The Poetry Thread

the first lines of Portrait of Tragedy - Joseph brodsky

third stanza Portrait of Tragedy - Joseph Brodsky

He picked you for your hair to play this role:
a look had reached Bootle from Altamont
that year. You wouldn’t say you sold your soul
but learned your line inside a beating tent

(From 'Keith Chegwin as Fleance' - Paul Farley)

(From 'Whang Editorial Policy' by Mark Halliday. Full text here: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr88-4/halliday.htm)

But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

(from 'The Geranium' By Theodore Roethke)

(the end of 'Frost At Midnight' by ST Coleridge obv. I have always loved that last line quite unreasonably much.)

For a solid month I tried
to think of something new to say about rivers
I called the newspaper to find out
how many horses were left on earth,
and numbly watched mosquitos swarm
over a pile of high-heeled shoes
while my colleagues hunted in the corners.

At least I was not in the line of work
that had me spending most of my day
avoiding God. My desk held painfully
complicated sufaces filled with shadow cassettes,
black bear theory and drinking water.

There was the sadness in a name like Jesse Winchester
and the wind howling
on the answering machine when I returned home
from daydreaming in a margarita shop.

All the blessings and counter-blessings
that move my mind like FM waves
from a butter churn, and granted me the sight
of parallel collies standing on a hilltop

And the rain falling on the United States
while it wonders
'What is the United States?'

I used to sing a song that went
'No more Springs, no more Summers, no more Falls'
I believed I was nearing the morning when
nettles would pour from the shower head.
When I would be ripped out of the world for re-casting
of blues and plastic.

I believed that I would finally break
where I had been bent,
that I would lose the game inside the game
But that has not happened,
And now I don't expect it ever will.

(David Berman)

But I love it so.

The Pope's Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat - and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

----- Sharon Olds

Finally: “Asked what distinguished him, as a poet, from an ordinary man, Wallace Stevens replied, Inability to see much point to the life of an ordinary man.”

--
After An Argument Over Global Warming

You feign sleep and face the wall
because you believe in ice shelves
cleaving under the weight of their water.

Your birthmark melts down in the dark.
The lack of pigment sapped into a lack of light.

We stood in the kitchen with the faucet running.
You at the sink washing the same plate over and over, me
propped up on the counter top. I spoke of the shoreline

creeping upward in inches over centuries.
The gradual spread of seashore
and drift of continents.

You saw the bayou sucked into the Gulf.
Desert droughts blooming in the countryside.
Monsoons washing out the soil.

And when I said "Beauty is slow," you dropped the plate
like a shard of ice and bolted into the bedroom.
The faucet running.

...
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney
(i used this as a freaky trigger focus group response but i don't think it ever ran.)

last stanza of "Lost in Translation" by James Merrill

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found-I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

Early in spring the weather hasn't changed.
The concert-room is peppishness unhinged.

Tonight the lady pianist who plays
con fuoco hardly hears her own applause.

*

A Mr Macaroni stops his Ford
two streets away and lets the engine flood,

the radio just loud enough to hear,
one crate of pippin-apples, one of beer.

*

She makes her music, loosening her hands.
The moment holds. But if the evening ends,

[...]

Matthew Welton

For another bone in the stock,
mug of water in the soup,
more of the plate,
more fresh air baked into the cake:
for a better look at the bread
through the butter, at the knee
through the trouser leg;
for a longer washing line,
for the bar of grime
to be raised a little higher up the side of the shared brown bath;
for a wider photograph,
extra drawer –
another face,
but it’s full of yours.

Jacob Polley

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-E. E. Cummings

1                               put dogs on the list
2          of difficult things to lose. Those dogs ditched
3          on the North York Moors or the Sussex Downs
4          or hurled like bags of sand from rented cars
5          have followed their noses to market towns
6          and bounced like balls into their owners' arms.
7          I heard one story of a dog that swam
8          to the English coast from the Isle of Man,
9          and a dog that carried eggs and bacon
10        and a morning paper from the village
11        surfaced umpteen leagues and two years later,
12        bacon eaten but the eggs unbroken,
13        newsprint dry as tinder, to the letter.
14        A dog might wander the width of the map
15        to bury its head in its owner's lap,
16        crawl the last mile to dab a bleeding paw
17        against its own front door. To die at home,
18        a dog might walk its four legs to the bone.
19        You can take off the tag and the collar
20        but a dog wears one coat and one colour.
21        A dog got rid of---that's a dog for life.
22        No dog howls like a dog kicked out at night.
23        Try looking a dog like that in the eye.

Simon Armitage

1          The rain. Rain that will not end.
2          The daily errands. Daily bread.
3          No letting up. No pause
4          as I steer blindly, circling
5          the great city. City of tears and blood.
6          I woke this morning to the ringing phone.
7          To the last days of the twentieth century.
8          Hello. Hello. But the line was dead.
9          The phone in my hand heavy.
10        My mind whirling. Numb. Taken

[...]

Elizabeth Spires

Next, anybody gets an orange from a hat, takes it, & keeps it;
then anybody goes under
while doing something under the conditions of competition
& ends by putting in languages other than English.

--Jackson Mac Low, "19th Dance - Going Under - 1 March 1964"

with His old detachment, and the old warnings
still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to
an ugly finish, Irreverence
is a greater oaf than Superstition.

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.

[Auden - "Moon Landing']

-- Ted Berrigan, from "Train Ride"

(I hope the formatting worked out OK...)

It snows, obscuring the lamp until, in a Great Plains blizzard,
I find myself in a self-constructed Eskimo igloo
waiting with the family lantern in the yard,
for father to come up the path from work,
lift me and take me inside the house
to the warm flickering wicks
before a harsh electric glare had replaced them.
I remember sitting in the snowhouse waiting.
...

Father, mother take me back even though life was harsh
in the small kitchen.
Who would have dreamed
the universe so large?

...

Can there not be miniature time? Some place where one stays
forever at the kitchen table,
on the same page of one's book,
with one's parents looking on,
an old photograph perhaps
but that would have faded.
We would not truly be there.
...

I do not recognize this alien grown up body.
I will not recognize it ever.
I am there, there, in the yellow light in the kitchen,
reading on the stained oilcloth
We are all there. I did not grow up.
...

I have rushed like a moth through time
toward the light in the kitchen.
I am safe now. I never grew up.
I am no longer lost in the mist on the mountain.

(Loren Eiseley, The Innocent Assassins)

No relation.

A tree trunk is something "pressed together" and so
is money, weighed. Both produce softly graded shadows
by repeated small touches (resembling freckles), or
use "for" to become appendages capable of passing implements
through substances with circular movements.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
...Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes...

...In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means...

And nothing cared I...that time allows...
so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace...

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

(Fern Hill, of course. Which I think is the greatest poem in the English language.)

sun young
time play
golden mercy means

cared time allows
morning songs
children green golden
follow grace

young easy mercy means
time held green dying
sang chains sea

alien blizzard body book child come dreamed electric eskimo faded family father father father find five flickering glare great grew grow grown harsh harsh house igloo kitchen kitchen kitchen kitchen lamp lantern large letters life lift light light little looking lost miniature mist moth mother mother mountain mouthing myself myself obscuring oilcloth oilcloth old page parents path peering photograph place plains primer reading reading recognize recognize remember replaced rushed safe same self-constructed sitting small snowhouse snows stained stays table table take take time time time truly universe waiting waiting warm wicks window work yard yellow

time; little window; oilcloth table; mother; father; child; primer; letters;
lamp; Great Plains blizzard; self-constructed Eskimo igloo; family lantern; yard; path; work; house; warm flickering wicks; harsh electric glare; snowhouse;
father; mother; life (harsh) ; small kitchen; universe (large);
miniature time; place; kitchen table; same page; book; old photograph (faded);
alien grown up body; yellow light; kitchen; stained oilcloth;
moth; time; light; kitchen; [I (safe, no longer lost)]; mist; mountain

(''For a Diva' by Geoffrey O'Brien, whose brilliant book about pop I am relishing at the moment.

The Flea, John Donne

- William Wordsworth, 'There was a boy...'