The Poetry Thread

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...'

To cross the border
Between the sunflower
And the moonflower
Between the alphabet
Of handwritten
And printed events.

To be friend of all atoms
Which form the light
That sings with the atoms
For the atoms that die
To enter into all the days of one's life
No matter
whether they fall on one side or the other
Of the word
'Earth'.

This passport
Is written in my bones
On my skull, femur, phalanges and spine
All arranged in a way
To make clear
My right to be human.

Marin Sorescu

(from Errata 5uite by Joan Retallack)

Then I understood--if it had been
half a generation later
you would have been lovers, you would have married
and it seems to me I might be dead by now,
dead long since, not married, or married
badly, never had children or written any
words. I'd have died on West 12th Street, that time,
making a bomb--badly--they would have
identified me by my little finger, my
mother sitting at the precinct, holding
my cocked pinky.

To My Husband

I think I love you, all.

Sticks-in-a-drowse drop over sugary loam,
Their intricate stem-fur dries;
But still the delicate slip keeps coaxing up water;
The small cells bulge.

One nub of growth
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Pokes through a musty sheath
Its pale tendrilous horn.

Theodore Roethke

I love Roethke even more than Sharon Olds. Yes.

As for the hibiscus
by the roadside,
my horse ate it.
-Basho

Napped half the day -
no one
punished me.
-Issa

The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep.

MURASAKI SHIKIBU

The three graces and the greenwood nymphs,
naked, dare to dance.
You won't live always, warn the year and the hour,
seizing the honeyed day.
...

Who knows how many tomorrows the gods will add
to day's small sum?
Whatever you spend in pleasures now, you won't
leave in your heir's moist grip.

--excerpt from IV. 7 Ode by Horace. tran. Rosanna Warren

A kinswoman covered me in the clothes she wore,
no kind but kind indeed. I was coddled & swaddled
as close as I had been a baby of her own,
until, as had been shaped, so shielded, though no kin,
the unguessed guest grew great with life.

She fended for me, fostered me, she fed me up,
till I was of a size to set my bounds
further afield. She had fewer dear
sons and daughters because she did so.

[Riddle No. 9 from the Exeter Book, translated from the Anglo-Saxon by Michael Alexander.]

A serious love touches the universe,
the two and one of it contributing to the sum of what's real.
Not that planets or even hydrogen atoms
begin falling toward you,yet something intensifies
where you are. The different light
shed by double stars. No consensus why they form,
or how they'll dim or dazzle, perishing.

Laura Fargas ( do I love this poem? I think so. She's an attorney. I forgive her.)

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
and of thy slender store
two loaves alone to thee are left--
sell one, and with the dole
buy hyacinths to feed thy soul

...one of the best memories I have of her. For some reason, Among Our Great Ceremonies reminded me of this.

The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep.