and spoke the words he read. If what had been long dead then came alive, that resurrection was by all appearances metaphorical. The miracle arrived without display. He held a book, and as he read he found the very thing he’d sought. Just that. A life with little hurt but one, the lucky gift of a raveled book, a kettle slow to heat, and time enough therefore to lift the book and find in one slight passage the very wish he dared not ask aloud, until, that is, he spoke the words he read.

Scott Cairns

Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

A Lot

A little loam and topsoil is a lot. —Heather McHugh A vacant lot, maybe, but even such lit vacancy as interstate motels announce can look, well, pretty damned inviting after a long day’s drive, especially if the day has been oppressed by manic truckers, detours, endless road construction. And this poorly measured, semi- rectangle, projected and plotted with the familiar little flags upon a spread of neglected terra firma also offers brief apprehension, which—let’s face it, whether pleasing or encumbered by anxiety—dwells luxuriously in potential. Me? Well, I like a little space between shopping malls, and while this one may never come to be much of a garden, once we rip the old tires from the brambles and bag the trash, we might just glimpse the lot we meant, the lot we hoped to find.

Scott Cairns

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Late Results

We wanted to confess our sins but there were no takers. —Milosz And the few willing to listen demanded that we confess on television. So we kept our sins to ourselves, and they became less troubling. The halt and the lame arranged to have their hips replaced. Lepers coated their sores with a neutral foundation, avoided strong light. The hungry ate at grand buffets and grew huge, though they remained hungry. Prisoners became indistinguishable from the few who visited them. Widows remarried and became strangers to their kin. The orphans finally grew up and learned to fend for themselves. Even the prophets suspected they were mad, and kept their mouths shut. Only the poor—who are with us always—only they continued in the hope.

Scott Cairns

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,Faith & Doubt

Necropolitan

Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze of these skeletal figures affects the disposition of those grinning candies one finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November, though here, each face is troublingly familiar, exhibits the style adopted just as one declines any further style—nectar one sips just as he draws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes citizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns in that city finally how to enjoy a confection, even if a genuine taste for this circumstance has yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself whose sugars and oils now avail a composure which promises never to end, nor to alter.

Scott Cairns

Living,Death,The Body,Nature,Mythology & Folklore,Horror

Loves

Magdalen’s Epistle Of Love’s discrete occasions, we observe sufficient catalogue, a likely-sounding lexicon pronounced so as to implicate a wealth of difference, where reclines instead a common element, itself quite like those elements partaken at the table served by Jesus on the night he was betrayed—like those in that the bread was breakable, the wine was red and wet, and met the tongue with bright, intoxicating sweetness, quite like ... wine. None of what I write arrives to compromise that sacrament, the mystery of spirit graved in what is commonplace and plain— the broken, brittle crust, the cup. Quite otherwise, I choose instead to bear again the news that each, each was still itself, substantial in the simplest sense. By now, you will have learned of Magdalen, a name recalled for having won a touch of favor from the one we call the son of man, and what you’ve heard is true enough. I met him first as, mute, he scribbled in the dust to shame some village hypocrites toward leaving me unbloodied, if ill-disposed to taking up again a prior circumstance. I met him in the house of one who was a Pharisee and not prepared to suffer quietly my handling of the master’s feet. Much later, in the garden when, having died and risen, he spoke as to a maid and asked me why I wept. When, at any meeting with the Christ, was I not weeping? For what? I only speculate —brief inability to speak, a weak and giddy troubling near the throat, a wash of gratitude. And early on, I think, some slight abiding sense of shame, a sop I have inferred more recently to do without. Lush poverty! I think that this is what I’m called to say, this mild exhortation that one should still abide all love’s embarrassments, and so resist the new temptation—dangerous, inexpedient mask—of shame. And, well, perhaps one other thing: I have received some little bit about the glib divisions which so lately have occurred to you as right, as necessary, fit That the body is something less than honorable, say, in its ... appetites? That the spirit is something pure, and—if all goes well— potentially unencumbered by the body’s bawdy tastes. This disposition, then, has led to a banal and pious lack of charity, and, worse, has led more than a few to attempt some soul-preserving severance—harsh mortifications, manglings, all manner of ritual excision lately undertaken to prevent the body’s claim upon the heart, or mind, or (blasphemy!) spirit— whatever name you fix upon the supposéd bodiless. I fear that you presume—dissectingthe person unto something less complex. I think that you forget you are not Greek. I think that you forget the very issue which induced the Christ to take on flesh. All loves are bodily, require that the lips part, and press their trace of secrecy upon the one beloved—the one, or many, endless array whose aspects turn to face the one who calls, the one whose choice it was one day to lift my own bruised body from the dust, where, it seems to me, I must have met my death, thereafter, this subsequent life and late disinclination toward simple reductions in the name of Jesus, whose image I work daily to retain. I have kissed his feet. I have looked long into the trouble of his face, and met, in that intersection, the sacred place—where body and spirit both abide, both yield, in mutual obsession. Yes, if you’ll recall your Hebrew word. just long enough to glimpse in its dense figure power to produce you’ll see as well the damage Greek has wrought upon your tongue, stolen from your sense of what is holy, wholly good, fully animal—the body which he now prepares.

Scott Cairns

The Body,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Nature,Religion,Christianity

Lunar Baedeker

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations A silver LuciferLunar Baedeker...Lucifer A Baedeker is a series name of popular guidebooks. Another modern poem with “Baedeker” in the title is T. S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1919). Lucifer is the former angel name for Satan, which has been used to name the morning star, that is the planet Venus serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperiesPerisPeris “In Persian myth, an elf or fairy, male or female, represented as a descendant of fallen angels, excluded from Paradise till their penance is accomplished” (Century Dictionary) in liveryin livery Dressed for their job prepareLetheLethe River of forgetfulness in Hades for posthumous parvenuesparvenues Those who have recently come into wealth Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoriainfusoria Class of protozoa; “so called because found in infusions of decaying animal or vegetable matter” (OED) from Pharoah’s tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdaysdoomsdays The end of the world or Judgment Day, usually in the singular Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorousphosphorous “Phosphorous” (with a capital “P”) is Venus, the morning star, archaically referred to as Lucifer, mentioned in the first line of this poem. the eye-white sky-lightwhite-light districtwhite-light district Possible alternative to red-light district. The term appears in Theodore Dreiser's book A Hoosier Holiday (1916). of lunar lusts StellectricStellectric A word formed from “stellar” (star) and “electric” signs “Wing shows on Starway” “Zodiac carrousel” Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on NecropolisNecropolis Literally: a city of corpses From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed OdalisquesOdalisques “Female slaves or concubines in an Eastern harem” (OED) and ornithologists observe the flight of ErosEros God of Love in Greek mythology; also, the name of an asteroid, discovered in 1898 obsolete And “Immortality” mildews ... in the museums of the moon “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes

Mina Loy

Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

James Wright

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned

I will grieve alone, As I strolled alone, years ago, down along The Ohio shore. I hid in the hobo jungle weeds Upstream from the sewer main, Pondering, gazing. I saw, down river, At Twenty-third and Water Streets By the vinegar works, The doors open in early evening. Swinging their purses, the women Poured down the long street to the river And into the river. I do not know how it was They could drown every evening. What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore, Drying their wings? For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia, Has only two shores: The one in hell, the other In Bridgeport, Ohio. And nobody would commit suicide, only To find beyond death Bridgeport, Ohio.

James Wright

Living,Death,Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Sappho

Ach, in den Armen hab ich sie alle verloren, du nur, du wirst immer wieder geboren .... —Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge The twilight falls; I soften the dusting feathers, And clean again. The house has lain and moldered for three days. The windows smeared with rain, the curtains torn, The mice come in, The kitchen blown with cold. I keep the house, and say no words. It is true I am as twisted as the cactus That gnarls and turns beside the milky light, That cuts the fingers easily and means nothing, For all the pain that shoots along the hand. I dust the feathers down the yellow thorns, I light the stove. The gas curls round the iron fretwork. the flame Floats above the lace, And bounces like a dancer stayed on air. Fire does not rest on iron, it drifts like a blue blossom And catches on my breath; Coiling, spinning, the blue foam of the gas fire Writhes like a naked girl; Turns up its face, like her. She came to me in rain. I did not know her, I did not know my name After she left to bed her children down, To phone her husband they were gone asleep. And she, lying, a pure fire, in the feathers, Dancing above the ironwork of her bed, Roaring, and singeing nothing. She had not wound her arms about me then, She had not dared. I only took her coat, and smiled to hear How she had left her purse and her umbrella In the theater, how she was sopping cold With the fall rain; and mine was the one light In the neighborhood. She came to my gas fire And lay before it, sprawled, her pure bare shoulders Folded in a doze, a clear, cold curve of stone. I only leaned above the hair, Turned back the quilt, arranged the feet, the arms, And kissed the sleeping shoulder, lightly, like the rain; And when she woke to wear her weathered clothes, I sent her home. She floated, a blue blossom, over the street. And when she came again, It was not long before she turned to me, And let her shawl slide down her neck and shoulder, Let her hair fall. And when she came again, It did not rain. Her husband came to pluck her like an apple, As the drunken farmer lurches against the tree, Grips the green globe not long beyond its bloom, And tears the skin, brutally, out of the bark, Leaves the whole bough broken, The orchard torn with many footprints, The fence swung wide On a raw hinge. And now it is said of me That my love is nothing because I have borne no children, Or because I have fathered none; That I twisted the twig in my hands And cut the blossom free too soon from the seed; That I lay across the fire, And snuffed it dead sooner than draft or rain. But I have turned away, and drawn myself Upright to walk along the room alone. Across the dark the spines of cactus plants Remind me how I go—aloof, obscure, Indifferent to the words the children chalk Against my house and down the garden walls. They cannot tear the garden out of me, Nor smear my love with names. Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock’s heart is found and shaped again. I keep the house and say no words, the evening Falls like a petal down the shawl of trees. I light the fire and see the blossom dance On air alone; I will not douse that flame, That searing flower; I will burn in it. I will not banish love to empty rain. For I know that I am asked to hate myself For their sweet sake Who sow the world with child. I am given to burn on the dark fire they make With their sly voices. But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body’s work of twisted iron.

James Wright

Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Minneapolis Poem

to John Logan 1 I wonder how many old men last winter Hungry and frightened by namelessness prowled The Mississippi shore Lashed blind by the wind, dreaming Of suicide in the river. The police remove their cadavers by daybreak And turn them in somewhere. Where? How does the city keep lists of its fathers Who have no names? By Nicollet Island I gaze down at the dark water So beautifully slow. And I wish my brothers good luck And a warm grave. 2 The Chippewa young men Stab one another shrieking Jesus Christ. Split-lipped homosexuals limp in terror of assault. High school backfields search under benches Near the Post Office. Their faces are the rich Raw bacon without eyes. The Walker Art Center crowd stare At the Guthrie Theater. 3 Tall Negro girls from Chicago Listen to light songs. They know when the supposed patron Is a plainclothesman. A cop’s palm Is a roach dangling down the scorched fangs Of a light bulb. The soul of a cop’s eyes Is an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs Of Juárez, Mexico. 4 The legless beggars are gone, carried away By white birds. The Artificial Limbs Exchange is gutted And sown with lime. The whalebone crutches and hand-me-down trusses Huddle together dreaming in a desolation Of dry groins. I think of poor men astonished to waken Exposed in broad daylight by the blade Of a strange plough. 5 All over the walls of comb cells Automobiles perfumed and blindered Consent with a mutter of high good humor To take their two naps a day. Without sound windows glide back Into dusk. The sockets of a thousand blind bee graves tier upon tier Tower not quite toppling. There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn To sell me my death. 6 But I could not bear To allow my poor brother my body to die In Minneapolis. The old man Walt Whitman our countryman Is now in America our country Dead. But he was not buried in Minneapolis At least. And no more may I be Please God. 7 I want to be lifted up By some great white bird unknown to the police, And soar for a thousand miles and be carefully hidden Modest and golden as one last corn grain, Stored with the secrets of the wheat and the mysterious lives Of the unnamed poor.

James Wright

Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Crime & Punishment,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

A Mad Fight Song for William S. Carpenter, 1966

Varus, varus, gib mir meine Legionen wieder Quick on my feet in those Novembers of my loneliness, I tossed a short pass, Almost the instant I got the ball, right over the head Of Barrel Terry before he knocked me cold. When I woke, I found myself crying out Latin conjugations, and the new snow falling At the edge of a green field. Lemoyne Crone had caught the pass, while I lay Unconscious and raging Alone with the fire ghost of Catullus, the contemptuous graces tossing Garlands and hendecasyllabics over the head Of Cornelius Nepos the mastodon, The huge volume. At the edges of Southeast Asia this afternoon The quarterbacks and the lines are beginning to fall, A spring snow, And terrified young men Quick on their feet Lob one another’s skulls across Wings of strange birds that are burning Themselves alive.

James Wright

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

A Way to Make a Living

From an epigram by Plato When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetery. Think of all I could Have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much. I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living. Thank you, no. I am going to take my last nourishment Of measure from a dark blue Ripple on swell on ripple that makes Its own garlands. My dead are the secret wine jars Of Tyrian commercial travelers. Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves Drift in and out of the Mediterranean. One of these days The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans, Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance, And waken, The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away. They are stars and snowflakes floating down Into your hands, love.

James Wright

Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Labor Day

A Secret Gratitude

Eugen Boissevain died in the autumn of 1949. I had wondered already, at the time of our visit, what would happen to Edna [Millay] if he should die first. —Edmund Wilson 1 She cleaned house, and then lay down long On the long stair. On one of those cold white wings That the strange fowl provide for us like one hillside of the sea, That cautery of snow that blinds us, Pitiless light, One winter afternoon Fair near the place where she sank down with one wing broken, Three friends and I were caught Stalk still in the light. Five of the lights. Why should they care for our eyes? Five deer stood there. They looked back, a good minute. They knew us, all right: Four chemical accidents of horror pausing Between one suicide or another On the passing wing Of an angel that cared no more for our biology, our pity, and our pain Than we care. Why should any mere multitude of the angels care To lay one blind white plume down On this outermost limit of something that is probably no more Than an aphid, An aphid which is one of the angels whose wings toss the black pears Of tears down on the secret shores Of the seas in the corner Of a poet’s closed eye. Why should five deer Gaze back at us? They gazed back at us. Afraid, and yet they stood there, More alive than we four, in their terror, In their good time. We had a dog. We could have got other dogs. Two or three dogs could have taken turns running and dragging down Those fleet lights, whose tails must look as mysterious as the Stars in Los Angeles. We are men. It doesn’t even satisfy us To kill one another. We are a smear of obscenity On the lake whose only peace Is a hole where the moon Abandoned us, that poor Girl who can’t leave us alone. If I were the moon I would shrink into a sand grain In the corner of the poet’s eye, While there’s still room. We are men. We are capable of anything. We could have killed every one of those deer. The very moon of lovers tore herself with the agony of a wounded tigress Out of our side. We can kill anything. We can kill our own bodies. Those deer on the hillside have no idea what in hell We are except murderers. They know that much, and don’t think They don’t. Man’s heart is the rotten yolk of a blacksnake egg Corroding, as it is just born, in a pile of dead Horse dung. I have no use for the human creature. He subtly extracts pain awake in his own kind. I am born one, out of an accidental hump of chemistry. I have no use. 2 But We didn’t set dogs on the deer, Even though we know, As well as you know, We could have got away with it, Because Who cares? 3 Boissevain, who was he? Was he human? I doubt it, From what I know Of men. Who was he, Hobbling with his dry eyes Along in the rain? I think he must have fallen down like the plumes of new snow, I think he must have fallen into the grass, I think he Must surely have grown around Her wings, gathering and being gathered, Leaf, string, anything she could use To build her still home of songs Within sound of water. 4 By God, come to that, I would have married her too, If I’d got the chance, and she’d let me. Think of that. Being alive with a girl Who could turn into a laurel tree Whenever she felt like it. Think of that. 5 Outside my window just now I can hear a small waterfall rippling antiphonally down over The stones of my poem.

James Wright

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack

Near the dry river’s water-mark we found Your brother Minnegan, Flopped like a fish against the muddy ground. Beany, the kid whose yellow hair turns green, Told me to find you, even in the rain, And tell you he was drowned. I hid behind the chassis on the bank, The wreck of someone’s Ford: I was afraid to come and wake you drunk: You told me once the waking up was hard, The daylight beating at you like a board. Blood in my stomach sank. Beside, you told him never to go out Along the river-side Drinking and singing, clattering about. You might have thrown a rock at me and cried I was to blame, I let him fall in the road And pitch down on his side. Well, I’ll get hell enough when I get home For coming up this far, Leaving the note, and running as I came. I’ll go and tell my father where you are. You’d better go find Minnegan before Policemen hear and come. Beany went home, and I got sick and ran, You old son of a bitch. You better hurry down to Minnegan; He’s drunk or dying now, I don’t know which, Rolled in the roots and garbage like a fish, The poor old man.

James Wright

Living,Death,Growing Old,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

To the Muse

It is all right. All they do Is go in by dividing One rib from another. I wouldn’t Lie to you. It hurts Like nothing I know. All they do Is burn their way in with a wire. It forks in and out a little like the tongue Of that frightened garter snake we caught At Cloverfield, you and me, Jenny So long ago. I would lie to you If I could. But the only way I can get you to come up Out of the suckhole, the south face Of the Powhatan pit, is to tell you What you know: You come up after dark, you poise alone With me on the shore. I lead you back to this world. Three lady doctors in Wheeling open Their offices at night. I don’t have to call them, they are always there. But they only have to put the knife once Under your breast. Then they hang their contraption. And you bear it. It’s awkward a while. Still, it lets you Walk about on tiptoe if you don’t Jiggle the needle. It might stab your heart, you see. The blade hangs in your lung and the tube Keeps it draining. That way they only have to stab you Once. Oh Jenny. I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy And disastrous place. I Didn’t, I can’t bear it Either, I don’t blame you, sleeping down there Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring, Muse of black sand, Alone. I don’t blame you, I know The place where you lie. I admit everything. But look at me. How can I live without you? Come up to me, love, Out of the river, or I will Come down to you.

James Wright

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

A Side Street

On the warm Sunday afternoons And every evening in the Spring and Summer When the night hurries the late home-corner And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes Float from the open windows and jar Against the voices of children and the hum of a car; When the city noises commingle and melt With a restless something half-seen, half-felt— I see them always there, Upon the low, smooth wall before the church; That row of little girls who sit and stare Like sparrows on a granite perch. They come in twittering couples or walk alone To their gray bough of stone, Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five— But always they sit there on the narrow coping Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping To see more than what is merely moving and alive. . . They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet. . . Before the quiet church that smells of death They sit. And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath And reaches out and plucks them by the hand And calls them boldly, whispering to each In some strange speech They tremble to but cannot understand. It thrills and troubles them, as one by one, The days run off like water through a sieve; While, with a gaze as candid as the sun, Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive, They come and sit,— A part of life and yet apart from it.

Louis Untermeyer

Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

The Victory of the Beet-Fields

Green miles of leafy peace are spread Over these ranks, unseen and serried; Screening the trenches with their dead And living men already buried. The rains beat down, the torrents flow Into each cold and huddling cave; And over them the beet-fields grow, A fortress gentle as a grave.“Morose, impatient, sick at heart, With rasping nerves and twitching muscles, We cannot even sleep; we start With every twig that snaps or rustles. Sought always by an unseen foe Over our heads the bullets fly; But more than these, we fear the snow, The silent shrapnel of the sky. “Yonder our colonel stalks and grieves, Meeting the storm with thoughts more stormy; But we, we sit and watch the leaves Fall down, a torn and crumpled army. We mourn for every leaf that lies, As though it were a comrade slain; Each was a shelter from the eyes Of every prying aeroplane. . . ”

Louis Untermeyer

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Weather

Irony

Why are the things that have no death The ones with neither sight nor breath! Eternity is thrust upon A bit of earth, a senseless stone. A grain of dust, a casual clod Receives the greatest gift of God. A pebble in the roadway lies— It never dies. The grass our fathers cut away Is growing on their graves today; The tiniest brooks that scarcely flow Eternally will come and go. There is no kind of death to kill The sands that lie so meek and still. . . . But Man is great and strong and wise— And so he dies.

Louis Untermeyer

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Religion,God & the Divine

The Jaunt

In party outfits, two by two or one by one (I was expected to go along as well), They step up the steep gangplank, hands on Metal railing. The river, youthful also In midnight blue with sunset-tinted wavelets, Lets them borrow its broad back For an evening’s unhurried round trip, Which won’t interrupt old river habits for long. Not the chop and churn of big propellers As the rocking stern heaves off and wheels fanwise Into the current, nor a short blast from the stack, Not the up-tempo drumbeat of the black-tie combo Nor an answering fusillade of popped corks, not geysers Of laughter pitched flagpole high among flailing Limbs out on the polished floor nor the mixed Babble of sideline comment over bubbling glasses Can shake that seamless imperturbability. . . . When the springy net of sparkles has shrunk and faded Out of sight, the last rough throb been coaxed From the tenor sax’s frog-in-the-throat, the final Needling tremolo of the clarinet been wrapped up In distance, suddenly it is strange to be here In lilac afterglow with trout-leap and mayfly. . . . Strange, too, how our part of the river continues To trundle along its tonnages of water and motion. The unused ticket spins to the ground. As much as any person not two people can I miss the jaunt, for just this one hour of dusk. . . . Then, a veiled echo, my name called as I turn To answer, eyes adjusting to where we are At the pivot of night, the cusp of light. Light enough to feel our way back to the grove Of alders along the curving path beside the river; Light enough to recognize my life when I see it, Going in its direction, more or less at the same pace.

Alfred Corn

Activities,Travels & Journeys

Waiting for a Ride

Standing at the baggage passing time: Austin Texas airport—my ride hasn’t come yet. My former wife is making websites from her home, one son’s seldom seen, the other one and his wife have a boy and girl of their own. My wife and stepdaughter are spending weekdays in town so she can get to high school. My mother ninety-six still lives alone and she’s in town too, always gets her sanity back just barely in time. My former former wife has become a unique poet; most of my work, such as it is is done. Full moon was October second this year, I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine owl hoots and rattling antlers, Castor and Pollux rising strong —it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts! that even our present night sky slips away, not that I’ll see it. Or maybe I will, much later, some far time walking the spirit path in the sky, that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the “narrow painful passageway of the Bardo” squeeze your little skull and there you are again waiting for your ride (October 5, 2001)

Gary Snyder

Living,Activities,Jobs & Working,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion

I Went into the Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick Bar In Farmington, New Mexico. And drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer. My long hair was tucked up under a cap I’d left the earring in the car. Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables, A waitress asked us where are you from? a country-and-western band began to play “We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie” And with the next song, a couple began to dance. They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties; I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness— America—your stupidity. I could almost love you again. We left—onto the freeway shoulders— under the tough old stars— In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself, To the real work, to “What is to be done.”

Gary Snyder

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Popular Culture

Meeting the Mountains

He crawls to the edge of the foaming creek He backs up the slab ledge He puts a finger in the water He turns to a trapped pool Puts both hands in the water Puts one foot in the pool Drops pebbles in the pool He slaps the water surface with both hands He cries out, rises up and stands Facing toward the torrent and the mountain Raises up both hands and shouts three times! VI 69, Kai at Sawmill Lake

Gary Snyder

Living,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,The Spiritual,Philosophy

The Moralists

You would extend the mind beyond the act, Furious, bending, suffering in thin And unpoetic dicta; you have been Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fact. As metal singing hard, with firmness racked, You formulate our passion; and behind In some harsh moment nowise of the mind Lie the old meanings your advance has packed. No man can hold existence in the head. I, too, have known the anguish of the right Amid this net of mathematic dearth, And the brain throbbing like a ship at night: Have faced with old unmitigated dread The hard familiar wrinkles of the earth.

Yvor Winters

Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Social Commentaries

On a View of Pasadena from the Hills

From the high terrace porch I watch the dawn. No light appears, though dark has mostly gone, Sunk from the cold and monstrous stone. The hills Lie naked but not light. The darkness spills Down the remoter gulleys; pooled, will stay Too low to melt, not yet alive with day. Below the windows, the lawn, matted deep Under its close-cropped tips with dewy sleep, Gives off a faint hush, all its plushy swarm Alive with coolness reaching to be warm. Gray windows at my back, the massy frame Dull with the blackness that has not a name; But down below, the garden is still young, Of five years’ growth, perhaps, and terrace-hung, Drop by slow drop of seeping concrete walls. Such are the bastions of our pastorals! Here are no palms! They once lined country ways, Where old white houses glared down dusty days, With small round towers, blunt-headed through small trees. Those towers are now the hiving place of bees. The palms were coarse; their leaves hung thick with dust; The roads were muffled deep. But now deep rust Has fastened on the wheels that labored then. Peace to all such, and to all sleeping men! I lived my childhood there, a passive dream In the expanse of that recessive scheme. Slow air, slow fire! O deep delay of Time! That summer crater smoked like slaking lime, The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, That where I pushed my way the giant hush Was changed to soft explosion as the sage Broke down to powdered ash, the sift of age, And fell along my path, a shadowy rift. On these rocks now no burning ashes drift; Mowed lawn has crept along the granite bench; The yellow blossoms of acacia drench The dawn with pollen; and, with waxen green, The long leaves of the eucalypti screen The closer hills from view—lithe, tall, and fine, And nobly clad with youth, they bend and shine. The small dark pool, jutting with living rock, Trembles at every atmospheric shock, Blurred to its depth with the cold living ooze. From cloudy caves, heavy with summer dews, The shyest and most tremulous beings stir, The pulsing of their fins a lucent blur, That, like illusion, glances off the view. The pulsing mouths, like metronomes, are true, This is my father’s house, no homestead here That I shall live in, but a shining sphere Of glass and glassy moments, frail surprise, My father’s phantasy of Paradise; Which melts upon his death, which he attained With loss of heart for every step he gained. Too firmly gentle to displace the great, He crystallized this vision somewhat late; Forbidden now to climb the garden stair, He views the terrace from a window chair. His friends, hard shaken by some twenty years, Tremble with palsy and with senile fears, In their late middle age gone cold and gray. Fine men, now broken. That the vision stay, They spend astutely their depleted breath, With tired ironic faces wait for death. Below the garden the hills fold away. Deep in the valley, a mist fine as spray, Ready to shatter into spinning light, Conceals the city at the edge of night. The city, on the tremendous valley floor, Draws its dream deeper for an instant more, Superb on solid loam, and breathing deep, Poised for a moment at the edge of sleep. Cement roads mark the hills, wide, bending free Of cliff and headland. Dropping toward the sea, Through suburb after suburb, vast ravines Swell to the summer drone of fine machines. The driver, melting down the distance here, May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer Or pass the faint head set perplexedly. And man-made stone outgrows the living tree, And at its rising, air is shaken, men Are shattered, and the tremor swells again, Extending to the naked salty shore, Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore.

Yvor Winters

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

The Journey

Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I came, I, sometime living, sometime with a name, Creeping by iron ways across the bare Wastes of Wyoming, turning in despair, Changing and turning, till the fall of night, Then throbbing motionless with iron might. Four days and nights! Small stations by the way, Sunk far past midnight! Nothing one can say Names the compassion they stir in the heart. Obscure men shift and cry, and we depart. And I remembered with the early sun That foul-mouthed barber back in Pendleton, The sprawling streets, the icy station bench, The Round-up pennants, the latrinal stench. These towns are cold by day, the flesh of vice Raw and decisive, and the will precise; At night the turbulence of drink and mud, Blue glare of gas, the dances dripping blood, Fists thudding murder in the shadowy air, Exhausted whores, sunk to a changeless stare. Alive in empty fact alone, extreme, They make each fact a mortuary dream. Once when the train paused in an empty place, I met the unmoved landscape face to face; Smoothing abysses that no stream could slake, Deep in its black gulch crept the heavy Snake, The sound diffused, and so intently firm, It seemed the silence, having change nor term. Beyond the river, gray volcanic stone In rolling hills: the river moved alone. And when we started, charged with mass, and slow, We hung against it in an awful flow. Thus I proceeded until early night, And, when I read the station’s name aright, Descended—at the bidding of a word! I slept the night out where the thought occurred, Then rose to view the dwelling where I lay. Outside, the bare land stretching far away; The frame house, new, fortuitous, and bright, Pointing the presence of the morning light; A train’s far screaming, clean as shining steel Planing the distance for the gliding heel. Through shrinking frost, autumnal grass uncurled, In naked sunlight, on a naked world.

Yvor Winters

Activities,Travels & Journeys

To a Young Writer

Achilles Holt, Stanford, 1930 Here for a few short years Strengthen affections; meet, Later, the dull arrears Of age, and be discreet. The angry blood burns low. Some friend of lesser mind Discerns you not; but so Your solitude’s defined. Write little; do it well. Your knowledge will be such, At last, as to dispel What moves you overmuch.

Yvor Winters

Activities,School & Learning,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Graduation

On Teaching the Young

The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands When imperceptive hands, Feeling, have gone astray. It is what one should say. Few minds will come to this. The poet’s only bliss Is in cold certitude— Laurel, archaic, rude.

Yvor Winters

Living,Midlife,Activities,School & Learning,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets

John Sutter

I was the patriarch of the shining land, Of the blond summer and metallic grain; Men vanished at the motion of my hand, And when I beckoned they would come again. The earth grew dense with grain at my desire; The shade was deepened at the springs and streams; Moving in dust that clung like pillared fire, The gathering herds grew heavy in my dreams. Across the mountains, naked from the heights, Down to the valley broken settlers came, And in my houses feasted through the nights, Rebuilt their sinews and assumed a name. In my clear rivers my own men discerned The motive for the ruin and the crime— Gold heavier than earth, a wealth unearned, Loot, for two decades, from the heart of Time. Metal, intrinsic value, deep and dense, Preanimate, inimitable, still, Real, but an evil with no human sense, Dispersed the mind to concentrate the will. Grained by alchemic change, the human kind Turned from themselves to rivers and to rocks; With dynamite broke metal unrefined; Measured their moods by geologic shocks. With knives they dug the metal out of stone; Turned rivers back, for gold through ages piled, Drove knives to hearts, and faced the gold alone; Valley and river ruined and reviled; Reviled and ruined me, my servant slew, Strangled him from the figtree by my door. When they had done what fury bade them do, I was a cursing beggar, stripped and sore. What end impersonal, what breathless age, Incontinent of quiet and of years, What calm catastrophe will yet assuage This final drouth of penitential tears?

Yvor Winters

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Time and the Garden

The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all! These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar’s heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind’s immortal, but the man is dead.

Yvor Winters

Living,Time & Brevity,Activities,Gardening,Jobs & Working,School & Learning,Nature,Spring,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It’s two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple. Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it’s baby lima beans. It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You’d be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later. There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.

Margaret Atwood

Relationships,Home Life

The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Confess: it’s my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don’t go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser’s: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or, having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. These are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons, lovers, and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. They come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse’s neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right— though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It’s no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men’s bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I’m just as human as you. But it’s no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

Margaret Atwood

Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Marrying the Hangman

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history. * To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. * In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman. But there is no hangman, first she must create him, she must persuade this man at the end of the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her, this darkness, she must persuade him to renounce his face, exchange it for the impersonal mask of death, of official death which has eyes but no mouth, this mask of a dark leper. She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry? * You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal. * She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches through the wall, stroking and touching. What could she possibly have said that would have convinced him? He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history. * My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn’t have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe. This is not fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman and because of this some of them are unemployed. * He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple. She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, thighs, eyes, eyes. They both kept their promises. * The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he accidentally spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice. * Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare. * What did they say the first time they were alone together in the same room? What did he say when she had removed her veil and he could see that she was not a voice but a body and therefore finite? What did she say when she discovered that she had left one locked room for another? They talked of love, naturally, though that did not keep them busy forever. * The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it. At that time there were no female hangmen. Perhaps there have never been any, and thus no man could save his life by marriage. Though a woman could, according to the law. * He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife. She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood. They both kept their promises.

Margaret Atwood

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality

They eat out

In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal. At the moment only I can do it and so I raise the magic fork over the plate of beef fried rice and plunge it into your heart. There is a faint pop, a sizzle and through your own split head you rise up glowing; the ceiling opens a voice sings Love Is A Many Splendoured Thing you hang suspended above the city in blue tights and a red cape, your eyes flashing in unison. The other diners regard you some with awe, some only with bordom: they cannot decide if you are a new weapon or only a new advertisement. As for me, I continue eating; I liked you better the way you were, but you were always ambitious.

Margaret Atwood

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships

They are hostile nations

i In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres ii Put down the target of me you guard inside your binoculars, in turn I will surrender this aerial photograph (your vulnerable sections marked in red) I have found so useful See, we are alone in the dormant field, the snow that cannot be eaten or captured iii Here there are no armies here there is no money It is cold and getting colder, We need each others’ breathing, warmth, surviving is the only war we can afford, stay walking with me, there is almost time / if we can only make it as far as the (possibly) last summer

Margaret Atwood

Living,Marriage & Companionship

Tourists

In Tunis we try to discuss divorce And dying but give up to lounge With rug merchants under a plum tree. From its corner the lamb’s severed head Watches the flies drink from its eyes And its fat disappear into the fire. The light rinses the edge of your sandal, The two wasps that ornament the blur Of screened window. My grandmother Would have loved a night like this. In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart With its china rolling through Cook Street’s Stony yard one summer when I was always Thirsty, and she moved like a figure On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart, Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut My hair with the straight razor. I was a week out of the hospital. Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed With stitches of surgical thread. The scalpel came so close it gave My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died. Years later I can still see the skin Flutter on the inside of my left breast And my heart limps like a great uncle Who, because he was a Jew and lame, Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes. He became a friend asking a favor Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.

Lynn Emanuel

Living,Health & Illness,Separation & Divorce,Activities,Travels & Journeys

The Planet Krypton

Outside the window the McGill smelter sent a red dust down on the smoking yards of copper, on the railroad tracks’ frayed ends disappeared into the congestion of the afternoon. Ely lay dull and scuffed: a miner’s boot toe worn away and dim, while my mother knelt before the Philco to coax the detonation from the static. From the Las Vegas Tonapah Artillery and Gunnery Range the sound of the atom bomb came biting like a swarm of bees. We sat in the hot Nevada dark, delighted, when the switch was tripped and the bomb hoisted up its silky, hooded, glittering, uncoiling length; it hissed and spit, it sizzled like a poker in a toddy. The bomb was no mind and all body; it sent a fire of static down the spine. In the dark it glowed like the coils of an electric stove. It stripped every leaf from every branch until a willow by a creek was a bouquet of switches resinous, naked, flexible, and fine. Bathed in the light of KDWN, Las Vegas, my crouched mother looked radioactive, swampy, glaucous, like something from the Planet Krypton. In the suave, brilliant wattage of the bomb, we were not poor. In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports. A new planet bloomed above us; in its light the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates. The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot; we could have anything we wanted.

Lynn Emanuel

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Seizure

This was the winter mother told time by my heart ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest. This was the fifties & we were living on nothing & what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse, what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists & each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass, what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman, into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming & brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,” & hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots on the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.

Lynn Emanuel

Living,Health & Illness,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

What Grieving Was

That was not the summer of aspic and cold veal. It was so hot the car seat stung my thighs and the rearview mirror swam with mirage. In the back seat the leather grip was noosed by twine. We were not poor but we had the troubles of the poor. She who had been that soft snore beside the Nytol, open-mouthed, was gone, somewhere, somewhere there was a bay, there was a boat, there was a scold in mother’s mouth. What I remember best is the way everything came and went in the window of my brief attention. At the wake I was beguiled by the chromium yellow lemon pies. The grandfather clock’s pendant of unaffordable gold told the quarter hour. The hearse rolled forward over the O’s of its own surprise.

Lynn Emanuel

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Industrial Lace

The city had such pretty clotheslines. Women aired their intimate apparel in the emery haze: membranes of lingerie— pearl, ruby, copper slips— their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind. And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent of baking, a sensual net over a few yards of North Troy. The city had Niagara Mohawk bearing down with power and light and members of the Local shifting on the line. They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid, synthetics that won’t vent. They pieced the tropics into housecoats when big prints were the rage. Dacron gardens twisted on the line over lots of Queen Anne’s lace. Sackdresses dyed the sun as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass against the leading of the tenements, the warehouse holding medical supplies. I waited for my bus by that window of trusses in Caucasian beige, trying to forget the pathological inside. I was thinking of being alive. I was waiting to open the amber envelopes of mail at home. Just as food service workers, counter women, maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo their perms from the delicate insect meshes required by The Board of Health. Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route. She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes— milk crates of orange industrial lace the cartons could drip through. Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning put their veins up and sawed their nails to dust on files from the plant. All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper. Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called garnet cloth. It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed their larval curls and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs. It was yesterday—twenty years after my father’s death, I found something he had kept. A packet of lightning- cut sanding discs, still sealed. I guess he meant to open the finish, strip the paint stalled on some grain and groom the primal gold. The discs are the rough size of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle and label Best Before. The old cellophane was tough. But I ripped until I touched their harsh done crust.

Alice Fulton

Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

The Nineteenth Century as a Song

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints (1893). John Gray’s translation of Verlaine John Gray’s translation of Verlaine The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints (1893). & Baudelaire’s Baudelaire’s French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) butcher in 1861 shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe.tripe Cow’s stomach, prepared for human consumption He thought himself a clever man and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands, gazed briefly at what Tennyson called at what Tennyson called Not an actual phrase by Tennyson. Possibly a play on “Hateful is the dark-blue sky”, from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters” “the sweet blue sky.” It was a warm day. What clouds there were were made of sugar tinged with blood. They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages new settings of the songsMoravian Moravian Could refer to either a person from Moravia, a region of the Czech Republic, or a member of the Moravian Church. virgins sang on wedding days. The poet is a monarch of the clouds The poet is a monarch of the clouds Translation from Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros”: “Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées” (line 13) & Swinburne Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale” : “trod by no tropic feet”. on his northern coast “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale”: “trod by no tropic feet”. composed that lovely elegy elegy A melancholy poem that laments a person’s death but ends in consolation. See more in the Glossary of Poetic Terms. and then found out Baudelaire was still alive found out Baudelaire was still alive Baudelaire died August 31, 1867, but his death was erroneously reported four months earlier, in April of 1867. According to Swinburne biographer Edmund Gosse, “Baudelaire came to life again, and Swinburne was on the point of tearing up his elegy. However, Baudelaire died some months later, and, after a delay of eleven years, “Ave atque Vale” was at length included in the volume of 1878.” Read “Ave Atque Vale” here. whom he had lodged dreamily in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.” “deep division of prodigious breasts.” A direct quotation from Swinburne’s poem “Ave Atque Vale” Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, An allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover” over spring afternoons in the nineteenth centurywhile Marx in the library while Marx in the library Karl Marx (1818-1883), political economist, researched works in the reading room of the British Museum in London for his major publication, Das Kapital gloom studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit Tilsit A town in what was East Prussia, now named Sovetsk, Russia. Marx mentions the 1807 Peace Treaties of Tilsit in his 1870 correspondence with Friedrich Engels. and that gentle man BakuninBakunin Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian anarchist who participated in the Czech Rebellion of 1848. Bakunin met Karl Marx in Paris, and later Bakunin’s anarchist faction would clash with Marx’s socialist faction at a congress of the International Working Men’s Association, and Marx’s leadership prevailed and Bakunin and his men were expelled from the association. Bakunin had stood for violent overthrow, while Marx believed that existing political systems should be reformed into socialism. Compare to these lines from Larry Levis’ poem “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans”: “And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold” , home after fingerfucking the countess, applies his numb hands to the making of bombs.

Robert Hass

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Two Views of Buson

1 A French scholar says he affected the Chinese manner. When he took his friends into the countryside To look at blossoms, they all saw Chinese blossoms. He dressed accordingly and wept for the wild geese of Shosho. 2 One year after making love through the short midsummer night He walked home at dawn and noticed that the river Oi Had sunk two feet. The following year was better. He saw bubbles of crab-froth among the river reeds.

Robert Hass

Love,Relationships,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Summer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Lost Pilot

for my father, 1922-1944 Your face did not rot like the others—the co-pilot, for example, I saw him yesterday. His face is corn- mush: his wife and daughter, the poor ignorant people, stare as if he will compose soon. He was more wronged than Job. But your face did not rot like the others—it grew dark, and hard like ebony; the features progressed in their distinction. If I could cajole you to come back for an evening, down from your compulsive orbiting, I would touch you, read your face as Dallas, your hoodlum gunner, now, with the blistered eyes, reads his braille editions. I would touch your face as a disinterested scholar touches an original page. However frightening, I would discover you, and I would not turn you in; I would not make you face your wife, or Dallas, or the co-pilot, Jim. You could return to your crazy orbiting, and I would not try to fully understand what it means to you. All I know is this: when I see you, as I have seen you at least once every year of my life, spin across the wilds of the sky like a tiny, African god, I feel dead. I feel as if I were the residue of a stranger’s life, that I should pursue you. My head cocked toward the sky, I cannot get off the ground, and, you, passing over again, fast, perfect, and unwilling to tell me that you are doing well, or that it was mistake that placed you in that world, and me in this; or that misfortune placed these worlds in us.

James Tate

Living,Death,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict,Funerals,Father's Day

The Motorcyclists

My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way, did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other. I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now. Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July, but fireworks any time? There are people like that, you know. They’re like people who like orchestra music, listen to it any time of day. Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them. Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats, shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene, the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first one at the scene of a bad accident. Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas? I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me, did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep. Do you know that I have never understood what they meant by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They should have called it something like “the grudging notch.” But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say? “It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.” You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story, but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much. Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon? I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.

James Tate

Activities,Travels & Journeys

Poem to Some of My Recent Poems

My beloved little billiard balls, my polite mongrels, edible patriotic plums, you owe your beauty to your mother, who resembled a cyclindrical corned beef with all the trimmings, may God rest her forsaken soul, for it is all of us she forsook; and I shall never forget her sputtering embers, and then the little mound. Yes, my little rum runners, she had defective tear ducts and could weep only iced tea. She had petticoats beneath her eyelids. And in her last years she found ball bearings in her beehive puddings, she swore allegiance to Abyssinia. What should I have done? I played the piano and scrambled eggs. I had to navigate carefully around her brain’s avalanche lest even a decent finale be forfeited. And her beauty still evermore. You see, as she was dying, I led each of you to her side, one by one she scorched you with her radiance. And she is ever with us in our acetylene leisure. But you are beautiful, and I, a slave to a heap of cinders.

James Tate

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

A Wedding

She was in terrible pain the whole day, as she had been for months: a slipped disc, and there is nothing more painful. She herself was a nurse’s aide, also a poet just beginning to make a name for her nom de plume. As with most things in life, it happened when she was changing channels on her television. The lucky man, on the other hand, was smiling for the first time in his life, and it was fake. He was an aspiring philosopher of dubious potential, very serious, but somehow lacking in essential depth. He could have been an adequate undertaker. It was not the first time for either of them. It was a civil service, with no music, few flowers. Still, there was a slow and erratic tide of champagne—corks shot clear into the trees. And flashcubes, instant photos, some blurred and some too revealing, cake slices that aren’t what they were meant to be. The bride slept through much of it, and never did we figure out who was on whose team. I think the groom meant it in the end when he said, “We never thought anyone would come.” We were not the first to arrive, nor the last to leave. Who knows, it may all turn out for the best. And who really cares about such special days, they are not what we live for.

James Tate

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Marriage & Companionship,Anniversary,Weddings

A Vagabond

A vagabond is a newcomer in a heap of trouble. He’s an eyeball at a peephole that should be electrocuted. He’s a leper in a textile mill and likely to be beheaded, I mean, given a liverwurst sandwich on the break by the brook where the loaves are sliced. But he oughtn’t meddle with the powder puffs on the golf links— they have their own goats to tame, dirigibles to situate. He can act like an imbecile if the climate is propitious, a magnate of kidnap paradising around the oily depot, or a speck from a distant nebula wishing to purchase a certain skyscraper .... Well, if it’s permitted, then let’s regulate him, let’s testify against his thimble, and moderate his gloves before they sew an apron. The local minister is thinking of moving to Holland, exchanging his old ballads for some lingerie. “Zatso!” says the vagabond. Homeless, like wheat that tattletales on the sermon, like wages swigged. “Zatso, zatso, zatso!” cries the vagabond. The minister reels under the weight of his thumbs, the vagabond seems to have jutted into his kernel, disturbed his terminal core. Slowly, and with trifling dignity, the minister removes from his lapel his last campaign button:Don’t Mess with Raymond, New Hampshire.

James Tate

Stone Canyon Nocturne

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back. No one believes in his own life anymore. The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs. In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings. They sing songs, and their fingers blear. And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot And belladonna insist on our comforting, Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more, Like a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind, Part eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.

Charles Wright

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Spider Crystal Ascension

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend ... At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.

Charles Wright

Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

The Precincts of Moonlight

Her first child belongs to the crows and his days go circling the yellow-black fields summers and into the falls. He scans the horizon, mouth in a sticky O, like a spirit caged to infinite space.Winged One, she calls, Winged One, come here. Receding, he pulls off his straw hat and waves, showing his tuft of obsidian hair. He’s not coming back just yet. She remembers how crows are small black rivers like stairways leading to rooms that can’t be rooms, only the hallways of space. And then, how she watched him last night in the ruined farmhouse across the road where only a chimney and staircase are left jutting up to the vacant precincts of moonlight. He was stepping so lightly then, who at sixteen forgets his own name, and shits himself like the mindless, fear-mad prey of barn owls. He belonged to the crows and stood for hours on the stairway’s precipice, weaving a dance like crows in flight, until his brother, with rope and fists, carried him struggling down.

David Wojahn

Living,Parenthood

Truth-Taking Stare

... in which generally the patient has the sense of having lost contact with things, or of everything having undergone a subtle but all-encompassing change, reality revealed as never before, though eerie in some ineffable way. —Louis Sass Or gallery. Or strange askew museum. Or painting of a hotel bed with some cheap print above the headboard. (Palm tree or a sleigh pulling Xmas trees.) Or the day two-dimensional, subzero as I run the beach along the frozen lake. The waves lathed to Hokusai spirals. Cold gallery, every inch of wall space covered, park benches derbied by snow. House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. House for battered women. House of the servants of His Godhead Reverend Moon Who plots in some Seoul penthouse His glorious death and resurrection. Ten minutes ago I left you to the laying on of hands. Maria talking fast in glottal Polish, and the physical therapist, hugely blonde, lifting your legs, white cocoons of the casts. First up, then to the sides, the hospital bed in the living room hulking, whirring as it moves along with you. To talk of this and you directly, though I can’t. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. Legs not working, hands not working, tongue encased in plaster. The tongue going numb with the hands. Why my friend Dave loves jazz: to hammer and obliterate the words, nullify too the wordlessness. “Blue Train” on my Walkman as the Moonies leave from house to van, lugging crates of silken flowers. Blue pills that didn’t work. Then my month of yellow pills. To not metamorphose to my father writhing as the charges surge from temples down the spine, a dog’s twitching legs in sleep. To mollify with acronyms: ECT, Odysseuses and Tristans of PDR, yellow Prozac, sky blue Zoloft. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. The day two-dimensional. (Past and present and to dwell in neither.) Truth-taking stare. Height and width, no depth. On a screen the paramedics ease you from car to ambulance, having labored with a crowbar at the door, and I push again through the crowd on Thorndale. This is my husband. Please let him come with me.

David Wojahn

Living,Health & Illness,Arts & Sciences,Architecture & Design,Music,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

The Shampoo (From The Nightingales)

How long it must have been, the girl’s hair, cascading down her shoulders almost to her waist, light brown and heavy as brocade: the story I’m remembering of N’s, remembering as my own hair’s washed and cut, the salt-and-pepper cuneiform to frill my barber’s smock. Arts and Science is expanding. The wall to the empty shop next door pulled down and a dozen workmen slink improbably on scaffolds butting the dusty ceiling, cacophony and plastic tarps, the whirr of drills that mingles with the dryers’ jittery hums, the scissors’ flash, veronicas of clicks, the coloring, the curling, the antique cash register, melodious with its chime. And best, the liquid gurgle of hands massaging scalps the row of sinks, twelve hands and six wet scalps in a line. I’m next, and leaning back (let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon)

David Wojahn

The Body,The Mind,Nature,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Poem about People

The jaunty crop-haired graying Women in grocery stores, Their clothes boyish and neat, New mittens or clean sneakers, Clean hands, hips not bad still, Buying ice cream, steaks, soda, Fresh melons and soap—or the big Balding young men in work shoes And green work pants, beer belly And white T-shirt, the porky walk Back to the truck, polite; possible To feel briefly like Jesus, A gust of diffuse tenderness Crossing the dark spaces To where the dry self burrows Or nests, something that stirs, Watching the kinds of people On the street for a while— But how love falters and flags When anyone’s difficult eyes come Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique Soul, its need unlovable: my friend In his divorced schoolteacher Apartment, his own unsuspected Paintings hung everywhere, Which his wife kept in a closet— Not, he says, that she wasn’t Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing My rock radio sing my self-pity: “The Angels Wished Him Dead”—all The hideous, sudden stare of self, Soul showing through like the lizard Ancestry showing in the frontal gaze Of a robin busy on the lawn. In the movies, when the sensitive Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns Trying to rescue the thrashing Anti-semitic bully, swimming across The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth:Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself. The weather Changes in the black of night, And the dream-wind, bowling across The sopping open spaces Of roads, golf courses, parking lots, Flails a commotion In the dripping treetops, Tries a half-rotten shingle Or a down-hung branch, and we All dream it, the dark wind crossing The wide spaces between us.

Robert Pinsky

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

More Blues and the Abstract Truth

I back the car over a soft, large object; hair appears on my chest in dreams. The paperboy comes to collect with a pit bull. Call Grandmother and she says, Well you know death is death and none other. In the mornings we’re in the dark; even at the end of June the zucchini keep on the sill. Ring Grandmother for advice and she says, O you know I used to grow so many things. Then there’s the frequent bleeding, the tender nipples, and the rot under the floormat. If I’m not seeing a cold-eyed doctor it is another gouging mechanic. Grandmother says, Thanks to the blue rugs and Eileen Briscoe’s elms the house keeps cool. Well. Then. You say Grandmother let me just ask you this: How does a body rise up again and rinse her mouth from the tap. And how does a body put in a plum tree or lie again on top of another body or string a trellis. Or go on drying the flatware. Fix rainbow trout. Grout the tile. Buy a bag of onions. Beat an egg stiff. Yes, how does the cat continue to lick itself from toenail to tailhole. And how does a body break bread with the word when the word has broken. Again. And. Again. With the wine. And the loaf. And the excellent glass of the body. And she says, Even. If. The. Sky. Is. Falling. My. Peace. Rose. Is. In. Bloom.

C. D. Wright

Living,Health & Illness,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Music