The Poetry Thread

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

PRAYER

Angel of lost spectacles
and hen's teeth

angel of snow's breath
and the insomnia

of cats, angel
of snapshots fading

to infinity,
don't drop me--

shoeless,
wingless.

Defender of Burrows,
carry me--

carry me
in your pocket of light.

From the Journals of the Frog Prince
-Susan Mitchell ©1983

In March I dreamed of mud,
sheets of mud over the ballroom chairs and table,
rainbow slicks of mud under the throne.
In April I saw mud of clouds and mud of sun.
Now in May I find excuses to linger in the kitchen
for wafts of silt and ale,
cinnamon and river bottom,
tender scallion and sour underlog.

At night I cannot sleep.
I am listening for the dribble of mud
climbing the stairs to our bedroom
as if a child in a wet bathing suit ran
up them in the dark.

Last night I said, "Face it, you’re bored.
How many times can you live over
with the same excitment
that moment when the princess leans
into the well, her face a petal
falling to the surface of the water
as you rise like a bubble to her lips,
the golden ball bursting from your mouth?"
Remember how she hurled you against the wall,
your body cracking open,
skin shriveling to the bone,
the green pod of your heart splitting in two,
and her face imprinted with every moment
of your transformation?

I no longer tremble.

Night after night I lie beside her.
"Why is your forehead so cool and damp?" she asks.
Her breasts are soft and dry as flour.
The hand that brushes my head is feverish.
At her touch I long for wet leaves,
the slap of water against rocks.

"What are you thinking of?" she asks.
How can I tell her
I am thinking of the green skin
shoved like wet pants behind the Directoire desk?
Or tell her I am mortgaged to the hilt
of my sword, to the leek-green tip of my soul?
Someday I will drag her by her hair
to the river--and what? Drown her?
Show her the green flame of my self rising at her feet?
But there’s no more violence in her
than in a fence or a gate.

"What are you thinking of?" she whispers.
I am staring into the garden.
I am watching the moon
wind its trail of golden slime around the oak,
over the stone basin of the fountain.
How can I tell her
I am thinking that transformations are not forever?

By the way, I really love this last poem.

That tie, knitted, with a thick knot
that matched perfectly a dark-colored shirt
and a tweed jacket, ravished me.

This was a really elegant fellow,
with his short-sropped black mustache.

We were introduced on Mazowiecka Street, a few steps
from Ziemianska restaurant and Mortkowicz's bookstore
(the only place in Warsaw that carried my Three Winters,
Published in an edition of 300 copies).

Whoever believes in Providence must see an Eye:
A rider from the Pamir Mountains gallops, all in rose and purple.
Then Benvenue Street in Berkeley and Wat on the couch.
His astonishment as he tries to grasp his fate.
And I, a young provincial with a tape recorder
who, it seems, was destined to bear witness.

It is true we lived together
through that horrible New Year's Supper of 1950.

Poor Wat,
he suffered enough in Kazakhstan and Tajikstan.

A beautiful tie was of no avail,
nor the street of phantoms, Mazowiecka, in Warsaw.

-Czeslaw Milosz

Tattoo

The mark on my arm makes it perfectly clear
that I was once a prince among frogs.
My father made it perfectly clear
that someday, I would rule the swamp.

If you ask me, you can't make cheap enough whiskey.
If you ask me, you can't make it cheap enough.
If you ask me, you can't make cheap enough whiskey.
If you ask me, you can't make it cheap enough.

This tattoo no longer reminds me of me
though my shoes are still covered in muck.
And there are flies, more of them every day
though none of them will be eaten up.

Cause without them, who else would be listening?
And without them who else would be near me?
Without them who else would be listening?
And without them who else would kiss me?

Ah, this thread has nearly warmed through my cold little wage slave heart this morning.

And YES I would like an anthology please :)

should I go back for those three stragglers at £3, £2, and £3 apiece?

also, I found a copy of don paterson's 'the landing light' (in the hardback edn. no less) in fopp union street for £5. just a few weeks after I shelled out £9 for the paper back. grr &c.

re:'garbage' - I've never seen, nor will ever see, any a. r. ammons on general sale (i.e. without having to special request it) in any british bookshops plus it was chopped down to only £2. I couldn't resist.

:) :)

Leaving the house,
the house will be
left completely,
from cellar to
attic my absence
entire.

Do I enter the world
the same,
my presence felt
from cloud
to ditch?

Only in departure whole.
Arrival
is always partial.

The Back Seat Of My Mother's Car

We left before I had time
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny
rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out
for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in,
cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping
the dusty August air. I pressed my face to the glass;
I was calling to you - Daddy! - as we screeched away into
the distance, my own hand tingling like an amputation.
You were mouthing something I still remember, the noiseless words,
piercing me like that catgut shriek that flew up, furious as a sunset
pouring itself out against the sky. The ensuing silence
was the one clear thing I could decipher -
the roar of the engine drowning your voice,
with the cool slick glass between us.

With the cool slick glass between us,
the roar of the engine drowning, your voice
was the one clear thing I could decipher -
pouring itself out against the sky, the ensuing silence
piercing me like that catgut shriek that flew up, furious as a sunset.
You were mouthing something: I still remember the noiseless words,
the distance, my own hand tingling like an amputation.
I was calling to you, Daddy, as we screeched away into
the dusty August air. I pressed my face to the glass,
cold as ether, and I could see your fat mole-fingers grasping
for the slit in the window where the sky streamed in
rivers down my face and legs, but at the same time I was reaching out
to stem the burning waters running over me like tiny
hands in that vacuous half-dark. I wanted
to comfort you, to tell you that we nearly touched.
We left before I had time.

- Julia Copus

Poet Sylvia Plath is pregnant.
Sylvia's pregnant with her poem.
Pregnancy is only nine letters.
Syllable, a metaphor for month?
Sylvia's nine pregnant syllables!
Pregnant: creative and inventive.
Poet and her poem, both pregnant.
Pregnant means filled and charged with meaning.
Sylvia is a pregnant poem.

[Harryette Mullen]

(Congrats, Archel!)

I think about that late TSE these days and reckon: I am no longer sure that TSE and EP are good models for a poet.

I don't claim that they would care either way, or reckon that their being models was the most important thing about them.

Oddly, this just reminded me of the open mic horror last night: the first 'act' was a man clutching a book of Goons scripts, which he proceeded to read from, DOING ALL THE VOICES. For about TEN MINUTES.

I've not read much eliot, to be honest, and have read so little pound as to be able to say I haven't read pound at all.

[Ezra Pound, a fragment of a very late Canto that was never finished]

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

[Ezra Pound, the last section of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", about WWI]

I have read the 'Four Quartets' now. Wow. I think you were onto something when you said his poetry is a worldweary sigh. But what a sigh!

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

--Ezra Pound

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;...

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase....

In the back of a garbage truck parked on a side street,
five garbage collectors gobble a chocolate cake,
the gift of a lady each would like to squeeze a lot.

Sprawled in the gutter a black dog licks his dick
like there is no tomorrow, and no tomorrow either
for the five men eating with grubby fingers, smearing

the hand-cut slabs of thick black cake onto cheeks,
chins, noses and sometimes their mouths. That frosting
dribbles sweetness like a cut wrist drips blood

and they suck it from their fingernails and gulp down
the last crumbs. How disgusting! squawks a passing
matron to her friend. Had they fathomed the fullness

of the world's filth they would never have trusted
their pristine garbage to these galoots. One puffs out
his cheeks to make a poot-poot noise like a fart,

and the matrons scuttle off to eat sweet creams and read
their lady poems. What a dreadful world! The immortal
verse of Keats versus a dog's red dick on the concrete.

Such contradictions make us rich. The black dog whacks
his tail against the sidewalk. These garbage guys
are his heroes and the dog reckons that if he's polite

all five will let him lick their fingers clean. The hot
sun baking his belly, his fleas idle for a change,
the prospect of sweet things in his mouth. Why, if he

could talk, he'd make a speech against the intellect,
art and math. What's so precious about what's not there?
Into the trash with Einstein and his furious sums!

Stephen Dobyns

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she's dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can't find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it's this one, maybe it's that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing into their laps to see which
feels more familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually it solves a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You've seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantle?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother's breasts. In their smoothness,
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

Stephen Dobyns

from Louise Gluck's "October"

Snow had fallen. I remember
music from an open window.

Come to me, said the world.
This is not to say
it spoke in exact setences
but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture
on each living thing. Pools of cold light
formed in the gutters.

I stood
at the doorway,
ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.
Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,
bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing
in my woolcoat at a kind of bright portal--
I can finally say
long ago; it give me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher--

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

{James Schuyler 'Faure's Second Piano Quartet': in honour of the new Mark Ford-edited New York school anthology}

in a dusty shop you pause in, or a bar
you never tried, and a smell
         will do as well;
         then you're

suddenly very far from what you know.
You found it as a child,
         when the next field
         to you

was the world's end, a breeze of being gone.
Now it begins to give,
         a single nerve,
         low down:

it sags, as if it felt the gravity
at long last.
[...]

The Nerve - Glynn Maxwell

IZUMI SHIKIBU

(Now if I could only find a haiku about writing haiku... then my artist friend could paint that on my body instead of just ideograms...)

First: Five syllables.
Second: Seven syllables.
Third: Five syllables.

("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)

denis johnson - you

First: Five syllables.
Second: Seven syllables.
Third: Five syllables.

("Haiku" by Ron Padgett.)

-- Casuistry (chri...), May 10th, 2004
* * * *
Darlin', not only do you warrant special mention in my blog for this, but I'll be sure to credit you when the photo of my fleshy calligraphy project is posted (and I'll send you the link!)

Today's poem comes from Robert Grenier, who is one of my favorites, although I think perhaps his poems work better if you read, like, thirty of them rather than just one. But here's one:

IT'S NOT SO MUCH THAT SHE'S TAKING A LONG TIME

it's probably more that she has to stand in a long line

On a day like any other day,
like "yesterday or centuries before,"
in a town with the one remembered street,
shaded by the buckeye and the sycamore--
the street long and true as a theorem,
the day like yesterday or the day before,
the street you walked down centuries before--
the story the same as the others flooding in
from the cardinal points is
turning to take a good look at you.
Every creature, intelligent or not, has disappeared--
the humans, phosphorescent,
the duplicating pets, the guppies and spaniels,
the Woolworth's turtle that cost forty-nine cents
(with the soiled price tag half-peeled on its shell)--
but, from the look of things, it only just happened.
The wheels of the upside-down tricycle are spinning.
The swings are empty but swinging.
And the shadow is still there, and there
is the object that made it,
riding the proximate atmosphere,
oblong and illustrious above
the dispeopled bedroom community,
venting the memories of those it took
[...]

The Disappearances - Vijay Seshadri