The Poetry Thread

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

Cozen: we had a good crack at TSE on ILE. I will revive it, for you.

I had serious intentions of starting the Muldoon thread to go seriously at Muldoon. But other things came along, I drifted from Muldoon more quickly than I expected to. But we should still have the thread - when we are ready.

(My copy cost £3! Only a couple of months after it came out!)

In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.

Robert Frost - The Door in the Dark

from the ballad of the lonely masturbator - anne sexton

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.

O poplar, you are great
among the hill-stones,
while I perish on the path
among the crevices of the rocks.

-H.D.

Who's this moving alive over the moor?

An old man seeking and finding a difficulty.

Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
does he fully intend going in over his knees off the military track from Okehampton?

keeping his course through the swamp spaces
and pulling the distance around his shoulders

the source of the Dart - Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor,
seven miles from the nearest road
and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
where will he shelter looking round
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

[...]

- Alice Oswald.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves]

under her dark veil - anna akhmatova

[...]

I think his family is so ancient,
His heart must still be over on the right,
Though I have searched for it before
In full swing until it shrank to nothing,
Merging with my name, that comes
From nowhere, and is ownerless,
Like all we can see of the stars.

Now, like them, I lie with my back
To him, his chance neighbour,
Watching the entrance to the house,
But not the house. The long autumn
Has scattered its poisonous seeds,
So I will have no October child.

[...]

- Medbh McGuckian

This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.
This is the book I lifted high over my head, intending to smash a roach in my girlfriend's bedroom; instead, my back unsprung, and I toppled painfully into her bed, where I stayed motionless for eight days.
This is a "book." That is, an audio cassette. This other "book" is a screen and a microchip. This other "book," the sky.
In chapter three of this book, a woman tries explaining her husband's tragically humiliating death to their daughter: reading it is like walking through a wall of setting cement.
This book taught me everything about sex.
This book is plagiarized.
This book is transparent; this book is a codex in Aztec; this book, written by a prisoner, in dung; the wind is turning the leaves of this book: a hill-top olive as thick as a Russian novel.
This book is a vivisected frog, and ova its text.
[...]

Library -- Albert Goldbarth

What is D'Agata? Is that a lit mag?

Reasons run out and we are
ready to play backgammon
once again. Come on, I say.
I know when I am being
watched. Even in the washroom
here's a window left unlatched
and various small monsters
have nipped softly in to take
up key positions amongst
sunny patches on the walls.
Look at the little angels.
Chits of demons. Fools and spies.
Look at the conclusive way
in which their detail lies. One
touch would be catastrophe
or a whisper to the wise.

[...]

- R. F. Langley

Btw cozen, you asked somewhere else about getting hold of my book. The website for ordering it is broken, but if you send me your address I will post you a free copy - you can send me something of your choice in return if you like :)

rp30@sussex.ac.uk