The Poetry Thread

(translated by K. Kalocsay)

what language is that translated to/from, chris?

you sweetly laughing, when all my
senses have been torn from me: for, Lesbia,
as soon as I see you I've nothing left
[...]

but my tongue is choked, my limbs
shiver aflame, my ears
echo with their own ringing, my eyes
shroud in night.

Leisure, Catullus, is bad for you:
at leisure you luxuriate and lust too much.
before now, leisure has ruined kings
and great cities.

Catullus 51, translated by me (with much (poetic) licence. pls to forgive).

Casuistry, is that in Esperanto, or?

It's translated from English, but now I'm going to get all coy.

in shoeless corridors, the lights burn. how
isolated, like a fort, it is -
the headed paper, made for writing home
(if home existed) letters of exile: now
night comes on. waves fold behind villages.

philip larkin - friday night in the royal station hotel

(from Ghost of a Pear by Ayala Kingsley)

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

--Masaoka Shiki, the fourth "great master" of haiku (the other three are Basho, Buson, and Issa)

Amatory Epigram
(to Aristotle or Ignatius Loyola)

I'd have to be drunk to fuck around with you
And sober to live
Therefore I am dying

[Bernadette Mayer]

I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
As wonderful as thirst.

I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.

Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and monger;
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Air For Mercury" - Brenda Hillman

Once when our blacktop city
was still a topsoil town
we carried to Formicopolis
a cantaloupe rind to share
and stooped to plop it down
in their populous Times Square
at the subway of the ants

and saw that hemisphere
blacken and rise and dance
with antmen out of hand
wild for their melon toddies
just like our world next year
no place to step or stand
except on bodies.

Virginia Hamilton Adair

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.
-James Joyce, Chamber Music

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

--William Carlos Mofo Williams

When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover's wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,

I'd say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda's antithesis,
yet still with it own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever - sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who'd believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?

Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater's wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.

- Don Paterson.

Today's poem, by Aram Saroyan:

priit

I tell with severity, I think what I feel.
Words are ideas.
The purling river passes, and not its sound,
Which is ours, not the river's.
So I wanted my verse: mine and not-mine,
To be read by me.

--Ricardo Reis

[Paul Muldoon, 'The Avenue']

[...]

12. Have you broken the following Ten
Commandments? Answer each just yes or no.

[...]

24. With a view to bioengineering suggest at
least six names for new animals...

[...]

36. Describe the onset of your first period. OR
Avoid this subject entirely.

[...]

- Robert Crawford

One strokes the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And gives him a sweet sign with its leg

Another kisses a keyhole
Kisses it O how he kisses it
Until the keyhole returns his kiss

A third stands aside
Stares at the other two
Shakes shakes his head

Until it falls off

--Vasko Popa

I was browsing the poem in the bookshop and it's tremendously funny / hurtful (which is rare for Crawford - he usually writes opaque, 'interesting' poems, or not very good ones.)

If I find it anywhere online (I doubt it), I'll post up the link.

Or does it? Is nature exactly aligned with grief?
Is the window, washed in rain, an echo of sadness and despair?
I should mourn the hands that built it, long gone,
and the faces that have pressed against it,
and then ask, and then compare.

Breath leaves its imprint, the sure symbol of blood
being pumped, a soft and malleable canvas born
from the first and last action our
bodies will ever perform.
I could use my finger to write this onto the glass:
Save me, I am here, God is coming.
And then breathe once more
and watch it all disappear.

Something has been lost, I know
that much. I would like to feel a shiver of response at least.
A wind through orange and purple and countless leaves or
for everything to fall down at once.
I would like to know how to rustle, how to bend,
how to sway. How to grow crooked and survive.
How to give and die as if it were
the most natural thing.

A riot of color is fragmented in cracked wood.
The slow descent of rain from
purged clouds sounding upon fogged
glass and my own breath upon it,
like everyone before.

I would like to know that I did it,
that I completed the task,
that I did say I love you one last time.
That breath can be on breath
Long after the last is taken.

Now the window is to my left.
The storm has progressed
and rumbling comes over the roof and in.
One real second resuscitates the view.
Breathing at all is a small matter
as this illumination occurs. An instant
when all seems both right and wrong
with the world.

I know the Nipper's Muldoon pome quite well. I suppose I am not keen on it really because it reminds me of Muldoon's sexually-fuelled arrogance.

But it makes me think that it may be time for me to start my long-delayed Muldoon thread.

"At a bit of a loss...
my good friend and budding genius
joined the Hare krishna following.
I hope he finds god and all that
because I don't expect to ever find him again.
Swallowed up
by the machine of religion,
his orb controlled by diet.
They say his last words were:
"I don't know, these people are real nice..."
Goodbye, Eric.
I'm sorry we weren't as nice as rice."

LMcMamara

I see a butterfly go by
And for the first time in the universe I notice
That butterflies do not have color or movement,
Even as flowers do not have scent or color.
Color is what has color in the butterfly's wings,
Movement is what moves in the butterfly's movement,
Scent is what has scent in the flower's scent.
The butterfly is just a butterfly
And the flower just a flower.

Duino Elegies - R.M. Rilke, trans by John Waterfield

Acre of graves, I lay down my gasping roses
And lilies pale as ice as one who knows
Nothing is certain, nothing; unless it is
My own small place and people, agony and sacrifice.

--Leslie Norris, THE DEAD (after the Welsh of Gwenallt, 1899-1969)

A READING IN SEATTLE

....
In the evening I thought
Of Dylan, how he had read
in Seattle. "The little slob,"
My friend said, marvelling,
"He read Eliot so beautifully,
Jesus, I cried." I did not answer.
In the city now the bars are
Empty of his stories
And only the downtown Indians
Are drunk as his memory.

I read in a hall full
Of friends, students, serious
Listeners. The great dead had
Had spoken there, Auden,
Roethke, Watkins, many others.
There was room for a plump ghost.
I thought I heard his voice
Everywhere, after twenty years
Of famous death. The party over,
I walked home, saw on peaks
The coldest snow, white as bone.

--Leslie Norris (again)

(from a song)

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was—
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

* * *

Also, a note to let anyone who's interested know that I'm now working on this thread's "anthology" through May 31st. If you're wanting a copy for personal use, send me a note.

from "voices" - antonio porchia